5
Mission Day 2
Velocity 14,810 m/s (33,129 mph)
Acceleration 0.981 m/s2 (0.10g)
Sleep was even more elusive than Jack expected. His body ached for it after being up for almost a full day but his mind was so keyed up that rest would come only when there was no more stopping it.
The porthole by his bunk wasn’t helping. Jack’s room just happened to be on the side facing back toward Earth thanks to one more odd fact of spaceflight: Flying along an orbit toward a planet that was also moving along its own circle around the Sun meant they wouldn’t be pointed at their destination almost until they arrived. For the next several weeks, his personal window on the universe would always be looking back toward home. After having no time to waste looking out the window, now he’d have a solid twelve hours with it right in front of him when he was supposed to be sleeping.
Even now, Earth had receded enough for most of the globe to fit in the window. By the time he woke up they’d have crossed the Moon’s orbit. How weird would it be to see both bodies in that little window? And yet it would still take most of the next month just to get past Mars’ orbit.
Later, Jack told himself. He snapped down the window shade, making for one less distraction.
He puttered around his sleep compartment—an appropriately impersonal, functional name for a space about the size of a walk-in closet—and began unpacking. This was going to be home for the next couple of years and he might as well make it feel that way now. His experience on the ISS had taught him that the pressure to just keep everything working in the unforgiving environment of space would relentlessly eat into his personal time as their mission drew on.
He didn’t have much to unpack: a few pictures with his mother and sister, all of them in the mountains up and down the Pacific. Now that he was living in a flying soup can, he couldn’t help but be reminded of his family home. His mother had been a true believer in the old “tiny house” fad and had never abandoned it after others moved on, mostly due to Seattle’s stratospheric real estate prices as he’d figured out later.
Growing up like that made living in a cramped space like this familiar if not comforting. There might not be open spaces and fresh air, but he’d learned a lot about getting the most out of close quarters.
The clothing likewise reminded him of outdoor technical gear: all multifunction, antimicrobial, breathable synthetics designed to be worn several times over before going in the trash. Out here, there would be no laundry service. Water was at a premium, and a washing machine would’ve just been one more contraption to keep spare parts for. Filling a storage module with fresh clothing was easier and carried a lower mass penalty. Jack arranged this month’s clothing allowance in a set of collapsible drawers underneath his bunk.
He unzipped a padded sleeve and removed a tablet and keyboard. Two years’ worth of entertainment was contained in that little slate and Jack had made it a point to avoid any new books, movies or television series ever since he’d been assigned to this mission. Not that their training had allowed much free time, but now he’d have plenty to catch up on if the ship behaved itself.
Beneath that were a couple of surprises. It had become tradition for the mission managers to let family members slip a few items in their loved one’s PPK’s. With a wide grin, he lifted out a hand-knit afghan and a personalized, two-year calendar made of old vacation photos.
Finally he got to a small collection of books including Robinson Crusoe, The Count of Monte Cristo, a pocket New Testament, and a text on Zen Buddhism. The first two he’d cherished as a kid while the others he’d barely opened, and then only when asked. A bizarre combination from his mother, who held a unique Northwest Hippie amalgam of beliefs.
Mom.
Jack bunched up the blanket at the head of his bunk and curled up on the mattress with a slow-motion hop. He set the tablet into a mount on the adjacent wall and plugged it into the ship’s radiation-hardened network. The tablet flickered on and he typed in his password. He’d planned to keep his personal machine off the network for now but the information that had been sent up with them was too juicy to wait. The soft electric hums he heard coursing through the thin walls told him his crewmates were thinking the same thing.
“You guys should be getting some sleep,” he said, loud enough for them to hear.
Traci’s muffled voice came through the partition: “So should you. We’ve got first watch.”
Jack lay against the back of a small closet that also served as his headboard and rapped his knuckles against the wall, something that had driven Traci nuts during their weeks in isolation sims. She answered him with an annoyed mule kick from the opposite side.
“Stow it, kiddies,” Roy’s voice resonated from the opposite side of the crew deck.
“Yes, Dad,” he heard Traci whine. If the mission commander and his wife were going to be the parents on this road trip, Jack and Traci were already falling into the brother/sister role with incessant taunts and tormenting schemes.
Jack slipped on a pair of headphones and tuned out the background noise. First up was a file with Arkangel’s layout and technical specs. Another file held a separate set of dossiers on the crew. Otherwise, there were no menu selections. They were going to get this in whatever order HQ thought best.
