Dead Men Flying

by Bill Patterson

  “Urgent?” Roger Standish was deep in an Engineering analysis of the next several weeks' events.

  “Not for the next ten hours, sir. But we better come up with a solution long before then.”

  The peculiar tone in Mickey's voice made the Commander look up. He blinked rapidly as he cleared his mind from the images, facts, and figures. Unstrapping, he launched himself in a careful parabolic curve ending at Mickey's console.

  “What's up?”

  “Radar. It's full of noise in the forward direction, since we're blasting all kinds of crap ahead of us. So I was moving the dish around, hoping it would clear with a side-lobe or something. Instead, I caught this on the other side-lobe.” He manipulated the screen and pointed to a splotch on the edge of the screen. “It's not quite defined, so I'd like to unlock the limits on the radar dish and slew it over to look at this thing.”

  “Risks?”

  “We can look at only one thing at a time. When I unlock the limits on the dish, we won't be seeing anything in the front. But this thing has me worried.”

  “Where does the ten hours come in?” asked Roger.

  “That's the time when this splotch crosses our position, if this velocity figure is accurate,” he said, tapping at a number on the screen.

  “Anything in the front?”

  “Here's what the front looks like,” said Mickey, switching to another image. “This was three minutes ago, the other one was live. This image is garbage, all kinds of returns, but they're all moving away from us. The computer's separated them out, but if the radar images a stone at ten meters, it can be hiding a large rock that's five hundred kilometers away. That's why this image is so full of holes—they are from radar returns of our exhaust.”

  “Do it. Look at the splotch. Take an hour, then go back to the front.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Mickey manipulated the controls. He waited while the image built up. Roger looked over Mickey's shoulder. As the splotch built up on the screen, it appeared first as an amorphous mass. With each pass of the radar beam, more and more of the cloudiness disappeared, and more of the constituents of the cloud appeared.

  “Time to intersection?” asked Roger in a hushed voice.

  “Nine hours, forty-seven minutes. That's for the leading elements. We can expect to see impacts from elements of the cloud for total of thirty-seven minutes.” Mickey waited a beat. “Our rotational period is four revolutions per hour. We're going to suffer impacts.”

  Roger reached over Mickey's shoulder, lifted the plastic cover, and punched the round red alarm button. Throughout both ships, General Quarters alarms sounded, rousing every member of the awake crew.

  “This is Roger Smithson. Collision, nine hours, thirty minutes. Secure everything. Suits nine hours from now. Move!”

  ***

  Mickey was thinking hard about his options. He didn't want to come all this way to die from a stupid stone punched through his gut. Something that was said earlier in the mission. What was it? All he could think of was a cat's tail, swishing back and forth hypnotically.

  Tail. He kept drifting back to that word. What did it mean? Cats, sure. Women? What? Thinking about sex at a time like this? No, that can’t be it. Dammit. He shook his head.

  “Something?” asked Roger.

  “I keep on thinking of the word 'tail'. Can't figure out why. It's like my brain is trying to tell me something.”

  “I assume you're not thinking of women during General Quarters,” Roger said drily.

  “No. Something recent. Dammit,” said Mickey.

  “Well, Mike and I always thought of that chunk that we cut off the end of Eighty-two as the 'tail'.”

  “Ah. Okay, that's probably it.” Mickey went back to thinking while he subconsciously scanned his board.

  Roger quizzically looked at him for a moment, then left him to his introspection.

  Mickey suddenly sat up straight, which caused his body to lift up slightly from the seat in the slight gravity. He hammered on the keyboard, looked at the results, then hammered some more. He flicked on the intercom, and spoke into his microphone.

  Roger noted these actions with a part of his mind. He also knew his men. With Mickey, when he was presented with a problem, he wanted to understand the problem all the way through before he came up with a solution. Roger concentrated on other tasks while Mickey worked it out.

