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3.3

10 March

I.R.V. Intercession

Extra-Kuiper Space

258 A.U. from Earth


“My greatest concern right now,” Michael was saying, “is for the mental and spiritual health of our frozen passengers.”

“Why?” Thenbecca asked. “They’re frozen.”

They were in the hibernation bay together, where the coffins of the aforementioned freezelings protruded from the walls and formed a mazelike pattern on the floor. Between the coffins, the white padding of the walls was puckered with indentations where it was riveted to the metal plates underneath. The floor where Michael and Thenbecca “stood” in the low gravity was padded in the same way, making the whole place feel vaguely like a lunatic asylum.

“Hmm, yes,” he said. “And what happens when they aren’t?”

He’d assumed a lecturing tone, and resolved to dial it back, because they were supposed to be bonding as peers and human beings. This was his fourth time in session with Thenbecca, and he still found her difficult to read. She was generally cheerful all the time, which surely had to be a front, because nobody was cheerful all the time. But what lay behind it was . . . unclear.

“They’ll be awake for a few days,” she said. “Like a big sleepover party.”

“Some longer than others, yes? We thaw them out in groups of eight, over a period of two days. And then put them back in—I think?—the same order? Right away, that sets up some group dynamics that nobody has planned for.”

“Well, okay,” Thenbecca said. “Point taken. And as both the chef and the purser of this bucket, I’m really kind of responsible.”

“As are we all.”

She put a hand on one of the coffins—actually called a “hibernation pod”—and peered in at the person inside. A man, gray-skinned and quite dead-looking. Fortunately, the display on the coffin’s upper surface said otherwise. It said he wasn’t actually frozen at all, but hovering at two degrees centigrade, at least down inside his core. He looked frozen, though. There was frost on the coffin’s glassy inner surface. His name was Donald Banhold, and Michael had never met him.

For reasons of speed and practicality, the whole ship was modeled after Dan Beseman’s Mars ship, Concordia. This meant that, even though the hibernation bay was not part of a landing craft, it was nevertheless shaped like a truncated cone twelve meters high, with ninety-two of these pods projecting inward from the white walls. It was a bit like being inside a gigantic vending machine. Actually, it was exactly like that.

Michael and Thenbecca were standing at the bottom of the chamber, on either side of the railing surrounding the ladder, which led upward into the cargo deck (and the service deck above that), and downward into a tunnel leading to the aft airlock and—God forbid!—the engine. The flutter drive was thirty meters below them, connected to the conical ship by narrow struts, but still from here you could feel it humming as the fuel sphere slowly ablated away into gamma radiation.

“It feels like a violation,” Michael observed, “to watch him sleep like this. I’m not the flight surgeon, and neither are you. Is it ethical? Are we voyeurs? I wish we could give them their privacy.”

“Yeah. I mean, they knew what they were signing up for, but yeah.”

“We’ll be driving them like cattle. There’ll hardly be time for their individual concerns when we wake them up, yes? Think how disorienting it must be, to be frozen on Earth, and thawed out twelve months and twenty-eight hundred A.U. later, in your underwear, with seven strangers shivering around you. And then told to stay out of the way while we thaw out the next batch. Yes, of course, they’ve agreed to all that, but still it’s a strange thing. I wonder which is worst—to be in the first group to be woken up that way, or the last?”

“You have been thinking about this.”

“Too much, yes. I need to share the burden. And of course, as you say, they’ll only be awake for a couple of days. We’ll shove them straight into the most transformative experience of their lives, and then right back into their coffins, and no, ma’am, you can’t send a message to your people back home. The bathroom situation alone is going to be ghastly, especially for those with minimal experience in zero gravity. One bathroom is fine for just the eight of us, but a hundred? That can’t be good, not any of it.”

“Welcome to Igbal’s world,” Thenbecca said. She had been the chef at ESL1 when she’d been selected for this mission. She must know him pretty well.

“All hardware, no heart?”

“Some heart,” she said. “More than you’d think. But he has people chasing behind him all day, cleaning up the details.”

“And now that’s us.”

“Yes,” Thenbecca said. “But we agreed to it, too. These problems can’t be helped.”

“Indubitably,” he agreed, “I’m sure the design tradeoffs were very challenging. But that doesn’t lessen the tragedy of it.”

