Starfire & Snowball Read online

  “BD +5 1668. Other names and catalog numbers: Luyten’s Star, Gl 273, Hip 36208, —” Okay, skip a bit. “Planets: None. Comments: This star, like many red dwarfs, does not possess a developed planetary system. There are several belts of asteroidal material that never accreted, and there may be an outlying cometary cloud. The existence of the latter is unconfirmed.”

  “Whaddaya mean, ‘Planets: none’!” If it wasn’t time to panic, it was beyond time to take things calmly. “How the futz am I supposed to refuel the goddamn ship?” I pushed away from the console and stomped back to the living area to sulk, er, think. Stomping isn’t easy in zero-G; the result wasn’t satisfying. I ordered a drink from the autobar.

  Somewhere around the third drink, I had the glimmerings of an idea. Of course there was hydrogen in this system. It had been staring me in the face. I’d have to do some research; getting it wouldn’t be easy. On my way back to the main computer console I told the entertainment system to cue up Pink Floyd’s “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.”

  It was a crazy idea, one I’d have dismissed if I were less desperate or more sober, but it was a chance. Not anything as suicidal as diving at the heart of the sun, or even of BD +5 1668, but maybe I could skim its outer atmosphere.

  The Starfire could scoop the thick atmosphere of a Jovian planet at orbital speeds; perhaps I could do something similar higher in the star’s atmosphere. I didn’t need to fill the tanks; just ten percent would get me to Procyon.

  Again I popped up the astronomical database and the Starfire’s manual, and went through the numbers. I’d made too many mistakes lately. I wanted to be sure I got this right.

  At first blush things looked good; BD-plus-five-etcetera was a “cool” red dwarf, a mere 3100K—about 2800C. That was more than normal reentry heating, but much less than the scoops were designed for. Then I worked out flight profiles and realized just how fast I’d be going when I rounded the star.

  Oh. I put on Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell”.

  Of course, “out of” wasn’t quite right. I’d be going the other way. If the radiant heat didn’t get me the friction heating probably would.

  I was going to have to think this through. I grabbed another drink from the autobar and pulled myself back to the cabin area. I left Meat Loaf on as background music.

  * * *

  Perhaps the music, or the alcohol, was too conducive to letting my mind wander. I couldn’t concentrate on the problem at hand. That didn’t bother me, if left alone the subconscious often comes up with better solutions than the conscious, but a nasty, annoying part of my brain kept whispering “you’re going to die out here, Jason.” The rest of me kept telling it to shut up, buzz off, and let me think.

  I thought back on why I was out here in the first place. That last meeting at NanoDesign, I’d accused the new CEO of spending too much time and money planning for contingencies that would never happen, and he had accused me of being too laid back and not taking things seriously. I’d told him that I’d never run into a problem I couldn’t think my way out of.

  “Until now,” that nasty, annoying part of my brain said. “Shut up”, I told it, and downed the rest of my drink.

  Okay, start thinking. What did BD plus five etc. have going for it? No planets. No confirmed comets. Oh, there must be some out there; they’d be the dickens to find, looking for dirty snowballs in the dark. Radar-absorbing dirty snowballs, at that. What else? Asteroids? What good were they?

  I snapped alert. That was it! Asteroids!

  This system had asteroids. And I had a plan. Back to the computer.

  The music advanced to “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”.

  * * *

  I was going in. It had taken days to find some likely asteroids. I wanted nickel-irons, not stony chondrites that might blow apart at the wrong moment.

  It took over a week to push them into fast sun-grazing orbits. I hated wasting even a little of my precious hydrogen on the fusion thrusters, but you can’t push anything with a warp bubble.

  The asteroids would be my sunshades. I’d hide in the shadow of one on the way in to the star, then dash out and scoop hydrogen. There’d be a second asteroid passing perihelion for me to duck behind and ride out, again in the shade, to where I could use warp again. That was the plan, anyway.

