Frontier

by Patrick Chiles

  Staring at the couple lying before her, she trembled. They hadn’t had that luxury. They came here knowing this would become their graves. And there they lay, holding hands, together to the end.

  She felt a catch in her throat. A tear welled up, sticking to her eye in the near-complete absence of gravity. Irritated, she shook her head to knock it free. It rippled out of her field of view, slowly traveling down to settle on her neck ring.

  She unspooled a rescue tether from her utility harness to clip onto one of the lifeless forms. She brushed at a thin layer of dust just beneath the suit’s chest pack and pulled at the D-ring connection.

  As she pulled at the suit, a hand shot out and grabbed hers. Startled, she reflexively backed away. The light from her lamps fell on their helmets and she gasped as Max Jiang’s eyes snapped open.

  Oh my God.

  Her eyes darted back and forth between the pair of helmeted faces before her. Max and Jasmine Jiang, after all this time, so far from home, were both alive.

  “Alive!” she stammered, almost rolling back into Harper behind her, then checked to make sure her radio was still voice activated. Her normally cool, controlled voice stumbled over the words. “They’re alive! We need a dust-off ASAP!”

  * * *

  Marshall moved the shuttle as close as he dared to the surface, flying formation with the asteroid over their position while they prepped the Jiangs for transport. This consisted of clumsily dragging each of them out from under their rocky shelter and into the open, where they could be tethered to each spacewalker and flown up to the waiting Specter.

  “We’re going to get you out of here,” he heard her repeatedly say over the common emergency frequency. “Just stay with me.” It was like a mantra and he wondered if she was doing it intentionally, whether for their sake or her own.

  Looking down through his side window, he could see the bright yellow suits of his EVA team bouncing about as they prepped their evacuees, occasionally jetting above the surface with their maneuvering packs. “Keep clear,” Rosie instructed firmly. “Minimum safe distances. I didn’t come all this way to get blasted in the face by your MMU.”

  They wasted no time. Rosie had pulled both of them out from under their makeshift shelter while the shuttle maneuvered in closer. She and Harper each had one of the Jiangs harnessed to them, then to the safety tether leading back to Specter.

  “You ready?”

  “Ready,” she said. “Evacuees are secure.”

  “Specter is stable. Bringing ’em up now.”

  Marshall kept the shuttle in position from the aft control station. He watched the safety lines go taut as first one limp form, then the next, lifted off the surface behind Rosie and Nikki. “Ten meters. Halfway there. Looking good, sir.”

  He was focused on their evacuees almost to the exclusion of everything else. The effect was startling; for a moment they were all he could see. He shook his head to clear it; this was not the time for tunnel vision. He checked the small auxiliary control panel: the ship remained stable relative to the surface and the inertia reel was taking up the slack as the Jiangs drifted toward him. Almost in reach.

  He braced his feet in the floor restraints and reached out to slow them down as they drifted into the open hatch. He pulled them aboard, locking down the tether in its reel. “Both evacs are secure aboard. Need you guys back here ASAP.”

  “On the way,” Rosie said, already heading for the equipment bay and the MMU mounts on either side of the aft hatchway. Having drilled this countless times, it was a matter of minutes for them to back their maneuvering packs into the mounts, lock them down, and glide through the open portal into Specter’s passenger cabin. She waited for her partner to go in first, then flew in herself and moved to pull the big outer door closed behind her. “EVA team secure aboard.”

  “Good work, guys. My spacecraft,” Wylie called from up front as Marshall began pressurizing the cabin. “Hunter, stay there with your team. I’ll fly us back.”

  Harper had already strapped Jasmine Jiang into a gurney mounted in the floor. Max Jiang floated beside her, still locked onto the inertia reel.

  “What can I do to help?” Marshall asked.

  Rosie slipped her feet into a pair of floor-mounted stirrups and moved to strap Max into the opposite gurney. Behind the glass of her faceplate, Marshall could see the concern clouding her eyes. “Don’t know yet, sir. They’re in bad shape.” Still encased in her suit, she tore open the Velcro flap of her sleeve pocket and clumsily pulled out a pen light to shine in Max’s eyes. “Eyes are sunken and dilated. He looks badly dehydrated.”