  He had several going on at once. The biggest was trying to avoid the cloud of stony debris bearing down on them. Probably the leftovers from the tail of a comet, the cluster of stones was going to cross their path at a closing velocity of four kilometers per second, faster than a rifle bullet. Eighty-two was in no danger, but Burroughs and Bradbury certainly were. Spacesuits were an obvious precaution, but so was the protection of the hydroponics. Explosive decompression in that area of the ship meant that the crew of the Expedition would be in a world of hurt. The little farms, one per ship, were part of the oxygen renewal and carbon dioxide removal process, as well as providing needed roughage and nutrition to the crews.

  The other major item was propulsion. The swarm was detected too late to avoid completely, but perhaps the worst of it could be bypassed. Benjamin was executing a careful recalibration of the braking maneuvers, arcing Eighty-two up and over the densest portion of the swarm.

  “Got it!” said Mickey. “Remember that plan to cut off the tail with the communications laser?” In his excitement, Mickey forgot to say 'commander' or 'sir'.

  Roger ignored the breach of shipboard custom. “Yes. We rejected it because of the danger of reflected laser light.”

  “Well, the debris cloud is too far away to worry about that. We can do one of two things: try to target the debris one by one, or we can defocus the comm laser and bathe the swarm with a fan of high-intensity light.”

  Roger thought for a second. “What good is that going to do? It's not enough to vaporize them—these are stones, or so we think.”

  “Right. But these are the remains of a comet, the debris that was blasted out with its tail, right? That's why I kept thinking 'tail'—it was the one word that linked the comm laser with the menace. I don't think we can, in eight hours, get all of the individual debris items that are going to impact us, so we have to go with the fan. We use one comm laser for the fan, and the second one to blast the largest debris items aiming for us.”

  “That will mean we drop contact with the Moon,” said Roger. “Just pointing out the consequences. If we need the lasers for survival, the hell with the Moon.”

  “Good, I was going to tell you that. So, what do you think happens when a rock finds itself surrounded by vaporized gas in a comet's tail? I am betting each one of these bits is surrounded with a shell, however thin, of ice. All we have to do is warm the ice with laser light, and it will vaporize again, only this time, since we're heating it up from our side, the vaporization will shove the pebbles away from us. Best of all, as they get closer, the effect is more pronounced. Not only is the ice vaporized, but light pressure will force the gas backwards, away from the light, and push the pebbles more. We don't need much, just a deflection off a couple of hundred meters is enough to clear us.”

  “Let me talk with Benjamin,” said Roger. He triggered the intercom for the astrogator, and discussed the relative motions of Eighty-two and the swarm.

  He turned to Mickey. “Do it. Immediately. I'll talk with Mike, and he'll talk with Ragesh.” He turned back to the intercom while Mickey alerted Ragesh and grabbed control of both communications lasers.

  The beams lashed out, and the debris, the remains of a long-period comet that had last seen the sun five years ago, again felt the heat of impacting light. The first to move was the dust, each grain encased in its own small ice shell. The unrelenting pressure of untold photons from the communications lasers shoved each grain aside. Their ice shells blasted into vapor, and the dust accelerated away from the ravening beams, bouncing into the larger pebbles, giving them a nudge.

  Radar, hooked into the targeting
computers of one laser, directed the beam to individually target the larger chunks of debris. Each radar echo represented a bit of stone that reflected radar energy. If they were large enough to do that, they were large enough to deserve their own special bath of laser energy.

  Priority went to the stones near the top of the debris cloud, as viewed from Eighty-two. In the hours since first detection of the swarm, the movement of Eighty-two across the cloud was sufficient for the computer to build up a three-dimensional image of the hazard. Only those bits most likely to impact felt the loving caress of the merciless lasers.

  “It's working,” said Mickey, as bit after bit of the cloud puffed into vapor. “Was it in time, though?”

  The hours ticked by, one after the other. Mickey and Ragesh hovered over the controls of the comm lasers like two hens over a single chick. The readouts flickered with each movement of the laser, which focused inhumanly quickly. The only numbers that concerned the two techs were the measure of output power, which remained steady, and the temperature of the lasing crystals, which initially shot up to operating temperature then held steady.

