Delta-v, page 25
“. . . in accordance with EU regulations. Company management will need those documents out at the work site. In coming years it may avert litigation. Next, the foreman should supply you with your captain and crew shipping licenses.”
Kerner passed her a packet of documents with ID cards for each of the crew.
She turned to them. “Guys. Your shipping licenses. I know you were concerned we’d leave without them.”
Tighe glided close to check his out. “Goddamnit. I can never get away from this DMV photo. I look half asleep in this picture.”
“You look high.” Morra laughed.
Rochat examined the faces of the crew. “At this time, I need to hear a positive proclamation that each of you are embarking on this journey of your own volition and that you reached this decision free of all coercion. Please state for the record, beginning with you, Captain Clarke.”
Clarke did so, as did the rest of the crew.
Satisfied, Rochat nodded. “That is all. I wish you a safe and successful expedition.” With that, Rochat’s image faded.
Kerner turned to them. “Well, the Konstantin is all yours.” He pounded the central core’s aluminum-zinc wall. “She’s a sound ship, and she’ll look after you. Please, if you do not mind . . .” He reached into his flight suit and pulled out a photo of the Konstantin’s first crew floating in this compartment the day before. He then produced a marker pen. “. . . can I ask you to sign this for posterity?”
The crew exchanged looks. Clarke grabbed the marker and held the photo against the wall as she signed beneath her image. They passed the photo from one crewman to another, each signing it with their own unique flourish.
When they were done, Kerner took care to place the photo in a sealed sleeve, then had them pose for another group photo, which he took with his crystal’s integrated camera. “The departure countdown has begun. . . .” He checked his crystal. “I am synchronizing your displays. We are at t minus three hours, six minutes and counting.”
The digital countdown appeared in the upper right corner of all their displays.
“When we reach t minus zero, the Konstantin’s main engines will fire, and she will accelerate on a trajectory to Ryugu. Mission control will be in contact within the hour to make sure you’re strapped in and prepared for the injection burn.” He looked at them. “Any questions?”
They shook their heads.
Kerner held up a phone handset. “I have here a comm link to mission control. They can connect you into Earth’s phone system. If any of you wish to call someone before you depart, now is the time. There is a one-and-a-half-second delay due to the distance from Earth, and I should warn you that Dr. Bruno will be monitoring your call to ensure that no confidential information is divulged. You will be cut off if you reveal anything about this mission or your location.” He held up the phone again. “Anyone?”
Adisa raised his hand, as did Tsukada, Clarke, and Tighe.
Since Tighe was closest, Kerner passed the phone to him. “Five minutes.”
“Right.” Tighe moved hand over hand to the far section of the Central Hab and held on to the storage shelving. He then turned on the phone.
A mission controller’s voice came on the line. “Who am I speaking with?”
“James Tighe.”
“What number would you like to call, Mr. Tighe?”
Tighe was surprised he remembered the number so readily—or maybe he wasn’t surprised. He repeated the country code and phone number to the mission controller.
“Stand by, I’ll connect you directly. Please remember: your call will be monitored.”
“I know.”
After a few moments he heard the line ringing.
His mother’s voice answered on the third ring, speckled by static: “Hello?”
Tighe took a breath. “Mom. It’s Jim.”
A pause.
“James?”
Another pause.
“Yes, it’s Jim, your son.”
Several moments of silence passed. Too many.
“Are you there?”
“Well, James, you call out of the blue. I haven’t heard from you in years.”
A pause.
“It’s been a while. I know.”
A pause.
“What’s that? There’s some sort of delay.”
A pause.
“I know. I’m far away.”
A pause.
“I can guess why you’re calling.”
Tighe looked around at the spaceship and his fellow miners—some of them floating upside down. “No, I don’t think you can, Mom.”
“Are you in trouble?”
“I’m not in trouble. I just—”
“Is it money?”
“I’m going away, and I wanted to call you before I left.”
A pause.
“You can’t think that just by calling you’ll be in our lives. You have to be present to be part of people’s lives.”
“I know. But this is—”
“—doesn’t do you any good, and it doesn’t do us any good either.”
“Mom, listen for a second!” Tighe noticed the other crew members look at him, but then they purposely turned their attention elsewhere.
Tighe looked away from them and spoke more softly into the phone. “I called because we might never speak again.”
Pause.
“That’s the way it’s always been.”
“Believe me, this is different. Things haven’t been perfect between us, but I wanted to talk before I go.”
“Have you been arrested, James?”
Tighe pinched the bridge of his nose.
“I can’t waste more help on you. I have grandchildren to—”
“I just wanted to say that—”
The delay caused them to step on each other’s words.
“—you finally grow up and become a functional adult? Your brothers and sisters all have families. What have you accomplished with your life? There’s no purpose in it at all as far as I can see.”
A familiar numbness came over Tighe as he listened to her voice. It was as though he were fifteen years old again. He began to hear only the tones of her voice, not the words.
“Mom.” A pause as she still talked. “Mom.” Another pause. He nodded to himself and spoke without emotion. “I have to go.”
