Frontier

by Patrick Chiles

  Rosado had made no such effort to get presentable yet, which made Marshall increasingly uncomfortable. “That’s total for the whole force, yeah.” She looked at Marshall. “A third of us are up here in orbit now, the rest are either training for their own cruise or on leave. There’s more in the pipeline but the training footprint is huge.”

  “I’ve heard,” Marshall said, forcing himself to look at her face. “Tough school?”

  “Like BUD/S, just with a lot more math,” she said with a shrug. “There’s a few more differences, like learning how not to die in vacuum instead of by drowning.”

  “Zero-g combat training too?”

  “Wish there wasn’t, but yeah,” she said with an edge to her voice, and jerked a thumb at the emergency medical packs Velcroed to a sidewall. That they were in such close proximity to the small-arms locker seemed to grate on her. “That’s what we’re about. I get why Pararescue has to—downed pilots are being hunted by the bad guys and you may have to shoot your way out. But us? Up here? No idea . . . sir.”

  “You’ll have to pardon us, sir,” Harper interjected. “We were all medics before becoming spacers. Combatants run a distant third to us, at least until hordes of marauding space aliens show up.”

  Marshall shrugged it off. “I appreciate your candor. I’ve got a lot to learn here.”

  Rosado stifled a laugh. “It never stops, sir. Soon as you think you’ve got it all locked down, that’s when everything comes unglued.”

  “I’ll try and remember that, Petty Officer.”

  Flynn helpfully interjected himself back into the conversation. “Everyone calls her Rosie,” he explained. “Also, ranks and ratings get complicated compared to the ground forces so it’s easier to just call them spacers.”

  Marshall wondered about that. “So new officers would be . . . ?”

  “Space Cadets.” Flynn smiled. “What, you thought we were gonna make this easy on you?”

  After just a few weeks on the job, Roberta was starting to understand how people became coffee snobs. She’d never touched the stuff as a cadet and had barely tolerated it in fleet officer’s basic, but pulling regular shifts in the Ops center was teaching her to avoid the nasty government-issue stuff in favor of their team’s private stash.

  She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and lifted a mug of the hot black liquid as she flipped through the day’s intel brief on a monitor. The drone work with the X-37 was interesting stuff, but in the end they were still just moving unmanned birds around, avoiding traffic, and keeping tabs on what other countries were up to. Even the occasional debris-removal ops promised more of a challenge, as it involved maneuvering one satellite in close proximity to a chunk of orbiting flotsam. But still, she found an odd satisfaction in getting the god’s-eye view of orbital space.

  The Russians had almost pancaked another Soyuz the day before, and its upper stage was tumbling in a barely stable low orbit that would bring it down some time over the next few days. Where was the million-dollar question. There was a range of uncertainty that depended greatly on perturbations of the upper atmosphere. It might come down in the Pacific, it might come down in Alaska. Roscosmos claimed to have everything under control but the techs here seemed to think otherwise.

  SpaceX had just put up another string of broadband-internet satellites, constantly replacing its old constellation in medium orbit. Astronomers would be pissed as usual as the string of artificial stars took their places in the sky. That was the downside to space commerce: the people who paid attention to the night sky were having their views obstructed on a regular basis.

  Up in geosynchronous orbit, yet another comsat had gone dark: SAMCOM-3, a South American bird already near the end of its service life, which was weird. Most of those comsats were built around common frames and network buses. Once they reached orbit they were famously reliable, most lasting well beyond their design life. Yet this was the third one to go dark this week, just shy of its sell-by date.

  She scrolled back through the week’s database updates: the SAMCOM bird, GULFSAT 10-A, and a Japanese bird, NSTAR-G. All in GEO, and all near the end of their service lives. So maybe common frames and buses hadn’t been such a good idea after all? Not if it led to a single point of failure.

  Nothing a rookie officer could do about it except note the updates to their database and warn other operators about them. As she swiped over to the next page in the daily briefing, an alert popped up from Space Weather that made her forget about it.

