Disc

by Laurence E. Dahners

  He decided to talk up the flying car. A flying car was just the sort of technological toy that would excite their supreme leader. Like distracting a cat from a mouse with a laser pointer, he thought.

  ***

  Tiona told the BMW to stop at the hospital entrance. She waved at her parents and they started her way. Her dad got in the back, so her mother got into the passenger seat. Tiona told the car to take them back to her parents’ house, then turned to her dad, “How are you feeling?”

  “Fine.”

  Lisanne said, "Fine except he's been going crazy in there.” She snorted, “No lab to work in, you know?”

  Tiona could imagine. Talk about a recipe for putting her dad on edge. An unfamiliar place, filled with unfamiliar people, where he couldn’t focus on things that mattered to him. She turned back to her dad, “Did you do some programming?”

  Her dad nodded. Her mother snorted, “Did he do some programming? Every freaking moment, even while the doctors were trying to talk to him.”

  Tiona grinned at her mother. “You knew he was this way when you married him,” she said in a singsong voice, repeating a mantra they’d all heard a million times.

  Lisanne grinned back. “Yes I did,” she said turning to look fondly back at her husband.

  Tiona said, “Dad, how did you know that guy was going to pull a Taser on you?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Oh, come on. You’d stopped and wrapped your belt around your hand. You were expecting to hit them, weren’t you?”

  Her dad didn’t say anything for a while, so she turned to look at him in the back seat. He had a mulish expression on his face, but said nothing.

  Tiona’s AI said, “You have a call from General Cooper.”

  “I’ll take it… Hello General, what can I do for you?”

  The general sounded a little distracted, “We’ve got a problem…”

  When Cooper didn’t say anything further, Tiona’s heart skipped a beat worrying that something bad might be happening. Maybe General Harding had gotten loose?

  Before Tiona asked Cooper to clarify, he continued, “Space Command launched a multibillion-dollar satellite this morning. The second stage of the launch vehicle has failed multiple attempts to ignite it.”

  “And it didn’t reach orbit?” Tiona asked.

  “It’s in orbit, but it’s very low.”

  “How long till it burns up?”

  There was a pause, Tiona suspected Cooper was checking with someone. When he spoke again, he said, “3 to 5 days… we think.”

  “And you’re hoping we can tow it up to the orbit it’s supposed to be in?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  Tiona didn’t say anything for a minute while she considered. There were probably hundreds of questions she should ask the general. “Does it have an attachment point we can clamp on to?”

  Cooper said, “Yeah, there is a suspension ring at the front end that was used to hold up the frame during construction and to move it from place to place including while they were mounting it on the rocket.”

  “Can you detach the satellite from the upper stage? I’m not sure we want to try to grapple and move it while it’s still attached to something that’s a lot like a bomb.”

  “We should be able to, but we haven’t tried to detach it yet. If you’re going to try to move it, then we can send the signal to detach it. If you aren’t willing to try, we’d like to keep trying to ignite the second stage.”

  “Well, to be honest, I see lots of problems. The saucer we’ve currently got flying wasn’t really built to be doing this kind of thing. We’re still assembling one that’s been designed from the ground up for moving things around out in space, but it probably won’t be ready to fly for another week or two.”

  “I thought the one you already had could generate 100,000 pounds of thrust?”

  “It can, but I don’t want to be sitting in the cabin while it’s pushing against your satellite with its upper windows. It’d ruin my day if those windows broke. There aren’t really any attachment points on the bottom for cables to use to tow something either.” She paused for a moment, then had another thought, “Besides, remember we’ve mostly been flying this thing by the seat of our pants. I’m not sure we can find something whizzing along in a low orbit like that, nor am I sure we’d know how to move it into the right orbit.”

  Vaz spoke up from the back seat, “The AI can do it. Orbital mechanics are really simple problems for an AI like that and in Earth orbit you’ll have GPS for precision location.”

