So we did. I was born in ’67; fanfare, please. I think that my own first personal recollection of a striking space project was the trial launch of the first Mustard craft, from a much expanded Woomera base. I was five years old then . . .
Mustard? I never heard of that.
Perhaps it never got built in your timeline, Malenfant. Multi-Unit Space Transport And Recovery Device. I think! Everyone just calls it ‘Mustard’. Keen as. Under development since the early sixties, I believe. You might have recognised the engineering logic, as from what little you have told me it sounds like the design of your own ‘space shuttle’.
Winged launch craft, mated together?
That’s the idea. But with Mustard you got three for the price, not two. Three more or less identical aircraft, mated belly to back. Quite a ride. We had realised that for really ambitious missions, such as getting to the Moon and beyond, what we needed was a facility to assemble spacecraft stacks in Earth orbit, rather than try to launch them complete from a site like Woomera. So that was what we started to do in 1972, with Mustard.
And in 1978 – I was eleven years old – I was there to see the blurry TV pictures as Jim Richards landed his big knife-blade of a ship on the Moon, and took his first steps, proclaimed dominion on behalf of the King, and started looking for useful minerals.
I was nine when I saw Armstrong and Aldrin land. What an age to be, to see such a thing.
I can only agree. Some things we have in common, across the timelines?
Well – by 1990, when Wing Commander Victor Hassell took Ares to Mars, I was twenty-three years old, and beginning my secondment to Barford, and I knew very well that the linear-fission engine that had taken Hassell to Mars, an extrapolation of the successful Prometheus design, had been developed at that very plant, and that I would be working on future variants of it. I took my own first orbital trip as far back as 1997 – I was thirty years old, or nearly. And now here I am, an old man of thirty-eight, and grandfather to my crew of clean-shaven youngsters.
What about your personal life? You never married?
Never had the time. I wouldn’t fall for the old cliché that one is wedded to the service. But the travel, you know – never mind the Moon – even the Shetlands are remote enough to put a strain on a relationship. And I would never have wished to plant a family in, for example, Woomera.
I can sympathise. It was different for me, I grew up with Emma – kind of, there was an age difference. A shared past. We did marry, my Emma and me, had a kid. But it all went wrong.
Now you have another chance, of sorts. I suppose. Or not. So. Do you think we are done here? I’m not sure what we have achieved, other than place each other’s life stories against the background of a more or less bewildering multiplicity of histories.
True. But that’s something, isn’t it? With every discussion like this, we achieve a little more understanding.
And with understanding comes control. You’re a man after my own heart.
Good. Listen, Lighthill. Maybe you can do me a favour. Potentially a big favour.
Ask.
You’re on your way to explore the object you call Shiva. Going by Persephone along the way.
Correct.
I have an idea. Let me talk to Bartholomew. My doctor. He will tell me I’m crazy.
Crazy how?
Crazy to be asking for a ride to Persephone.
56
A day later, Geoff Lighthill called a meeting of the two crews in the wardroom of the Harmonia. His purpose, he said, was to discuss Malenfant’s request: for a ride to planet Persephone aboard the British ship.
But Malenfant had the strong sense that Lighthill really wanted to talk them out of it.
Malenfant and Emma went over to watch the preparations. Lighthill had the big dining table folded up and stowed away – a miracle of space-saving in itself – and nine fold-out stools, complete with foot bars and straps for zero-gravity comfort, set up before a slide projector and a screen.
Malenfant said, ‘It’s like a cabin on a cruise liner. Not that I ever sailed on one of those, but I saw the old movies . . . Everything compact and foldaway, so a bedroom could become a lounge. Smartness and elegance. I guess the Brits had centuries of that kind of experience. Building luxury ships.’
‘Yeah,’ Emma said, ‘but including the Titanic, and let’s hope that’s not an omen.’ She was bemused by Lighthill’s gadgets. ‘That is an actual slide projector,’ she said, marvelling. ‘With a bulb. And slides. Look, there’s a rack of them in that round cassette thing.’
‘I think they used to call it a carousel,’ Malenfant murmured.
