Warp Speed

by Travis S. Taylor

  Being an astronaut nowadays is more like construction work than the glory of flying high-tech spacecraft. Tabitha and I had been turning bolts and making electrical connections for the better part of three hours. It was time for a scheduled break.

  Tethered to the probe, Tabitha and I watched as the Arm disconnected from us and folded back toward the payload bay. An incomplete Zephram, Tabitha, and myself simply floated there above the shuttle, Newton's Laws still being in effect.

  "Rayford, you drive that thing like a pro," I teased as he locked onto the final component of the probe, the ACS Fuel Supply and Science Instrument Suite Sphere. Tabitha and I watched and panted trying to catch our breath in the thin atmosphere of our EVA suits. Rayford manipulated the Arm right into the sweet spot of the universal connector on the probe component. The tank grabbed back at the arm and was connected. The internal circuitry kicked in and blew the circuit breakers for the other connectors around the tank. In a matter of seconds the tank was free from the Shuttle other than at the connection with the Arm.

  About fifteen minutes had passed and Tabitha and I had caught as much of our breath as you can at about a third of atmospheric pressure. Although the PLSS pumps an oxygen rich environment into the suit, it's still like snow skiing, wrestling a bear, running a marathon, and attacking Mount Everest all at the same time. EVA astronauts had better be in shape. All that cardio kickboxing had paid off for me. All the extracurricular activities with Tabitha didn't hurt either.

  "Until you've done it, you can't imagine it." Tabitha had told me that a thousand times about astronaut stuff. It turns out that she was right about this one. Actually, she was right about it all, but I didn't tell her that. She's cocky enough as it is.

  I connected a cable to the major portion of Zephram and then thrusted my way over to the upcoming final component. The Arm had halted about two meters from us. I slowed my descent to the Tank and lightly touched down on it. I had lined up on the hook perfectly. I grabbed the handhold with one hand and snapped the carabineer on the hook with the other. This was a lot easier than working in the neutral buoyancy tank in Houston--you can move quicker. Some astronauts had told me that the difference would be hard to get used to. I couldn't understand why. It seemed more natural to me not to have the resistance from the water.

  "Probe tank is secure. Release the Arm," I said over the UHF.

  "That was good work, Doc!" Jim said over the comm.

  "Thanks, Jim. Preparing cable engage and final component attach!" The motor on the other end of the cable started spinning. Tabitha ran the motor as she pulled the two parts of the spacecraft together, slowly pulling us together.

  As Tabitha and I slowly maneuvered the two spacecraft parts together, the Shuttle began slowly pulling away from us. Neither of us were concerned since this was part of yet another NASA scheduled event. As we began connecting the components of the probe, we would need to power them up. The immense electromagnetic fields created by the probe would wreak havoc on the Shuttle's systems so it had to be backed off to at least a hundred or so meters from the probe. Once Zephram was completely constructed and brought online, Tabitha and I would use our SAFER MMUs (Simplified Aid for Extravehicular activity Rescue Manned Maneuvering Units) to fly back to a safe distance where the Shuttle could catch us. No problem!

  I could see the Shuttle in my peripheral vision (what little of it you have in a spacesuit) drifting farther and farther away.

  "Hey, that's my ride home," I joked.

  "Well, you guys finish all your chores and then we'll think about giving you a lift," Rayford announced. At least he had a sense of humor.

  I guided the Tank the last couple of feet with my SAFER MMU. The two components came together with a clank that I could feel through my suit. Tabitha quickly snapped some of the connection clamps that were closest to her. I began feeling around the tank, doing the same.

  "This is Huntsville. We read that all components of the probe are connected," Jim reported.

  Tabitha and I completed closing the clamps around the circumference of the connection between the cylinder and the tank. We finished face-to-face with each other. She raised her visor and winked at me.

  "It's your show," she said quietly over the UHF.