  Cooper started to speak to Tiona, but she said, “Just a second General, my dad’s had some ideas.” She turned frowning to her dad in the back seat, “You know what we’re talking about? You’ve only heard my half of the conversation.”

  Vaz shrugged and spoke in a monotone, “Something didn’t reach a good orbit; it’s going to burn up sometime soon; they want you to tow it up to a better orbit; you’re not sure whether you can find it or put it in the right orbit.”

  Tiona gave a little laugh, “I guess you heard enough. How would you suggest we attach the saucer to the satellite? I’m not real excited about having it trailing behind us on a cable and maybe smashing into us if we maneuver.”

  Vaz looked at her for a moment, then said, “You could bolt a gripping arm to the bottom of the fusion plant under the saucer. Strong enough to either push or pull.”

  “How would you activate the gripper? Whatever you use has to stand up to a space environment.”

  “Electromagnet, the saucer has power to spare.”

  Tiona frowned, “What if this attachment ring is nonmagnetic?”

  “The magnet doesn’t attach to the satellite, the magnet opens a gripper device that springs back shut to mechanically grasp the attachment ring.”

  “Okaaay,” Tiona closed her eyes for a moment thinking, then said, “General, my dad thinks we can do it. Can you give us precision data on the orbit and exact dimensions for this ring we’re going to attach to? We’d want to grip it rather than just clipping onto it with a tow cable.”

  “Sure! We even have a replica of the satellite that you can try attaching the grip to.”

  “Yeah… unless that replica’s here in North Carolina, it’s probably just as easy for us to try attaching to the one that’s out in space.”

  “Sorry, still thinking old school. Too used to doing everything we can down here on Earth because it’s so hard to get to space.”

  “Okay, have somebody send me exact dimensions so we can build something to grip it. I’ll contact you for exact orbital elements when we’re ready to go up.”

  “Um, thanks. Uh, how much is this going to cost? Our bean counters are going to want to know.”

  Tiona gave a little laugh, “Well, I’d have to ask my brother the CEO since I’m not the business person in our group. But, how about if I promise we won’t charge more than one percent of the cost of the satellite?”

  “That’d be over $30 million!” Cooper sounded a little indignant.

  “And a lot cheaper than letting it burn up in the atmosphere. Do you want us to proceed or no?”

  “But it isn’t going to cost you anywhere near that much!”

  “Ah, but we have all these startup costs. You can bet my businessman brother is going to think I’m letting you off way too cheap.”

  “Yeah,” Cooper sighed, “and you’re right, it’s way cheaper than building another satellite. I think you can assume you’ve got the go-ahead though I’ll have to confirm with the bean counters.”

  Tiona laughed, “You might have more trouble than you expect. We’re not on their list of ‘approved vendors.’ You know that satellite’s going to be drifting ash before they get done dithering about using an unapproved vendor.”

  Cooper sighed again, sounding depressed, “Yeah.”

  Tiona snickered, “Tell you what. We’ll save this satellite whether we get paid or not, but you tell them after they get done putting it out for competitive bids and r
ealize we’re really cheap compared to all the people out there who can’t do it at all, that they’ll want to pay us what we charge for this one. Otherwise, we’ll charge five percent for any satellite rescues in the future.”

  Cooper agreed to the plan. She reminded him to send her the dimensions for the attachment point, then disconnected.

  ***

  Bob Thompson shook his head. It’d only been an hour since he’d called Sophie to tell her that the new skin suits were ready. Apparently she’d been in Raleigh at the new GSI headquarters, so she, Tiona, and Nolan had jumped in the saucer then flown out immediately to try them on. He watched the saucer slow as it came down behind his house.

  As they walked back into his house to try out their suits, Bob said, “Why such a rush?”

  Sophie said, “We have our first mission and we’re flying it tonight. We’re hoping that at least one of these suits will fit well enough that we can have someone do an EVA if we need it.”

