Trajectory Book 1 (New Providence) Read online

  Some clanking and swearing drifted up from below decks. “Damnit Carl, secure those tools. I don’t want to go outside with a fucking screwdriver floating around in my suit!”

  Edson ignored it for the time being. He’d deal later.

  He opened the attachment from control and watched the video of Pandora. He didn’t blink during the entire twenty second playback. He played it again.

  Flash, was that a smaller flash? Bloom. Then something drifting out. Piece of the ship? Piece of whatever hit it? Not enough resolution at this distance to make anything out beyond a pixel. Why two flashes? Why different sizes? He squinted and ran it again.

  How could he use this?

  “Control, this is Calypso. What is your science team saying about those flashes? Over.”

  Edson hollered down the tube, “Carl, come up here please”. More clanking below.

  Carl re-emerged through the hatch, muttering, “can’t do two things at once.”

  Edson put the Watchtower video up again. “Hey, focus on this for a minute. What do you see here.” He played the video.

  While he watched it, he had an idea, and put up Em’s orbital data beside it.

  Carl watched, gnawing on a stubby fingernail.

  Edson put the video from Olympus at the beginning of the Watchtower video and played them both in sequence.

  Carl had to ask. “Ok, what’s this other data? This doesn’t look like Control telemetry.”

  Edson watched Carl studying the screen. He tapped on the grainy footage from Emma now occupying the display. “This is from a project my daughter and her friend put together. Data from Olympus Mons’ big ‘scope and some ballistic projections.”

  Carl watched. Edson tried to coach him through this, hoping he’d come to the same questions he had. “Just ignore the telemetry for a second. Look at this.” He pointed at Emma’s repeater. “That’s happening really regularly, sped up in the video. And the intensity’s the same each time.” The replay cut to the Watchtower scene. “Here, there’s one flash, and then a smaller flash. Why two? Why are they different intensities all of a sudden?”

  Carl squinted and leaned in closer. “Are there two flashes?”

  Edson shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m asking Lighthouse.”

  “Control, this is Calypso. We have some questions: We want to know what the two flashes are in the Watchtower video. The repeating flashes in the Olympus footage are all a single intensity. The secondary flash in the Watchtower video is smaller. Please report. Over.”

  From below a voice wafted through the hatch. “You can’t leave me down here with all these tools, bitch!”

  Carl spit out a piece of fingernail and it floated in front of his face. He watched it tumbling there. “I better go help Trig before he pops a vein.” He took one last look at the screen over Edson’s shoulder and stared at it for a good long moment before turning back to the hatch. “Gots to be aliens.”

  021

  Making Time was drifting through the inner belt. Dead calm. One hundred and fifty million kilometers from Mars. They’d been adrift for a day now.

  Jerem was in his bunk with messages from Tam and Emma.

  Em wrote telling him about her discovery of the repeating object. Describing the fast transit across the inner asteroid belt towards their ship. She was sure that was what happened to Pandora. She speculated the object was some kind of ship.

  Remember our last night together? You and me alone in your apartment. I don’t want that to be my last memory of you. please come home safe. We miss you. I miss you. We need you. I love you. xxooxx em

  Tam’s message was less affectionate.

  Damn, this was serious.

  He pulled up the videos and telemetry on his tablet as the intercom fizzled in. “Burn in twenty minutes. Come up to the cockpit, please.”

  Jerem pushed the button on his intercom. “Be right up.” He slid out of his bunk with his tablet into the access-way. Then swung up through the hatch into the dim red cockpit. He was hungry but it was too late to do anything about that.

  “Dad, did you see these? I got messages from Tamra and Em.”

  Hal was going over his calculations. “Yep. What do you make of it?”

  Jerem buckled into his seat and stuck his tablet onto the console. He felt his face flush thinking about Emma’s mail reminding him of their last night together. “I really don’t know. I haven’t had a chance to look at the data and videos yet. They seem pretty … serious.” He made some adjustments to his seat. “Any word from Control?”