  "Roger that Jim!" I said into the mic. "Call sign Zephram is complete. We just need to give a few bolts up here a couple extra turns and then kickstart it off." I raised my visor and winked back at Tabitha. I could tell Jim was excited from the sound of his voice. I was equally thrilled. What am I saying? I was tickled shitless! If you're from the South, tickled shitless is about as good as it gets.

  "Can't wait down here Ans---" the communication blacked out.

  I could see a bright light glare off Tabitha's visor and she winced as in reflex and tried to turn her head. Instinctively, I tried to turn and look over my shoulder. Then I realized that I was wearing a spacesuit and that isn't a move you can do very easily in a spacesuit. I started to request that Jim copy me on the last transmission, but instead Tabitha snapped her cable onto my belt and hit her thrusters full reverse, pulling me with her.

  "What are you doing?!"

  "Move, Anson!" she said as she dragged me with her. She said move so I hit my forward thrusters to go with her. Just after I kicked my thrusters toward her, Tabitha reversed thrusters and I flew into her, hard! We were now chest-to-chest. Our facemasks smacked together with a THWACK! I hugged her whether I meant to or not. Knowing that Tabitha knew what she was doing, whatever it was, I killed my thrusters, hoping not to counteract something she did. I also kept my mouth shut and just hung on for dear life hoping that she wouldn't kill us. She fired her thrusters again. This time we moved toward the probe. The probe was only a half a meter away and it didn't take long for her to sandwich me between her and one of the ECCs. Tabitha locked a safety cable onto the ECC and grabbed a handhold. I figured what's good for the goose is good for the gander and started to follow suit. In order to lock onto the ECC I would need to fire my thrusters and turn around. Tabitha realized what I was doing and bearhugged me, sandwiching me again.

  "Don't move!" she cried.

  "What the hell is going on?" I had to know! How could I help if I had no idea what was going on?

  "The Shuttle exploded!" she screamed.

  "What!?" I wasn't sure that I heard her right. Ignorance is bliss, I have always heard. It would've been nice in this case had I remained ignorant.

  "Hold on!" Then Zephram started vibrating and I could feel through my suit millions of small impacts dinging into it. I just prayed that nothing came through the ECC and into my suit from behind! A large section of one of the payload bay doors flew by us about fifty meters to my left--Tabitha's right. There were like pieces passing below, above, and to the other side as well. A hard thud hit the warp spacecraft somewhere. I could feel it. Zephram was given a slight rotation by the impact of whatever it was that caused the thud.

  Tabitha and I held on for the ride of a lifetime. I don't know about her, but I was scared to death. Earth rolled by underneath us. Then it was gone and then back again. We were spinning pretty fast. I prayed that no debris hit while we were facing the direction of the explosion. A cloud of tiny shiny debris zipped past us and made our rotation worse and more unstable. Then we were inside the blast wave and it was over--I thought. Whatever hit the probe must have hit the propellant or oxidizer tanks enough to cause a rupture, which let go just then. All at once the pressure vessel gave way, spewing pressurized gas out of the tank. This increased the rotation of the probe we were holding to an all-out random three-dimensional uncontrolled spin. The centrifugal force slung us away from the probe too fast for me to hold on. Fortunately, Tabitha had the foresight to snap a carabineer and a cable onto her handhold. But the force was too great for her to keep her hold while the fuel was still spewing and accelerating the spin.

  "Hang on, Anson!"

  "Hang on to what?" I cried, not knowing if I should try to keep holding her, hold the cable, or try to grab a
t the vacuum. None of which seemed to help.

  "Just keep breathing as normal as you can!"

  My handhold on her slipped and I was flung away from her. The meter-long tether connecting us jerked taught. It felt like it cut me in half. The tether hung on my left leg somehow and caused me to be slung outward headfirst. I tried to unhook it, but the g-forces were too much for me to overcome. My head was on the outer end of the centrifugal force--my head felt like it would explode.

  "My head is going to pop!" I couldn't stand the build up of pressure in my head much longer. The gees were approaching my limit.

  "You can take it, Anson! Just hold on. The tanks will empty soon."

