Heaven's Shadow (9 page)

“It’s all within limits,” Yvonne replied, clearly stung.

“What it is, is in the wrong locker,” Zack said, taking it from Patrick and handing it to Yvonne. “20-B is where the PPKs go.”

He slid between Patrick and Yvonne and entered the airlock. The chamber was almost as big as the cabin itself. On the day—hopefully a week from now—when Zack and his crew climbed into
Venture
to launch off Keanu’s surface, it would be left behind, along with the rest of the descent stage of the vehicle. But right now it was serving as a dressing room, where Tea waited, holding Zack’s helmet for the final stage of his suiting. “Oooo, Commander Stewart,” she purred in a fairly good imitation of some movie sex kitten, “I’d much rather be undressing you . . .”

“We’ve still got time to add ‘first boff on Keanu’ to the resume.”

“Optimist,” Tea said, resuming her normal voice, “but thanks for asking.” She was about to lower the helmet past his ears when she hesitated.

“What is it?” Zack was normally not a nitpicker or worrier, but this was not a normal situation.

She leaned forward and kissed him gently. “For luck.” Then the helmet descended, dampening the humming rattle of
Venture’
s ambient noise. Tea clicked the base of the helmet into the neck ring, and Zack was now suited up, breathing from its tanks.

In his headset, he heard Pogo say, “Zack, check this out!”

“What is it?”

“Brahma’
s coming in.”

Without being told, Tea disconnected Zack’s helmet and helped him remove it. “Remind me—”

“—That you’ve already used a few minutes of air, yeah, yeah.”

At the command console, Pogo had turned one of the exterior cameras north and zoomed out.

The image showed black sky over the fuzzy white edge of Vesuvius Vent . . . and a bright star. “Looks like an airliner on approach,” the pilot said.

“They’re feeding it live,” Tea said, calling up the worldwide broadcast from the flight deck of the Coalition craft . . . it showed the snowy surface as seen from an altitude of fifteen hundred meters, according to the updating figures.

“Should we be at general quarters or something?” Pogo said. He had not forgotten the missile launcher.

“Yeah, stand by to repel boarders.” Zack was confident there would be no “action”; even if there was, he didn’t have a lot of options for counterattack. “Houston, we’re holding on EVA prep until
Brahma
is safely down.”

Five seconds later, Houston acknowledged. “We copy,
Venture
. Wait until the debris settles.”

The bright star resolved into what looked like a beer can with legs, with a fin on one side.
Brahma
was actually stopped in midair, hovering.

“Taj is taking his time,” Tea said, paying attention to the commentary on Coalition TV.

“He’s not flying it, is he?” Pogo said.

“Don’t worry, Colonel—people will still remember you did it first,” Yvonne said. Pogo shot her a look that could have burned holes in her forehead.

“Coming down—!” Tea reported.

Like the
Venture
lander,
Brahma’
s engines burned clear; there was no plume of flame, just a brightness at the base of the vehicle and wisps of vapor being blown off the snowy surface. “It looks like
2001
,” Yvonne said.

“Like what?” Patrick said, almost snarling.

“The
movie
,” Tea said. Zack could see the point . . . there was indeed a resemblance to the big round commercial Moon shuttle touching down at Clavius Base in the Kubrick-Clarke film.

“Fifty meters now, I think,” Pogo said.

Then
Brahma
disappeared in a cloud of white.

“What the hell was that?” Yvonne said.

Zack slapped her on the forearm of her suit. “Shut up and watch!”

Through the mist—like the lifting fog on a coastal morning—Zack could see
Brahma
bouncing just as he imagined
Venture
had . . . but only a few meters.

The damn spacecraft actually rotated, allowing the
Destiny
astronauts to see a line reaching from the missile tube on
Brahma’
s side into the ground. The giant six-story vehicle shuddered like a breaching whale . . . then gently settled.

Zack laughed out loud. “I don’t believe it! They harpooned it!” Seeing that none of his crew understood, he said, “They fired an anchor from that tube. It wasn’t a missile launcher, it was a tool to keep them from bouncing the way we did.”

