Delta-v, page 33
By then, the biweekly crew rotation had been altered to let Clarke and Abarca remain in Hab 1, with only the other two slots changing. On November 6, Clarke called Abarca, Tighe, and Jin into the medical bay. She was sleeping in the hospital bed there now since concern about cosmic radiation was moot. Abarca had Clarke on an IV to manage her pain.
Clarke was calm and lucid as she looked up at them. “Isabel and I have discussed this with the specialists back on Earth. They tell me it gets much worse from here on out. And I refuse to use up all the ship’s pain meds on a lost cause.”
Jin shook his head. “None of us here want you to suffer. You must use whatever medication you need.”
“That’s just it, Han. I need to end it.” Before he could object she held up her frail hand. “Like I said: it gets much worse. I don’t want to be remembered like that. It’s my decision. I need to go.”
All three stood silently around the bed.
“I need your help, J.T.”
“My help?” He looked at Abarca. “Is Isabel—”
“It’s not that. I don’t want to waste critical medication that cannot be replaced. You may need it in coming years.”
The word years fell heavily on him. It occurred to Tighe that he and the rest of the crew would very likely be joining Clarke down the line.
He looked at her. “What do you need?”
“I’ve been out here almost a year, and I haven’t gone on an EVA. Can you believe it? I want to see the cosmos—not through a hologram—but with my own eyes. That’s where I’d like to pass—out there.”
Tighe tried to keep it together.
“Can you help make it as painless as possible?”
Tighe struggled to steady his breathing. He nodded. “I . . . I can pressurize your suit.” He took another breath and focused on the task. “To a full atmosphere—and then pipe in pure nitrogen. You won’t sense asphyxiation, not in the absence of carbon dioxide. It will feel like going into a peaceful sleep.” Tighe looked into her eyes. “I’ll make certain of it.”
She gripped his hand as tight as she could manage. “Thank you.”
* * *
—
The entire crew came to the upper airlock to bid Nicole Clarke good-bye. Tighe was prebreathing pure oxygen, a step Clarke could forego since she was going to fully pressurize her flight suit. A mercy, as it allowed the other crew members to kiss her cheek and hug her tearfully just before she left the ship for the last time.
Tighe had never seen Morra cry. The ex-soldier hugged her.
While the rest of the crew said their farewells, Tighe quietly floated toward the suit airlock. As he did so, Abarca floated up behind him and looked into his eyes. “It’s up to you, J.T.”
Tighe took a deep breath.
“Listen to me . . .” She held his face. “You cannot tear up. Do you hear me? Not in microgravity. Not on an EVA. You need to be able to see what you’re doing to get back. We can’t afford to lose you.”
He nodded.
“You grieve later. Right now, help ease her passage.”
Tighe took deep, slow breaths to steady himself. “I understand.”
Tighe entered the suit airlock, sealing it behind him. Next he removed his flight suit and oxygen mask before climbing through the hatch of his clam suit and sealing it behind him.
He pressurized, checked the diagnostics, then undocked the suit from the ship. He moved handhold by handhold down to the mule airlock. Soon he floated outside the hatch.
In a moment it opened, revealing Clarke, puffed up in her blue flight suit, pressurized at a full atmosphere by a life support pack. The flight suit wasn’t meant for extended EVA operations, but today that hardly mattered.
Tighe reached in and took Clarke’s gloved hand, gently pulling her into space.
He heard her gasp and worried for a moment that she was choking.
Instead, he saw the look of joy on her face and was grateful to see her smile.
“It’s so beautiful. J.T. It’s so beautiful.”
It took every ounce of willpower Tighe had not to tear up. Instead he turned and saw that Chindarkar had remotely guided a mule near them. Tighe carefully secured Clarke atop the cargo rack. He then clipped himself in and mounted the running board. He waved back to the ship, as he knew they were watching via cameras.
The mule’s cold-gas thrusters fired, and it coasted out into space, away from the mountainous shadow of Ryugu. In a minute or so they cleared the sweep of the Konstantin’s three radial arms.