  “Same here,” Nikki said of Jasmine. “We need to get them on IV fluids, stat.”

  “Agreed.” Rosie eyed the pressurization panel, shedding her gloves and helmet even before it was in the green. “I can handle thin air,” she said impatiently, anticipating Marshall’s concern. “We coped with worse in survival and rescue school.”

  “Roger that,” Harper said over her shoulder, not far behind in getting out of her suit. Marshall noticed they did not practice the same haste with their patients. As soon as the cabin pressure display went green, they were unlocking the Jiang’s helmets and opening up their suits. Both pressed oxygen masks to their patient’s faces.

  She reached into Max Jiang’s suit and pinched the skin of his chest, leaving a tent-like crest behind. “Piss-poor skin turgor. Let’s get the fluids started.” She turned to open the protective cover on an intravenous pump, then pulled a pair of shears from a pouch. She began cutting open an arm of Max’s spacesuit. “It’ll take too long to get them out,” she explained to Marshall, and began probing Max’s forearm before starting an IV line. With the suit open, he recoiled at the stench of accumulated body odor and a waste control garment that was well past saturation.

  To her credit, Rosie seemed oblivious to it. “How’re you doing over there?” she asked her partner.

  “Blew a vein,” Nikki muttered in frustration, “but I’ve got a good one now. Starting saline push.” There was a faint electric hum as the IV pump started.

  Rosie did the same, then pointed to a blue cabinet behind Marshall. “If you could, sir, there’s some electrolytes in there. One each, please.”

  He hurriedly removed two squeeze bottles of a common sports drink, pushing one through the air to each medic. Rosie lifted the O2 mask from Max Jiang’s face and gently placed the straw in his mouth. “Can you take a drink for me?”

  Jiang nodded weakly and closed his lips around the straw. She gave the bottle a little squeeze; a few stray globules of greenish-yellow juice floated free before he gulped the rest down. He coughed reflexively and Rosie put the mask back on. She checked to see that Jasmine had been able to drink as well. “That’s real good, folks. We don’t want to push too much too soon, enough to wet your whistles. Let’s give these IVs time to work and you can have the rest. Deal?”

  Max Jiang lifted his free arm in a weak thumbs up, then reached across for his wife’s. They clasped hands, tears welling in their eyes. Rosie took a gauze pad and swabbed Max’s away, motioning for Nikki to do the same for Jasmine. “You’re going to be okay, Mr. Jiang,” she said, looking to Marshall for affirmation. Crippled or not, going aboard Borman was a hell of a lot better than where they’d been and there was another ship on the way.

  Marshall nodded, not so certain himself of China’s motives with the Peng Fei. Part of him preferred to take his chances with diminished rations on a much longer return to Earth under their own power, but having two evacuees changed that calculus.

  Looking at the frail bodies being cut away from their suits made him doubtful they could endure a long trip. Maybe they could snap back quickly with some food and fluids, but putting them on a limited diet for months seemed like an unacceptable risk. Ultimately that was up to Poole and he would base much of his decision on what his medics had to say, maybe even more so than the actual MDs back on Earth.

  Marshall studied Max Jiang’s face: jet black hair matted
beneath his helmet and skullcap, eyes sunken from dehydration and starvation. Red blotches around his neck hinted at a bloom of friction sores beneath his cooling garment.

  He laid a hand on Max’s arm and they made eye contact for the first time. After months of following their expedition, watching every livestream, he was at long last face-to-face with a man he’d greatly admired. Weakened near to the point of death, his dark eyes still burned with determination. Marshall had no doubt it was this fiery spirit and inventiveness that had enabled them to survive almost two weeks in deep space in nothing but their EVA suits.

  “I’m Ensign Hunter from the USS Borman,” he began. “We’ll be taking you aboard soon where you’ll be under full medical care.”

  Jiang reached up to grip his hand, hoarsely whispering “thank you” beneath the mask. His strength was surprising, one more attribute which had kept them alive.