  Meanwhile, the computer registered the depopulation of the debris cloud, at least along the portion most likely to impact Eighty-two.

  “Attention, crew. Please don your skintights and helmets now. We will be depressurizing all compartments with the exception of Hydroponics and Sick Bay. Depressurization will occur in fifteen minutes.” It was blowout protection for the crew. Should a pebble penetrate an exterior wall of a compartment, all of the air would rush into space and the man inside would die. Skintight garments were enough to keep body integrity, and the helmets and air packs were enough to supply breathing air, ensuring the astronauts' survival.

  As the crew donned their protective garments, they checked in. When the last were protected, Mike ordered the depressurization. To the accompaniment of alarm klaxons, pressure doors slowly closed, isolating compartments one from another. The crew heard the throbbing pumps pulling the air out of their work areas and stuffing it into the large tanks located in the protected tanks in the engine sections of the ships. When all of the air was removed, the lack of a conduction medium caused a complete silence to envelop the ship.

  Intercom and radio were the only means of communications with the crew. “Report!” ordered each ship commander.

  When his crew finished reporting, Roger toggled the intercom in his helmet to contact Mike Standish in the Bradbury. “How are we doing over there?”

  “Everyone's safe over here. No issues. Hydroponics and Sick Bay show full pressure and no damage.”

  “Same here, Mike. Eighteen minutes until the first fringe of the cloud hits us.”

  “Good luck, Roger. I'm showing very little left in the cloud. I think the lasers are chewing it up good.”

  “We're not out of the woods yet, Mike. Radar could have missed something.”

  “Ragesh. I just got an idea,” said Mickey excitedly. “You know how radar might miss something? Bet it's reflecting some of the fanning laser light, though. Can you rig something to look for that?”

  “In eighteen minutes? Maybe,” Ragesh said, his hands blurring over the control panel. All over Eighty-two, surveillance cameras swiveled in the direction of the incoming cloud. The fanning laser brightened as more energy was fed into its lasing crystal. The other comm laser, blasting tertiary targets, abruptly received new coordinates, and slewed madly across the sky, its beam stabbing out to vaporize previously undetected debris.

  “Good! It's working!” said Ragesh.

  “I see it!” replied Mickey. The new targets were so close that it looked like a scene from an old world war movie, with sudden puffs appearing in the solid black sky.

  “Tighten the criteria, men,” ordered Roger. “Just like we talked about. I only want the lasers hitting targets that have a high probability of hitting us.”

  The fanning laser tightened its angle, and the individual laser only targeted debris in that angle. The operating temperature rose within the lasing crystals as more power was pumped into them.

  “We're starting to get into the warning zone,” said Mickey.

  “Thirteen minutes until we clear the cloud,” said Benjamin.

  For the remainder of the crew, it was a matter of wait and worry. All activities except debris targeting were suspended during the critical impact period. The actual cloud was so dispersed and nonreflective that there was nothing to see on the few cameras that were not commandeered for the laser fight. The only display that gave any information was the radar output, and that was relayed into every compartment.

  The cloud crept by, and the crew watched and waited.

  A shudder ran along the ship, and everyone jumped up, ready to react, only to slam into the ceilings over their heads.

  “Impact along Eighty-two, nothing vital hit. Engineering, please report on structural strain gauges.”

  “Engineering. Strain gauges report no problem. Seismos picked up the hit, though.”

  “Didn't know you had seismographs installed,” said Commander Smithson. “Why?”

  “We wanted to get information that the strain gauges might not pick up, like deep flexure along the center axis,” said Jeff. “Signal dying down, and I don't think we had any damage.”

  “Continue monitoring. Out.”

  “Eleven minutes until we clear the trailing edge of the cloud,” said Benjamin.

  The waiting continued.