Clarke smiled as she looked back. “She’s a beautiful ship. And I was her captain.”
“You are her captain, Nicole—the first captain ever of a deep space commercial vessel.”
“That should go on the wall.” She chuckled slightly and squeezed his hand.
“It’ll be written on a lot more than our wall.”
Five hundred meters out, the mule’s thrusters pushed them downward along the dark face of Ryugu. It was as though they were diving beneath the hull of some gigantic ocean liner.
Finally, Clarke said, “Here, J.T.” She gasped again. “Yes, here.”
Tighe gazed ahead at the glow. The very center of the Milky Way stood before them. He knew Clarke was seeing it with her naked eye, and so he did the same, pulling back his helmet visor so she could see his face. He smiled as he looked at the center of their home galaxy. “Isn’t that something?”
“I didn’t think anything could be so beautiful.”
Tighe unstrapped Clarke from the mule and then righted her to “stand” alongside him as they drifted slightly away from the mule, still linked by his tether.
Clarke smiled—a look of serenity on her face as she beheld the universe. “Do you realize how fortunate we are, J.T., to be here at all?”
“I do.” He pointed. “Look, the Large Magellanic Cloud.”
“It’s incredible.”
He then pointed lower and to the left. “And there’s Earth. The Moon on the far side.”
Clarke stared, her eyes blinking in amazement. Home was just a point of white light, like a bright star.
Tighe stayed silent, he didn’t know or care how long. He didn’t even check his oxygen. Instead he held Clarke’s hand as she absorbed the enormity of the universe and her place in it.
Finally, she nodded, whether to herself or to him, he wasn’t sure. “I’d like to go now. Just like this.” Her weak hand gripped his. “Thank you so much for this gift. I love you all so much.”
Pangs of grief tore through him, but Tighe smiled and nodded. “And we love you.” Tighe clipped a nitrogen bottle to her input feed. “I’m right here.”
“I know.” She smiled as she gazed into the starlight. “I know.”
Tighe opened the nitrogen and let it flow into her suit.
It took several minutes, but slowly her eyes closed, and she descended into sleep. Tighe monitored her heartbeat in the suit’s sensor, for the minutes it took to slow—and finally stop.
Tighe breathed deeply for several moments to steady himself.
He then folded Clarke’s hands across her chest and then motioned for the mule to come in. He got back onto its running board and held Clarke’s body as the mule’s thrusters fired, sending them upward.
Chindarkar remotely piloted the mule toward a collection of polyamide columns packed with silica powder—solid waste from regolith processing. Tighe and Jin had gathered and lashed them together over the months. Each column was 10 meters long and a meter in diameter. Two dozen of them were bound together by polymer straps into an emergency radiation shelter—what would now become a cairn fashioned from Ryugu’s stone.
Chindarkar guided the mule to the darkened entrance.
Tighe unstrapped Clarke’s body from the mule and turned on his helmet lights as he gently guided her inside the cairn. The chamber was a barren space 5 meters on a side, formed by silica columns arranged like logs.
Tighe spoke to Clarke’s now lifeless face. “We’ll bring flowers. Something to brighten this up.” He settled her to the floor, where he’d prepared Velcro straps. Tighe secured her body with a chest strap, and then he purged the air from her suit, leaving the valve open.
He knew that the other crew members were viewing what he saw through his helmet-cam. Now Abarca spoke, but though he would never admit it, at the time he deliberately did not listen to her words. Instead he kept his gaze on Clarke’s peaceful face.
Finally, when there was silence for several moments, Tighe roused himself and left Clarke in the cairn. He said nothing over the comm link as the mule brought him back to the Konstantin. His limbs moved robotically as he docked his suit and returned through the airlock.
Abarca was waiting for him there, alone. She embraced Tighe, holding him close.
And Tighe finally wept.