The ship was not, of course, a perfect copy of H.S.F. Concordia. Among its unique features, you had the forward and aft particle shields, and the inflatable/deployable Encounter Bubble, and no landing craft. There was only empty space between the aft struts, where Concordia’s enormous chemical fuel tanks would be. Those were major design adjustments. But like Concordia, Intercession was designed for a crew of eight and a total complement of one hundred. Fully loaded, it weighed as much as three jumbo jets, and there was barely enough antimatter in the solar system to push it out this far, this quickly. To have it otherwise would mean bringing fewer people, or else waiting five or ten or even fifteen years longer to commence the mission at all, with a larger and more capable ship. Or, to take much longer to get out here and back, with the same amount of antimatter pushing a heavier ship. This mission was what Igbal Renz had been able to accomplish in the four years he’d allotted himself. Any of the other options were clearly worse, both from a geopolitical standpoint and, to be honest, a business one. Whatever motives had brought Igbal all the way out here, he did not have unlimited resources. Bogglingly large, yes, but nevertheless finite. For all of these reasons and more, it had to be this way.

Thenbecca surprised him by reaching out to touch his hand. “You’re a very kind person,” she said. “It makes me realize how awful most of us are.”

Accepting the compliment, Michael said, “It’s about choices, about where you spend your time and your energy and your thoughts. In small environments, it matters because you’re stuck living in the consequences of your own actions. In large ones, it matters because even the flapping of a butterfly’s wing ripples outward until it changes the entire world. Kindness and self-interest are not at odds, unless you define your self-interest very narrowly. Which is a phenomenally stupid thing to do.”

“There’s no shortage of stupid,” Thenbecca said.

“Alas,” he agreed. And once again had nothing to add. If God had indeed created the world—created a whole universe in which Earth and humanity might eventually arise—then surely there was a purpose to it all. An imperfect striving toward some eventual perfection? But it was hard to see, and Michael’s only certain role was to help the people around him. It was a daunting task, and one for which he was very definitely unworthy. But he would keep after it nonetheless!

After a companionable silence of perhaps twenty seconds, Thenbecca said, “You’ve never asked me about my name. Usually it’s the first thing people want to know.”

“You’ll tell me if and when you feel like it,” Michael said, though he was indeed very curious. Was it Greek? Semitic? He’d never met a Thenbecca before. But he knew: people who carried an unusual characteristic around with them were generally tired of answering questions about it. “Names do have a way of defining people, for good or ill.”

Then veering back to the previous topic, he said, “The food situation will be ghastly as well. MREs?”

Meals, Ready to Eat. Military-style packaged meals, served cold. As the chef, Thenbecca had had a hand in planning that side of mission logistics.

“Not just for them,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “For us as well. It’s really the only way we can pass out three hundred meals a day. We want to make sure hunger is not a problem these people have to deal with, even briefly.”

“Won’t that generate a lot of trash?”

“It will,” she agreed, “And that goes straight back into the cargo hold. We have to carry it all back with us, which wastes fuel on the way back home, but the alternative would set a bad pollution precedent.”

“Yes, I suppose it would.”

Even in the vastness of extrasolar space, littering would leave behind a potential navigation hazard for some unlucky future traveler. It would take a million years and a planet’s worth of mass for such pollution to rival that of Low Earth Orbit, but at interstellar speeds, any mass at all had the potential to vaporize a ship.

The awakened sleepers would generate a lot of sewage, also—far more than the recycling system could possibly recover during the twelve-month journey home—but there was a large, disgusting storage tank set aside for that purpose.

Thenbecca said, “My birth name was Rebecca. I was the second of two children. My mom used to always say, ‘We had Petey and then Becca.’ Until I was three, I didn’t realize Becca was my actual name. My parents would call out for me, and I’d walk up saying ‘Thenbecca. Thenbecca.’ And Mom would maybe say something like, ‘That’s right, we had Petey and then Becca.’ By the time I figured out that wasn’t my name, it was too late. It was firmly stuck. I officially changed it when I turned eighteen.”

She looked somewhat embarrassed by the admission, which Michael found strange.

“Do you still like it?” he asked gently.

“I do. I mean, it’s my name. But sometimes I can’t help second-guessing my younger self. I got a tattoo at that time, also, and I sometimes wish . . . I’d waited?”

