CHAPTER 8
Electric rockets look futuristic, like an advanced space propulsion system should. As the xenon gas fuel is stripped of its outer electron and accelerated toward the rocket’s exhaust by carefully designed electric and magnetic fields, the entire engine emits a brilliant blue glow. There is none of the fire and smoke that would be seen from some conventional chemical rocket engines. Chemical rockets are a brute force approach to moving things around in space and the only realistic way to get off the surface of a planet, deep in a gravity well, and into space. But once you are in space, highly efficient electric rockets are an excellent alternative.
Chemical rockets produce all the thrust they’re going to produce in their first few minutes of use by providing spectacular acceleration—the kind an astronaut can feel as he is pushed back into his seat while the rocket begins to speed up. Electric rockets produce a continuous, very small thrust that might not even be felt by a person. But it is a continuous thrust, and, given enough time, an electric rocket can accelerate a spacecraft to much higher speeds using only a fraction of the fuel required by a chemical rocket. Such was the case with the electric thrusters bound to the surface of the Sutter’s Mill asteroid.
The gentle push began as soon as the thrusters were turned on. Sutter’s Mill, which would weigh just over two billion tons on Earth, didn’t have any weight in space. It still had mass, so it still required a significant total force in order to alter its motion so that it would go where the mission planners from Asteroid Ores wanted it to go. The entire operation was similar to a swimmer pushing a barge off its original course. A single swimmer couldn’t make any abrupt changes to the course of a multiton ship. But if that swimmer could swim sideways into the barge for a very long time, then the barge would drift slowly onto a different path.
The electric thrusters were designed to operate continuously for the entire two years it would take to nudge the massive rock from its current course to one that would make it accessible for Earth-based miners to exploit, including an Earth flyby in just another eleven months. With each day of operation, the asteroid would be on a slightly different course on its billion-year journey around the Sun. To bring it where its operators wanted it to be, two full years of thrusting would be required.
* * *
Bill Stetson and his wife Rebecca had just enjoyed a rare weekend away at Galveston Island as they pulled into the driveway of their modest suburban home in the Houston suburbs near Clear Lake. Though Stetson no longer worked for NASA, he still considered Houston to be his home.
“Too many good memories were made here to sell it and move,” he told her as he patted her thigh lightly and ended it with a gentle squeeze. Bill had often told himself and his family that very same statement word for word. In fact, she was pretty sure he had said it every single time that she had suggested to him that they move closer to either Nevada or Kentucky for better proximity to his new employer, Space Excursions. For whatever reason, she could never convince him that they should move. She smiled inwardly, thinking of just how set in his ways her husband was. Her wonderfully heroic husband who had walked on the Moon and flown into space on countless occasions.
Their home was built in the 1990s and had all the hallmarks of a suburban “McMansion” that seemed to dominate construction in that era. It was all brick with a roofline broken by many separate gables and lots of skylights. Next to the road sat a mailbox made from matching brick with a simple name plate that said, “Stetson.” Rebecca had suggested they do something more to the mailbox like putting a rocket or something on it. But Bill had always rejected doing anything much different than the others in the neighborhood. Bill was a humble man and didn’t care much for showing off.
The sun was about to set as Bill pulled the car into the driveway. The secure proximity sensor in the garage had already sensed that the car was approaching and the garage door was therefore already on its way up as they approached. While Bill wasn’t much for showing off, he was certainly one for having the latest gadgets. Since their children had long since moved out of the house, and with only the two of them making the trip, there weren’t too many bags to be unloaded after their weekend away.
“I set the alarm for while we were gone,” he said and nodded to the system’s keypad on the garage wall. The little off-white keypad’s secure light was glowing a steady red color, meaning that it had not been triggered in their absence. Becca didn’t really give it any further thought. As far as she knew nobody had been robbed in their neighborhood as long as they had lived there. And they had lived there a really long time.
“Bec, I’ve got the bags. Can you get the mail?” Bill asked her.
“Sure,” Rebecca smiled at her husband and then turned and walked to the mailbox. On her way to the box, she was distracted by their next-door neighbor, Denise, who was leaving her house, Irish Setter in tow. Denise often took evening walks with her dog and this evening looked to be no different. She and Rebecca had chatted at the end of the driveway on countless occasions but they were just neighbors, not seriously close friends.
