“Okay, everyone!” Zack used the command voice. “Hey, Harley . . . interesting news.” He wondered if the sarcasm traveled across the 440,000-kilometer distance. “Care to elaborate?”
“We can tell you this much, my man. There has been a second eruption on Keanu, but it took place approximately half an hour after Brahma’s burn. There was no apparent commonality. In fact, there has been a third event since then.”
Zack found that news fascinating—and soothing. “So it’s possible the first venting was a coincidence? That we’re just looking at some kind of volcanism.” Keanu had been venting ever since it was first observed—indeed, Venture and Brahma were both targeted to the same spot on Keanu’s surface, a circular crater nicknamed Vesuvius that had been the source of several plumes of steam over the past two years.
Harley confirmed Zack’s thinking. “So far that’s the most logical theory.”
“Yeah, well,” Yvonne said, “the other theories are freaky . . .”
“Good to know,” Zack radioed. “We’ll keep our eyes open.” He set aside the question of what—if anything—was strange about Keanu to wonder instead what Brahma would do when it arrived. What was that missile-like thing it carried? It didn’t appear in the Brahma schematics available on the Web.
“Venture, we show one minute to PDI,” Weldon said from Houston. “Everything’s looking good from here.”
“Is it okay if I say that I can’t fucking believe we’re still going to land?” Tea said.
In spite of the apparent anger, the whole exchange was pro forma, its very familiarity allowing the crew to feel as though they were back in their Houston simulator and not attempting the first piloted landing on a Near-Earth Object.
It was ten times the challenge faced by Armstrong and Aldrin on the first lunar landing—yes, Venture had far better guidance systems, but the Apollo crew had been aiming for a world that had always been in the human mind . . . had been studied for centuries, and in the years prior to their launch, been probed a dozen times.
Keanu had been unknown until three years ago. It had since been the subject of exactly two distant flyby space probes. (There wasn’t a government or corporation on Earth capable of conceiving, funding, building, and launching a probe to Keanu in less than five years, by which time the NEO would be long past its closest encounter and heading back into the interstellar darkness from which it came.)
Zack Stewart’s Destiny-7 and Venture crew would indeed make the first human contact with this world.
“Thirty seconds,” Pogo said.
It didn’t seem to take that long for the numbers to reach zero. With a rumble that Zack found startling—he had never experienced a burn from the Venture cabin—the twin RL-10s ignited, ramping up from twenty percent of thrust to a full one hundred.
Zack was technically the commander of the Destiny-7 mission, something he found especially absurd at the moment. Hot pilot Pogo Downey was flying this landing.
Of course, Pogo wasn’t actually flying it yet. True, hundreds of hours of simulations had prepared him to manually steer Venture to a flat spot on the surface of the Moon . . . and several dozen hasty, postdecision sims had concentrated on the challenges of accomplishing the same thing in Keanu’s lesser gravity.
But Venture’s incredibly sophisticated and rugged guidance system was really making the decisions, its radar pinging the surface of Keanu, recording range and rate of descent, then making the delicate adjustments in the tilt of the engines, whose combined axis of thrust—tweaked by the smaller reaction control jets spaced around Venture’s exterior—determined where the vehicle was going.
Two booms rattled the cabin. “RCS,” Zack said quickly. He could actually hear the startled gasps of Tea and Yvonne on the communications loops.
He grinned to himself. He hadn’t been selected as commander for his ability with a joystick. As much as he joked about Tea’s “big sister” mentality, he had an even more acute case of wanting everyone to be happy. This personality trait had guided his professional life—he couldn’t count the number of people with whom he’d nursed violent disagreements who took his low-key assents and gentle arguments as signs of genuine friendship. If he had to work late hours, fine. If an apology was called for, he would make it. If being charming was what a situation required, he could be very charming.
And, if the greater good could be served by a display of temper, he could boil over with the best of them.
After his second space station tour, one of the NASA doctors had told Zack he rated highest among every astronaut studied in one key interpersonal factor: not technical skills (though his were superior) or even emotional control (though he obviously stayed on an even keel).
He simply played well with others. Shared his toys. Helped pick up. Did more than his portion of dirty jobs.
Making the first landing on Keanu was, in many ways, a dirty job. Training time was short, danger was great, the crew had been shuffled at the last minute. And there was a good chance of conflict with the Brahma crew.
NASA wanted the people of Earth to be happy. And who better to keep them that way than Zachary Stewart? Not only was he an experienced space flier who had spent two years training on Destiny-Venture, he happened to be the astronaut office specialist in all matters Keanu. Best of all, he actually knew—and liked!—the rival Brahma commander.
“Coming up on pitchover,” Pogo said, the first words he’d uttered since the start of powered descent.
Although there was no sense of motion—nothing like the banking of an aircraft—the view out the forward window changed, black sky giving way to Keanu’s gray-and-white horizon.
It was as if Venture had clambered to its feet—which, in technical terms, it had. Within moments they were heads up, plus Z in NASA terms.
“What’s that?” Pogo said.
Since burning into orbit around Keanu, Destiny-Venture had made two low passes, but both on the night side, where visibility was almost non-existent. Now, for the landing, Venture was heading toward the sunlit side, like a transatlantic airliner flying toward the European dawn.
Only this dawn showed a giant geyser flaring thousands of feet into the black sky. Unaffected by winds—Keanu had no atmosphere—it looked like a perfect tornado funnel out of Zack’s childhood nightmares.
He had to force himself to say, “Houston, are you seeing what we’re seeing?”
Houston was receiving the same image, of course, from Venture’s cameras, but controllers wouldn’t experience the same awe and majesty . . . or barely contained terror.
“I hope that’s not from Vesuvius,” Zack said, and immediately saw the answer to his own question, as the plume slid off to the left—clearly from another vent, which Weldon calmly confirmed.
As Buzz Aldrin had, while Neil Armstrong flew the first lunar landing, Zack concentrated on his job as commentator. “Okay, Pogo, there’s three hundred, down at twenty.” Three hundred meters altitude, down at twenty meters per second, both figures diminishing at different rates. “The field below looks smooth.” They could see their landing zone from the forward windows, whose lower halves were angled inward. But glare from Keanu’s snow and ice washed out the view—better data was coming from a radar image in the head-up display, which showed scattered boulders, though so far none big enough to topple Venture.
“Copy that,” Pogo said, in a voice that was basically a grunt. Zack had once flown in a NASA T-38 jet that Pogo had to land in bad weather. All during the approach, the pilot had fallen essentially silent, his eyes locked on displays, hand on the stick.
Scope-locked.