  After the first few lines, she put her coffee mug down slowly and looked across the room to their consoles. “Hey, Met,” she called across the room. “What’s up with this CME warning?”

  “It’s big and fast,” the lieutenant responded. “The filament we observed is a solid six degrees across and doesn’t look to be dissipating. Solar wind speed clocked over a thousand kilometers per second.”

  After being quiet for months, the Sun had just burped up a major coronal mass ejection, a solar storm that would impact Earth in less than a day. The stream of charged particles hitting Earth’s magnetic field carried the potential for widespread power and communication outages, not to mention the radiation hazard to anyone in orbit.

  “And what about this K-index . . . eight?” Roberta whistled. “You really think it’ll be that high?” That portended a severe geomagnetic storm. She scrolled through the details. The leading edge of the filament would hit in sixteen hours; it would take another two for the bulk of the CME to strike.

  “Wouldn’t be there if I didn’t think so. Batten down the hatches,” the lieutenant said. “It’ll be a real show. When the lights go out, they’ll be able to see auroras all the way into Arkansas.”

  She wondered what kind of sight that would be from orbit, then thought of Marshall up there on the Borman. The lucky bastard. Yes, she decided, he deserved a good ribbing.

  The handheld on Marshall’s hip had been buzzing incessantly ever since the first warning came across the message board, with one cryptic message from Roberta kicking it off: Heads up - hope u brought ur lead underwear. He stopped wondering what she was talking about when the space weather brief showed up soon after.

  As he floated through Borman’s core module, headed for the rec area, his watch chimed with its friendly reminder that he was once again running late. He’d already not been looking forward to the hours they’d be spending in the hardened shelter, which was the entire central hub of the spacecraft. It would seem a lot less roomy with all twelve crew in it.

  That was until the all-hands meeting had been called in the now even more crowded rec module. As Marshall scrambled into the module, Captain Poole began his announcements.

  “I know your private message folders are filling up quicker than the official traffic, so I won’t waste time on the obvious. There is one big-ass solar flare headed our way, folks, and it promises to play hell on anything in its path. So we’re not going to stay in its path.”

  The gathered crew exchanged curious looks. What he was describing sounded like the opposite of easy.

  “If you don’t want to get slimed when the shit hits the fan, then you move out of the way.” He nodded toward Riley and his team. “Your people have already spent too much time outside keeping the sensor suite up. I’m not about to throw all that work away while we wait inside for the storm to pass.”

  Poole looked over the gathered crew. “So here’s what we’re gonna do. Commander Wicklund and Chief Garver have worked out a burn sequence to change our orbital period and put us on the back side of Earth when this thing hits.” He read their surprise. “This should be no big deal for us, we just haven’t done it yet. This is the whole point of nuclear engines, people. They can burn hard enough, long enough, to get us where we need to be. We’ll raise our orbit and put Earth between us and the storm.”

  He continued. “The trick is we have to act fast. It’ll take several burns to get the phase changes we’ll need, so we have to start at the next ascending node. That’s in forty minu
tes. If you’re not already on duty, start securing all loose gear by division modules and get them oriented for some long burns.”

  After giving them a minute to process that, he added: “One last thing. There is a civilian Stardust spacecraft in orbit right now that will be in the path if they don’t move quickly. Once the ship’s secured for burn, I want all hands getting the shuttle and medical bay prepped for possible rescue ops.”

  Harper raised her hand. “Sir, do we know if they need assistance now? Can we go get them and move them with us?”

  “Not that simple,” Poole said. “They’re up in GEO and our orbits don’t converge. We’re already going to have to do a transverse burn to rotate our plane, and we can’t do both maneuvers in time. The Stardust-class vehicle has a docking tunnel that can double as a rad shelter. It’ll be cramped as all hell but they’ll survive.”