“It’s quite common for people to change their birth names,” he said. Indeed, something like twenty percent of the global population had done it at one time or another. Monks and priests and nuns often changed their names when they took their vows. Some abbeys actually required it. Michael himself had not done it, but he understood the urge. It was also the norm among people changing gender identities or entering show business, or taking up residence in a foreign country where their actual names were unpronounceable.

Of course, people also did it for entirely frivolous reasons. Before retreating to monastic life, Michael had known a guy named Flash-E who was not even a musician, and he had known a young woman who had named herself Preeble on a whim. Preeble!

“It’s a beautiful name,” he added. “And naming for birth order makes just as much sense as Russian and Scandinavian patronyms. Perhaps someday we’ll all be named that way.”

“You’re too kind,” she said, somewhat sarcastically.

And that’s when a grain of ice struck the ship, hard.

The forward shield—a dome-shaped stack of alternating materials—shrieked through the support struts as it absorbed the hit, as did the shock-absorbing springs and pistons on which it was mounted. With four meters of travel available to it, the shield jammed fully two and a half meters closer to the nose of the ship itself, before easing back into its original position. Michael and Thenbecca knew none of this at the time, but the bang-scream-jolt of it told Michael the gist of what had happened.

“God!” he said, as fear washed over him. Michael firmly believed that when he died, his soul would go to some kind of heaven and meet some kind of maker, and in slower moments, this largely stilled his fear of death. But the process of becoming dead (along with fear of pain, injury, or incapacity) remained frightening, and in any case the limbic system had its own ideas. A coppery wave of adrenaline flooded through his body.

“What was that?” Thenbecca said, her face gone the color of linen. But of course she knew.

“We hit something,” Michael said. “It couldn’t have been too—”

And that was when a second ice grain hit, followed moments later by a third and fourth. Michael felt the shield’s shock absorbers bottom out, transferring the impact straight through the four struts that connected the fore and aft shields. The hull itself—the tall, slender, pressurized cone that held all the humans—was attached to those struts in multiple places, at the floor of each deck, and so a ripple passed through the hull, and he felt that as well. And saw it, like the ground ripples of an earthquake.

The lights went red, and Ptolemy’s voice said, calmly but loudly, “Impact alarm. Impact alarm. All personnel to pressurized lockers.”

“Shit,” said Thenbecca. From the look on her face, Michael figured she did not expect to make it to the lockers alive.

“It’ll be all right,” he told her, based on nothing whatsoever.

But she was already on the ladder, not climbing it but heaving herself upward against the minimal gravity. She cleared six rungs with the first mighty pull, and six more with the second one, and in another moment she was into the sealable tube connecting the hibernation bay to the cargo deck.

Didn’t have to tell her twice, apparently.

Fighting to remain as calm as possible, Michael followed along behind her, shrugging out of his robe as he went, for one could not climb fully dressed into a spacesuit, but only in the slick, gray, form-fitting garments known as “space underwear.” He kicked off his slippers as well, so that by the time he entered the cargo deck, he was ready to ensuit.

Of course, everyone else was entering the cargo deck as well, shedding clothing as they went, crowding and bumping against each other in the low gravity. Life in space involved a lot of group hangouts in underwear (or even, in a dust-control airlock, completely naked), and one grew accustomed to it. In an emergency setting like this, one barely even noticed. But one noticed a little bit, yes, the curve of a hip or buttock, or the intriguing point where two legs came together. Even a monk, nearly two decades into his vows, was not above noticing, as eight people clambered past one another and into their respective lockers. The human brain was a fantastic instrument, indeed.

The truncated cone of the cargo deck was a hexadecagon in cross section; a sixteen-sided polygon. Here, pressurized spacesuit lockers—each with a crew member’s name block-printed above—alternated with entrances to the surrounding storage ring, which held tools and equipment of various kinds, but mostly the deflated Encounter Bubble, which would house the ninety-two sleepers when they awoke.

Getting into one’s own locker was easy enough, even with other people crowding the space. The heavy glass door swung outward, and one stepped inside the space where one’s spacesuit was hung. Actually getting into the spacesuit was slightly more complicated; one slithered into the upper half, with helmet already attached, and then one lifted and turned to get one’s feet into the trousers and boots. Mating the two halves involved lining up a pair of rings and then, with the aid of a wrist-mounted mirror, rotating a latching ring until it seated. Just like in the safety drills.