  The computer showed that I might need two passes to collect enough hydrogen for the jump to Procyon. I set up three pairs of asteroids, just in case. Enough of fooling around, I wanted out of there.

  My real worry was whether the ship would stand up to the punishment I was going to give it. The stellar data on BD-plus-five weren’t precise, and I wondered if a scoop designed for orbital speed through Jovian atmosphere would withstand a faster trajectory through much thinner, but hotter, stellar atmosphere. The calculations said it would, but they were kludged up from what little reference data I had aboard. Too bad the computer didn’t have an expert system for hypersonic fluid dynamics.

  * * *

  Everything that could be battened down was battened down, and I had reduced internal power to help cold-soak the ship. I drifted in the shadow of the first asteroid—I’d nicknamed it Icarus—as it plummeted starward. Perihelion was in fourteen hours. I thought about jumping away to get some sleep for a few hours, but it would be impossible to get back here; the warp drive isn’t that precise, and the local gravity well was only getting deeper. I’d have to trust to the autopilot to keep station with Icarus.

  * * *

  An alarm woke me with a start. Okay, only the wakeup alarm. Six hours out now. I wished to hell I had something to do. I checked over my calculations, for the Nth time.

  * * *

  Four hours out. The sensors showed that local space curved too much now to risk a warp bubble. I was in for the duration.

  * * *

  Two hours out. I’d be making my scoop run soon. I ran yet another radar scan to make sure Daedalus, my outgoing shield asteroid, was on course. I nudged the ship’s thrusters to stay in Icarus’s shadow. Icarus itself was starting to get hot. It had a slow rotation that I hadn’t quite canceled, and as the sun-warmed side rotated into shadow it radiated heat back at me. Still, it was cooler here in its shade than out in the sunlight.

  * * *

  Four minutes and counting. The timing wasn’t split-second critical; I’d be maneuvering all the way to Daedalus anyway, but I had to leave Icarus before we were too deep in the stellar atmosphere. One more visual check of the cabin: everything secure. I snugged my seatbelts and keyed the checklist one more time.

  Scoops: out and locked. Thrusters: idle. Active cooling: on. Hull temperature: 100C. Scoop temperature: 100C. Controls: Free and operating.

  Music: “Ride of the Valkyries"? Something by Kansas? No, I didn’t need any distractions.

  Okay, here we go. I pitched the nose up and shoved the thrust lever forward. The ship bucked as we left Icarus’s slip stream, and the hull and scoop temperatures jumped when the sunlight hit. Clear of the asteroid now, I nudged the ship over and started our screaming rush to where Daedalus should be in twenty minutes. That was about nineteen-and-a-half minutes longer than I liked, but the gas was thin out here.

  Perhaps not thin enough. The scoops were heating up much faster than I’d expected, and the hull temperature was already nearly a thousand degrees. I pulled up to climb to thinner atmosphere, feeling the G-forces pull me back and down into my seat as the ship clawed up from freefall. I heard the roaring of the gas—plasma—as it swept past the ship, and the whine of the compressors as the scoops sucked up hydrogen and squeezed it into the tanks. I looked at the scoop temperature: 3500C. Expansion cooling kept the inlet temperature lower, but even that was heating up fast. The cabin was getting warm.

  I checked the compressor temperature and was thankful for the hafnium carbide blade coatings.

  The hull temperature was still rising, and I pushed the ship higher still. Seven minutes to rendezvous. A yellow warning light lit just as I looked at t
he compressor temperature again. Damn! I slapped the compressor bypass control to divert the scoops straight overboard; I’d have to settle for what I’d collected so far on this pass. The sounds changed then, the whine of the compressor lowering in pitch and fading, but with new rumbles and vibrations as the outside flow changed.

  Still five minutes to reach Daedalus. Sweat dripped off me; the cabin was getting hot but most of that sweat was stress. I caught a faint smell of something acrid but strangely bittersweet. Burning insulation! I thought, but I knew the electronics were fireproof. Supposedly. I scanned the warning indicators and hunted around for smoke. Nothing. The smell was fading; I hoped I’d imagined it.

