Far Space

by Jason Kent

  Vicinity of Bullard Space Elevator Tether

  The first missile that struck the elevator car passed straight through the relatively thin outer hull and inner bulkheads without detonating. Even so, it did plenty of damage.

  Ian blinked, hardly able to believe his eyes.

  The top two passenger levels, including the observation room where Ian and Jennifer had first heard the news about Explorer, were nearly sheared free from the rest of the car. Held together now by only a few twisted bulkheads and some stubborn cabling, the car assumed a weird, unnatural look no manmade structure should have.

  The car, so recently Ian’s ticket to destinations off-world, exploded in a flash of light as a second missile struck home. This time, the detonator went off as designed. The explosion engulfed both parts of the lift car and amputated the power panel. Freed from its hinges, the huge silvery collector twirled away from the expanding cloud of debris. Turning wildly, it caught bright glints of sunlight over and over and over.

  Ian turned his head from the blinding flashes from the panel and expanding fireball. Holding his breath, he waited for some razor sharp piece of shrapnel to find him, sure this was going to be the end of his first, so-far, successful emergency egress.

  When nothing struck him after a moment, Ian chanced a look back at where the car had been.

  Before the expanding ball of flame and material could dissipate, the blunt edge of one of the alien ships burst through the space moments ago occupied by the elevator car.

  It took a moment for Ian to realize he was not seeing a close up from a special effects shot which made science fiction movies look so believable.

  “What the…” Ian stuttered.

  This was not happening.

  The huge vessel was coming straight at him.

  “This just isn’t my day,” Ian muttered as he clawed at the suits manual control panel mounted in a holder on his chest. He pulled the controller free with a whirring sound. The panel fit into his hands and was attached with a zip cord that would retract the assembly back into place when he was done with it. He held it close to his face plate to better see the markings.

  Ian took one look at the panel and smiled. It was shaped just like the game controllers he had been using all his life; ergonomic positions for the hands, a trigger for his pointer finger, an arrow pad for this right thumb and various colored buttons for this left thumb, all sized for the suit’s gloved hands. Ian got as far as ‘DO NOT RE…’ on the controller cover before he had ripped off the protective wrapping. He thumbed the right-hand arrow key and mashed the trigger at the same time.

  The EERS system may have been designed by people who played too many on-line games. But, they did have a firm understanding how the system they were building would be put to use and who would be using it. The EERS, by definition, would be used in emergency situations by people who were egressing a spacecraft or elevator car for some unknown reason. Common people, who are facing an emergency and performing their first and only egress possibly combined with reentry through the Earth’s atmosphere (depending on their altitude when the egress occurred) should be assumed to be not in full use of their cognitive facilities. The designers knew stress and whatever outside influences had driven a person to don their EERS would most likely reduce these people to babbling fools. Therefore, in order to combat the use by neophants of an unfamiliar system under extreme conditions, the designers did three things. First, the EERS would deliver a person back to the Earth automatically if left to its own devices. Second, if someone did need to use the emergency controls, the inputs would have to be straight forward. Finally, assuming the least common denominator in a stress-filled situation, the control system would have to be idiot-proof.

  Ian was no idiot, but he was in an extremely hazardous situation; one the EERS designers probably did not foresee even in the wildest late afternoon bull sessions around the water cooler. He had to get out of the way of an alien spacecraft which was barreling right towards him. Ian needed to move.

  While the design process did not consciously run through Ian’s head, he was a good enough engineer to know the system would be planned for inexperienced persons acting illogically. He instinctively turned off the months of zero-gee training he had received and went with the simplest commands he could come up with; move the right button and fire thrusters.

  In a normal control system, one touch of the right hand button would send out a jet of propellant from the left-hand thrusters – either initiating a turn or nudging a ship or suit pack in the opposite directing. The problem here, which the EERS designers had taken into account, was the system thrusters were built into the suits backpack. In a regular suit meant to be operated by experienced personnel, what Ian had just done would have sent him into a spin from which he would have been nearly impossible to recover due to the off-center position of the thrusters and the amount of thrust he was piling on. Ian hoped the commands he was giving would be interpreted as his extreme desire to move to the right, out the path of an alien ship bearing down on his position.

  It did. Performing as programmed, the EERS manual control system interpreted Ian’s desire to move to the right and fired the left-side cold thrusters while compensating with small blasts from the rear-facing right-hand jets. This combination of thruster fire proved to be adequate to keep Ian from spinning out of control.

  Ian held his breath as the tiny jet pack provided all the punch it could muster. As the mottled hull grew steadily nearer, Ian knew it was going to be close. Five seconds later, the blunt nose flew past followed by a blur of hull plating. Barely five meters separated him from the starship.

  “Sweet mother!” Ian shouted as the curved tail of the alien vessel swept by. In the back of his mind, he noted the skin of the craft was flickering oddly.

  Just as Ian began to give thanks for his delivery from certain death by means of high speed impact, he felt something odd.

  “This isn’t right,” Ian said, feeling himself being pulled after the alien ship now plummeting toward the Earth’s surface. He muttered, “Nothing that small should have a gravity effect on me. And there sure as heck isn’t enough of an atmosphere this high up for it to cause a vortex to pull me along after that thing.” He paused and looked down to see the ship growing larger as the distance closed between him and the vessel diminished.