* * *
TOP SECRET-SCA // EYES ONLY //
FROM NATL SECURITY COUNCIL
TO MAGELLAN EXPEDITION II CREW
VIA NASA ADMINISTRATOR
SUBJ PROJECT ARKANGEL
1. DEEP-SPACE EXPLORATION PROJECT UNDERTAKEN BY FORMER USSR SPACE AGENCY CIRCA 1985 BASED ON “ORION” TYPE NUCLEAR PULSE-DETONATION DRIVE.
2. CONSTRUCTION AND ON-ORBIT CHECKOUTS COMPLETED LATE 1990. SPACECRAFT DEPARTED EARTH ORBIT JAN 1991 BY DISPOSABLE CHEMICAL UPPER STAGE TO AVOID DETECTION BY USAF EARLY WARNING SATELLITES. [NSC NOTES: WISE MOVE. PROBABLY AVOIDED WWIII.]
3. PROPELLANT MAGAZINE CONTAINED +5,000 REPURPOSED TACTICAL WARHEAD CORES W/ MINIMUM 0.3 KT [MSL] YIELD. SPACECRAFT MAINTAINED AVERAGE 0.7 G ACCELERATION FOR FINAL VELOCITY 0.10 C.
* * *
Whoa. That was a lot of nukes, no doubt most of their tactical arsenal. But ten percent of light speed?
Here he sat in the most advanced spacecraft ever built and it had been beaten by a clapped-together heap of fifty-year-old Russian tech propelled across the solar system by a load of repurposed nuclear bombs. It was as high tech as low tech could get, a real Wile E. Coyote Super Genius solution.
“Steampunk starship,” Jack muttered.
The British Interplanetary Society had tried to whip up enthusiasm for such a project back in the ’70’s, and why not? Assuming you didn’t blow yourself up first, an Orion drive could boost a ship to an impressive fraction of light speed given enough fuel. And by “fuel” they of course meant bombs, and lots of them. But their Daedalus starship concept had been ridiculously large, and the rest of the spaceflight community had stopped taking it seriously.
While the western countries may have laughed off the idea, the Russians had quietly embraced it. Should anyone have been surprised that they’d been the only ones crazy enough to try it? They had the heavy lift rockets and expertise in long-duration spaceflight, keeping cosmonauts on the old Mir station for over a year at a stretch. Plus they were sitting on enough nukes to slag the whole planet three times over. According to the briefing notes, some in the Politburo saw it as a clever way to get rid of a bunch of miniaturized tactical warheads they weren’t supposed to have anyway by treaty. He continued reading:
* * *
4. SATURN FLYBY ADDED 26 KM/S DELTA-V FOR OUTBOUND COAST TO PLUTO. RETURN PLAN ASSUMED FLYBYS OF NEPTUNE AND MARS.
5. SIX WEEK 0.7 G BRAKING BURN PLACED SPACECRAFT IN ORBIT AT PLUTO.
* * *
So they’d blasted Arkangel clear out to the edge of the solar system and just left it there? Jack flipped through the electronic files: no hint of the kind of catastrophic failure that would’ve stranded them out there. And the orbit they’d followed: hyperbolic, well above solar escape velocity with a flyby of Saturn. No one had bothered to even send pictures?
The level of secrecy was stunning. How had no one ever heard of this before? Just getting the film back would’ve been the PR coup of the century. The USSR had trumpeted every dubious achievement from inside the Workers’ Paradise; something this stupendous ought to have made the front pages of Pravda and been dutifully picked up by sympathetic western news outlets. Sitting on this had to have driven the Kremlin nuts.
The Soviet Union had collapsed in the middle of the mission. Might that explain it? If anything, the old guard Commies would have broadcast any good news they could find if it might help them hold on to power. Even better if it happened to be true, unless it somehow undermined that power . . .
He tapped the screen, opening the next folder. Vehicle specs, which he’d already seen. He wasn’t ready to digest that yet, so he swiped over to the next folder: more mission data, event timelines and crew activity plans. On to the next folder.
That was when he stopped. Now it was getting interesting.
* * *
Arkangel Commander’s Log
08 January 1991
A glorious day for the Motherland! We embark on the greatest adventure yet undertaken by humanity, spreading our reach far into the solar system. It is a destiny that could only be fulfilled by the Soviet Man. When our feats become known, the world will both delight and tremble in righteous fear of this achievement for all the Soviet peoples!
* * *
Good Lord. Had he actually written this garbage or was it scripted by some political officer? It was easy to forget how heavy-handed their propaganda had been. Scrolling ahead, Jack saw the early log entries were filled with more of the same eye-rolling bombast that was guaranteed to please their political masters. Millions of miles from Earth and they still behaved as if they were on a very short leash.
