Frontier

by Patrick Chiles

  Roberta suspected she was being rude but couldn’t stop looking past him to study their monitors, trying to get a sense of what they were doing. She hadn’t seen any placards like the other sections had.

  Ivey smiled around the wad of whatever it was in his mouth. “You’re wondering what we do here.”

  She turned back to him. “Sorry, Lieutenant. That obvious?”

  “Don’t apologize.” He motioned her off to the side. “And you’re an officer, not a cadet anymore, okay? I only made full L-T last month, so you can drop the rank when it’s just us talking.” He eyed her once more, apparently deciding how much to trust her. “Traditionally we’d waste the new guy’s time for a day or so, maybe send you down to S-2 for a box of grid squares.”

  “Intel shop . . . that’s down by the flight line isn’t it?” she asked seriously. “Will you need me to bring back a bucket of prop wash too? And is that before or after I stop by admin for the ID.10.T form?”

  He stared at her coldly for a second, then broke into another goofy smile. “You’re savvy. Good. I don’t have much patience for newbs, and the naïve ones just piss me off.” He pointed her back to his console, which is when she finally noticed the aircraft-style control column mounted to it.

  “So you work in the intel shop?” Roberta wondered. “I thought this was all Ops.”

  He motioned for her to take a seat beside him. “You’ll find a lot of overlap in what we do here.”

  She noticed his monitors were configured differently than the others too. They looked more like an aircraft’s multifunction displays, including an eight-ball attitude indicator in the center screen. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “That depends. What do you think it is?”

  She didn’t want to get her hopes up, but . . . “It looks like a drone pilot’s station.”

  “We have a winner,” he said. “Welcome to the X-37C Remote Orbital Vehicle control team.”

  4

  Max and Jasmine Jiang floated side by side, smiling for the camera. Centered in Prospector’s habitation module, they were surrounded by meticulously wrapped packages of freeze-dried food and the other dry goods needed for almost a year and a half in space.

  “It looks crowded in there.” The observation came from a news anchor, off camera and with the nearly six-minute signal delay edited out.

  Jasmine’s face beamed, framed by black hair which flowed around her in zero g. “It gets a little better with each passing week. As we dig into our supplies, it frees up more room.” She gestured toward a small porthole at the back of the hab. “We couldn’t see that bulkhead a month ago. Getting access to another window was a nice incentive.”

  Max Jiang interjected. “We still have to stow our garbage, though, so waste is always a challenge. It makes us creative.”

  The video skipped and they were positioned differently, a byproduct of the editing as the announcer moved on to his next scripted question. “You’re now less than two weeks out from your asteroid rendezvous. Are you able to make out any details yet?”

  Another video skip, now Max and Jasmine were giving a lesson in orbital mechanics. He held up a sugar cube; she held a bulb of fruit juice. “Not without assistance,” Max said. “RQ39 is still only a point of light in our window, but it’s showing some variation now and is obviously not just another background star.” He pushed the cube away, she soon followed with the drinking bulb. “We’re essentially pulling up alongside it for the next several million miles.” Max worked a remote and the camera tracked the cube and bulb as they approached and crossed paths, then refocused on himself and his wife. “It will be a few days until we can make out features with the naked eye. Until then, we still have to rely on our telescope and binoculars.”

  “Binoculars,” the interviewer chuckled. “You can make out details with only binoculars?”

  “You’d be surprised,” came Max’s time-edited reply. “Plenty of amateur astronomers on Earth use them for deep-sky viewing. Out here, this much closer to the objective and with no atmosphere to sully the view, it’s amazing what you can make out.”

  “Though he prefers the telescope,” Jasmine cut in with a laugh. “The binoculars are there for whichever of us couldn’t get to the eyepiece first. Here, I’ll show you.” She reached out for the camera and the hab appeared to spin about with her movement. It stabilized and settled in on the eyepiece of a compact commercial telescope on a fork mount in front of a porthole. “Because the spacecraft is in a slow roll to control our solar heating, we don’t get the same view from the same windows all the time. It should be coming up here in a second.” Off camera, Max turned down the cabin lights.

