Never Never Stories
Page 6
But I guess Johnie had forgotten all that. “Thanks for everything,” I said. Johnie's proxy looked puzzled and asked if I could rephrase my comment. Like I said, he'd never understood sarcasm.
“So what are you up to with your balloon?” the proxy asked.
I glanced at Bee's telemetry. Johnie was orbiting a few hundred klicks above me in low Earth orbit aboard the Freedom 2 space station. In a few minutes he'd be below the horizon and out of range. “Tell you what . . . you get me into the Outpost, I'll tell everything I know.”
There was a pause as the proxy relayed this request to the real Johnie. “No can do,” it finally said. “Astronauts only in there.”
Astronauts only my ass, I thought as I disconnected the proxy, popping Johnie's holographic face like a soap bubble. I'm better than any damn astronaut. Even if I'll never get to space like I'm supposed to.
* * *
My parents joined the Seekers before I was born, drawn to the religious movement by the teaching that salvation lay in living simply and reaching one's God-given destiny. Each Seeker's destiny was secret, decreed by your preacher on behalf of God and not revealed to the world until you achieved it.
Even though I grew up in a staunch Seeker community, I never was very devout. While all my friends wore brown chastity dresses or refused to use cells and access the net, I obsessed on science fiction novels. I sat through church services reading old Heinlein and Clarke stories. I couldn't recite the hundred and one supreme destinies, but I knew Asimov's three laws of robotics by heart.
My parents were embarrassed; the congregation was appalled.
Fortunately for me, our preacher Brother Page defended my science fiction habit, telling my parents not to worry about me because God moved in mysterious ways. Brother Page had always been interested in space exploration – in the upper draw of his church desk lay a tablet with dazzling images of the stars and universes taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, which he hid from everyone but me. During weekly confessions he always listened with rapt attention to my starry-eyed dreams of the future. Without Brother Page, I would have never survived growing up a Seeker.
However, Brother Page was still a true believer and beholden to returning humanity to simpler ways. So imagine my surprise when I turned eighteen and asked Brother Page for my destiny. His response: I needed to become an astronaut. To travel into outer space.
“But we're supposed to live simply,” I said, quoting from Brother Page's own sermons. “Forsake the distractions of the material world and all that.”
Brother Page laughed at having his own words thrown back at him. “God's will can be difficult to understand,” he said with a secretive wink. “But I'm sure you'll manage.”
I hugged Brother Page, excited by his encouragement to follow my dreams. When my parents questioned my Seeker commitment after I joined the Air Force, I merely told them I was following my destiny, to which Brother Page nodded knowingly. For two decades I screamed F-35s across the Middle East and Asia, studied aerospace engineering, worked hard toward being the ideal astronaut.
And then NASA kicked me out.
To say I was devastated would be an understatement. Even though I hadn't been to church in years, I looked up Brother Page, who now ran a large Seeker congregation outside Houston. We met in his church's main worship hall, which was shaped like a massive planetarium. I entered to find the lights out and a projected replica of the night sky slowly spinning above me.
“Where away, Sister Dusty?” Brother Page hailed from the front pew, using the ancient mariners' term for direction which Seekers had adopted as a greeting.
“Where I must go,” I said, giving the standard reply. I motioned at the ceiling. “I'm impressed by the setup.”
“Helps the congregation put the world into its proper perspective – something I'm afraid too many Seekers fail to do these days.”
I didn't need Brother Page to tell me about the trouble caused by misguided Seekers. Every week brought a new divinely ordained attack or explosion. The greatest strength and weakness of the Seeker movement was that each congregation was independent. Unfortunately, too many extremist preachers exploited this with an overly strict view of how simply humans should live. I wished more of them were like Brother Page.
As the stars slowly orbited our bodies, Brother Page and I talked about my destiny. I asked why God kicked out of NASA when my destiny was to reach space. Brother Page merely said my ultimate fate was extremely complex.
By the end of our talk, the big dipper was rising behind the altar. I smiled as I glanced at Brother Page brown robes, which meant he had yet to achieve his own destiny. He then asked if I remembered Sister Tess Harqo.
“She was a few years older than me,” I said, remembering the girl with stern, fanatical eyes from our congregation. Tess once told me I was going to hell for reading a science fiction book during choir practice. “I didn't know her too well.”
“Well, she now runs her own aerospace company and needs a pilot for a special job. She specifically wants a Seeker.”
I was stunned. Only a few Seekers sought out high-tech work, let alone fanatics like Tess. However, getting canned by NASA had made me persona non-grata with every private space company, so I eagerly accepted Brother Page's offer to connect me to Tess. He then leaned in close. “Sister Harqo has been presented with an amazing opportunity to meet her destiny,” he whispered. “But she needs the help of a Seeker with your skills. Doing so may guide you both to your ultimate goals.”
I thanked him. As I left, I asked Brother Page a question which had nagged me for years: Does our focus on destiny keep Seekers from understanding the true world around us? Brother Page paused for a moment before shaking his head. “That's not simply a Seeker problem,” he said. “Most people spend so much time looking at the future that they fail to live in the present. Unless we focus on this world and what we have here, everything is lost.”
