Orbital Disruption Page 16

  After hanging up the phone Anna got up from the seat in the living room of the safe house in Brooklyn and walked into the kitchen. Sergey was standing at the sink, washing an apple.

  “So, Maggie’s guy found the boat?” Sergey asked.

  “Yes,” Anna replied. “I’ll need your help getting some equipment from a storage locker. Then we’re going to drive to Connecticut. I think it’ll be a lovely evening for a swim.”

  “Can we just ram it with our asteroid?” Tabitha asked.

  “I’m afraid it’s just too far away,” Molly explained. “We’re still several months away from our first flyby of Earth. We’re going in the right direction but already moving at the maximum acceleration our drives can provide. There’s just no way to speed our rock up very much and catch up.”

  “So much for the billiards option,” Dennis grumbled and scratched at his beard. He hadn’t shaved in several days and his facial hair was getting scraggly. “Could we launch another capture ship and hijack it like we did with 207302?”

  “Even if we had something ready for launch tomorrow there’s no way we could execute a capture,” Molly explained. “Remember that Ruben’s rock is moving toward Earth at something like fifteen kilometers per second. We’d need to get out to it, flip around and accelerate back toward Earth to match speed with it. Executing that maneuver in the weeks we have remaining would require an order of magnitude more acceleration than our ships are capable of. Remember that we had over a year to do it for the capture of 207302.”

  “We could ram it, though,” Dennis suggested.

  “Yeah, we could,” Molly replied. “But since it’s not relying on a relay ship on the front of the asteroid anymore and all of the drive ships would be on the far side from the impact I doubt we’d l cause any real damage. Pretty hard for a ten-kilogram nano-craft to make much of a dent in a ball of dirt that weighs a million tons or more. It’s like a mosquito ramming a semi truck.”

  “Crap.” Dennis muttered and tapped his fingers on the table in the main cabin of the Blue Orchid.

  “Maybe we could fly just past the asteroid and then detonate some kind of explosive to take out the drive ships.”

  “Hmmm…”

  Molly looked at Esteban’s laptop screen and typed in a few numbers.

  “I’d need to run some calculations on Jovian’s servers when we get back on-line but it might be possible. Cutting acceleration might cause enough of a delay to cause the asteroid to miss Earth. The key would be to get something up there quickly. And it would need to be a powerful warhead to damage the driveships while moving away from them at a relative speed of something like twenty kilometers per second. I mean, I don’t even know if a conventional explosive blast expands that fast…”

  “Do you think the military has any nukes that could be strapped onto a missile with enough thrust to achieve escape velocity?” Dennis speculated aloud. “I suspect blowing up the asteroid is something they’re thinking about already. But at the very least we should suggest it.”

  “It’s definitely worth passing back to Jessica once we’re back in range of the shore and I can get WiFi again,” Tabitha agreed.

  “How soon is that?” Dennis asked.

  Tabitha stood up, climbed two stairs so that her head was outside the hatch that led to the main deck of the Blue Orchid.

  “Hey, how long until we get to Fairfield?” she shouted.

  “Pine Creek Point is just off our starboard,” Esteban replied from the helm, “so, twenty-five minutes, maybe thirty, until we’re docked in Southport Harbor. But you should be able to get decent WiFi as soon as we reach the breakwater. That’s probably just fifteen minutes away.”

  Tabitha came back down the stairs.

  “Esteban says we should be back online in fifteen minutes and can pass along the suggestion that the military ought to try nuking the rogue asteroid’s backside. But I wouldn’t put a lot of hope there.”

  She sat back down at the table next to Molly.

  “Let’s keep thinking of alternatives.

  “Molly,” Dennis started, “you said 207302 is moving in roughly the same direction as Ruben’s asteroid, right?”

  “Yeah, more or less.”

  “But we can’t accelerate our asteroid to catch up to Ruben’s.”

  “No, we can’t.”

  “But could we detach the capture craft from our asteroid and race ahead to catch the other one?”

