Orbital Disruption Page 22

  “Bert, I’m seeing a vector anomaly alert. What’s going on?”

  “Roger, small torque,” the flight engineer replied, staring intently at his own screen. “Within bounds for variable throttling, I think we’re ok.”

  Even before the engineer spoke, the automated guidance system of the rocket had slightly increased the flow rate of kerosene and liquid oxygen being fed into several of the combustion chambers. The thrust from those engines increased accordingly, compensating for the force caused by the slightly asymmetrical payload and returning the rocket to its intended trajectory.

  As the rocket accelerated past the speed of sound, shockwaves formed in the flow of air around the nose of the central rocket as well as each of the three boosters. The cylindrical hull of the rocket was held rigid primarily by the intense pressure of the fuel and oxidizer tanks which took up most of its interior volume. It easily withstood the aerodynamic forces. The payload bay was different. Designed for lifting massive satellites to Earth orbit, the booster was equipped with a fifteen meter long payload bay that could easily contain a city bus. The bay was enclosed in an aerodynamic fairing made from carbon fiber with an aluminum-alloy nose cone and seams. Normally, the fairing would separate into three separate pieces once the rocket had left the atmosphere and it was time to deploy the payload. The slight asymmetry in the payload mass distribution combined with the countervailing force of the increased throttling of the engines on the heavier side of the craft altered the shape of the shockwave as it formed. Instead of surrounding the nose symmetrically, it was more intense on one side. For several seconds the thin yet strong strands of carbon fiber in the fairing held out. Months earlier, however, when the fairing was being fabricated, a slight flaw was introduced into one section. Some of the fibers were not properly bonded due to air bubbles in the resin. Under normal launch conditions the defective fairing would likely have survived. But the combination of higher acceleration and the asymmetric shockwave combined to exceed the tensile strength of the flawed section and it collapsed spectacularly.

  In less than twenty milliseconds, supersonic wind blasted into the payload bay and the rest of the fairing was exposed to stresses an order of magnitude beyond their design tolerances. Less than one hundred milliseconds later, the fairing collapsed, much of it shredded.

  The heavy uranium radiation cases of the warheads protected them from the sudden exposure to thousand-kilometer-per-hour wind and the impact of the fairing as it crumpled. The main body of the center rocket was not nearly so robust, however, and less than a second after the fairing’s failure the liquid oxygen tank ruptured followed half a second later by the enormous kerosene fuel tank and then the entire airframe of the rocket. The supersonic mixing of liquid oxygen and kerosene would have exploded in any event but the presence of twenty-eight rocket engines ensured the rapid ignition of an enormous fireball.

  Less than two seconds after the wobble caused by a slight asymmetry in the mass distribution of the warhead - and before the flight engineer had even finished his sentence - the entire spacecraft was destroyed in an explosion.

  The triaminotrinitrobenzene high explosive charges that were designed to trigger the primary plutonium fission reaction were engineered to avoid accidental detonation even in the event of a plane crash or a fire. As a result, the six warheads, still bolted firmly to the remnants of the payload mount flew on a ballistic arc for several minutes, trailing smoke and debris before splashing into the Atlantic Ocean and sinking beneath the waves.

  “Thank you for that report,” Caroline O’Rourke, head of STETSON, said with a sigh. Two dozen faces on the video conference showed varying signs of distress ranging from tight frowns to barely-restrained tears.

  “I suppose it’s a sign of how bad things are that we aren’t even bothering to ask what happened to the warheads,” she continued.

  “We’re not sure, ma’am.” the man with short-cropped black hair and thick glasses answered. “We know they didn’t detonate and we believe they are likely to have survived the explosion and impact with the sea. Most likely they’re resting on the seafloor, more or less intact.”

  “I suppose when all of this is over we’ll send someone out to look for it,” Caroline suggested. “But for now, we need to focus on the big picture. Ambassador McIntyre, where do we stand with the Chinese?”

  A heavyset man in a suit with a red tie unmuted his line and replied. “The official word is that they only have one vehicle available that would meet our needs and it won’t be ready to launch in time. Our contacts in the PLA corroborate that statement. I don’t believe they’re bluffing, ma’am. They’d help if they could but there just isn’t time.”

  “And there’s no other possibility? The Russians? The Indians? Does Elon Musk have something we don’t know about?”

  The ambassador shook his head.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Jessica replied as well.

  “In that case it sounds like plan A, using a sequence of nuclear blasts to nudge the asteroid off course, is off the table.” Caroline looked down, sighed again and then looked into the camera. “That brings us to plan B. Jessica, where do we stand?”

  “In a little under twenty-four hours from now the Jovian team’s salvage craft will enter the ion plumes of the drive ships that are pushing asteroid X. They’ll execute their flip - turning the vehicle around so that their drive faces forward and start decelerating as quickly as possible. This is a risky, untested maneuver. If the ion stream from the other drives is too intense it could damage the electronics on the Jovian ship. If the stream is too thin it won’t slow the ship down enough and it’ll either slam into the asteroid or fly past it too quickly to make the capture.”

  Jessica paused to take a breath.

