6
In his limited flying career, Marshall Hunter had yet to succumb to airsickness. Not during instrument training, not while learning aerobatics and upset recovery; not once had he felt the urge to tear off his mask and lunge for a barf bag.
All of that had occurred while he’d been in the pilot’s seat, behind a windscreen or beneath a bubble canopy with his instruments to lean on instead of his own vestibular vicissitudes. The rolling and shaking of launch might have been otherwise tolerable if he’d had some kind of outside reference. Here, strapped into the back of an S-21 Specter spaceplane, its lifting-body fuselage enclosed behind a clamshell fairing, he had no view of the window or even the pilot’s instruments. For the first time in his flying experience, he was a helpless passenger.
The rattles and roars of ignition hadn’t bothered him at all; it was the roll and pitchover after clearing the tower at Vandenberg’s Space Launch Complex 6 which had sent his inner ear spinning. There’d been a brief respite as the Vulcan booster’s first stage burned out, but the rumbling and shaking had returned immediately when the second stage ignited. The ride smoothed out once they’d climbed above the atmosphere, when he eyed the chronograph strapped to the cuff of his orange pressure suit: one minute until second-stage cutoff. They’d jettison the protective shroud soon after.
The vibrations finally ended. “SECO,” Wylie announced over the intercom. Though he’d never been in orbit, Marshall had flown enough suborbital hops that he anticipated that sudden sense of speeding over the crest of a hill into infinite freefall. He felt freedom even as his body floated against the five-point harness.
“Shroud jett,” Wylie announced, and the upper stage’s clamshell doors sprang open to fall away behind them. The darkness that had surrounded them disappeared in a blaze of sunlight, dazzling and disorienting him even further. His ears had gotten used to their new normal and now Earth was all of a sudden not where he’d expected it to be. Up was down, left was right, and now the rising bile in his gut wasn’t just from being in freefall. He tore an airsick bag from the leg pocket of his suit and snapped open his visor just in time to avoid fouling his helmet.
The passenger beside him silently offered a package of wet wipes which were clearly not government issue. Marshall took them, embarrassed and hoping Wylie hadn’t noticed from his perch up front. The smell in such a confined space would’ve been unmistakable if their visors were up. “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it, Ensign. This ride’s a bit like climbing into a paint mixer and getting thrown off a building.”
He watched his fellow passenger slip the package back into one of his cargo pockets. “That part of your personal gear, Master Chief?”
“Never leave home without them,” the older petty officer said. “After the first couple of times, I figured this was just how it was going to be.”
Marshall finished cleaning himself up and stuffed the wipes into a waste bag by his seat. “You seem okay with it.”
The chief held up a hand and spread his fingers apart. “Five. This is the first time I haven’t blown chunks. Guess that means I’m acclimated.”
Wylie gave them the all clear to unbuckle, and that was the first time Marshall had gotten a good look at the chief’s ID patch on his chest. Besides his name and rank—GARVER, MCPO—it showed both the wings of an enlisted space crewman and the dolphins of a former submariner. The Force’s Orbit Guard hadn’t been around long enough yet for anyone to reach senior rank who hadn’t first spent time in one of the other branches.
He nodded at the chief. “It takes that long to get your space legs?”
The older man floated up from his seat and braced himself against a handhold in the ceiling. “Wouldn’t know,” he said. “Everybody’s different. I always do fine once I’m aboard. It’s getting up here’s the bitch of it.”
Satisfied he was clean, Marshall hit the quick release on his waist and floated free. He grabbed hold of a cargo container behind them. “I figured it’d hit me after we were in orbit.”
“I’d heard the same thing when I cut over from the Navy.” Garver pointed at the cockpit. “Maybe if you got up here on a different ride, one with windows. Those damn clamshell doors guarantee it’ll be disorienting.”
He followed the chief’s gesture. Earth rolled by above them as they climbed toward apogee. There, another engine burn would begin phasing their orbit to eventually match their target, the USS Borman.
Marshall blinked and fought the urge to shake his head—that would just make the zero-g disorientation worse. “I knew we were inverted, but my body thought otherwise. It felt like we were right-side up.”
The chief laughed. “Always does. First cruises are for learning; about yourself as much as how things work in the fleet. You’ll find the skipper will never let you forget that you don’t know squat.”
“You worked with Captain Poole before, then?”
The chief nodded. “During the shakedown cruise, and a long time ago before that.”
Marshall took another look at the submariner’s dolphins on his chest and realized they must have gone very way back, indeed. “You cruised with him in the Navy?”
“You figured that out yourself? Good. Skipper doesn’t like having to spoon-feed his officers.” He smiled. “But yeah, I was a reactor tech with him on the West Virginia, right before he first got into the astronaut program.”
He was impressed. “Any advice for a nugget like me, then?”
Chief Garver put a steadying hand on his shoulder. “Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Learn from them. If it feels like you’re having the worst day of your life, just remember it’s only the worst day of your life so far.”
They spent the next day catching up, Wylie and his copilot precisely timing burns until their orbits were co-elliptical. They approached from below and slightly behind, affording Marshall the opportunity to check out his home for the next six months as the Borman’s crew inspected their new shuttlecraft. With a puff of control jets the shuttle pitched up perpendicular, momentarily taking the bigger ship out of view. Soon enough, it began to slowly fill their windows.
