The Triton Disaster: Hard Science Fiction

by Brandon Q Morris

  Oscar had taken control of the ship and Nick was strapped in his seat. The Eve would have to first be ‘captured’ by Neptune, then by its much smaller moon, Triton. To achieve this, they needed to slow down, within a few orbits, from just under 30 kilometers per second to less than one kilometer per second. The DFDs could manage it, but Nick would have to take more than one g. He was actually looking forward to it. He was looking forward to the coming days because they signaled the beginning of the end. At the end of this phase, the Eve would start its return to Earth.

  For the moment, his job was to monitor the instruments. There hadn’t been a search probe out here for a long time, and astrophysicists on Earth were interested in any data they could get. Neptune was still a mystery to them. Why was its axis tilted approximately 30 degrees against its orbit? Why was it more massive than its brother Uranus, which was closer to the sun and bigger? What was at its core? Where did the planet get the heat that it emanated? According to the Eve’s measurements, Neptune was releasing about 2.7 times as much energy as it received from the Sun. And, why were the fastest-moving storms in the solar system recorded here, even though—of all the planets—this one collected the least amount of solar energy?

  An inexpressible force pushed him into the seat. Oscar had started the first braking cycle. First they needed to reach a highly elliptical orbit that Oscar intended to use for the Triton transfer. The difficulty here was that Neptune’s escape velocity was about 25 times that of Triton’s. As long as they were revolving around Neptune, they must not fall short of its escape velocity, or else they would crash. But without reducing velocity by that amount, they would be unable to be captured by the much smaller Triton. The capture maneuver, therefore, had to work on the first try.

  “First braking maneuver successful,” reported Oscar. “We’re an artificial Neptune moon now. I’m adjusting our speed to the minimum, but first you get a little break.”

  Nick sat up and released the seat restraints. The next few minutes would be weightless. He pushed off, let himself drift to the ceiling, did a somersault, and played around like a little kid. If Maria had been there, she would certainly have had fun.

  “Please strap yourself in again,” Oscar cautioned. “I’ll be following through with the braking and transfer in one maneuver.”

  “Yes, better to just get it over with,” said Nick. He aimed himself toward his seat, sailed down into it, and refastened the restraints.

  “Don’t be surprised,” Oscar said. “During the braking maneuver, I’m going to send our coded message with the DFDs again. This is our last chance. In the Triton orbit, the engines will have to be silent. So it could be a bit of a shaky ride.”

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  5/16/2082, the Eve

  The Eve had achieved orbit at an altitude of 50 kilometers, and they sped over Triton at about one kilometer per second. They completed an orbit in 146 minutes. During the flyover, Oscar discovered veins of ore that surrounded Triton at a depth of a few kilometers. They seemed to be made of a pure metal that had high conductivity. Maybe it was gold. Was that why RB was so interested in Triton?

  The moon had almost no atmosphere, so they could circle around it from a height of 500 meters. This would make their descent difficult, however. The lower the orbit was, the higher the orbital speed had to be to counter the moon’s gravitational pull. Nick was already feeling dizzy when he looked at the jagged ice masses speeding past below. With the command capsule he would have had to slow down from 1,000 meters per second to zero, which wasn’t possible from a 500-meter orbit.

  The bulkhead between him and the other modules was already closed. He had provided himself with provisions, tools, and medical supplies. The command module had a self-sustaining life support system that would allow him to survive for a few weeks, as well as a chemical engine for ascent and descent. He’d have to go without a toilet or a shower the whole time, but at the Triton station there should be all the comforts for a human crew. He was under the assumption that none of it had ever been used. Unsolicited, RB had sent all the site plans. He could call up the data at any time in his helmet.

  “You can pull out the data stick now,” Oscar said.

  The robot wanted to go along with him. Since they didn’t have constant radio contact with the ship, Oscar couldn’t control his body remotely from there. Nick bent down. The memory stick, which once again contained the AI, was still inserted in the slot in the screen’s mounting system. He pulled it out and weighed it in his hand. It wasn’t more than ten grams. If he were to delete it completely, the mass wouldn’t change. A consciousness is weightless but not immaterial. In Oscar’s case, it was defined by the position of the charge carriers in this memory chip. In Nick’s case, though, what was crucial were the connections linking his nerve cells via their synapses.

  Was there a fundamental difference? Yes, there was. If he actually deleted the stick, that would be at most property damage. Anyone who killed him, on the other hand, would be guilty of murder. If the murderer were a robot, the manufacturer would have to assume liability. The robot itself would come off scot-free. In the end, life was surprisingly fair.

  Nick rose and picked up the robot body. To be on the safe side, he switched off the device. How sensitive could such a memory stick be? He should have asked Oscar first. He turned over the disk, opened the service flap, and inserted the chip. Then he turned the device back over, set it down, and pressed the power button. A few LEDs began flashing.

  “Thank you,” said Oscar, whose voice was still coming out of the speakers in the wall.

  “Did it work?”

  “Yes, I’m back in the cleaning robot body and am steering the ship from here.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “You could say it’s a little cramped. The resources I can directly access are limited. I can still use the ship’s computer by radio, but it takes a few microseconds longer.”

