But the thing that sucked most for Harley on this day was feeling nailed to one spot. Yes, he was digitally ept, Bluetoothed, and eager to multitask, but he missed being able to stand, to move around, to talk with his hands. He was like the Sundance Kid from that old Western—“I’m better when I move.”
Maybe that was why he was so slow to realize what was obvious from the Keanu data.
He returned to the din of the Home Team room, with its conference table covered with laptops and hard copies, resuming the messy business of wrangling seven verbal, loud, entitled specialists. They ranged from seventy-five-year-old Wade Williams, a popular astronomy writer (one of JSC Director Jones’s idols, which was the only reason Harley tolerated the arrogant, half-deaf shithead), to thirty-two-year-old Sasha Blaine, a brilliant new Ph.D. from Yale noted as much for her startling figure as for her impressive IQ. There were also other contributors available on Skype . . . hell, Harley felt more like a drill instructor than a project leader. “All right, people! Goddammit!”
That outburst didn’t shut them up, but it reduced the decibel level so that Harley could be heard. It was probably fortunate that his mobility was limited, or he might have smacked someone.
“This isn’t a fucking seminar. We’re working critical, real-time mission support, and next door we’ve got a mission manager who really wants an answer to the question—what is going on with Keanu?”
“Does he want the right answer or an answer?” Williams said in a Georgia drawl. Glenn Creel, Williams’s snarky little buddy on the team—the guy was a television writer, for Christ’s sake—actually gave him a high five.
“Okay, Wade,” Harley said, reaching for patience and not really attaining it. “Do we have any kind of answer? Anything that might keep the crew from further danger?” No one offered. “Then let’s review the bidding,” Harley said.
“We’ve had four eruptions on Keanu since Destiny-Venture made its orbital insertion burn. What do we know about them? Sasha?”
Sasha Blaine, the tall, nervous red-haired woman from Yale, was undisciplined but had at least demonstrated the ability to understand the team’s priorities. “Each venting took place at a different location on Keanu, each with varying duration and apparent force—”
“What about the frequency?” Williams said. “Time between events—increasing, decreasing?”
“Counting down to the destruction of Washington, D.C.?” That was Williams again.
Blaine simply took the question seriously, then dismissed it. “The gaps were two hours, one hour thirty-five minutes, one hour fifty-one minutes. No obvious pattern.”
“Wait!” That was Lily Valdez, a professor from Irvine. “Are we seeing increased angular momentum?”
The Home Team chatter died in silence. “Anybody?” Harley said. This was not his area.
“Yes,” Sasha Blaine said. “Prior to the, uh, recent events, Keanu had a very slow rotation, on the order of sixty days—”
“—Which was out of family for NEOs,” Williams said.
“—Not that there is much of a family for extrasolar NEOs,” Harley said, unable to resist. He nodded at Blaine. “Setting aside what we had . . . what we do we have?”
“It looks as though its new period will be twenty hours.”
“Something less than a day.”
There was something troubling about all these numbers, but Harley was damned if he could see what, especially with Williams in full honk. “I’m more worried about these eruptions,” the writer was saying. “They’ve all been in the same hemisphere, so that’s one data point. Is there any other correlation?”
“I don’t know if we have enough information to suggest a pattern,” Harley said. “We noted only a dozen ventings over the past two years—”
“—and now we’ve got four in the past few hours,” Williams said, unnecessarily.
“Four so far,” said Creel.
Harley’s head hurt. He was missing something obvious—all of them were.
Just then Sasha Blaine said, “We’re getting data from DSN,” and Harley’s headset chirped. He turned away from the eruption of chatter around the table to hear: “Harley, Shane. Two of the guys on Brahma went EVA and reached Yvonne. She’s alive with a suit leak. They’re taking her back to Venture.”
“Could be worse,” Harley said. He knew that this was Weldon’s way of asking for an answer. “Wait one, Shane—” He lowered the headset and said, “What now?”
This time the Home Team room fell into silence. Everyone present, or on-screen, looked directly at Harley. “What?”
“Look at this.” Sasha Blaine turned her laptop screen toward him.
Until this moment, Harley had convinced himself that the events on Keanu would have some geological explanation—indeed, the likely trigger for the increased eruptions was tidal stress caused by the NEO’s close encounter with Earth. It might even explain the change in the object’s rotation.
But no longer. Harley looked at the figures for Keanu’s trajectory and said, “This sucker’s in orbit now, isn’t it?”
“Correct,” Williams said. “Today’s eruptions were much more powerful than any seen earlier . . . strong enough to act like rocket burns.”
As Harley let that info-bomb detonate inside his brain, he heard Weldon: “We’re all waiting, Home Team. Do you have something? Anything?”
Harley looked at the faces around him, especially Sasha Blaine, who gestured as if to say, What are you waiting for?
“Okay, flight. New data shows that Keanu is not a Near-Earth Object. It just burned into orbit, perigee 470,000 clicks, apogee five hundred, inclination seventy-eight degrees, new period circa twenty hours.”
“What does that mean, Harley?”
“It means that Keanu is an autonomous, powered vehicle of some kind. Until we come up with a better word, I’d call it a starship.”
Does anyone else think it’s suspicious that Destiny has all these Ku-band problems just when the EVA started? Coincidence? I don’t think so.
POSTED BY CESSNA MAN AT NASA.JSC.GOV @ 83:42 MET
DELETED @ 83:44 MET
“Where is she?” Zack said. “Someone speak!”
He had a general idea . . . he had seen Yvonne flying away from him, away from Vesuvius Vent toward Brahma. But the combination of short horizon, residual vapor, undulating ground, and restricted helmet vision made it impossible for him to know where she had landed.
Or, for that matter, if. The gravity on Keanu was so low that a human could reach escape velocity by running. The eruption that had caught Yvonne might have been strong enough to launch her into orbit.
Assuming, or hoping, that that hadn’t happened, Zack turned his back on Vesuvius and, keeping the Venture lander to his left, began hopping, sliding, and shuffling in the same direction Yvonne had flown.
There were voices on the control loop—Tea and Pogo as well as the capcom—but no information.
“Quiet down, everybody!” Zack snapped, using what Rachel would have called his grown-up voice. “Yvonne, do you read?”
He waited, afraid he would hear more screaming, but just as afraid he would hear nothing. “Yvonne . . .”
Then he heard harsh breathing, the sound of a mouth literally on a microphone. And a moan. “Copy. Zack?” Yvonne, alive!
“Can you tell me where you are?” And please don’t say halfway around Keanu.
“Ah . . .” She was clearly in pain. “Down, somewhere.” Another moan. She was probably shifting to look at her surroundings. “Beyond Brahma. I can see the top of it.”
“Then I can reach you in a few minutes.” He tried to pick up the pace and fell flat.