“You mean, they winched themselves in?” Tea said, clearly stunned. Of the four of them, she was the only one with sailing experience.

“Bingo,” Zack said. “Just like a sailing ship.”

“Well,” said Pogo, turning to Zack. “I guess you’re not the only Horn-blower reader around here.”

The crew of spacecraft
Brahma
prepares for its historic exploration of
Near-Earth Object Keanu. Data continue to be received via Deep Space
Network at Byalalu near Bangalore.

It may be recalled that the
Brahma
spacecraft was launched from
European Space Agency’s Kourou Space Centre on 18 August 2019.

INDIAN SPACE RESEARCH ORGANIZATION PRESS RELEASE, 22 AUGUST 2019

“Yes, I’m standing by.”

Lucas Munaretto was growing tired of using that phrase. In the four days since
Brahma
had launched from Kourou, it was almost the only thing he had been able to say on the air-to-ground link.

The problem was Bangalore mission control, where even the simplest question triggered a series of lengthy consultations. Lucas had noticed this hesitancy during the months of mission simulations but had written it off as the learning process (Bangalore had never controlled a mission this complex). Besides, Taj’s international crew had frequently been too slow to act.

But now, as Lucas struggled with a pressure regulator on Natalia Yorkina’s EVA suit, he realized that no one on the ground team, not even lead flight director Vikram Nayar, seemed willing to exercise any authority. With the eyes of the world on them, with a crew of four newly landed on Keanu, they were like actors who froze the moment the lights went up.

From his tour on the International Space Station, Lucas knew that NASA did not operate that way. Its communicators were either astronauts or training team members who worked in tandem with shift flight directors. Routine decisions got made instantly. Emergencies obviously required some consultation, but even then the voice on the line would be brisk, professional, informed.

But that reflected the difference in approach: Bangalore had based its style on the Russian method, in which cosmonauts’ actions were strictly controlled from the ground. NASA was more flexible, operating on the attitude that a properly trained astronaut was capable of responding to any situation.

Bangalore apparently had little faith in its crew. A shame, since it included the World’s Greatest Astronaut.

Lucas Munaretto loved the title, which had descended on him several years ago, during his one and only space mission, the first by a Brazilian astronaut to the International Space Station.

During an EVA, Lucas’s partner, a Japanese astronaut, had briefly become disconnected from the station exterior. EVA astronauts were tethered by at least two different lines, but one of those perfect storms struck, where a latch failed at the same time the Japanese engineer was relocating his backup line to a new position on the S6 truss and failing to catch it on first try. That simple motion—normally damped by connection to the massive station—caused the man to keep turning and begin floating away from the truss.

Without apparent concern, and in full view of TV viewers on Earth, Lucas had simply launched himself at his comrade, who had almost floated out of reach, grabbing the errant spacewalker’s feet and slowly but steadily pulling him back to safety.

The emergency lasted only a few seconds. Indeed, later analysis discounted the real threat, noting that there were no “rates”—no tumbling or even much motion—on the disconnected astronaut, who was also reachable by the station’s remote manipulator arm.

Nevertheless, the legend had already taken flight, unhindered by Lucas’s dark-haired good looks, smile, and fluency in four languages, or by his reputation as a daring rescue helicopter pilot, or by his sister Isobel, a former Victoria’s Secret model.

The notoriety had obviously helped Lucas win a coveted spot on the
Brahma
crew. Brazil’s financial contributions to Coalition space efforts theoretically earned it the right to have a representative on the first big mission, but the Agencia Espacial Brasileira had no astronaut corps, only a pair of pilots who had been hired over the past decade and sent through the training programs in Houston, Moscow, Cologne, and Tsukuba. By 2017, Lucas Munaretto was the only one still qualified, and he faced competition from members of the Russian cosmonaut team and India’s vyomanauts, not to mention qualified applicants from the European Space Agency and Japan, and even a disgruntled former NASA astronaut.