  The video went black but began to brighten as a pale gray, oblate shape appeared in one corner and began to slowly transit the screen. “This is a low-power, wide-field eyepiece. We sometimes use higher-power eyepieces, but it’s harder to track that way.”

  Another time-edited remark from the announcer. “And there is your target, the asteroid . . .” He paused for effect as if checking his notes and not responding to a producer’s cue in his ear. “2023 RQ39?” A self-effacing chuckle. “It’s quite a mouthful. Are you planning give it a different name?”

  The camera was back on Max now. “We thought about ‘Mine 39’ but the International Astronomical Union frowns on commercializing celestial bodies.” He turned to his wife with a smile. “I’ve just taken to calling it ‘Malati.’”

  The interviewer’s production staff had taken advantage of the time lag to look up the word and its translation from Mandarin Chinese. “Jasmine Flower,” he said appreciatively. “I’m sure Mrs. Jiang is flattered.”

  * * *

  “You watch that crap?” Ivey leaned over Roberta’s shoulder in the SOC’s breakroom.

  She put her tablet away. “A friend of mine in primary flight was obsessed with them. Wants to go to Mars himself.” Even if it was only for a quick look as they flew by, Marshall had been captivated by their adventure. “I was too focused on not washing out at the time, but what they're doing is dramatic and dangerous as hell. I have to admire them.”

  Ivey nodded. “And true to form, we found a way to turn it into reality TV garbage. Seriously, at this point I’ll bet half the country’s just waiting to see if they crash into the planet.”

  Her eyes widened. “Okay, now that’s just sick. Seriously?”

  “Didn’t say I hope so. It’s simply an observation of our hopeless train-wreck culture.” He glanced at his watch and spun a finger in a hurry-up gesture. “Break’s almost over. We’ve got real work coming up soon.”

  Roberta nodded and gathered her things, grabbing a paper coffee cup as she followed him back into the Ops center. He’d promised a big day.

  She settled into a drone control station identical to the one Ivey occupied next to her. “Best way to learn aero-grav assists is to follow my lead,” he explained. “We can program the Orbital Maneuvering System ahead of time and the bird will take care of itself, but when it’s time to bite into atmo we have to do our pilot thing.”

  Her eyes danced over the multifunction displays. A camera mounted between the drone’s v-tail stabilizers provided a view outside the spacecraft, but it was the instrument panel that demanded most of her attention. Where was the spacecraft right now, where was it heading, and were any critical systems hinting at an unpleasant surprise?

  The yellow and green bands on the digital gauges made the “systems” part easy. The hard part, as always, was interpolating between the differences to anticipate problems: Was a rise in fuel pressure just due to solar heating or a sign that a tank was about to fail? For now she could leave that to Ivey. She focused on the flight path indicators instead, as that was the intent of today’s lesson. The drone was set to intercept a maneuver node they’d programmed to begin over the South Pacific near Chile. The effect of whatever action they took there would manifest itself on the opposite side of the globe over China.

  A sudden dissonant, grinding noise dist
racted her. “What the hell is that?”

  “‘Seek and Destroy,’” he said. “Metallica. Gets me in the mood.”

  “Seriously? That was old when my grandparents were listening to it.”

  “You get to pick the music when it’s your turn in the box,” he said. “Until then, let me enjoy my golden oldies.” He pointed to a cascade of numbers scrolling down one display. “Watch here. The fun’s about to start.” He kept his hands free of the controls while the spacecraft followed its programmed burn schedule. “Orbital maneuvers 101. A retro burn at perigee does what?”

  “Lowers apogee,” she said. Easy.

  “How?”

  “Subtracting velocity reduces the orbital period,” she said. “Burn just long enough and you circularize the orbit. Burn too long and you re-enter.”