  “What kind of mission? I thought you guys were trying to go to the moon, surely you’re not trying to do that tonight?”

  “No, no, Space Command has had a second stage failure while launching one of their satellites. They’re hoping we can take it the rest of the way up before it deorbits.”

  Jokingly he said, “You’re not gonna have someone get out there and give it a shove are you?”

  Tiona Gettnor said, “We’re having our engineering firm build us a fixture for the saucer that’ll let us grab it. Hopefully we can attach with the fixture and tow it into the new orbit without any EVA, but I’m worried that it might need a little hands-on.”

  They split up to put on the spandex garments that went under the skin suits. They split up into separate bedrooms to do that, but then they all rejoined in his family room to climb into their electroactive polymer suits.

  Bob found the appearance of the two young ladies in spandex to be pretty distracting.

  Soon enough they’d relaxed the polymer in their skin suits and began climbing into them. They took turns checking each other’s suits for wrinkles. Once they thought they had them on fairly straight, they turned down the juice to the polymers and re-smoothed out wrinkles with the suits moderately tight. Finally, they turned off the power completely so the polymers fully tightened. They did some twisting and turning to make sure they had freedom of movement, then put on their boots and coveralls and headed out to the saucer. The saucer took them up to altitude while maintaining 100 percent O2 atmosphere. They ate a little dinner and then started trying on their helmets.

  Tiona was talking to someone through her AI. Bob had been thinking that they were still well out of the atmosphere, but then he glanced out the windows and found to his surprise that the saucer seemed to be inside some kind of a building. “Where the hell are we?” he asked.

  Nolan said, “We’re in a construction hanger at Costa and Sons. They’re the ones that built this saucer. Right now they’re installing the fixture for grabbing the satellite.”

  Bob looked out all the windows without seeing anyone doing any work on the saucer. “Where are they going to put it?”

  “Um, they’re bolting it to the bottom right now. That’s those little clanking and scratching noises you hear faintly.”

  Now that the noises had been pointed out, Bob noticed them. “Have they got us up on some kind of scaffold to work underneath the saucer?”

  Nolan grinned at him, “Remember? It’s got thrusters. Tiona’s got the AI floating it the right distance off the floor so the guys can screw the grabber on. That’s who she’s talking to. She’s been moving it up and down and turning it back and forth so the bolts line up.”

  A few minutes later, a door on the big hangar opened and the saucer floated out into the dusk. Once again, Bob watched the world fall away beneath him as the saucer shot up into the sky. “Are we going after the satellite right now?”

  Tiona said, “I thought we should give it a try. We don’t have much time. The real question will be, if the gripper won’t lock onto the satellite, whether we should try an EVA to see if we can manually lock it on.”

  “If it’s underneath the saucer, I assume you must have cameras that let you line it up?”

  “Yeah,” she said, then spoke a couple of quick words to her AI and pointed at a set of screens in front of the seats.

  Bob looked at them and saw a heavy duty arm protruding from the bottom of the saucer. It had a large clamp on it with what looked like some kind of custom fixture, presumably to grab onto some part of the satellite. “I imagine it could be kind of touchy trying to get that fixture to lock on. It looks like it has to fit something on the satellite exactly?”

  “Yeah, that’s what makes me worry we’ll need an EVA. I have this sinking feeling that we could spend hours moving the saucer around, trying to get the fixture lined up exactly. I don’t think it’s something the saucer’s AI will be able to do very well. On the other hand, somebody in a suit out there could probably do it by hand in a few minutes once we got it pretty close.”

  Bob said, “All right! I’m your man.”

  “You’re not our employee, you’re our suit consultant!”

  He lifted an eyebrow, “I’ve actually done an EVA. Sign me up as an employee. We’ll all be a lot safer with me out there.”

  A few minutes later, Bob found himself reading an employee contract for GSI and recording verbal agreement to it.

