Rocket Girls: The Last Planet (16 page)

TWO HOURS LATER
there was a general assembly of the crew on the middeck of
Atlantis
.

They had all clipped on intercom mics, getting ready for the next communication with ground control—the communication that would determine whether or not they were going to try to save Orpheus.

Norman and Gordon had already changed into their space suits and were pre-breathing to get ready for the next round of extravehicular operations if it came to that.

“Solomon and Houston have an early report for us,” the captain told them. “If we like the sound of what they’re saying, then we’ll go ahead with Akane’s plan. Let’s hear what Houston has to say first.”

“This is George Grant speaking,” the voice said over the intercom. “Mission director at Houston. I’d like to share our results with you. Though our flight safety committee expressed considerable concern, they concluded that we should go ahead with the operation. Speaking only of the shuttle’s safety, we predict no critical danger. They had one condition, however. They want the SSA astronauts to perform
Mangosteen
’s separation.”

Yukari responded immediately. “That was our intention from the start.”

“Thank you, Yukari. We’ll share what details we were able to work out by fax. Over and out.”

This was a surprising decision coming from the usually very conservative NASA. Yukari wasn’t sure what dealings had gone on behind the scenes, but it was clear that damage control was part of the equation. So far, the SSA had been showing NASA up, and they didn’t want to lose even more credibility by failing to reclaim their errant probe.

Yukari looked around at the faces of the shuttle crew. They looked determined, ready to do whatever they had to.

“
Atlantis
? This is Solomon.” It was Matsuri. “We looked into Akane’s plan as well.”

“Go ahead, Solomon.”

“Well, we don’t think it will be impossible to properly stage
Mangosteen
inside the shuttle and rendezvous with Orpheus. Your splashdown point will be off the coast of Chile. Our recovery team won’t be able to make it there in time, but the U.S. Navy have a cruiser nearby, and they’ve agreed to help. There’s just one problem.”

“What is it, Matsuri?” Yukari asked.

“
Hoi
, I’ll have our flight surgeon explain.”

Satsuki Asahikawa came on the intercom. “Listen up, you two. The problem is with radiation exposure. If you take
Mangosteen
up to Orpheus’s current orbit, you’ll be passing through the Van Allen belt close to the equator. There’s a lot of radiation focused there.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“It’s not fatal, but it’s a lot more radiation than any X-ray technician would ever dream of subjecting you to. Compounding the problem is the fact that both you and Akane are of childbearing age.”

“So what’s the bottom line?”

“As your physician, I can’t allow you to stay up there for more than a single orbit.”

“So you mean we have to do the rendezvous and all our work on the orbiter and reentry in the space of two hours?”

“That’s right. If you can’t pull that off, I’m afraid we have to cancel the mission. The radiation is highest at just around three thousand kilometers. You’ll hit that halfway through your first orbit, so you’ll need to finish all your work outside the ship by then. Though the protection won’t be complete, you’ll be a lot better off inside the orbiter than outside.”

Yukari was silent.

“Personally, I wouldn’t recommend even doing a single full orbit. Discretion is definitely the better part of valor here. A brave astronaut is a dead astronaut. I’d like you both to consider what this risk means for you personally before deciding to go ahead with this.”

“Thanks, Solomon. Over and out.”

“Let me state for the record what I’d like to see,” the captain said as soon as the transmission ended. “I don’t like this plan. I’m grateful to both of you for your dedication and your passion, but I think you’ve done enough. Let’s call it off.”

“You’re right…” Yukari said, the fire gone from her eyes.

She felt like she could do what had to be done in the space of two hours. But even if she made no mistakes herself, there was no telling what might happen up there. If they messed up their return timing for some reason, they might end up passing through the Van Allen belt more than once.

If I could just do it by myself without putting Akane at risk too…

Yukari turned to Akane. “Let’s call this off. It’s just not worth it.”

Akane shook her head. “I appreciate what Satsuki said,” she said. “But I think she’s being too cautious. She’s exaggerating the danger. I know it.”

“I’m not too sure about that.”

“The Apollo missions went through the Van Allen belts both ways. And they were up for days on the moon, which has no magnetic field at all. They must have endured a lot of radiation. And they were fine.”

“But their equipment was designed for that, and let’s face it, they were all old guys.”

“We’re hardly any different. Sexual development stops around the age of sixteen.”

“Really…?”

Uh-oh. She’s going to out-brain me here.

Yukari changed tack. “Well how do you
feel
about this? Are you confident we can do it?”

“Huh?”

“We had, what was it, four hours of sleep, and we’ve been working for fifteen hours straight. Do you think we can make it through the next seven hours without making a single mistake? Because that’s what this is going to take.”