  “Should be impossible and yet, here we go,” Ian said. He was proud of his snappy comment and the fact he still managed to sound so calm, at least to his own ears. Falling or being pulled to the ship, it really did not matter to Ian any longer. He used a small burst from his thrusters to orient himself face down. “I at least want to see the thing up close when I hit it.”

  The flickering on the hull was building in intensity until Ian found he had to squint against the brightness of the display. He thought he saw the shadow of another EERS-suited figure moving close to the hull. “That can’t be good.”

  Ian tried to get a better look at the figure only to be rewarded with red after-images on his retina. He screw his eyes shut tight.

  A brilliant flash of light engulfed Ian, visible even through his eyelids. After a moment, merciful blackness engulfed him.

  Ian tentatively opened his eyes to find only the night side of Earth, blissfully dark even with the spots of light from the city sprawl of South America. He looked right and left, up and down.

  The alien ship was gone.

  Ian was interrupted from his search of near space by an alarm from his helmet speaker. He let the controller he had been gripping in his hand retract back to its holder and checked his wrist display. The read-out numbers were all flashing red at him.

  “Great, so now I’m going too fast,” Ian muttered. “Like that’s my fault.” Again Ian had to believe the suit was capable of getting him home and the alarms were set well within some sort of pre-defined safety tolerance.

  Still, the planet surface was getting awfully close.

  Ian shook his head and allowed EERS to re-orient him with
his back to the thickening atmosphere with the little bit of propellant he had left. Once the maneuver was complete, a new alarm sounded.

  Ian did not bother to look at the display screen. “Yeah, yeah, don’t tell me, I’m out of fuel.”

  USS Bernard Schriever

  Earth Space

  Alarms were screaming for attention at the same time Pearl was yelling in Yates’ direction. Stunned by the latest explosion still echoing through his ship, Yates stared at his engineer for the shortest of moments before comprehension snapped into focus.

  From slow motion to hypersonic in less than a heartbeat, the turmoil that was the command module of the USS Schriever pressed in on the spacecraft commander.

  “…going to lose it!” Pearl was shouting. His face was contorted in rage. The big engineer smashed his huge hands on the dark control board again and again. He screamed at the dying power plants, “You can’t just up and quit on me! Come on, you bi…”

  “Breach!” Maytree shouted. “Make that multiple breaches!”

  A swift glance over the master control panel told Yates everything else he needed to know. His spacecraft was lost.

  Yates reached above his head and firmly grasped the two D-rings set into the recess above his head. It was the last system on board he thought he would ever need to use. He shouted the words only heard in the most evil of training exercises, the kind which nearly always ended with everybody dying. The trainers who wrote the script loved those sorts of things. Yates wished they were here now.

  “EJECT! EJECT! EJECT!” Yates shouted as he pressed his head back against his seat and twisted the eject bars, the first of two movements needed to activate the system. In that short moment, Yates sucked in half a breath and took in his crew with a quick sweep of his eyes. Mitchell was the first to follow Yates’ command. The Weapons Officer already had his hands on the ejection rings and was beginning the wrist snap to bring them into the correct position.

  The eject system required only one crewmember to twist and pull their bars in order to initiate the eject sequence. Once the eject command was called, procedure required each able crewman to pull their own D-rings. This was done in case the person directing the emergency eject was unable to follow through or the first pull failed to lead to a ‘safe eject’.

  The other two officers, Reeves and Maytree, were a split second behind Mitchell.

  Pearl slammed his head back and grabbed his chair arms. He cursed, “Mother-frippin’…”

  Not bad, Yates thought, for an action none of them ever planned on needing. Most everyone involved in space combat assumed if you were going to die, it would be quick and thorough, from a hyper-velocity missiles strike or rail gun slug cleaving through the hull.

  Yates pulled on his eject D-rings with all his might.

  Mitchell, Reeves, and Maytree followed swiftly thereafter.

  The other crew members’ actions proved to be redundant to their commander’s.

  Electrical relays closed by the ring-pull and mechanical lines, very much like bike brake cables, attached to Yates’ levers, all acted flawlessly. Two identical and redundant eject systems voted and allowed ‘Side B’ to initiate the command module eject program.

  As near simultaneously as was humanly possible to engineer, sixteen explosive bolts sheared the hard connections and interfaces between the control module and rest of the Schriever. At the same time, thirty-two smaller charges severed the mounts for the add-on armor plates protecting the bridge. The shaped charges severing the armor also served to blow the plates away from the module’s exit path. A full four-tenths of a second later, six solid rocket motors ignited, slinging the entire, now independent, command module away from the rest of the spacecraft.

  During its hasty separation, the command module scraped past the newly freed armor pieces. As it turned out, the eject system designers had not allowed enough force to break them free fast enough to get completely out to the way. Another minor engineering flaw in the eject design was encountered when the forward antenna structure was broken off as the command module cleared its cradle.

  Neither the armor scraping by nor the jolt from the antenna made much of an impact on the crew’s departure.

