by Glenn Damato
Out the window—the whole rocky gray Baja peninsula stretches to the horizon. The edge of the Earth curves and glows against the deep violet sky. Sunlight dances around the control center, but the two windows on the far side are almost black. The engine drone plus the acceleration are a hypnotic combination. Out the window: all of Mexico down to Panama.
A male voice bursts from the com. “This is Constitution. If you can hear me, call out the name of your spacecraft.” That has to be Eric!
I press the talk switch. “This is Liberty!”
Unfamiliar voices call in from Endurance and Resolute.
Heaviness . . . acceleration still rising. Head motion harder, breathing is a real chore. How much worse will this get?
Eric says on the com, “Independence, report if you can hear me.”
A girl responds, “Independence reporting, feeling some pressure, all well.”
The engine hum changes tone and the GNC announces, “J2X shutdown in three, two, one.”
This time no bang, just one quick jolt forward, then a rumble-shudder. Sudden quiet except for the hum of fans.
Falling . . . no, hanging upside-down. Too strange. I stupidly grab my seat.
Another “Wahoo!” from Ryder. I will someday hit him.
I turn my head toward Shuko and that makes me dizzy. Which way is up? Minimize head movement, look in one direction. The nav panel makes good target. It shows our altitude in kilometers—in the 2040s with the last digit changing too fast to read.
From the GNC, “Maneuvering in three, two, one.”
Paige mutters, “Not again.”
Solid bump forward, then back against the seat. This time the head-swim is worse and there’s a falling backwards sensation. Earth departure stage. The noise and shakes are softer, but it presses harder—the acceleration rises just past four G. No one speaks. I decide not to move my head at all and just consider two thoughts: Earth, and departure.
The truth of those two words triggers memories. No matter what happens, this is a kind of death. Our past lives are over. The sweet faces of Isabel and Nathan. As far as they know, I disappeared without a trace. Will they ever know the truth? Will they believe it?
Passing four thousand kilometers, acceleration steady at 4.7 G. Each breath is a huff and a puff.
“Escape!” Ryder shouts, blowing out the word. “Velocity!”
Memories jump in from nowhere. Isabel’s tears. Dr. Mike, one hundred percent! Red Block. A cluster of six fireballs against the pink and blue ocean below. Is anyone else thinking about the rocket that exploded?
Here comes six thousand kilometers. Over soon? Tired of breathing against the force.
“J2X shutdown in three, two, one.”
A rumble, a jerk forward, a final shudder. The dizziness again, but I’m ready for it and keep my eyes open. A black sleep mask tumbles past my face.
Mikki whispers, “Don’t throw stuff.”
“Alison,” I call out over my shoulder. “How you doing?”
“Fine. Heard your song.”
Ryder loudly announces, “If anybody wants to know, those absorbency pants work pretty good.”
Paige growls, “You did not!”
The GNC sings out, “EDS separation in three, two, one.”
Bang bang bang! Mild jolts.
“Flight directors, check your panel for warnings.” That’s Eric again. “Your cabin pressure should be down to thirty-five kp. Check your O2 partial around twenty-four kp with some variation expected.”
Shuko scans the warning panel. His face is pale, or it seems that way in the dim blue light. Why is everything blueish? No sun from the windows, just a soft sapphire glow reflecting from the walls—it’s the ocean and the rest of the Earth. The sun must be directly behind, blocked by the Trans-Mars Injection stage.
“Oh, yeah!” Ryder squirms his body away from his seat. He twists into the narrow space between me and Shuko. “I can get used to this!” He grabs the underside of the warning panel and pushes himself under my seat, although the concept of under doesn’t have much meaning.
“Eric, this is Cristina. Can you hear me?”
“Use your spacecraft name, Liberty. Go ahead.”
“Pressure is good, exactly thirty-five.”
Mikki chuckles. “You didn’t use your spacecraft name.”
I twist my release knob and cast the harness aside. The straps wriggle in the ventilation breeze as if alive. I rotate myself to face Mikki. “Glad you’re feeling better. Want to be our official communication person?”
