Orbital Disruption Page 23

  “Looks like we’re running fine,” she said, “and no signs of memory issues. If we don’t see any reboots in the next couple minutes, I’d say we’re in good shape.”

  After a few more tense minutes passed with no issues, Dennis slid his wheeled desk chair over toward Molly. He raised his hand.

  “Nice work, Molly.”

  Molly returned Dennis’s high five.

  “Thank, Dennis. Now let’s see if we can catch ourselves an asteroid!”

  Thirty-Three

  The thin cloud of energetic xenon gas was far thinner than the air at the top of Mount Everest but it was traveling fast enough that still exerted a drag on the small black spacecraft as it approached the asteroid. The spacecraft’s own ion drive, facing the asteroid and running at full power also served to slow its arrival. But it was coming in fast. At over twenty meters per second it closed the last kilometer in less than a minute. A few seconds before impact the spacecraft fired a long blast of compressed nitrogen from its aft maneuvering thrusters, reducing its speed further but not enough to bring it to a halt. It had already deployed its landing legs to increase aerodynamic drag. It left them deployed in a futile attempt to cushion the impact as it crashed into the surface of the asteroid still traveling at almost ten meters per second, equivalent to being dropped from about five meters onto a gravel surface.

  The impact snapped off all four landing legs and badly dented the aluminum drive cone. The ion drive would never function correctly again. It also shook the frame hard enough to jar the heavy radioisotope thermoelectric generator module away from its electrical contacts. A small green LED light on the main circuit board winked out.

  “We should have had contact by now,” Molly stated, her voice betraying her nervousness.

  Dennis grunted in response and continued to stare at his monitor. The status messages from the capture craft were listed on the screen:

  13:07:51.255 Dist: 400 m; Vel: 22.1 m/s

  13:07:55.816 Dist: 300 m; Vel: 21.9 m/s

  13:08:00.377 Dist: 200 m; Vel: 21.7 m/s

  13:08:00.914 Aft gas thrusters engaged

  13:08:07.525 Dist: 100 m; Vel: 15.6 m/s

  13:08:15.040 Connection lost, reconnecting...

  13:08:45.039 Reconnecting...

  13:09:15.041 Reconnecting...

  13:09:45.040 Reconnecting...

  The reconnection attempts repeated every thirty seconds without success and minutes passed silently at the control room of Goddard Space Flight Center.

  The small boxy spaceship tumbled slowly end over end. The impact with the asteroid had badly damaged its drive cone and smashed its landing legs. Most importantly, though, the shock had shaken loose the connection between the power supply and the main computer’s circuit board, effectively rendering it unconscious as it drifted.

  The surface of the asteroid was uneven and when the spaceship crashed into it, one leg had hit a protruding lump of soot-covered water ice, imparting a spin to the small ship and ensuring that after impact it did not simply rebound back out into space but instead was traveling more or less laterally to the asteroid’s surface. After drifting for a few minutes it happened to collide with one of the Excelsior drive ships. The collision was not strong enough to damage either ship but it was just enough to shift the radioisotope thermoelectric generator back into its socket, reconnecting power to the spacecraft’s circuits. The green LED light came on again and began to blink as the computer went through its boot-up sequence.

  Molly’s eyes grew damp. Dennis clenched his fists. Still the capture ship remained unresponsive.

  13:14:15.043 Reconnecting...

  13:14:45.044 Reconnecting...

  13:15:15.046 Reconnecting...

  Dennis exhaled. It hadn’t worked. Their “plan B” had failed.

  “We came in too fast,” Dennis said softly. “It was probably going over ten meters per second at impact. That’s enough to break things.”

  Molly didn’t reply but she sniffled.

  One of the NASA engineers took off his glasses and wiped tears from his eyes with his shirt sleeves.

  Dennis slide his chair back from his desk and stood.

  “Well, I’m afraid we have bad news, everybody. We tried our best but it looks like luck just wasn’t on our side. I think we need to…”

  “Woo!!” Molly shrieked and clapped her hands.