Insufferable as it was, it showed how even the most agile minds could be manipulated given enough time. If he were being honest, it was easy enough to spot in his own country: Political partisans and religious fanatics held beliefs all bent in different directions by their rules and expectations. That anyone so obsessed could think clearly at all was amazing. How hard must it have been to visualize and build a machine like Arkangel while pretending loyalty to such a system?
The answer was that of course they hadn’t all been pretending. There were always just enough true believers to maintain the illusion and keep the agnostics off balance. And if the true believers held the power, then the unconvinced soon learned to play along for their own well-being.
Jack flipped over to the crew dossiers and found the author: mission commander Vladimir Ilyeivich Vaschenko, colonel of the Soviet Air Force, who’d spent most of his uniformed service as a cosmonaut in Star City outside Moscow.
Had Vlad been a true believer? Jack scrolled ahead, hoping to find some stray comment that might reveal a telling detail or let him tease out some hidden meaning.
* * *
11 Jan 1991
Spacecraft checkouts are complete. We only await word from Star City to begin our journey. Our vessel is massive enough that this will require burning two Block D kick stages in sequence to first raise our orbit and then achieve escape velocity. We could easily do this with the pulse drive, but chemical rockets will not attract unnecessary attention from our adversaries. It is a pity we cannot yet demonstrate the power of this vessel for the whole world to see. That time will come.
* * *
Jack sighed. If there were any hidden treasures, they would have to come later. Much later, as in when—if—they boarded Arkangel and he could see Vaschenko’s original diaries firsthand.
* * *
14 Jan 1991
We have finally traveled far enough from Earth that it is safe to engage the pulse drive. The trajectory planners calculated our departure window to place the Moon between us and Earth, ensuring that no one will be able to observe our drive plume when it ignites.
With the Americans and NATO so preoccupied with their imperialistic adventure in the Persian Gulf, it seems doubtful as to whether any early-warning satellites could possibly be looking anywhere in our direction. I suppose their Hubble telescope poses a potential threat, although we had a good laugh at the American’s expense when it was discovered the primary mirror was misconfigured! GRU insists this is no cover story, either: The vaunted NASA buggered it up that badly. That is the sort of thing one should check before the launch, comrades!
I must admit some sympathy for them, being in such proximity to the Moon they abandoned two decades ago. We were all quite thrilled to watch it pass by close enough to fill our windows; I can only imagine what other wonders await us at the outer planets.
* * *
15 Jan 1991
Ignition!
With the very first detonation, we could feel the plasma jet firmly kick our backsides. The second followed in quick succession and continued that feeling seamlessly. With each detonation we could sense our velocity building as gravity returned with it. We gaped at each other as our instruments confirmed the magnitude of the force we felt.
It is too grand to put into words. After being used to spaceflight only in freefall while coasting between destinations, to be accelerating for so long is exhilarating. Even flying a MiG-31 in full afterburner doesn’t compare. We thought watching Earth fall away under the thrust of chemical rockets was profound. To see it recede so quickly now? Indescribable. We are living a science fiction tale.
On another note, Alexi learned a hard lesson about securing loose equipment before igniting a massive rocket. We assured him the bruise on his forehead will eventually heal.
* * *
Somebody forgot to stow his gear before they lit the candle? Cute. Reminded him of a story from one of the Moon missions, when Al Bean took a head shot from his camera. Maybe that’s what made the guy decide to become a painter?
* * *
19 Jan 1991
We are so very isolated out here as our ship continues to propel us along a nuclear vapor trail, now well beyond Earth’s sphere of influence. Though still distinct in color and shape compared to the stars beyond, home is just another point of light in the window. A sapphire grain in a sea of diamond dust.
Our velocity increases daily by astounding increments, even with the mandatory shutdown periods. We have found these quite useful for both checking up on the ship’s health and for recalibrating our navigation instruments. Despite our shock dampeners, there is no way to entirely null the vibrations from our pulse drive.
Under full thrust, Arkangel rumbles like a speeding train. Once settled into its natural resonance it can be just as soothing, but we did not fully appreciate how much this rhythm might affect our inertial guidance platform. The magnitude of accumulated error threatens to overcome the regular calibration which is part of the daily activity plan. The inertial units have been quite reliable in the past—that is, in a customary free-fall environment. It is one thing to function in Earth orbit, it is another matter entirely to use such sensitive instruments under constant acceleration.
I have added periodic sextant sightings to our automated star tracker’s input to reduce our gross navigation errors. We have had to perform a complete realignment of the inertial platform, but I believe as time goes on we will find ways to compensate for errors without such drastic steps. These deviations must be contained before we begin transiting the gravity fields of the planets on our itinerary.
* * *
So things got shaky almost from the start? That was interesting.