  Marshall nodded silently, almost ashamed to reply. “That’s not necessary, sir,” he said. “This is what we do.” This is what we do. It sounded self-aggrandizing: No worries, dear wayward traveler, just another day at work for us Guardians. It’s our job, saving your asses from imminent death in the Big Empty.

  Instinct told him it was best not to mention the Peng Fei’s impending arrival. Famously outspoken against their birth country’s ruling party, they would not welcome the news of their rescuers.

  25

  Simon Poole waited just outside the medical module, purposefully staying out of the way while the Jiangs were maneuvered into hastily prepared EMS pods. They hadn’t expected survivors, and therefore hadn’t prepped the med bay other than to keep two sets of human remains on ice. He reminded himself to never again allow his crew to let their guard down like that ahead of a rescue op, or anything else for that matter.

  Marshall and Rosie had quickly stripped out of their spacesuits back in the airlock and came up behind Poole. He regarded them briefly, as they were still in their cooling garments. It was a breach of procedure he’d address later. Right now he needed information. He nodded toward the Jiangs.

  “So you found them in a cavern? Do I understand that right?”

  “I wouldn’t call it that, sir,” Rosie said. “It was an overhang, maybe three meters across and a couple deep. It looks like they dug out part of it underneath, too, enough to fit their heads under, and piled up the regolith around the sides.”

  “Like a lean-to?”

  “Exactly. They were dug in real good, sir. I took some quick readings after we prepped them for dust-off and they made themselves a nice little hasty radiation shelter.”

  “And they used the ISRU to crack oxygen out of the substrate,” Poole marveled as he watched them lay in the EMS pods. “Hell of a way to prove the concept.” He imagined they’d be anxious to get up and moving as soon as their bodies started to recover. “And a hell of a long time to be stuck in a suit.”

  “Almost two weeks,” Marshall agreed. “I can’t imagine what was going through their heads that whole time.”

  “That’s what I want you to find out,” Poole said. “You’ve been following them pretty closely, haven’t you?”

  Marshall did a double take. “Begging your pardon, sir—how would you know that?”

  “Inductive reasoning. You have an abiding interest in humans exploring the planets, and they’d have been the first to see Mars in person.” Poole smiled. “Plus there’s not much soundproofing between berthing spaces. If there was any news about them, you were watching it.”

  “I’ll make it a point to use earphones from now on, sir.”

  Poole waved it away. “You know more about those two than anybody else onboard. Once they’re up and about, get me a full debrief. Keep it loose. Informal. The kind of questions you’re probably itching to ask anyway.”

  “Like how’d they survive that long outside their spacecraft?”

  “That, and why didn’t they try to go back? It should’ve been close enough for them to reach, even after all of the crap hit the fan. What makes digging a hole on an asteroid seem like the better plan?”

  Colonel Liu Wang Shu floated in his quarters, legs crossed tightly in a full lotus position that he found uniquely challenging in zero g. Once a person was limber enough, gravity helped the body’s own weight maintain the position with little effort. It had taken some practice to achieve the same state in freefall. Now he freed his mind to enter a state of deep meditation, aided by the steady hum of the Peng Fei’s air circulators.

  He envisioned their position in space as if he were flying it himself like an open-cockpit biplane, with bare hands and the seat of his pants. He could feel the power of their nuclear engine when it fired, its roar silenced by vacuum but hinted at in the steady rumble conveyed through its hardened crew modules, reverberating like an echo of distant thunder.

  Liu visualized himself among the Sun and planets against the still backdrop of stars. He traveled along an invisible road defined by gravity and velocity, understood only by a system of elegant mathematics that had not so much been invented as discovered—the universal language of nature itself, deciphered and available to anyone with the will to understand it. It defined his path among the cosmos and in a sense his own life. There was nothing in his mind that could not be defined by mathematics. Even his meditation could be described as such: equations of force and motion, tension and compression within the body, electrochemical reactions in the brain . . . even if leading to a heightened state of awareness, what some thought of as “projection,” he believed could be described by natural processes. Which in turn meant mathematics. The act of solving complex equations was its own form of meditation; pages filled with differential equations were a form of poetry to those who chose to comprehend them.

