Space

Chapter 5

SADDLE POINT

The Commodore Perry was assembled in lunar orbit.

The fuel pellets were constructed at Edo, on the Moon, by Nishizaki Heavy Industries, and hauled up to orbit by a fleet of tugs. Major components like the pusher plate and the fuel magazine frame were manufactured on Earth, by Boeing. The components were lifted off Earth by European and Japanese boosters, Ariane 12s and H-VIIIs.

After decades in orbit the old International Space Station module had a scuffed, lived-in look. When the salvage crew had moved in the air had been foul and the walls covered with a scummy algae, and it had taken a lot of renovation to render it habitable again.

The various components of the Perry were plastered with sponsors’ logos. That didn’t matter a damn to Malenfant; he knew most of his paintwork would be scoured off in a few months anyhow. But he made sure that the Stars and Stripes was large, and visible.

Malenfant prepared himself for the trip.

In her cramped office at JSC, Brind challenged him, one last time. She felt, obscurely, that it was her duty.

‘Malenfant, this is ridiculous. We know a lot more about the Gaijin now. We have the results returned by the probe –’

‘The Bruno.’

‘Yes. The glimpses of the beautiful flower-ship. Fascinating.’

‘But that was two years ago,’ Malenfant growled. ‘Two years! The Gaijin still won’t respond to our signals. And we aren’t even going back. The government shut down Frank Paulis’s operation after that one shot. National security, international protocols …’

She shrugged.

‘Exactly,’ he snapped. ‘You shrug. People have lost interest. We’ve got the attention span of mayflies. Just because the Gaijin haven’t come storming into the inner system in flying saucers –’

‘Don’t you think that’s a good point? The Gaijin aren’t doing us any harm. We’re over the shock of learning that we aren’t alone. What’s the big deal? We can deal with them in the future, when we’re ready. When they are ready.’

‘No. Colonizing the solar system is going to take centuries, minimum. The Gaijin are playing a long game. And we have to get into the game before it’s too late. Before we’re cut out, forever.’

‘What do you think their ultimate intentions are?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe they want to dismantle the rocky planets. Maybe take apart the sun. What would you do?’

Oddly, in her mundane, cluttered office, her security badge dangling at her neck, she found herself shivering.

The Perry looped through an elliptical two-hour orbit around the Moon. On the lunar surface, the lights of the spreading Japanese colonies and helium-3 mines glittered.

The completed ship was a stack of components fifty metres long. At its base was a massive, reinforced pusher plate, mounted on a shock-absorbing mechanism of springs and crushable aluminium posts. The main body of the craft was a cluster of fuel magazines. Big superconducting hoops encircled the whole stack.

Now pellets of helium-3 and deuterium were fired out of the back of the craft, behind the pusher plate. They formed a target the size of a full stop. A bank of carbon dioxide lasers fired converging beams at the target.

There was a fusion pulse, lasting two hundred and fifty nanoseconds. And then another, and another.

Three hundred micro-explosions each second hurled energy against the pusher plate. Slowly, ponderously, the craft was driven forward.

From Earth, the new Moon was made brilliant by fusion fire.

The acceleration of the craft was low, just a few per cent of G. But it was able to sustain that thrust for a long time – years, in fact – and once the Perry had escaped lunar orbit, its velocity mounted inexorably.

Within, Reid Malenfant settled down to the routines of long-duration spaceflight.

His hab module was a shoebox, big enough for him to stand up straight. He drenched it with light from metal halide lamps, hot white light like sunlight, to keep the blues away. The walls were racks which held recovery units, designed for easy replacement. There were wires and cables and ducts, running along the corners of the hab module and across the walls. A robot spider called Charlotte ran along the wires, cleaning and sucking dust out of the air. Despite his best efforts, the whole place was soon messy and cluttered, like an overused utility room. Gear was scattered everywhere, stuck to the floor and walls and ceiling with straps and Velcro. If he brushed against a wall he could cause an eruption of gear, of pens and softscreens and clipboards and data discs and equipment components, and food cans and toothpaste and socks.

Much of the key equipment was of Russian design – the recycling systems, for instance. He had big generators called Elektrons which could produce oxygen from water distilled from his urine. Drinking water was recovered from humidity in the air. There was a system of scrubbers called Vozdukh that removed carbon dioxide from the air. He had a backup oxygen generator system based on the use of ‘candles’, big cylinders containing a chemical called lithium perchlorate which, when heated, gave off oxygen. He had emergency oxygen masks that worked on the same principle. And so on.