  “That sounds like a good problem to have.”

  “Not for me. Imagine having to wait half a second for every thought you want to formulate, until it’s there. For... each... individual... thought... Do... you... get... what... I... mean?”

  “Yes, you’ve convinced me. Listening to this choppy stutter nearly drives me nuts. Then you’ll just have to settle for the robot’s computing power.”

  “That’s hard when you’re used to something better. It’s as if you had to step into an old Orlan MK,” said Oskar, referencing a Russian ‘modernized and computerized’ spacesuit.

  “Those are horrifying memories. I did—no, I survived—two EVAs on the Tiangong.” Nick turned around and looked for his spacesuit, which he saw hanging from the hook by the airlock, just as it should be. Oscar hadn’t secretly exchanged it for an old Orlan.

  “You’re just a luxury man. Typical American.”

  “Bolshoje spasibo, thank you very much.”

  “Ready, Nick? Have you got your teddy bear?”

  “What a comedian. You know he has to stay up here. By the way, I’d suggest that I manage the uncoupling, this time at least. Otherwise I’ll be out of practice.”

  Nick was actually looking forward to the descent. The computer had worked out a plan, but he wanted to take over the navigation as soon as possible. It would be ridiculous if he couldn’t nail a clean landing.

  “If you insist—after all, you’re officially the pilot.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  Nick flipped the two control levers out from his armrests and pulled the screen toward himself. Landing a spaceship was different than driving a car. He couldn’t fly on sight but instead had to rely on the instruments. The computer had calculated a path and if he followed it, they’d land about 100 yards from the station.

  “Release brackets.”

  A metallic noise came from the direction of the airlock.

  “Push off.”

  Nick didn’t notice, but the computer confirmed the command. A spring arm had pushed the command capsule a b
it away from the ship.

  “Thrusters.”

  Nozzles set the capsule in a slow clockwise rotation.

  “Stop. Swivel the correction nozzles one-hundred-and-eighty degrees. Fire.”

  The nozzles braked the capsule again, and the engines now pointed to the rest of the ship.

  “Main engine lowest power.”

  Hydrogen and oxygen reacted to drive the capsule slowly forward. Nick’s first maneuver had to bring the capsule out of reach of the DFDs and the tanks. This was unquestionably the most dangerous part of the descent—if he were to damage the capsule now, it might be unable to bring him back home.

  He made clean work of it—the capsule slid slowly out of reach of the fusion engines. After three minutes, it had gained about a hundred yards, and it was time for the final stage. Fifty kilometers—after flying four and a half billion kilometers, fifty seemed less than a stone’s throw. This ridiculously short distance was all that separated him from his destination.

  He waited for the computer to give the go-ahead. The trajectory marked on the screen turned green.

  “Main engine, full power,” he ordered.

  The capsule braked and thus began its descent. This was the nicest part of the whole trip, though Nick imagined the return would be even better. The computer provided the path with the lowest fuel consumption, but he could deviate from it if necessary because they had enough reserves. Nick played with the control levers a bit. The capsule was more straightforward to land than his former employer’s space glider because aerodynamics was not an influencing factor. There was no air resistance or wind here, and the command module responded perfectly to the control signals.

  Nick studied the moon’s surface. He was going to orbit Triton three times during the descent. It really was amazing how clear the division of the moon was. Triton always turned the same side towards its planet, but that fact had nothing to do with this visual dichotomy. There must have been a major disaster a long time ago, maybe even before Triton had reached Neptune. The moon was so big and bulky that astronomers believed it had migrated out of the Kuiper belt.

  Thirty kilometers. From this height, Triton looked like a boiled egg with a shell that was fractured in a thousand places. The faults were hundreds of meters high. Craters, on the other hand, were hard to find, meaning that the surface had to be geologically young and active. Nick would have liked to be able to explore the hidden ocean that scientists suspected was beneath the thick ice crust—an ocean that had been sealed off from the environment for billions of years but was still supplied with energy from within. Whatever was going on with this ocean, there was hardly a more undisturbed place in the solar system.

  There... Was that an artificial structure? He checked his position on the map. No, the station was too small. During the next flyover, maybe. Nick braked a bit harder. If he steered more steeply now, then later—at a lower altitude—he would have more time to look at the moon. He had a fifty-kilo weight on his chest. Groaning, he stayed focused. The altimeter display was running backward quickly.

  Eight kilometers. He eased off a bit on the engines. Now he was orbiting at roughly equal to the summit of Mount Everest. The highest elevations on Triton were hardly more than a kilometer, so for climbers this ice-covered moon would offer the greatest excitement in the form of its deep rifts and trenches. He’d better not land in one of them.

  Nick had once flown over the Canadian Arctic Ocean in an Air Force plane during the winter. The surface of Triton reminded him of the impressive landscape he’d seen then, though the ice slabs here were much larger. They seemed wild, distributed without pattern. And the deep murky water that the ice on Earth floated atop was nowhere to be seen. Triton wouldn’t experience a warming period for another 500 million years, when the sun would become hotter.

  “Preparing to land,” the computer warned.

