Marshall watched as Poole, again working from the cupola, expertly deployed their manipulator arm to grab the smaller ship and maneuver it onto their open berthing port. They were rewarded with the familiar, satisfying thud of docking rings locking together.
“Capture,” Garver called up from the deck below. “All contact points are green.”
“Very good.” Poole left the arm in place. “Mr. Wylie, get us clear of this mess. I’ll watch from here.”
“Aye sir,” he said from below. Thrusters fired along the length of the ship, gently moving the stack sideways and safely away from Prospector’s floating detritus.
“Watch this.” Poole pointed forward. “Just because there’s no atmosphere or gravity—okay, not really but you know what I mean—that doesn’t get us off the hook. Not everything is going to move at the same rate. That’s a lot of mass we just plugged onto our nose. It’s got its own inertia and I want to see how much flexion there is under lateral thrust.”
“Even though it’s less mass than the node’s certified for?”
“Not until I’ve seen it in person,” Poole said, intently focused on their new addition. He glanced down at the arm’s control board for any signs of excess mechanical feedback through its joints. “Little bit of load on the first joint. Nothing to get too excited about.” He kept watching as thrusters fired along the opposite side, cancelling their motion. There was some slight twisting—Marshall wasn’t savvy enough yet to know if it was a problem, but Poole didn’t seem overly concerned. “We’re clear to maneuver,” he announced tiredly to the crew below. “Whenever that might be.”
“I’ll get to work, sir,” Marshall said, and pushed away to float down through the command module and into the forward node.
Prospector’s logistics module felt a good bit more crowded now that he was entering through its opposite end—opening the outer hatch, he was greeted by a wall of tightly-wrapped packages. Each was marked with a barcoded inventory number and labeled with its contents, though in no more detail than “Meals-Day 121,” as was the first package he encountered.
Marshall recalled his knowledge of the expedition. They’d planned on another six months for the return to Earth—one hundred eighty days’ worth of food for two people. Splitting it up amongst the Borman’s crew would make it sixty days’ worth, maybe ninety if they really stretched it. And there had to be some reserve, though he had no idea how much. He made a mental note to dig into their mission plans to find that out, and tried not to think about the fact that it still might not be enough.
Being back inside what he had to properly call a derelict, now just in shirtsleeves, he felt alarmingly exposed. Before, behind layers of latex-impregnated fabric and polycarbonate glass, he’d been literally insulated from the reality of it. Now it felt close. Vulnerable and real. The little ship had a different smell than what he’d become used to, and it made him feel like an intruder.
He couldn’t place the scent, it being so far removed from his sole spacefaring experience so far. The air was pregnant with a sweet aroma that reminded him of his parents’ backyard.
Lilacs. They’d installed filters that made their spaceborne home smell like a garden in springtime. When money was no object, why not do it if it was just going to be the two of them stuck in here for months?
He winced at the subtle reminder of the fact that they should have still been in here. It was like finding an abandoned cabin in the deep woods, filled with signs of life as if its owners should return any minute. He was Goldilocks, raiding the bear’s porridge stash. He felt guilty picking through their belongings, even if they were only packages of freeze-dried food.
Accounting for each was going to take a while, too. He couldn’t escape having to verify each item himself, but he could still give Captain Poole a first-look idea of what they had aboard.
He found a touchscreen control pad on the partition between the logistics and habitation sides of the module. If there were barcodes, then there ought to be an inventory list somewhere that would show what they had left in stores.
No luck. As he scrolled through its menu, he was rewarded with empty screens. It must have been dependent on the command module, which was mostly powered down. He moved into the CM and found the master cabin switch. It was on, but no lights or panel displays. He searched for the circuit breaker, and sure enough it had been popped open.
When he cycled the power back on, displays came to life. One in particular caught his eye: two blinking green lights on the biomonitor screen. It was looking for a signal, like a faithful dog waiting by the window for a glimpse of its owner returning home.
The persistence of this unfeeling technological sentinel shone a harsh light on his own dedication. Its silent devotion accused him: I’m not giving up, why should you?
