She shakes her head. “None of this mattered.”
Ping looks alarmed. “We should turn it over to them, do what they say.”
“They’ll be back and forth for the next couple of days. They’re not just going to leave us here. As soon as they get what they want they’ll kill us and wipe all the station logs.”
“Then, what do we do? We have to find someplace to hide.”
“No, they’ll comb the ship until they get us. Besides, we need the emergency area.”
Ping shakes his head. “Don’t worry about me, I’m tougher than you think.”
She puts her hands on her hips and paces in front of the screen. Something clicks in her mind. It’s like a magic act, Ward said. He doesn’t know how we got here.
“Maybe there’s one other option,” Jia says. A deep sigh. “Suit up.”
Every planet has its own custom-designed PLEX suit, and you can identify them by color. Copper for Mars, amber for Saturn, blue for Uranus. It reminds Jia of the heraldry used to differentiate knights in armor suits. Because these are Cloud Nine’s, they are fully interfaced with the platform’s computers. Jia’s faceplate has a heads-up-display streaming Runway Camera Two.
It’s nighttime outside and one of the stars alternates red and green. As it grows larger, wing floodlights illuminate two forward cones. The puddle jumper’s engines roar as it glides down onto the runway.
Jia recognizes it as a Pelican light-lift ascent vehicle. Five-ton max capacity. No wonder Ward’s been here for four days.
The Pelican’s rear cargo door descends and a cylindrical tank protrudes. Four men emerge on the ramp wearing white EV suits augmented with red combat plates. All carry pulse rifles and move like soldiers securing an area. A fifth man descends in a silver EV suit. He’s not holding a weapon, but a pistol is sheathed in a downward-angled mount on his left breastplate. He stops at the bottom of the ramp and surveys the area, looks over at the umbilical, then taps up a few commands on its panel.
Jia sees his commands scroll in another window along with Cloud Nine’s response.
Current time: 21:04. Query: Launch pad buffer tank status. Result: Empty.
He stares a minute and taps another command.
He3 Inventory Log:
20:00163,000 liters.
20:12Product flagged as defective. Purge request
20:26Purge tanks filled.
20:30Atmospheric venting complete.
21:04Query: He3 inventory. Result: 0 liters.
Jia smiles. Told you that you weren’t getting it.
Ward smashes his fist into the panel, then pulls out his gun and shoots the display. The flash is like lightning on the deck.
“Well, that was rude,” Jia says to her helmet display.
Ward motions to the other men. They break into two squads. One searches the deck while the other heads into the control room. Jia switches to internal cams and watches them move through the corridors.
Ping is next to Jia, sitting in his blue PLEX suit on the floor of Aero One. He’s watching the same camera feed and says, “He looks pissed.”
“Yes he does.”
Ward is back in the control room now, trying to access the computer. He can try and hack it again, but she’s declared an emergency, and no matter what anyone does Cloud Nine’s safety protocols will not allow it to restart until the originator cancels the emergency or Central resets it.
Ward dispatches two men to the lower decks.
Jia glances at Cloud Nine’s air traffic display. They are flying fifty kilometers west of Cloud Nine, just one of twenty-four aerostats in the loop, all currently paused due to Cloud Nine’s shutdown. In a way, Aero One is now where it was originally meant to be, flying in the loop with the other aerostats.
“See,” Ping says, “I knew there was a reason Aero One was my favorite.”
Jia chuckles. “I’d be okay, though, if we didn’t see any more of it after this.”
They watch the pirates fan out through the platform’s underbelly. For the next thirty minutes the soldiers look in every hiding place. Every camera they pass logs more info about their identity. She’s got Ward’s message and everything about his ship from the orbital platform’s externals. He was overconfident and careless, and didn’t think he could lose. I can relate, Jia thinks.
A communication notification pops up, and for a second Jia thinks it’s Ward. But it’s not. It’s on the priority channel. She tenses and puts it on her screen.
