Trajectory Book 1 (New Providence) (17 page)

Edson nodded. “Could be.” A light started blinking on the console. Incoming message. He put it on.

“This is Mars Control to MSS18 Calypso. Captain Franklin, please be advised, we have your daughter on the station.”

A pause.

“Hi Dad.”

Emma.

What the hell were they doing putting her on the station? Mancuso, you old fool. What about his wife, Julie? Was she alone down there? The rest of the transmission barely registered as Edson’s mind spun with questions.

He opened a channel. He wasn’t even really sure what he was going to say so he just spoke. Operational talk.

“Mars Control this is MSS18 Calypso. Acknowledging transmission. We are commencing the day’s burns as per previous flight plan. Please update with all available telemetries as they become available.” He took a breath, recovering. “Emma. So good to hear your voice. Tell your mom I love her. And I love you. Talk to you soon. Calypso out.”

He rang the ship’s bell then addressed the crew over the intercom. “Burning in five, secure the ship.”

Carl buckled in, cursing under his breath. “I guess we’re staying on plan, then?”

Edson nodded. “That’s right. Commence pre-burn checks.” He ran through the checklist in a hurry, skipping over the engine contamination warnings requesting a purge. “Just make sure that bomb’s ready to go.”

Carl belted himself in. Double checked the checklists as Edson skipped through them. Noted the engine contamination warnings and looked at his captain. He’d never seen Edson this worked-up before. It made him uneasy. “The bomb. Right.” That thing in their hold he and Trigger’d wired up with duct tape and old suit parts. If that was their only defence he didn’t like their chances.

Maybe there’d be another way. Maybe he could make his own luck.
 

043

Making Time.

Hal watched the latest telemetry from Control on the nav screen.

“You’ve got to hand it to him, he’s a tough old bastard.” Hal marvelled at the heavy burns Edson was pulling onboard Calypso, widening the gap ahead of them. The predicted path of the object was due to intersect with Edson’s ship in about a day, if they didn’t blow right past it.

Jerem studied the chart. “The Terror’s still gaining on us, Dad.”

“Yep.” Hal squeezed a mouthful of beans into his mouth and chewed on them. He was looking forward to some eggs.

“Looks like Edson’s gained a day on us. Maybe two.” Jerem had been keeping track. That put them four to five days behind Calypso. They were still on target for ten days until Mars.

“You get any breakfast?” Hal finished his beans.

“Nah. Just had some coffee.”

“You should eat something.”

“I will when I get hungry.”

“Well don’t wait too long.”

“Fine!”

Jerem got up and pushed himself down the ladder past the bunks. He kept sliding past the galley and into the equipment locker, landing with a thud.

He walked over to his suit and looked it over. He’d spent a fair chunk of yesterday cleaning it, brushing off the debris that had accumulated during their mining job, brushing its surface inside the airlock where they could push the dust and grit out into space. His suit was as clean as it was going to get, and the equipment room had only suffered some minor extra dust in the process. It looked almost as good as the unused spare hanging on its rack.

Jerem sat down on the floor and pulled out his tablet. Space travel was incredibly boring, only this time there was an overbearing sense of dread. What was that thing out there chasing after Calypso? It made him feel sick just thinking about it. Maybe they should be doing something different. Rather than steering away from it, below the ecliptic, boosting after Calypso and trying to meet this thing together.

Em,

Give us some good news. We’re out here, four, maybe five days behind your father. They’re burning for Mars but we’re on the slow boat. What’s it looking like from down there? We haven’t seen any new telemetry on the bogey since just after Pandora and I’d sure like to know what it’s doing.

Waiting sucks.

So, what do you think it is? Human, alien or other? Maybe it’s just a really smart rock. That’s my theory anyway. I’m sticking with it. Even smart rocks are pretty stupid.

Human? Doesn’t seem likely, does it? The way that thing moved after Pandora I don’t think a human crew could survive.

Alien. Seems pretty unlikely too. Why would they shoot down our mining ships? That is a shitty first contact effort. The shittiest. Maybe they thought our ships were pests and they sent an exterminator for us. Interstellar roach control.

That leaves “Other”. What is “Other”? Robots? That’d be something. We haven’t heard a peep from Earth in over a hundred years. After they blew themselves up everything went dark. Nothing made it off planet after that and everything they had in space wasn’t exactly a fast mover.

So what do you think it is?

He thought about that for a second. “Everything they had in space.” Earth had sent up a lot of probes, robots and research ships during their final years leading up to the Collapse. Most of it ended up around Mars. Some of the simpler probes launched during the earlier part of the twenty-first century had kept doing what they were meant to do, sending back signals from the distant parts of the solar system. Many had simply shut down or disappeared without any control signals from Earth.

He thought about telling her about the dreams he’d been having, but these channels were all monitored. He wasn’t sure he cared, but writing them down wasn’t exactly going to help him out here either.

He hit send on his message and stowed his tablet in one of the pockets in his pants. Jerem climbed back up the ladder into the galley to forage for a bean stew ration package. Later, he’d make some coffee.
 

044

Lighthouse.

“Shouldn’t we try to figure out what it is?” Emma was watching Ortega across the table in the board room. The latest visuals from Watchtower running on the wall behind them, accelerated ten times so they could see the blinking against the stellar background.

“Let’s forget about theorizing about what it is for now. We need to calculate it’s trajectory. We need to be accurate.” Ortega impassively typed rapidly into his tablet and the displays changed. “Here are the plots of every blink captured by Watchtower. Olympus’ data isn’t really useful anymore as it’s blacked-out for at least half of every day.”

