6
Mission Day 3
Velocity 53,658 m/s (120,030 mph)
Acceleration 0.981 m/s2 (0.10g)
Sleep, when it finally came, had been fitful: dreams of long-lost cosmonauts and nuclear bombs and unknowable secrets. The images dissolved as soon as he forced himself awake.
Jack yawned and stretched against the weak gravity. Years of astronaut training was still not enough to overcome the inertia of deep sleep and a lifetime in Earth gravity. As he planted his feet on the deck to stand he pushed off like he would on any normal day. But “normal” on Earth was too much here by a factor of ten, and he ended up rocketing into the ceiling head first. At least the fall back down was gentler.
Rubbing the fresh knot on his head, Jack hopped lightly across the crew berthing deck and climbed a ladder up to the galley into the adjacent recreation area. It was nice enough, with an exercise bike, treadmill, and a weight machine loaded with resistance bands. He’d have to think of a way to partition the gym from their dining room and made a mental note to pay extra attention to the air exchangers on this level. It all looked hospital-clean now, but it was going to get ripe in here over the next couple of years. At least this deck had plenty of windows for natural light, not that they’d ever be able to open one to air the place out.
The indirect lighting on the crew decks shifted their color palette depending on the relative time of day. “Mornings” and “evenings” bathed them in warm light that shifted spectrums between blue, yellow and red with occasional hints of orange and purple for effect. The electrically tinted windows completed the illusion of twilight, dimming the relentless sun while they were still close enough for it to matter. A nice touch, but it couldn’t overcome the astringent smell of artificial air.
Jack turned the lights out to let the sun do its thing. For the first time in days, he had some unoccupied minutes to catch his breath. He had the luxury of being able to pay attention to things other than whatever life-or-death task wasn’t right in front of him. Sunlight streamed in from one side, the ring of portholes lighting up the other half of the room. Jack closed his eyes and leaned against the padded wall, basking in the sunlight. The acoustic insulation in here wasn’t as dense as down in the berthing deck, and so he was able to feel the comforting hum of the spacecraft at work.
Downstairs, the only sound all night besides Roy’s snoring had been the quiet hiss of air circulators. Here in the galley, the change was dramatic. It was still quieter than ISS had been but the abrupt return of all that mechanical background noise made it seem louder. Another level up, the control deck was much the same. Turning back aft, past the crew quarters and far down an access tunnel, the logistics and equipment spaces were calamitous as the pumps and valves and solenoids supplying a dozen utility modules made for an orchestra of mechanical racket.
Jack shoved a spill-proof mug into their hot drink dispenser and pressed the “coffee” button. As the machine hissed, he stared through a nearby porthole. It took a minute to find Earth, now shockingly small. What had been basketball-sized last night was now the size of a marble. The dim gray pebble of the Moon was separated from it by a couple of hand widths. In one day they’d sped beyond cislunar space and Earth’s shine had dimmed enough for the brighter stars to become visible.
Jack tapped his watch, summoning Daisy. “How far out are we?”
The computer’s feminine voice generator answered from a nearby intercom panel, artificially eager to please and a tad too loud for his comfort: WHAT IS YOUR DESIRED REFERENCE FRAME?
He frantically waved his hands at the panel. “Shh! Inside voice, please!” he whispered.
PLEASE EXPLAIN “INSIDE VOICE.”
“It means be quiet. People are sleeping.” Had no one thought to put a simple volume knob on the intercom?
UNDERSTOOD, it said, matching his volume and logging a new subroutine to do the same in the future. DO YOU STILL WISH TO KNOW OUR DISTANCE FROM EARTH?
“Now that’s interesting,” Jack said. “I never answered your first question about frame of reference.”
IT SEEMED LIKE A REASONABLE GUESS, DESPITE OUR ORBIT BEING SUN-CENTERED.
“You guessed right. And whole numbers are fine.” He’d have to ponder over what process led it to a “reasonable guess” later. This could be an interesting side project if they ended up going the full distance to Pluto.
AS OF TWELVE HOURS MISSION ELAPSED TIME, MAGELLAN IS EIGHT HUNDRED SIXTY-NINE THOUSAND, FOUR HUNDRED SEVENTY-FOUR KILOMETERS FROM EARTH’S BARYCENTER.
“Thanks. Back to sleep now.” A status light by the speaker blinked from green to amber.
Overnight they’d sped out to over three times the distance to the Moon. In just a couple of weeks they’d cross Mars’ orbit, though the planet itself would be a million kilometers distant during their passage. A few weeks after that, they’d have a first-person look at Jupiter while using its gravity to add more velocity. Even after all that, it would be another nine months to Pluto. It had taken New Horizons nine years to make the same journey. Swift as they would be, the distance was still intimidating. Space was just too big. “Save any for me?”
Traci’s voice startled him. Jack looked up to find her hopping off the ladder and into the galley. “What?”
She laughed. “Coffee. Java. Breakfast of champions.” She pointed to his mug, still sitting in the machine. “Is that for me, or do I hope for too much?”
