Worst of all, they hadn’t arrived at their destination, not really. They’d still need to make another pass through Saturn’s atmosphere before they’d be able to match orbits with the alien operation.
Zhang jotted off an order to have the ship’s stores re-inventoried and a rationing schedule drawn up, in case things got worse. He was fairly certain they weren’t going to get better.
He and the management team ran on stims, and by the next morning, had a better idea of the range of their problems.
“The external survey crew says at least one of the external tanks can be repaired,” Cui said. “That’ll take at least a week. The second tank we’re not sure about yet, but I think we can do it.”
“We have to do it,” Zhang said, “so let’s enter that as repairable.”
The third tank was a complete loss.
“We can’t do anything with the tanks before our next pass through the atmosphere. Since the bay doors don’t appear to be damaged, most likely heat warping has jammed the releases. Let’s get Maintenance to focus on that.”
More stims, and a few hours’ sleep, and another day.
The morning brought an extended contact with Beijing. He’d started it with as complete a report as he could provide, including specific data that showed they’d hit Saturn’s atmosphere precisely as the groundpounders had recommended: and they’d still been badly damaged.
Mid-morning had brought a long message from the chairman and his scientific counsel. That had been an exercise in tap-dancing, everybody agreeing that nobody was to blame for anything, that everything had been done according to the best protocols.
That ended with the chairman turning to the screen and saying, “Zhang, you know how much I wish I could be there with you. I have nothing but admiration and respect for the way you and your crew have conducted yourselves….”
When he’d finished, Zhang thought that he’d actually sounded sincere, and that he may actually have been.
Midday brought the inventory reports.
Zhang looked them over glumly. On the plus side, they weren’t going to run out of food or water. Hydroponics could provide them with a nutritionally adequate diet for an indefinite time. Oxygen and water could be regenerated. The problem was that spaceships didn’t have perfectly closed recycling systems; some chemicals were consumables they couldn’t produce on board.
Zhang supposed the mission planners had done well. They’d taken a ship designed for multi-month trips and fitted it to support a crew for years. Since they had no idea what would be found at Saturn or how long it would take to explore, they’d been able to squeeze in almost five years’ worth of life support. There was a good fifty percent safety margin over the optimum mission duration built into that.
The mission, though, was no longer running at anything like the optimum profile. If they couldn’t get back to Earth in three years, max, they’d be in trouble. They really needed the two salvageable external reaction-mass tanks to hold through the next aerobraking.
Zhang drifted from his office down the passageway to the bridge. Seventeen months in zero-gee had been a hard regimen to live with. He’d been skipping days in the gym while confronting their difficult situation, and the ship’s physician was going to beat him up if he didn’t get back on schedule.
He’d told the doc, “If the aerobraking doesn’t work, I’m going to die. So are you. Why spend our last moments worrying about whether our hearts would be healthy back on Earth? Once we know we’re going to survive, I swear, it’ll be an hour a day, every day.”
“I don’t believe you… sir,” the doctor said.
“Remind me to have you pushed out the air lock for insubordination,” Zhang said.
Now he floated into the bridge, strapped himself into the captain’s chair, and brought up the status screen. Everyone at their stations? Yes. All sections reporting everything that could be locked down, was locked down? Yes, except for the maintenance team in the downside bay. They’d been working on the door mechanisms and reporting good progress.
“Cui, tell Maintenance to have the team in the bay finish what they’re doing and strap down. This is going to get bumpy.”
Again.
He’d pressed the geniuses on Earth to provide a better set of navigation parameters for the next pass through Saturn’s atmosphere. They’d been both sympathetic and largely unhelpful. Their computer models still suggested much the same trajectory and angle of attack that had caused them grief on the first pass.
Chedan!
From their viewing ports, Saturn looked less like a planet than a landscape. The horizon line was nearly flat at this close distance, the cloud tops below them streaked with tawny shades of yellows, oranges, and dusty greens. Far ahead, the broad bands of the ring system filled the rest of the sky, their knife-like precision contrasting sharply with the fuzzy fringes of Saturn’s atmosphere. The whole image looked unreal, an airbrush fantasy.
Cui said quietly, “Here we go.”
The ship began to vibrate; just a bit for the first few seconds, then more strongly. The view through the port was obscured by a faint reddish haze that quickly yellowed and brightened, and negative gee forces pulled the crew forward in their seats.
The incandescent plasma sheath made the ports almost too bright to look at. Atmospheric friction did its job, converting the kinetic energy of the Celestial Odyssey into heat and sound. The scream of the wind penetrated the hull as a rattling roar. For minutes that seemed much too long, the cacophony continued, then the ship bucked violently, and simultaneously a new alarm fired.
Through chattering teeth, Zhang called, “Helm, status.”
“We’re losing more pieces of the external tanks! I don’t think they’re going to hold.”
“Navigation, how much more of this?”
“We’re most of the way through, sir. Another two minutes and we’ll have shed enough velocity to handle the rest of the re-orbiting on our own.”
“If we make it that long,” Zhang whispered to himself. If they didn’t burn up. Even if they didn’t burn up, they might not have external tanks. If that was so, he thought, We are screwed.
Time dragged on, until it seemed impossible that the ship wouldn’t fly apart: but it didn’t. Gradually the buffeting diminished, the incandescent glow outside the windows dimmed, and the roaring wind quieted.
The Celestial Odyssey was free of Saturn’s atmosphere for a second time.
Zhang: “Navigation, you have a burn that will normalize our orbit?”
“Relaying it to the helm now, sir.”
“When you can, Helm, if you will.”
Peng: “Acknowledged, sir.”
A moment later he initiated the command sequence. Thrusters fired, rotating the ship one hundred eighty degrees. The main engines cut in, ten huge columns of blue-white-hot hydrogen plasma jetting from the rocket nozzles into space ahead of the ship. The Celestial Odyssey, much lighter than it had been when it left Earth, decelerated at a steady half gee. Fifteen minutes of this would have the ship in a much tighter orbit, from which they could work their way into the Maxwell Gap.
“Mr. Cui, what’s our status? Just the high points, if you will.”
The first officer scanned the ever-lengthening list of status summaries scrolling onto her screen. Maintenance had nothing new to say about the external tanks, but it was assumed that they were pretty much useless. Worse than useless, dead weight—they’d have to be cut away from the ship to reduce its mass before they returned home.
“Sir, I…” Then she stopped and turned pale. It took her just a fraction of a second to collect her thoughts, but the rest of the crew caught her hesitation. The bridge went silent.