  I checked the scoop temperature again. It was near redline, and I thought about closing the scoops in mid-flight to stop any further heating. That wasn’t recommended, but neither was flying close orbit through a star’s atmosphere. If I damaged the scoops without having collected enough hydrogen, I’d be stuck here. I reached for the scoop control. Should I? I checked the temperature again. Still rising, but the rate was slowing. A minute to rendezvous, I should be able to pick up the asteroid soon. I left the scoops alone.

  Yes, there it was, leaving a plasma trail that reflected my radar like sheet metal. It was on a skip trajectory; it would bounce off the atmosphere and back into space. I was coming up right behind it. I maneuvered quickly, wanting to get into that shadow. My hull and scoop temperatures were now edging above redline, and the cabin temperature was still climbing.

  There was a sudden BANG! and the ship rolled and yawed violently to starboard.

  Oh crap, now what? I heaved the stick to the left and goosed the thrusters to push up into Daedalus’s wake. The ship responded oddly, and the autostabilizer was blinking a yellow warning light. Yellow, that could be worse.

  It was worse; red warning lights started coming on too, and an alarm honked madly. Nothing for it but to keep going. The rock was still hypersonic, so the ride smoothed out when I got into the wake. I worried about that bang. It had been more than just crossing the shock wave. It almost felt like the time I’d hit a seagull while on final approach in an old Cessna. I must have hit a rock chunk ablating off the front of the asteroid. How much damage had it done?

  I silenced the alarm and checked the panel again; the starboard rudder actuator still showed a red light, but the autostabilizer light was back to green. The computer had learned to compensate. I breathed a little easier. The temperatures were even starting to drop.

  * * *

  It took forever, riding Daedalus’s shadow out to cooler space. I listened to the faint crackle and ping of the hull contracting as it cooled and wondered if I should worry about that. I hoped not, and couldn’t do anything about it anyway. I sat, limp and sweat-soaked in the control chair. The red warning light had gone back to yellow; the fault isolation had made sure the problem wasn’t getting worse. Everything else was in the green. Exhausted, I slept.

  * * *

  Two days later I had the nerve up for my next pass. By that time I’d missed the second set of asteroids and felt rather smug that I’d thought to set up a third.

  I spent part of that time checking the guidescope. It turned out to be misaligned by less than 0.2 degrees—but whoever had calibrated it had misplaced a decimal and plugged in an almost two-degree “correction” factor. Somebody would hear about that.

  I took another day to inspect the Starfire (maybe I should have named her Argo) after that first run. I suited up to check the hull exterior; remotes are fine, but I wanted to look for myself. The leading edges showed some abrasion, but nothing out of spec. A nickel-splashed dent the size of a dinner plate on the starboard fin confirmed my guess about the bang.

  A chunk of the asteroid had wedged itself between rudder and fin, jamming the rudder. That had stalled the actuator and the already-hot motor immediately overheated. Fortunately it had shut itself off before the damage was permanent. I freed it up and got green lights on the board.

  There was no structural damage, as far as I could tell, and I restored the fin contour by filling in the dent with thermal patch foam. I pondered writing Mitsubishi a letter of praise on their product, assuming I got out of this, but I wasn’t sure they’d believe me.

  When the hydrogen had been processed out of what I’d scooped, I had almost enough to get me to Procyon. It left me about a light-month short, but I could scoop that in a third the time of my previous run. Just as well, because I wasn’t sure how much longer the compressor would last.

  The smoke I thought I’d smelled worried me, so I tore panels off and examined all the electronics and cabling I could reach, but I didn’t find any damage. Still, the cabin had been an oven on that first pass. I overrode the life support’s climate control and set the temperature as low as it would go. By the time I started the second run my breath came in frosty clouds and I felt the cold in my fingers. Good.

  Having done it once, the second run through BD-plus-five’s atmosphere was slightly less terrifying. Slightly.