The cargo deck stank of fear. With considerable commotion, all eight crew members were attempting to follow these steps at the same time, while shouting things like, “Is the hull intact?” and “Can I get a goddamn status report?”

“Atmospheric pressure nominal and stable,” said Ptolemy. “Hull inductance measurements nominal and stable. Hull breach is not indicated.”

“We hit something,” Michael said, although by now it must be obvious.

“Probably passed through a comet tail,” said Dong.

“No, but a very diffuse cloud of ice crystals might—” said Igbal.

And that was when the fifth grain hit.


After that, there was a lot of chaos. Igbal was the first one out of his locker, and without a word he launched himself up the ladder toward the bridge.

Next out was Michael himself, who was fanatical about safety drills and could literally don a spacesuit while blindfolded. Thank goodness he had, in fact, helped design the fixtures in these lockers, to make sure such a thing was exactly possible. A few years back, Saint Joe’s had suffered two deaths from vacuum exposure (and very nearly three!), and Michael had never gotten over it. He was paranoid before that happened, but not paranoid enough. So, indeed, whatever ill fortune befell human astronauts from that point forward would not be because he, himself, had failed to prepare. Once out, he hovered near the ladder, ready to provide assistance.

Third was Dong Nguyen, a veteran of Transit Point Station who had logged more EVA hours than any other human in history. He headed up/forward as well, though probably to stand by the forward airlock, which happened to be in the nose of the bridge.

After that, things got complicated.

Hobie Prieto (more a pilot than an astronaut per se) took a full ninety seconds to get dressed, cursing all the while. The flight surgeon, Rachael Lee, took fifteen seconds longer.

“This is not acceptable,” Michael told them both, as they emerged like hermit crabs from outgrown shells. They had performed better than this in safety drills; there was no excuse for performing so badly when it actually mattered.

The others—Sandy, Harv, and Thenbecca—all gave up around that time.

“I can’t get this,” Harv said about his waist ring.

“I think I’m stuck,” Thenbecca said, about her entire body. She’d put the trousers on first, and then apparently been unable to maneuver her torso into the suit top. She had her head and arms in there, and would have needed to be a contortionist to get any further.

Sandy didn’t say anything, but a glance through the clear glass of her locker door revealed helmet and gloves floating free inside there, with Sandy herself apparently snagged by the camisole top on one of the suit rack hooks, looking back and forth for the reason she couldn’t get her feet down on the floor.

“I’m not so sure about bringing her on the mission,” Michael recalled Igbal saying, back in the early days while the ship was still under construction. “She’s a brain with no thumbs. She’s a brain with no brains, really. But none of my decent astronauts understand how the flutter drive works, and anyway I need them at ESL1, making money.”

Michael had met some of Igbal’s astronauts—ridiculously competent women, with nerves of steel and all that—and wished at least one of them were here now. To the laggards before him he said, with rare sarcasm and rarer anger, “Had this been an actual emergency, the three of you might well be trapped in those lockers for the rest of your lives.”


Thirty minutes after the fifth and hopefully final impact, the crew—still suited up—was crowded in the wardroom, looking up at the video displays. Even the ship’s minimal gravity was gone; the flutter drive had been shut down, and without its constant vibration, the place was as quiet as an air-conditioned morgue.

The two not present, Dong Nguyen and Igbal Renz himself, were outside, floating on tethers, inspecting the forward shield.

Michael watched the dizzying view from their helmet cameras, pasted alongside Ptolemy’s infographic of the damage to the shield. Five cones, like red icicles, sliced partway through the dome of the shield. One of them went almost all the way through.

Dong and Igbal were the most experienced astronauts, and the most qualified to perform emergency repairs. Yes, Igbal Renz, the trillionaire! He’d after all made his money by building things, often with his own two hands, and he was among the very first humans to take up permanent residence in space. But still, Michael found it jarring.

