Delta-v, page 40
But the Konstantin remained.
Shouts of relief spread as the crew hugged one another.
Adisa checked his crystal, then smiled. “The debris wave has passed. We have survived.”
They all cheered and hugged again.
Tighe asked, “Is it going to come around again, Ade?”
Everyone froze.
“No. The cloud will pass far below us on its next pass. I believe we are safe.” As the others started to sigh in relief, he said, “Choose some of these alarm codes. We need to prioritize and patch puncture holes in pressurized compartments.”
Tsukada was already clicking through UIs. “The fire’s already extinguished in the refinery. We’ve got leaks, though.”
Abarca nodded. “We need to complete this spin-down and do exterior visual inspections. Everyone start breathing pure oxygen. Parts of the ship are depressurized.”
Hours later and with the Konstantin finally spun down, Tighe and Jin found themselves on the running board of a mule remotely controlled by Chindarkar as they glided along the Konstantin’s length, shining searchlights onto girders and equipment.
It looked like a thousand maniacs had blasted the Konstantin with bird shot—every inch of the upper side of the ship was pockmarked, the flexible surfaces of the inflatable habs scarred by impacts. In places some of the composite box-truss girders had been splintered. Tunnel 3 was torn open, but the folded solar array was undamaged—probably because its thin edge was facing the storm. The hab airlocks were also undamaged, though dented in spots. By and large the Konstantin had weathered the hailstorm admirably.
Jin looked across the top of the mule to Tighe. “This could have ended us.”
He nodded to Jin. “But it didn’t.” Tighe felt elated. It was the sort of euphoria he experienced whenever he cheated death. They were alive, and now he was more determined than ever that they remain so.
CHAPTER 41
Isolation
AUGUST 14, 2036
Repairs to the Konstantin took months—although they were able to spin up again in just over a week. The difficult work of effecting repairs allowed them to concentrate on the present, to work to exhaustion, followed by sound sleep. It gave them respite from worry over the continued lack of contact with Earth. They were alive. That was all that mattered.
Once the repairs were completed, the isolation again began to take an emotional toll on the crew.
However, the mining never stopped. The robots continued producing water, nitrogen, iron, and more.
The expanding resources in the storage yard gave the crew their new focus: constructing a much larger robot tug to return resources toward cislunar space. Tighe, Jin, Chindarkar, and Adisa had spent most of July laboring to assemble Catalyst’s modular design in preparation for an October 2, 2036, shipment—now only seven weeks away. Catalyst had supplied not only the design but also the software and controllers capable of piloting robot tugs homeward on highly efficient but slow trajectories.
To propel the tug, Tighe and Jin had somberly repeated the task of cannibalizing rocket engines from the Konstantin, keenly feeling the absence of David Morra as they did so. Located on the “bottom” of the Konstantin, the delicate engines had been spared from the hail of debris kicked up by the meteor impact on Ryugu five months earlier. Because the crew no longer had technical support from Catalyst mission control they relied on Adisa’s prodigious genius in comprehending the wiring and piping of the complex engines.
Due in part to its huge mass, the new robot tug required two methalox engines instead of one, and this time it consisted of twenty-four spherical tanks, with thirty-six smaller tanks in the gaps between—4,500 tons of water, ammonia, nitrogen, and iron-nickel-cobalt carbonyls in all. It was more than four times the size of the first return vessel. Additionally the return delta-v to depart for cislunar space this time around was 706 meters per second—almost double the previous tug’s acceleration.
The crew’s fourfold production increase over the past year would have thrilled Nathan Joyce.
But screw Joyce, Tighe thought.
Due to the vagaries of orbital mechanics, the new return tug was scheduled to arrive in cislunar space in one and a quarter years (January 2038)—sooner, in fact, than the previous shipment, which had departed more than a year earlier.
And yet, the question of why they were sending any shipment at all began to press in on them. Whom were they producing these resources for—investors who couldn’t even be bothered to contact them? And how would those investors locate these resources? There was no one with whom to communicate their trajectory. At least not yet.
However, mining was why they’d come to Ryugu, so they continued. What else was there? With the loss of Nicole Clarke and David Morra—even accounting for the provisions lost in the fire en route—the crew had enough dehydrated food to last until the fourth quarter of 2038—roughly two more years.
Forgetting the fact that they were all sick to death of every dehydrated dish in the ship’s pantry, surviving beyond then wasn’t going to matter much. Ryugu’s closest approach to Earth in May 2038 would only bring them within 55 million kilometers—which was ten times the distance they’d traveled to rendezvous with Ryugu outbound. That return journey would take months to cover even if they had a ship—which they did not. None of the crew knew how to operate the Konstantin’s engines or how to load navigational data, and Adisa was prevented from learning the system due to a lack of administrator rights to the ship’s OS.
Riding one of the preprogrammed robotic tugs back to Earth wasn’t an option either. The tugs followed multiyear, low-delta-v trajectories. Any humans on board would die of starvation or radiation by the time they reached cislunar space.
Despite three hot meals a day, and despite maintaining the air and warmth of the ship, it was getting increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that they were all going to die out here unless something changed.