  “Yeah. We got some visuals from Watchtower.” He ran the video. It made Jerem feel sick even without any detail. “It’s… hard to watch.” There were humans in that explosion.

  “Yeah. It is. Mike was a good captain… Good friend.” They were silent for a moment, Jerem remembering the party at the Brunos. Mike’s copilot Vern got drunk and spilled punch all over the wall. Jerem’s mom helped clean up the mess while the men carried Vern out to his apartment where there was presumably more drinking taking place. Then he and Emma snuck off together and made out in the park under the willow tree. It’s a small group of people in the space program. Everybody knew everybody.

  Jerem brought up the videos Emma sent him on his tablet. He’d watch those once they were underway. “Have we heard from Calypso?”

  “We just got an updated flight plan from them. They’re going to take a wider burn. Go high and back in. It’s a lot of fuel, but they’re planning on getting well around anything that might be intersecting our trajectories.” Hal was getting the ship ready for power. “We’re going to take the opposite route.”

  Jerem considered this. Loaded up his preflight checklist.

  “Uhh. What if there’s a problem and they need help? Shouldn’t we be following them?”

  “Too risky. If the option’s losing two ships versus one, we have to save one of them.”

  “But, Dad… That’s Emma’s father on that ship.”

  “I know, son.” Hal set his jaw. “Pre-burn check.”

  They ran through the checklist. Green across the board. Jerem had a knot in his gut. His hands were shaking. He made a fist to stop it.

  Hal opened the comms channel. “Mars Control this is MSS27, Making Time. Updated plan filed. Commencing Burn. Over and out.” He clicked off. “You have the honors, kid. Light it up.”

  Jerem hit the autopilot switch and the engines kicked them into their seats. In a moment, the acceleration smoothed out and the shaking stopped. The ship easing into its new power-curve. “Engine’s reading stable power. 10%. Gravity’s at 0.2G.”

  “Roger. Looks good.”

  Jerem picked up his tablet and started flipping through it. He was looking for a game to play back in his bunk. Something to fill the time while they waited. “Dad? Why are we even out here?”

  Hal looked up from the engine readouts to his son. “What do you mean? We’re in the space program. This is what we do. The colony needs metal to grow. The station needs water and materials…”

  “Yeah, I know that, but we used to have robots. On Earth. Why are they sending people up into space?”

  Hal thought for a second. “You know why. We put a ban on autonomous robotics. It’s in our constitution.”

  “But wouldn’t it be safer? And we could leave them out for longer periods. They could replicate and mine the whole belt for us, then fire packages back to us to pick us up. We wouldn’t even need these ships.”

  “Sure. And then we lose our ability to operate in space and have an army of robots out here in the belt with unlimited resources. Look, we don’t know what happened on Earth, but if it was … an intelligence – like we think it was – if it’s still alive or if it returns, we can’t afford to have anything out here that isn’t under our direct control. That’s the thinking, anyway.”

  Jerem looked back at his tablet. “Oh.”

  “C’mon, kid. Let’s get some beans.”

  022

  New Providence: Nicola T
esla University.

  Greg, Tamra and Emma were being led through the halls of the university by Chief Administrator Walter Brennan.

  “Commander Mancuso requested you three personally by way of Doctor Powell. He says you have some idea what happened to Pandora?” He had an urgent walk at the best of times. His mostly bald head turned half around on his stocky neck to address them as he walked.

  Emma answered for them. “Maybe.”

  Tamra coughed again with a hacking wheeze. She was becoming increasingly miserable.

  Greg gave her a squeeze. “You should go back home. You’re sick.”

  Administrator Brennan plowed on. “Time for that later. We’re setup in the main conference room.”

  “We’re here.” He opened the door and gestured inside for them to enter the long room, dark in conference mode. Doctor Powell was sitting at the head of the table, bathed in low yellow light. He nodded at them as they came in.

  The face of Commander Mancuso centred on screen, looking serious but tired. Dark bags under his eyes. Two others sat at the table on either side of him.