Dong’s and Igbal’s crew functions were also the least critical on a moment-to-moment basis, so in that sense they were the most expendable. Yes, again, Igbal himself. He was a shambling wreck of a captain and probably knew it, and if he died out there, it would make basically zero difference to any mission outcomes. But still, yes, it was jarring to see the owner of Renz Ventures with a tool kit strapped to his leg, climbing hand over hand on an aluminized nylon tether, across the front-most surface of a wounded spaceship, like a common mechanic.

A common mechanic moving at three percent of lightspeed, who could be vaporized at any moment by a microgram of stationary matter. Michael had heard, but not quite believed, that Igbal was as cavalier about his personal safety as he was about everything else. It wasn’t courage that had driven him out there, so much as bloody-mindedness. He wanted the ship back on its way as quickly as possible and would not let anything as trivial as his own fears get in the way of that.

“We’re coming up on the holes,” said Dong. They were “walking” across the shield on magnetic boots.

The forward shield was a dome-shaped stack of alternating materials, and according to radar and surface conductance assays, it had absorbed the impacts by converting the particles into cones of relativistic plasma that, in turn, vaporized layers of tungsten and ballistic nylon and silicon nitride and tungsten again, and then spread wider through a layer of vacuum before again striking metal. According to Ptolemy’s best estimates, the particles weighed roughly 0.1 milligrams each, and were moving at about nine thousand kilometers per second relative to the ship. Striking with the energy of a thousand machine-gun bullets, the heaviest particles had worked their way through a hundred layers of shielding—more than half the thickness of the shield.

The helmet cameras didn’t show anything at first, but then, in Dong’s wandering view, Michael caught sight of a blackened divot in the otherwise-smooth surface of the shield. This by itself was surprising, because Ptolemy had estimated none of the grains were larger than four hundred microns across. But the hole was big enough that Dong could have stuck the thumb of his spacesuit glove in there. And a few meters beyond it was another hole, about the same size.

Igbal was holding a radar gun, playing it back and forth across the surface of the shield. “Impact cone is stippled,” he said. “We’ve got some solid structure under there, full of holes, like a colander.”

Michael nodded to himself. This was good news; it meant the damage, while serious, was not catastrophic. Like a bullet wound, the entry hole was the tip of a hollow cone. But if there was still solid material in that void—if it was mostly solid material—then those layers of the shield would still have some ability to absorb and dissipate the energy of another impact.

Dong Nguyen said, “I think we should put some spray foam down these holes. Let it expand and fill up the empty space.”

“That’ll compromise the vacuum gaps between layers,” Igbal said.

“More than they already are?” Dong said.

And that appeared to be the sum total of the technical discussion. Dong’s camera held steady on Igbal’s leg pack as Igbal fished out a canister with a straw-tipped spray nozzle on top.

Filling the first hole took them just a few minutes; they knelt beside it on magnetic knee pads, inserted the canister’s straw tip as far in as it would go, and pressed the button. For a while, nothing happened.

“How does this help?” Thenbecca asked.

To which Sandy answered, “You know how jumping off a bridge can kill you, even if the water is deep? For a body moving fast enough, there’s no time for the water to move out of the way, so it behaves more like a non-Newtonian liquid. Basically, a solid.”

“Okay,” said Thenbecca, hesitantly.

“To a particle moving at three percent of the speed of light, everything is a brick wall. It hits that foam, it’s going to vaporize, just the same as if it hit a metal plate.”

“The plate is going to absorb more energy,” Michael said.

Inside her helmet, Sandy nodded. “Yes. But if you expand that plate with voids, it’s an even better dissipator. Repair foam is actually a pretty good solution, all things considered. Better than the nothing that was in there before.”

On Igbal’s camera display, Dong was pulling the straw farther and farther back, until the tip of it was completely out of the hole, and then a yellow-white mass was boiling out behind it, forming a stalagmite the size of his fist, and then the size of his entire arm. It curled over a bit, like a ram’s horn, and then it stopped expanding.

“Do we shave off the excess?” Dong wanted to know. “I don’t think we need to.”

“I don’t think so, either,” Igbal said. Then more loudly: “Anyone disagree?”

No one did, so the two of them moved on to the next hole.

“Are they going to have enough foam?” Thenbecca wanted to know.

“There’s more in the equipment locker,” Sandy told her.

“What if we need it for something else?”

No one had an answer to that. Whatever they had, they had, and the best they could do was fix what they knew needed fixing, and hope for the best.


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