As always, I was amazed at Brother Page's insight.
* * *
Talking with Johnie left me in a sour mood. I was tempted to message Tess and tell her about Johnie's call. But I decided to keep quiet, not wanting Tess to panic and scrub the mission. Besides, I was nearing our target, the aerostat Gossamer Angel.
Like the Beatrice, the Gossamer Angel was a variation Roziere balloon, her stadium-size envelope supporting what most people believed to be a reinforced photo reconnaissance gondola. The aerostat's envelope was made of a one micro-meter thick hybrid polymer which, when charged with a weak electrical current, changed from transparent to reflective. Doing this enabled one to alternately heat and cool the envelope's different helium chambers using solar radiation, thereby maintaining altitude with minimal fuel use. One could also heat the helium using electric heaters, but that obviously used more energy.
High altitude balloons had become a viable alternative to satellites after the second ablation cascade event. While the chain-reaction sprawl from impacting satellites and debris didn't keep people from reaching space, it made the job even riskier. A hundred years after Sputnik, getting into orbit was still expensive and dangerous. Add in rogue satellites and a debris field in the millions, and the dangers and costs increased even more. Hence the blockade by the major space faring nations. They called it a safety issue, but over time it became more about keeping control than keeping everyone safe.
Without access to space, poor countries and companies turned to high altitude balloons to replace expensive satellites. The ceiling for these balloons was between 50 and 65 km and they could float there for up to a year. In fact, the biggest problem with the balloons was getting them to come down when you wanted. That's where Tess's company came in, repairing balloons inflight so they could be retrieved.
However, the Gossamer Angel problem wasn't that it wouldn't come down. Instead, it's payload wouldn't go up. I was supposed to fix that.
As I carefully edged the Beatrice closer to the Angel, Bee announced that Johnie was again calling on tightbeam. �
�Dusty, I want to apologize,” Johnie's voice whined. He must have been sincere because this time it was really him talking and not a proxy.
I laughed and disconnected him. While the most Seeker of virtues was forgiveness, I wasn't done letting Johnie stew in his own juices.
* * *
I met Sister Tess Harqo at a retro coffee shop in Houston. After a perfunctory “Where away, Sister Dusty,” she launched into a diatribe against the teenager behind the counter, who'd tried to mix gened milk in her old-fashioned double mocha latte. She was still a true believer who saw the world in frigid hues of right and wrong. She even wore the brown robes indicating she'd yet to achieve her destiny – robes worn in public by only the most fundamentalist of Seekers. But since I was desperate for a shot at space, I kept my mouth shut.
Tess had made her fortune on high-altitude balloons. But instead of launching them, she maintained them, sending up a single repair balloon each year to fix or retrieve broken high fliers. From what I'd heard, her main problem was finding good pilots. Everyone with the needed qualifications preferred to work for NASA or the private space companies, which paid more and let people go all the way into space.
Tess got right to the point. There was a special balloon stuck in the mesosphere and she wanted me to fly the repair mission. When I asked why, she told me about the old Project Far Side from the 1950s. The project used balloons to carry rockets to 25 kilometers in altitude, where the rockets were launched through the balloon's envelope at 70 Gs. I was instantly intrigued.
“If someone launched from 60 kilometers,” Tess said, “the blockade wouldn't have time to stop the rocket. The blockade succeeds because traditional rockets launch at slow speeds in the dense sea level air. In the mesosphere, a rocket could reach 5,600 kph in two seconds, and almost 30,000 kph not long after. The blockade systems wouldn't have time to react.”
“It'd be expensive,” I said. “Are you putting up the money?”
“Don't have to. A certain unnamed country already launched the balloon. But the rocket failed to fire and they've secretly contracted me to fix it. I need someone I can trust to fly the repair mission. Brother Page says you're the one.”
I imagined how shocked Johnie and all those fools at NASA would be. Unless they shot down every high-altitude balloon, their blockade would cease to exist. While this wasn't the same as going into space, I grew excited at the plan.
“So are you in or out?”
I looked at Tess and wondered how much of a fanatic she was. Still, Brother Page had vouched for her. I was in.
* * *
I piloted the Beatrice until we were thirty meters from the edge of the Gossamer Angel's envelope, and even further from the Angel's gondola. Fortunately there was no wind in the mesosphere – in fact, almost no atmosphere at all – to mess up our approach. I extended the thin support boom toward the Angel's gondola like an impossibly long finger. I snagged the repair hook on the second try, anchoring the two ships together.
I quickly dressed in my pressure suit – essentially a space suit combined with a high-altitude parachute system – and walked into the cabin's small airlock. The air up here had less than 1/1000th the pressure at sea level and depressurization would kill me as fast as if in deep space. As I opened the outer airlock door, I ordered Bee to begin continuous communications. If I fell, I wanted Tess to know where to look for me.
The world turned slowly beneath me while Bee maneuvered the Beatrice so the support boom angled down. Aside from not feeling the weightlessness of freefall, I could have been in orbit. I wondered if God gave credit for being close to your destiny?