  ***

  “The trailing edge of the cloud has cleared, and the laser targeting queue is dropping rapidly,” announced Benjamin.

  “Let me know when the queue reaches zero,” said Mike.

  “Wilco. Three hundred returns remain to be processed,”

  “So many?” asked the Commander. “What was it in the middle of the cloud?”

  “Two and a half orders of magnitude more.”

  “The hell? What, fifty thousand returns?”

  “More or less,” said Benjamin, watching the queue empty as more of the echoes were deemed no danger or targeted by the lasers and eliminated. “Computer was a bit busy.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Queue empty,” reported Benjamin. “We have some laggards, so we can't quite stand down yet, but another thirty minutes should ensure we clear this cloud.”

  Mike relayed the information to Roger aboard the Burroughs.

  Thirty minutes later, as the air rushed back into the compartments, the crew took off their helmets and sighed with relief. One radar dish returned to scanning in the direction of Eighty-two's travel, and the other began a carefully programmed all-directional scan of the heavens. Eighty-two was not going to be caught with its pants down again.

  ***

  “We sure as hell aren't gonna do that again,” said Jeff. “There's got to be a way to replicate a comm laser.”

  “There is,” said Ragesh.

  “Okay. Tell us.”

  “It's all part of one of the packages we snagged from the Collins. Remember how McCrary had all those lasers out, blasting debris? He sent us one as a model, but also sent along all the parts for several. He also sent a few tons of raw materials—KREEP material, lots of aluminum ingots, and glass ingots. They're all in one of the cargo spaces.”

  “Show me,” said Mike as he and Scott floated over to Ragesh’s workstation.

  “Hang on, hang on. I'm pulling it up now,” said Ragesh. “Here you go. Down near the engine, cargo hold 10-H. That's where the actual laser is, and the parts are also there. The raw material is all over the place.”

  Scott led a delegation down to the cargo hold. “I wonder what other Christmas presents we've got down here. I swear, before we get to the asteroid, we all better go over the list of packages, see what we've got.”

  The laser even came with operating instructions on a glass disk. “I'll be damned,” said Scott. “McCrary is a credit to the profession.”

  The laser was mounted by itself, well away from the ships, and in a position that
would make it quite difficult to target the ships snuggled against Eighty-two's side. A cable stretched from both ships to a control box that controlled the aiming and firing mechanisms.

  Jeff even wangled permission to try the laser against a target. He got into his spacesuit and walked out on the surface of Eighty-two, looking around for a bit of debris. He chipped out a stone just beneath the surface of the ice and threw it as hard as he could off into space. He then retreated back near the Burroughs and directed Mickey to track and fire upon the stone. The laser, being ultraviolet and quite invisible, did not show its beam, but a brief flare of light in the direction of his throw showed that the laser was completely functional.

  Jeff crossed one more item off his list.

  The Foundry

  Aboard 'Eighty-Two', May 4 2084, 1108 GMT

  The image of their destination began as a small dot in the camera pointed aft. It was distorted by the cloud of condensing water vapor that blasted from the engine bell, slowing Eighty-two from its headlong flight.

  “Two days. Then it's insanity tripled,” said Ragesh. “We thought we were dog tired when we screwed around with Eighty-two. It's going to be pure hell with this one.”

  The drive throttled down as the differential velocity between the comet and its target shrank. Soon, the drive ceased and the attitude thrusters came into play, tweaking the relative position of the block of cometary ice until it came to a rest one kilometer from the iron-nickel asteroid.

  It was an impressive sight, but one completely without scale. What appeared on the monitors was a roughly cigar-shaped shard of metal, somewhat dark in color, and about ten times longer than it was thick. Radar estimates showed on the sidebar data: length, 4200 meters; diameter, 476 meters; pitch period, thirty-six hours, seven point six minutes; yaw period, seventy-four hours, twenty-six point eight minutes; and roll period, forty hours, twelve minutes.

  “It's perfect,” said Benjamin.

  “Damn, it's beautiful,” said Niall.