He had made the cut, of course, and entered training with a vyomanaut commander and two Russians with wildly varying degrees of experience. Dennis Chertok was fifty and had flown in space five times, all to the International Space Station, one of them as a mission specialist in America’s long-gone space shuttle. He knew everything about hardware, operations, and especially EVAs, having logged eighty hours in space walks. Even Taj, notoriously sensitive to slights and perks, had deferred to Dennis for much of the training, right up to the time when his obsessive-compulsiveness became overwhelming.

Natalia Yorkina had never flown a mission of any kind. She had been selected, Lucas suspected, to have a woman on the crew. Dark-eyed, often nervous and giggly, Natalia had not impressed him at first, either. But she turned out to be ferociously competent, eager to learn, and relentlessly hardworking, like an automaton.

Then there was Taj himself, the most stolid, phlegmatic human Lucas had ever met, more like a retired accountant or grim-faced Swiss banker than a test pilot. His greatest virtue was patience . . . which was turning out to be a good thing, given Bangalore’s slowness.

The only time Taj lit up with anything like emotion was when learning of some American outrage. Then a smile would begin to form, an eyebrow would rise, and he would rub his hands together in anticipation.

Lucas was grateful to know that his vyomanaut commander had feelings, but as for him, he hated the amped-up rivalry between the Coalition and the United States. True, the U.S. relationship with Russia had blown hot and cold for the past twenty years, and, yes, the Americans had bullied India on a number of issues.

But Brazil’s disputes with the Big Brother to the north were largely limited to energy matters. Even those tended to consist of public huffing and puffing.

All of this—the lack of response from Bangalore, the petty gamesmanship, and the fact that the very capable American crew was already headed to the surface—made Lucas want to scream with rage and impatience:

Let’s go! Glory awaits!

Big Dumb Object
: n., from science fiction, a term originated by critic
Roz Kaveney, writing in
Foundation
, the British journal (1981), to describe large, extraterrestrial planetoids, spacecraft, or structures. See
Ringworld, Dyson sphere, etc.

SCIFIPEDIA
, ACCESSED AUGUST 2019

With
Brahma
safely down, Zack actually felt impatient, eager to go outside. Within an hour, he and Yvonne were suited, on oxygen, and waiting for the pressure in the
Venture
airlock to bleed down to zero. Although he was linked to Yvonne, to Pogo and Tea, and to Houston and the world beyond, Zack felt cocooned. It was to be expected, of course, since the suit, which weighed almost a hundred kilograms on earth—more than a naked Zack—was like a man-sized spacecraft.

But it was also the moment. Through his adrenaline-soaked fatigue, he had become mentally untethered. And why not? He was no longer on Earth, he had lost his wife, he was so disconnected from his daughter he had a difficult time imagining her face and voice—

He was like that ancient aquatic beast that found itself spending more time in the open shallows than in the water. He was embarking on an adventure, leaving his old comfortable world completely behind, exploring the Biggest and Dumbest Big Dumb Object in human history—

“Go for egress,” Tea said.

Yvonne cranked the hatch open. The light of the Keanu morning was brilliant, not only because of the unfiltered Sun, but the snowy landscape, too. If the sky hadn’t been completely black, Zack could have been convinced he was home on the Upper Peninsula, taking a winter walk.

Yvonne was first onto the grill-like platform extending out from the airlock hatch. She turned around, grasping the railings of the ladder. “How am I doing?”

Zack was a step behind her, peering down at
Venture’
s feet at the surface. It looked like recently melted snow and ice cooling over rock. Trickier than the nasty lunar terrain at Shackleton, perhaps, but not dangerous. He gave a clumsy thumbs-up. “It’s a nice day. Let’s take a stroll.”

Yvonne carefully negotiated the six steps down to the surface. The ladder reached only to within a meter of the ground—an easy step on the Moon, many times easier in Keanu’s gravity. Picturing Yvonne in near free fall, he cautioned her: “Take it slow, kiddo. It’s more like swimming than walking.”

“Got it.” She was already breathing hard. And when had he started using the word
kiddo
?

With her hands firmly on the railing, Yvonne kicked off and slid ohso-slowly to the ground. “Okay!” she said, clearly pleased. “Hello, Keanu! May you be as happy to see us as we are to see you!”