  Fortunately, Vaz’s program worked as well as he’d told them it would. Tiona gave the saucer’s AI the orbital elements General Cooper had relayed to her and about fifteen minutes later, the saucer approached Space Command’s satellite. Per her request, it assumed the same orbit as the satellite, but 100 meters behind it. She was glad to see the satellite wasn’t rotating, spinning, tumbling or anything like that. Space Command had detached it from the upper stage of the launch rocket as promised, then used its station-keeping rockets to steady it.

  Initially Tiona tried to use the joystick controller to put the saucer in front of the satellite. However, when she accelerated toward the satellite, the counterintuitive orbital mechanics which caused the saucer to move outward and then actually fall behind the satellite because of its bigger orbit made this very confusing. Eventually, she told the AI to adjust their orbit to place the saucer ten feet in front of the satellite. It actually did so by decelerating a little, which caused the saucer’s orbit to move inside the satellite’s and pass it by virtue of the faster inner orbit. Then the saucer accelerated to move its orbit back out to just in front of the satellite.

  Over this short ten foot distance, the tendency for the saucer to move inward when she decelerated to back up to the satellite was much less noticeable. However, even over such a short distance, with the joystick’s sensitivity set to make essentially micro adjustments, docking the grabber to the satellite proved to be quite frustrating. After a while, Tiona resorted to giving the saucer’s AI instructions regarding which way she wanted it to move.

  She was able to bump the grasping fixture against the handling ring on the satellite multiple times, but wasn’t able to get it aligned well enough to lock on. Tiona swore in frustration, finally saying, “I guess we’re going to have to go out there and line that SOB up by hand.”

  Sophie said, “Before we do it, I think we should depressurize the saucer down to five PSI so that we’ll all be able to egress and ingress more quickly. When exiting, we should each stay in the airlock for a few minutes to make sure there aren’t any problems with our suit. Then two of us should go out so we’ll have somebody ready to help if one of the suits has a problem.”

  Tiona said, “I think a third person should be in the airlock with it already decompressed to vacuum. Then they’ll be ready to go out and help if the first two have an issue.”

  They lowered the pressure in their suits and the main cabin, doing it gradually so everyone could pop their ears. Tiona wanted to be one of the people to EVA, but listened to reason when Nolan pointed out that she was the logica
l person to be in control of the saucer if a real problem occurred.

  Bob climbed into the airlock, decompressed it and then stayed in the lock for five minutes, moving around in his suit to make sure there weren’t any problems. Next, he snapped his EVA safety cable to the ring outside the lock and climbed out. Sophie, having had more training than anyone other than Bob, climbed in the lock and decompressed next. She also stayed in the lock for five minutes twisting and turning to make sure there weren’t any problems with her suit, especially the helmet seal.

  When Sophie climbed out of the airlock, Nolan cycled in. Sophie and Bob moved off around the edge of the saucer, trailing their safety cables and holding on to grips which had been installed just for this maneuver. When they reached the satellite, Bob reminded Sophie not to get her fingers between the satellite and the gripping fixture. They clipped short safety lines on, then taking positions on either side, they each put one hand on the satellite and one hand on the saucer’s gripping fixture. Though it took several minutes of pulling to maneuver the two massive objects into the correct alignment, once they’d done so, the actual locking of the satellite to the saucer was somewhat anticlimactic.

  Bob called out to Tiona, “Before we come in, give it just a little bit of thrust to be sure it all holds together.”

  “You guys move up onto the deck of the saucer and take a good grip before I do that,” Tiona said. “I don’t want you getting thrown off, or even worse being hit by any parts that break off the fixture or the satellite under load.”

  A few minutes later they felt some pressure as the saucer started gently towing the satellite. Nothing broke so they got ready to go back in through the airlock. Nolan protested, “You guys have got to let me climb outside for at least a minute! I came thousands of miles to go to this party; you can’t stop me at the door!”