The Voyage of the Iron Dragon

by Robert Kroese

  Vacuum tubes continued to be used for sound and radio wave amplification as well, but most of the tubes produced at Camp Aldrin were consumed by the production of computers, which were necessary for performing calculations related to acceleration, turbulence, and launch trajectories. These computers, laughably primitive even by the standards of the twenty-first century, were nevertheless vastly more powerful and adaptable than the mechanical adding machines and slide rules the engineers otherwise relied on.

  For extremely complex computation, the engineers used the wrist cuffs. Reyes had donated Slater’s cuff to the engineers in Hell early on, and O’Brien surrendered his upon his return from North America. Gabe gave his to Alma before the evacuation. O’Brien had borrowed Reyes’s cuff while she was in a coma, but when Reyes took control of Pleiades again, she gave hers up as well. Each of the four cuffs was now in one of four assigned locations, strategically placed throughout the facilities at Camp Aldrin. There was a waiting list for each cuff where engineers could sign up for blocks of computing time up to two hours long. Sometimes an engineer would have to wait weeks just to use one of the cuffs for an hour in the middle of the night.

  The exponential increase in demand for computing power, as well as the fragility and expense of vacuum tubes, soon made the fabrication of transistors a priority. Building transistors was always going to be necessary at some point: vacuum tubes were too bulky and fragile to be used in the control circuits of a spacecraft. Vacuum tubes also had two other big downsides: they required a lot of power, and they produced a lot of heat. By the Eidejelans’ seventh year on Antillia, over half the diesel and gasoline Camp Hughes produced was being consumed by generators to make electricity. About ten percent of the electricity was used by incandescent lights, and another thirty percent by the vacuum tubes. The rest was used to power air conditioners that kept the engineers from collapsing from the combined heat produced by their inefficient light bulbs and vacuum tubes.

  The electrical grid at Camp Aldrin was decidedly primitive. Power was produced by a motley assortment of gasoline- and diesel-powered generators. The geothermal generator that provided most of the electricity at Camp Armstrong had been cannibalized for parts. There was almost no excess capacity and nowhere to store surplus energy in any case. A few facilities had backup generators or emergency batteries, but these were sufficient only to provide emergency lighting and allow the safe shutdown of sensitive equipment. If the refinery went offline or a shipment of oil was late, there were outages.

  Converting from vacuum tubes to transistors would solve a lot of these problems. Unfortunately, it would also delay most of the other work going on at Camp Aldrin, since developing a process for fabricating transistors would be a technical challenge at least as daunting as making vacuum tubes. As blackouts became more frequent and the need for still more computing power increased, Reyes was forced to pull engineers and resources away from aerospace in favor of electronics. Knowing how long it had taken to develop reliable vacuum tubes, Reyes feared that they were going down a rabbit hole from which they’d never escape, but she didn’t see any way to get into space without developing transistors. Fortunately by this time Alma had a staff of several hundred engineers, most of whom already had some basic theoretical understanding of electronics. She also had extensive facilities that could be used for research and development—at least as long as the lights stayed on.

  The first transistors were produced at Camp Aldrin in the summer of 924 A.D., fourteen years after their arrival at Antillia. Over the next few years, production of vacuum tubes was slowed while production of transistors ramped up. Vacuum tubes would continue to be produced to service existing machines, but new equipment would use transistors. The total electricity demand at Camp Aldrin continued to increase, but at a slower rate, and with the addition of more generators and increased production at Camp Hughes, outages became less frequent.

  Meanwhile, Reyes had ordered the construction of a 100,000-gallon water tower near the center of Antillia. The purpose of the water tower was threefold: first, it would provide potable water to facility for drinking, washing, and myriad other purposes. Thus far, the settlers had relied on a 10,000 gallon tank connected to a single freshwater well, and as a result, water had to be carefully rationed. The new tank would provide more water than the Eidejelans could possibly use under ordinary circumstances. Reyes was, of course, planning for extraordinary circumstances: during the launch of a Titan II rocket, tens of thousands of gallons would be pumped into a concrete-lined pool underneath the launch pad. This water would absorb most of the heat of the engines and boil off as steam, preventing damage to the launch facility.