‘Back home you wouldn’t see one of those outside a museum of technology.’
‘So these Brits are behind us in some regards. But look at this ship. In our bundle, by 2005, we hadn’t got beyond Mars, remember. These guys have been out to a thousand AU – nearly a thousand times as far.’
‘Which is why you decided to try hitching a ride to Persephone.’
He gnawed a knuckle. ‘I’m starting to wish I’d thought it through.’
‘And that line, Malenfant, is going to be on your gravestone. Why did you want to go out there in the first place?’
He hesitated. ‘That is the question. I’m following a hunch, I guess. It’s just knowing that the damn planet is, right now, almost on a direct line between Earth, Deirdra’s Earth, and Shiva. And that it has some kind of alien structure on the surface . . . It’s kind of – as if I have pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but I don’t have the big picture on the lid, yet.’
She was staring at him. ‘I know you, Malenfant. Deirdra’s Earth, you said. You’ve got a personal investment, haven’t you?’
He shrugged. ‘They are good people. They preserved me in coldsleep for centuries, until your message came in from Phobos. Invested in me. It’s not . . . my world. It’s not the kind of world I would choose. But now, just maybe there’s a glimmer of a chance . . .’
‘Of what? Doing something about their Destroyer? How?’
He grinned. ‘I don’t know. But I hope I’m going to find out when Lighthill gives his slide show.’
The others started filing in.
Emma seized Malenfant’s hand. ‘Come on. Let’s go bag a front row seat.’
Giggling, they drifted through the air.
57
Geoff Lighthill took a seat beside the projector himself, and waited for everybody to settle down.
Malenfant glanced round at the assembled company: the three British crew, Emma, Deirdra, Bartholomew. Viktorenko sitting slightly apart from the rest, looking tired, subdued. Even Gershon, projected by a relay from the Step, next to Deirdra. All nine of them in one place for the first time, probably, since they had first encountered each other, here at Phobos. Not all of them actually human, and garnered from multiple timelines and historical periods . . . What a mess, he thought. Yet here they were getting on with it, as Lighthill would probably say. Christ. He’s got me thinking in his language already.
The smoke of Nash’s pipe lent a slight aroma to the air.
And Bartholomew was glaring at Malenfant. That wasn’t unusual, but Malenfant almost winced at the memory of the attack from the medic that he had had to endure when he had unveiled this latest scheme. Are you utterly insane, Malenfant? Utterly self-destructive? Will you keep on trying these stunts – flying off to the void, climbing that damn Pylon, even staying with your crashing booster – until you finally finish yourself off? If I ever get you back to Earth I will have you sectioned. That’s a bit of surviving twenty-first-century jargon you ought to recognise . . .
But they weren’t on Earth. And while Bartholomew’s diagnosis felt like it might be uncomfortably close to the bone, Malenfant realised belatedly that there were advantages to having a machine medic: a person might just have locked him up, but there were limits to a robot’s authority over a human. Bartholomew could glare all he liked. It made no difference.
His preparations done, Lig
hthill floated up in the air just a little above the floor, hands on hips, and glared around. ‘I imagine you all know by now what this latest jaw-jaw is about. In a couple of weeks we will have finished up our operations here, and we will stop off at Deimos to pick up the water ice the automatic miners have been collecting for us . . .’
Malenfant, curious, had been shown images of that operation: big clanking steampunk machines, dumb as shit, scraping away at the ice of that outer moon. He didn’t think there was much that was aesthetically pleasing about this version of British engineering, but it was big and heavy and it got the job done, and you had to admire that.
‘And then we will be off to our next stop, Persephone – or rather the base on Melinoe, the inner moon. Where once again we will refuel, and, if all goes well, we will consider progressing with the next phase, a journey all the way out to Shiva itself. Such were the mission plans I picked up at MOSA in Whitehall before the crew launched from Woomera.’
MOSA – pronounced ‘mow-sir’ – was the British Ministry for Outer Space Affairs, Malenfant knew by now.