The first thing he noticed were a pair of rocket nozzles, each mounted to a bottle-shaped fission engine. Just ahead of them, coolant panels formed a cluster of right triangles that fanned out around the base, angled to shield the forward section of the spacecraft from radiation. Two crewmen in saffron-yellow EVA suits were working on the next module, just ahead of the engines and radiator panels. One waved as they passed by while the other remained turned away, apparently focused on an exposed access panel. The module was covered by domes and square hatches, which he recognized as protective covers for long-range interceptor missiles.
“That’s the primary weapons and sensor module,” Chief Garver explained, anticipating Marshall’s question. “Some of that equipment’s pretty sensitive, so this mod gets a lot of TLC. It needs outside work almost every week. The yellow suits are for working in high-radiation environments. Like, you know, nuclear reactors.”
Marshall remembered some mention of them back at the academy, developed specifically for the Borman as it was being outfitted. “Those suits are externally mounted, right?”
“Very good, Ensign. Yep, we can’t have them bringing contaminated gear into the airlocks. Wouldn’t do to give the whole crew cancer.”
As the shuttle continued its drift along Borman’s long axis, more of it came into view: long, cylindrical tanks wrapped with insulating fabric and reflective panels; those were the hydrogen and oxygen that fed the engines and pressurized the crew modules. The tanks were mounted along a truss that served as the vessel’s spine, its length covered in handrails and tracks for mobile service platforms. On its forward end was mounted a squat, hexagonal module. Two long booms extended from it in opposite directions, each topped with parabolic antennas. Four bulbous, fork-mounted turrets were placed between them on adjacent sides.
“That’s the comm suite,” the Chief explained, “and those are the Phalanx pods.”
“Point-defense guns,” Marshall said, letting the chief know he’d done his homework. “Ten-millimeter, caseless depleted-uranium slugs, useful against hostile satellites or wayward space junk.”
“Correct, sir. We keep those things on an especially short leash. The first time we have to use them, the debris field and stray slugs will make that whole orbital plane unnavigable for years.”
“The Kessler cascade. Yeah, they did mention that in school once or twice.” It made one wonder what the whole purpose of a spaceborne patrol vessel could be, but the sad fact was that the more people had access to orbit, the more bad actors would arrive to screw it up for everybody else.
He heard one of the pilots call over the radio. “Borman, Specter one-one; coming up on Waypoint One.”
They arrived at the forward end of the ship, a cluster of six cylinders mounted along opposite sides of a central core with an observation dome in its center, which Marshall knew would be the control deck. The others were crew quarters and logistics. In the center module, a floodlight came to life above the open docking port in the nose.
A controller on Borman answered. “Specter one-one, we have you in sight. Call the ball.”
More completely unnecessary Navy lingo, but the pilots played along so seamlessly that he realized it had become custom—something they didn’t get in training.
“Roger ball. Specter one-one holding at Waypoint One with four souls onboard, three point three thousand kilos cargo, five point two thousand kilos propellant.”
“‘Call the ball’? That’s carrier slang.”
“That it is,” the chief said. “Up here, it means we confirm they’ve got lidar lock.”
Marshall was feeling comfortable enough to get some digs in. “They let a few squids into the program and you just took over, didn’t you?”
“Somebody had to. Think we’d leave all this up to the Air Force? They can’t build anything without first figuring out where to put the golf course. That didn’t work out so well up here.”
With another ripple of control jets the shuttle pitched over once more, turning its tail to face Borman. After several minutes, a final kick from its nose thrusters slowed them down enough for the big ship to drift into the shuttle’s tail-mounted docking port. The little spaceplane shuddered as they made contact. Amber lights flashed above the portal and on the pilot’s control panel.
“That’s a good capture,” one of the pilots said.
A second passed before the Borman’s controller answered. “Confirm hard dock. Stand by while we equalize pressure in the tunnel.”
The hatch creaked unnervingly as air moved behind it. He heard shuffling from the other side, which he knew were crewmembers connecting umbilicals between the two ships. Within minutes, the amber lights turned green and they had the all clear to open. With a nod from the pilot, the chief pulled on a lever and heaved the lock open. The hatch opened with a faint hiss. Marshall watched as he floated into the tunnel and saluted an officer in dark gray coveralls on the other side of the vestibule.
“Master Chief Petty Officer Garver, Anton A., request permission to come aboard.”
The officer rang a ship’s bell mounted above the entry. “Welcome back, Chief.”
The introductory tour was remarkably short; being a new officer, Marshall had been expected to memorize the ship’s layout. It shouldn’t have been complicated, as the interior volume was equivalent to a 737 airliner. The problem was that it was all broken up among compartments in modules arranged along the core tunnel, so turning into any one of them was like entering a different spacecraft. Two-dimensional diagrams, even a 3-D virtual tour, could not prepare him for the confusing experience of floating through Borman’s innards for the first time in zero g. Even with every deck and overhead in every compartment having clear labels to keep him oriented, it was a dizzying maze of hatchways and corridors all set against a monochrome background of white and gray.
After getting himself hopelessly turned around for the third time, he found Chief Garver floating patiently nearby.