  Brennan took a seat next to Powell at the table and motioned for the three to sit down and they took their chairs. Greg hesitated, but sat down at the far end of the table next to Tamra, self-conscious that he was closest to the camera.

  Doctor Powell cleared his throat and started the conversation. “Here we are. Commander Mancuso, this is Emma Franklin, Greg Pohl and Tamra Wheeler.” He gestured around the table introducing them. “They were the ones who found the object in the Olympus feeds. I think before even Watchtower picked it up.”

  Mancuso grumbled at the mention of Watchtower missing the object, but nodded in greeting. He was still bristling at the thought of a malfunction on their most important piece of sensing equipment.

  They were on a sub-second communications lag. The station was mercifully close at the moment and didn’t require multiple satellite relays. “Nice to meet you all. I have with me Dr. Nelson Ortega and Dan Wilkins from my science team.” Heads nodded around the table.

  “So, let’s get into this then. This is all highly-confidential information. You are not to relate it to anyone. Not even your families.” Mancuso looked at each of them on his screen in the boardroom.

  Emma and Tam exchanged a look. Tamra looked miserable, wiping her mouth on her wrist, stifling a cough.

  Mancuso leaned into the table. “Ortega, give us a run-down on where we are right now and what we know. We can save speculation until everyone’s on the same page.”

  Ortega cleared his throat and sat forward, lifting himself straighter in his seat. Emma knew he was the science team lead onboard Lighthouse Station. He looked tired, but his shirt was crisp. “Almost twenty eight hours ago, we witnessed what appeared to be the total destruction of MSS13 Pandora. I’m going to show you the footage we received from Watchtower around the time of the event.”

  The secondary screen lit up and the video began playing. The room was silent except for Tamra’s occasional sniffling.

  “Wilkins ran it through our image processing suite and was able to pull out some more detail from the original. We’ll let you take a look on your own time at the raw footage and data after this meeting. What I want to show you are these frames, at the Tower’s full resolution, enhanced for detail.”

  The screen zoomed into a grainy view of the scene, Pandora’s engines forming a small round blob of light in the left of the frame. You could almost make out the tiny dot of the ship in its center.

  “This happens so quickly we only get a couple of frames.” Ortega shifted in his seat and advanced the video. “First frame, the object flashes here.” A red arrow pointed to the pinpoint flash at the right of the frame. “This frame represents a width of approximately two thousand kilometers.” A red line appeared from edge to edge with the scale imprinted on the bottom, 2000kms. Pandora’s engine flare was maybe a third of the way from the left edge.

  “Next frame,” he advanced the image, “we see a much fainter flash much closer to Pandora.” Another red arrow pointed to another tiny pinpoint of light this time half as bright as the initial one. Everyone at the table leaned in, willing more information onto the image than was there. “We couldn’t see this secondary flash before we ran the enhancement on it. You’re seeing this at the same time as our ships.”

  Emma sat up, looking at Ortega through the camera. “It’s much dimmer. All of the previous flashes had been the same intensity.”

  Ortega had already started to speak and paused as Emma cut in over his feed. Their lag was starting to increase as the station rounded the planet and more satellites picked up and bounced their signal. “The flash is… that’s right, much fainter than the original and all previous flashes. We can get to theories about that in a moment.” He shifted in his seat, looked back at the screen and then back down at his tablet and advanced the frame.

  Ortega continued his explanation of what they were looking at. “The explosion begins here, I think slightly after the blast began. We probably missed the beginning of this event between frames it happened so quickly.” The bloom from Pandora’s engines was expanded brighter. Either noise from the sensor or debris from the ship or object added to the graininess, but mostly it was just a white blob twice the size as it was before. The scale zoomed in to show a range of five hundred kilometers edge-to-edge. The blackness of space became a dark grainy grey with some bright stars dotting the picture.

  Next frame. Still larger blob, but less intense as it expanded outward and faded. A two-pixel dark diagonal line at the top right of the explosion. Ortega waggled a red arrow around it on his tablet. “We don’t know what this is. Debris. Object. Not sure. Not enough detail.”