CHAPTER 33
Company
JANUARY 1, 2035
Tighe, Adisa, and Chindarkar sat around the galley table in Hab 1. Their New Year’s celebration was muted by the presence of only three people instead of four in their hab. The ship’s software had scheduled Nicole Clarke in Hab 1 this rotation, and her absence was keenly felt. Midnight had come and gone. They’d watched video of the ball dropping in New York’s Times Square. The old year had ended, but its consequences were still with them.
Catalyst mission control had promoted Isabel Abarca to captain after Clarke’s death, but an atmosphere of consensus reigned on board. No single person was in charge.
Looking up at the AR link to Hab 2, Tighe could see Abarca, Jin, Morra, and Tsukada trying to play an AR board game. The fact that Tighe had six staples in his forearm didn’t help his mood—an injury received from one of the milling machines in the Fab Hab. He was no replacement for Clarke, despite Chindarkar’s attempt to train him on the equipment. However, if they were going to finish building the first return tug on time, everyone was required to pitch in. They had lost one very skilled person.
Tighe looked up at a virtual window to Catalyst Corporation mission control back on Earth. Eike Dahl and Sevastian Yakovlev celebrated among the company engineers.
The Konstantin had been gone nearly a year. Tighe longed to have a live conversation with Eike, but the best they’d been able to do in recent weeks was one or two video messages. Now that the Konstantin was 163 million miles from Earth, it took fourteen and a half minutes for a broadcast to reach them—double that for a reply. He might as well have been writing letters for all the interactivity their conversations had. In some ways, Tighe preferred writing to her; at least then there wasn’t the sadness at seeing her face, unattainable. Tighe felt like a ghost she could no longer see.
Adisa spoke. “Champagne, J.T.?”
Tighe shook his head. He couldn’t help but notice that this year’s bottle was only a split. Half the delta-v to get it here. When the award locker unlatched, it contained very little.
What did that mean?
Sitting across the galley table from Tighe, Chindarkar gazed through the virtual window at mission control’s party back on Earth. “Looks like fun. Check out Yak and Eike. Yak’s a good dancer.”
Abarca spoke from Hab 2. “You guys should at least try to enjoy yourselves. You know Nicole would have wanted us to.”
Tighe and his hab mates stared blankly at the virtual Abarca.
Abarca persisted. “Doctor’s orders. Try to move your bodies for a reason other than survival.”
In the background behind Abarca, Jin and Morra were folding up the galley table to clear space for a dance floor. A compelling guitar riff suddenly played in both habs—Phantogram’s “When I’m Small.”
Abarca shouted, “Amy’s DJ tonight! C’mon. Let’s all dance. We’re still alive.”
Behind Abarca, Tsukada, Morra, and Jin started to move.
Chindarkar laughed and got to her feet, too. She tapped at a virtual UI and turned up the music in Hab 1. “You heard her, guys—doctor’s orders.” She extended her hands to both Adisa and Tighe.
Adisa smiled and got up. “I do enjoy dancing.”
“You haven’t lived until you’ve danced in space.”
“Technically, dancing on Earth is dancing in space.”
“Don’t ruin it, Ade. C’mon, J.T. You get up, too!”
Tighe reluctantly got to his feet. They folded the table aside and started dancing. The floor of the hab trembled with their movements. It was worrisome how flimsy the Konstantin felt beneath their feet.
Chindarkar didn’t seem to notice. She danced with extraordinary grace and laughed at Tighe’s reaction. “What? We rock climbers know how to move!” Suddenly her expression changed, and she quickly sat down in a chair against the hab wall. “Shit. Coriolis effect . . .” She leaned forward and breathed deeply. “Thought I was going to be sick there for a second.”
Adisa danced while barely moving his head. “Perhaps dancing is not a good idea on a spin-grav ship of this small radius.”
Tighe tried to keep nausea at bay through sheer force of will as he danced. The effect wasn’t what he’d hoped.
Jin pointed from the AR screen. “You are a terrible dancer, J.T.”
“I call it the Coriolis Shuffle.” He moved cautiously.
