The starchild compact, p.4
The Starchild Compact, page 4
Jon called up the Flash Cassini communication on his Link, and entered his private decryption code. The duty CapCom appeared, and said cryptically, "The following message is for Jon Stock only." His image vanished, and was replaced by words floating in the display.
"At oh-two-hundred zulu, we confirmed a velocity discrepancy for Cassini II. Based on the precise acceleration parameters transmitted from Cassini II, and the exact payload as determined from the engine test conducted after loadout, but before the crew arrived, and factoring in the measured mass of the entire crew and its effects, we have an excess of 80.93 kg of mass unaccounted for. Sometime between engine test and launch, 80.93 kg of mass was added to the Cassini II loadout. We are reviewing everything that occurred between those times to ascertain what we can from this end. We have recalculated the start-stop parameters based upon this new information. It will be uploaded into your astrogation computer when you give your specific authorization. We will send further Flash Cassini traffic when we have concluded our investigation. A final cautionary note. We ran exhaustive background checks on all the crew, but since governments were involved, we cannot know for certain that there is not some collusion taking place. Be cautious and watch your back."
Jon closed his Link and drew a cup of coffee from his personal spigot. He sat at his desk looking out the port beyond it at the dwindling Earth, and contemplated the startling news. Eighty-one kilograms – it could be almost anything, a missed container of supplies, an oxygen bottle, a missed piece of equipment, even a human. He thought about that for a moment – a stowaway on an interplanetary voyage. Not likely – more the stuff of a holovision drama.
Using his Link, Jon called Ari. "Ari, can you come to my cabin, please?"
Five minutes later Ari settled into a chair facing Jon's desk. "How long have we known each other?" Jon asked.
"'Bout twenty-five years, give or take."
"And how long have we been friends?"
"'Bout twenty-five years, give or take." Ari grinned at him. "What gives, Buddy?"
"Is there anything you need to tell me?"
"What do you mean, Jon?"
"I mean, is there anything you need to tell me…something I need to know, but you haven't told me yet?"
"Your comments yesterday, your feeling of unease…I didn't tell you that we picked up some chatter about the Caliphate trying to do something to this expedition. Nothing specific, and it disappeared almost as soon as it appeared. We heard nothing at all during the final week. Didn't seem important, so I didn't mention it to you."
"That's it…nothing else?" Jon locked eyes with his friend. "Absolutely nothing else?"
"Nothing, Jon…on our friendship, nothing…"
"Fair enough." Jon broke eye contact and tapped his Link. When the flash Cassini traffic appeared, without comment he rotated the holodisplay so Ari could read it.
A minute later Ari looked at Jon. "That's fucking crazy, Jon. They're saying we've got something or somebody onboard. It's insane!" Ari stood up abruptly, the sudden momentum change lifting him off the deck momentarily. "I should check their numbers. Maybe they got bore sighted on something, and missed it." He strode toward the stateroom door. "I should have an answer by the end of my watch."
#
During the remainder of Demitri's watch, Ari worked on the problem. Rather than simply duplicate Houston's calculations, he opted to take another tack. He worked from the loadout manifest, verifying the mass of each item brought onboard. It was a tedious task that took him through Demitri's watch, and well into Ginger's. Once he had derived the total mass of the onload, he combined it with the known mass of the ship itself, and compared this number to the total mass Houston had derived from the engine test. It matched to one decimal place – more than close enough.
Ari then examined the crew manifest, looking for anything unusual. Two items stood out. Michele deBois' personal effects massed in a normal range, but the volume was about half again as much as would have been normal. Elke Gratz brought aboard a normal volume of personal effects, but they massed about fifty percent more than normal. Although neither discrepancy could have accounted for the apparently extra mass, Ari decided to visit each woman personally. He located Michele in her lab on the bottom level.
He opened the door to the space, only to find his way barred by a fine net stretched completely across a light weight polymer passageway sealed to the door. He passed through a self-closing opening in the net, and two paces beyond passed through a second net into the lab. Michele was puttering with a tray of plants. Out of the corner of his eye, Ari saw something swooping toward him, and ducked.
"What the hell was that?" He quipped.
"Emmanuelle," she answered, "and there's Phillip." She pointed to a yellow canary – male, judging from its name. "I know, Cherie, no one knows yet. I suppose sooner or later…" Her voice trailed off. "You think it's a problem?"
Ari shook his head in amazement. "No, Michele, no problem, but you probably should have told someone." He gave her a warm smile.
"Merci, you beautiful man," Michele said, lifting herself on her toes, taking both his cheeks in her hands, and kissing him soundly and thoroughly.
Ari was slightly flustered by her unexpected response, but pleased in a way that excited him. Michele winked at him as he turned to leave.
Ari poked his head into the fifth level on his way forward, and found Elke pumping iron on the other side of the space. She was using a set of free weights that he knew were not on the manifest list. "Hey, Elke…"
"Hey, yourself."