“Something I can help you with, Ensign?”
“Maybe,” he admitted. “I seem to have gotten myself disoriented.”
“Layout’s a little screwy,” Garver said, “what with all those different modules plugged in like my kid’s Legos.” He looked around. “They were originally going to build it with a couple of big inflatables to save mass. The skipper wouldn’t have it. He doesn’t trust the things.”
Marshall was pretty sure he knew why. “The Navy wouldn’t have built subs out of ballistic fabrics, either.”
“Exactly. Though you may have noticed the outer skin’s the same material, just not pressurized. Inner hulls are titanium-aluminum alloy.”
“Standard construction materials. Seems risky for a warship.”
The chief nodded. “Hard to think of her that way sometimes. We’re a patrol vessel; our job is to protect US assets, keep the cislunar supply lanes clear, and provide on-orbit rescue. All of which would be cheaper and easier to do with satellites except for that last part.”
“Rescue,” Marshall said. “That takes up a lot of our bandwidth, doesn’t it?”
“We have twelve crew, fully half of whom are EVA specialists. The other half are dual qualified.”
“And how many rescues?”
Garver held up a finger. “One. Last year. Tourist vessel in LEO got holed by a micrometeoroid. Fortunately the pax were still in their pressure suits, otherwise it would’ve all been over before we got there.”
“I read about it. That was the only one?”
“World’s full of people with more money than sense, sir. The more civilians have access to space, the more knuckleheads are going to get themselves into trouble up here. It won’t be the last.”
“What about the rest—protecting the space lanes, showing the flag?”
“That’s the part that doesn’t make the papers.” The chief eyed him. “You got your threat briefing with your assignment here, right? About all of the foreign military birds up here?”
Marshall nodded. “LEO and GEO are chock full of comm and spy sats.”
“They’re not all spies,” the chief said ominously. “More than a few are what we like to call ‘dual-purpose’ birds.”
“Hunter-killers? Isn’t that a treaty violation?”
Garver laughed. “You have to understand that our Eastern friends regard treaties to be valid only as long as the ink’s still wet. After that, everything’s up for grabs.”
“Good thing we’re up here then. Nobody else has a deterrent like us.”
The chief nodded toward a porthole that looked out into space in the direction of the Moon. “Some of us have our suspicions about that Chinese station at L1, Peng Fei. They’re being awfully damned cagey about it.”
“They’re secretive about everything. Isn’t it supposed to be a propellant depot for their lunar ops?”
“That’s the official story, but they’ll have to really pick up the pace for that explanation to make sense.”
“They do like to appear inscrutable.”
“Screwing the inscrutable, effing the ineffable,” the chief drawled. “Whatever they say they’re doing, you can be sure they’re actually doing something else.” He waved Marshall ahead. “Come on, I’ll give you the nickel tour.”
“The modules are all oriented longitudinally,” Garver explained as he pushed off for the tail end of the connecting tunnel. Marshall only knew this because of the arrows labeled “Forward” and “Aft” along the sidewalls, otherwise there was nothing to distinguish one direction from another. A ladder was embedded in the ceiling along its length.
“Each deck is along the aft side of the module, then? How much time do we spend under thrust?”
“Enough for it to be a nuisance if we hadn’t paid attention to that. Those NERVA engines can burn for a couple hours before we have to cool them down. Not good for your deck to become your sidewall for that amount of time.”
Marshall did the math in his head. Though he’d seen the numbers before, being on the ship made them real. Each engine produced eight hundred seconds of specific impulse, thrust-to-weight ratio of almost point five . . . take it down by another half for the ship’s mass, and they were capable of a quarter-g burn. For two hours. He looked up and down the compartment’s length and whistled.
Garver read his expression. “Puts it in a different perspective being up here, doesn’t it?”
“It does. I’m just trying to think of what we’d need to burn that long for.”
“Only if the skipper was taking us to Jupiter for a couple of years, but I’m not signing up for that cruise. Mars, sure. Plug in a couple extra supply modules, get rid of some nonessentials, upload new nav software . . . we could do it. Out and back in about six months. Nine, tops.”
Which told him they’d been thinking about it. “Are they thinking about a ‘show the flag’ mission?” Please please please . . .
“Above my paygrade, Ensign. Yours too, I’m afraid. But it is fun to think about.”
“That was my senior thesis in astrodynamics,” Marshall volunteered, a bit too eagerly. “Adapting a Borman-class vessel for interplanetary flight. The delta-v budget’s not too far off from what we already use getting around cislunar space. Biggest hurdle would be consumables and life support.”
Garver nodded. “We know. Skipper and the XO have read it. They were amused.”
“Oh.”
“I read it too. You made a powerful case for a national Exploration Corps. But there’s a lot that can go sideways up here. Biggest problem with long-duration spaceflight is the ‘duration’ part.”
Marshall felt himself blush. “Maybe I let my enthusiasm get the better of me. Now that I’m here, it’s hard to look around a ship like this and not want to take it somewhere.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself, Ensign. Your job as a cadet was to learn how to think about outside-the-box concepts like that. Now you just have a different set of boxes. Come on.” He led them into the farthest aft module, the engineering compartment. The space was uniformly gray, one side filled with circuit breakers and access panels festooned with warning labels. The other side held racks of air and water filtration beds fed by clusters of ductwork and plumbing fed into the module’s entrance from all directions.