It was all crude and clunky, but – unlike the fancier systems American engineers had developed for the Space Station – it had been proven, over decades, actually to work in space, and to be capable of being repaired when it broke down. Still, Malenfant had brought along two of most things, and an extensive tool kit.

Malenfant’s first task, every day, was to swab down the walls of his hab module with disinfected wipes. In zero gravity micro-organisms tended to flourish, surviving on free-floating water droplets in the air. It took long, dull hours.

When he was done with his swabbing, it was exercise time. Malenfant pounded at a treadmill bolted to a bracket in the middle of the habitation module. After an hour Malenfant would find pools of sweat clinging to his chest. Malenfant had to put in at least two hours of hard physical exercise every day.

On it went. Boring a hole in the sky, the old astronauts had called it, the dogged cosmonauts on Salyut and Mir. Looking at stars, pissing in jars. To hell with that. At least he was going someplace, unlike those guys.

He communicated with his controllers on Earth and Moon using a ten-watt optical laser, which gave him a data rate of twenty kilobits a second. He followed the newscasts that were sent up to him, which he picked up with his big, semi-transparent main antenna.

As the months wore on, interest in his mission faded. Something else he’d expected. Nobody followed his progress but a few Gaijin obsessives – including Nemoto, he hoped, who had, deploying her shadowy, vast resources, helped assemble the funding for this one-shot mission – not that she ever made her interest known.

Sometimes, even during his routine comms passes, there was nobody to man the other end of the link.

He didn’t care. After all they couldn’t call him back, however bored they were.

While he worked his treadmill, his only distraction was a small round observation port, set in the pressure hull near him, and so he stared into that. To Malenfant’s naked eye, the Perry was alone in space. Earth and Moon were reduced to star-like points of light. Only the diminishing sun still showed a disc.

The sense of isolation was extraordinary. Exhilarating.

He had a sleeping nook called a kayutka, a Russian word. It contained a sleeping bag strapped to the wall. When he slept he kept the kayutka curtained off, for an illusory sense of privacy and safety. He kept his most personal gear here, particularly a small animated image of Emma, a few seconds of her laughing on a private NASA beach close to the Cape.

He woke up to a smell of sweat, or sometimes antifreeze if the coolant pipes were leaking, or sometimes just mustiness – like a library, or a wine cellar.

Brind had tried another tack. ‘You’re seventy-two years old, Malenfant.’

‘Yeah, but seventy-two isn’t so exceptional nowadays. And I’m a damn fit seventy-two.’

‘It’s pretty old to be enduring a many-year spaceflight.’

‘Maybe. But I’ve been following lifespan-extending practices for decades. I eat a low fat, low calorie diet. I’m being treated with a protein called co-enzyme Q10, which inhibits ageing at the cellular level. I’m taking other enzymes to maintain the functionality of my nervous system. I’ve already had many of my bones and joints rebuilt with biocomposite enhancements. Before the mission I’m going to have extensive heart bypass surgery. I’m taking drugs targeted at preventing the build-up of deposits of amyloid fibrils, proteins which could cause Alzheimer’s –’

‘Jesus, Malenfant. You’re a kind of grey cyborg, aren’t you? You’re really determined.’

‘Look, microgravity is actually a pretty forgiving environment for an old man.’

‘Until you want to return to a full Earth gravity.’

‘Well, maybe I don’t.’

After two hundred and sixty days, half-way into the mission, the fusion-pulse engine shut down. The tiny acceleration faded, and Malenfant’s residual sense of up and down disappeared. Oddly, he felt queasy; a new bout of space adaptation syndrome floored him for four hours.

Meanwhile, the Perry fired its nitrogen tet and hydrazine reaction control thrusters, and turned head over heels. It was time to begin the long deceleration to the solar focus.

The Perry, at peak velocity now, was travelling at around seven million metres per second. That amounted to two per cent of the speed of light. At such speeds, the big superconducting hoops came into their own. They set up a plasma shield forward of the craft, which sheltered it from the thin interstellar hydrogen it ran into. This turnaround manoeuvre was actually the most dangerous part of the trajectory, when the plasma field needed some smart handling to keep it facing ahead at all times.

The Perry was by far the fastest man-made object ever launched, and so – Malenfant figured, logically – he had become the fastest human. Not that anyone back home gave a damn.

That suited him. It clarified the mind.

