Frontier

by Patrick Chiles

  Word was the SAMCOM team had been annoyingly blasé about the loss of their satellite—it was near the end of its service life anyway. Their insurance company seemed a lot more interested in finding it. The Stardust people had been much more engaged, as orbital charters represented a considerable source of revenue and losing a spacecraft could seriously undermine their business. That particular concern was for the moment eclipsed by impatient inquiries from the government, as the fatalities onboard had invariably drawn the attention of the NTSB.

  That all of this had missed the attention of the Space Control deltas in Huntsville and Vandenberg left her in a slow burn. Their Space Fence radar could track objects a few centimeters square if they passed over its antennas on Kwajalein and Ascension islands. That might work for the bulk of stuff in low and medium orbits, as everything worth worrying about would eventually cross their field of view. But GEO? The whole point of geostationary orbit was the stationary part. If a bird wasn’t already parked within the antenna’s sight, it wasn’t going to be seen.

  She’d learned it was a capability gap that had frustrated a lot of satellite jockeys for a long time, but maybe now the brass could be moved to do something about it. In the meantime, they were still left with a hole in space. It wasn’t really her job to track down the missing targets, though she imagined this is what an F-22 driver would feel if flying an intercept mission only to find the target she’d been vectored to was gone. She’d be pissed off and wouldn’t stop looking for it until either the CO or her fuel gauges said it was time to come home.

  Fortunately, the CO hadn’t waved her off and that ACES upper stage still had plenty of delta-v in the tanks—she hadn’t even started using her onboard Hall thrusters yet, saving the more efficient but lower-thrust engines for later after ACES was discarded. The latest tasking order had left their vehicle out, so she had time on her hands. Those birds had to have gone somewhere, it was just a matter of how much they could do with the propellant each had aboard. SAMCOM couldn’t do much more than descend to a lower orbit, where the Fence radars would eventually catch it. Assuming it hadn’t, that left it somewhere in GEO.

  Stardust was a different animal. Its controllers said it still had over 3.5 km/second of delta-v left in its tanks. That was enough to either go all the way to the Moon, deorbit for Earth, or anything in between. Probably not the Moon, she decided. She suspected it didn’t have the nav program for that, and besides, what would be the point?

  That left a lower orbit or reentry, which the Fence also should have caught. There was a lot of junk up there. Maybe it was as simple as they got lost in the noise?

  Either way, it would’ve been maneuvering so its operators should have known what happened. That they didn’t know had to mean somebody else did. Spacecraft don’t just burn out of GEO on their own, particularly when the only surviving crewmember was back on Earth.

  He was here, wasn’t he? Hadn’t they brought him home with those Borman crewmembers last week? Word was he was on some kind of quarantine at the base hospital. Sounded like a load of crap to her but it must have made sense to somebody.

  She searched her memory for anyone she might have met from the provost’s office, and picked up the phone.

  26

  Marshall had a long list of questions for Max and Jasmine Jiang, none of which he dared show in front of them. He tried to place himself in their position, and the last thing he’d want to see is some wet-behind-the-ears kid in a uniform hovering over him with a checklist and a clipboard. Instead, he’d taken care to break the list into manageable chunks that he could memorize and bring out during the natural course of conversation. They’d been through a trauma that he was still having trouble comprehending, and they’d need a soft touch.

  He hadn’t counted on Max Jiang. “You get me out of this, okay?” he stammered, pulling at his bed restraints. “I have to use the bathroom!”

  “It’s okay, Mr. Jiang,” Marshall replied delicately. “You’re on a catheter.”

  “I don’t want that.” Jiang grimaced. “It’s most uncomfortable. You have me sedated?”

  “We did, for the first day. You both needed rest and—”

  “Then either get this tube out of me or give me more sedation. We have work to do, Mister—what is your name?”

  “Ensign Marshall Hunter, sir,” he said with an earnest smile. “We’ve met.”

  Jiang looked confused for a minute. “I’m sorry, we’ve never . . . oh. You mean, on the asteroid?”

  “Yes sir. I was on the team that got you out.”

  Jiang shook his head angrily, clearing the cobwebs. “I know you must have questions, Ensign Hunter.” He turned to face his wife in the bed opposite him, still asleep. He pawed uncomfortably at the tubes inserted at various places in his body. “But first, get these damned hoses out of me. And I suggest you do the same for my wife before she wakes up, or I promise you will wish you’d listened to me.”

  Marshall waved for Nikki. “Anything else?” he asked, hoping he didn’t sound amused.

  “Coffee,” Jiang said tiredly. “For the love of God, coffee.”

  Marshall returned with two drinking bulbs of fluid, one black, one orange. He handed the orange bulb over first. “You have to drink this one first, sir. Coffee’s a diuretic and your electrolyte balance is still on the low side.”

  “Of course it is,” Jiang said somewhat resentfully as he took the juice. He probed at some sores along his arm, then hazarded a glance at his crotch. “The rash is even worse than I thought. After a month in those suits—”

  Marshall looked embarrassed, hesitant to correct him. “Actually it was about half that, sir.”