  “Correct, and neither of which we’re here for today,” he said with a mischievous grin. “Today we are faking out the spooks who are expecting us to show up over Beijing in forty-five minutes.”

  “If satellite spotters are looking for us, then they can work backwards and figure out when and where we’d have to do a burn to avoid them.”

  His grin didn’t change; he was clearly enjoying the lesson. “That’s what makes this so much fun, besides the actual flying. Anybody can do back-of-the-envelope math to figure out how much we can change orbits with the OMS. What they can’t do yet is predict our atmospheric skips, and by the time they figure it out we’ll be in position to do another.”

  She pointed at the upcoming burn sequence. “So the retro fire is to get us into the atmosphere?”

  “Just enough to use it. That’s where we come in. We can program the drone to do a lot, but it takes a pilot’s feel to fly through this. Dig too deep and we’re re-entering. Don’t dig far enough and we’re skipping off in the wrong direction.” He pointed her to the control sticks. “Haptic feedback; you can feel what the spacecraft’s feeling as it starts biting into the air. Today you’re just gonna follow me through the maneuver. You’ll be able to feel the air build up and what I do in response.”

  “It'll lose too much energy to just skip back into orbit, won't it?”

  “Correct,” he said. “We’ll still have to do an OMS burn at the top of the bounce. This is more about using the aerodynamics to give us a plane change instead of burning propellant.”

  Plane changes—that is, changing the orbit’s inclination from Earth’s equator—required the spacecraft to overcome its considerable momentum in one direction to end up on a tangent to it, which took equally considerable of energy. Using aerodynamic forces to change directions still required fuel to remain in orbit after dipping into the atmosphere, but more importantly it made the X-37 wildly unpredictable.

  The chief petty officer monitoring the drone’s health spoke up from the workstation next to them. “Coming up on PC minus one. Setting your countdown to start at thirty seconds from node entry. She’s your spacecraft, Lieutenant.”

  Ivey threw a cutover switch transferring control to his flight station. “My spacecraft. Thanks, Chief.” He placed one hand lightly on the sidestick controller on his armrest and gestured for her to do the same. “Thirty seconds.”

  She mimicked his motions, just barely touching the sidestick. As the countdown reached zero, she felt it jump slightly and press back against her palm.

  “Retro thrusters firing,” Ivey said, “right on cue. Feel that?”

  “Yeah,” she said, if a bit uneasily. The stick vibrated against her fingertips. Was he certain she couldn’t give this thing any inputs from here?

  “Don’t worry, you can’t do anything to this bird,” he said, as if anticipating her reaction. “Just get a feel for it. I’m only following along right now myself.”

  As he’d warned her, the real work began when the X-37 began its tentative descent into the upper atmosphere. “This is where the fun starts,” he said as the digital altimeter unwound along one side of their main display. “Entry interface at four hundred and twenty thousand feet, but that’s just tapeline height. I want to know where the air really is.”

  “So the pitot-static system isn’t enough?”

  “Sure, once we’re too low for it to matter. The air data computer can’t always keep up.” He pointed to the sidestick. “Get your hand around it. Can you feel anything?”

  Roberta wrapped her hand gently around the controller and closed her eyes. A slight wobble here, a bit of pressure there . . . “Yeah, I can. Barely. What’s our altitude?” she asked, not wanting to lose focus.

  “Four hundred thousand even,” he said. They’d lost twenty thousand feet just in the last minute. “I’m going to ease back and shallow us out.”

  She felt the stick press into her palm as Ivey pulled the nose up ever so slightly. She opened her eyes and noticed the altimeter wasn’t unwinding quite so rapidly. On the main display the drone’s forward camera showed the view ahead. Superimposed above Earth’s horizon were animated attitude and direction indicators, scrolling speed and altitude counters, and an ever-changing array of numbers beneath a column of Greek letters. Sigma, delta, and theta each represented atmospheric pressure, density, and temperature, which were more important than the spacecraft’s geometric height above Earth.