  "They better! I'm starting to tunnel out." All I could see was a small white circle way off in front of me. Everything else was tunneling in around me. I tried to blink my eyes, shake my head, anything. Nothing helped.

  Finally, the angular acceleration stopped. The rotation didn't. I was getting very dizzy and very nauseated. Tabitha fired her thrusters until she slammed into the ECC. She grabbed the handhold tight. This pulled me upright and into her back. I was still fairly useless, nearly unconscious. Tabitha expelled all of her thruster fuel over the next few minutes trying to stop the spin of the probe. She succeeded only in slowing the induced spin to a tolerable rotation. I was able to upright myself with her. I grabbed a handhold very tightly and panted near hyperventilation.

  "Anson! Anson, look at me! Focus on your breathing. You have to slow down your breathing!" she ordered me over the UHF.

  I closed my eyes and tried to relax and breathe normally.

  "Focus!" she yelled.

  "Okay," I puffed. "I . . . am . . . okay." Just talking was tough. For a while I thought I was seeing red, but that faded within a few moments.

  Earth rolled by underneath us about every ten seconds or so. That was still considerable rotation, or so I thought.

  "Anson. My thrusters are out. You have to stop the probe's rotation or at least slow it some more." I was too confused and disoriented to ask questions right away. I followed orders and fired my thrusters a few times. That stopped the probe's spin the rest of the way. We were now facing Earth constantly.

  "What happened?" I asked her.

  "Don't know. How much air do you have?"

  I checked my Display and Controls Module (DCM). I ran through a few diagnostics on my suit. Tabitha was doing the same.

  "I have three hours fifty-seven minutes. How about you?"

  "Same," she said.

  "What do we do? We're in space with no way to get home!"

  "I ain't sure. First I think we should try communicating with someone. Although they'll be out of range." She was right. We both tried and failed to hail anybody. The UHF circuits on the suits only reach about ten kilometers or so. The Shuttle that relayed our signal to ground stations was gone. Earth was about three hundred kilometers below us and the ISS was about twelve thousand kilometers on the other side of the Earth.

  "We're so screwed. Oh man, we are so screwed!"

  "Anson, don't ever say that again! you hear me?" she scolded. "Think! There's a way out of this. We just have to find it."

  "You're right. I hope." I was still trying to shake off the massive headache and the feeling of having been on that nasty roller coaster from a few minutes before.

  "I don't hope. I know. That is the only way to see it in your mind. You know we will make it. Got it!" That last was more of an order than a question so I didn't answer.

  I could imagine Bob's face while he was yelling at 'Becca, "Never give up!" That look of determination on his face was the same that I was seeing on Tabitha now. I realized that by God they were right! I wasn't giving up no matter how bad things got. Ever! I looked at Tabitha and realized that I knew we were going to make it somehow. I had a whole new fire burning in me. There was a way home. I just had to find it.

  Now you might think, what about those poor folks on the Shuttle that just got destroyed? Where's the compassion for them? Weren't they your friends? I remember a decade or so ago how I felt horrible and cried while watching all those folks die when the World Trade Center towers were destroyed and I didn't even know any of them. Well that was different--I wasn't about to die myself then. At this point my main concern was survival--not compassion, anger, remorse, or any other emotion. Tabitha and I had all the time in the world to cry later--if we survived. My guess is that this is how soldiers must feel when they see their buddy beside them get blown away. They must know that they have to complete their mission or die, too. Then, later when they are safe, they cry. Tabitha is a soldier--I was certain that she was operating in pure survival mode. So, that was the only way that I could think--that I would think--until this was over and we were safe at home drinking a beer. Then I would cry for hours or days.

  I touched the ring I'd tucked in my EMU in anticipation of popping the question during the EVA. "Tabitha, will you marry me?" I asked her.

  "What!"

  "Marry me! I said. "Marry me, Neil Anson Clemons."

  "You are asking me now? We don't have time for this." She was frantic and looking furious.