  Jiang sucked on the juice, draining it in one long sip. “It felt like a month,” he gasped at the end. “But what do I know? I broke my watch digging out our shelter.” He reached for the coffee.

  Marshall handed over the black bulb. “About that, sir. We do have questions about what happened out here, and we’re curious as to how you both survived so long.”

  Jiang sipped on the coffee more slowly, savoring it. “Not bad for instant,” he said offhand. “I should have thought to take some from our stores, though Jasmine would have probably stopped me. Diuretic, as you said.”

  “What made you decide to shelter on RQ39 instead of in your spacecraft?”

  Jiang took another sip of coffee from the zero-g bulb. “We didn’t see any alternative. Life support was gone. Our spacecraft had plenty of food and water, but no air to breathe. The ISRU at least gave us a chance to crack oxygen out of the regolith. We were quite pleased when it worked.”

  The man had a well-deserved reputation for understatement, Marshall thought. “I can imagine.”

  “Trust me, you can’t.” Jiang closed his eyes. “I have never been claustrophobic before. I am now.” He opened them and fixed his gaze on Marshall. “Did you know we considered suicide?”

  How would I? he thought. “No, I didn’t,” he said calmly. “Though I suppose it’s understandable.”

  Jiang took a long, deep breath, as if rewinding the story in his mind. “We had fixed the in situ unit on the surface after studying the returns from our CubeSats,” he began. “I was too focused on my surface machinery—we had already identified likely locations of subsurface ice. Then I heard Jasmine scream.”

  Concentrating on the ISRU’s data, Max was startled by the shout from Jasmine. He snapped his head around and shot upright, dizzy from the sudden shift in his inner-ear fluids. “What is it?”

  It wasn’t his own movement confusing him. The ship was rocking and rolling, the hull thumping from thrusters trying to counteract.

  “There . . .” she stammered in disbelief and pointed out a nearby window. “What is happening?”

  He followed her gaze and saw a growing cloud of gas and debris outside. The ship had been rock steady in a common orbit with RQ39, now it slowly spun about its vertical axis as its shredded service module vented into space.

  “What is happeni
ng?” she repeated, raising her voice to be heard over metallic groans from the docking tunnel, straining from the sudden torque.

  “I don’t . . .” He couldn’t find the words. Who could possibly know what was happening? “Have you heard from Palmdale?”

  “I haven’t,” she said quietly. She turned to the control panel, realizing that she should have done that first. “But we’re losing oxygen and hydrogen, fast. Tank one is already gone.”

  He tapped the touchscreen panel. “Palmdale, this is Prospector,” he called. “We have a situation.”

  He waited several seconds for their signal to reach Earth; in fact more than enough for it to return. His only answer was the steady hiss of an empty frequency, peppered with the occasional squeals and chirps of cosmic background noise.

  “Palmdale, Palmdale. This is Prospector. Radio check, over.” He counted ten seconds, then switched to the universal emergency frequency. “Mayday, Mayday, this is the spacecraft Prospector.”

  Another ten seconds, another empty frequency. He saw Jasmine still staring outside in disbelief. “You won’t reach anyone,” she said despairingly. “I can see the main antenna is gone.”

  “Gone?” He squinted outside, struggling to focus with middle-aged eyes. How could she see anything behind the thickening haze?

  “Trust me, it’s not there,” she said, now pointing to the radio panel. “There’s nothing to relay our signal.”

  Marshall glanced over his shoulder at Jasmine, still sleeping soundly beneath the restraints in her EMS pod, and tried to imagine her charging through a cloud of what used to be part of their spacecraft. “You made it back over there without getting your suits punctured. We didn’t find any vacuum tape patches on either shell.”

  “A minor miracle,” Max allowed. “One of many.” He looked across at Jasmine. “My dear wife. Once she recovered from her initial shock, she was on a mission,” he said, emphasizing each word. “She went into action. That’s the businesswoman in her.” He began chuckling until it degenerated into a hoarse cough. “I was just along for the ride.”

  Marshall eyed him skeptically. That seemed hard to believe.

  Jasmine was already up in the supply module, tearing through stores while Max paged through the service module diagnostics. “You were right; I can’t bring up any radios. Doesn’t look like any telemetry is making it to Palmdale either.”

  “What about atmosphere?”

  “It’s gone,” he said. “Both O2 tanks are ruptured. The only air left is the command module’s reentry supply.”

  “Ninety minutes?” she asked sharply, emerging from the docking tunnel with a bundle wrapped in Nomex cloth. She strapped it into her empty seat. “We may need it.”

  “May?” he wondered, looking around at their dead spacecraft.

  “I know,” she said, flying back up into the supply module. “There’s no sense staying here. I’m getting us all the water we can carry.”

  Max did a double take. And go where, exactly? It took a second for him to realize her plan when she came back down with another bundle. “The ISRU?”

  “Of course,” she said. “It’s working, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” Max said. It had common fittings with their suit supply bottles . . . “Yes! We can extract oxygen from the substrate.”

  “We can’t stay here, there’s no air.” She pointed outside to the asteroid. “And there’s no food on that rock, but we can make our own air.”

  “We can take protein powder from the emergency locker, mix it with our drinking water.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “But we have to sure its fully dissolved so it doesn’t clog our filler ports.”