  “Hmm…” Molly thought and then ran a few calculations onto the laptop. “I’ll need to check when we get online to be sure but I think it’s probably out of range. We’d have to burn like crazy to close the gap and then halfway there we’d need to flip around and burn like crazy to slow down again so that we match speed when we arrived. I don’t know that we have the acceleration or reaction mass left in the capture ship to do it and still have enough time to take over the other drives and steer the asteroid away from Earth. But I can check.”

  She turned to Dennis. “We should start preparing the code for the capture ship to leave 207302 as soon as it can and start racing for Ruben’s asteroid. We’ll have to make up the rest of the plan along the way. Either way, this is going to be tight. Hours count, maybe even minutes.”

  “Good point, Molly,” Dennis replied. “I’ll start on that now so we’re ready to go when we get close to shore.”

  “Storage unit four-B-twenty-five, please.”

  Anna smiled at the young woman behind the counter. Sergey stood beside Anna in the lobby of the A-Plus Self Storage building in an industrial neighborhood in Jersey City nestled below the cliffs of the Palisades.

  “Name?” the woman replied in a bored voice.

  “Natalie Donner,” Anna replied smoothly.

  “Thank you Ms. Donner. You can go in.”

  The young woman pressed a button under the counter and the inner door to the facility buzzed open. Anna nodded to the woman as she and Sergey walked through the cheap metal door and into the cavernous warehouse space beyond.

  A short elevator elevator ride later and Anna and Sergey were on the fourth floor. The storage unit at section B, number twenty-five was accessed via a simple metal door, this one secured by a combination lock. Anna spun the wheels of the lock and quickly opened it. She and Sergey stepped inside and closed the door.

  The room was a square only about three meters on a side and lit by a single bare compact fluorescent bulb. Cardboard boxes were stacked against the left wall and a row of black plastic containers stood against the right. An old metal filing cabinet stood alone on the third wall directly across from the door.

  Anna stepped over to the plastic bins, lifted one down from the top of the stack and popped off its lid. Inside was a tangle of black neoprene fabric and the outline of a fin.

  “These are wetsuits. It’s warm out now but if we’re going to be in the water for a while, it’s best to have these,” Anna explained.

  She opened a second, smaller plastic container which held face masks, snorkels and a second set of fins.

  “The one with the blue zipper is mine. The one with the red zipper is larger, I think it should fit you.”

  Anna lifted the wetsuit out of its bin and held it up next to Sergey.

  “Yes, I think it will do just fine. Help your dear sister carry these down to the car, yes?”

  Anna placed the wetsuit back into its bin and closed both bins. With a grunt she lifted the smaller container while Sergey lifted the larger one. She set her bin down briefly after they’d left the room to switch off the light and lock the door. Then she joined Sergey at the elevator. The floor was empty and quiet. Sergey was grinning and chuckled softly. The sound carried in the large space.

  “What’s so funny?” Anna asked, smiling.

  “I was just thinking, Anna, that if I’m going to be playing James Bond tonight, I’ll need to pick up a tuxedo!”

  Sergey and Anna laughed as they stepped into the elevator.

  “Got it!” Tabitha said, typing quickly on the k
eyboard of the laptop. “Thank god for shitty cable modems with built-in WiFi!”

  With one final keystroke, an icon on the laptop’s screen turned green and Tabitha slide the device over to Molly.

  “It’s all yours,” Tabitha said. “Good luck.”

  Molly accepted the laptop wordlessly.

  Tabitha got up. Dennis took her place next to Molly while Tabitha climbed the stairs up to the deck of the Blue Orchid.

  “Ok, Molly - let’s double-check those instructions again and get them fired off. Every minute counts.”

  “On it,” Molly replied, focused intently on the screen. She typed quickly while Dennis looked over her shoulder.

  “Ready?” Molly said a few minutes later. She looked at Dennis. Dennis nodded once. “Done,” she said with a final keystroke and exhaled loudly. “I sure hope this works.”

  “Me too,” Dennis replied. “But we’re not done yet.”

  “Let’s send a quick note to Jessica and then get started on the orbital calculations to see how in the hell we can catch that damn rock,” Dennis suggested. Molly nodded.

