Amphitrite 2: The Black Planet: Hard Science Fiction (Planet Nine) Read online

  Amphitrite 2: The Black Planet

  Hard Science Fiction

  Brandon Q. Morris

  Contents

  Amphitrite 2

  Author's Note

  Also by Brandon Q. Morris

  Glossary of Acronyms

  Metric to English Conversions

  Amphitrite 2

  May 15, 2078 – SS Reliable

  The chunk of debris hit just as Doug finished buckling himself onto the toilet.

  He heard the sharp hiss of the onboard atmosphere escaping through the hole. It sounded like a snake readying to strike, and an ice-cold chill slithered up his spine. The urge to shit vanished instantly. Having to suddenly get by without air was a primal fear shared by all space pilots.

  But his body wouldn’t have to endure that. The ship had withstood the impact stoically, without even attempting an evasive maneuver. No sirens were wailing, which meant the debris was so small it hadn’t posed any real danger. The smaller the hole, the louder the hiss—they’d learned that at the academy. A truly dangerous impact caused the ship to belch you straight out of the ship, whoosh, and you were dead in 12 seconds.

  He was still alive, so he returned his attention to his morning routine. First a baked croissant, then a strong, black coffee, and next—now—his bodily evacuations. His sphincter wasn’t convinced, however. It seemed to have shut down in panic.

  Doug did the calculations. The spaceship was a cylinder, so many meters long, times the diameter squared, times a quarter Pi. That gave you the cubic meters of air. It would be hours before it was all sucked into space through a hole smaller than one’s asshole.

  Stupid hissing. Not even the math helped. It wasn’t hell out there, it was only the vacuum! The pressure difference was a mere bar, the same as if you dove 10 meters under water. Doug was disappointed with his body. He unbuckled himself. Maybe it was the microgravity. He’d been drifting without propulsion toward his destination for days. Tonight he’d take a tablet.

  The navigation console beeped. The screen was as black as his coffee, but a small light indicated he had a new message. Mary was impatient. She knew it took him a while to get moving in the morning. At 64, he was no spring chicken.

  “Reliable, you should be able to see the object now,” she said.

  Doug enlarged the image. Nothing. He increased the contrast. Still nothing. Blacker than black. It was like he was looking straight through, between all the stars.

  “Sorry, Mary, I can’t see anything,” he said.

  Then he leaned back and counted along. Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. The message would take five seconds to get to the moon, where Mary was following the mission from the control room of their small salvaging operation. The position had to be wrong. There was nothing out here. Maybe the piece of scrap had already drifted away years ago.

  Twenty-nine, thirty. Still no answer from Mary. He scrolled frantically through the data. Hopefully she hadn’t been scammed. That would mean the end of their business. Leasing the SS Reliable had already chewed through half the market value of the 6.5-ton piece of scrap, the JWST, which was the prize for this assignment.

  “Reliable, I’ve checked the position,” said Mary.

  Doug heard a meow in the background. He smiled. That must be Kiska, their cat. Mary had named her ‘Kiska’ because it meant ‘kitten’ in her native language. Doug was happy with that because it was the name of his beloved ship, which he’d had to sell after the events of ’72. It had gone for a large sum that they’d then used to start their new company.

  “I’m absolutely sure you’re in the right place, Doug,” said Mary. “Take another look. The object’s out there at L2, and according to the most recent data, it still has enough fuel to maintain its position.”

  Doug sighed. He’d already scoured the area. The Earth and sun were at his back. There was nothing out there but the blackness of space. Then he had an idea. The laser range finder! He’d used one in the past for docking at space stations. Doug searched for the button to activate it. He’d never docked at a space station with the Reliable. He’d only taken possession of the ship at the Lunar Gateway a few weeks ago after they’d had to part with the SS Victory, which had been almost as dear to him as the Kiska. The name itself was a joke, but the old Boeing capsule had served them well until the propulsion unit finally gave out.