  “We have everyone working on it who could help. The Jovian folks are embedded at Goddard and we’ve brought in senior staff from Houston, JPL and a couple of the larger private aerospace firms. But I have to be honest - the changes of success are low. There’s just too much that could go wrong.”

  “I understand, Jessica. Please let the team know that we fully appreciate what they’re up against. But with this morning’s launch failure they’re now our best option. Maybe our only option.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “In the meantime, given the risks I think we need to execute the next stage of our contingency plans. Laura, where does FEMA stand?”

  Jessica noted with satisfaction that Laura Stern, the Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was on the call herself rather than sending one of her subordinates.

  “We have run preliminary models, Caroline, and it doesn’t look good. If we give a general evacuation order for the entire East Coast there will be panic and disorder on a scale we’ve never seen before. Even if we tell everyone there’s still more than two weeks before impact we expect gridlocked roads and transit systems. Major property damage. Probable loss of life.”

  “And if we delay the evacuation order any further?” Caroline asked.

  “It only gets worse. With less time to prepare and move, people are even more likely to panic. And if we delay much longer there will be people who can’t make it out in time.”

  “Then we need to start the evacuations soon. I’ll speak to Fred and ask him to get executive sign-off ASAP. We should plan for the official announcements to go out tomorrow, assuming it doesn’t leak sooner.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the FEMA Director replied. “It’s going to be messy but we’ll do our best.”

  “Our least messy option exploded over the Atlantic Ocean this morning,” Caroline stated gravely. “All options from here on are messy. But messy is better than catastrophic. Meeting adjourned.”

  Thirty-Two

  “I thought you were going with your family,” Mike said.

  He leaned on a crutch just inside the kitchen of Jovian’s office in Brooklyn as Ricky ducked under a yellow ribbon of crime scene tape that covered the front door.

  “And I thought y
ou were still in the hospital, Mike.”

  Mike looked down at his leg, wrapped in a brace.

  “Naw, doctor’s patched me up enough. The bullet tore some tendons so I need a crutch to walk while it heals. But it’s no worse than a football injury I got once.”

  Mike tipped his head to one side. “But you didn’t answer my question - last time we spoke, you were heading to Penn Station.”

  “Yeah, I took my mom, sister and cousin to Penn,” Ricky replied. “They were going to take Amtrak up to stay with my aunt in Albany. But the tickets were all sold out. It was a madhouse, man. Huge crowds. I found a guy selling tickets for triple the usual price. I had enough cash for three. So they’re gone. I told them I’d catch a ride out with a friend later in the week. If we can’t stop it, that is.”

  “You should have gone with them.” Mike stated. “Things could get really ugly when people start to panic.”

  “And miss all the action?” Ricky grinned back. “Come on, Mike. Stop worrying about me. We’ve got a planet to save!”

  “Shit, there it goes again!” Molly exclaimed. She leaned back in her chair and slapped her palms down on the desk on either side of her keyboard.

  Several of the engineers around her looked up but only Dennis spoke.

  “Another reboot?”

  “Yep. And I’ll bet it’s another damned memory error,” Molly sighed.

  A few minutes passed before a short row of text printed on her screen.

  “Ok, we’re back online,” she said, typing quickly. “And yeah, this one was also a memory fault.”

  “We’re not in the center of the ion stream yet but we’re near the edge - probably getting some interference already,” Dennis stated.

  “If you’re already seeing memory faults and reboots now, I don’t see how your ship can function once you’re in the center of the stream,” one of the NASA engineers observed.

  “Yeah, I know,” Dennis replied, testily. “But how do we fix it?”

  “I’ve got an idea,” a deep, disembodied voice echoed across the room.

  Dennis, Molly and the NASA engineer looked up at the wall where a large flat panel display showed Mike’s face. He and Ricky and several others were dialed in to a persistent videoconference with Dennis, Molly and the other engineers in a large room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

  “Let me check something on one of the birds that’s still here in the office.”

  Mike stepped away from his computer. They heard the sound of his chair moving and then saw him stand up with the aid of a crutch and limp out of view. In the background they heard him say, “Hey Ricky, gimme a hand with this.”

  In Brooklyn, Mike walked toward the cleanroom at the back of Jovian’s office. Ricky got up from his seat and followed.

  “Let’s bring this one out to the main workbench.” Mike pointed at one of the small black spacecraft that was clamped to the vibration testing table in the center of the cleanroom.

  “Sure, Mike,” Ricky answered and unscrewed the clamps. He hefted the craft’s six kilogram mass easily in one hand while pushing aside the curtain at the entrance to the cleanroom with the other. He brought the spacecraft out to the main workbench in the middle of the office. Mike had already arranged a stack of O’Reilly programming books on one end of the long, wide table. He tapped the top book and motioned for Ricky to place the spacecraft on it.

  Ricky carefully balanced the capture ship on the top book, entitled “Python” with an illustration of a snake on the cover.

  “Turn it so the drive faces me, Ricky.”

  Ricky turned the ship so that the tapered aluminum cone of its ion drive faced Mike.

  “Ok, now can you bring me the lamp from Tabitha’s desk?”