  The third purpose for the tank was related to Camp Aldrin’s problems with energy reliability: during periods of low electricity use, water would be pumped into the tower, using some of the same diesel engines that powered the generators. Then, when demand for electricity was higher, a valve would be opened, allowing the water to fall through a pipe past a turbine, powering a generator. In essence, the chemical energy from the diesel fuel would be converted to potential energy by lifting the water above the ground, and then converted to electricity when it was needed.

  All the problems facing Camp Aldrin had been solved in the past (from the spacemen’s perspective) and could be solved again, but only through a painstaking process of trial and error. In the beginning, this process had been frustrating and time-consuming. Now, though, the Eidejelans had the personnel and infrastructure for solving problems. When a new problem was identified, it would be documented, prioritized, and assigned to one of the engineering teams. An entire department existed to keep track of which problems were holding up key project milestones and assign resources to address them. Occasionally a problem would arise that required a technology that the Eidejelans simply didn’t possess. Working with titanium, for instance, turned out to be far more difficult than expected, due to the difficulty of extracting pure titanium from the ore, as well as the metal’s extremely high melting point. Whenever possible, workarounds were found for such problems, but Alma judged that the ability to work titanium was a necessity: aluminum and steel would not suffice for certain parts of the Iron Dragon. A team of engineers spend the better part of three years mastering the processing of forging parts from titanium.

  The Eidejelans continued to build larger and more complex rockets over the next several years, gradually improving their designs and fabrication processes. Their first successful test of a two-stage rocket was in February of 919 A.D., nine years after their arrival at Antillia. In parallel with these efforts, more small planes were built. In the year 920, they built their first jet plane—a tiny personal jet built from specifications from a kit produced in the twenty-first century. Seven years later, they finished a mockup of the Bell X-1, the plane in which Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier. O’Brien’s son, Michael, replicated—or anticipated—that feat on April 29, 928.

  They had not yet put an object in orbit, but they’d mastered the process of stage separation and solved the problems with the fuel pumps. The second stage, which was equipped with a radio beacon they could use to track its location, made it eighty-three miles above the surface, beyond the atmosphere. Pleiades was still a long way from getting a crew into orbit, but the Eidejelans had proved they could reach space.

  Given these successes, spirits were generally high at Camp Aldrin and the other satellite facilities, but as the third generation of Eidejelans grew up and Pleiades closed in on its ultimate goal, a new sort of dissatisfaction had taken root. It was natural for parents to want a better life for their children, but the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the founders of Pleiades faced a devolution to the Dark Ages. At Svartalfheim, secrecy and efforts to avoid leaving evidence of their work had been justified as necessary to evade the Cho-ta’an and the meddling of the powers of Europe. But now they were a long way from Europe, and the Cho-ta’an hadn’t been heard from for over forty years. In keeping with the new openness
at Camp Aldrin, the Committee had been more candid about the need to minimize their temporal footprint, but many of the Eidejelans found the philosophical justification of the no-paradox principle unconvincing, and murmurs of LOKI were greeted as superstitious nonsense by most of the younger engineers. A movement grew to continue Pleiades after its initial mission was finished, either to build more spacecraft to get the Eidejelans off Earth or to spread their knowledge to the rest of the world, igniting a scientific and technological revolution. The Committee tried to quash these sentiments, arguing that they were at best a distraction and at worst an invitation to LOKI to wipe Antillia off the map. The closer Pleiades came to its goal, the closer it came to falling apart.

  Reyes continued to be the lynchpin that held the Eidejelans together, but she leaned heavily on Sigurd, whose health had begun to fail. Sigurd, who was now in his eighties, had not had an easy life. His first wife had fallen ill and died young, and his son Yngvi had been killed by men raiding his village. He’d fought in wars and had seen many of his friends and relatives die. The three daughters he’d had with Reyes were now grown and married and had children of their own. Sigurd enjoyed spending time with his grandchildren, but he was not immune to the fear that they would face a difficult life once Pleiades was finished. At times, the melancholy overwhelmed him. In the mornings he was strong and cheerful, but in the evenings he became sad and often confused. Sometimes he would call out for Yngvi. As his condition worsened, the urgency to bring Pleiades to fruition increased.

