Chapter 2
“A Cancerous Potato”
Farside Observatory
Korolev Crater, the Moon
March 24, 2049
1130 hours (Universal Time – U.T.)
From the fifty-meter telescopes at Farside Observatory, asteroid 23998 Hicks-Newman looked like little more than a patchy smudge of light. Six kilometers in its longest dimension, less than two kilometers in girth, it was known officially as a C-type minor planet body of the Solar System…a duke’s mixture of carbon and nitrogen compounds once identified and considered in UNISPACE scenarios for possible Mars impact someday in the distant future, to thicken the stew of that planet’s atmosphere and so make engineering the planet into a habitable place for Man that much easier.
The first unmanned scout ships to reconnoiter the asteroid found the big rock a tortured and battered world.
“Looks like something my daughter colored with black crayon and drop-kicked across the playground,” Greg Nygren had once remarked, looking at the close-up photos from the scouts. Indeed, 23998 Hicks-Newman was an elongated multi-lobed biconic rock pile, a “potato with cancer”, someone had remarked. The potato shape was kinked at one end, as if the asteroid were a fragment of a much larger body, perhaps sheared off in some massive collision eons ago. It was also twisted, deformed longitudinally, with visible stress marks from the forces involved. Overall, in the black void of space beyond Saturn’s orbit, where the first scout ships had caught up with the object, Hicks was vaguely tannish-gray in color, streaked with black lines—“carbon soot trails,” Nygren had said hopefully on first seeing the striations.
Over the course of nearly two months and half a dozen robotic missions, a complex array of mass driver electromagnetic impulse engines had been emplaced on the craggy surface of the asteroid. One array girdled the mid-section of Hicks—the asteroid was too weird to call it an equator—and other arrays had been placed near the lobed ends, the “poles” in more conventional reckoning.
Constructed by robotic fliers and surface hoppers, each array consisted of a long electromagnetic cannon which accelerated pieces of asteroidal surface material scooped up by robotic shovels and automatically conveyed to the impulse engine magazines. The impulse motors operated in almost continuous fashion under remote command from GreenMars Ops at Phobos Station, with backup control from Gateway in orbit around Earth.
The whole purpose of the arrays was to provide humans some kind of control over Hicks’ trajectory, bit by bit nudging the asteroid off its heliocentric orbit around the Sun onto a new course. Its original course had been disrupted by Red Hammer’s quantum generators at Copernicus on the Moon, but now those installations were supposed to have been eliminated by Quantum Corps.
UNISPACE wanted to regain control of the asteroid and shove it away from its current Earth intercept path.
The only question was: could the impulse motors deliver enough delta-vee to change Hicks’ trajectory? Or was the ‘cancerous potato’ of an asteroid too deep in the Sun’s gravity well to make the needed change?
The first signals arrived some seventy-five minutes after being transmitted from GreenMars Operations at Station P Phobos.
As before, the signals caused a number of actions to be automatically initiated by the system controller. Diggers and borers were activated to gouge ever deeper into the surface of Hicks, bringing up rock to be conveyed into the crushers for proper sizing. Once a stream of rock was flowing into the crushers, the outfeed conveyors were turned on and the impulse motor magnets activated. Rock pellets shaped and sized by the crushers were then fed into the magnets, where a magnetic field was applied. The now highly magnetized pellets were fed into the cannon and strong magnetic fields were sequentially collapsed along its nearly half-kilometer length, to accelerate the pellets to escape velocity and higher, nearly nine kilometers per second. The pellets streaked away from the asteroid surface like BB’s, imparting a tiny bit of momentum to the asteroid in reaction to their escape. The delta-vee was minute, nearly immeasurable at first, but steady and cumulative. Even a few days thrusting should produce detectable changes in the trajectory of the trillion-ton Hicks-Newman.
As before, all systems worked nominally, although the borers had to burrow deeper and deeper into their trenches to find enough material for the crushers. The impulse motors received their rock pellets and launched them out into space as designed. Momentum change was transferred to the asteroid by the steady stream of material being ejected.
The system controller reported back to Station P that all commanded actions had been accomplished. System status was nominal. All components of the diversion system…borers, conveyors, crushers, magnets, impulse drives…worked to design specifications.