The man is middle-aged and wears an ocean blue flight suit with a stitched globe insignia. Four other crew members stand behind him. “This is the Atlas responding to your distress signal. We’re a heavy gas freighter currently stationed at Saturn, and we’re carrying a skipper that should be able to land on your platform. Looks like if we push it a bit, we can make it in six days. We’ve already been in contact with the U.N. Hermes, which is orbiting Titan right now. They’re going to give us an armed escort in case your pirates are still around.” He smiles. “I kind of hope we bump into them, actually. I’d love for them to see what the Hermes can do. The Hermes will be in touch to coordinate the rescue. Stay safe, guys. We’re all thinking of you. See you in a few.”
Jia takes a deep breath as a lump forms in her throat. Tears well up, but here there is gravity, not like the weightless tears of the Prosperity, and they sink down her cheeks.
On the control room screen Ward smashes the console with both fists. Jia guesses he’s heard the Atlas’s response as well. There seems to be some kind of argument going on over comms between him and one of his men. The others stop their search and everyone returns to the Pelican. Ward is alone in the control room. He looks up and scans the top of the walls.
“What’s he doing?” asks Ping.
“I think he’s looking for the camera.”
He finds it and stares right at them.
Jia holds her breath. She doesn’t know why. He can’t hear her.
After a long, icy moment he turns and walks away. She sees him board the Pelican via Runway Cam Two.
Jia exhales. She hated to dump the He3 tanks, but as long as there was He3, the pirates would have kept trying. Ping’s pneumonia couldn’t wait another four days while the pirates shuttled back and forth. Now that there’s nothing, there’s no reason for them to stay. She will watch them ascend back to the orbital, and, when she’s sure they’re gone, she’ll turn Aero One around and fly Ping back to Cloud Nine. Antibiotics should be fabbed in a few hours.
“Well, now let’s just hope he doesn’t shoot the station from orbit for spite,” Ping says.
Jia shakes her head. “For once, having four thousand kilometers of atmosphere above us is a good thing. Hypersonic slugs will just fragment and burn up like meteors. The only thing that can get down here is the puddle jumper, and it’s unarmed.”
“I know you didn’t want to back down,” Ping says, “that you wanted to stay and find a way to fight them.”
“Yeah, I did, but I’ve lost count of how many second chances we’ve had this week. Sometimes fighting and winning aren’t the same thing.” She glances at the slate and all of the tagged identities. “So, today’s not the day to fight the pirates, but their day is coming.” She’s shoulder-to-shoulder with Ping. They don’t need to share body heat anymore, not with the PLEX suits, but they choose the contact.
They watch the Pelican glide up into the deep pitch of the night sky, becoming just another star in a thousand pinpoints of white. A dozen of Uranus’s moons are jewels suspended in the heavens.
Jia leans her head on Ping’s shoulder, and as he slides his hand down to hers, she intertwines her fingers with his.
THE END
Author’s Message
Thanks for reading Aero One. As Douglas Adams once said, “Space is big. Really big.” Even with the transformative technology of RF drives featured in my stories, there’s still days separating people anytime space is involved. It’s most noticeable when two people try and talk. In my story Signal L
oss, a father located at the edge of the solar system has an ongoing conversation with his daughter on Earth. Even at light speed it takes twenty-four hours for each response.
Isolation is a natural theme which emerges from the reality of great distance. In a way, the solar system has become the new wild west. Help is far away and you need to solve your own problems. Signal Loss explored a father who was completely isolated on a ship out near the heliopause. Aero One explores two people who are isolated together, trapped in a claustrophobic space with only each other to rely on. Both stories have main characters who seem to want to keep people at arm’s length, but, like all of us, are searching for connections.
I always like to comment about the science which underpins my stories, so check out the next section, “The Science of the Story” for some fun tidbits.
Thanks again, and keep dreaming big.