  I played it conservatively, and there were no surprises. It got only sauna hot, but again it was exhausting. I was glad I didn’t have to do it a third time.

  * * *

  I was looking forward to an uneventful trip the rest of the way to Procyon. I carefully, oh so carefully lined it up in the now-recalibrated guidescope. I checked the spectrum three times. I checked the fuel calculations three times. I warped out of there, made my way back to my bunk, and fell asleep.

  * * *

  “And you ended up here twenty hours later,” Greg said. He’d heard I was on Procyon Station and came to find me, concerned because I’d been carried off the ship in a stretcher.

  “Yeah. I set up the autopilot to slave to the station docking computer when it caught the beacon. Just as well, I was in no shape to do it manually.” I waved my bandaged hands at him. I’d woken up in a bed in the infirmary, feeling like hell and with my extremities swaddled in surgical gauze. Greg had found me there.

  “But why the bandages? Did you get burned, radiation or something?”

  “No. Oh, I got a small dose of radiation, nothing serious.” I didn’t want to tell him, but he’d find out anyway. “I left the climate control turned down below freezing, I forgot to reset it. I got hypothermia. And frostbite.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Author’s Introduction to “Snowball”

  This story first appeared in the anthology Footprints, edited by Jay Lake and Eric T. Reynolds, from Hadley Rille Books, July 2009. The premise of the anthology is that, long after humans have gone, our footprints and hardware (and yes, some trash) will remain relatively undisturbed on the surface of the Moon. What might alien visitors make of these remains?

  I took that premise rather literally, and also took a stab at explaining why we may not be here then. The Apollo flashbacks are interpolated from NASA transcripts of the actual missions.

  I'm rather pleased with how this turned out; it was my first story sale. “Snowball” copyright ©2009 by Alastair Mayer

  SNOWBALL

  by Alastair Mayer

  The exploration ship LifeSeeker came out of warp again just inside the inner edge of the Oort Cloud. It paused a while, scanning, then made a few short warp jumps in different directions, extending the standard scan to locate planets by their parallax. The crew noted a bright planet within the star’s habitable zone—the distance at which water could, though perhaps not would, exist in liquid form—and jumped LifeSeeker as close to it as the they dared before continuing in under normalspace thrusters.

  “Leader,” the Astronomer caught the captain’s attention, “this planet has a large moon, but the planet itself is ice-covered. I don’t think this could be the origin.” He referred to the robotic probe they’d discovered drifting away from this star, inactive but still thermally bright against the cosmic background.

  Leader’s brow crest flattened in consternation as he considered this. Not the origin? He hated coincidences. “From analysis of
cosmic ray damage, you said the probe hadn’t been adrift in interstellar space long enough to have come from any other system.”

  “Yes, Leader. And it was only four percent of the distance to the next nearest star, which is in a very different direction.” Astronomer paused. It was unlikely, but—“Perhaps another starfaring race left it?”

  “We haven’t found any other starfarers yet, or even seen signs. The technology is too primitive, too.” Leader made his decision. “Plot course for the moon, and begin an orbital survey on arrival.” They could check out the planet itself later; the moon would be easier. Any species who could send a robot out of its solar system could put robots on their moon.

  They had indeed. The orbital scans turned up many probable landing or impact sites, locations on the surface showing refined metals and radial dust patterns of low-velocity impact. A hand’s worth showed unusual radiation signatures.

  “Summary report?” the captain asked the assembled group of science department heads.

  “Telescopic analysis shows six sites with structures significantly larger than at any of the others, five of these have nuclear sources in close proximity, all of them have outlying smaller structures or equipment. They are all on the side of the moon facing the planet.”

  “Interesting. Structures?”

  “Octagonal platforms apparently supported on four legs, approximately three bodylengths wide. We located a number of smaller, three-legged structures, one of them near an octagon. We also found several other structures, metal debris from impacts, and possible wheeled vehicles or robots.”