Once the Beatrice was higher than the Angel, I hooked the slider to my support harness and the slider to the boom, ignoring how the boom shivered as it arched between the two balloons. The boom's weight limit wasn't much more than what I weighed in my pressure suit. I pushed off from the Beatrice, keeping my eyes on the gondola rushing toward me. If the boom or slider broke, it would take me less than 30 seconds to reach the speed of sound. From what others had told me I'd feel like I was standing still. If my drogue chute tangled, the flat spin would knock me unconscious. By the time I hit the cloud deck fifty klicks below, I'd be the fastest free-falling human in the world.
Not that I had any indication of falling. Even though Joe Kittinger proved a century ago that you could parachute from this height, and a few rich fools did so every year, I had no desire to take the chance.
A dozen meters from the Angel I hit the slider's brakes and eased up to the gondola's maintenance ledge. This was the most dangerous part of the mission. Inside the gondola was a small rocket carrying an even smaller satellite. If the rocket launched while I was on the gondola, I'd die instantly.
I plugged a direct line from Bee into the gondola's system and the computer transmitted the security code to open the access panel. The gondola bumped and shook to the panel's movement. Praying the vibrations wouldn't trigger the rocket, I carefully disconnected the primary and secondary launch initiators. Once completed, I breathed a sigh of relief and plugged Bee into the repair jack. The computer verified several problems, including a faulty router for the launch initiators and some type of programming block in the system.
To transport a new router I had to return to the Beatrice. Bee lowered the Beatrice's height and I slid back down the boom.
After I took off my pressure suit, Johnie again tightbeamed me. I considered bragging about what I'd just done – after all, sliding between balloons at 60 km was more exciting than anything he'd ever do in space. But in the end, I decided his stew wasn't done cooking, so I didn't answer his call.
* * *
When the Beatrice launched, I'd been prepared for everything except silence. Where moments before the hiss of gas and the clanks of access tubes and restraints had echoed through the pressurized cabin, the moment I cut free silence overwhelmed me.
Beatrice rose through an overcast sky, the wind blowing slightly, the mists beading on the windows. Then the ship cleared the clouds in an explosion of sun light. I continued to climb and within minutes the blue of Earth's atmosphere hung below me.
While I stared in awe at the sight before me, Brother Page tightbeamed me. “How is it?” he asked. “I mean, the mesosphere's not your destiny, but it's close.”
I thanked him again for recommending me to Tess, and asked if he'd ever had the urge to go into space. I hadn't forgotten how much he loved photographs of deep space.
“Once. Back in graduate school, before I found my true calling, I studied noctilucent clouds. Those are thin clouds of water ice up above 85 km. Very rare and hard to find because they're extremely faint. We still don't fully understand how they occur.”
I tried to imagine how clouds could exist at such a height, but my mind couldn't wrap around the idea.
“Anyway,” Brother Page continued, “after graduation NASA offered me a research position, which would have eventually let me visit a space station to study the clouds. But by then I'd joined the Seekers and my destiny wasn't in space. Still, I've always wondered what I'd have found up there.”
I smiled and said if I saw any of his clouds I'd record them.
* * *
By the second day of repairs, I'd made two more trips to the Gossamer Angel and replaced the launch initiator router, along with another faulty system. However, the software block was still holding me up. Tess contacted the rocket's host country and recommended reloading the programming from scratch. According to her, the country was initially hesitant to trust us with their main security codes but eventually realized they had too much invested in the project to simply give up.
Once I received the codes and the go-ahead, I slid back to the Angel while Bee uploaded the new software. Out above the horizon, the reflected star of Freedom 2 moved toward me. I wondered if Johnie was watching me through one of the station's cameras or if he'd lost interest. Either way, he'd get a shock when the Gossamer Angel launched the first unauthorized satellite in a decade.
“Next window is ten minutes. After that, windows repeats every hour and a half.”
I nodded absently and prepared to slide back to the Beatrice. Just then I caught sight of the Freedom 2 station moving through the black sky above my position. I wondered if Johnie would try to tightbeam me again or if he'd finally realized I was still pissed and ...
I paused. “Bee, what's the rocket's target altitude?” I asked.
“360 km.”
That wasn't right. The rocket was supposed to place the satellite in high Earth orbit, not low orbit. And why would the launch window so closely mimic the appearance of Freedom 2, which orbited the Earth almost 16 times a day. I told Bee to reaccess the Angel's system. This time, access was denied.
“Bee, why don't we have access? Didn't we override the old security codes?”
“Access denied.”
I tried the earlier access codes, but nothing worked. I was locked out of the entire system, unable to even reopen the Angel's access panel. I asked Bee to prepare a tightbeam to Tess at headquarters, but Bee said communications access was denied. When I ordered the computer to lower Beatrice so I could slide back, it again said access was denied.
Right then the gondola pinged from thermal expansion and my heart jumped at the thought of the rocket igniting. Only Tess could override my access with Bee. Her fanatical eyes burned in my memory as I realized she'd hijacked the rocket. I also remembered the rumor blaming a Seeker for the last explosive satellite cascade. As I watched the bright star of Freedom 2 cross the sky above me, I knew what the rocket's target was.