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.
“Thirty seconds,” Pogo said. “Looking good.”
Only now did Zack allow himself the luxury of looking ahead. Humans had been to the Moon eight times now, half a dozen during Apollo, two more since.
He and his crew would be the first to land on another body entirely . . . one that hadn’t even been discovered until three years ago. It would have lower gravity, but water in the form of ancient snow and ice—
“Ninety seconds. Still good.”
And what else? From years of studying Keanu, he knew that it was pockmarked with deep craters and vents that occasionally spurted geysers of steam. Their landing target would be next to one such feature known as Vesuvius Vent.
It would be the adventure of a lifetime, of several lifetimes . . . if the equipment worked.
And if politics didn’t interfere.
“Shutdown!” Pogo called. “Right on time, three minutes, sixteen seconds!”