“Pick someone else.”
Ryder calls out from the window, “I can see the Amazon, the Andes, the tip of South America!”
“Have a good look,” Shuko tells him. “You’ll never see anything like it again.”
Something grabs my leg; Ryder pulls me out of my seat and closer to the window. The sight wipes out all other thoughts. The Earth—immense, radiant, impossibly colorful. South America is vivid green and dotted with hundreds of tiny clouds.
Ryder says, “Mick, come see our former home dropping away at twelve kilometers per second.”
She’s wearing her sleep mask. “The man said stay in your seat and sleep, and that’s what I’m gonna do.”
Rosies! Still clutching them. I open my fist and let them float free. The burgundy beads dance in slow motion and the silver cross glows in the earthshine.
The control center seems larger now. Paige is on the other side, head pointed down. My head should be pointed up, but too many sights contradict that assumption. I decide that the bulkhead separating the equipment bay will be my personal down, no matter which way I’m pointed.
“Something going on here,” Shuko reports, words quivering. “TMI startup sequencer, warning messages too.” He presses the com switch. “We have warnings. Invalid precheck values, missing RSC authentication. I don’t know what any of that means.”
Eric answers, “Disregard the warnings. Let me know if you see any errors.”
What makes him an expert? He learned these systems in one day?
Paige asks, “Isn’t Jürgen supposed to be in charge?”
Shuko responds, “Except for the scientists left behind, I think he knew the most.” He keeps his head perfectly still and directed at the panel. Smart man.
“Jürgen should talk to us. He’s the leader, right?” asks Paige.
I press the com button. “What happened to the rocket that exploded? Was it Enterprise? Does anyone know?”
Ryder mumbles, “I think they put Kim on Enterprise.”
My heart sinks. Happy tears, happy tears. The pains and efforts of the last forty-eight hours wrap around me like a black shroud. My muscles tighten and the dizziness is back. Kim, gone, with five others. Who else left with her group?
“Jürgen,” I call into the com. “Are you there? What do we know about Enterprise? Can you talk to us?”
But Eric answers. “The vid from launch confirms Enterprise was destroyed. That’s all I know.”
I whack the back of my hand against my seat. “That’s all he knows!” I’m tired. And more than a little tense.
Ryder shakes his head. “Easy, tiger.”
◆◆◆
“Maneuvering in three, two, one.”
Sharp bangs rattle the control center, and the universe spins to the left. I have to hold on to the edge of Mikki’s seat in order to stay in place. The sunbeams come back and drift across the pale green storage lockers.
We have a vid of Eric’s face. His chin shows even more bristly carrot-colored stubble than it did two days ago. “Broadband links are up,” he announces. “All five GNC systems just completed their navigation alignments.”
In just a few minutes the Earth shrinks from a curved surface to a sphere hanging in a black void, the visible part forming a huge crescent. The colors are even more intense contrasted against the black of space. The tip of the crescent glows brilliant white.
Clicks and thumps from far away, then the lights flicker.
/> Shuko reports from his panel, “From what I can tell, the TMI nuclear generator is producing power. We’re no longer on the battery, all buses shifted to the TMI stage. Haven’t seen an error.”
“All spacecraft,” calls Eric on the com. “My GNC is predicting TMI thruster start at twenty-two fifty-four, less than three minutes. Probably a good idea to get back in your seat. The acceleration will be low, just five percent of one gee, but if you’re not ready you can knock against something with enough force to get injured.”
We push and twist ourselves back into our seats. Eric doesn’t give a shit about what happened to Enterprise, but he seems on top of events, and maybe that’s the only thing that matters now.
“Maneuvering in three, two, one.”
Silence for one second.
“Thrusters on.”
A soft buzz, a gentle push from behind, then a bounce forward. The GNC lets out a sharp chime and tells us, “Thrusters off.”
Ryder exclaims, “What?”
Shuko looks at me, eyes wide. “Thruster failure!”