  Dennis looked down at his screen.

  13:15:45.048 Connection established

  “Hot damn!” he exclaimed. “We’re back online!”

  The room erupted in clapping, shouts and questions but Dennis and Molly were focused on their terminals.

  “It looks like we’re fully functional but we don’t have much gas left in the thrusters,” Molly stated. “It must have used almost all of it for braking at the end.”

  “Got it,” Dennis answered. “Let’s find the nearest driveship and initiate the capture program as soon as we make contact.”

  “Yeah, let’s just make sure to watch our gas,” Molly agreed. “It’d be a shame to come up dry now…”

  The room waited tensely as Molly selected a nearby driveship and instructed the capture ship to approach it slowly, using minimal puffs of compressed nitrogen gas.

  “Ok, we’ve made contact, capture protocol started,” Molly said.

  “Wait! Halt the capture!” Tabitha’s voice came over the video conference system.

  “Ok,” Molly replied and typed a short sequence of commands. “Capture program is paused.”

  “What’s wrong, Tabitha?” Dennis asked.

  “I’ve decrypted more of the network traffic. It looks like Excelsior had a pretty good idea of how we’d hijacked their ships.”

  Several eyebrows went up among the NASA engineers in the room but Dennis ignored them.

  “Yeah?” Dennis prompted when Tabitha paused.

  “It looks like they implemented a countermeasure, Dennis. If any device connects to the debug port it triggers a pulse that fries the driveship and probably damages our ship’s electronics, too.”

  “A pulse?” Molly asked.

  “Yeah, it looks like they charge up the big capacitor they use for their communications laser but instead of firing the laser, they divert the charge onto the main five-volt power circuit which drives the USB port that we’re connected to. It’s effectively a self-destruct mechanism that takes us out, too.”

  “Crap,” Dennis muttered. “How do we work around it?”

  “I don’t see any other way to connect to the driveship, Dennis,” Tabitha replied.

  There was a long pause. Then one of the NASA engineers spoke up.

  “You mentioned a capacitor. How long does it take to charge up?”

  “I don’t know,” Tabitha replied. “The program initiates charging and then triggers the discharge as soon as the capacitor reaches eighty percent charged. It doesn’t seem to be time-based.”

  “Ok, but it would still take a while, right?” the engineer asked.

  “Probably at least a few seconds. Maybe even a few minutes,” Mike replied over the video conference. “Ours take about thirty seconds to build up enough charge to transmit,” he continued, “and from what I can tell, Excelsior copied the designs of most of our systems.”

  “If it’s thirty seconds, could we connect and disable that program before it discharged?” Dennis asked.

  “I think so,” Molly replied. “And I don’t see another option. Our ion drive is offline. It probably got damaged when we crashed into the asteroid. And we only have a little bit of gas left for the thrusters. Once that’s gone we’ll simply get left behind as the asteroid continues to gradually accelerate. Even if we disconnect from this driveship before the pulse fries us, we’d have to fly to one of the other driveships to try again. And I don’t know if we have enough gas left for that.”

  “Ok, then it sounds like we get one shot at this. How quickly can you write a script to clear the countermeasure, Tab?”

  “It’s just finding and d
eleting one file, should be quick,” Tabitha replied.

  Dennis could hear the keys clicking in the background as Tabitha typed.

  “We’re drifting,” Molly observed. “I can only hold station here for a few more minutes.”

  “Done,” Tabitha announced. “I’ve uploaded the script into the capture payload. You better double-check it, though, Dennis.

  “On it,” Dennis replied as he scanned through the script that Tabitha had just completed. “Looks good,” he concluded. “Let’s go.”

  “Restarting capture protocol,” Molly said. She typed a short command.

  Dennis held his breath until his lungs hurt. He forced himself to breathe. The seconds ticked by.

  “Ok, looks like we’re in and Tab’s script ran,” Molly said. “One file removed. I think we’re ok.”

  Molly typed a few commands and then let out a low whistle. “Whoa. Looks like the capacitor got to 75% before we switched it off. That was close.”