“Electrical, environmental, and comm are all in here,” he explained. “We can run everything from the control deck, but if something needs fixing this is your first stop. If it can’t be fixed here, your next stop is outside.”
It seemed as patched together as the old International Space Station every new flight officer had been familiarized with. “All that plumbing’s internal for a reason. They need too much work to keep the feed lines outside. Every other compartment can be sealed off if there’s an emergency depress. It’s not perfect but they couldn’t come up with a better layout,” the chief said. He pointed back to the entrance, across the connecting corridor. “Over there is reactor control, computer network, sensors and weapons. Other than the server racks, there’s not much that can be fixed in there.” He floated past, back into the gangway.
Marshall poked his head in and saw a much tidier version of the module they’d just left. Almost immediately, the chief’s feet disappeared into the next adjacent portal. “This is medical and suit maintenance.”
Pulling himself inside, it was clear that the space was as much about suit maintenance than any medicine. Racks of EVA suits and helmets lined an entire half of the module; work benches and supply cabinets took up much of the other half. “Where’s the medical gear?”
Garver pulled on a white panel with a Red Cross symbol to unfold an exam table out of one wall. As he locked it in place and unstrapped its zero-g restraints, a rack of patient vital-sign monitors and intravenous pumps embedded in the wall behind it switched themselves on. “All here,” he said, “including idiot-proof EKG leads and an auto-defibrillator. Theoretically any one of us can use these. I don’t pretend to understand what they do, but the rescue spacers can explain that better anyway.”
“You’re not one?” Marshall asked, surprised. He noticed three more tables just like it folded up along the aft wall—realizing it was in case they had patients to work on while under thrust. Another panel embedded in the ceiling was labeled “IV Meds.” So that’s where they kept it all. Yet another access panel in the floor was labeled “First Aid.”
“Oh, I’m cross qualified in three different areas,” Garver said. “Doesn’t mean I understand them all. My primary rating is propulsion and reactor systems.” He pointed to the massive inner door of the emergency airlock at the far end of the module, beyond the racks of EVA suits. “My medical training is just enough to get a person through that ’lock and plugged into one of these beds without making matters worse. The rescue spacers are the real docs.” He floated back into the connecting tunnel. “We’re headed for their berth next. You can see for yourself.”
They briefly popped into a module filled with exercise equipment. Two men pounded away on treadmills embedded in the wall, each strapped to it with elastic cords. On the opposite wall were resistance machines. A large HD television screen dominated the far corner. “Rec deck,” Garver said. “Crew recreation and wardroom.” He pointed to a long table whose surface was embedded in the floor. “Double or triple use, just like everything else up here. We also use it for cards. Movie night’s on Saturday, otherwise you’re likely to find people in here running video game tournaments when they’re off duty.”
Moving next door, Garver led him into the first crew berthing module. Three retractable fabric doors lined either sidewall, each decorated with personal photos, flags, and mostly profane messages. One featured an action-movie poster with someone else’s head cropped over the hero’s face. “Back on the boat, those would’ve been centerfolds and tool-calendar pinups,” Garver said.
“Was that back when Noah was still a sailor?”
“Seems longer than that,” the chief lamented. “You should’ve seen it back when they banned tobacco aboard ship. That was the only thing that kept a lot of us sane.” He pirouetted and headed back out, turning right. “Your quarters are next door.”
The only difference between the officer and crew berthing was a larger compartment at the end of the module, which he guessed were the captain’s quarters. If the others weren’t much bigger than a closet on Earth, the skipper’s was at least walk-in sized.
Marshall pulled open the folding door to his own compartment. On the ground it would’ve felt claustrophobic, but you could make more use of the same living space in zero g. Any surface could be a wall, as orientation didn’t matter except under thrust. To that end, he noticed his bunk (really a light sleeping bag) was along the aft wall, just as the chief had mentioned. So if he were in it during a burn, he’d be pressed into the padded sidewall behind him. The whole thing in fact looked like a padded cell.
If the room wasn’t any bigger than a closet, then it wasn’t furnished much more than one either. Small drawers were embedded into one wall, mounting brackets for a tablet computer and keyboard faced his “bunk,” while the adjacent wall was bare. From what he’d seen, most crewmembers filled that blank wall with personal photos. He realized he hadn’t brought any and wondered if he’d have enough time to spend in here for it to matter. He imagined the guys with families back on Earth probably had. Would that make a stint up here harder or easier? He wondered.
It wasn’t long after connecting to the ship’s network that his tablet and phone began pinging him with backlogged messages. Most were anodyne administrative notices from Fleet HQ, thrice-sent confirmations of his duty assignment, forwarding addresses, generic safety briefings, though it was the next-of-kin designation form that got his attention. A formality, but still . . .
He was grateful for the distraction when his phone buzzed with a raft of incoming texts from Roberta, starting two days ago. Her hyper-staccato texting perfectly mirrored her bouncy personality.
U wont believe this. They got me operating X37s!
Hope ur job at the Wing isnt too boring.
DUDE where r u?
U ghosting me? SRSLY?
