Heaven's Shadow (2 page)

He pushed away from the forward right window of the
Destiny
spacecraft and turned toward the lower bay ten feet away, where Pogo Downey had his 20/15 eyes pressed against the lenses of the telescope. “See anything yet?”

Pogo, born Patrick but rechristened in flight school, was a big, red-haired Air Force test pilot wearing a ribbed white undergarment that made him look like a Himalayan snow ape. “Nothing.”

“There should be
something
.” Something, in this case, would be a faint point of light against a field of brighter lights . . .
Brahma
, a crewed spacecraft launched toward Keanu by the Russian-Indian-Brazilian Coalition . . .
Destiny’
s competitors. “We’ve got two tracking nets looking for the son of a bitch,” he said, as much for his own morale as for Pogo Downey’s edification. “It’s not as though they can
hide
.”

“Maybe
Brahma
’s pulling the same stunt—your gravity whatever.”

“Gravity gauge.”
Destiny
was about to make an unscheduled and unannounced burn that put the American spacecraft closer to Keanu than its Coalition challenger. “The wind is at your back, your opponent is in front of you. For him to attack, he’s got to tack against the wind.” Pogo still seemed unconvinced. “Didn’t you ever read Horatio Hornblower? Where they mention weather gauge?”

“I’m not a big nautical fan, in case you haven’t noticed.” Pogo was fond of referring to astronauts with Navy backgrounds as
pukes
.

“Okay, then . . . it’s like getting on their six.” That was a fighter pilot term for getting behind—in the six o’clock position—an opponent.

Now Pogo smiled. “Does that mean we can take a shot at them?”

“Don’t get any ideas,” Zack said, not wishing to broach that particular subject at this time. “Besides, they can’t pull the same stunt.
Brahma
’s too limited in propellant and they’re too nervous about guidance.” The Coalition craft relied on Indian and Russian space tracking systems that were far less capable than the NASA Deep Space Network available to
Destiny
. “Just keep looking,” he told Pogo, then floated back up to the main control panel.

The
Destiny
cabin had twice the interior volume of the Apollo spacecraft, which still wasn’t much, especially with the tangle of cables and the two bulky EVA suits.

“Gotcha!” Pogo used a touchpad to slide a cursor over the image, clicking to send the image to Zack’s screen. Only then did the pilot turn his head and smile crookedly. “RCS plume. Dumb bastards.” The Air Force astronaut’s contempt for the competing vessel, its crew, and its politics was well known. It had almost cost him a seat on this mission.

“Everybody’s got to tweak their traj,” Zack said. He actually sympathized with
Brahma
commander Taj Radhakrishnan and his crew. An experienced flight control team would
not
need to fire reaction control jets—RCS—at this stage. But the Coalition had flown only three piloted missions total, and this was the first beyond low Earth orbit. Its control team, based in Bangalore, was naturally cautious.

Now the fuzzy image of
Brahma
appeared on Zack’s screen, trajectory figures filling a window. “Houston,
Destiny
, through Channel B,” Zack said, touching the send button on his headset. Without waiting for an acknowledgment, he added, “We have
Brahma
in the scope.”
Destiny’
s 440,000-kilometer distance caused a four-second lag for each end of a conversation. That was going to be increasingly annoying.

Sure enough, mission director Shane Weldon’s reply was out of sync. “Go ahead,
Destiny
.” It took several seconds to give Houston the information that
Brahma
had been spotted, and for Houston to confirm that the burn was still go.

Zack relinquished the left-hand pilot seat, then floated down to the telescope. To hell with
Brahma
. . . what he wanted to look at was Near-Earth Object Keanu.

Three years ago, a pair of amateur astronomers—one in Australia, the other in South Africa—had spotted a bright Near-Earth Object high in the southern sky . . . literally over the South Pole.

The NEO was designated X2016 K1—an unknown (“X”) body sighted in the first half of July 2016—but, to the horror of professional astronomers, quickly became known by its more popular name, Keanu, after the actor who had played the iconic Neo in the
Matrix
movies.