A moment’s hesitation passed over Akane’s face. “Well, I’ve stayed up all night preparing for tests before—”

“Taking a test and navigating a spacecraft are two different things. And we’ll need both of us working at full capacity in order to pull this off. If you made a mistake, it could mean both of our lives.”

Akane’s eyes fell, and Yukari immediately regretted her words.

“I’m sorry, I take that back. I was only thinking of myself—”

Akane nodded and thought. For a full minute neither of the girls said anything.

Then Akane looked away and started to talk. “I know it’s dangerous.”

“Yeah.”

“And I know Orpheus is just a machine.”

“Yeah.”

“But it’s more than that. It’s a dream…it’s science! And I think it’s worth risking my life for. I truly believe that,” Akane said, her emotion spilling forth. “Yukari. We need to save Orpheus!”

At that moment, the whole mood on the middeck changed.

It was like all six of them there had signed the same unseen contract by some unspoken agreement.

We’re not going home as failures. We can do this.

IN THE MANNED
spacecraft design center located within the easternmost building on the Solomon base, a 3-D model of something resembling a bell was slowly rotating on a workstation screen.

The surface of the object was crisscrossed by a lattice-work of countless vectors, each square colored from white to red, purple, and blue. The object represented the orbiter
Mangosteen
, and the colors reflected surface temperatures at different points along a simulated reentry. A young technician was working the controls.

“Right, now increase impact speed by 640,” Mukai, sitting off to the side, directed. The technician included the figure and restarted his simulation.

Once again, the simulated spaceship began to heat up. A separate window on the monitor showed a graph of peak temperatures.

“One thousand three hundred seventy…one thousand four hundred sixty…one thousand four hundred fifty… There’s the peak.”

“Huh? That low? That won’t be a problem at all.”

“Not in the model, at least,” Mukai said.

Reentering the atmosphere from a height of three thousand kilometers was a first for an SSA orbiter. Falling from a greater height meant faster speeds. Greater speed meant more friction when the orbiter hit the atmosphere. Mukai had concerns that the orbiter wouldn’t be able to take the heat.

Rough calculations had already shown it could, but as long as there was time left, it was his duty to keep running the numbers.

A maximum temperature of 1460° was lower than he had expected. Reentry speed had increased by a whole 10 percent, but their temperature hadn’t climbed nearly as much.

It made him feel uneasy. “Try again with different parameters. Once they start on the rendezvous, we won’t be able to stop them.”

“Right.”

Just then, the phone rang. Another technician answered. “Chief, it’s the control center.”

Mukai picked up the phone. “Right,” he said then hung up. “Everyone, listen up. We just received word back from
Atlantis
. Operation: Rescue Orpheus is a go. We’ll be here for another six hours, so everybody give it all you’ve got!”

A cheer rose up in the room. At the same time, things were stirring at Johnson Space Center. George lit a cigar he kept for special occasions, stood up, and said, “All right, everybody! We’re sending those girls up to meet Orpheus! Stay sharp and let’s do this!”

“
JUST GO TO
sleep. Solomon will tell us everything we need to know.”

“I just don’t think you’ll be able to do all the tying and the untying in those bulky suits…”

“We can do rope work when we need to.”

The captain sent Yukari to her berth and closed the shade. “Sleep tight. I’ll wake you up an hour before we start,” he said from the other side.

Akane was nestled inside the berth below her. Though both of them resisted it at first, sleep came quickly.

In the payload bay, Norman and Gordon worked on securing
Mangosteen
. They had lowered the orbiter down to the floor of the bay, where they could use Kevlar fiber rope to attach it to the staging platform that had been installed to hold Orpheus.

Once the shuttle finished accelerating, they would have to release
Mangosteen
immediately. If they were late in cutting her loose, they would lose that much energy. Solomon had given them twenty seconds to pull the whole thing off.

In order to keep it tightly in place yet easily detachable, the brains at Johnson Space Center had settled on bow ties attached to three points. Instead of trying to make the ropes hold the orbiter in place during acceleration, they inserted a cushion between the orbiter and the platform beneath it to absorb the thrust. For the cushion they used an old Personal Rescue Enclosure—a large ball capable of holding a single astronaut in a fetal position for transport to a rescue shuttle—that was kept on the shuttle for unforeseen emergencies.

When they wanted to release
Mangosteen
, either Yukari or Akane would pull on those three ropes. Once they had undone the ties, they would jump in the orbiter and leave the shuttle behind.

“No, that’s not how you do it,” Norman said to Gordon. “Pass it through the loop from the bottom.”

“Right, right. It’s been a long time since Boy Scouts.”

“You should go yachting. You learn this stuff whether you want to or not.”

For maximum speed, they worked together, four hands helping to tie each knot.

“By the way,” Gordon said, “I think Yukari wanted to tell you something.”