It was too much. Because we know they’re dead and you’re a stupid machine not sophisticated enough to figure that out, he thought. Unable to avoid its accusatory glare, he angrily stabbed at the screen to turn it off. It blinked and went dark.
And then stubbornly came back to life with cursed persistence. Would he have to disconnect the damned thing to avoid its presence? Each of the Jiang’s biomonitor feeds displayed the well-known semicircular graphic signifying weak reception. Curious, he warily pressed one of the telemetry traces. STANDBY—SIGNAL PAUSED, it now read.
That couldn’t be possible. Somehow, from somewhere, their suit monitors were still trying to transmit data.
He frantically pulled their ship’s quick-reference handbook from a pocket in one of the folded-up seats and flipped to the “communications” tab. If the omnidirectional antennas couldn’t find them, maybe the high-gain could.
22
While Marshall was supposed to be busy taking inventory on Prospector, Garver was on comm duty with Ops. It amounted to not much more than staying dialed in to their voice frequency with Ops and having to fuss with a headset while he was busy with other work—in particular, calculating exactly how few calories each of them could tolerate and remain halfway functional. It should have been simple math, but he couldn’t balance the equation based on the food they’d brought with them.
He had his doubts about what they could scavenge from Prospector as well, unless Hunter found some secret stash of protein powder and vitamin supplements. Which, given its unique crew, could’ve been entirely possible. The Jiangs might have been insanely rich, but that didn’t make them foolish. They’d come up the hard way, escaping real poverty to make it big in America. They showed the hallmarks of being careful, conservative planners. Maybe they’d built in enough reserves and redundancies in their own stores to save everyone’s bacon.
It was tempting to poke his head into the docking tunnel, just to check on Hunter’s progress, he told himself, but knowing it was really to hurry the kid up. There hadn’t been a peep out of him since he’d disappeared into the bowels of Prospector’s logistics module. Garver looked down at the small loop of wire from his headset, jacked into the radio panel between the pilot’s seats. If it had been longer, he’d have been in there taking inventory himself.
As if to chastise him for questioning his orders, that was the moment the channel lit up and a chime sounded to alert him to incoming message traffic. “We copy your transmission, Ops. Ready to receive,” he said. “Got a data packet for us?”
After nearly a minute’s light delay, the voice on the other end returned. It was hesitant, uncertain. “Not exactly, Borman. This is a heads-up, you’ll be receiving a text transmission relayed to us from the commandant.”
“Say again? Understand we have incoming from the Pentagon?” Garver said, raising his voice and motioning for Poole’s attention. By the time Poole arrived at his side, HQ replied.
“Affirmative, Borman. Relayed to them via the State Department. It’s an offer of assistance from the Chinese spacecraft Peng Fei.”
Their L1 station? Garver was skeptical. “Don’t know what kind of assistance they can offer, Ops, but we’ll take it
.” Garver made eye contact with Poole. The Earth-Moon L1 point was a cheap—in terms of fuel—jumping-off point for sending spacecraft farther into the solar system. Maybe they had a supply ship ready to shoot out in their direction?
Another minute passed. Uncertainty returned to the comm officer’s voice. “Yeah, it kind of surprised us too, Borman. Fleet HQ advises they are standing by for Captain Poole once he’s read their message.”
“Copy,” Garver said. “Stand by.” He pulled up the message window and printed off a hard copy for Poole, who still preferred to get official traffic the old-fashioned way. In the meantime, he satisfied himself with reading the on-screen copy.
ATTENTION USS BORMAN//CAPT SIMON POOLE
FROM PRCS PENG FEI//COL LIU WANG SHU
WE HAVE RECEIVED WORD OF YOUR SITUATION AND OFFER OUR ASSISTANCE.
