Déjà Doomed

by Edward M. Lerner

  She had suited up earlier to position datasheets around the ship to record the show. When Marcus radioed her the okay, she would start the detonator timer. “Helping you. Is that what you young kids are calling it?”

  Chuckle. Wince. “Do not make me laugh. Anyway, if, as we hope, the ship gives a good detonation, things here will be messy. The Hammer is basically a solid chunk of metal. It will transmit the shock wave a good, long distance. And there will be a lot of ….” For once, Yun floundered for an English word. “The little pieces of metal flying away from an explosion?”

  “Shrapnel,” Marcus offered.

  “Yes, shrapnel. Thank you. I expect much, even most, of the shrapnel to escape into space, but some could come straight at us here. Some shrapnel could go into tight orbits around the asteroid, and strike us minutes, even hours, after the blast.”

  Finally, Marcus had Yun prepped for vacuum. Splint and bandages had made the broken arm too bulky for a suit sleeve. But squeezed into the hard-shell torso, pressing against his stomach, at least the arm was somewhat supported.

  They exited the igloo together. Marcus radioed the go-ahead to Ekatrina. They did not start toward the anti-sunward horizon—inching along at the fastest snail’s pace Yun could manage, the empty suit arm swinging unnaturally at his side—until Ekatrina emerged from the ship and headed their way. She caught up quickly.

  “Twenty-nine minutes on my mark,” she radioed. “Mark.”

  “No, that’s Marcus,” he said. He started a countdown on his HUD.

  Tethered together, cautiously, they marched. From the wheezes and gasps of pain, Yun’s arm took a jolt at every step. With almost five minutes to spare, they hunkered down in the deep crevasse Marcus had surveilled hours earlier. They had trekked almost a kilometer from the ship.

  A fraction of a second after zero, as the ground shook, Marcus glanced up to see streaking shrapnel agleam in the Sun.

  * * *

  They detoured on the return hike to collect datasheets Ekatrina had pre-positioned to capture the explosion. The two they recovered were useless: punctured and shorted out by shrapnel. The third and final datasheet was missing altogether, bounced somewhere, perhaps even off-world, by the passing shock wave.

  Marcus would have loved to see some vid, because they had missed quite the show. The ship’s stern had vanished. Turned to shrapnel, he supposed. The bow had pounded farther into the ground and down the access shaft. The airlock—its frame further twisted and burst, its hatches nowhere to be seen—stood a good five meters closer to the surface than before.

  What remained resembled nothing as much as the stub of an exploding cigar.

  They went on.

  Their igloo was deflated. Swiss-cheesed. Their supplies were scattered, and some doubtless missing.

  “Good call about waiting farther out,” Marcus told Yun.

  “Thanks,” Yun wheezed. He gestured at massive metal plates last seen in a tidy stack, covering a craterlet and in it, their spare igloo. Those now suggested a game of fifty-two card pickup. “If you two could get to work, I might yet be able to walk inside under my own power.”

  Chapter 59

  Valerie let Simon order dinner (pepperoni pizza and breadsticks, delivered to their hotel room), as she had since their arrival in Colorado Springs. Choosing their meals was about the only control he had left. Once the atomic-bomb-proof blast doors sealed them into the nearby Cheyenne Mountain Complex, who knew if any choices would remain?

  Who knew what sort of world they would find when those doors reopened? Apart from devastated.

  Simon grabbed his fourth, no, fifth slice. (This was after the supersized burger meal he’d had delivered around five, after she had called from deep underground to admit she would be late. Again.) “This is terrible pizza.”

  The first slice burned in her stomach like so much molten lead. To judge from the drum solo being played on her bladder, Little Toot was no fan, either. Anything else she ate tonight would come in breadstick form. Or a brownie sundae, if she could find someone to deliver that. “I can see how it’s hurting your appetite.”

  “Bad pizza is still pizza.” He folded the latest slice in half, and got a good third of it in as one bite. Around the mouthful of pizza, he asked, “You want to watch the news?”