Beyond the windows now there was only blackness, between Malenfant and the stars. At five hundred astronomical units from the sun, he was far beyond the last of the planets; even Pluto reached only some forty astronomical units. His only companions out here were the enigmatic ice moons of the Kuiper Belt, fragments of rock and ice left undisturbed since the birth of the sun, each of them surrounded by an emptiness wider than all the inner solar system. Further beyond lay the Oort cloud, the shadowy shell of deep space comets; but the Oort’s inner border, at some thirty thousand astronomical units, was beyond even the reach of this attenuated mission.

When the turnaround manoeuvre was done, he turned his big telescopes and instrument platforms forward, looking ahead to the solar focus.

‘You must want to come home. You must have family.’

‘No.’

‘And now –’

‘Look, Sally, all we’ve done since finding the Gaijin is talk, for twelve years. Somebody ought to do something. Who better than me? And so I’m going to the edge of the system, where I expect to encounter Gaijin.’ He grinned. ‘I figure I’ll cross all subsequent bridges when I come to them.’

‘Godspeed, Malenfant,’ she said, chilled. She sensed she would never see him again.

The Perry slowed to a relative halt. From a thousand AU, the sun was an overbright star in the constellation Cetus, and the inner system – planets, humans, Gaijin and all – was just a puddle of light.

Malenfant, cooped up in his hab module, spent a week scanning his environment. He knew he was in the right area, roughly; the precision was uncertain. Of course, if some huge interstellar mother craft was out here, it should be hard to miss.

There wasn’t a damn thing.

He went in search of Alpha Centauri’s solar focus. He nudged the Perry forward, using his reaction thrusters and occasional fusion-pulse blips.

The focusing of gravitational lensing was surprisingly tight. Alpha Centauri’s focal point spot was only a few kilometres across, in comparison with the hundred billion kilometres Malenfant had crossed to get here.

He took his time, shepherding his fuel.

At last he had it. In his big optical telescope there was an image of Alpha Centauri A, the largest component of the multiple Alpha system. The star’s image was distorted into an annulus, a faintly orange ring of light.

He recorded as much data as he could and fired it down his laser link to Earth. The processors there would be able to deconvolve the image and turn it into an image of the multiple-star Alpha Centauri system, perhaps even of any planets hugging the two main stars.

This data alone, he thought, ought to justify the mission to its sponsors.

But he still didn’t turn up any evidence of Gaijin activity.

A new fear started to gnaw at him. For the first time he considered seriously the possibility that he might be wrong about this. What if there was nothing here, after all? If so, his life, his reputation, would be wasted.

And then his big supercooled infrared sensors picked up a powerful new signature.

The object passed within a million kilometres of him.

His telescopes returned images, tantalizingly blurred. The thing was tumbling, sending back glimmering reflections from the remote sun; the reflections helped the processors figure out its shape.

The craft was maybe fifty metres across. It was shaped something like a spider. A dodecahedral central unit sprouted arms, eight or ten of them, which articulated as it moved. It seemed to be assembling itself as it travelled.

It wasn’t possible to identify its purpose, or composition, or propulsion method, before it passed out of sight. But, he was prepared to bet, it was heading for the asteroid belt.

It was possible to work out where the drone had come from. It was a point along the sun’s focal line, further out, no more distant from the Perry than the Moon from Earth.

Malenfant turned his telescopes that way, but he couldn’t see a thing.

Still, he felt affirmed. Contact, by damn. I was right. I can’t figure out how or what, but there sure is something out here.

He powered up his fusion-pulse engine, one more time. It would take him twenty hours to get there.

It was just a hoop, some kind of metal perhaps, facing the sun. It was around thirty metres across, and it was sky blue, the colour dazzling out here in the void. It was silent, not transmitting on any frequency, barely visible at all in the light of the point-source sun.

There was no huge mother-ship emitting asteroid-factory drones. Just this enigmatic artefact.

He described all this to Sally Brind, back in Houston. He would have to wait for a reply; he was six light-days from home.

After a time, he decided he didn’t want to wait that long.

The Perry drifted beside the Gaijin hoop, with only occasional station-keeping bursts of its thrusters.

Malenfant shut himself up inside the Perry’s cramped airlock. He’d have to spend two hours in here, purging the nitrogen from his body. His antique Shuttle-class EVA Mobility Unit would contain oxygen only, at just a quarter of sea level pressure, to keep it flexible.

Malenfant pulled on his thermal underwear, and then his Cooling and Ventilation Garment, a corrugated layering of water coolant pipes. He fitted his urine collection device, a huge, unlikely condom.