OUR NATION HAS BEEN AWARE OF THE PIRATE GROUP CALLING THEMSELVES THE “SPACE LIBERATION FRONT” AND HAVE BEEN CONCERNED ABOUT THEIR INTENTIONS FOR SOME TIME. IT IS TO OUR DEEP REGRET THAT YOUR FIRST KNOWLEDGE OF THESE BANDITS HAS COME AT SUCH HIGH COST. THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA WILL NOT ALLOW SUCH A BRAZEN ACT OF PIRACY TO STAND.
MY SHIP AND ITS CREW ARE AT YOUR SERVICE. WE CAN RENDEZVOUS WITH YOUR VESSEL IN SEVEN DAYS. PLEASE ADVISE IF YOU REQUIRE ANY SPECIAL MEDICAL ASSISTANCE.
WITH KINDEST REGARDS,
COLONEL LIU WANG SHU, COMMANDING
“Well,” Poole breathed. “Didn’t see that one coming.”
“So Peng Fei isn’t a propellant depot after all,” Garver observed flatly.
“Clearly not.” His eyes narrowed. “This is my shocked face, by the way.”
“That always was a hell of a lot of tankage,” Garver said. “Way more than they needed for lunar surface ops.”
“I’d love to know what they’re using for propulsion,” Poole said, “preferably before they get here.”
“Got to be nuclear, Skipper. Maybe electric, like VASIMR thrusters, but there’s definitely a nuke plant running it.”
“Agreed,” Poole said. “I want to know how we missed this.” He sighed. “Chief, your priorities just changed. We need Hunter to finish his inventory, but calorie intake isn’t our concern anymore.” He stared out the window, back toward the tiny blue marble of the distant Earth and the heretofore unknown Chinese deep-space vessel orbiting it. “I need all available information on this Peng Fei and her skipper. I want to know everything about her and the man running it. What modules did the Chinese use to build it, what kind of propellant is in those tanks, and more importantly, which PRC agency does it report to? Because it sure ain’t their space agency.”
“We’re in a real fix, and they are offering help, sir,” Garver said, having to point out the diplomatic angle. “We have to be careful about biting the hand that feeds us.”
Poole looked annoyed, though he knew the chief was just offering the kind of contrarian advice he needed when his dander was up. “I know, Chief. And I’m not turning down a helping hand. I just want to know what’s in the hand they’re keeping behind their back.”
Marshall was able to isolate and power up Prospector’s comm and datalink system, which wasn’t what he’d been ordered to do but it wasn’t exactly against orders either. If finding the Jiangs, alive or otherwise, was their ultimate mission out here then any reasonable action he took in pursuit of that goal was, by extension, within the scope of their orders.
When the directional antenna showed it was alive, he began slewing it to find the source of those weak biomonitor signals. It was simultaneously thrilling and somber—they were out there, waiting to be found, but he also knew they’d be long dead by now. He’d only be recovering their bodies.
Their suits were the only sign of life left. The thought crossed his mind that those suits must have had fantastic batteries, maybe solar rechargers built into the life-support packs.
It soon became obvious that he needed to trace out a search pattern that made sense. Just slewing the antenna around blindly would do nothing but waste time. He had to focus on which region of space they were most likely to be in.
That had to be RQ39, didn’t it? It was the reason they came, after all, and they were supposed to have deployed a couple of surface experiments, both of which were missing. Wherever they were, the Jiangs should be too.
He rotated the antenna dish to face the asteroid, and was almost immediately rewarded with a solid green light on the biomonitor screen. So they were in the vicinity all right. Could they have been on the surface?
It would’ve made sense. That had been their intention; everyone had just assumed they never got there because of the wrecked spacecraft. What if they had? What if they’d been stranded on RQ39 after watching their home get blasted? To be standing there on a pile of space gravel, with Earth a really long way away, and seeing your only refuge, your only way home, torn apart . . .
The thought made him shudder.
That had to be where they were, given the evidence. Hell, the directional antenna was literally pointing at them even if was only somewhere on that big flying rock pile.
One question nagged at him: Why hadn’t they tried to make it back to Prospector? At the time it would’ve been close enough, it was only over the intervening week that it had drifted far enough away in its own orbit to make returning impossible for their small emergency maneuvering packs.