  Dennis exhaled sharply.

  “I’ll take close. Great work, everyone! We caught ourselves another asteroid!”

  In the background of the video conference, Dennis thought he heard Ricky briefly shout “Arr!” before Mike muted the line from the Jovian office in Brooklyn.

  “Now let’s just hope there’s time to make it miss Earth,” Molly replied. “It’s going to be close.”

  Thirty-Four

  The bar was located in the ground floor of an old brick row house on H street, NE. Calling it a “dive” would be charitable, Esteban thought to himself. The word “dump” was what came to mind. But Dmitry had insisted so… Esteban sat at the bar, slowly sipping a cheap whiskey.

  “Esteban, my old friend!”

  Esteban stood up from his stool just in time to receive the enthusiastic embrace of a tall man with a bushy mustache, faded t-shirt and trucker cap.

  “It’s good to see you, Dmitry.” Esteban took in the other man’s attire and chuckled. “I see you’ve gone native.”

  “All part of the game,” Dmitry laughed. “But I must admit. In another life I think I could have been very happy as a member of the American proletariat! People say your working class have no culture. But those people simply do not appreciate country music, firearms and populist politics the way I do!”

  Esteban smiled. “I guess it’s a good disguise for a Russian spy.”

  “Russian spy?” Dmitry asked in mock incredulity. “I am the Deputy Assistant for the Ministry of Trade’s international agriculture cooperation program! I seek mutually beneficial information exchange between the Russian and American farming communities...”

  Dmitry was interrupted by Esteban’s laughter.

  “Yeah, and I was an English teacher in Bishkek!” Esteban replied and Dmitry laughed as well.

  Esteban gestured to the bar stool next to his. “Have a seat, Dmitry. What are you drinking?”

  “Budweiser.” Dmitry replied, sitting. “It fits my new persona, no?”

  Esteban just chuckled and then clicked his glass against Dmitry’s bottle after the bartender slid it over.

  They each took a sip and waited for the bartender to drift away.

  “So, I trust this isn’t just a social occasion,” Dmitry stated, his expression growing serious.

  “No, Dmitry. It’s not,” Esteban replied. “I need your help.”

  “Is this related to the shitstorm that’s been kicked up about rockets?”

  “Yeah. How much do you know?”

  “Only that for some reason everyone wants to know if we have rockets available, ASAP. But nobody’s saying why, at least not to peons like me.”

  “It’s an asteroid, Dmitry. Some asshole at one of those asteroid mining startups has set a big one on a collision course with Earth. Probably somewhere in the Atlantic - with major damage to coastlines on both sides. We’ve got less than two weeks to stop it.”

  “Are you fucking with me?”

  Esteban looked intently at Dmitry.

  “No, you aren’t, are you,” Dmitry replied.

  “I wish I were,” Esteban sighed and took another sip of his whiskey. “I really wish I were.”

  Dmitry took a long pull from his bottle of Bud.

  “I’d heard rumors but was really hoping it was just another one of your cover stories…”

  “I wish,” Esteban nodded. “But it isn’t.”

  “The rocket that blew up over the Atlantic yesterday?” Dmitry asked.

  “That was our best shot at interception. It was carrying six nuclear warheads. But we rushed to get it ready for flight and something went wrong.”

  Dmitry looked at Esteban and then turned back to stare at his drink.

  “I’m sorry, my friend. I’m afraid I can’t help you,” Dmitry said.

  “Can’t or won’t?” Esteban said quietly.

  “Can’t,” Dmitry insisted. “Our space program is in worse shape than you know. We don’t even have a working Soyuz booster available right now.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. The modernization program that got launched a couple years ago is way behind schedule and it sucked up all the funding. So everything else got bled. Usual political bullshit.”

  “Shit.”

  Dmitry took another swig from his bottle.

  “You know,” Dmitry said softly, “you might ask the Chinese.”

  “We have. They said they don’t have anything available with the capacity to get something as heavy as a nuke even as high as geosynchronous orbit. And obviously we’d like to be able to hit this rock quite a bit further out.”