The Science of the Story
Uranus is a fascinating planet which often gets overlooked in science-fiction. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1781 while he was looking for comets. In Aero One, Ping points out that Uranus is the only planet not named after a Roman god. All planets closer than Uranus (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) are visible to the naked eye. The Romans saw them and named them. It wasn’t until telescopes were invented that Uranus was spotted.
Perhaps one of my favorite facts about Uranus is that Hershel didn’t get to name it. His proposed name was Georgium Sidus (George’s Star) in honor of England’s King George III. So, for all of the snickering about the name “Uranus”, just remember, it could have been planet George. The winning name came from astronomer Johann Elert Bode.
Interestingly, Bode’s colleague, Martin Klaproth, had just discovered a new element. He liked the name so much that he called his element Uranium, which turned out to be the stuff of nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons.
The weirdest thing about Uranus is that it’s backwards and sideways. Imagine spinning a top on a table. Looking down at the top, it spins counterclockwise. This is pretty much the setup for nearly every planet in our solar system. Now flick the top with your finger and it wobbles off axis. Say, twenty-three degrees. That’s what happened to Earth. Now whack it hard from the other side and it tilts 98 degrees. That’s Uranus. Because its bottom is now pointing towards the sun, it’s rotating clockwise. And the weird part is that all of its moons and rings are tilted by the same amount. How? They’re not physically connected. It means whatever hit Uranus did so before the moons and rings formed.
Now, because it’s sideways, depending on where Uranus is in its orbit it will either have a relatively normal day and night cycle or have one side in endless sunlight and the other side stuck in night. It depends on the season. Winters are twenty-one years long and must be particularly dreary, but summer is nothing but sun.
All of the Hayden’s World Origins stories are set in the 2080’s, which means that it’s Spring in the northern hemisphere (where the aerostats are located on the 20 degree latitude line). In Spring there’s normal day and night cycles, so we get a nice sunset scene at the story’s end.
The idea of using aerostats to mine our solar system’s gas giants for He3 has been around for a while. Even NASA’s weighed in on it. He3 is a non-radioactive isotope of helium which can be used in fusion reactors. Unfortunately, there is very little of it on Earth. China has already proposed mining our moon for He3.
However you collect He3, you’ll need a way to get it to orbit and haul it back home. The two ascent vehicles used in the story, the Crane and Pelican, were described as 100 ton and 5 ton lift vehicles. Modern day heavy lift vehicles are capable of lifting between 20 to 50 tons.
One of my favorite contrary-to-popular-belief story moments is when Ping talks about how spacesuits aren’t designed to keep you warm. We’ve had decades of sci-fi movies showing people insta-freeze when exposed to vacuum, yet back here on Earth we use vacuum insulation to keep everything in our thermos nice and toasty. As anyone who’s ever broken a sweat knows, it’s really hard to get rid of heat through radiation alone. In space, the only way to get rid of heat besides radiating it is to transfer the heat to some mass and then eject the mass. Hence, the ice sublimation trick.
Hats off to the movie (and of course book) The Martian. You’ll notice that Matt Damon’s character Mark Watney changes suits. When he’s wandering around Mars he wears his orange and white planetary suit. When he’s in the capsule to rendezvous with the Hermes, he wears a bulky white spacesuit. The two suits have very different design requirements. This is the same idea as the PLEX (planetary excursion) and EV (extravehicular activity) suits in Aero One.
And yes, the U.N. Hermes at the end of Aero One was a nod to The Martian. Both are survival stories on alien worlds where science, wits, and fortitude save the day.
Thanks again for reading Aero One!
About the Author
S.D. Falchetti is a mechanical engineer by day who dreams of fantastic voyages and far, far away places at night. He thinks that The Empire Strikes Back was the best of the Star Wars movies, and still has an original AT-AT from his childhood. He lives in the Northeastern United States.
www.sdfalchetti.com
[email protected]
Hayden's World Shorts, Stories 1-3: 43 Seconds, Signal Loss, Aero One Page 11