OK man, now u got me worried. Its been 2 days. Where u b?
Had it really been that long? Things had happened fast. How to answer her? There wasn’t anything in his assignment notice or onboarding brief about secrecy. Coming here was unexpected, but it wasn’t classified either.
Hope your job at the Wing isn’t too boring. Yeah, about that . . .
He began thumb typing and almost sent his phone flying away with a screen full of garbled text. His usual light grip wouldn’t work up here; one more minor adjustment he’d have to make in zero g. This time he made sure it was wrapped firmly in his hands and tried again.
Not ghosting u. Sorry. Been a busy week.
And it was only Wednesday, he realized. He kept typing.
Got my assignment. Not what I expected at all.
The familiar incoming message bubble appeared on screen. It hadn’t taken long for her to reply.
Its all good. Hope ur well. Remember the worst job in the SF is still better than the other branches. So what r u doing?
That was Roberta, always trying to lift his spirits, but in this case not really necessary. How to answer that? He found it was always best to get to the point . . .
Nothing much. Hanging out on the Borman. Rode a Specter shuttle up here yesterday.
Marshall sent it, checked the time and wondered exactly how much her eyeballs must have been popping out of her skull at that moment.
U @$$hole!
So, about that much. He stuffed his small pouch of personal effects into a drawer and secured his duffel bag inside the sleep restraint. He could unpack later. The chief was giving him a tour of the ship because that’s what was customary, but now he was expected to report to Captain Poole.
The control deck felt cramped compared to the layout he’d studied so much. The diagrams and virtual models had looked so much more spacious, but Marshall soon realized that was because they weren’t occupied with people.
Half the crew was on duty at any one time, and most of them were in here. Two pilots floated above the flight station, one stood in front of the reactor systems panel with his feet hooked into restraints in the deck. Another hovered in front of what Marshall assumed to be the EVA management station, watching a monitor which showed the two crewmen in yellow spacesuits still working on the sensor suite. Two sets of legs dangled out of the observation cupola mounted in the overhead. One of them belonged to Captain Simon Poole.
A voice boomed from the cupola. “That you, Chief?”
“It is, sir.” Garver straightened perceptibly. Marshall strove to do the same.
“Got our new nugget in tow, do you?”
“Aye, Skipper. Just finished giving him the ship’s tour.”
“That should’ve taken all of five minutes,” Poole said, not moving from his spot in the dome. “What’d you do, fold his clothes for him?”
Garver checked his watch. “Five minutes, twenty seconds, sir. And the young ensign stowed his own gear.”
Hands reached around the lip of the cupola, and a stocky form in a gray flight suit floated down into the control deck. A black ballcap embroidered with the spacecraft’s logo and captain’s scrambled eggs on its brim covered Simon Poole’s bald head.
Marshall pulled himself to attention to the extent possible in zero g and saluted. “Ensign Hunter reporting for duty, sir.”
Simon—Captain Poole, Marshall had to remind himself—made a show of looking him over before returning the salute. “Welcome aboard, Mister Hunter.” He waved a hand dismissively. “And at ease, for God’s sake. Got your service record?”
That Poole could’ve just as easily pulled it up on the tablet in his hip pocket signaled that he still preferred to go about this the old-fashioned way. Marshall handed over his own tablet, his service record already displayed. He shot a glance over at Chief Garver, silently thanking him for the heads-up, and realized this was no doubt a standing routine between the two. He wondered if that was behind the chief’s many trips to and from Earth—suiting up and flying into orbit with each new crewmember, with an introduction to the Borman following naturally—and made a mental note to find out. If he was right, five launches seemed like an awfully low count.
It was obvious Poole leaned hard on his senior NCO to break in new crew, especially officers. Especially extremely junior officers he’d known since they were children.
“So you got the chief’s tour—think you can find your way around my ship without breaking anything?”
“I’ll do my best, Captain.”
“I’m sure you will. And if you don’t, I’ll be busting both of your asses.”
“I’ll keep him out of trouble, Skipper,” Garver said. Marshall laughed nervously.
Poole swiped through the pages in his records. “Aced your suborbital pilot quals, good scores in space ops concepts—so you might have a decent chance at orbital quals.” He continued. “Double majors in Astro and Mech E,” he read aloud, though he already knew that story. “So if you break something, you have some idea how to fix it.” Poole closed the file. “Mister Hunter, know this: there’s no way to learn this business without doing it. You’ve had a good start, but you’re about to find out how little they teach in school.”
“I had a taste of that in orbital mechanics, sir,” he said, hoping he wasn’t digging himself a hole. “I didn’t really get it until I played a couple of PC games.”
“That old one with the little green men who build rockets?” Poole laughed. “The crew runs a tournament on Thursday nights. Best way to learn until you get up here to actually do it. I’d rather you blow up something you built online instead of my ship.”
“I will endeavor to not blow up your ship, sir.”
“Don’t crap where you eat. Always a good idea.” He swiped across another page. “Mister Hunter, you’ll be the division officer for the EVA specialists. Finish stowing your gear and report down to their spaces.”
“Yes sir,” Marshall said, silently eyeing the pilot’s flight station over Poole’s shoulder.
Poole followed his gaze. “Looking for something?”