“Probably remembered something else she wanted to say about how crappy I look in my space suit.”

“That wasn’t the impression I got.”

“So what?” Norman snorted. “Let’s get this thing tighter,” he said, looking at the knot they were working on. “Don’t want it coming undone during acceleration.”

IT WAS AN
hour before they began the rendezvous. The captain woke up Yukari and Akane. The girls used the vacuum toilet on the deck and wiped their faces and hands with a sponge. Then they put on their helmets and backpacks.

“How do you feel?”

“Couldn’t be better.”

“I can’t believe I actually slept.”

“That’s good to hear.” The captain passed a sheaf of fax papers bound with a ring to Yukari. “This is the latest procedural manual. Put it in this bag and keep it with you.”

“Thanks.”

Luis came down from the upper deck to see them off. “You two are the best,” he said. “I hope we’ll get to meet someday when we’re back on the ground.”

“I guess it depends on how this goes.”

“It’ll go fine,” he said.

They shook hands, and Yukari and Akane went into the air lock. Outside, they found Norman and Gordon standing in front of
Mangosteen
, bathed in the glow from the giant blue arc of Earth toward the bow of the ship.

“Hi, Norman, Gordon,” Yukari called to them on their intercoms, and the two men raised their arms to signal everything was ready. Together, both of them circled
Mangosteen
, checking the fastenings.

“This is tied down pretty well,” Yukari said.

“All in a day’s work,” Norman replied.

“Okay, hand me the end of the rope.”

“You won’t be needing it.”

“What?”

“You won’t have time to pull the ropes, make sure the knots are undone, then get inside and close the hatch. Gordon and I will use knives to cut the lines instead.”

“But Houston said they’d only give the okay on the condition that we handled the separation!”

“Houston doesn’t need to know.”

“That means we’ll be accelerating the shuttle with both of you outside!”

“No worse than riding in a convertible. We’ll be fine.”

Yukari stared at the man’s face behind his visor. She might as well have been looking at a mask.

“Well, this is a surprise,” Yukari said, a smile playing on her lips. “I never knew NASA had such reckless pilots.”

“Yukari!” Akane scolded.

“If you do something it’s brave, but if we do the same thing, it’s reckless. Is that it?”

“Norman, I should tell you,” Akane said, “Yukari is completely incapable of directly expressing gratitude. Right, Yukari?”

“Right.”

“See?”

Someone—maybe Gordon—blew a kind of bemused snort into his mic.

“Well, I’d certainly like to hear a word of gratitude now and then,” Norman said. “The English word you’re looking for begins with a
T
.”

“Sorry, drawing a blank,” Yukari said. “I’ll be sure to let you know if I remember it. Let’s go, Akane.” Yukari moved to get into
Mangosteen
.

“I’m sorry. She’s got this attitude—but she’s really a good person inside,” Akane said before turning to leave. Somehow, despite being entirely weightless, she managed to bow to the two NASA astronauts.

“Since when did you become my wife?” Yukari asked as soon as the cockpit pressurized.

“You haven’t even apologized to him yet, Yukari! If you just thanked him, it would make that a lot easier, you know.”

“It wasn’t that I couldn’t say it. I just want to say it without everyone listening in on the conversation.”

“That just means you can’t say it.”

“What’s the big deal, anyway?”

“I just think that with such an important task ahead of us, it’s better to have none of these personal differences getting in the way.”

“Really? I focus much better when I’ve got a little fight in me.”

“Whatever works,” Akane said. Now was no time for an argument.

Yukari fixed the procedural manual on top of the instrument panel and flipped on the communication switch. “
Atlantis
, this is
Mangosteen
. We’re aboard. All systems are operational.”

“Roger that,
Mangosteen
.”

“Solomon, this is
Mangosteen
. Do you copy?”

“
Hoi
,
Mangosteen
. Loud and clear.”

Together, the two girls read through their manual.

The rendezvous procedure would begin as they were flying over Midway Island, with Orpheus trailing two hundred kilometers behind them. They would slow down and let Orpheus catch up. Then, like the next runner in a relay race, they would accelerate to the same speed to match Orpheus as it approached.

First,
Atlantis
would fire its orbital maneuvering system engine for six minutes on full thrust.

As soon as the burn finished, they would detach
Mangosteen
within twenty seconds and say farewell.

Then
Mangosteen
would fire its OMS engine for five minutes on full thrust.

This burn had to wait until they were clear of
Atlantis
, so Yukari would start the sequence by hand. The computer would take over after that.

Once both craft had finished their burns, eleven minutes would pass until
Mangosteen
and
Orpheus
were flying side-by-side far above the Hawaiian Islands.