  “Ok,” Dmitry replied.

  “Do you know something they’re not telling me?” Esteban asked.

  “I’ve heard some rumors of new defense systems but nothing that’s detailed or confirmed. I don’t know enough to even say whether it would be useful in a situation like this. But I hear it’s a big deal for them and it involves being able to attack targets in space.”

  “I could see why they’d want to keep that under cover,” Esteban nodded. “But there could be millions of lives at stake here. If it came out later that the Chinese - or anyone else - had a system available that could have helped and didn’t use it… I think world opinion would be unfavorable.”

  “I assure you we agree,” Dmitry said. “I’ll see if I can pass that message along.”

  “Thank you, Dmitry.”

  “I wish I could offer more, my friend.”

  Dmitry finished his beer. Esteban took a last sip and finished his whiskey.

  “I hope I’ll see you again under better circumstances,” Dmitry said, shaking Esteban’s hand.

  “Likewise,” Esteban replied. “In the meantime, you really ought to consider leaving DC. Go somewhere inland.”

  “That bad?” Dmitry tipped head to one side.

  “I don’t know, but I’d rather not be close enough to the coast to find out.”

  “Understood. Perhaps it’s time for me to explore West Virginia. I hear there are some farmers’ daughters there who might be in need of cultural assistance.”

  Esteban chuckled. “You’ll fit right in, Dmitry.”

  “Good morning, everyone,” Caroline O’Rourke said once the video conference started. “Let’s start with some good news: congratulations on the capture of drive ships, Jessica.”

  “Thank you, Caroline,” Jessica replied, “but the credit goes to the Jovian team and our partners at Goddard and Fort Meade. It was a risky plan but they pulled it off.”

  “Now that we have control over the rock, can we deflect it?” Caroline asked.

  “I’m afraid the news there is less positive,” Jessica replied. “Our initial data shows that this asteroid is large - well over three hundred meters in diameter - and dense. Apparently the Excelsior drive ships had been operating at full thrust the entire time. The slow acceleration we were measuring before was not an attempt at stealth, it was just a side effect of how large the rock is.”

  “And our options for deflec
ting it?”

  “Our options are very limited at this point. We can’t cause it to miss Earth entirely. At best we can shift the impact location a few hundred miles.”

  The conference call erupted in several simultaneous reactions, comments and questions.

  “Can’t we rotate the drive ships to the other side and slow it down?” the liaison officer from the European Union asked.

  “I’m sorry,” Jessica replied, “but we don’t have enough thrust or enough time to make it miss Earth. We’re just over eighty hours away from atmospheric entry. Slowing it down right now just moves the impact location further west - closer to the US coastline.”

  “Could we move it far enough west to make it hit land instead of ocean?” Caroline asked.

  “How would that help?” someone blurted out.

  “It would avoid the tsunami effect but would still cause massive damage wherever it came down,” Jessica replied.

  “Could we bring it down somewhere less populated? Like Canada?” someone else asked.

  “Pardon me?!” the representative from the Canadian special forces Joint Task Force 2 exclaimed.

  “I mean northern Canada, of course!”

  “I must object!”

  “That’s not even an option,” Jessica interrupted. “We can only shift the impact site a few hundred miles. The only land within range is heavily populated.”

  “Then we need to find a way to blow it up.”

  “I wish that were possible but we don’t have that as an option, I’m afraid,” Caroline replied. “I think we need to plan on that asteroid landing in the Atlantic. And given its size, we should expect a large tsunami.”

  “How big?” he Director of FEMA asked.

  “It depends on how much of the asteroid burns up in the atmosphere and some details of its composition,” Jessica explained, “but the models suggest parts of the US East Coast and Canadian maritime provinces could see a wave as high as twenty meters. Bermuda and the Azores would likely see worse. Waves that high would cause massive damage, similar to what was seen during the Indian Ocean tsunami event of 2004. Iceland and the West coasts of Europe and Africa may sustain some damage as well. We expect effects as far south as the Caribbean.”