The plots appeared on the screen against the stars. A dash-dotted line indicating an inferred path with each dot representing a flash.

Ortega continued. “We can tell where it’s headed, and we’re starting to get better depth data, but we’re still not certain. Last known point of contact — Pandora — gives us a pretty good line.”

Emma stared at the plot. At the right of the image, were a few dozen blips until the Pandora explosion. It was illustrated by a larger dot. Then the smooth curve where the object radically altered its course putting it on track to Calypso.

“Do you have an extrapolation for Calypso’s destination and a prediction of where the object should be around their intersection?” She had a pretty good guess where they’d be.

“Calypso’s burn pattern and velocity are making that hard to predict.” Ortega hadn’t really moved since they had set up in here. Other than to type his hands remained in his lap the whole time. Sitting straight. “Today, they’ve been altering their burn direction. Their orientation keeps changing, adding what appears to be a spiral to their trajectory.”

Emma smiled. Her dad was being tricky. He used to tell her about yacht racing on Earth. How you could sail in a zig-zag course to throw off your opponents. “Yeah, he’ll keep doing that. Expect it to get crazier.” She hoped he wasn’t going to mess up his orbital insertion. Or miss Mars altogether. “We’ll have to keep plotting his course. They may need some corrections from us if they get off-line.” Or worse.

Ortega nodded.

“So, we should be able to get a rough destination volume where we can expect them around encounter time.” She wished Greg were here. He was really good at these navigational calculations. She looked again at the object’s path and its too-fast line across the stars. “Can we infer anything about the object from this data?”

Ortega looked at her. “All we have is velocity and direction on two axes.” He thought for a second. “And one known point on the third axis, backed up by some emerging parallax data.” Emma could see his brain working the way his eyes defocused.

Emma sat forward, hands on the table. “Right. But we know that velocity is too fast for that position. So we know it’s not in a regular orbit, if it’s in an orbit at all. We also know it was able to do a massive course correction in a very short time,” she pointed at the curve, “we should be able to establish some bounds on the object’s mass and maybe some values for–”

She stopped. Ortega watching her.

“I’m an idiot. These things aren’t reflections. They’re burns!”

Ortega blinked at her. “Wasn’t that obvious?”

Emma’s eyes widened. “Are you serious? You knew that?”

Ortega fidgeted. “It was obvious when it performed the S-curve. The course change implied an exerted force.”

Emma felt her face get warm again. She felt like an idiot.

Ortega carried on, oblivious to the tiny crisis forming in front of him. “But if I am interpreting what you’re suggesting, we should be able to infer the mass of the object based on these ‘burns’ and the course corrections required to maintain an intercept course with our ships.” He smiled, pleased. Not necessarily with himself but for having a conversation based around his observations and data.

Emma nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I’m wondering.” She was thinking again. “If these things are burns, they’re tiny. They barely show up on our optics they’re so short. Like, sub second burn times. What kind of engine can do that?”

“I don’t know.” Ortega unconsciously rubbed his chin with a knuckle.

Emma’s tablet beeped and a new message notification popped up on it. From Jerem. She smiled but forced herself to put it aside to read later.

“It could be a small fission pulse.”

Emma looked at him.

“Freeman Dyson proposed a space ship design back in the mid-twentieth century based on a theory by Stanislaw Ulam using nuclear fission for propulsion. Gamma ray lasers fired at uranium pellets to produce fission inside a directed cone would produce directional thrust…”

“That sounds huge.” Emma considered this. She’d read about Project Orion in her History of Physics course. The proposed designs were massive. “Also, dirty. Wouldn’t we be receiving a lot of extra noise from the boosts?”

Ortega remembered Pradeep’s x-ray bursts and put them aside for now. Wrong emissions. “Yes, we’d be picking up wide spectrum noise if these detonations were in the terajoule range. Most of the theories around these devices were never tested and measured in kilotons of TNT explosives.”

Emma looked at the chart again. She got up and walked over to the screen. “How much force would it take to move a ship like that along this curve?”

Ortega started entering some values into his tablet.

Emma stopped him. “A lot.” She pointed at the screen again. “I think we’re looking at something much much smaller.”
 

045

New Providence.

Tamra had been awake for a few hours. She was cold and clammy in her bed. Unable to get comfortable.

She heard the door slide open and close and some thumping in the living room. “Greg?”

More thumping. Footsteps outside her room. Then her door slid open and Greg stuck his head in. “Hey babe. How’re you feeling?”

Tamra felt miserable and started coughing. “Where did you go?”

He came in and sat on the bed. “Was at the Reef. Can I get you anything?”

“No.”

“You feel any better?” Greg tried to fluff Tamra’s pillow with her head still on it, failed.

“Not really.”

“Well, at least you’re not passed out on the floor.” Greg smiled and brushed a hair out of her face. “You’re still warm though. I’ll get you some more water and some ibu.”

He left the room. Tamra sighed and tried to get comfortable.

Some rummaging sounds from the kitchen. He came back a minute later with a glass of water and a couple of gels. “Here ya go.”

She sat up with some effort and took the pills. Sitting made her feel woozy and she dropped back down onto her pillow.

“You heard from Emma yet?” Greg sat on the floor.

“Haven’t really been checking my messages.”

“Oh.” Greg looked at his feet. One of his socks had a hole in the toe. “Wonder if she made it up there ok?”

Tamra struggled with her blanket. “You don’t have to sit here. I’m fine.”

Greg smiled. “You’re sick. Get some rest. I’ll go sit on the couch.”

She tried to argue but was cut off by a coughing fit.