  Yates screwed his eyes shut, his job complete, and prayed they would make it clear in time.

  In the main body of the Schriever, internal stresses in two of the three damaged reactors caused pressure overloads and release of massive amounts of uncontrolled energy. This was enough to blow all the safety valves in the mass drive system. The failures, equivalent to nearly ten kilotons of high explosive each, combined with the compression wave radiated through the structure of the ship, breaking chemical laser lines and control thruster feeds, was more than enough to completely destroy the spacecraft.

  The cloud of debris was accelerated beyond the speed of the escaping command module.

  “Here it comes!” Maytree shouted.

  “Get us through this, Lord,” Yates prayed as the hiss of debris hitting the module hull built violently.

  The final chapter of Schriever’s life was spectacular, brief and silent.

  Earth Upper Atmosphere

  Things began to happen very quickly for Ian after the EERS suit had managed to reorient him with his back more or less toward the Earth. First, he started to get a little warm from the building friction of the ever-thickening atmosphere. Then his suit began to speak. A feminine voice issued from the suit speakers. “Please prepare for your Personal Reentry System deployment.”

  The voice was hard to make out over the other alarms trying to tell Ian he was entering the Earth’s atmosphere too fast and that he was out of maneuvering propellant. The second fact was a little unfortunate as a little more fuel may have been able to take care of the first problem.

  The voice continued. “Deployment in five…four…three…two...Personal Reentry System deploying, please remain still.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ian said as his pack released a black gel which rapidly expanded then set into a semi-rigid mold.

  Ian gently touched the material, noting its sponginess.

  “Please remain still while your Personal Reentry System deploys,” the voice said.

  Ian stopped moving, not sure if the recorded statement was in response to his action or simply timed. As he watched, remaining quite still, the mold material continued to expand until it formed an elongated half sphere. The mold’s sides arched up and around Ian’s entire body pressing close all around. It also forced his legs into a bent position and effectively pinned them together.

  “Crap,” Ian muttered as a wave of claustrophobia swept over him. He watched helplessly as the expanding mold edged up the sides of his helmet. He tried to bring his arms up to cover his face plate and discovered they were as immobile as his legs. “Breath, Ian, breath…”

  The expansion rate of the reentry mold slowed, mercifully leaving Ian with enough of an opening to see the stars above.

  “Your Personal Reentry System is now in place,” the suit reported.

  “What, no ‘good luck’?” Ian muttered. Ian flexed his fingers again. This also proved to be difficult with the stiff material pressing in around his hand and fingers. But there was enough give to verify the material was not completely solid.

  “Ablative material,” Ian guessed, shaking his head inside his helmet. “Like this is going to work.” He did his best to shrug but managed to only move his shoulders against the suit material now immobilized by the mold. “Well, at least this ain’t boring.”

  Ian’s thoughts were interrupted as the first lick of flame flashed to life at the edge of the mold. He had seen videos of spacecraft coming back to Earth. This would have been before the space elevator had all but eliminated the need for craft to use the atmosphere to shed enough velocity to reach the ground at survivable speeds. He never thought he would be experiencing such an entry personally and certainly not in such a flimsy contraption.

  “Please, God, let these guys have gotten their math right,” Ia
n said, shutting his eyes.

  The EERS was elegant in its simplicity. All it needed to do was to get a relatively slow-moving object through the planet’s atmosphere. In this case, a person forced to evacuate their spacecraft. The amount of heat generated as this object passed through the atmosphere, shedding speed, was in direct proportion to the speed at which it had been traveling in orbit. Since Ian and the other passengers were not moving in relation to the spin of the Earth due to the unique characteristics of the space elevator, their speed upon reentry was simply a sum vector of their momentum upon ejecting from the car and the pull of gravity from Earth. Ian had the added bonus of being caught up in whatever gravitational anomaly had dragged him toward the alien ship. The EERS had to do was produce enough ablative material to get its passenger low enough for what basically amounted to a very high altitude parachute plunge.

  Ian felt the vibrations passing through the spongy mold as the atmosphere he was falling through grew thicker. He could not help but open his eyes to take a look. When he did, Ian wished he had just kept them closed.

  The starry sky above him had been replaced by the intense flames of the burning ablative material. For the sacrifice of his Personal Reentry System mold, Ian received reduced speed in exchange for extreme heat – the cause of the outer layer of the mold boiling off as it was consumed.

  Ian could feel his back growing steadily warmer. He wondered how thick the mold had been when it had finished forming around him. How much ablative material could there be left under his tail bone by now?

  The heat in his suit continued to climb until Ian found himself screaming into his helmet.

  Ian was still screaming when he realized the intense heat was tapering off. Above him, he could see the flames weakening. He still felt sweat pooling all over his body from the high suit temperature, but at least it was not getting hotter any longer.

  “You can do this,” Ian muttered. From his training, he knew the fiery eclipse of reentry was the most perilous time for any craft or object coming back to Earth; out of communication due to the ionization caused by the friction of hitting the atmosphere and subjected to intense heat for the same reason. If something was going to go wrong on the way in, this is when it would have happened.