“What else?” Ryder asks. He’s out of his seat and clutching the bottom of the panel.
“All spacecraft stand by,” Eric growls.
“Thruster failure,” Shuko repeats. “That’s all it says.”
I clench my fists. The nausea is back. “Has to be more information.”
Shuko points at the panel. “See for yourself.”
Mikki yanks off her mask. “What the hell’s the matter?”
I close my eyes, turn my head, open them again, the only way to avoid dizziness. Paige and Mikki stare at me, eyes wide. Alison is still and wearing her mask.
“Technical issue, looks like,” I tell them. “Eric will handle it. He seems to know the system.”
“He seems to know,” Mikki repeats. “That makes me feel better.”
Ryder reads from the warning panel. “Error zero six two. Sys-op, expand error zero six two.”
I bend forward to read the information with Ryder and Shuko.
ERROR 062: THRUSTER STARTUP FAILURE.
TMP SEQUENCER ABORT
“Something did start,” I point out. “For a couple of seconds, a definite push. I felt it!”
Ryder’s hand flicks over one of the displays. The panels are slower than the Stream, old-style flat, but the layered documents make it easy to get information. “The GNC agrees with you, Cristina. Thrusters did start. Ran for two point five seconds, went from zero to point zero one eight gees. Then they shut down.”
Eric’s voice is annoyed. “Obviously we have an issue with the GNC. The same problem occurred on all five spacecraft, so the good news is we’re facing a programmatic failure and not a physical equipment failure.”
Paige asks, “What’s he talking about? Can he fix it?”
I return to the familiar security of my seat. My mouth fills with fluid. I should imitate Shuko—point my head in one direction no matter what.
Where’s Jürgen? Isn’t it his job to speak to us? To remark on major events?
“These thrusters are supposed to speed us up, right?” Paige asks. “If they can’t fix it, how long will it take to get to Mars?”
Ryder answers, “I know this much. Without the plasma thrusters, an ordinary transfer trajectory to Mars takes seven to ten months.”
“Ten months in this thing!” Mikki shouts.
“Don’t worry about that, Mick,” Ryder mutters. “Mars is a moving target.”
Mikki covers her eyes. Paige sucks in her breath.
I tell them, “We’ll miss it. So we have to make the thrusters work.”
Paige whispers, “Can we get back?”
Ryder shakes his head. He traces his finger over a curved green arc on the nav display. “This is our trajectory right now.” He zooms out until the curve becomes egg-shaped. “We’re climbing away from the Earth, but technically we’re in an elliptical orbit around the sun. Unless we change our velocity with the thrusters, we’ll fly twenty-four million kilometers beyond the orbit of Mars, then curve back again.”
My stomach won’t let up. I take a closer look at the nav panel to see where Ryder reads this information. The trajectory is labeled with a solar orbital period of 406 days and the tip of the elliptical shape is 174 million kilometers from the sun. Pretty firm.
Eric comes back on vid. “We’re going to do a manual override. Once the thrusters are running, the GNC will take us back to the programmed trajectory.”
I ask, “You’re going to give us instructions?”
“I’m going to perform the workaround on Constitution and then upload the edited module to the other four nav programs.”
We wait. Mikki mumbles to herself, “Correct me if I’m misunderstanding. We’re not in space for an hour and already we’re dead.”
“Mikki,” I call out without moving my head. “Keep those thoughts to yourself.”
“And if I don’t? Are you going to sing to me?”
Eric’s voice cracks from the com. “The workaround did not result in the thrusters maintaining operating voltage. We experienced the same automatic shutdown.”
Mikki whispers, “We’re fucked.”
SIXTEEN
Jürgen is the flight director aboard the spacecraft named Independence.
“Independence, this is Liberty.”
Seconds later a female voice replies, “Tess.”
“Tess, is Jürgen planning to talk to us?”
“Talk? Talk to who? You?”
“Me and all the rest of us.”
“Jürgen’s indisposed.”
“He’s working on the problem?”