  “Watch outside pressure and density for me,” Ivey said, more for her benefit than his. He’d done this enough to sense when they’d hit the sweet spot.

  “Kind of high for this altitude,” she said.

  “Exactly. Even in the ionosphere, the air doesn’t always behave the way you think it should. We haven’t studied it enough.”

  “Are we gathering data then too?”

  “Sure,” he laughed. “We just can’t share it with NOAA. Classified.”

  That sounded too ridiculous, even for the military. “The upper atmosphere is classified?”

  “Of course not. But the way we get the data is.” She noticed his hand tighten around the stick. “Here we go. Watch this.”

  Not as subtly this time, the stick pressed against the side of her palm as Ivey put the spacecraft into a shallow turn. Ahead, the horizon tilted onscreen. “Ten degree bank. How long at this rate?”

  “Not quite twenty seconds. Doesn’t take much at this end for a big change at the other end.” He turned to his senior technician. “How’s it looking on your side, Chief?”

  “Solid. You’re on target to be about four minutes early and three degrees south of where they’ll be looking. New inclination will be twenty-eight point four.”

  “Sweetness. I’ll hand her back off to you after the OMS burn.”

  “Yes sir,” the chief said. “Ready whenever you are.”

  Three degrees of inclination change? Roberta watched as a diamond target appeared ahead. As it crept across the screen, Ivey eased up on the stick until it sat neutral as the diamond centered in the attitude and direction indicator. The T-handled translation controller, dormant beneath her left hand until now, startled her when it jumped.

  “OMS relight,” Ivey announced. “We hit our target and are burning back into our new orbit. Not a bad day’s work.”

  Nick felt an overwhelming urge to scratch his nose almost as soon as Giselle locked his helmet in place, making it impossible. The suit techs had helpfully placed strips of Velcro inside, along the edges of his visor, which he had been repeatedly taking advantage of during their seemingly interminable pre-breathing period.

  “It’s purely psychological,” Giselle tried to explain as the compartment depressurized. “You know that, right?”

  “It’s no less real,” Nick said testily, not letting on that his snout now felt raw as well. It didn’t help that their confinement to Stardust’s cramped nose-mounted airlock had kept him mostly immobile.

  “I guarantee you wouldn’t feel it if you had the option of taking your helmet off.”

  “Then I’d be able to do something about it.”

  She reached for the outer door and pushed it open. “Trust me, you’re about to forget all that.
” She pulled herself up and out, apparently in as much of a hurry to get outside as he was to get out of his suit.

  Nick made a final check of his safety tether, just as they’d rehearsed, and pushed off for the opening and the empty black ahead.

  It was a sensation that abruptly ended as he emerged from the airlock tunnel.

  “Something else, isn’t it?”

  He was speechless. In the midst of the nothingness he’d dreaded hung Earth in full sunlight, sparkling and glorious and distant enough that he could see its entirety as if he could spread out his arms and embrace the whole planet. The Sun exploded out of the blackness behind him. “Um . . . yes,” he stammered.

  “It’s called the overview effect.” Did he hear her chuckle? Her voice seemed distant now, after two hours of being almost nose to nose in the airlock. He was acutely aware of the cool air around his face and the crisp, sanitized scent of a fresh EVA suit. “Welcome to space. Your perspective will be forever changed from now on.”

  He turned to face the disabled satellite they’d come to revive and thought of the money they stood to make if they were successful. That was one perspective he knew wouldn’t change. “Yeah, wonderful,” he said. “Let’s do what we came here for.”

  5

  Marshall balanced himself atop a rickety chair behind a worn desk in an empty corner of the Group Admin office, a spot that looked to be a well-traveled waystation for incoming junior officers while the CO found useful work for them.

  The S-1 officer had sent him a file, password protected and marked for his use only, which had seemed interesting at first but had turned out to be the personnel records of a mix of flight-rated officers and enlisted specialists currently assigned to orbital patrol duties. That put them in one place, because as of now the Orbit Guard fleet consisted of only one spacecraft: the USS Borman.