Trajectory Book 1 (New Providence) (4 page)

“Fair shmare. I just wanted a taste.” There was some giggling and some more punching.

Emma scrunched up her face. “Perv.”

They walked up to Powell’s office, his door was ajar and another student was talking to him about something. So they waited.

Tamra was still grinning. Emma looked at her and sighed. “Will you quit it? You can tell me about it later.”

Eventually the student, Joe Price, got up and walked out. He nodded to Emma as he passed them, head down, shuffling out. Tamra snorted at him as he went past.

Doctor Tadeuz Powell professor of Astronomy and council science member waved from behind his desk, leaning to see who was out in his hallway. He poked his glasses up to a more prominent position on his nose. “What can I do for you, ladies? Come in.”

“We think we found something.” Em pushed into a chair on the other side of Powell’s desk. Tam followed and closed the door behind her. Emma brought out her tablet and set it in front of the old astronomy professor on his desk and lit the screen up.

Powell studied the recording for a long time. Tamra thought he might be asleep. He had a nose whistle somewhere under his grey moustache.

“I can zoom…”

Powell held up a crooked finger and went back to wheezing at the video. Not much there. No detail. Which constellation was that?

Emma was fidgeting so she sat on her hands to try to keep herself from exploding.

On the ancient monitor panel on Doctor Powell’s desk, a swirling visualization of the asteroid belt near Mars rolled past. An ambient display of the known rocks of the solar system modelled into simulation on the school’s computer system.

“It’s probably just a rock with a chunk of ice or metal on it.” Powell put the tablet back down on his desk and pushed it towards the students.

Em couldn’t contain herself any longer. “That’s what I thought at first too, but the orbit’s wrong. It’s going too fast.”

Powell sighed. “Show me what you have.” Another student mangling some linear algebra. He should let his assistant deal with them.

Emma stood up and picked up her tablet, turning it around, she opened an orbital view. “At the speed we’ve estimated, it’s traveling nearly eighty-thousand kph. That’d almost put it in Mars Orbit, but it’s much further out.”

“How do you know that?”

Now Tam was fidgeting.

Em cleared her throat. “I’ve been following this thing for over a week now. There’s definitely parallax transition. It’s in slight retrograde compared to us on Mars. It’s moving against the stellar background in a way that means it can’t be close to Mars or in our orbit. It’s also traveling much faster than the asteroids nearby. It’s passing them.”

Powell frowned, his eyebrows threatening to cover his eyes. “But it could be a comet.”

Tam blurted, “I thought so too!”

Emma nodded. “We considered that. But there’s no coma. It’d be fuzzy if it were in this close and would probably be brighter all around. This thing’s blinking.”

Powell thought for a minute. “It could still be an asteroid on a large elliptical orbit. The speed could mean it’s near periapsis.” He rubbed his chin and started drawing an ellipse on his screen, frowning harder.

Em nodded. “It could be. But I don’t think it is anymore.” Tam blinked at her.

Powell. “What do you think it is?”

Emma shrugged. “I’m not sure. It could be some space junk.” She trailed off, unsure. “… or maybe a probe?” There was certainly no shortage of flotsam in the solar system. Remnants of Earth’s heady days of colonization and exploration. Every major power in the world had sent up probes and robots into the belt to search for resources. Many of them had crashed out there or got stuck in orbit.

Tamra sniffled. She felt unusually warm in the cramped office, but shivered in spite of the heat. She remembered Greg’s apartment last night and the tricky thermostat. Maybe Greg hadn’t messed with it. She hoped she wasn’t getting sick.
 

008

The Terror.

Captain Francine Pohl was worried about her son Greg. She was checking her feeds and hoping for a message from him. Instead it was just streams of news from the colony about food shortages and a new flu strain making the rounds. It never ceased to amaze her that their well-planned colony with all the safeguards and protocols that were in place when it was created still had to deal with the common cold and various flu viruses.

Life would indeed find a way.

She put down the pad and dealt out another round of solitaire.

Reggie was in the cockpit on watch. Avery was in his bunk, reading or sleeping. Quiet. Macgregor was doing maintenance on their suits.

The Terror was burning under gentle acceleration riding her pre-programmed route through the belt towards Mars. They were two and a half weeks out after a tour in the deep belt. They’d been out for six weeks and were bringing back a passenger in their hold: a big block of dirty snow and ice to top up the station’s reservoir. Enough water to keep them going for another two months until the next supply run.

Francine sat at the folding dining table in the galley, her cards laid out in front of her. Deal three, flip one. The dishes were all packed away after dinner, the room clean but still showing years of use. Worn cupboards. Worn counter. The steel stovetop had a blue and green patina that shone through the dull finish. The table’s plastic laminate scratched and worn smooth by decades of hands and the objects they held. The whiteboard on the small refrigerator stuck into the wall by the cupboards had a list of the crew and their next scheduled kitchen duties. Reggie was up for dinner tomorrow. That was usually interesting.

Deal three, flip one. Move some cards around.

Some light clattering from the equipment room below drifted up through the hatchway. Vanessa dropping some tools as she put the suits back together. They’d all been through a tough bit of abuse on this run and they needed some love to get them back to where they should be. She looked forward to Vanessa’s report on them, hoping none were on the verge of failing.

Suits. It was only two months since her son had washed out of crew training in the space program. They started young, during college, before they’d even finished developing. Their brains and bodies still growing and forming. He hadn’t been able to complete his walk on the surface that every young spacer does as a part of suit acclimatization. The psychologist said it was agoraphobia. He never even made it off the ground.

