Zero Limit

by Jeremy K. Brown

  He stopped in front of the famous portrait of Kennedy, arms folded, looking down. He looked at Sara and pointed at the picture.

  “Do you know this was based off of Ted Kennedy’s posture at JFK’s funeral?”

  “What?” Sara said, almost as though she wasn’t sure why she was being asked.

  “Yeah,” Alex said. “Jackie had the painting commissioned after the assassination, and the artist, Aaron Shikler, he didn’t want to do the same old portrait that had been done before. He found this picture of Ted at the funeral and, just like that, came up with probably the most famous presidential portrait in the White House.”

  “OK,” said Sara. “Thanks for the history lesson. Now comes the part where you tell me that you have a plan, any plan, that doesn’t involve launching nuclear missiles into the upper atmosphere.”

  “Come on, Sara,” Alex said, starting to walk again. “We’ve run simulations on everything from knocking the asteroid off course with a laser ablation to sending up a ship and attaching booster rockets to blowing the asteroid back with a blast of steam.”

  “Right, I know,” Sara said. “We run the same simulations at the PDCO every week. And of those simulations, shall we talk about how many of them were successful?”

  Alex looked at her, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

  “None,” he said flatly. “None to date.”

  “Exactly.”

  She began walking again. Alex hurried to catch up to her.

  “But you know that we’re close,” said Alex. “Really close.”

  “You know what else is close?” Sara asked. “That goddamn asteroid. And if we don’t come up with a workable solution, our president is going to blow it out of the sky and turn a big problem into a million smaller problems.”

  “Forgive me for saying so,” said Alex, “but I don’t think the nukes are what’s got you so upset.”

  “Then please share with me what you think has got me so upset in your infinite wisdom.”

  “You’re worried about the crew,” he said. “Specifically, this Taggart woman.”

  “She’s got a daughter, Alex,” said Sara.

  “I know. But she violated a travel embargo,” he countered. “She was mining an asteroid illegally. She’s broken countless ICC and federal regulations. Even if we brought that rock to a soft landing on the Mall, they’d clap her in irons the second she stepped off of it.”

  “At least she’d be alive,” said Sara. “I think her daughter would prefer that.”

  “Sara, I understand your compassion,” Alex said. “I even admire it. But what the secretary of defense said is true, ass though he may be. We’re talking about four people weighed against millions. Right now, those millions are our priority.”

  They left the White House and walked over the Ellipse, where they had parked earlier in the afternoon. Sara started to get back into the car. Alex touched her arm gently.

  “Look,” he said, “if I can figure out a way to save them and the crew, I’ll do it.”

  Sara smiled at him. “That’s good enough for me.”

  She started to get into the car and then turned and looked back at Alex.

  “It was a cool story,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The painting,” Sara said. “It was an interesting story.”

  “Oh, yeah, well, I’m full of interesting stories,” he said.

  He closed the door behind her and walked around to the driver’s side. As he did, he sighed.

  “Now all I need is an idea.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  PDCO headquarters had become asteroid central. Nearly all other work had stopped and every available mind was focused on staving off the impending devastation from space. One of the conference rooms, or, as the scientists were calling it, CIC for command information center, had been turned into the nerve center of the operation and was abuzz with activity. People brushed past each other, moving in and out of the door carrying printouts, photographs, and old binders filled with yellowing reports. Anything that could shed any light on asteroids. How they moved, what their properties were, and what, if anything, could be done to stop them.

  The room itself looked like a cross between a science lab and a frat house, walls dotted with SMART Boards covered in equations, algorithms, and thumbnail sketches of asteroids entering Earth’s atmosphere. The table was littered with a mosaic of coffee cups, soda cans, takeout containers, and textbooks. Somewhere in the background, music played on a constant loop in an effort to keep the team awake and engaged. It was coming up on two days since the discovery that the Thresher had moved into Earth’s path, and people were starting to get punchy.

  Into this chaotic scene came Alex and Sara, fresh from their meeting at the White House. Sara clapped her hands, bringing everyone to attention.

  “All right, everyone,” she said. “Let’s all get on the same page!”

  “How’d it go at 1600?” asked Ned.

  “Not great,” she said. “Everyone here has been given clearance to receive any information related to this crisis, so I’ll fill you in. Let me remind you of your professionalism and the expectation that you will keep these briefings completely confidential. First, people, let me introduce, for those who haven’t already met him, Alex Sutter from FEMA. He’s been working with us for some time now on asteroid defense, and he’s agreed to stay here until the crisis has passed.”

  Alex waved somewhat awkwardly to the room.

  “Excellent,” said Sara. “Now that we all know each other, let’s get caught up. Any new info here?”

  “We’ve been looking into what happened up there to set the asteroid on a course with Earth,” said Ned. “The fire on the Tamarisk wouldn’t be enough to redirect an entire asteroid. So we’ve tried to piece it all together.”

  “What have you come up with?”

  “Well,” said Patricia Delgado, a theoretical physicist on loan from MIT, “from what we can tell, when the Tamarisk exploded, the shock wave broke off a piece of the asteroid, which went off in one direction, while the remaining section was pushed closer to the Moon.”