  On the deck of the Blue Orchid Tabitha stepped over to where Esteban was steering the sailboat with one hand while easing a line with the other.

  “Hey, Tab - can you help me furl the mainsail?” Esteban asked. Tabitha nodded and stepped up to gather the fabric as Esteban allowed the halyard to flow freely through the winch. He noticed how the late afternoon sun reflected off Tabitha’s hair as the wind caught it. The image - combined with the feeling of the wind blowing across his face and the smell of the ocean brought back memories.

  A few minutes later, sails furled, Esteban started the sailboat’s small motor and guided the Blue Orchid past the breakwater and into Southport Harbor. Stately waterfront homes with expansive lawns lined one side of the narrow waterway while a golf course was on the other. A few minutes later, the waterway widened a little and they came upon a long dock that ran parallel to the shore as well as several fields of mooring buoys.

  “Welcome to Pequot Yacht Club in lovely Fairfield, Connecticut,” Esteban said with a smile and a small bow.

  “Do you think it’s safe?” Tabitha asked, skeptically.

  “It should be safe for a little while,” Esteban replied. “I know the dockmaster here. I think he’d let me know if anyone had been asking around about us.”

  “Ok, but let’s not stay too long,” Tabitha demurred.

  “Sure, just need to fill up the fresh water tanks and buy some groceries. There are some shops a few blocks up Main Street from the dock.”

  “You go, I’ll stay back and take care of the water.”

  “Ok, sounds good,” Esteban agreed. “Now, if you can help me get a line over a cleat as I come alongside the dock, that’d be great.”

  “No problem,” Tabitha replied as she stepped over the lifeline and jumped lightly down to the deck, a thick black woven nylon deck line in her hand. She quickly looped it around a steel cleat fixed to the dock and the Blue Orchid came to a gentle stop.

  “Just like old times,” Tabitha asserted.

  “Just like old times,” Esteban agreed.

  In the cold vastness of space, asteroid 207302 moved silently. A dozen flares of deep indigo streamed from the exhaust nozzles of the ion drives of the hijacked Excelsior drive ships on the back side of the craft. A thirteenth craft, smaller, darkly painted and unadorned with markings received new instructions. It disengaged itself from one of the drive ships where it had been attached like a parasite. With a tiny puff of compressed nitrogen it moved away from the driveship. A brief LIDAR pulse confirmed its new trajectory and assured the small Jovian Resources capture craft that it would not collide with any of the other drive ships or the asteroid.

  A few minutes later the capture ship was drifting away from the ball of rock and ice known only as number 207302. Sensing that it was far enough from the asteroid, it energized its own drive. Electricity generated from the radioactive decay of a carefully shielded lump of Plutonium was used to generate a powerful electromagnetic field. Xenon gas was heated to a plasma and then a tiny stream of xenon ions was allowed to enter the field, accelerate to a substantial fraction of the speed of light and escape from the drive cone. While the mass of the escaping stream of ions was tiny compared even to the small spaceship, the immense speed of their escape imparted a significant force in the opposite direction - Newton’s third law in action. The small ship accelerated slowly by the standards of a chemical rocket or a race car but steadily. It’s velocity increased relative to the asteroid and it gradually moved ahead, gaining speed every minute.

  A few hours later, asteroid 207302 was a nearly invisible spec of grey against a field of stars and the deep blackness of space.

  Twenty-Six

  “Damn,” Molly said with a burst of breath and sat back on the bench. Dennis sat next to her, rubbing his temples. The Blue Orchid swayed gently.

  “Even if we accelerate at our fastest rate and then decelerate again as quickly as we can, we don’t reach Ruben’s asteroid in time. Best case scenario is that we’d be getting control of the drive ships just a few hours before the asteroid enters Earth’s atmosphere and it’s game over.”

  “I know, Molly,” Dennis agreed. “The physics just isn’t on our side on this one.”

  “I wish there were some way to move that ship faster,” Molly said, frustration evident in her voice.

  “Or slow it down faster as it approached Ruben’s asteroid,” Dennis replied.

  He thought for a moment.

  “Actually, there might be a way.”