In his previous career of listening in on encrypted Russian military channels, Jack had brought a mathematician’s discipline to his reading. This made him loathe to jump ahead to the ending, fearing he’d miss some important context along the way. Whether from fatigue, impatience or curiosity he nonetheless flipped ahead a few pages at random.
* * *
22 Jan 1991
Only two weeks into our journey and we are crossing the orbit of Mars! It is ironic that the planet which for so long was assumed to be the next goal for men to explore is on the opposite side of the Sun now. Instead of its warm ruddy glow to encourage us along our way, our isolation becomes more evident as we continue ever faster. We will have to wait for it to welcome us home on our return leg.
One imagines it would still be possible to simply turn around and go back. Alas, that is not how the great discoveries were made, not how the western lands were conquered. The great Pyotr Alekseyevich did not turn back against the Ottomans or the Swedes . . .
* * *
Peter the Great? Now Vladimir was showing some balls. Back in the bad old days, your average Ivan had to be mighty careful about referencing Tsarist history, even when it came to the man who’d dragged Russia out of the Dark Ages. In reality, renaming St. Petersburg to “Leningrad” had been a warning for the proles to not get too uppity.
Vaschenko’s poetic side was starting to peek through as well. Jack imagined him hunched over a table with an ice-cold bottle of Vodka and a half-eaten loaf of black bread by his side. Who knows, maybe he’d actually had some? The Russians had always been a little more liberal about keeping a ration of the good stuff aboard their spacecraft. A long duration mission just about guaranteed there’d been a stash of hooch aboard. Maybe they’d get lucky and find some still there.
* * *
. . . nor did our brothers and sisters give up at Stalingrad. The Motherland did not press on to crush the Nazis through timidity. It is raw courage which propels us.
* * *
There we go. Good boy, back to licking the master’s hand. The old survival instincts always seemed to find their way up through the haze. Vlad was setting up the apparatchiks for some less-than-happy news.
* * *
As we become more adept at deep-space navigation, our ability to keep the inertial guidance units in tune has likewise improved. Gregoriy, bless him, has taken particular pride in his “spacemanship.” If my phrasing is clumsy, it is because I have yet to find a better term. He has become so adept at navigation that he manipulates the sextant as a violinist would a Stradivarius. He outsmarts the automated systems on a regular basis, and I have come to trust his solutions over the computers.
Yet we must treat our vessel with utmost care. The pulse drive exacts a punishing demand upon this great ship; it is the price for such marvelous speed.
* * *
Yeah, this looked promising. Here we go . . .
* * *
Our flight engineer is examining the ablative coatings on each propellant casing for any anomalies; however, we are limited by the onboard test equipment. We can detect impurities in the coatings with spectral analysis, but an X-ray machine is needed for a more complete picture.
* * *
Good luck finding one of those out here. So the string of low-yield nukes they were setting off behind them was making for a rough ride? Not surprising, given twentieth-century Soviet technology. There wouldn’t have been any way to make it a smooth ride even with the best equipment: The drive used shaped nuclear charges with ablative material on both the bomb casing and the ship’s pusher plate. Each bomb’s detonation was directed at a tungsten plate atop its casing—they’d taken to calling them “slugs”—which was vaporized by the blast into a fast-moving jet of plasma against the pusher plate. They could maintain constant acceleration for as long as the crew could stand it until they ran out of slugs.
By Jack’s reckoning, their betters in Moscow presumed that would be quite a long time. The poor bastards would’ve gotten pummeled.
* * *
We have adjusted the timing between detonations to limit our acceleration to one-quarter g until the propellant casings have been inspected. There is only time for random sampling if we are to remain within reach of the outer planets and not exceed the constraints of our life support and consumables. The pressurized access tunnel may eliminate the need for repeated spacewalks, but the inspection ports’ limited visibility makes a thorough check time consuming.
Otherwise, crew activities remain as planned. With signal delay times increasing each day, we have taken notice of the increasing level of detail included in the daily activity plans from Mission Control.
* * *
I’ll bet you did, Vlad. That was a laugh. Russian flight controllers were notorious micromanagers. As Arkangel sped farther and faster from the Motherland’s reach, he imagined their directors in the Mission Control Center, or “TsUP” as translated from Russian, becoming a little more freaked out as response times increased with each passing day. They’d have had no time to react to events, which would’ve driven the flight controllers crazy.
The cosmonauts, on the other hand, no doubt savored being so far out of reach. Such were the lengths some men had to travel to finally gain their freedom.
It left him with one thought that he couldn’t shake, something the old man Rhyzov had said: They found something out there. Something that drove their most trusted crew mad.