  His mind moved beyond its own position in space along a curved path, arriving at the crippled American ship named for one of its hero astronauts—common for their culture, whereas he had been pleased to see his vessel christened with something more imaginative and meaningful. It had been amusing to see the Americans and their western allies utterly fail to appreciate its connotation. He understood the liberal West’s aversion to state disinformation, but was it propaganda when they chose to accept official explanations at face value for their own comfort’s sake?

  They had chosen defeat without realizing it, long before the battle was joined. A part of him was saddened that this was so often the case, though in the end that way saves more lives than it takes: It is best to let the enemy defeat himself.

  While politicians—including generals—were often foolish, he always respected the tactical leaders he was matched against. Some were more inventive than others, but an honorable man, whether in charge of a ship or an infantry battalion, could be dangerous indeed.

  Simon Poole had proven himself to be a dangerous man in both the American naval and space services, though he’d let his guard down for the sake of rescuing those troublesome Jiangs. Liu reminded himself that Poole’s most consequential act had been chasing down a hijacked Orion spacecraft and arguably saving much of humanity in the process. And he’d done that as a civilian being paid to shepherd wealthy tourists around the Moon. He’d proven his survival skills and fighting sense—how would he respond now? That depended on how he perceived the root of his predicament, something Liu did not expect him to discern for himself. Therefore, expect the worst.

  Liu paused, letting his mind take in the tactical picture at asteroid RQ39. The privateer spacecraft misleadingly named Prospector sat among a haze of its own wreckage, the crippled American warship nearby and in a similar predicament. Though still able to make way on its own power, losing most of its propellant had left it essentially stranded. They had no hope of return before its crew ran out of food. Had Poole chosen to keep his ship fully armed, would it have made a difference?

  Liu smiled to himself: No, it would not have.

  There was a knock on his door. Liu’s mind withdrew from its deep contemplation. At first annoyed, he recognized the pattern of
three brisk knocks on the door frame: Major Wu, with news.

  Liu unfolded his legs, took a cleansing breath, and slid open the door. As expected, Wu hovered just outside in the corridor. “Yes, Major?”

  “News from control,” Wu said stiffly. “The Americans report they have found the Jiangs.”

  Liu lifted his eyebrows. “That is interesting,” he said, “but hardly worth the interruption, Wu.”

  “Pardon me, sir, for not being more specific: They found them alive.”

  His eyes narrowed. “I see.”

  Finding a misplaced spacecraft was not something Roberta McCall had ever seriously contemplated, and she didn’t like it. Any other time it would have been an alarming curiosity, something left for the Ops planners to run down after so obviously screwing the pooch. That it happened while so many other satellites had been going dark all over the place put a decidedly different spin on things. Now she took a very personal interest in it, and was not about to leave it up to the intel weenies although she suspected they wouldn’t ignore her this time.

  After running so many successful ops against unfriendly sats, her teammates weren’t used to having the opposing team pull one over on them. The tables were turned, and they took that personally. These weren’t even state vehicles, unless you considered a South American telecom consortium to be a state actor. And the privately contracted Stardust? That one was just weird. It should’ve been an easy target to run down, but its control center had lost contact days earlier.

  That was something the intel group ought to have caught before the rendezvous, she fumed. Spacecraft rendezvous was no joke—if things weren’t exactly where you expected them to be, bad things could happen. They went to great pains to avoid collisions in orbit, as vehicles had a way of sneaking up on you if you misjudged a rendezvous and lost sight of them.

  That was ironically less of a problem for X-37 operators, as the camera suite mounted in the drone’s cargo hold combined to give its operators an expansive, high-definition view. Roberta had already used them to sweep the area several times, slowly panning the cameras in a full circle around its axes. Nothing unexpected had turned up. Radiant dots in the distance could all be identified as previously cataloged satellites; conversely, no more in the vicinity had come up missing.