"You have a point," says Prescott.
Yes, and I still have a very vivid image in my head of Peterson leaving a trail of blood through the K1 right before she died before my eyes.
"What about strangulation?" asks murder machine Prescott.
"Yes… if you're not worried about the effect that will have on the commander's face. Bulging eyes and burst veins might be a tip off that something is amiss."
"Mr. Dixon, I hope you understand this is not a game where we get a do-over. The stakes are far too high," says Markov. "If the Captain uses anything other than a non-lethal on the commander and it fails to work, so does the mission."
"I get that. I'm not trying to take the pacifist approach. Hell, I put bullets in three men yesterday because I didn't see any other way out." As I say it, my words make the memory more intense.
"So you understand the need to use whatever means necessary?" asks Markov.
"Yes. I would tell the Captain to try anything that didn't put him at greater risk."
Laney holds up her hand. "Okay, may I suggest an alternative approach?"
"Yes, Ms. Washburn?" asks Markov.
"Well, if the danger is in getting Captain Prescott close enough to the commander to use something to incapacitate him — whether it's lethal or non-lethal — then the solution would seem to be use your spy onboard the K1. Maybe she can?"
"She?" replies Markov.
"You kept avoiding a gender specific pronoun. That usually only happens when you're trying to indicate a female when normally you'd assume a male. Anyway, why not let her do it?"
"Interesting assumption," Markov says, not actually confirming her observation. "The problem is that this person has limits to what they will and won't do. I think this may push them too far if we ask them to help kill their commander."
"And that's why it should be a non-lethal, like a fast-acting paralytic. Could the Captain pass her a syringe that she could then use?"
"Perhaps. Captain, what do you think?" asks Markov.
"Well, I'm a soldier. I'm not really familiar with the whole social engineering solution. But Dixon makes a very compelling and graphic case as to why I shouldn't knife the commander. And strangulation puts me in close quarters with someone who has a lot of combat training. I don't doubt I could take the man out, but it might not be as clean as I like."
I interrupt. "And he has the advantage of having spent months in zero-g. In your case, we're not even sure if the anti-nausea drugs will do their job, let alone how quickly you can adapt. No offense."
"None taken. Dr. Markov, I can certainly pass a syringe to your operative, if you think they'll go for it."
"I believe if they understand this is the least violent of the solutions, they will accept this solution. This still leaves us with the second commander. After you gain entry to that module, you need a way to deal with him."
"You could use your knock-out gas once he opens the door," I suggest. "It's a small enough chamber that the gas will quickly fill it before the air handler has a chance to pump it out."
"That could work," says Prescott. "Here on Earth that's how we'd incapacitate someone in a similar situation. When we practice infiltrating enemy submarines we do that. We also have special rounds that are designed to go through people but not hulls."
"Spaceships and stations are different than submarines," I reply. "Some parts are literally as thin as a Coke can. You're in a balloon waiting to pop."
Prescott makes a note of this in his little journal. "Okay. I'll need a gas mask. Is there a problem if I strap one to my chest inside the space suit? I'm not sure what exposing the filter to extreme cold or vacuum would do."
I get a sinking feeling at the realization of all the different variables going into this. "I think you should be fine with that."
There are so many things that can go wrong. We don't even have a chance to do a dry run. And the man we're sending up to do this has never even been in space before.
Granted, neither had I until a few days ago, but I had the benefit of years of training and weightlessness onboard our vomit comet airplanes. I knew as much as you could know until actually doing it.
I tell myself to relax. Prescott is the best of the best. He's built for this intellectually and physically. His combat experience far exceeds my pilot and astronaut training.
Markov checks his phone. "Hmmm. Unfortunate news. The sensor unit malfunction on the US/iCosmos station that prevented you from docking has spread to another module and they're afraid their water supply may be contaminated with bacteria."
"Oh wow," says Laney. "That's horrible."
"Yes, it is," he replies. "It would seem they asked the Russians for help and they declined — not surprising. Now they're requesting an emergency resupply from iCosmos. Captain Prescott, it looks like we will be sending you into space quite shortly."
"You clever bastard," says Admiral Jessup. "How did you arrange that?"
"Sometimes serendipity must be seduced."
59
State of the Art
The Alicorn rocket used to send the Unicorn spacecraft into orbit consists of two stages: The upper and the lower stage.
The lower stage is the big cylinder on the bottom that uses nine engines to send the upper stage to the edge of the atmosphere, disengaging at about Mach 10 then falling back to Earth where it uses the carefully calculated fuel left onboard to land on a platform at the far end of the iCosmos assembly bay.
The second stage pushes the Unicorn into orbit, reaching 17,500 miles per hour, then heads back down to Earth top first, using a heat shield to slow it down before it does a somersault and lands like the first stage on another pad adjacent to the assembly bay.
There's a third landing pad for the Unicorn to land on, but I have no personal experience because I decided to take a side trip to Rio.
After landing, each component of the rocket is pulled into the iCosmos assembly bay where they're inspected for damage and any parts that need refurbishing are replaced.
The entire rocket, all three sections, are designed to be reused like a passenger jet. This reusability is why iCosmos, SpaceX and Blue Origin have been able to radically change space travel.
It hasn't come easily or cheaply. These companies were the pet projects of some of the richest men in the world who had a grand vision about the future of space.
Several years into this era, the improvements and changes are still happening. The iCosmos assembly building is like one huge machine. Rockets go out one side, come back used through another, and are carried along on tracks as robot arms inspect the surface. AI diagnostic software checks the internal systems and the engines are X-rayed for stress.
Before this period, the most expensive part of a rocket launch was the cost of the rocket itself — even the Space Shuttle. Its side boosters were dumped into the salty ocean making them more costly to reuse than just buying new ones — although you'd never know that from the magic of government contractor accounting. The main tank burned up on reentry and the shuttle itself had to have the engines rebuilt after every launch and the tiles resurfaced. All of this added up to a billion-dollar price tag per launch.
The contractors who worked on the shuttle and its successor, the SLS, really didn't have much interest in solving the problem they were paid handsomely to solve — that was until the upstarts came along and changed the game.
Now the single biggest cost to getting into space is fuel. It takes roughly the same amount of fuel to put the Unicorn and its payload into orbit as it does to send a 727 around the world.
On the bigger rockets they're using to send materials to the US/iCosmos station, the cost per pound is much less.
All of which leads to the current state of affairs where rocket launches are cool, but they're no big deal, to the point that while security is extremely tight around the iCosmos facility — it's still located on an Air Force base — this isn't anything like an Apollo launch of yesteryear.