  And hear more about spreading worldwide panic? The looting? Religious fanatics calling down God’s wrath from the heavens? “You go ahead. I’m going to step outside for some air.”

  The hotel parking lot was filled, the hotel booked to capacity by refugees from lower altitudes. Valerie nodded at the elderly couple emerging from a nearby unit before turning her gaze upward. She wanted a final look, before the world ended, at the night sky.

  Her datasheet trilled. The number that came up on caller ID was unfamiliar, but the area code and prefix matched the Cheyenne Complex. She took the call voice-only, and heard faint cheering in the background. What did anyone find to cheer about these days? “Clayburn.”

  “Gonzalez.”

  A Space Force orbital analyst, and the shift manager who had relieved Val an hour earlier. Data feeds from around the world went into the complex, just as they fed command bunkers in other countries. “What’s up, Edie?”

  “The Hammer … took a jolt, Val. If nothing else happens, it will miss Earth! We’ll get a close shave, but a miss is a miss.”

  “That’s wonderful!” So why the hesitation? And that bit of passive voice—took a jolt—also nagged. Val had seen and heard nothing about any launch anywhere having any prospect of affecting the Hammer. “But …?”

  “At about the same time, spectrometers detected a gas cloud behind the Hammer. Mostly water vapor and oxygen. Some carbon dioxide and traces of hydrogen. The cloud is rapidly dissipating.”

  That was chemistry, not explanation, as though the truth were too terrible to put into words. “Water vapor and oxygen, as from a hydrogen/oxygen reaction. Traces of hydrogen are whatever part of the fuel didn’t mix well and take part in the explosion.”

  But carbon dioxide? From burned food? Burned … people? Valerie swallowed, hard. “They blew up Rescue One”—and themselves?—“to give the Hammer a final push.”

  “That’s how it looks.” A long pause. “Your husband is a hero. Everyone on that mission is. And they saved all of us.”

  “Thank you. And thanks for letting me know.”

  “Can I do anything for you?”

  Valerie shook her head, dropping the connection before she remembered it was voice only. She could not have spoken just then anyway, past the lump in her throat.

  She marshaled her thoughts, squared her shoulders, and turned toward the hotel-room door. She needed to tell Simon the world was probably saved—

  Even as theirs had ended.

  Chapter 60

  Marcus sat quietly, scrolling through … something on his datasheet. It could have been the Vladivostok phone directory for all that he was getting out of it. Yun did whatever he did with his own comp. Ekatrina was asleep, her nose whistling. Her hair, in a staticky halo, stuck out every which way.

  Sigh. Marcus folded and tucked away his datasheet. He ate … something. He fidgeted with the 3-D printer. For no reason beyond a random, ancient, happy memory of Simon, he printed a Slinky. There was nowhere near enough gravity for the plastic coil to walk down stairs, if they had had stairs, so he pumped loop stacks from hand to hand—whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—until Yun, never looking up from his datasheet, barked, “Quit that.”

  More than an hour had gone by since Marcus had reentered the igloo with yet another set of sky images. He could no longer bear the suspense. “Well? Did we succeed?”

  Yun rubbed his chin. His beard had grown longer, but no less scruffy, these past few days. “I still do not know. The single new thing I can offer is, I don’t think I can figure it out. Not with the instruments we have at hand. Until we pass Ear
th, of course. Or run into it.”

  Marcus extracted a pudding cup from their ration sack. He had been eating almost nonstop since the explosion. Weight gain and lack of exercise were not pressing issues. Katya’s evident plan of sleeping till the end was no better and no worse. “I don’t get it, Yun. Why won’t more measurements resolve the question?”

  “Give me a few more minutes to be sure, and I’ll explain.”

  It was more like fifteen minutes before Yun looked up from his datasheet. His eyes were jubilant! “We cannot get decent images with which to estimate our location because the Hammer is wobbling.”

  “It’s been spinning all along, hasn’t it?”

  “Around its long axis. Wobbling is different.” Yun straightened a leg to prod Ekatrina with a toe. “Katya, wake up. You will want to hear this.” He clammed up until she grumbled, stirred, ducked into the tiny shelter’s even tinier lav, and returned.