But it wasn’t enough.
It fell to Adam Bright, technician on duty at Lunar Farside Observatory, to send the bad news to UNISPACE.
Station P, Phobos Station
Mars
March 29, 2049
2300 hours U.T.
The cycler shuttle Pinocchio lifted away from K-Dog’s aft docking port and arced out east over the Valles Marineris, still shrouded in pre-dawn darkness as the winged ship decelerated into a low orbit around Mars. The phasing and approach to Phobos Station would take a day, even though the rock pile of a moon swung around the Red Planet in a relatively low orbit of about six thousand kilometers, circling the plant in slightly more than seven hours with each revolution.
Aboard Pinocchio was the full Quantum Detour detachment along with Lieutenant John Winger. Lieutenant Eddie Mendez was the shuttle pilot and Stu Kamler her first officer, both Frontier Corps veterans. Kamler had served aboard Galileo when she was a cycler ship several years before and knew her systems well.
The trip went off without incident. Twenty hours after departing cycler ship Kepler, the mottled gray and tan crescent face of Phobos had come nicely into view.
“Still looks like a rock pile to me,” Kamler noted.
“Or an apple dipped in acid,” added Mendez. “That blip of light over the terminator…that’s Galileo and Phobos Station. We’ll be there in about two hours.”
Johnny Winger studied the battered surface of the moon through a navigation scope. “The whole place is covered with craters. Phobos has some serious acne.”
Kamler was helping Mendez set up for the rendezvous, tweaking Pinocchio’s alignment for her final approach. “She may not look like much but Phobos is an important midway point for Mars. From up here, we can get into and out of Mars orbit pretty easily and you’ve got one hell of a view below. The astros say she’s losing altitude fast and should impact the surface in a few tens of thousands of years. Pity GreenMars couldn’t wait…they wouldn’t have to try to corral some poor asteroid to do the job.”
The approach to Phobos Station went off without a hitch. In loose orbit around the moon, the station was an oddball assortment of cylinders and spheres, hung on trusswork-like structure like grapes on a trellis. A few hundred meters away, Galileo floated serenely oblivious to the fantastic vista around her.
It was the re-purposed cycler ship Galileo that would take the detachment deeper into space, to their rendezvous with 23998 Hicks-Newman.
Sheila Reaves studied the venerable old ship through the nav scope. “She looks like a kebab skewer.”
Kamler beamed. “True, she ain’t much for the eyes. But she did yeoman duty as a cycler for five years…’til Da Vinci and Kepler came along. Venus, Earth and Mars, around and around. Not the most exciting duty I ever pulled but she was a good ship and we had a good crew. Mendez, you remember Layton Hewitt?”
“Old Huey?…I do indeed. Worked with him building the station here. I guess he was off flight duty then. Gruff old bird but he had some stories that would curdle your nose hairs.”
“Yep, that was Hewitt. Best captain I ever worked with.” To Reaves and Winger, he added, “When you’re cycling, time passes pretty slowly. It’s bori
ng duty. But I have to hand it to Old Huey. We seldom had a boring day. Only C/O I ever served under who could make casualty drills into a contest and get you motivated to pull doubles every week and like it.”
Presently, Galileo and Phobos Station hove into view, hovering over the gaping Stickney Crater end of Phobos. The once-mothballed cycler was designed with a long central mast off of which hung cylinders and spheres, a quad of propellant tanks stuck on the aft end above radiation shielding and her plasma torch engine bay.
“She’s the only thing around here that could make the trip out to Hicks in less than a year. We don’t have a lot of deep-space ships in the vicinity.” Mendez gently maneuvered Pinocchio toward a docking port at the nose of the cycler’s command and control deck. Soft dock was an almost imperceptible bump, followed by the staccato firing of the capture latches.
“Hard dock,” Mendez announced. “Let’s get to work, folks. We’ve got a lot of work to do and not much time.”
Aboard the Galileo
En Route to 23998 Hicks-Newman
One Hundred Twenty Million Kilometers from Earth
April 4, 2049
0730 hours (ship time)