  Where was that damned laser button? They should not have taken this contract. Half a million in a maximum of eight weeks—that must have clouded Mary’s judgment.

  Aha—LRF! Doug pressed the button. A sideways figure eight appeared in the bottom third of the screen. Instinctively, he looked through the porthole, as though expecting to see a green laser beam cutting through space. But of course, there was nothing to see. Doug reached for the joystick and pulled it slightly to the right to precess the ship a little, so the laser beam coming from the bow now described a circle. Next he made an adjustment that caused the circle to grow and then shrink. If there was anything out there, it should reflect the beam.

  The sideways figure eight flickered. Numbers flashed briefly. Four digits. The first one... crap! Had it been a five, or an eight?

  “Salvage Ship Reliable to base, I think I’ve finally found something,” he radioed.

  But it could just be a disturbance. If only they’d invested the 45,000 yuan in the damned radar! But the Chinese merchant at the Gateway had insisted on being paid in anonymous bitcoins, and none of his acquaintances had ever seen the woman before. They wouldn’t have been the first to be ripped off for an overpriced toy. Ever since the Lunar Gateway had opened to private space merchants, scammers had started showing up, too.

  Doug wiggled the joystick, but the figure eight had stabilized. The first digit must be a nine. At a distance of 9,000 kilometers, he had to aim very precisely to find a 14-by-21-meter target with the LRF.

  Wait a minute. The ship must have an electronic navigation log. That had been mandatory for 15 years now, ever since piracy became rampant. If he synchronized the log with the briefly flashing digits, he’d just need to... There! The reflected laser beam had been registered by the ship’s sensors exactly 82.44334 seconds ago. Doug made a note of the exact orientation of the bow at that point in time. Then he entered the direction vector into the navigation computer and accelerated the ship.

  This far out, the gravitational forces of the Earth and sun were neutralized by the centrifugal force of the ship’s rotation, so he could navigate with the SS Reliable at minimal propulsion. A few thousand kilometers were neither here nor there after the 1.5-million-kilometer flight through the backyard of his home world. If he was lucky, he’d reach his destination this month.

  Beep. Beep. Beep.

  The computer translated the laser impulse into primitive sounds. Yes! He was definitely on the right course. Half a million yuan—how much was that in dollars these days? He’d have to ask Mary. Maybe they’d finally be able to pay off the house in Kentucky where they hoped to settle down someday.

  “SS Reliable to base,” he radioed. “I’m on course. You can predict when I’ll arrive more accurately than I can. I’m going to lie down for a while. There’s nothing else to do. Give Kiska a kiss on the nose from me.”

  Doug attached the target coordinates to his message. Mary had always been better at calculations. That was why she took care of the business side of things, and he mined the scrap. Doug tilted the commander’s seat back, picked up the blanket from the floor, buckled himself in, covered himself, and closed his eyes.

  He could still hear the hissing, but that could wait. Fir
st he needed a little sleep.

  A horrible howling woke him. The ship wasn’t messing around. Alarm! The backrest of his seat tilted forward automatically. He just managed to grab the screen to steady himself and keep his forehead from slamming into it. The belt cut into his abdomen. The ship was turning. It must have automatically activated the corrective thrusters and was now attempting to swivel the drives in the opposite direction in order to brake.

  “Proximity alarm,” appeared on the screen.

  “Base to Reliable,” came Mary’s voice. “What’s happening out there? I’m getting a whole lot of impossible activity announcements.”

  If only he knew! The screen had misted up. He wiped it with his left hand as he braced himself against the sharp tilt of the ship with his right. On the display he could see a shimmering gray rhombus. No, more like a kite, with two short sides and two long. It was turning slowly and rapidly increasing in size. The object must be 10 meters across, no, 15, maybe even 20. The corrective thrusters were reacting too slowly, and the Reliable was moving too fast to avoid a collision.