  Chapter Forty-six

  The largest building on Antillia was a 40,000 square foot hangar for the assembly of the Titan II rocket. The completed Titan II—technically a modified version of the Titan II GLV (for “Gemini Launch Vehicle”) would be 109 feet tall and ten feet in diameter. The Titan II had itself been adapted from the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile, originally designed in the 1950s to deliver nuclear warheads to the Soviet Union. Reyes planned to build three of the rockets to allow for adequate testing before the rendezvous mission. The first would take at least five years to build once the designs were finalized; it was hoped that the second and third could be started concurrently with the first and completed somewhat more quickly.

  The Gemini capsule was designed to carry only two astronauts: a pilot and an engineer. Both jobs were critical to the success of Pleiades. Michael, who had taken charge of the aeronautics department, had been training test pilots for several years. As the first Titan rocket neared completion, he selected four of the best pilots for the position of piloting the Gemini capsule. In turn, Alma selected four of her best engineers. They hoped to have at least two crews trained by the time the Iron Dragon was ready for a manned launch.

  Being a test pilot was a dangerous job, though. One of the pilots, a woman named Sarah, who was the daughter of two engineers from Cairo who had been with Pleiades almost from the beginning, died when the engine of her Cessna replica caught fire and she crashed into the Atlantic. This left only three pilots: two women, Jorunn and Lila, and a young man named Thorvald. The engineers were Olan, Lucas, Hella and Freya. Freya, the youngest candidate at only sixteen, was Michael’s own daughter. She had the distinction of being descended from two of the survivors of the Andrea Luhman: her mother, Michael’s wife, was Sigurd and Reyes’s oldest daughter, Astrid. Favoritism didn’t factor in: Freya was a prodigy, having taught herself calculus at the age of eight.

  There were other pilots, including Michael himself, but most were older and no longer in the prime of health. Even Michael, who was now forty-one years old, couldn’t tolerate g-forces as well as he had when he was twenty-five. It was vital that the crew survive not only the launch and rendezvous, but also the long journey that followed.

  Once the Gemini capsule reached its initial orbit, the pilot would maneuver it to rendezvous with the Cho-ta’an ship, and then both astronauts would exit the capsule, traverse the space between the two craft, and enter the Cho-ta’an ship. At this point, the engineer’s job would begin: first, the hull of the Cho-ta’an had to be repaired. They didn’t know the extent of the damage to this ship, but they knew Captain Mallick had blown a hole in it to get inside. When the ship was sealed, the engineer would have to program the Cho-ta’an ship to fly to the planet where crew of Andrea Luhman had met the Cho-ta’an sect called the Fractalists, where they would gather whatever information they could about the planet-killers to deliver it to the IDL. Virtually every step of this process was more complicated than it sounded.

  Reaching orbit was simple in theory: the rocket would launch straight up but soon begin to tilt sideways to increase its lateral velocity, in line with the Earth’s rotation. After the rocket was above the denser layers of the atmosphere, the first stage would drop off and the second stage would fire, continuing to increase the rocket’s altitude and velocity, until it was roughly two hundred miles above the surface and traveling at close to 25,000 miles per hour. The second stage would be ejected, and the capsule’s engines fires would fire, carrying it into a low Earth orbit. Much of this process would be automated, thanks to miniaturized logic circuits made possible by transistors. Course corrections required to maintain an optimal trajectory would be done by technicians on the ground who could track the rocket’s attitude, location and velocity in real-time using radar—another innovation made possible by the production of transistors. The astronauts wouldn’t have access to that information and would be too busy fighting g-forces and being rattled like pebbles in a tin can to fly the ship in any case.