“That’s right.”
“Words of encouragement would be appreciated right now.”
“I’ll pass that along.”
The clock on the nav panel reaches 00:00:00 PCT and the date changes to 17 Taurus. Taurus? Is that supposed to be the month?
“Tess, we need to figure out how much time we have to get the thrusters working. Is there anyone on Independence who knows how to do that?”
Eric cuts in. “I have Indra working it out. And I have other ideas. We’re going to perform a GNC reboot. I need a volunteer spacecraft.”
Ryder spins around and thrusts his face into Eric’s vid. “Reboot? That’s all you came up with?”
“The thruster program module is probably corrupted,” Eric growls. “There’s no other explanation why it shuts down the thrusters when they do in fact run.”
Ryder asks, “Can you reload from a master?”
“What do you think I’ve been trying to do? Each spacecraft has two identical Core Control Units. One acts as primary and the other as backup. When I delete the thruster module on the primary, it just reloads from the backup. When I overwrite it, it still re-sets from the backup.”
Mikki calls from her seat, “Overwrite it on both, genius.”
“When I try that, the system goes into protected mode and I can’t edit anything. They should have given us more flexibility. Anyhow, if we hard-boot both CCU’s with the breaker for the primary left open, the backup will automatically take over, and the GNC should fire the thrusters.”
I tell him, “Try it.”
Eric’s eyes turn away. “That’s not prudent, not on Constitution. If we can’t power up, we lose communication. I’m the one person who can continue to troubleshoot the remaining systems.”
“We’ll do it here on Liberty,” I announce. That makes Shuko move his head. “But I want you to answer a question. Why are you the one person?”
Eric opens his mouth but doesn’t respond.
I press. “What’s so special about you? How did you become such an expert so fast?”
“I was going to inform everyone shortly,” Eric says. “I’ve been with Genesis from the initial phase five months ago. I worked with Chao and the rest to integrate systems from NASA, JPL, and Chēngzhăng.”
Ryder snorts. “You were a plant? You didn’t volunteer?”
“I volunteered! I vo
lunteered months ago, before any of you, before any of this hardware existed. My job was to ask questions and show you selects this skeptical and perceptive guy deciding to volunteer. We had to do it. It was better than forcing people, or sending up empty seats, or sending oldies. We didn’t know if enough selects would volunteer.”
Liars are everywhere. Nevertheless, this is reassuring. He knows the systems. “We’ll try it. Tell us what to do.” I turn to the others. “You didn’t expect this to be easy, did you?”
◆◆◆
Like most things, it’s trickier than it sounds.
Eric has to override a key safety program in order to force our system to run his code. He’s doing it as an experiment, yet no one protests.
Ryder tells me, “Cristina, you are flight director. Not contesting that. But if we do this, an engineer should be in charge for the duration of the procedure.”
“Agreed.”
There’s something different about him. His voice carries a strain. Much better to consider Ryder fearless, but that’s not possible for any human being. Dread and a touch of anxiety have emerged, just a little, and it feels worse than if it were anyone else.
Paige offers to assist in the equipment bay, but there’s no room; the only way to group around the System Power Panel is for her to be half-way through the access opening.
Eric tells us, “As soon as your GNC powers up, it should align, take a fix, and fire your thrusters. The rest of us will do the same. Each local GNC coordinates the spacecraft in formation flight about a kilometer apart.”
Ryder manipulates the panel. His fingers quiver. “Opening master breaker.”
The panel chimes and flashes red.
NOT RECOMMENDED
Harsh thumps sound out from all around us. The panels, the lights, and the fans die. We wait for our eyes to adjust to the dim illumination provided by a thin sunbeam reflecting off the master panel screens.
“Does it matter how long we wait?” Paige asks.
“I should have asked him.”
I open the breaker for the number one CCU, then close the master. It clicks into place. But no lights, no fans. Ryder blinks as if confused.
Paige says, “That should have restored power to the busses.”
A sharp hiss explodes from behind the equipment.