  Nick Lesko struggled to stay awake while the others slept in the darkened capsule. It was his turn to stay on comms watch with their tracking center, but another very full day of exhausting EVAs had left him drained. He cracked open another cold gel pack and pressed it against his aching hands, aware they were running short on them and not caring. They were done with spacewalks and he didn’t much care if Giselle needed them or not. She was the pro, and so he assumed was therefore better conditioned against the physical toll. She was cocooned in her bag, sleeping soundly in the cabin’s lower bay with Whitman and Billy/Xenos, though it was a sign of her exertion that he could easily pick out the heavy rise and fall of her breathing above the others. Not quite snoring, but the deep slumber of a person at the edge of exhaustion. He had to grudgingly admire her for not showing it while awake.

  He examined his bruised fingertips, wondering how she did it. Experienced walkers must develop calluses harder than farmers, he decided. Well, this would be his last—his only—excursion beyond Earth if he had anything to say about it.

  Hopefully his patrons would feel the same way. He did not look forward to talking with them despite their success up here.

  Nick reached for the radio panel and made sure all their telemetry was isolated to the primary high-gain antenna. There would be no interruption in their feed to the ground, and he could still nominally stay on comms watch. But he had other, more urgent, matters to relay to another group: his patrons had their own priorities beyond that of the company they’d hired Stardust from.

  He looked down at his sleeping companions, making one last check that they were fully asleep, and opened an access panel beneath the radio controls. He found the secondary antenna relays just as he’d practiced on the ground, disconnected them, and jacked his own laptop into its signal path. He opened up an encrypted message app and began typing.

  ALL OBJECTIVES ACHIEVED. SUCCESSFULLY EXERCISED LOCAL CONTROL. DATA PACKET TO FOLLOW.

  With that, he sent a compressed file that held each satellite’s encryption codes as planted by Billy. It took longer using the frequency-hopping algorithm built into his message program, but someone would have to know what they were looking for to find it.

  The reply came much sooner than he’d expected, thankfully. He didn’t want to risk having this hack laid out in the open for the others to wake up and see.

  ACKNOWLEDGED. PROCEED WITH CLEANUP PLAN UPON RETURN.

  “Cleanup.” A typically anodyne euphemism for some very nasty work. Nick quietly disconnected his laptop and replaced the antenna cables. When he switched his headset back to the company frequency, the alert tone startled him. They were demanding he acknowledge something impossibly urgent. When he read the message in the comms window, he understood. His initial fright soon gave way to a sense of focused calm—he knew the contingency plan for a CME. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but the experience would be survivable.

  There were many opportunities for tragic accidents in space, some more believable than others. He checked the time and began moving supplies into the tunnel while the others slept.

  7

  “There is no need to worry about us. We are quite well protected,” Max Jiang said to the camera. He’d become well practiced enough by now to anticipate certain questions and work around the increasing signal delay. He’d also become more camera savvy, always knowing where the live one was and taking care to not look directly at it, giving the illusion of a sit-down interview with the itinerant astronaut.

  “Our command and service module is radiation hardened, and we are shutting down all nonessential systems before the coronal mass reaches us,” he explained. Behind him, his wife could be seen moving packages from their inflatable habitat module through the docking tunnel.

  “We see Jasmine back there,” the interviewer said, and she waved as if on cue. “What is she doing?”

  Jiang looked over his shoulder. “She’s bringing food and water from the hab into the CM. We don’t know for certain how long we’ll have to stay in here, but our control center thought it best to plan for an extended stay,” he said with a hint of amusement at the expense of their overly cautious control team. “As you may know, water is an excellent insulator against particle radiation and we plan to have every square inch of panel space covered with water bladders.”

  The interviewer had no such idea but nodded along as if he did. “Yes, of course. But is there enough aboard?”