Sitting across the galley table from Jin and Abarca one night, Tighe said, “If they’re willing to abandon us, they sure as hell aren’t going to honor our contracts—or Dave’s and Nicole’s contracts. Why send this next shipment back? I say, make them come and get it.”
Jin looked up. “No one can reach us until 2038, and if we do not send shipments, they might believe we are already dead.”
“Then why don’t they contact us? The laser transmitter works—Ade checked it.”
“Maybe the new owners . . .” Jin’s voice trailed off.
“What happened to Eike and Yak? Where is everyone?”
Abarca said, “Maybe creditors just liquidated everything. Eike and Yak can’t communicate with us on their own.”
“So we just keep working out here until we’re dead?”
Abarca looked down at the table. “It could still make a difference to humanity.”
Tighe stared at her.
That night Tighe lay sleepless in his cot. Reaching for his crystal, he thought he might read, but then he noticed his personal effects pouch nearby. He decided to open it for the first time in years, dumping its contents onto his chest. He studied his US passport and the various ID cards he carried in his wallet—all the things that told him who he’d been back on Earth. They were meaningless out here—just pieces of paper.
But then he withdrew a copy of an old color photo from one corner of his wallet.
His father’s young face stared back at him, handsome and smiling, photographed at the head of a forested trail, heavy pack on his back. Whitecapped mountains loomed in the background. Tighe ran his finger across the photo’s surface. His father’s face looked different to him now. There was a forced quality to that smile that he hadn’t detected before, as if the path was not so clear to his father either.
Tighe placed the photograph on the edge of his nightstand, and soon he fell into a sound sleep.
OCTOBER 2, 2036
They named their new tug the David Morra, but there was no celebration this time. No speech. Tighe and Jin stood on the running board of a mule and watched from a hundred meters away as the engines they’d installed ignited. Tighe was too numb to take joy in their handiwork. The vessel was 30 meters long and 25 on a side—nearly six times the mass of the Konstantin the day she disembarked. This was again historic, not that anyone was watching. The resources were worth a fortune back in a lunar DRO.
So much had been sacrificed. Tighe felt powerless to fulfill his promise to Morra. Would any of that wealth reach Morra’s family? From the look on Jin’s face, the taikonaut was thinking much the same.
* * *
—
As the weeks passed and radio silence from Earth continued, Tighe went back to watching Eike Dahl’s VR BASE-jumping film. To make it more real, he floated in microgravity in the Central Hab and let the beauty of Norway’s fjords flow around him as she flew. But after a while he couldn’t handle seeing Dahl’s beautiful, smiling face on a green, healthy world, diving joyfully off a cliff, riding the razor’s edge between life and death—blowing him a kiss and saying “Hi, J.T.!” as she jumped.
So he explored the other VR titles in the ship’s library. There were tours of the great monuments of Earth—the pyramids, Versailles, Yosemite. The shrinks had also added a few therapy titles—the VR camera “walking” through crowded shopping plazas and dance clubs. He’d always been fond of desolate places, but the Konstantin’s isolation was too great.
Eventually, Tighe took to playing first-person video games, the constant feedback loop short-circuiting his introspection. He stayed up all hours, pulling an imaginary trigger.
Even Abarca began to lose her disciplined edge. As the months passed and it became increasingly apparent that no one was coming for them, the crew began to pursue their own therapies—work, reading, watching movies and TV, exercise, sex, sleep—anything to distract them from their hopeless circumstances.
One evening, standing in the galley, cleaning up dishes, Tighe brushed against Chindarkar’s arm while stowing something in a cabinet. After a lingering look, suddenly they were kissing, and then they stole away to the crew quarters to make love—both of them yearning for a human touch.
A week or so later Tighe entered the crew quarters to find Jin and Abarca lying in bed next to each other. The next week he saw Tsukada and Adisa kissing in the Central Hab. All the crew had was each other, and it was palpable that their end was slowly approaching.
The crew no longer followed the two-week hab rotation schedule. Instead, Tighe and Chindarkar took up residence in the upper compartment of Hab 2, while Abarca and Jin and Adisa and Tsukada had on-again, off-again liaisons.
Days went by where Tighe and Chindarkar saw no one else.
* * *
—
One day in mid-November Adisa broadcast over the ship’s comm that Tsukada was missing. Her crystal had dropped off the Konstantin’s tracking display, and she was not responding to radio calls. She had simply disappeared.
The last place the system had logged her was the Fab Hab, and since Tighe was in the Central Hab playing VR video games, he was closest. He quickly headed for Transfer Tunnel 3.
Tighe found Tsukada at the bottom of the tunnel in a pool of blood.
He noticed the winch line was halfway down the tunnel, and in retrieving it, he found one of the cable carabiners still held a clip from Tsukada’s pressure suit.
Commuting daily between her hab and the workshop, she had apparently used the same clip on her suit harness every day. It had simply worn out.