Within days, as Keanu’s size (more than a hundred kilometers in diameter) and trajectory (originating in the constellation Octans and heading sunward, passing close to Earth in October 2019) became clear, imaginative elements in the space community began to talk about a crewed mission to the NEO. A spacecraft already existed: NASA’s
Destiny
, designed for flights beyond earth orbit, to the Moon and Mars—and to Near-Earth Objects.

But with budgets tight and benefits uncertain—what would a crewed mission learn that a fleet of uncrewed probes couldn’t discover for a tenth the cost?—enthusiasm for the idea faded away as Keanu grew in brightness in the southern sky.

Until the Russian-Indian-Brazilian Coalition announced that it was diverting its first planned lunar landing mission to Keanu. The first flag planted on its rocky, snowy surface would not be the Stars and Stripes.

That announcement triggered a frantic amount of replanning by NASA comparable to its fabled 1968 decision to send
Apollo 8
around the Moon ahead of the Soviets. “It’s going to be like NASCAR,” Pogo Downey liked to say. “Only this time we might actually be swapping paint.”

In search of an edge, NASA’s great minds had cooked up several disinformation gambits. At this moment, the two other astronauts in Zack’s crew, Tea Nowinski and Yvonne Hall, were talking on the open loop, visual and audio of their preparations from the
Venture
lander being fed through the NASA Deep Space Network. Meanwhile, Zack and Pogo did their dirty work on an encrypted loop transmitted via military satellites.

The last-minute gravity gauge prank had been forced on the
Destiny
crew when bad weather at the Cape allowed
Brahma
to launch a day ahead of them.

Much as he enjoyed the challenge of spoofing the Brahmans, it killed Zack to be looking for another spacecraft instead of the hundred-kilometer-wide bulk of Keanu, now less than two thousand kilometers away.

And invisible! Both
Destiny
and
Brahma
were approaching Keanu’s dark side, just as several of the early Apollo missions had sneaked up on the Moon—the crew hadn’t even seen the cratered surface until moments before making the burn that put them into lunar orbit.

If the gravity gauge maneuver echoed the age of sail, so did this night-side approach . . . it was like sailing toward a rocky coast on a moonless night in fog . . . undeniably dangerous.

And ten times as complicated. Zack was not a specialist in orbital dynamics, but he knew enough about the mind-boggling complexities of the intercept to make his head hurt.

Destiny
and
Brahma
were falling toward Keanu a thousand kilometers and twenty-four important hours apart. Without this added burn,
Destiny
would arrive a day later.

Arrive where? Keanu was actually approaching Earth from below, almost at a right angle to the plane of the ecliptic, where most planets of the solar system orbited. Both
Destiny-Venture
and
Brahma
had had to expend extra fuel to climb away from Earth’s equator toward a point where Keanu
would be
in 4.5 days.

Complicating matters further,
Destiny- Venture
was now slowing down after having been flung out of Earth orbit by the powerful upper stage of its
Saturn VII
launcher.

And Keanu itself was speeding up as it fell toward its closest approach to Earth, passing just outside the orbit of the Moon—the brightest thing humans had ever seen in their night sky.

In order to sneak past
Brahma
,
Destiny
had to essentially hit the brakes . . . to fire
Venture’
s engines directly into the path of flight. The burn would cause the vehicle to take up a lower orbit around Earth, where it would then be going much faster than
Brahma
.

The cost in fuel was immense, eating up six thousand of the vehicle’s nine thousand kilograms of gas.
Destiny-Venture
would have zero margins for error in landing or eventual liftoff. But if it went as planned, twenty-four hours from now, Zack’s crew would be on the surface of Keanu in time to welcome the crew of
Brahma
as they landed.

At which point, Zack fervently hoped, everyone’s attention would turn to exploration of this unique body and the arguments would be over its nature and not issues as pointless as who got there first.

“Thirty minutes,” Pogo announced, startling Zack out of a momentary reverie—or nap. One more like that, and he would have to hit the medical kit for Dexedrine.