The delay again.
“Of course you do. You always had to go. I have to go, too.”
With that the line disconnected.
Tighe gripped the phone and rested his head against the cold carbon fiber of the shelving. He floated there for several moments.
Abarca eventually moved over to him. “Hey, are you done?”
He looked up and nodded. “Yeah. Sorry for the wait.” He handed her the phone.
She gripped his arm to stop him from floating away, pulling their faces close. “For what it’s worth, you matter a lot to me, J.T.—to all of us.”
Tighe nodded.
She embraced him. “People back home don’t understand us. They can’t help it.”
As the countdown reached t minus two hours, mission control instructed the crew of the Konstantin to don their blue flight suits and strap in to the eight seats bolted to the Central Hab’s core wall.
Tighe looked around at his crewmates. They appeared to be contemplating the magnitude of what they were about to do. Abarca had summited the highest mountains in the world. Morra had experienced combat. Tighe had dived to the limit in unexplored caves. Most of them were intimately acquainted with danger.
However, intercepting an asteroid as it passed a few million kilometers from Earth, rendezvousing with it, and drifting away from Earth for years—traveling to the far side of the Sun—well, no human had ever gone even a thousandth that distance from Earth. This was an expedition unlike anything anyone had ever attempted.
The capcom’s voice finally came over the laser comm link. “Stand by for message, Konstantin.”
Suddenly a hologram of Nathan Joyce appeared before them. He sat behind his desk at Baliceaux and nodded. “I won’t speechify much before you go. We’ll be talking later anyway. Just remember this: we all know things will not go according to plan—but that’s why we’re sending you. To rewrite the plan as needed. Surprises are to be expected. The entire mission control team and myself will be ready whenever you need us. If you do your jobs correctly, a few years from now you’ll be able to afford a ship like this yourself—and there’s more than enough asteroids up there for all of us.” He studied their faces. “You may have wondered why I kept this ship a secret. It’s because I didn’t think Earth would let us go. I didn’t think they’d understand. You go now with our confidence in your ability to do what no one else has ever dared. Safe journey, and I will see you all again soon.”
With that, Joyce faded away.
“T minus five minutes and counting.”
As Tighe waited, strapped to his seat in free fall, he listened to the countdown over the mission control comm line. Tighe looked over at Jin, Tsukada, Clarke, Morra, Adisa, and Chindarkar, some with their eyes closed, others looking tense. Abarca, by contrast, looked calm, determined. He imagined her charging to the summit of K2 in the dead of winter. Her father’s ax in hand.
These were the most important people in his life now.
Tighe was ready. He’d been ready to leave for a long time. If death awaited him on this voyage, so be it. In the meantime, he would help his crewmates however he could.
Abarca held out her arms, and the crew did likewise, joining gloved hands. “Here we go . . .”
The final countdown began.
“T-minus 10, 9, 8, 7 . . .”
As the countdown reached zero, the ship vibrated almost imperceptibly, easing them back against their seats with about a half g of force. The sensation was minor compared to the violence of launching off the Earth.
The crew clapped—followed by nervous laughter.
“I guess that’s it, then.”
Mission control’s voice came in over the comm link. “Fair winds and following seas, Konstantin.”
Clarke answered: “Roger that, mission control. See you in four years.”
“All engines throttling to 70 percent . . .”
* * *
—
Erika Lisowski pored through a worksheet of project costs in her cramped office on the ninth floor at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC. Her door stood open and colleagues walked past or clattered away on keyboards in cubicles nearby.
Just then Lisowski’s mobile phone chimed, indicating an incoming text.
She pulled it out of her jacket pocket and looked at the display.
A single line of text from a restricted number read:
Heading out—do you need anything?
Lisowski gasped and stood up, pushing her office chair back. She breathed fitfully and put the phone down on the desk, bringing her trembling hands to a peak against the bridge of her nose. After a moment she moved to close her office door, then turned to face the wall. She struggled to restrain herself from shouting in joy.
After a few more moments, Lisowski picked up the phone and texted back:
Bring back water.
Then she slipped the device into her jacket and picked up her desk phone. She tapped in an unlisted extension. When the line picked up, the only words Lisowski said were: “Let’s grab a coffee.”
CHAPTER 26
First Passage
Throughout history, most of a sailor’s time was spent performing maintenance or in training drills. It seemed the life of an asteroid miner wasn’t going to be much different. Very little of the seven-week transfer orbit to Ryugu was spent in relaxation. Despite all the automated systems, Tighe and the rest of the crew were kept busy performing upkeep on CO2 scrubbers, oxygen generators, water-processing systems, and moisture-removal systems. The crew also maintained three banks of aquaponics units, growing leafy plants in each of the two residence habs and harvesting fresh greens for their evening meals. They rotated domestic chores, cleaning living spaces and lavatories and restocking pantries and consumables.
Whenever possible they remained in the crew quarters behind the core’s radiation protection and wore AstroRad vests while moving about the hab.