  “I’m about to collide with a kite-shaped object. If you don’t hear from me again, I love you, Mary. Give Kiska a...”

  An incredible force flung him to the left. The outrigger with the solar cells must have hit the object. The commander’s seat tipped over. No, it wasn’t the seat. The Reliable was spinning. The ship was simultaneously rolling on its longitudinal axis as it rotated on its transverse axis. It was impossible to compensate for that. Hopefully it had a decent automated emergency system. The sun flashed through the porthole, and then it was gone. A huge dish came into view and was gone. Kite! Yeah, right! The old satellite they wanted to dismantle and sell had surprised him, and now it was dismantling the SS Reliable.

  Reliable, haha. That had been a joke from the start. But it wasn’t the ship’s fault. The laser range finder must have found another object, and the JWST, the former NASA telescope, had drifted into their path on its orbit around Lagrange point L2 only by chance. What was the other object? They should have done their homework before the launch. This Lagrange point was especially popular with astronauts because the sun and the Earth were aligned here, so that thermal radiation from both objects could be blocked by a single shield. That must be what the Reliable had collided with.

  “Reliable to base, can you hear me?” Doug asked via the radio.

  The rotation slowed, and the rolling motion eased, too. It turned out the Reliable was more reliable than he’d expected. If only Mary would reply. Doug counted up from 21 again, but he got to 30 and then 40 and still hadn’t heard from his wife. He sent another radio message, then another. No answer. He was alone.

  But he was alive. The capsule had come to rest. Doug unbuckled his belt, then realized he was weightless. He put it back on because he didn’t trust zero gravity. On his first flight to the moon, a sudden corrective maneuver had caught him off-guard and smashed him into the floor like a fly. After that, he’d lain for two months in what was still a very primitive lunar base hospital.

  “Reliable to base, how about now? Some encouragement would be nice.”

  He tapped the screen and flicked through the system reports. The capsule was still sealed. That was good. The left solar cell battery had taken over the energy supply—it had more than enough capacity. The solar panels on the right appeared to have been torn off in the collision. It could be worse. But the condition of the thrusters was problematic. They weren’t even reporting their status. He’d have to take care of that first. The fuel tanks still appeared to be full.

  Slowly, Doug, space doesn’t reward haste. What is the next thing that could kill you? The oxygen supply, maybe? He checked it.

  Everything had been generously provisioned so that he could dismantle the target and then drag it back to the moon with the Reliable. He had a few days to repair the thrusters. Could he still tether the JWST? Don’t get ahead of yourself, he told himself.

  He undid the seatbelt and drifted over to the wall where he could still hear the hissing. He took duct tape out of his tool bag and stuck two strips in a cross over the hole. Then he got on the cycling machine and began warming up for his EVA.

  Doug pulled his upper body out of the airlock, which wasn’t much wider than he was. He shined his flashlight in all directions. Shit. The visor was already misted over. He’d asked Mary to have the helmet replaced! He pressed a button on his wrist. The ventilation blasted. He repositioned the tube with his chin so that the dry air would blow on the visor. The thin layer of condensation disappeared almost immediately.

  But then the thruster caught his eye—well, what was left of the thruster. Now, he wished the helmet visor would mist up again! He was sweating, but even that didn’t help—he’d solved the vision problem too well. On the other hand, the thruster would be impossible for him to repair with his own two hands.

  This would be their economic downfall. Mary had hoped to grow flowers and vegetables in her own garden. They’d spent their lives as nomads traveling through space. After they’d blasted that black hole out of the universe, together with Watson, back in ’72, they’d decided to adopt a new, shared-family name so they could continue to lead normal lives. Maria became Mary, but Doug couldn’t bring himself to part with his first name. “Nobody voluntarily calls themselves Swartzenberg,” he’d said. “That will have to suffice as camouflage.”

  The little office on the moon had been their first home. Then somehow, Mary had come up with the idea of Kentucky. She’d never been there. An acquaintance had bought the property for her, a small ranch with a wooden house.