Francine had tried to talk to him about it. Tried to get him to tell her what happened but he just shook his head. They’d had a fight when she pressed him on it, Greg storming out of the apartment on one of his sullen walks. She just wanted to understand what went wrong. She wanted him to know that it was ok and that she knew it was scary and that was alright.

Mars surface on the Tharsis plains was probably a scarier place than out here, deep in the asteroid belt. At least in space, you’re not getting covered in micro-silicates that can eat through your seals if you stay out too long. She grimaced at the thought of it. Who was she kidding? There was nothing safe about wearing a space suit.

She didn’t think he was ready for space and that was a hard thing to admit. It could be tough out here and you needed a stable mind to do it. When things went wrong, you had to be steady. Even. She thought about her crew and their coping mechanisms. Winston spent a lot of time in his bunk, listening to old music and watching movies. Reggie, well, he took out his frustrations on the rest of the crew.

It could be worse. There were plenty of things Greg could do with that brain of his. Whether as support or logistics for the ships or some other job within the city, there were lots of options. She was really proud of her son. It made her ache when she thought of him. He was the most important thing she’d ever done and she had to spend her time up here in the belt, away from him and his life.

She sighed dealt three and flipped over an ace.
 

009

New Providence.

Greg was skipping his engineering class and feeling guilty about it. He’d been skipping a bunch of classes this term and wanted to see how far his teachers would let things slide. He didn’t care. It’s not like he was going to pass. He’d been ignoring the messages from his advisor asking for a meeting.

He’d been ignoring pretty much everything.

Part of him wanted to see how far he could slip through the system and where that would take him. He knew students in other sections of the school sometimes got recruited for work duty, but that never happened in the space program. They got all the good stuff, and the other students hated them for it. The word was getting around about his flunked test and some of the students were starting to sniff around wondering if a spot had opened up on the roster. They could smell blood.

Some ambient electronica generated from some old space recordings run through a pattern matching algorithm to produce backing beats and pads was pumping on the sound system. The floor was almost covered with discarded ration packs.

They might have a mouse.

The crazy thing was he wanted to talk to someone about it. About his suit test. But anytime someone else brought it up it just made him angry. He didn’t even know why, but he felt it. Just thinking about it now gave him a feeling of dread, tensed his shoulder muscles.

When those doors opened and the Martian wind blew sand and dust into the hangar, he just shut down. He never even made it outside.

Put it away. Read some of the news feeds. Mars Orbital was suspending shuttle transits pending some glitches in the station. Not that he’d be going up any time soon. One of the tunnelling operations north of Ascraeus Mons hit a void and collapsed a section of tunnel. How had they not known that was there? Somebody screwed up the scans. Flu levels in the colony were on an upswing. Agriculture was recruiting. It all sounded like the end of everything.

He flipped over to the recording of the object Tam had shown him from Olympus. Something about it was bugging him.

He pulled up a navigation screen on his tablet. He had a plot from The Terror’s planned trip. It was approximate based on a destination radius and estimated return time, but the cone of flight gave him an ellipse within a certain margin of error where the ship would be. He liked to compare his predictions against the actual telemetry when his mom got back. He was usually pretty accurate.

He put in the coordinates for the object and started plotting, extrapolating a curve based on Emma’s observations. It was still hard to get any accurate distance measurement without knowing anything else about this thing, but if he put it in a band describing possible distances…

“Shit.”

Greg pulled up reports on the current ships in the belt. Four ships listed. He laid down a couple of rough predictions. Three were miners, The Terror was a deep belt vessel.

“Shit!”

He picked up his tablet and bag and bolted out of the apartment into the street towards school.

*

Greg barrelled down the hallway of the science wing, knocking into a junior student. “‘Scuse me!” A professor looked on disapprovingly as he rounded the corner.

The school was cramped, built to accommodate the original five hundred students from the original colony. They hadn’t been able to expand it much past that in the two generations since. As a result of the population growth, it was overcrowded and forced some classes to be taught off-premises in the neighboring commercial block. There was the additional problem of a lack of qualified instructors. Some of the professors had to teach very long days.

Greg struggled against the opposing people traffic. “Excuse me. Coming through.”

“Watch where you’re going, Pohl!” Derek Branson put out a sizeable arm and stopped Greg in his tracks. “Where do you think you’re going?” Derek glowered at Greg under his heavy monobrow. Students behind tried to get a look over him but Derek managed to block most of the hallway.

Greg ducked under the arm and wormed through some of the students. A girl named Cindy squeaked as he pushed between her and a friend. “Can’t talk right now, Derek. Later!”

He pressed on, running awkwardly through the second-floor hall of the science building. He passed the lounge, smell of coffee rushing out. He was just wondering if Tam was still around Powell’s office when he ran into her and Emma in the hallway, screeching to a stop.

“Greg! What are you doing?”

Greg looked over his shoulder at the annoyed mass of students behind him. Derek’s head frowning at him twenty paces back. He made a fist and sneered at Greg over the heads of the other students.

Greg was breathing hard and bent over to catch his breath. “I need to… tell you something… about the thing.”

He looked up. Tamra looking expectant, Emma annoyed. “Let’s get out of the hall.”

Sitting down at a library terminal in one of the few remaining break rooms, they huddled. Tamra asked, “Ok, Greg. What’s up?”

“The thing. I ran some plots and I think it’s heading for our ships.” Greg reached into his pack and pulled out his tablet.

Emma looked pointedly at Tam, “I guess you told him about ‘The Thing’.”