“No sir.”
The captain arched an eyebrow. “Do you understand the mission of this vessel, Mister Hunter?”
He tried not to sound like he was repeating the stock answer that had been drilled into him during basic officer school. “Sir, the Borman is a spaceborne medium-endurance patrol vessel analogous to a US Coast Guard national security cutter. Our mission is to protect US assets in orbit, ensure freedom of navigation in cislunar space, and rescue spacecraft of any nationality in peril. Sir.”
Poole smiled. “Congratulations, you paid attention in class. What that means in real life is that we’re one ship with an overly broad mission and a small crew. Everybody here is dual or triple qualified, Mister Hunter, including pilots. Outside work is one area they can’t train you for on the ground, I don’t care how much time you spend in the tank.” He pointed to the crewman at the EVA control station with a headset jacked into the panel, intently focused on the video from the spacewalkers’ helmet cameras. “Petty Officer Riley here is their NCO in charge.” Poole looked up into the cupola at the pair of feet jutting out from its opening. “Lieutenant Flynn had been their division officer until now, but he’s rotating back into engineering. He’ll show you the ropes.” Poole gestured for Marshall to join him.
Even with one crewman inside, the cupola swirled with activity. The dome was less than two meters across, ringed with six trapezoidal windows around a central round window. Laptops jacked into the ship’s network were strapped beneath the windows with Velcro. Flynn, short with a close-cropped head of red hair, watched the spacewalking crew outside. He spied them through a pair of binoculars on the rare instances when he thumbed the mic on his headset to speak with them, apparently choosing to leave the running commentary to Riley down at the control station. He nodded, silently acknowledging Marshall before turning back to watch his men.
Marshall floated behind him to watch the two spacers still working around the sensor module. Now over Earth’s night side, their yellow suits shone brilliantly under the ship’s floodlights. Beneath them, the planet sparkled with the lights of cities passing by. Ahead, the sky along Earth’s limb glowed with their reflection.
“Must be hard to stay focused out there,” he offered, hoping it didn’t sound too lame.
“You get used to it,” Flynn said, “and plans get filled up quick. Too much work to waste time looking around.” He lifted the binoculars and clicked his mic. “Rosie, how’s that P2 harness? Continuity’s intermittent.”
A female voice crackled on the radio, frustration cutting through. “One of the cannon plugs isn’t seating. I’m about to disconnect and try again.”
Flynn poked his head down into the control cabin. “Riley?”
The petty officer at the EVA station answered. “It’s from that same batch that gave us trouble last month, sir. She’ll get it, it’ll just take some time.”
Flynn checked his watch against an exposure table taped beneath a window. “Not too much time,” he said. “They’re going to be pushing their rad limits being that close to the reactors.”
They couldn’t have illustrated Flynn’s point better if they’d tried: limited time, and every task outside seemed to be twice as hard as on Earth—or so he’d been told repeatedly. Panels stuck in place, cold welded to each other. Wire harnesses and coolant lines frayed from unexpected torque. Drop a tool or component in the training tank and it’d float to the bottom of the pool. Here, it’d go off in whatever direction it had been inadvertently pushed, forever.
“Lowest bidder,” Flynn muttered.
“Pardon?”
“Before John Glenn flew into orbit, he supposedly said he couldn’t help but think that every single part of his spacecraft had been assembled by the lowest bidder. Some things never change.”
Marshall tried to sound savvy. “So you’ve got a set of spares giving you trouble?”
“More than one. You can take an aircraft component that does the same job up here, but as soon as you put it in space it won’t work. I don’t think all of our suppliers understand that yet. Sometimes it’s as simple as gas flow not working the same in zero g. Sometimes it’s the radiation environment, sometimes it’s thermal. Sometimes the thing just gets shaken up too much on the ride uphill and shits the bed. You’ll save yourself a lot of frustration if you just assume nothing works right out of the box.”
Back in the EVA/medical module, Marshall watched as the two spacewalkers emerged, exhausted, from their external suit ports. Despite the already stringent exposure protocols—keeping their rad-hardened spacesuits outside the spacecraft in a dedicated shelter—the pair still had to go through a decontamination shower as one final step before entering the module. The complications of having even one normal shower functioning in space were daunting enough, having two sealed behind plastic screens just for deconning spacewalkers must have been a huge mass penalty.
He averted his eyes when he discovered both were women, and not unattractive ones either. It didn’t help that they seemed to be getting a good laugh at his expense as they vacuumed away globules of water and patted themselves dry.
Chief Garver had tagged along and tried not to look amused. “Everything okay, Ensign?”
“Great, Master Chief. Awesome.” He shot a glance over at Flynn, who just shrugged and began making introductions. He was going to have to develop thick skin, and quickly.
One dark-haired crewman—woman, he corrected himself—who seemed to be enjoying it the most made a halfhearted effort to cover herself up. “Petty Officer First Class Ana Rosado,” she said, and gestured to her partner. “And that there is Petty Officer Second Class Nikki Harper.”
“Heard a lot about you guys but haven’t met any yet,” Marshall said. There were tall tales about the Rescue Spacers, their service’s equivalent to Air Force pararescue or Coast Guard rescue swimmers, “special operators” on par with the SEALs or Rangers.