  Next frame. The bloom was fainter and larger. Some more dark pixels near the center of the light. “Maybe debris here and here.” A waggled red pointer around the dark areas. Next frame, more dissipation. Some lighter sources near the interior and so on until the bloom faded out and was replaced with the stellar background.

  Ortega sat back. Everyone watched in silence.

  Mancuso cleared his throat. “What have we seen since, Nelson?”

  “No flashes until this morning.”

  Mancuso narrowed his eyes. Emma thought he looked like this caused him physical pain.

  Ortega carried on with the explanation. “This morning, at 0900, Captain Franklin aboard Calypso,” he nodded fractionally at the camera, “entered a new flight plan.” The image on the left from Watchtower was replaced with an orbital trajectory, tilted down by forty-five degrees. “Calypso intends to break out of the ecliptic into a high trajectory and drop back towards us, skirting the previous trajectory of the object.” He paused. Chewing something inside his mouth with a crunch. “Wilkins, show them what you found.”

  Dan Wilkins sat up, his hands went from the table to his lap. “Uh, this morning at 0915 Calypso started a burn, ran for sixty minutes, waited for fifteen, started another burn for sixty and so on. She’s accelerating hard on her new plan.”

  Wilkins tapped at his tablet and a new image came up beside the orbital trajectory. “Watchtower picked up a flash past the position of Pandora’s last contact around 1020. Then another at 1030. Then 1032… And then it did something really unexpected. A series of flashes on a decreasing timescale down to the framerate of Watchtower’s video feed for nearly a full minute followed by an increase in period back up to ten minutes.”

  He paused and looked around at the faces on his screen. Everyone’s eyes were widening with the possible exception of Tamra who just looked increasingly uncomfortable. Even administrator Brennan was starting to look alarmed for her. The implications of Ortega’s message were clear to everyone in the room.

  “The time series appeared to be a cubic bezier curve. An S-curve. Symmetrical. Perfect.”

  The room burst with gasps and exclamations. “I knew it!” Emma could be heard over the din. Powell reigned himself in and attempted to calm the room. Administrator Brenn
an just looked stunned in his suit. Doctor Powell pushed his glasses up on his nose and frowned.

  After everybody’d been contained, Mancuso picked up the conversation again. “Now, what does the new trajectory of the object look like?”

  Wilkins looked at Ortega who gave him a quick nod. “It’s, uh, moving up out of the plane of the ecliptic. It looks like it’s tracking Calypso.”

  Wilkins added the plot to the orbital graph and showed them intersecting.

  “If these plots are correct, they’ll rendezvous in about forty hours.”

  Quiet.

  Mancuso leaned forward. “We really appreciate your help. Which one of you wants to come up here to help us work on this?”

  Emma and Greg gawped at each other. Tamra covered her mouth preventing another wheezing cough.

  023

  The Terror. 1.2 AU from Mars.

  Reggie Talbot and Vanessa Macgregor struggled with the suits in the equipment locker. For the second time in an hour they were under hard acceleration, almost Earth gravity. The suits and EVA equipment they had arrayed in front of them crashed to the floor along with themselves.

  “God damn it!” Reggie tried to untangle himself from the suit he was checking.

  “Didn’t you hear the countdown? What did you think was going to happen?” Vanessa, arrayed with somewhat more dignity on the floor, sat up and continued her suit check.

  “I figured I’d be able to get this suit section checked out before it started.” Reggie tried in vain to right himself under the bulky suit torso. His helmet rolled out of his reach and he had to crawl after it. “What is with these burn patterns anyway? Everything’s all fucked up.”

  “We’re on a new course.” Vanessa had caught the new flight plan while she was drinking her coffee earlier. “Low trajectory, under the ecliptic. We’re plotting an intercept with Making Time.”

  That explained the higher burn frequency. They needed to course correct along two axes and it required a lot more energy to break out of the solar system’s rotational disc. Reggie was unimpressed.