  “What?” she asked. “Did we do it?”

  “Again, I do not know. But this is big. I’ve suspected it for days, and now I am sure. The Hammer is tumbling. The extent is more and more pronounced.”

  She yawned. “I thought most asteroids tumble.”

  “Just so,” Yun said. “I had expected to arrive and find this asteroid tumbling. When instead we found it spinning along its long axis and otherwise stable, I was happy for our good fortune. Docking was much easier for Yevgeny than would otherwise have been the case.”

  “An obvious red flag,” Marcus said. “There is no luck on this mission.”

  “Wrong,” Ekatrina muttered. “There is bad luck.”

  “Unexpected, but not impossible,” Yun continued imperturbably. “I thought that maybe the Titans had carved a few pieces off the asteroid to balance it, then spun it up like a gyroscope for stability. In case the time ever came to give it a shove.”

  As that time had come, Marcus thought. “Why should we care?”

  Yun stroked the scruffy beard again. “Why is it tumbling now? Not just spin, but around all three axes?”

  “The explosion of our ship.” She yawned. “Now, can I get some rest?”

  Yun shook his head. “The Hammer was shoved out of its longtime orbit. It made a pass near the Sun that changed its orbital plane and aimed it at Earth. Then we came along and shoved it ourselves for days. All the while, evidently, the Hammer did not tumble.”

  If there had been enough gravity for it, Marcus would have paced. “Can we skip to whatever has you so pleased?”

  “Almost there. My conclusion is that the Hammer has, or rather, it had, a stabilization mechanism. It remained stable for perhaps hundreds of shots from the mass driver. It remained stable as it slingshot around the Sun. It was still stable as we nudged it along with the ship. And then it broke.”

  Marcus pictured the final explosion, and Rescue One pounded into the Titan control room like a rocket-propelled tent stake. “We broke it.”

  Yun nodded vigorously. “You both are engineers. You will have better ideas than I what broke, and how. But whatever it was ….”

  “Computers crushed,” Ekatrina suggested.

  “Molten working fluid for the thermoelectric generators spewing from cracked pipes,” Marcus guessed, “or the mass driver shattering, spraying shrapnel around the control room.”

  “Any or all of those.” Yun agreed. “Or the stabilization mechanism itself was broken. In my non-engineering way, I suspect stabilization involves very large flywheels in underground chambers scattered around the asteroid. If for whatever reason they cannot spin, or cannot be told how and when to speed up or slow down … we get wobbling.

  “What I do know, as the tumbling grows worse, is that whatever once controlled the Hammer no longer does.”

  Marcus turned his head toward Ekatrina. “What do you think?”

  “I think that was worth waking up for.” She brightened. “I think maybe the damned Titan machines have done to us everything they can. If that last shove was enough, we won.”

  * * *

  The engine room, and with it fusion reactors and backup batteries, was … gone.

  And in the crushed and twisted stub that remained? The nanotech, at its most basic, was mostly carbon. It had burned away in the brief firestorm, all that precious, irreplaceable carbon erupting from the shattered hull in the brief maelstrom of escaping gases. Gaps and short circuits riddled what few patches of nanotech surface had survived.

  And so, as the final dregs of heat ebbed from fire and blast, that which no longer knew itself as Ship faded, for the final time, into oblivion.

  * * *

  Marcus helped Ekatrina carry the parts of her kludged transceiver from the igloo.

  The heart of the device was the short-range helmet radio removed from Yun’s much abused counterpressure suit. The amplifier was built from spare parts Marcus had foraged before the explosion. A fuel cell from the same scavenging expedition powered the rig. A datasheet held their prerecorded Mayday message. The comp would also record, flashing to signal success, any incoming signal. The dish antenna and its tripod base had been fashioned from hull scraps. The scarcest resource turned out to be ordinary copper wire—when the opportunity had existed, Marcus had not thought to collect a spool of that. Instead, they had had to dig short lengths out of the hulk, and weld—they also didn’t have a soldering iron—those wire snippets into the longer lengths they needed. It all sat on spread-out rubber scraps from Yun’s counterpressure suit, to insulate everything from the metallic mass of the Hammer.