  “The Moon’s gravity then captured the asteroid and swung it onto its present course,” said Ned.

  “Right in our path,” said Sara. “Good work, guys. As you know, Alex and I were at the White House today to bring everyone up to speed on what’s happening.”

  “What do they want to do?” asked Daniel Kim, a young scientist who had joined the PDCO from the Jet Propulsion Lab.

  “The president wants to use nukes,” said Sara.

  “Can he even do that?” asked Ned. “I thought there was a law or something that prevented using nuclear weapons in space.”

  “There is,” said Alex. “The Outer Space Treaty. But most of the nations involved have agreed that, under certain circumstances, the ban could be lifted. The potential eradication of millions, if not billions, of human lives from a space-born PHO apparently applies.”

  “Are they even sure it would work?” another young astrophysicist asked from the back of the room.

  “They seem to believe that, with a large enough warhead, a nuclear blast will break the asteroid up into smaller, more manageable fragments,” said Alex. “I for one happen to think that they’re dead wrong. But that doesn’t mean a nuclear option isn’t a viable one.”

  “Explain,” said Sara.

  “If the bomb were detonated near the asteroid, the surface would be irradiated by the X-rays and neutrons released by the detonation,” Alex explained. “Those X-rays and neutrons would, in turn, create so much heat on the surface that portions of the Thresher would be vaporized. As the vaporized material is blown from the asteroid, it could create a change in momentum. Theoretically.”

  “That makes sense,” said Patricia. “But do we even have a nuke big enough to cause that kind of detonation?”

  “We’ve got it,” Alex said. “Shortly after he took office, the president ordered the construction of the largest
nuclear missile ever built. Sixty-eight megatons. The warhead sits on an old SLS booster left over from the shuttle program. The missile’s called the Thunderclap. He’s got it stored in a silo somewhere outside Topeka.”

  “Moving on,” said Sara. “We know the missile is an option, but we also know the risks. It would have to detonate near the asteroid at just the right angle to be effective. Any miscalculation and it’s raining rocks all over the world.”

  “That’s exactly right,” Alex said. “The Thunderclap nuke is a last resort. Which means we’ve got to come up with a whole lot of other resorts before we get there.”

  “So what have we got to work with here?” asked Sara. “What have you bright young minds been cooking up?”

  “Our options are slim,” Ned began. “We’ve run through everything again and again. We thought maybe we could use a ship as a gravity tractor, employing its gravitational field to alter the asteroid’s path.”

  “I don’t think that’ll work,” said Sara. “Not in the time we have. A gravity tractor only works after years of station-keeping with an asteroid. A spaceship has minimal gravity. Anything we could launch in the time frame we’ve got to work with would be too small to make any difference.”

  “That’s what we found,” Ned agreed. “We were also thinking of an enhanced gravity tractor.”

  “What about a kinetic impactor?” asked Patricia. “We launch something right at the asteroid. A craft of some kind. It hits the Thresher with enough force and, boom, knocks the asteroid out of the way. It’s been done before.”

  “Yeah,” Alex agreed. “With a comet. It’s an intriguing idea, but where are we going to find a ship that can get the job done in time? This is a big bastard we’re talking about and for something to hit it hard enough to knock it back, that something would have to comprise a decent portion of the asteroid’s mass. But let’s keep that one in our back pocket. Let’s check with NASA. Maybe they’ve got something that can get the job done.”

  “On it,” said Patricia, gathering up her notes and leaving the room.

  “Is a laser ablation out of the question?” asked Ned.

  “It wouldn’t be if we had a strong enough laser,” said Sara.

  “We have no directed-energy weapons available?” Ned persisted. “Nothing from the military?”

  “Most of the more powerful DEWs were decommissioned and dismantled after the Second Cold War and the Last Campaign,” she said. “The government felt the resources and materials would be better directed elsewhere. There are some laser weapons in use on naval vessels, but they’re used to shoot down missiles. They’re not powerful enough to handle something of this size.”

  Clicking his pen over and over again, Daniel stared at the ceiling. His face wore the expression of a man to whom an idea was slowly but surely coming.

  “What about the Yarkovsky effect?” he said, still studying the ceiling tiles.

  “Go on,” said Alex.

  “The idea that sunlight can heat the asteroid and change its trajectory,” said Daniel. “So what if we painted the asteroid’s surface white? The side facing the Sun, right? That way you alter the amount of radiation it absorbs. When it rotates, the irradiated side would start emitting infrared photons, generating a small amount of thrust, and whoosh, we’re saved.”

  Sara and Alex were silent a moment. “And how do you propose we paint the asteroid?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.”

  “OK,” said Alex. “Let us know when you get there. But I like the way you think. Think weird, people. It’s what we need.”

  “Also,” Sara said, “we’re all going to be burning the midnight oil on this one, so I want everyone to start working in shifts. Sleep is critical. When it comes to asteroid deflection, every measurement counts, and we can’t risk disaster because someone was pulling an all-nighter. All good?”

  Everyone nodded in agreement and then went back to scanning their notes, holopads, tablets, and phones. Sara looked over at Alex.