‘However,’ Lighthill said heavily, ‘as you all know, we have encountered a complication here on Phobos. Six complications, in fact, along with their rather exotic spaceship.’ He smiled around. ‘Complications who have become fast friends, for we humans must stick together out here in the barren wastes of space.’
‘Seconded,’ Nash murmured around his pipe.
‘Good grief,’ Malenfant muttered.
Emma whispered, ‘Hush.’
‘Now, though, we have another choice to make – for Colonel Malenfant has asked, politely enough, if we will give him, and at least some of his companions, a ride out to Persephone with us. With you lot on board the journey would still be possible, at least in engineering terms. Just about. So Bob assured me.’
Nash nodded, grave.
‘Now then. I have quite a decision to make. And it is my decision, by the way, as long as we are out of touch with the chaps in Stevenage – that is, our ground controllers. The situation is novel enough that there may be a great deal here for us to learn – and this is, above all, an exploratory mission.’ He smiled around. ‘And what richer resource is there to explore than each other?’
Malenfant muttered, ‘God, I hate that man.’
Emma nudged him in the ribs.
‘But before I make that final decision, what I want to do with you people from the Last Small Step is to convince you what a bad idea this is. Because the journey, to a planet called after the queen of hell, would be hell in itself. Not to mention the possible jaunt beyond.’ He eyed Malenfant. ‘So is the agenda clear?’
Malenfant just shrugged.
‘Very well.’ Lighthill pressed a button on the slide projector. The screen area of the bulkhead lit up with a square of featureless light – Lighthill thumped the gadget with his fist – and the carousel turned and dropped in its first slide with a reluctant rattle.
And up came an image of what looked like, to Malenfant, a 1950s B-movie spaceship.
Lighthill beamed around, looking extraordinarily pleased with himself.
58
‘Now, look,’ he said. ‘It’s obviously true that you chaps aren’t familiar with our technology.’
Malenfant snorted. ‘So now’s your chance to show off, is it?’
Lighthill ignored that. ‘And while your own gear seems in some regards more advanced than ours, nevertheless I must tell you something of our ships – more than I have disclosed to Malenfant here already. Because, you see, and it’s not false modesty, to get to Persephone stretches our technology right to the limit. And to Shiva, even more so, of course.
‘Well, then, here we go. After we’d sent up a few test shots, here is our first successful crewed lunar spacecraft.’
Up came an image of what looked to Malenfant like a huge artillery shell set on the back of a delta-wing bomber.
‘The Prometheus,’ Lighthill said proudly. ‘As you can see, two stages, a lifting body and a dedicated lunar spaceship. Both relied on nuclear propulsion. The lifter was an atomic ramjet, an air-breather. The propellant for the lunar ship, methane, was supplied from tanks at Inner Station in Earth orbit. And the nuclear technology was what we called a line-focused reactor – or, linear fission – with a thin plutonium core capable of reaching temperatures comparable to the surface of the Sun.
‘Now, such a ship produced an exhaust velocity of a couple of miles per second.’ He eyed Deirdra. ‘If you’re not familiar with that concept, just remember that a rocket is most comfortable travelling at speeds comparable to, or less than, its exhaust velocity – the speed at which its exhaust shoots out of the nozzle at the back. Actually Prometheus was designed to take four days to get to the Moon, which works out at around half a mile per second, so that was hunky-dory.
‘Next generation.’
When the next slide had clunked into place, Malenfant saw a ship pictured against the background of deep space. A rough dumb bell, like Harmonia.
‘Ares. First to Mars. Assembled and fuelled in orbit, at Inner Station. And it used a development of our nuclear technology which – well, perhaps I won’t go into that here. Suffice to say the first Ares mission took less than a hundred days to reach Mars. Now, our Harmonia is a development of the same design—’
‘Hence the name, actually,’ Nash said. ‘Daughter of Ares, in some versions of the mythology. In others—’
‘Oh, do shut up, Oxford. In our case our exhaust velocity is up to around three hundred miles per second. About ten times more than Ares.’