  “What’s that?” Molly asked, sitting up a bit straighter.

  “We’re coming up on Ruben’s asteroid from behind, right?” Dennis asked. Molly nodded. “So we’ll be in his drive flare.”

  “We’re not coming up from exactly one hundred eighty degrees behind him,” Molly corrected. “We’re off by a few degrees. So don’t worry, we won’t get cooked on the way in.”

  “No, I mean, but we want to get cooked,” Dennis insisted.

  “We do?” Molly tipped her head to one side inquisitively.

  “Yes, I think we could use the drive plume to slow the capture craft. It’d be like sailing into the wind - we could slow down faster.”

  “Um, but you’re forgetting the part about being cooked, Dennis. Flying into a wind of charged xenon gas nuclei accelerated to relativistic speeds is, um, not good for the electronics, right?”

  “No, it voids the warranty for sure,” Dennis said, talking more animatedly. “But for a short time it might work. And we’d be coming in ass-first so the drive cone should shield the rest of the capture craft from the worst of it, right?”

  Molly said nothing at first but raised her eyebrows.

  “Come on, Molly. Those little ships are tough, they can take some radiation, right?”

  “Well… I think it’s crazy but it might work. Emphasis on ‘might’”.

  “And if we didn’t fry the computer, how much more quickly could we slow down,” Dennis asked.

  “Um, I’m not sure but I’ll see if I can make some estimates. Don’t forget that we’d need to follow a slightly curved trajectory in order to maximize the effect of the ‘wind’ coming from the drive ships’ plumes. So that complicates things a bit more…”

  Dennis slid over a few inches as Molly re-engaged her fingers with the keyboard and focused intently at the screen. He’d take a back seat for a little while as Molly methodically ran through all the factors that could make his idea viable - or not.

  Dennis prided himself on his lack of superstition but… he had a feeling in his gut that it was going to work.

  Tabitha was sitting with her back to the helm, her eyes closed. The afternoon was wearing into evening and she was tired. She’d dozed off a few times, only to be woken by the sound of voices on the dock or the engine of a passing motorboat. She was a light sleeper at the best of times and these were not the best of times. Still, she managed to be star
tled when the Blue Orchid swayed as Esteban stepped aboard, large paper grocery bags in each hand.

  “Success?” she asked.

  “Well, assuming you like hot dogs, beer and potato chips then, yes - success!” Esteban replied, grinning. “The little convenience store wasn’t exactly gourmet but we won’t starve for a few days.”

  Tabitha chuckled and started to climb down the steps into the sailboat’s main cabin.

  “Let’s get this stuff stowed and get moving,” she said as she reached up so that Esteban could hand the bags to her. “I think we’re too visible here.”

  “I agree,” Esteban said as he handed her the last bag and turned to descend the steps. “There’s a place called Black Rock harbor that’s just a couple miles up the coast which has mooring buoys that are pretty far from the shore. I think we can stay there tonight.”

  “Sounds good,” Tabitha replied. Turning to Dennis and Molly she asked, “Are you guys ready for us to get under way? We’ll lose network access for an hour or two.”

  “Sure,” Molly replied, leaning back from the keyboard. “I’ve just started a batch of simulations running on one of our servers. It’ll take an hour or two to finish.”

  “I got a reply from Tony,” Dennis added. “He said Jessica’s convinced the FBI to go after Excelsior. Apparently they raided their office this morning.”

  “Did they arrest anyone?” Tabitha asked.

  “Tony didn’t say anything about arrests but at least they know who the bad guys are. Hopefully we’ll get good news from him soon.”

  Dennis looked over as Tabitha pulled several packages of hot dogs and a six-pack of beer from one of the bags and placed them in a small refrigerator next to the sink.

  “I’ll feel better once that crazy woman is behind bars,” Tabitha stated.

  “Me too,” Molly agreed.

  “That’s why we keep moving.”

  The sun had set and the waters of Long Island Sound reflected a thin red band along the western horizon. The rest of the sky was already deep blue, rapidly darkening to indigo and black. The first few stars fought to be seen against the streetlights of Fairfield and the faint glow of the distant New York City.