With the ship spun-up the habs were run on a twenty-four-hour cycle in Earth’s UTC time zone, and as artificial twilight approached each evening, hab lighting would imperceptibly change to a softer hue. The company psychologists also instantiated virtual windows in the hab walls, displaying hours of ultra-high-def video overlooking vistas on Earth, with the effect that the ship’s crew seemed to be living in a circular tower overlooking first a Swiss valley, followed a few days later by Lake Como in Italy, and the following week by a view of the Caribbean. The frequency of the hab’s lighting matched natural sunlight, and in a-grav while tending to the plants in the aquaponics bay Tighe could almost convince himself he wasn’t on a spaceship at all.
A few times Tighe opened a private virtual window to look out upon space from one of Konstantin’s external cameras. Exposed to direct sunlight as the Konstantin was, space looked more like a faded black, endless void, with only a few of the planets and no stars visible. Earth and the Moon were now no more than white disks behind them, difficult to distinguish from Jupiter, Venus, or Mars.
The crew was also kept busy tracking down dozens of error and trouble codes that sprang up throughout the Konstantin’s operating system—most of which turned out to be false alarms. This resulted in several corner-to-corner inspections of the ship as well as sending out video drones to glide along the length of Konstantin’s z-axis box trusses.
Mission control also ran the crew through emergency drills, extinguishing virtual fires and simulating medical emergencies—rushing simulated injury victims to one of the two medical bays.
Immediately after departure the company psychologists implemented a habitat crewing schedule as part of their “emotional hygiene” regimen; every two weeks the crew assignments for Hab 1 and Hab 2 would change, following a “Social Golfer” algorithm to mix people with maximum variety.
The biweekly crew shuffle was treated as a “fun” event by mission control, and it was a sound idea; being in close quarters with the same people constantly could get old, and moving between habs required at least fifteen minutes. That meant Tighe would go a week or more without seeing the other hab crew in person.
The first rotation found Tighe, Han, Abarca, and Clarke in Hab 1, with Adisa, Morra, Chindarkar, and Tsukada in Hab 2. The sleeping arrangements within a hab were up to the occupants. As of yet, no shipboard romances had begun.
Not long after the Konstantin departed cislunar space, the company shrinks also suggested the crew determine their preferred holiday schedule. Holidays were important, they noted, to maintain “rootedness” to the passage of time and to have events to look forward to.
Toward that end Captain Clarke held a crew meeting, with each hab using augmented reality to virtually extend their galley table to include crewmates from the other hab. Christmas was only a few days away, but Clarke suggested that, since none of the crew was particularly religious, they should implement their own holiday schedule based on Earth’s celestial events: the equinoxes, solstices, and New Year. They could celebrate birthdays as well. That way the holidays were based on something they all shared (and in truth many religious festivals on Earth were variations on these celestial events anyway).
Thus, the first shipboard holiday occurred a little over a week after they left lunar DRO, on December 21: the winter solstice. The crew strung LED emergency lights and held a rehydrated feast of sorts—with steak, noodles, turkey, and vegetables, all of it rather similar in consistency.
They had another feast on New Year’s Eve—although for this, mission control maintained a videoconference link and also remotely unlocked one of the gift lockers to reveal a bottle of brandy. The entire crew toasted in the year 2034 along with mission control.
Helping to liven things up was news from Earth, TV shows, movies, and especially capcom shifts by their colleagues Eike Dahl, Sevastian Yakovlev, Elizabeth Josephson, and Katsuka Akira. The four of them were still employed by Catalyst Corporation, and a couple of days after the Konstantin’s departure they’d caught the lunar cycler Rosette back toward Earth, where they now checked in regularly with the crew. Early on, the transmission delay wasn’t more than a few seconds, so conversations were still normal.
Sometimes, during his one hour per day of personal time, Tighe would go to his quarters and make use of a separate channel from the Konstantin’s 1.3-gigabit laser comm connection to chat with Dahl after she’d clocked off for the day as a capcom.
No doubt the company was monitoring their calls, but their mutual attraction was too strong to ignore—and sadly pointless. They both knew nothing between them would ever be the same, yet they resisted acknowledging this as long as possible.
In the darkness of his quarters Tighe asked her image, “Are you flying again?”
Dahl shook her head. “I’m planning a trip to Stryn, but first I have to recondition, make certain all this microgravity work hasn’t messed with my flying instincts.”
“I have no right to say this, Eike, but . . . be careful.”
She laughed. “Says the guy on a spaceship heading 200 million miles from Earth.”
He chuckled. “We’re both terrible at the ‘careful’ thing.”
She grew serious. “But I appreciate the sentiment.”
Invariably their video calls would end reluctantly, and Tighe would feel an irresistible emotional pull toward Earth for an hour or more afterward. However, he knew that bittersweet taste was as good as it got for him. Experience had shown he was not suited to long-term romantic relationships. Tighe had a feeling Dahl was wired the same way. They’d just never had the chance to enjoy the bloom of their romance, and that stung more than he expected it would. She was an extraordinary person and often on his mind.