Harper pulled on a clean jumpsuit. “Guess there aren’t many of us to meet yet, sir.” She looked to her partner. “There’s what, a couple dozen of us?”
Rosado had made no such effort to get presentable yet, which made Marshall increasingly uncomfortable. “That’s total for the whole force, yeah.” She looked at Marshall. “A third of us are up here in orbit now, the rest are either training for their own cruise or on leave. There’s more in the pipeline but the training footprint is huge.”
“I’ve heard,” Marshall said, forcing himself to look at her face. “Tough school?”
“Like BUD/S, just with a lot more math,” she said with a shrug. “There’s a few more differences, like learning how not to die in vacuum instead of by drowning.”
“Zero-g combat training too?”
“Wish there wasn’t, but yeah,” she said with an edge to her voice, and jerked a thumb at the emergency medical packs Velcroed to a sidewall. That they were in such close proximity to the small-arms locker seemed to grate on her. “That’s what we’re about. I get why Pararescue has to—downed pilots are being hunted by the bad guys and you may have to shoot your way out. But us? Up here? No idea . . . sir.”
“You’ll have to pardon us, sir,” Harper interjected. “We were all medics before becoming spacers. Combatants run a distant third to us, at least until hordes of marauding space aliens show up.”
Marshall shrugged it off. “I appreciate your candor. I’ve got a lot to learn here.”
Rosado stifled a laugh. “It never stops, sir. Soon as you think you’ve got it all locked down, that’s when everything comes unglued.”
“I’ll try and remember that, Petty Officer.”
Flynn helpfully interjected himself back into the conversation. “Everyone calls her Rosie,” he explained. “Also, ranks and ratings get complicated compared to the ground forces so it’s easier to just call them spacers.”
Marshall wondered about that. “So new officers would be . . . ?”
“Space Cadets.” Flynn smiled. “What, you thought we were gonna make this easy on you?”
After just a few weeks on the job, Roberta was starting to understand how people became coffee snobs. She’d never touched the stuff as a cadet and had barely tolerated it in fleet officer’s basic, but pulling regular shifts in the Ops center was teaching her to avoid the nasty government-issue stuff in favor of their team’s private stash.
She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and lifted a mug of the hot black liquid as she flipped through the day’s intel brief on a monitor. The drone work with the X-37 was interesting stuff, but in the end they were still just moving unmanned birds around, avoiding traffic, and keeping tabs on what other countries were up to. Even the occasional debris-removal ops promised more of a challenge, as it involved maneuvering one satellite in close proximity to a chunk of orbiting flotsam. But still, she found an odd satisfaction in getting the god’s-eye view of orbital space.
The Russians had almost pancaked another Soyuz the day before, and its upper stage was tumbling in a barely stable low orbit that would bring it down some time over the next few days. Where was the million-dollar question. There was a range of uncertainty that depended greatly on perturbations of the upper atmosphere. It might come down in the Pacific, it might come down in Alaska. Roscosmos claimed to have everything under control but the techs here seemed to think otherwise.
SpaceX had just put up another string of broadband-internet satellites, constantly replacing its old constellation in medium orbit. Astronomers would be pissed as usual as the string of artificial stars took their places in the sky. That was the downside to space commerce: the people who paid attention to the night sky were having their views obstructed on a regular basis.
Up in geosynchronous orbit, yet another comsat had gone dark: SAMCOM-3, a South American bird already near the end of its service life, which was weird. Most of those comsats were built around common frames and network buses. Once they reached orbit they were famously reliable, most lasting well beyond their design life. Yet this was the third one to go dark this week, just shy of its sell-by date.
She scrolled back through the week’s database updates: the SAMCOM bird, GULFSAT 10-A, and a Japanese bird, NSTAR-G. All in GEO, and all near the end of their service lives. So maybe common frames and buses hadn’t been such a good idea after all? Not if it led to a single point of failure.
Nothing a rookie officer could do about it except note the updates to their database and warn other operators about them. As she swiped over to the next page in the daily briefing, an alert popped up from Space Weather that made her forget about it.
After the first few lines, she put her coffee mug down slowly and looked across the room to their consoles. “Hey, Met,” she called across the room. “What’s up with this CME warning?”
“It’s big and fast,” the lieutenant responded. “The filament we observed is a solid six degrees across and doesn’t look to be dissipating. Solar wind speed clocked over a thousand kilometers per second.”
After being quiet for months, the Sun had just burped up a major coronal mass ejection, a solar storm that would impact Earth in less than a day. The stream of charged particles hitting Earth’s magnetic field carried the potential for widespread power and communication outages, not to mention the radiation hazard to anyone in orbit.
“And what about this K-index . . . eight?” Roberta whistled. “You really think it’ll be that high?” That portended a severe geomagnetic storm. She scrolled through the details. The leading edge of the filament would hit in sixteen hours; it would take another two for the bulk of the CME to strike.
“Wouldn’t be there if I didn’t think so. Batten down the hatches,” the lieutenant said. “It’ll be a real show. When the lights go out, they’ll be able to see auroras all the way into Arkansas.”
She wondered what kind of sight that would be from orbit, then thought of Marshall up there on the Borman. The lucky bastard. Yes, she decided, he deserved a good ribbing.