  “I don’t want to side with the president on this or just about anything else,” she said, “but our choices are frighteningly scarce.”

  “I don’t want to side with him either,” he said, “but show me a better option.”

  Just then, the door burst open and a nervous-looking technician ran in.

  “Dr. Kent?” he said. “Comm channel’s buzzing. It’s Caitlin Taggart. She says they have a plan.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  While Diaz and Shaw were outside assessing what they would need for the solar sail, Vee and Caitlin began a thorough checkup of all the Alley Oop’s flight systems to see how easily they’d be able to get her flying. Of course, even if they were able to get off the surface, they still had to consider the cracked heat shield. They did have materials on board to repair the damage, but how effective those materials would be was anyone’s guess.

  “How are you holding up?” Caitlin asked Vee as she ran through the preflight checklist.

  “Fine as wine,” she answered. Then she looked up at Caitlin. “I didn’t mean what I said earlier, you know. When I said that I wished it had been you instead of him? I didn’t mean that.”

  “Yes you did,” Caitlin said. “And you’d be nuts if you didn’t. He was your husband, Vee. And, for whatever it’s worth, I wish that I could trade places with him for you, believe me.”

  Vee was quiet a minute, then began tinkering with the control panel again. “But if that’s your way of saying you forgive me,” Caitlin said, “then I can live with that.”

  “Forgive has nothing to do with it,” Vee replied, shaking her head. She wiped her eyes quickly. “What happened happened. And even if things had gone differently and Tony was still here, so what? It’d be five of us stuck on this asteroid waiting to die instead of four.”

  “Don’t think like that,” said Caitlin. “We’re gonna get off this thing.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because you’re a stone-cold badass and I’m the goddamn Mama Bear,” she said. “What chance does some four-billion-year-old rock have against the two of us?”

  Vee shook her head and went back to work.

  “You’re crazy,” she muttered. “That’s all there is to it.”

  “Sometimes I wish that I was,” said Caitlin. “It would make every day so much easier. Now, what about this ignition problem?”

  “The good news is that the ignition isn’t the problem,” said Vee. “The bad news is that it’s something else.”

  “Something such as . . . ?”

  “I’m not sure yet, but I’ve been running diagnostics, and I think this bucket is a hell of a lot older than we thought. It’s still got an EDS setup.”

  Caitlin whistled. That was surprising. In the early days of spaceflight, the vehicles that were used to propel the astronauts to the stars carried explosive device systems designed to perform a wide range of tasks, from separating stages to deploying parachutes. The Saturn rockets that ferried men to the Moon carried more than two hundred of them, while the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars in 2012 employed seventy-six different pyrotechnic devices, each one designed to fire at a specific moment during the landing. However, over the last fifty years or so, pyrotechnics had been phased out on most spacecraft in favor of pneumatic separation systems that allowed for quicker reusability.

  “Jesus,” said Caitlin. “Where the hell did Ross find this thing?”

  “Black market, probably,” said Vee. “I’m guessing this thing is Russian, or maybe Chinese. It might have been an old lunar lander that’s been retrofitted.”

  Caitlin called up the Alley Oop’s schematics on the screen and began running tests of her own. She had always had an interest in gear from the time she was a kid, fixing cars in the driveway with her dad. Even as an adult, tinkering with something took her mind off worry and distress. She looked intently at the display, swiping through screens of system checks until she zeroed in on a
potential problem.

  “I’ve got something,” she said. “Looks like the computer’s reporting a failure in the guillotine system.”

  “And that’s bad?”

  Caitlin nodded. The explosive guillotine was a particularly key piece of tech, which, when fired, would sever the umbilical cables connecting the Alley Oop’s ascent and descent stages. If the charges didn’t ignite and propel the blade down with enough force to cut the umbilical, they’d be stuck on the asteroid for a long time.

  Before Caitlin and Vee could consider their circumstances further, the comm lit up with an incoming message. Sara was back on the mic.

  “Looks like your girl’s finally picked up,” said Vee.

  Caitlin switched on the comm. “It’s about time,” she said. “Where were you? On a hot date?”

  “Oh, nothing special,” said Sara. “People here are telling me you’ve got a plan.”

  “That’s right.” Caitlin broke down what she had come up with. Sara took it all in.

  “I like that you’re thinking proactively up there,” she said, “but I’m going to be blunt. I don’t think it’s going to work.”

  “I appreciate the direct approach,” said Caitlin. “Care to tell me why?”

  “The amount of Mylar you’ve got on that lander compared to the size of the asteroid just isn’t enough to make a difference,” Sara said. “It would be like putting a handkerchief on an elephant.”

  “We’ve got a science teacher here who kind of told us the same thing,” said Caitlin. “But we’ve got to try something.”

  “I understand,” said Sara, and then she told Caitlin to hold on. After a moment, another voice came on the line.

  “Hi, Capt—Mrs. . . .”

  “Caitlin’s fine,” she said. “Who’s this?”

  “Dr. Alex Sutter, Federal Emergency Management Agency. Dr. Ken—Sara’s just told me about your plan, and I have to agree with her assessment. It’s risk versus reward. And, from where I’m sitting, it doesn’t balance out.”