Four minutes later, Solomon would remotely adjust
Mangosteen
’s orbit after pinpointing the locations one final time. If a fuel check at that point showed insufficient reserves, the mission would be scrubbed. Nineteen minutes total would have passed by the time the orbit adjustment was complete. Then Yukari would nudge the orbiter as close as possible to Orpheus while Akane went outside to remove the wire shorting out Orpheus’s engine control and pull the safety tag.

Ideally, all of this had to happen in the space of twenty minutes. At that point they would be over two thousand kilometers up, and the radiation would only get worse.

Forty minutes after the rendezvous procedure had begun, they would get back inside the orbiter in the sky over Brazil. Twenty minutes later, they would reach their apogee at an altitude of three thousand kilometers while passing over southern Africa.

Here, they would fire a short retrograde burn and leave orbit. Orpheus would remain above them, ready to fire its upper-stage engine as it passed over Indonesia and leave Earth’s gravitational pull altogether.

Around the same time,
Mangosteen
would reenter the atmosphere just east of Japan, doing a half orbit of the earth to splashdown off the coast of Chile. U.S. Navy helicopters would be waiting near the splashdown zone to shuttle the two of them back to a carrier.

“Wait a second—what’s this all about?” Yukari read out one of the warnings written in her manual. “‘While Akane is outside the craft, take
Mangosteen
to a safe distance.’”

“A precaution in case the engines fire. I guess they’d rather save one of us than none of us.”

“That is
so
not cool.”

“No, it’s okay. If it did fire, you wouldn’t have any fuel to chase after me anyway.” Akane giggled nervously. “Believe me—I’d be happy to go to Pluto.”

“Great. My copilot is a space kamikaze.”

“I think we all have to be, at least a little bit. I knew that when I applied for the job.”

She’s tougher than she seems
, Yukari thought.
Time to pull it together
.

“Well, I’m not retreating to a safe distance, and that’s that,” Yukari said. “Keep your lifeline tied on. The second you think something might be going wrong, push away from Orpheus. Don’t let that propulsion exhaust get you.”

“But, Yukari—”

“That’s an order from your captain!”

Time marched relentlessly on. Houston was in charge of watching the clock and counting off the seconds.

“Orpheus is approaching two hundred thirty climbers behind you.
Atlantis
, you have fifty seconds until OMS burn.”

“All systems are ready,” Berkheimer confirmed from the shuttle.

“
Atlantis
, thirty seconds until OMS burn.”

“We’re ready to fire. Norman, Gordon, you two sitting down out there?”

“You bet we’re sitting.”

“
Atlantis
, start your sequence. Ignition in ten seconds…four…three…two…ignition.”

A jolt passed through the shuttle, and they felt a gentle weight pressing on their backs.

“Houston, this is
Atlantis
. We have a confirmed OMS burn.”

“This is
Mangosteen
. No unusual vibration in here.”

“Roger that. Orpheus is approaching the hundred-seventy-kilometer mark. Three minutes forty-five seconds until separation.”

The sound of the engines firing was barely audible through the ship vibrations, despite the fact that seven tons of force were being generated just a few meters away.

“Norman, Gordon, you still sitting down?”

“We’re both doing great.”

“
Atlantis
,
Mangosteen
. One minute until burn completion.”

I wonder what they’re up to?

Yukari took a look through the periscope, but something was in the way, and she couldn’t see the two NASA astronauts outside. If she said anything to them now,
Atlantis
and the entire space communications network would hear. But there was no guarantee that they would be able to communicate at all after separation.

Yukari bit her lip.

I waited too long, and now I missed my moment.

“
Atlantis
and
Mangosteen
. Twenty seconds until burn completion.”

“Houston, this is
Mangosteen
. We are ready to fire engines. All systems are go.” Yukari lifted the cover on the sequencer activation switch and held her finger over it.

“All crew prepare for weightlessness. I’ll count it down. Weightlessness in five…four…three…one…complete burn now, begin separation!”

“The lines are free,” Norman said almost immediately. “
Atlantis
, begin evasive maneuvers.”

In the periscope protruding from the bottom of the orbiter, Yukari saw the payload bay drop away into the distance. Then she saw the two wings, the engine housing, the nose—the entire shuttle—drifting away, becoming lost in the giant blue sphere of the earth.

“Separation complete.
Mangosteen
, begin!”

Yukari pressed the activation switch.

This time, the sound of the engine was a roar, the vibrations more intense.

That’s more like it.

“This is
Mangosteen
. Sequence started. OMS firing. Everything’s looking good.” Yukari kept her finger on the talk button. “Norman, Gordon, Luis, Captain Berkheimer, thank you all. And I’m sorry about earlier. You’re the bravest, coolest people I know. We’ll try not to let you down.”

Akane’s eyes opened wide.

Yukari stared at the instrument panel, muttering to herself. “I can’t believe I said it. Must be the adrenaline.”