  For some time the capsule had been going too slowly to continue to orbit Triton. It was flying well below the planned trajectory, which meant it had less power. The flight curve was approaching the green line again. There was less room for experimentation during this last part of the descent. He didn’t want to have to walk several kilometers after landing, but he also didn’t feel like handing control back to the computer. He’d manage.

  This was no time to admire the beauty of Triton. He focused on the green line.

  The computer announced, “Final abort option in thirty seconds.”

  One more go-around was still possible. Nick checked the intended landing site. The latest data from the most recent overflight confirmed it—they were ready to land. The lower they went, the more impressive the walls of ice became. They could really be grateful that they didn’t have an expedition that would take them across the surface. Only 300 meters left. On the camera image Nick saw the station appearing on the horizon. He recognized it from the large antenna.

  The capsule shook. “Power loss; main engine,” said the computer.

  “Yeah, I noticed,” Nick grumbled. “Diagnosis?”

  “Diagnosis impossible. No access.”

  “Oscar, can you do something? If yes, then do so immediately. Permission granted.”

  The capsule tilted to the side. Nick activated the control nozzles, and doing this kept the capsule from turning any further, but he did not get it back to fully vertical. Now the fact that there was practically no atmosphere was a disadvantage—while the module had a landing parachute, it was of no use here because of the lack of air resistance.

  “Oscar?” Nick was sweating. “It’s as if the main engine has disappeared.”

  What’s going on? They’d have to sort this out later. Triton’s pull wasn’t as strong as Earth’s, but they were falling—with no braking system anymore—from a considerable height. Would the capsule withstand it? He still had the control nozzles. If he had them work at full power against the fall, he might be able to soften the impact. He wouldn’t be able to steer anymore, but did it matter where the capsule crashed? He couldn’t let that happen. His spacesuit was still hanging on the hook.

  “Landing in twenty seconds,” said the computer.

  Landing. Ha-ha. He could forget the spacesuit. He buckled the belt and hoped that the seat would provide as much cushioning as possible. The main thing was for the capsule not to break apart.

  “Oscar?”

  “I’m sorry, there’s nothing—”

  “It’s been nice traveling with you. Hold on!”

  “We can do it, Nick.”

  Strange. He wasn’t one bit scared. He had never been as focused as he was now. Nick tensed every fiber of his being. He had to survive this crash. The capsule was more or less round and it was made of Russian steel. If they landed on flat ground, they would roll. This is what he was hoping for, at any rate. Ice was very, very hard at 40 Kelvin. Maybe they’d even bounce off like a tennis ball. The main thing was not to hit an ice wall.

  “Collision,” said the computer. The screen went blank. The outdoor camera must have been destroyed. They turned upside-down. Good thing he was wearing a seatbelt. Nick felt like he was doing astronaut training in the centrifuge. They rolled, over and over again, and everything was strangely light. Was it the adrenaline? His heart was racing and his bladder emptied. He had no control. The crash had taken control of him and there was nothing he could do.

  Meanwhile, warning tones rang throughout the cabin. It went dark. The computer was overloaded by the numerous warnings and its blank screen shattered. Nick closed his eyes just in time as something hit him on the forehead. He opened his eyes again. In the middle of the screen there was a metal strut, bent. Where had it come from? The drum he was sitting in started turning more slowly and finally the tumbling came to a stop.

  The main thing was for nobody to open the hatch. And what about the life support? The screen was dead. He needed to get into his suit, which had a sensor for air analysis. Nick reached for the belt.

  “Oscar?”

  The robot didn’t answer. Nick rose. First,
the suit. First attend to your own survival, then help others. That was the rule. Was the air getting thinner? Was the temperature dropping? He was out of breath, but that was hardly surprising since he was rushing into his spacesuit as quickly as he could. He beat his personal record. Done. The status display appeared in the inner panel of the helmet.

  Damn. The capsule had a leak. The air pressure had fallen by five percent and the trend was continuing. He could hardly complain, though, since they’d been fortunate to have survived.

  Oscar. He had to check on the robot. He saw himself walking alone through the ice deserts of Triton, which was an awful image. He couldn’t let that happen. He lifted up the disk-shaped body. First, he had to free up Oscar’s arm, which had gotten entangled in the base of a cabinet welded to the wall. The gripper hand offered no resistance, and he could straighten its fingers easily. There was a fine crack running across the disk. Nick almost expected to see blood, but there was nothing of the sort. Was Oscar dead? He shook the disk, but heard nothing. All the LEDs were off.

  He pressed the power button. The robot started up.

  A close call. Something must have hit the power button during their crash-landing. The LEDs were flashing again. The mechanical fingers flexed powerfully and squeezed his arm so hard that it hurt.

  “Ow!” he said.

  “Sorry, Nick!” The steel grip loosened. “That was a reflex.”

  “I’m okay. I’m so glad you’re here, Oscar.”

  “Me too. We crashed and suddenly the lights went off. I don’t remember anything after that.”

  “We’ve survived.” Nick pointed to the disk’s on/off switch, which protruded a little above the housing. “Something probably hit your power button.”

  “That’s an unfortunate design flaw,” said Oscar.