Gershon whistled. ‘Now that is impressive. Beats out my own plasma drive, which took a couple of centuries longer to develop to maturity. In my timeline, I mean. Got to be fusion, right? Like my Step. You have fusion technology?’
Lighthill glared, but refused to answer.
Deirdra looked abstracted, and Malenfant realised she was doing sums in her head. ‘Three hundred miles a second. Say five hundred kilometres. That kind of performance will get you around the whole of the Solar System with ease. A hundred days, not to Mars, but out to Neptune – I think.’
‘Yes. Precisely. That’s what she’s primarily designed for. And maybe you can see now the problem we face with shipping you lot out to Persephone. For that world is thirty times as far again as Neptune. And Shiva is almost twice as far out again as Persephone.’
Deirdra frowned. ‘OK, but you can’t be intending to take three thousand days to travel to Persephone. Eight years? And that’s just one way.’
‘No. Of course not. We need to get there faster. In fact we aim to get there in just one thousand days – and we can do that by pushing the ship faster. Unfortunately, you see, if you want your rocket to exceed your exhaust velocity by such a factor, you have to pile on the fuel . . .’
There followed a discussion involving much hand-waving and scribbling on pads. Malenfant, a rocket pilot himself, understood the essentials. The problem was that at any moment a rocket had to push along not just its payload but also any unspent fuel; and the more fuel you carried, the more fuel you needed to push that fuel . . . As you planned longer, faster missions the growth in overall weight was exponential.
The engineers spoke of the rocket equation. A pilot’s rule of thumb was that if you wanted to reach three times your exhaust velocity, you needed a full load, including fuel, of mass about twenty times your final payload.
And it got worse, if you wanted such a luxury as deceleration at the far end. Another factor of twenty.
‘So,’ Deirdra summed it up, ‘if your dry weight is around two hundred tonnes, as Bob told me—’
Nash nodded.
‘You will need about eighty thousand tonnes of propellant to get you to Persephone.’
‘Correct. Which is equivalent to a spherical tank fifty or so yards in diameter . . . And in this case, of course, we may refuel at Melinoe to head further out: all the way to Shiva itself. Where we must find a fuel source to get us home again.’
Bartholomew said, ‘But what’s your point, Wing Commander? You can’t be telling us that the additional weight of your extra passengers would make that much difference.’
‘The concern is not the weight but the duration,’ Lighthill said, exasperated. ‘A thousand days to Persephone, remember. Another thousand to Shiva. If you add in the return journey, a couple of thousand days more to get back home . . . You are looking at a mission of four thousand days, more than ten years. At least. Now, our mission was to sustain the three of us across that journey – and we will relieve some crew already at Persephone. We are equipped to carry six, total, in case of emergencies – if, for example, we needed to bring casualties back from Melinoe. But to carry nine—’
‘Good point,’ Malenfant said. ‘But we can whittle down that nine straight away. Bartholomew over there is an android. A robot, an artificial man—’
‘I know what a robot is,’ Lighthill said testily.
‘Sorry. So he doesn’t need feeding; he can live off a trickle from the power supply. Or even be shut off, ideally.’
‘Thanks,’ Bartholomew said coldly, not looking round. He seemed to hesitate, as if wrestling with a dilemma – whether to contribute to the proposal or oppose it. At length, to Malenfant’s relief, he was positive. ‘Also,’ he said, ‘transferring a few coldsleep pods from the Step would not be difficult. Cut the burden even more.’
Lighthill frowned. ‘Coldsleep pods. Unfamiliar terminology, but I get the general idea. Interesting.’
Malenfant said, ‘Meanwhile Stavros is just a projection, who takes even less power—’
‘And who won’t be going anyhow,’ Gershon said. ‘My job is with the Last Small Step. Call and I’ll come back to Phobos if you need me. Otherwise you’ll find us back at the Sahara museum, I guess. Two old relics of a vanished space age.’
Malenfant turned to Deirdra. ‘And, look – you need to understand this too. Ten years. That’s a big chunk of your young life. Now’s the time to bail out, kid.’
World Engine Page 37