  A self-effacing laugh from Jiang. “It’s complicated. The environmental recycler filters and recirculates nearly all of our air and water, the rest is made up for with onboard supplies. We have enough stored for a sixty-day contingency.” He made a sweeping gesture around the cabin. “Part of which is intended for situations just like this.” He moved briefly off camera and returned with an undulating blue bladder, about a half-meter square. “Five liters of fresh water right here. Notice the Velcro strips and corner grommets?” He fastened one to an empty side panel, then grabbed another to place next to it, then another. “There. Instant rad shielding.”

  “It looks as if you still have some work to do,” the interviewer said as the floating camera bot spun about in midair, showing off the cabin’s cramped quarters and mostly bare walls. “You’re only a week away from your first destination, asteroid RQ39.” Which wasn’t the proper name, but the media had been running with it long enough that it had stuck. “Are you concerned about this solar storm interrupting your exploration plans?”

  “Not at all,” Jiang said. “It will be over with well before we begin our rendezvous. On the contrary, our confinement will make us all the more eager to get outside for a walk.” He reached out for the camera and placed it in front of a nearby window. “You can see it from here already. It’s just a bright spot in the sky right now, but our destination is literally in sight and we’re quite excited.”

  Preparations aboard the Borman were much more hectic, and being a brand-new division officer only made it that much harder. Lieutenant Flynn already had his hands full as their newly appointed engineer, which left Marshall completely reliant on his senior NCO. This was much as it had been in military organizations throughout history.

  Chief Riley’s patience with him was admirable, no doubt helped along by the fact that the spacers on their team had apparently drilled for this to the point where they could do it blindfolded. His biggest challenge was staying out of their way, not an easy task in a module already full of equipment.

  After fumbling around in a storage compartment that held exactly all of the wrong items, Riley handed him a pair of clear wraparound goggles. “Augmented reality glasses,” he explained. “Tap the right hinge and a menu bar will show up. Navigating it’s pretty self-explanatory.”

  Marshall turned them over in his hands. “Can’t help but notice no one else is wearing them.”

  “You’re the only one who needs them, sir. Nothing to be ashamed of. It’ll be asses to elbows around here for a while and this’ll help you find your way around. Every piece of gear on this boat has an RFID tag, but not all of it ended up where Fleet Ops thought it should go. What makes sense on the ground ain’t always so
up here.”

  “So I’m finding out.”

  “Just the way things are, sir. Like I said, nothing to be ashamed of.” Riley looked around the compartment, appearing satisfied with their preparations. Of the seven enlisted crew aboard Borman, four worked here. It was a plum job and they knew it—there would be no slackers for him to worry about on this crew.

  “Coming through. Make a hole—sir.” Rosie swam past them, trailing a net bag filled with medical packs.

  “Anti-radiation prophylactics,” Riley explained. “She’s taking them down to the core module. If anyone starts feeling funny or sees any light flashes, we’ll all be taking them.” He motioned for Marshall to put the AR goggles on and tapped the hinge for him. “You should be seeing an inventory list scrolling down the right side of your field of view.”

  Floating tables of alphanumeric characters appeared, rolling over and changing wherever he looked as green outlines appeared over his constantly changing focus points. “So it’s telling me what’s in each compartment I look at?”

  “Yessir. We all know what’s stored where because we’re the ones who set up the spaces. You’ll pick it up soon enough. Where you will see these glasses used is when we take inventory for resupply missions. Easier than working off a tablet and it updates in real time.”

  Everywhere he looked, new outlines and rosters appeared. He tapped the hinge and they disappeared. This would be useful. He noticed a countdown timer in the opposite corner of his view. “Is that time to ignition?” he asked, realizing it was a stupid question as he said it. What else would it be, a self-destruct timer?

  “That it is, sir. All major shipboard events will show up on the left side.” He made a sweeping gesture around the medical cabin. “You can see the module’s prepped for a burn. We only had to make sure any loose items were secured, and I can promise you there were none. Loose gear turns into projectiles as soon as those engines light, so the skipper takes a hard line on it.”