“It’s mine,” he said, and removed it from the dispenser. “But you’re welcome to it. I haven’t contaminated it with sugar yet.” A quivering glob of black liquid spilled out in the low gravity, which he managed to sweep the cup underneath to catch before it had a chance to splatter in slow motion onto the deck.
“Keep it,” she said with amusement, and reached for her own mug. “So what’s up? We spent too much time together in the sims for you to be getting weird on me this soon.”
“Am I?” Jack shook his head and slid into a seat at their small table. The gravity from their constant acceleration was just strong enough to make him clumsier than usual. “Guess I didn’t sleep much,” he said.
“I knew it.” Learning from his mistake, she carefully lifted her mug out of the machine and sat down opposite him. “You got all wrapped up in those briefing docs, didn’t you?”
“You didn’t?” He pulled his tablet from the cargo pocket of his utilities and slid it across the table.
Her eyes widened as she opened up the bookmarked folder. “What the—?”
“Someone didn’t do her homework,” he teased. “These are transcripts of Arkangel’s commander’s log, straight from Star City’s archives in the original Russian.”
She set down her coffee and looked through his reading assignment. “You got a different file, then. Mine are just the English translations.” Even for the little Russian she understood, the added mystery was fascinating. “You’re in for some long nights. Might need to break out the sedatives.”
Jack rubbed his eyes. “Great. Am I that obvious?”
“Just keep pounding this bean juice,” she said. “If you need a break today, I’ll cover for you. But you have to do one thing for me.”
“I’m almost afraid to ask.”
She smacked the table, maybe a bit too hard as the low-g reaction pushed her up in her seat. “Tell me about it! What’s in there?”
“Nothing much. The usual vast conspiracy to infiltrate the West and enslave humanity under the iron fist of communism. Otherwise it’s pretty typical stuff. Predictable.”
Traci leaned in, her body language suggesting she wasn’t buying it. “Come on. It’s got to be better than Cold War propaganda.”
“Okay, not quite typical,” he said. “But Owen keeping it from us until now might’ve given Roy a case of the red ass, but it’s giving me the creeps.”
She stared at him over the lip of her mug, silently urging him to go on.
Jack hesitated. “Congress fought tooth and nail over funding the Jupiter expedition, until all of a sudden they didn’t,” he said. “Next thing you know they’re letting NASA throw the Hail Mary pass, adding a high-speed run to the Kuiper Belt without a question why. Two different presidents made sure they kept the money flowing and stood on Owen’s throat to keep us on schedule. They had to know what was out here.”
“No chance they just finally saw the light and realized if we were going to have a space program, that it needed a purpose?”
Jack wasn’t used to her usurping his usual role as devil’s advocate. “Fat chance. The agency hasn’t been able to put a new vehicle into service since Apollo without someone else dragging it across the finish line. We wouldn’t have had the space shuttle without Pentagon money, and now here we sit in a for-real interplanetary spaceship for the same reason. Because once again, the Russians beat us.” He lifted his mug in salute.
“They only did it sooner because they didn’t care about the consequences of putting nukes into orbit,” Traci said. “If they’d had anything resembling an open society, people would have lost their minds.”
“You’re assuming the Kremlin would have cared. One of the advantages of totalitarian police states is you don’t have to give a crap about public opinion.”
“On the other hand, they put a lot of effort into molding ours. They convinced a lot of our own people that we were the bad guys.” She gestured toward the papers. “Anything in there about purpose?”
“What do you mean? Rhyzov told us.”
“And you believe that?”
“No reason not to,” Jack said. “He had no need to lie.”
“I didn’t mean that,” she said. “Think about the context. Back then, the Kremlin was scared to death of us building an antimissile system that would’ve neutered their nuclear force.”
“So they counteract that by taking most of their tactical warheads off the planet? I don’t follow.”
Traci rolled her eyes. Jack was thinking like a technician while she was talking strategy. “A pulse drive is just a really big gun that shoots nukes out of its tail. How easy do you think it would’ve been to repurpose something like that into a weapon?”
Jack blanched at the thought. The original purpose, to create some kind of brute-force way-back machine that could read our mail from the future, was just too absurd. Nobody, not even old commie fossils like Andropov, could have possibly believed that. So was it all in fact a cover story?
She pressed the point. “What if we’re looking at this all wrong? What if it was a weapon to begin with?”
Jack leaned back and rubbed at his temples. “You’re making my brain hurt.” Could some kind of orbiting nuclear battleship have been their actual goal? How close would that have brought us to an extinction-level war? “They wouldn’t have needed a ten-meter pusher plate for a nuclear cannon. Getting something that big into orbit in the first place shows commitment.”
“Dual purposes, then. They would’ve had a lot of incentive to make it look benign, even to the point where they could demonstrate its use as a drive system. C’mon, you’re the engineer.”
Jack scratched at the fresh stubble around his chin. “A propulsion system that powerful is going to be indistinguishable from a weapon of mass destruction, ours included. The only difference is which direction you point it.”
“Especially when it’s loaded to the gills with actual WMDs for propellant,” she said. “Maybe the crew understood that and took matters into their own hands.”