  "Tabitha," I began calmly and slowly. "I know that we're going to make it. And I want you to spend the rest of your life with me and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. If we don't make it, and we will, I would rather make it with my fiance than my commander. Marry me!" I pleaded.

  Tabitha took a long pause and a deep breath, if you can do that in an EMU. Then she nodded.

  "Are you sure you aren't just asking me this because you're hysterical?"

  "No! I was going to ask you earlier. I just never got the time. I have a ring right here in my pocket! I haven't let it out of my sight since we launched."

  "Are you serious?" she asked.

  "Hell, yes, I'm serious!" I was hurt a little.

  "I will," she said quietly.

  "Yes! I wish I could kiss you." I laughed. I'm not sure if I was hysterical, but I probably appeared to be.

  After a few moments of silence, we set to work thinking about a plan to get us home. Communicating with those bright boys dirtside at NASA was our first priority.

  We spent the next thirty minutes reconfiguring the datalink system for the probe to accept the UHF signals from the EMUs and then relay them over the digital data dump back to the HOSC in Huntsville. Had Al Rayburn and I not redesigned the spacecraft bus as a graphical interface this wouldn't have been possible. Any off-the-shelf spacecraft bus would've required actual rewiring that couldn't be done in an EMU. The dexterity in the gloves just wouldn't allow that. However, Al and I had the idea of making the entire spacecraft modular. Each wire connects to the generic connection point on the spacecraft bus. Then that connection can be allocated by the central computer system and some solid-state and mechanical relays. All the wires are the same but each has a different job as assigned by the computer. Al and I had taken the commercial bus we bought and spent a good deal of effort reverse engineering and reengineering it.

  Tabitha and I finally reconfigured the data comm system to accept our UHF signal as data in. Then we retransmitted that signal through the Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier or "TWeeTA" system. The TWeeTA was designed to handle more data than had ever been attempted with a spacecraft. The warp field data would be vast when operational. Standard communications systems just wouldn't have been able to handle the data rates needed. So, Al, Jim, 'Becca, and I spent a good bit of time and money designing a newer more updated system. This communications system works a lot more like the Internet than a radio. That amount of data required a lot of power amplification. A TWeeTA is the only way to go about that. Tabitha and I used this to our advantage. Since the communications dish hadn't been deployed yet, we planned to use the omnidirectional antenna. We pumped plenty of power through the dipole so that the relay satellites could receive it with no problem.

  But there was a problem: the datalink was just that, a datalink. Nobody would be expecting a voice signal over it. Jim woul
d have to realize that the data he was receiving was a frequency modulated signal, then decode it to an audio circuit. Who knew how long that would take? The plus side is that with the Shuttle now destroyed, the folks dirtside wouldn't expect anybody to turn on the warp probe, either. The fact that it came on should surprise them, if they were watching their consoles properly. Also, while in orbit the probe was designed to communicate directly with the HOSC through the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System or TDRSS (pronounced "tea-dress") network. And we were in line-of-sight with one of those constantly. This meant that as soon as we turned on the transmitter, the HOSC would be receiving the data. We weren't worried about choking the bus of the relay satellites because an audio data file doesn't require much bandwidth.

  "HOSC operations come in please. Is anybody there?" I began repeating.

  Tabitha followed. "Come in Jim. Are you there?"

  We kept talking so a constant audio file would be sent through Zephram, over TDRSS, to the HOSC, and hopefully to Jim.

  "Tabitha, I'm going to survey the probe while we wait. There might be something on it we could use. Use for what I don't know."

  I powered up the forward thrusters and moved slowly around the spacecraft. Where the large thud had taken place was on the ACS Fuel Tankage and Science Instrument section. We wouldn't be measuring the electromagnetic field strength and the gravimetric effects of the warp field today. We sure wouldn't be firing the attitude control thrusters either. The rest of the probe looked okay. I made my way back to the GUI panel and did a system diagnostic using its graphical user interface. The probe checked out, although the warp field coils hadn't been completely connected and the ECCs hadn't been brought online yet.