The crew laughed. It was the first time in months. There hadn’t been much to laugh about. The ship was already starting to show signs of wear. Tighe had no doubt the others harbored unspoken concerns about what it would look like a year from now, much less in three. They mourned for Clarke—and they also knew what her death implied.
Suddenly the music dimmed and the ship’s Klaxons sounded a critical alarm. Strobes flashed. The ship’s robotic voice said, “Warning: impact alert. Repeat: impact alert.”
The crew grabbed their crystals from a nearby charger and put them on.
“What the hell!”
Adisa muted the Klaxons and instantiated a hologram where the galley table would normally be. Everyone stared at the image. “There is an object on a collision course with us. Distance, 1 kilometer.”
“What speed?”
“This cannot be correct.” Adisa tapped at an invisible UI.
Tighe asked again, “How fast, Ade?”
“At low velocity. It seems to have originated from the far side of Ryugu.”
Tighe watched as a radar ping moved toward them. “Could it be an old object from the Hayabusa2 mission?”
“No, the orbits of those objects are all known.” Adisa brought up a virtual screen for the CCTV camera on the lower spine of the ship. He focused it on an approaching reflected light.
Tighe, Chindarkar, and the entire crew of Hab 2 stared at the screen.
Morra frowned. “What the hell is that?”
“It is a spacecraft.”
Chindarkar said, “Not ours. And it is not slowing down.”
Abarca spoke into the laser comm link. “Mission control. Mission control. We have an unidentified spacecraft inbound. Repeat, we have an unidentified spacecraft on a collision course.”
Morra corrected her. “It’s already here.”
The mysterious craft moved under the ship as Chindarkar tried to focus cameras on it. “What the hell. Where’d it go?”
“It is changing course! Heading up the length of the ship.”
“Shit!” Tighe stood. “It could impact the radial arms.”
Abarca shouted, “Everyone into the hab core! Now! Suit up!”
The crews in both habs scrambled. Tighe and Adisa unlocked the pressure door. They all three rushed inside and sealed the door behind them. Tighe and Adisa pulled on flight suits as Chindarkar descended through the floor hatch to the lower crew quarters.
Jin called out the object’s movements. “Whatever it is, it has moved through the arc of the rotating habs. A collision could have destroyed the Konstantin. It is now headed up past the solar mast.”
“How big is that thing?”
“It is 4 meters in length.”
Tighe looked up. “That could weigh tons.”
Abarca was now calling out developments for mission control, but Earth’s response was still twenty-eight minutes in the future. The crew of the Konstantin was on its own.
Jin said, “Now it is heading back to the far side of Ryugu.”
Tighe took a deep breath. “Thank god.”
Morra’s voice came over the comm line. “You reckon it’s in orbit? It could come back around.”
Adisa shook his head. “That was no orbit. That was a controlled maneuver.”
A minute later the object disappeared behind the kilometer-wide rock—gone as quickly as it had appeared.
Tighe sat on his cot and unzipped the hood of his flight suit again. “We need to know what that thing was. Do we have any visuals on it?”
“Yes.” Adisa poked at the air in front of him, manipulating unseen virtual objects. “I am going to stitch together video from all exterior cameras. . . .” Moments later he said, “Look . . .”
He tossed up a virtual layer that every crew member perceived as floating just a few feet in front of them. It was a 3D model derived from imagery taken by the Konstantin’s external CCTV cameras. Adisa zoomed in on an object as it passed by the fuel bladders of the refinery at the stern of the ship. A burst of thruster gas sent it upward along the Konstantin’s spine.
Tighe watched the footage. “Jesus, it nearly hit the methalox tanks. That would have been the last anyone ever heard from us.”
“Look . . .” Adisa paused the imagery and rotated the model, expanding it into a somewhat grainy close-up. The point at which Adisa froze the image showed the craft moving between the sweep of the rotating radial arms—about 30 meters away from the spine of the Konstantin. The spacecraft was at least 3 meters long and cylindrical, with twin solar arrays.