  Once the capsule was in orbit, the astronauts would be faced with a new set of challenges. To get from the Gemini capsule to the Cho-ta’an ship, they would have to match the capsule’s position and orbital velocity to that of the Cho-ta’an ship. Locating the Cho-ta’an ship would be easy enough: for the past eighteen years, it had been broadcasting a message from Andrea Luhman’s captain on an endless loop. They could pinpoint the Cho-ta’an ship’s location and velocity from hundreds of miles away, and once they got within a few miles they could navigate by sight. Getting the capsule to the Cho-ta’an ship was another story.

  The natural inclination would be to point the capsule at the target ship’s location and thrust toward it, but this would result in failure: if the target ship was ahead of the capsule and the capsule increased its speed, its altitude would also increase, moving it away from the target. The higher altitude would then increase the capsule’s orbital period. Thus, simply pointing the capsule at the target and increasing thrust would put the capsule not only above, but also behind the target.

  To execute the rendezvous would require altering the capsule’s orbit to allow the rendezvous target to catch up and then at the correct moment changing to the same orbit as the target with no relative motion between the vehicles. This would be done by first putting the capsule into a lower orbit and then executing a maneuver called a Hohmann transfer, which consisted of accelerating to attain an elliptical orbit that intersected the orbit of the target ship, and then accelerating again to match the target ship’s circular orbit. If this maneuver was not executed with precise accuracy, the capsule could end up matching the target ship’s orbit but not its location, leaving the two vessels hundreds of miles apart with no way to close the gap. Worse, it could result in the capsule being miles above or below the target vehicle, putting it at a different orbit and therefore a different relative velocity. The pilot could attempt a second Hohmann maneuver, but if the second attempt failed, they would probably not have enough propellant for a third.

  It was difficult to train for this maneuver on the ground. Virtual reality simulations (or even a two-dimensional video simulation) remained beyond the Eidejelans’ abilities, but Nestor had built an ingenious spring-powered model similar to the models of the solar system built by astronomers to explain the movements of the planets. It consisted of a wire-frame globe sixteen feet in diameter, around which moved a quarter-inch-long sliver of wood representing the Cho-ta’an ship. By manipulating attitude and
thrust controls at the base of the globe, one could maneuver a tiny wooden capsule in an attempt to make the two vessels rendezvous.

  The model was not to scale: given the size of the Earth, a realistic model would have rendered the two ships microscopic. Still, it gave one a sense of the complexity of the problem: A system of gears in the floor under the model caused the capsule to respond to changes in its attitude and velocity more-or-less as an actual spacecraft would. Would-be capsule pilots learned quickly that intuition worked against them: to get the two ships close to each other, one had to forget what one knew about how objects moved in relation to each other and internalize a new system of rules. Knowing the theory of orbital rendezvous was little help: you could calculate an intended course, but minute variations in how the model’s parts moved meant that last-second corrections were almost always needed to get the two ships to rendezvous.

  Nestor had at first been frustrated with his inability to get the ships to move in a way that exactly matched real-world physics, but Michael assured him that the model was more than adequate: in reality, the two ships would be much smaller relative to each other, with the result that tiny variations in thrust could result in huge differences between an intended course and the course the ship ended up taking. A pilot who expected to be able to be able to get the capsule to execute a rendezvous with textbook precision was going to be in for an unpleasant surprise. The quirks of the model were just frustrating enough to keep the pilots from getting cocky. In the model, the capsule was on a slightly higher plane than the Cho-ta’an ship; a rendezvous was not considered successful unless the capsule was directly on top of the target ship and remained there for a full minute. So far, Thorvald, despite being the youngest pilot at seventeen, was the only one who had been able to match the Cho-ta’an ship’s position and velocity, and he’d only done it once. In reality, the ships were so much smaller than their representations in the model that performing the equivalent maneuver with the real thing might still leave the ships several miles apart. Orbital rendezvous was so difficult that even NASA’s first few attempts at it had failed. Michael insisted this was due to NASA’s failure to properly understand the problem and train for it, but the prospect was daunting nonetheless.