The handheld on Marshall’s hip had been buzzing incessantly ever since the first warning came across the message board, with one cryptic message from Roberta kicking it off: Heads up - hope u brought ur lead underwear. He stopped wondering what she was talking about when the space weather brief showed up soon after.
As he floated through Borman’s core module, headed for the rec area, his watch chimed with its friendly reminder that he was once again running late. He’d already not been looking forward to the hours they’d be spending in the hardened shelter, which was the entire central hub of the spacecraft. It would seem a lot less roomy with all twelve crew in it.
That was until the all-hands meeting had been called in the now even more crowded rec module. As Marshall scrambled into the module, Captain Poole began his announcements.
“I know your private message folders are filling up quicker than the official traffic, so I won’t waste time on the obvious. There is one big-ass solar flare headed our way, folks, and it promises to play hell on anything in its path. So we’re not going to stay in its path.”
The gathered crew exchanged curious looks. What he was describing sounded like the opposite of easy.
“If you don’t want to get slimed when the shit hits the fan, then you move out of the way.” He nodded toward Riley and his team. “Your people have already spent too much time outside keeping the sensor suite up. I’m not about to throw all that work away while we wait inside for the storm to pass.”
Poole looked over the gathered crew. “So here’s what we’re gonna do. Commander Wicklund and Chief Garver have worked out a burn sequence to change our orbital period and put us on the back side of Earth when this thing hits.” He read their surprise. “This should be no big deal for us, we just haven’t done it yet. This is the whole point of nuclear engines, people. They can burn hard enough, long enough, to get us where we need to be. We’ll raise our orbit and put Earth between us and the storm.”
He continued. “The trick is we have to act fast. It’ll take several burns to get the phase changes we’ll need, so we have to start at the next ascending node. That’s in forty minutes. If you’re not already on duty, start securing all loose gear by division modules and get them oriented for some long burns.”
After giving them a minute to process that, he added: “One last thing. There is a civilian Stardust spacecraft in orbit right now that will be in the path if they don’t move quickly. Once the ship’s secured for burn, I want all hands getting the shuttle and medical bay prepped for possible rescue ops.”
Harper raised her hand. “Sir, do we know if they need assistance now? Can we go get them and move them with us?”
“Not that simple,” Poole said. “They’re up in GEO and our orbits don’t converge. We’re already going to have to do a transverse burn to rotate our plane, and we can’t do both maneuvers in time. The Stardust-class vehicle has a docking tunnel that can double as a rad shelter. It’ll be cramped as all hell but they’ll survive.”
Nick Lesko struggled to stay awake while the others slept in the darkened capsule. It was his turn to stay on comms watch with their tracking center, but another very full day of exhausting EVAs had left him drained. He cracked open another cold gel pack and pressed it against his aching hands, aware they were running short on them and not caring. They were done with spacewalks and he didn’t much care if Giselle needed them or not. She was the pro, and so he assumed was therefore better conditioned against the physical toll. She was cocooned in her bag, sleeping soundly in the cabin’s lower bay with Whitman and Billy/Xenos, though it was a sign of her exertion that he could easily pick out the heavy rise and fall of her breathing above the others. Not quite snoring, but the deep slumber of a person at the edge of exhaustion. He had to grudgingly admire her for not showing it while awake.
He examined his bruised fingertips, wondering how she did it. Experienced walkers must develop calluses harder than farmers, he decided. Well, this would be his last—his only—excursion beyond Earth if he had anything to say about it.
Hopefully his patrons would feel the same way. He did not look forward to talking with them despite their success up here.
Nick reached for the radio panel and made sure all their telemetry was isolated to the primary high-gain antenna. There would be no interruption in their feed to the ground, and he could still nominally stay on comms watch. But he had other, more urgent, matters to relay to another group: his patrons had their own priorities beyond that of the company they’d hired Stardust from.
He looked down at his sleeping companions, making one last check that they were fully asleep, and opened an access panel beneath the radio controls. He found the secondary antenna relays just as he’d practiced on the ground, disconnected them, and jacked his own laptop into its signal path. He opened up an encrypted message app and began typing.
ALL OBJECTIVES ACHIEVED. SUCCESSFULLY EXERCISED LOCAL CONTROL. DATA PACKET TO FOLLOW.
With that, he sent a compressed file that held each satellite’s encryption codes as planted by Billy. It took longer using the frequency-hopping algorithm built into his message program, but someone would have to know what they were looking for to find it.
The reply came much sooner than he’d expected, thankfully. He didn’t want to risk having this hack laid out in the open for the others to wake up and see.
ACKNOWLEDGED. PROCEED WITH CLEANUP PLAN UPON RETURN.
“Cleanup.” A typically anodyne euphemism for some very nasty work. Nick quietly disconnected his laptop and replaced the antenna cables. When he switched his headset back to the company frequency, the alert tone startled him. They were demanding he acknowledge something impossibly urgent. When he read the message in the comms window, he understood. His initial fright soon gave way to a sense of focused calm—he knew the contingency plan for a CME. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but the experience would be survivable.
There were many opportunities for tragic accidents in space, some more believable than others. He checked the time and began moving supplies into the tunnel while the others slept.