He lifted up his Lower Torso Assembly; this was the bottom half of his EMU, trousers with boots built on, and he squirmed into it. He fitted a tube over his condom attachment; there was a bag sewn into his Lower Torso Assembly garment big enough to store a couple of pints of urine. The LTA unit was heavy, the layered material awkward and stiff. Maybe I’m not quite the same shape as I used to be, forty years ago.

Now it was time for the HUT, the Hard Upper Torso piece. His HUT was fixed to the wall of the airlock, like the top half of a suit of armour. He crouched underneath, reached up his arms, and wriggled upwards. Inside the HUT there was a smell of plastic and metal. He guided the metal rings at his waist to mate and click together. He fixed on his Snoopy flight helmet, and over the top of that he lifted his hard helmet with its visor, and twisted it into place against the seal at his neck.

The ritual of suit assembly was familiar, comforting. As if he was in control of the situation.

He studied himself in the mirror. The EMU was gleaming white, with the Stars and Stripes still proudly emblazoned on his sleeve. He still had his final mission patch stitched to the fabric, for STS-194. Looking pretty good for an old bastard, Malenfant.

Just before he depressurized, he tucked his snap of Emma into an inside pocket.

He opened the airlock’s outer hatch.

For twenty months he’d been confined within a chamber a few metres across; now his world opened out to infinity.

He didn’t want to look up, down or around, and certainly not at the Gaijin artefact. Not yet.

Resolutely he turned to face the Perry. The paintwork and finishing over the hull’s powder-grey meteorite blanket had pretty much worn away and yellowed; but the dim sunlight made it look as if the whole craft had been dipped in gold.

His MMU, the Manned Manoeuvring Unit, was stowed in a service station against the Perry’s outer hull, under a layer of meteorite fabric. He uncovered the MMU and backed into it; it was like fitting himself into the back and arms of a chair. Latches clasped his pressure suit. He powered up the control systems, and checked the nitrogen-filled fuel tanks in the backpack. He pulled his two hand controllers round to their flight positions, and released the service station’s captive latches.

He tried out the manoeuvring unit. The left hand controller pushed him forward, gently; the right hand enabled him to rotate, dip and roll. Every time a thruster fired a gentle tone sounded in his headset.

He moved in short straight lines around the Perry. After years in a glass case at KSC, not all of the pack’s reaction control thrusters were working. But there seemed to be enough left for him to control his flight. And the automatic gyro stabilization was locked in.

It was just like working around Shuttle, if he focused on his immediate environment. But the light was odd. He missed the huge, comforting presence of the Earth; from low Earth orbit, the daylit planet was a constant overwhelming presence, as bright as a tropical sky. Here there was only the sun, a remote point source that cast long, sharp shadows; and all around he could see the stars, the immensity which surrounded him.

Now, suddenly – and for the first time in the whole damn mission – fear flooded him. Adrenaline pumped into his system, making him feel fluttery as a bird, and his poor old heart started to pound.

Time to get with it, Malenfant.

Resolutely, he worked his right hand controller, and he turned to face the Gaijin artefact.

The artefact was a blank circle, mysterious, framing only stars. He could see nothing that he hadn’t seen through the Perry’s cameras, truthfully; it was just a ring of some shining blue material, its faces polished and barely visible in the wan light of the sun.

But that interior looked jet black, not reflecting a single photon cast by his helmet lamp.

He glared into the disc of darkness. What are you for? Why are you here?

There was, of course, no reply.

First things first. Let’s do a little science here.

He pulsed his thrusters and drifted towards the hoop itself. It was electric blue, glowing as if from within, a wafer-thin band the width of his palm. He could see no seams, no granularity.

He reached out a gloved hand, fabric encasing monkey fingers, and tried to touch the hoop. Something invisible made his hand slide away, sideways.

No matter how hard he pushed, how he braced himself with the thrusters, he could get his glove no closer than a millimetre or so from the material. And always that insidious, soapy feeling of being pushed sideways.

He tried running his hand up and down, along the hoop. There were – ripples, invisible but tangible.

He drifted back to the centre of the hoop. That sheet of silent darkness faced him, challenging. He cast a shadow on the structure from the distant pinpoint sun. But where the light struck the hoop’s dark interior, it returned nothing: not a highlight, not a speckle of reflection.

Malenfant rummaged in a sleeve pocket with stiff gloved fingers. He held up his hand to see what he had retrieved. It was his Swiss Army knife. He threw the knife, underarm, into the hoop.

The knife sailed away in a straight line.

When it reached the black sheet it dimmed, and it seemed to Malenfant that it became reddish, as if illuminated by a light that was burning out.