He thought through what he knew of their EVA plan. The whole thing was a proof-of-concept experiment to see if humans could productively mine asteroids for resources in ways that robots couldn’t. It had started with them deploying a pair of CubeSats a few days prior; in fact the little toaster-sized probes should have still been in orbit around RQ39. He made a mental note that they could be important later, if video from them could be retrieved.
The surface experiment package was externally mounted on its own sled, which included methane-powered maneuvering jets with enough propellant to take them to and from the surface. Its gravity was so low that they wouldn’t even be landing, just floating above it. The only item that had to be mounted on the surface was the in situ resource unit so it could crack oxygen and hydrogen out of the regolith . . .
Oh my God.
His eyes darted back to the biomonitor screen. Did that steady green mean it was still getting live data, or was it just an open channel to two dead people? Their control center would know, but nothing was making it back to Palmdale after the explosion put the spacecraft in safe mode.
He stared at the green status bar, thinking through the implication. It just couldn’t be. They couldn’t be. Still alive, after this long? Even if the ISRU had supplied them with water and oxygen, their suits wouldn’t protect them from radiation for that amount of time.
What must that have been like? They’d probably seen everything . . .
Then it all made sense.
He scrambled for the forward hatch, banging his head off a panel as he tumbled through their small command module. “Sim—” he began to shout, before catching himself. “Captain!” he stammered. “Captain Poole!”
Colonel Liu Wang Shu of the People’s Liberation Aerospace Force made one final sweep of his quarters. He expected it would be some time before he returned, allowing himself to sleep for only a few hours at a time, and that he would accede to only when he was assured there would be no need for him to make critical decisions for his ship.
In truth there were very few decisions that weren’t critical when operating such a complex spacecraft as the Peng Fei, whether in his eyes or those of his superiors in Beijing. He had campaigned mightily for a level of autonomy never before granted, shattering the long-established relationships between spacecraft and their ground control teams. While he understood the general staff’s need to know where its capital ship was and where it was going at any time, no military vessel could function with every detail of its crew’s activities planned and monitored to the degree he’d endured as a taikonaut aboard their Tiangong-3 station. At least not from the ground, he’d argued.
There would be no aspect of their daily lives that didn’t escape his notice. The general staff would have to trust him just as they would the command pilot of a strategic bomber, or the captain of a capital ship.
It had taken months of lazily orbiting Lagrange 1, the first region between Earth and Moon where the two bodies’ gravity wells essentially cancelled each other’s out. It was a highly desirable strategic location for a number of reasons, all centered on the fact that it took relatively little energy to reach and even less to depart in any direction they chose to move. That neither the Americans, Russians, or Europeans had not seen fit to establish even a perfunctory presence here was remarkable.
Or perhaps not. They were all locked into their own modes of thinking—and in the grubby Russians’ case, strangled in the crib by a thieving government that had barely kept their economy above third-world levels. Though their research and development had been invaluable to his own nation’s space program, they’d had no hope of funding such technology, being reliant on the rest of the world’s table scraps. Pity for them, but the results of their early work now powered his own vessel.
The Anglos were constrained by their own bureaucratic inertia, the Europeans especially so, though the Americans could be annoyingly inventive. They were continually surprising, which made near-term planning a difficult exercise. Long-term, however, their government could be counted on to keep doing things the way they’d always been done. Upstart, troublesome businesses like Hammond Aero and SpaceX were another matter, but they at least weren’t deploying armies on Earth or warships in cislunar space.
Peng Fei had been his country’s answer to that. While it had its place as a waystation between Earth and Moon, it was far more than just a fuel depot. After years of steadily building its capability with successive small modifications, each delivered on launches from Earth as their cargo carriers stopped for propellant en route to the Moon, this great ship was ready to show itself to the world. That it would be on a mission of mercy to rescue its only serious challenger was indeed poetic: Let your adversary first defeat himself.
Frontier Page 24