  Doug had enough oxygen for 80 days, but how was Mary supposed to organize a rescue mission? They couldn’t afford insurance. Their account was maxed out. This assignment could have saved them, but now it spelled their ruin.

  Mary would move mountains to get him back, of course. She’d spare no expense. She’d sell one of her kidneys on the black market. The house in Kentucky wasn’t valuable enough to cover a deposit for a rescue mission. But a healthy kidney, in an era of a hopelessly aging population, was worth a fortune.

  He had to dissuade Mary from doing that. Doug suddenly felt nervous. He didn’t want to be rescued, not under those circumstances. And they’d have to forfeit the job, too. His rescuer would demand payment from the profits.

  He felt behind him to make sure he hadn’t forgotten the SAFER. The jetpack was on his back. The target was so clear that he wondered why the cameras hadn’t detected it sooner. Maybe it was due to the direction of flight. What had once been humanity’s most expensive telescope was now slowly spinning on its axis. It seemed to have stabilized itself, like the SS Reliable. Why not just use the James Webb Space Telescope for the return flight? It must have got here somehow. Then it occurred to him that its corrective boosters could only change its position up to a maximum of 150 meters for the entire life of the telescope. That fell somewhat short of the 1.5 million kilometers to Earth.

  Doug pushed himself through the hatch. Then he shoved off and yelped. It was the feeling of free-fall that made him cry out. He couldn’t help it. He’d never met anybody who didn’t shout when they experienced this. He briefly considered a different route. What if he didn’t fly to the JWST? One press of a button and the SAFER would carry him toward the sun. After eight to ten hours, he’d run out of oxygen, and then he’d never, ever, have problems again.

  But that would be unfair to Mary. She wouldn’t know what happened, so she’d still organize an expensive rescue mission. That would be the worst outcome of all. There’d be nothing left for her to do other than wander off in a spacesuit into the moon’s wastelands. She wouldn’t be the first. He’d seen it himself. You could find them about 500 meters from the South Pole base. They looked like they’d been frozen in their spacesuits. Some were still standing, and some had lain down to die. The administration had left them where they were, allegedly out of propriety. But these were poor souls. It wasn’t worth burying them. Back then, he’d
asked Mary why somebody didn’t just collect up the spacesuits and sell them on the black market. They must have been worth a few dollars.

  “Unsellable,” Mary had said. “The smell. There wouldn’t have been enough oxygen left to breathe, but there’d still have been enough for the microorganisms to decay the bodies to some degree.”

  Mary was neither a doctor nor a biologist. “How do you know that?” he had asked her.

  “Practical experience,” she’d replied, giving him a look that told him not to pursue the topic.

  The space telescope was enormous. He steered with the SAFER and arrived at the tip of the shallower triangle—the head of the kite. He braked shortly before contact, but he was still moving too fast, so his right hand went through the skin of the kite-shaped shield as though it were paper. It wasn’t paper, of course, it was a thin, aluminum-coated plastic skin made of a material called Kapton, half as thick as a sheet of paper. It must have been a hell of a job folding this large structure so that it fit into a rocket from the 2020s. He couldn’t remember the launch, but the James Webb Space Telescope had continued to deliver discoveries almost monthly until the late 30s.

  And now he was here to dismantle it. Or rather, that was the original plan, but it wasn’t going to happen now. He’d already established from a distance that the entire probe was still intact. How had Mary gotten her hands on this assignment? Astronauts didn’t like giving up an instrument that still functioned. Maybe there wasn’t enough money left to finance the research. But even then, they’d typically just wait for more prosperous times.

  Especially if an instrument that once cost billions would now only bring in half a million, which was a considerable sum for Mary and himself. But in terms of space research, it was chump change. Doug sighed. He’d so hoped Mary could move into her house. And that Kiska would finally have free-range, instead of hunting mice in the dark caverns of the moon base.