  Max studied the bundles of supplies she’d brought down. “We’ll need radiation protection.” He opened the emergency locker behind their seats and pulled out two Mylar blankets. “We’ll have to dig out the rest.”

  Jasmine looked through the open hatch, the universe outside spinning slowly as their craft tumbled. “Can you get this back under control?”

  Max watched the twirling attitude indicator and their rapidly declining propellant. “I think we lost a propellant tank as well. The guidance platform has been trying to compensate. It burned through most of what’s left.” He pulled up a projection of their path through space. It now meandered off into a new direction. “We won’t be able to come back here for long. It’ll have drifted too far away.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.” She checked the level of compressed nitrogen in her maneuvering pack. “We may not be able to risk a second trip.”

  Their suits were filthy with dust after hours of moving loose rock and digging beneath a nearby overhang to clear out a small cavern. Max stepped back to inspect his work with an odd satisfaction. “This will work,” he said. “We have a nearly a foot of regolith around the entrance, and solid rock behind that.” He draped one of the Mylar blankets across the opening, keeping it in place with more rocks. “This will help regulate temperature, so our suit batteries won’t drain as fast.”

  “Will we be able to keep them charged from the ISRU?” Jasmine asked from inside their little cave, where she had been stacking nutrient packages and water bladders.

  “That’s my next job,” Max said, holding up a bundle of cables he’d brought from Prospector. “I’ll have to plug these into the stepdown transformer, then we can take turns recharging. We should alternate every two hours.”

  “What will we lose in the process?” she asked, coming out from behind the Mylar curtain.

  “I haven’t decided. We don’t touch the oxygen processing plant, but that runs on too much voltage anyway. It will have to be a lower-powered system we can live without. That doesn’t leave much.”

  “The spectrometer package,” she suggested. “Or the telemetry relays.”

  “An easy decision, I think. We may yet be able to use the telemetry package.”

  “Good.” She carefully sat on one of the larger rocks. It was more of an approximation of sitting, as the gravity was so low that any movement sent her floating away from her perch.

  Max moved to join his wife, placing a steadying hand on her shoulder. “Your quick thinking saved us,” he said. “You knew what we had to do right away, whereas I’d still be up there wasting valuable time, trying to fix the unfixable.”

  She stared up at the patch of black sky where the distant Earth hung. With the frenzy of reacting to the crisis now behind them, she slumped inside her bulky EVA suit. “No one can hear us, and who knows what Palmdale can see?” she said. “Saved us for what? What do we do now?”

  Home was not much more than a bright blue speck in the distance. “What we’ve always done when nothing else made sense,” he sighed, and took her gloved hand in his. “We pray.”

  “You guys worked fast under pressure,” Marshall said. “That made all the difference.”

  Jiang nodded toward his sleeping wife. “And I give her all the credit. I was too absorbed with trying to fix what was broken. Thinking like an engineer. It took the hard-nosed businesswoman to realize that ship had sailed, as they say.”

  “She knew you were running out of time.”

  “Afraid,” came a groggy voice behind him. “I was afraid.”

  Marshall turned to see Jasmine, eyes opening under still-heavy lids. “Mrs. Jiang. Can I get you anything?”

  “A mimosa would be nice,” she said with a weary grin.

  Jasmine Jiang gratefully accepted the same electrolyte drink and coffee as her husband, along with Marshall’s apologies for not having alcohol. “We’re a military vessel, ma’am.”

  “Ah. I should have guessed from the short haircuts and extreme politeness.” She took a sip of coffee and blissfully closed her eyes. “This will do fine, thank you, young man.”

  “Your husband was telling me about your experience on RQ39,” Marshall said. “How you became marooned. You did an amazing job, ma’am.”

  “A skill I acquired in childhood,” she said. “When you grow up in an u
ncertain world, you learn to prioritize quickly. Fear is a great motivator.”

  “I admire your clear thinking under pressure,” Marshall said. “And begging your pardon, let me say how much I’ve admired you both. I’ve been following your expedition ever since you announced it last year.” He blushed. “My friends think I’ve been a little obsessive. They’re probably right. I just wish we could’ve met under different circumstances.”

  Jasmine reached for his hand. She felt cool, comforting, a woman in total control of herself. “Considering the alternative, I’m quite pleased with the circumstances.” Tears began welling up in her eyes. Marshall handed her a quick-dry cloth.

  Max Jiang pushed away from his bed and glided over to embrace his wife. Free from their spacesuits for the first time in nearly two weeks, they collapsed into each other with quiet sobs. Marshall turned away, embarrassed for what now felt like an intrusion.

  Jasmine reached for him again as he moved away. “It’s okay, young man. We need other people around us. We were alone for a very long time.”

  “I know,” he said, trying to be soothing and hoping it didn’t come off as condescending. He hadn’t really had any practice at this. “We frankly expected you to be dead. It was a real shock to find your spacecraft empty.”

  Her eyes widened. “You were on Prospector?”

  “I was . . . that is, we were. My team and I,” Marshall explained.

  “Did you see the other satellite, then?”

  Marshall was confused. “You mean your CubeSats?”