  Ricky raised one eyebrow but didn’t reply. Instead he went to Tabitha’s workstation and unplugged an architect-style lamp on a counterbalanced arm that clamped to the side of the desk. He loosened the clamp, gathered up the cord and brought it to where Mike was standing at the opposite end of the main workbench from the spacecraft.

  “Here is good,” Mike gestured and Ricky clamped the lamp onto the workbench. Then Ricky crawled under the workbench to plug in the lamp while Mike adjusted it.

  As Ricky crawled out from under the table, Mike switched off the overhead lights. Now the room was dark except for the desk lamp clamped to one end of the main workbench, its single halogen bulb casting sharp shadows. On the far end of the table, the capture ship rested on a stack of books, its drive end facing the lamp.

  “Ok, Mike. What are we doing?” Ricky asked.

  “Our capture ship out there is pretty much identical to the one here on the table, right?” Mike gestured at the spacecraft in front of them.

  “Sure.”

  “And it’s just entering the ion plume coming from the driveships anchored to Ruben’s asteroid, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “And the ion stream is messing with our electronics. We thought we were pretty well shielded by coming in with our own drive cone facing into the stream but Molly says the computer is detecting memory faults and rebooting. If this happens too much, we’ll lose control of the ship.

  “Uh huh.”

  “So the light from Tab’s desk lamp is like the ion stream.”

  Mike leaned in closer to the drive ship. Ricky also looked at it more closely.

  “You see how most of it’s being blocked by the drive cone, right? That’s what we were hoping for. But some of it must be getting through and hitting something delicate.”

  “You mean like here?” Ricky was leaning down on the table and looking up at the craft from below.

  “Where?” Mike asked and bent down to try to see where Ricky was pointing.

  The capture craft was roughly rectangular in shape owing to its use of the popular CubeSat standard in which small satellites were assembled from ten-centimeter cube-shaped frames. The capture craft consisted of four ten-centimeter cubes in line with a ten-centimeter diameter drive cone at one end. With the drive cone facing the light, most of the ship was in shadow. But not all of it.

  “Right here, in the corner of the second cube from the bow,” Ricky pointed again. “There’s a circuit board that takes up the entire aft face of the cube and the corner isn’t in the shadow of the drive cone.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Mike nodded in agreement. “I think this is what’s causing the problem. Those chips you see in rows on both sides of the board? Those are memory for the main computer. The last two chips are exposed to the ion stream which is probably why Molly is seeing memory faults.”

  Mike stood up straight and looked over at the webcam clipped to the top of one of Dennis’s monitors.

  “Did you catch that, Molly?”

  A moment later Molly’s voice came through from the computer’s speakers.

  “Yeah, I think so. Which chips are exposed, Mike?”

  “Looks like the last two chips on the second socket.”

  “Ok, let me see if I can disable those two.”

  At Goddard, Molly started typing again.

  “Yeah, I think you’re right, Mike. Each of the faults I’ve seen has come from one of those two chips.”

  “Can you just mark those ranges in BadRAM?” Dennis leaned over and asked Molly.

  “I think so. We’re giving up almost two gigs of our initial thirty-two but I can trim some other buffers and keep everything within thirty gigs, I think.”

  Molly typed quickly.

  “Dammit!” she shouted a minute later.

  “What happened?” Dennis asked.

  “Piece of shit just rebooted on me before I was done modifying the configs for the main controller program. I didn’t get to save the file.”

  “Crap. This could be bad if it can’t boot cleanly now,” Dennis agreed. “But probably it’ll come up for a little while. The image recognition system is the memory hog and it’s near the end of the startup sequence and it’s slow to load. So you might get
enough time to connect and change the memory config before it crashes.”

  “Ok, yeah, I think I got this,” Molly stared intently at her screen, waiting for the network connection to be re-established with the capture ship. It was close enough to Earth now that she could log in to its main computer interactively. This was much better than sending patch files and waiting almost an hour for a response as she had done when operating the craft in the asteroid belt. But the short time delay was also a reminder of how close the asteroid was.

  One of the NASA engineers spoke up.

  “Maybe we should test those configuration changes before you make them.”

  Dennis leaned to one side to look around his monitor.

  “We’re already getting reboots every few minutes and we’re not yet in the center of the stream. If we don’t make some changes on our next connection attempt, we might not get another shot. By the time the craft exits the far side of the ion stream it’ll be too late to start the deceleration burn and we’ll miss the rendezvous entirely.”

  “Good point,” the engineer nodded. “But it’s awfully risky.”

  “Nah, Molly’s on it,” Dennis assured him. “She’s used to the pressure.”

  Molly calmly lifted the middle finger of one hand and aimed it at Dennis without taking her eyes from the screen.

  A brief flash of the cursor and the appearance of a login prompt triggered a flurry of rapid typing. Dennis and the other engineers in the room held their breaths while Molly worked in silence.

  Finally she let out a dramatic sigh and leaned back in her chair.

  “All the configs have been updated and I initiated a reboot. We should be well under thirty gigs now and hopefully by blocking off the two chips that are exposed to the ion stream we’ll see fewer faults.”

  The room remained silent as Molly waited for the reboot to finish and for her connection to be restored. Finally, the cursor flashed again and she logged in.