  Rube Goldberg’s radio. Or perhaps Dr. Frankenstein’s.

  While Ekatrina did final assembly, Marcus studied the sky. The fast-approaching Earth had swelled into an appreciable disk. The Moon seemed almost a disk. So near, and yet so far away.

  Ekatrina looked up as he lobbed something into space. “What’s that?”

  “Nothing. A message in a bottle.”

  “Why not?” She finished fiddling with the assemblage. “Confirm my aiming, please.”

  Sighting over the top of the dish, he did his best. “Do the honors, Katya.”

  She tapped the virtual send key on the datasheet.

  And in response to their text transmission, there came … nothing. Tweaking their aim, they tried again and again, to the same lack of response. The slow, seemingly random tumble of the Hammer did nothing to improve their pointing.

  He asked, “Is the gear working on our end?”

  She peered at the datasheet. “So say the diagnostics I wrote.”

  “Try aiming at the Moon,” he suggested.

  They did. Repeatedly. And nothing.

  After twenty minutes that felt like an eternity, some combination of spin and wobble took Earth and Moon out of sight altogether.

  She sighed. “To be honest, I never expected this to work. Between the impossibility of maintaining our aim, and reflections all along this huge piece of metal generating interference, it just seems hopeless.”

  “Would we fare better at the other end?”

  The end that—even with the Hammer’s newfound wobbling—still most often pointed, more or less, toward Earth. When the Hammer did so point, their radio might be dealing with fewer reflections.

  She said, “Ask rather, could we slog about twelve kilometers? Distrusting and testing our boots’ magnetic grip with every step. Toting”—she gestured at her monstrosity of an apparatus—“all this. Bringing along many replacement oh-two tanks. All the while, we’ll have only our suits for shelter. And above all, ask: to what purpose would we abandon Yun? Or do you imagine one of us alone would undertake the trek?”

  “I didn’t say it was a good idea. Just an idea.” And with the solemnity the moment deserved, Marcus added, “Of course, you’re right. However this ends, we three will see it through together.”

  * * *

  They went back inside the igloo. Chok
ed down a meal. Looked at each other.

  “Now what?” Ekatrina asked.

  Yun managed a one-shouldered shrug. “We wait for the end.”

  “Here’s the problem,” Marcus said, “Waiting is the thing I’m absolutely worst at.”

  EPILOGUE

  EPILOGUE

  On the Hammer’s sterile surface, the three survivors stood—silent, awestruck—as the Earth grew and grew and grew. They cheered themselves hoarse as, unmistakably, that precious, beautiful, unattainable orb began to recede. With no more guide than eyeballs and the experience of their past spaceflights, they estimated the Hammer’s closest approach to the planet at between five hundred and a thousand kilometers.

  And then, out of options, they returned to their igloo.

  * * *

  Their world shrank to the crowded confines of the igloo. After a few days, no one spoke. There was nothing more to say, nor any will to talk. Their datasheets offered countless hours of reading, viewing, listening—and soon enough, no one bothered. Apart from the occasional brief outing to swap empty oh-two tanks for full ones, they did little but sleep, eat, and wait ….

  * * *

  Marcus and Ekatrina emerged onto the surface for the first time in … he had lost track how long it had been. Since there had ceased to be any purpose in being outside. After their jerry-rigged, ineffectual transmitter had died in a coruscation of sparks. After the final full oxygen tanks had been brought inside. All that had remained to bestir them, before their oh-two would be gone, was this day’s astronomical event: the Hammer reaching its aphelion. Its farthest remove from the Sun. The slowest point anywhere along its new, elongated orbit.

  Aphelion was anticlimactic.

  Yun was feverish, and his arm swollen, infection having taken root despite antibiotic pills. When he could at all avoid it, he did not move. Wrestling himself into a hard-shell suit would have been torture. “I did the calculations,” he had told them. “That was enough. You watch if you want.”