Surveillance video later showed that she was halfway to the top of the tunnel when her clip broke off. Due to the peculiarities of spin acceleration, she didn’t fall—or even notice the failure at first. Instead, she continued reading in her crystal until her back bumped against the anti-spinward wall of the tunnel. Then she began to slide down it as the wall altered her trajectory, slowly at first. She couldn’t grab the nearby ladder rungs with her back facing the wall, and her speed increased. Toward the end of her trajectory it was as though she’d fallen from a third-story window onto the aluminum airlock door. The impact shattered her crystal, knocking her offline.
Tighe covered Tsukada’s body with a silver emergency blanket before Adisa arrived. Their reunion was hard to witness. Adisa’s sobs echoed in the transfer tunnel.
Abarca later examined Tsukada’s injuries in the medical bay of Hab 2 as Tighe stood by. She declared the cause of death to be a fractured skull and internal bleeding—among a dozen other broken bones.
“She died instantly.”
Tighe was thankful for that much at least.
* * *
—
Only Chindarkar remained aboard the Konstantin for the funeral service. Tighe, Abarca, Jin, and Adisa carried Amy Tsukada’s remains to the cairn and laid her to rest alongside Nicole Clarke and David Morra. It had been months since Tighe had beheld Morra’s and Clarke’s perfectly preserved faces.
Adisa hadn’t gone on an EVA since his inspection of the laser comm link, but instead of being shaky or nervous, this time he stared at Tsukada’s peaceful, beautiful face with fortitude. He appeared to be trying to commit her to memory. Tighe suspected that from early childhood Adisa had been no stranger to loss. The Nigerian was mature beyond his years.
Adisa placed his gloved hand on Tsukada’s helmet. “I want always to feel this pain. A part of me will always be here beside you.” He floated there for minutes in silence, eyes on her.
Tighe looked upon Tsukada as well. She had taught him miraculous things. He would miss her voice. Her smile. Her refusal to accept the hand the universe had dealt her. She had escaped the Hum for a few brief years. Now she was free of it forever.
Tighe couldn’t help the feeling that they would all be joining Tsukada, Morra, and Clarke. It was just a matter of time. Eventually some minor mishap or major catastrophe would claim them all.
Yet, Tighe felt no fear. Looking upon the calm faces of his dead friends, he realized that if he died, so be it. But he wasn’t going to go quietly.
As if in answer to Tighe’s challenge, the mourners were barely back in the shadow of Ryugu when alarms went off. Riding on the running board of a mule, Tighe could see high-radiation alerts in his crystal display—warnings from their relay satellites. He and Jin turned to see charged particles, colorful waves of red, blue, and green light—a mini aurora borealis—rippling around the horizon of Ryugu and fading into space like a ship’s wake.
It was indescribably beautiful. The great rock shielded them as it cut a path through space.
Adisa spoke over the comm link without emotion. “Solar flare. The largest yet. A lethal dose of radiation.”
If it had occurred minutes earlier, they would have been caught in the open—and they would all be dead right now, leaving Chindarkar alone.
Tighe gripped the mule’s running board, then held his other gloved hand up and extended his middle finger to the universe. “You’ll have to try harder! You hear me?”
* * *
—
Two days later and 300 million kilometers from Earth, the communication link with Earth suddenly sputtered back to life.
CHAPTER 42
Renegotiation
NOVEMBER 24, 2036
Tighe and Jin had joined Adisa to live in Hab 1. They didn’t want him to be alone with his grief. Abarca and Chindarkar moved to Hab 2. Now all of them sat at their respective galley tables, staring at the wall and the video message projected there.
Across the virtual table from them sat representatives of Catalyst Corporation’s creditors—three men and a woman arrayed around a table adorned in gold leaf somewhere back on Earth. There was no obvious leader. All four were in their sixties. One was a Caucasian man with a heavily jowled face and an exquisite suit. Next to him sat a younger Arab man with a trimmed beard and crisp white thawb and shemagh head scarf. To his side was a Chinese businessman, also in a well-tailored suit, and finally to his right, a South Asian woman in a designer suit and jewel-encrusted broach.
The recorded message played.
The Caucasian businessman on the right was the first to address them, and while he spoke in what sounded like Russian, it was simultaneously translated into English—in a cold and clinical tone.
“Crew of the Konstantin, we represent the investors defrauded by Nathan Joyce. It took considerable time to unravel where our money has actually been spent. Now we want to understand the status of our investment. Immediately forward a full accounting of what’s been mined from Ryugu—as well as the status of the Konstantin and its equipment. We await your reply.”
With that the message ended.
Adisa said, “Our new oga.”
Jin looked his way. “How can we be sure these people are the legal owners of the Konstantin?”
Adisa replied, “Who else would have access to the encryption codes and the laser relay?”
Abarca sighed. “Let’s give them what they’re asking for. Ade, send the current manifest from the storage yard. Also a listing of our equipment and its condition, as well as the status of our crew and the casualties we’ve suffered. Survivor benefits will need to be paid.”
In a few hours the information had been collected and beamed seventeen minutes back to Earth. It took much longer for an answer.
Finally a video message arrived, and Adisa screened it.
The group of businesspeople looked even less friendly this time. The Russian businessman spoke, simultaneously translated. “The loss of nearly half the crew shows an incredible failure in leadership. Effective immediately, the new captain is Major Jin Han.”