Rebecca stopped short of the mailbox, standing to its side, so that she could chat with Denise without the bulk of the mailbox being between them. Luckily for her, this meant that the bulk of the massive brick mailbox was between her and the aluminum front door of the box as she opened it. Had she been standing in front of it, the explosion that sent densely packed ball bearings and nails would most likely have killed her. Instead, the shrapnel from the bomb that was triggered by the door opening tore into her left hand, nearly severing it, and sent the bricks surrounding it outward—knocking her to the ground and burying her legs and feet under a pile of mortar and shattered masonry. A dust cloud of powdered mortar mixed with dust and brick settled about the destruction. Rebecca was stunned and the world seemed to be moving in a strange swimming and blurry slow motion to her. Voices and sounds were nonexistent. The only thing she could hear was her heartbeat pounding like a big bass drum inside her head and chest. She watched red blood spurt from what was left of her hand with each pounding of the drum. Her head fell more than turned to the side and she could see Denise holding her ears and screaming in terror. Still there was no sound. Nothing but the pounding drum in her head and chest. Rebecca was most certainly in shock and was losing blood very fast. Her mind drifted even deeper into the surreal swimming slow reality around her.
As far as Becca could grasp, Denise and her dog were only momentarily deafened by the blast, the shock of which had caused Denise to loosen her grip on the dog’s leash, setting the dog free. Rather than run away, the dog immediately began barking and then sat by her side looking feral and protective of his mistress. Rebecca thought to herself that he was such a good dog. But the thought faded as a shadow blotted out the sun above her and then lowered over her. Consciousness drifted away from her.
* * *
Stetson heard the explosion from inside the garage. He dropped the bags he was carrying and ran to the street only to see a cloud of smoke and the remains of his mailbox collapsed on top of his wife’s body. His heart nearly stopped as he assessed the scene and then began running toward her, hoping and praying that she was all right.
“Becca?!” he shouted. “Honey, are you all right?” Stetson kneeled beside his wife and turned pale when he saw the blood squirting from her hand with each beat of her diminishing pulse. He understood almost immediately that she was bleeding out.
“Hold on, Bec!” he shouted as he yanked his belt free from his pants. Bill quickly slipped the belt around his wife’s wrist and fumbled nervously with the buckle for a second or two. “Get a grip on yourself, Stetson. Stay calm and focus.”
Bill took a deep breath just as he would in any flying emergency and then calmed his mind. He slipped the belt through the buckle and pulled it tight until the bleeding went from gushing to a slight trickle with each pulsing of her heart. His own heart was racing. He pulled his outer shirt off over his head, not worrying about the buttons. Then he slipped his undershirt off quickly and started to carefully wrap it around his wife’s mangled limb.
“Hang in there sweetheart,” he said fumbling through his pocket for his cell phone. He calmly but quickly dialed 911. He held the T-shirt firmly in place around her hand as it became soaked red with his wife’s blood.
* * *
Paul Gesling was having dinner with Gary Childers at his Lexington home. Childers was dining weekly with Paul and had done so since the shooting. The meals weren’t strictly social, with Gary Childers there was no distinction between “shop talk” and casual conversation. He lived for his work and his work defined his life. Until the shooting, Childers would have assumed the same was true for Gesling, but not now. Gesling was clearly in mourning for his wife, now in a coma for well over two months, although the doctors were saying that she could wake up at any time.
Intentionally avoiding any mention of the shooting or Carolyn O’Connor-Gesling, Childers and Gesling were engaged in a discussion about all that was happening within Space Excursions.
“I’m telling you they’ll love it and not really care that they’re sleeping in a hammock. They’ll be on the Moon, for God’s sake.” On this point, Paul was passionate. He’d been there. He’d experienced the thrill at being on the surface of another world and he knew that people would pay a lot of money to have the same experience.
“I’m sure you are right, but I just can’t help but think we need to start planning to bring more conventional bedding. There are customers who are telling me they plan to do more than sleep while they are there, if you catch my meaning.”
“Well, yeah, sure. Who wouldn’t want to screw on the Moon? But I wouldn’t worry about the logistics and expense of sending beds. Those who want to do some lunar hanky-panky can find some privacy in one of the curtained areas of the habitat and go at it. I’m sure one sixth gee will open up some innovative approaches to that sort of thing.” Gesling came close to leering as he finished the thought.