He blinked and took another look into the scope. The fuzzy white blob that was
Brahma
seemed to swell, then fade in brightness. The Coalition vehicle was cylindrical, so even if rotating it shouldn’t be waxing and waning. “Pogo, do you see a hint of a halo around
Brahma
?”

“Sorry, got a different screen up at the moment—”

“How’s the prank coming?” Yvonne Hall emerged from the docking tunnel between
Venture
and
Destiny
in her heavy white EVA suit, minus the helmet.

“Careful!” Zack said. “We’ve got half a dozen different mikes going.” He waggled both hands with index fingers extended. “You never know what’s going to get fed where.”

Yvonne’s eyes went wide. An African American engineer who had worked with the
Saturn
launch team at the Cape, she was clearly not used to being corrected. It was another reminder to Zack that Yvonne, Patrick, and even Tea were not originally Zack’s crew.

“Hey, sports fans.” Tea joined them, a candy bar and a bag of trail mix in hand. Blond, athletic, the all-American girl, she was one of those types found—and, Zack suspected, deliberately selected by NASA—in every astronaut group, the big sister who wants everyone to play nicely. “Do we need any snacks before the burn?”

Yvonne took the trail mix and pulled herself toward Pogo’s floating EVA suit. “Any time you’re ready to don your armor, Colonel Downey . . .”

Meanwhile Tea launched a candy bar at Zack. “Here,” she said. “Take a bite and get dressed.”

Zack allowed Tea to literally tow him and his suit through the access tunnel. He tucked and tumbled, orienting himself properly inside
Venture
’s cabin, a cylinder with a control panel and windows at the front end, and an airlock hatch on the back. “What’s our comm situation?”

“You’ll love this.” Tea smiled and touched a button on the panel, allowing Zack to hear NASA’s public affairs commentator.
“—Due to tracking constraints at the Australian site, direct communications with
Destiny-7
will be unavailable for the next fifteen minutes. The crew is in no danger and will accomplish the burn as scheduled—”

“Those guys are good,” Zack said.

“We’re all good, baby. And you’ll be better if you get some rest.” Tea knew he was operating without sleep.

“So now you’re my nurse?”

“Just noticing that you’re getting a little scope-locked.” This was a term from Houston mission control, when some engineer would work a problem to death, ignoring food, sleep, and common sense.

But Tea knew better than to prolong the argument. She also had to concentrate on the tricky business of helping Zack into his EVA suit, a process that required gymnastic flexibility and brute strength and could rarely be accomplished in less than ten minutes. “And you’re all buttoned up.”

“T minus fifteen,” Pogo called from the other side of the tunnel. “Are we gonna do this gauge thing or what?”

It was only when strapped to his couch in the second row next to Yvonne, behind the two occupied by Pogo, the actual pilot, and Tea, the flight engineer, that Zack allowed himself to relax.

Tea reached a hand back and took his, squeezing it. A simple gesture that triggered tears . . . partly from fatigue, partly from tension, but mostly from the memory of the strange events that had put him in this place, at this time. The events of two years past—

Where was Rachel now? Was his daughter watching
Destiny
’s flight from mission control? What was she thinking about her father? Zack could picture the look on her face, the unique mixture of love and exasperation. More of the latter than the former. He could almost hear her the way she would stretch the word
Daddy
across three syllables.

“Five minutes,” Pogo said.

“How close are we?” Tea said. “I’m the navigator and I have a right to know.”

“Fourteen hundred clicks from Keanu, give or take a few.”

The four screens that dominated the
Destiny
cockpit were alive with spacecraft systems data, range and rate, timelines, numbers, images.

They would do this burn in the dark, without talking to Houston through either the open network or the encrypted one. Mission control wasn’t worried about being overheard . . . but the Coalition had systems capable of detecting raw communications traffic, and even if the other side couldn’t decrypt a message, just the heavy traffic load might give the game away.

“One minute,” Pogo said.

The cockpit was now completely silent except for the hiss and thump of oxygen pumps.

The figures on the panel ran to zero.

Zack and the others heard a thump and felt themselves pressed forward into their straps, their only experience of gravity since launching from low Earth orbit.