“Well, if zero gee is any indication of libido, then I’ll have to agree. Just last week, two of the guests in the What-A-View sneaked into the viewing cupola during the middle of the night shift to make love with the nearly full view of the Earth beneath them. They would’ve been fine if they hadn’t forgotten that the only places in the hotel with complete privacy are in their sleeping areas. Once they moved from behind the curtain to the cupola, they were on camera and in view not only of our mission controllers but the webcam that’s streaming for the entire world to see. It wouldn’t have been so bad had they been young and beautiful movie stars out for a romp. That might have boosted bookings. But no, these two had certainly seen better days and we had viewers from all over the world asking us to shut off the camera feed before they became ill.” With that, both men laughed.
“Gary, I hate to change the subject away from something as interesting as sex in space, but how is the NASA Deep Space Habitat progressing?”
“It’s going well. It’s mostly fabricated and going through quality inspection now. After the environmental testing, she’ll be ready for launch. The Mars mission departure is only about six months away and they want all the hardware at the launch site four months out so they can begin the final integration into the launch vehicle,” Childers said.
“I’m glad we’re going to be part of the mission. I just wish Bill or I were on the crew.”
“Paul, the work you’re doing will open up space travel to far more people than NASA ever will. Yes, they’ll get the glory for being the first to ‘explore strange new worlds,’ but it’ll be us that bring those to follow.”
“Speaking of which, have you thought about how busy space will be in half a year? We’ll have two hotels in orbit and one on the Moon, all full of paying customers. NASA will be launching a crew to Mars and Asteroid Ores will have their rock halfway back. Not to mention the new Chinese and Russian lunar base,” Gesling said with his characteristic zeal as he spoke.
“Yeah, I’ve thought about that. And I think…” Childers was interrupted by Gesling’s phone vibrating and playing a tune he didn’t recognize.
“It must be family or something about Carolyn. I have the phone set to send everyone else to messaging,” Gesling said as he looked at the incoming message on his phone. He began to read the message and frowned.
“Damn! Someone just tried to kill Bill and his wife!”
“What? Are they okay?” asked Childers, nearly spilling his drink onto his plate as he heard the news.
“Yeah, well, no, not really. Bill’s okay but his wife was nearly killed by some sort of bomb in his mailbox. She’s lost her left hand and suffered some burns. They’re at the Clear Lake Medical Center. He said he’d call with an update as soon as he knew more.”
“Text him back. Tell him that we’ll pay for whatever they need. I’ll get my personal physician on a plane to Texas to advise and see if there any specialists we need to hire. And we need security there, now!” Gary slammed his fist against the table rattling the dishes and silverware.
“What is going on? Why would someone put a bomb in Bill’s mailbox? It’s got to be related to your shooting. It is too coincidental to be anything other than related.” Gesling had gone from his stunned and emotional reaction at hearing the news to a more analytical mode.
“I fear you’re correct. We have to assume that whoever tried to kill me also tried to kill Bill. Or at least harm him by killing his wife. They’re still out there and until we know otherwise, no one working for me can be safe.” Gary tapped away at his phone sending messages to his personal security teams.
“Has there been some sort of recent business deal that went bad? Do you have any enemies out there that might have gone over the edge like this?” Paul searched his memories for anything that might offer insight on what was happening.
“Not that I know of. But for someone to go after me and Bill, it’s got to somehow be related to Space Excursions. I think there is no doubt about that now.”
“I agree. But who?”
Childers pondered the question and replied, “And why? What could we possibly have done to cause someone to try and kill us?”
“Both attempts have resulted in innocent people being injured; first Carolyn and now Rebecca.” Paul rubbed at his chin feeling the days’ growth of whiskers there. “This person is sloppy or doesn’t care who he hurts or how he hurts Space Excursions.”
“We can’t let that happen again. From now on, you, Bill, your families and all of my personal staff are going to have twenty-four-hour protection.”
No longer hungry, both Childers and Gesling moved from the dining room table into the living room. Noticing the massive glass window on the front wall of the room, they silently stopped before crossing in front of it, wondering who might be on the other side looking in. Childers walked to the right side and pulled the curtains closed.
Time until Asteroid 2018HM5 “Sutter’s Mill” reaches near Earth: 338 days.