"Never saw those before," Ari said in passing.
"Nope…brought them in my hand baggage." She grinned at him. "They work totally different in low-g." She handed him a dumbbell. "Try it."
He did…it was…and he handed it back. "Weird," he said. "Gotta go. My watch is coming up."
With the two discrepancies resolved, Ari found himself facing the same calculations using the same numbers as Houston a few hours earlier. He grabbed a quick bite in the Canteen, and then assumed the watch from Ginger. He was still tingling from Michele's kiss, and found himself comparing the two women – Ginger and Michele. In appearance they could not have been more different. Ginger's skin was blue-black, with her kinky hair cropped close to her head. Her small-breasted body was long and lithe. Her physical beauty was striking. Michele, on the other hand, was fair skinned and blond with a small tight curvaceous body that screamed sensuality. Her physical beauty was, if anything, even more striking – at least to Ari.
He thrust these thoughts from his mind as he concentrated on the calculations. He was dealing with third order derived numbers, and their derivation was tricky. Since the ship flew itself, he had nothing else to do, but follow the calculations to their inevitable resolution. Near the end of his watch he called Jon. "The numbers match," he said. "They're real."
#
Meanwhile, Elke had continued to work out in the rec room. After completing her free weight sets, she spent the next half hour on the treadmill, facing one of the ports with a view of the shrinking Earth. As she neared the end of the half hour feeling exhilarated from the exercise, she heard a sound behind her, and stepped off the treadmill, turning around. Michele had just entered the space, and caught her breath at the sight of Elke, perspiration flowing freely from her face, soaking her tank top, wetly outlining her nipples.
"Mon Cherie!" Michele exclaimed. "How beautiful you are!" She stepped up to Elke, stroked her finger across Elke's cheek, and put it into her own mouth. "Mmmm…"
Elke's entire body reacted to the sight of this beautiful petite woman taking pleasure from her physical exertions. She felt her nipples swell in response, and she reached out to touch Michele's lips with her finger. Michele opened her lips to accept the proffered finger.
Shyly, the two women walked hand in hand to the ladder-way and descended to Michele's lab on the deck below.
#
Jon sat with Ari in his quarters quietly discussing the situation. They had a good chuckle about the canaries, and exchanged a couple of wry comments about Elke's personal free weights. "I gotta tell you," Ari had concluded, "she certainly makes a tank top look good."
"What about our crew?" Jon asked. "I'm certain we can eliminate Noel. He's way too much part of the system – even if he is Canadian."
"I agree." Ari got to his feet and paced around the cabin. "Could the Russian have an issue with not being in command?"
"He has an issue, but I think he's a good officer. He certainly knows the command structure is not my doing."
"But could he have an agenda?" Ari stopped pacing and stared out the port. "What about Lee-Fong? He's a very good VASIMR engineer. He seems to accept his role totally."
"Yah…but that's partly cultural. I'm not playing a cliché here, but there is no way an Israeli Semite can second guess a Mandarin Chinese. You see the world through a totally different set of filters – even if he did graduate from MIT."
Ari laughed. "You certainly have a turn of phrase, Jon, I'll give you that much." He sat back down. "That leaves the girls. Whatever it is, Ginger is not involved…I'd lay money on that."
"How about your life?" Jon asked quietly.
Ari appeared to think about it and then said, "Yah, I think so. Ginger is clean. So's deBois, but for a totally different reason."
"And that is…" Jon was especially interested to hear what Ari had to say about the sensuous French scientist.
"Simple…Michele is totally self absorbed. If it isn't good for Michele, she leaves it alone. Mark my words, before this trip is over, she will have gotten into each of our shorts – you included." Ari laughed. "As they say in Tel Aviv, if it's inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it!"
"The Doc's a devout Christian," Jon said. "That could make her totally reliable, or a danger to the expedition, if she has come with a religion driven agenda."
"I haven't really interacted with her," Ari said. "She's a bit of a mystery to me."
"Same here. We need to keep an eye on her until we know how tolerant or intolerant she is." Jon paused, picturing her bowed head the previous day. "My guess, she's okay."
"So…what about iron pumping Elke Gratz?" Ari pulled the "l" to just behind his teeth, and rolled the "r" off the tip of his tongue.
"Elke follows the rules," Jon said. "If the German government gave her an agenda, she will take it all the way."
"But what are the odds? What could Germany possibly gain by setting us up somehow?" Ari sounded genuinely puzzled.
"Let's shelve it until we cut the engines and set the tether." Jon got to his feet. "Just keep your eyes and ears open."
#
Demitri had spent several hours working up the exact time for engine shutdown. This never was exactly as originally calculated, even for as short an acceleration period as their two days. The reason it took so long was that he found his original time was less than what he currently calculated – sufficiently less that he was concerned. When he found that the problem would not resolve itself, when he found himself chasing his tail through a looped equation, he brought Ginger into the problem. He walked her through his calculations, and brought her to his dilemma.
"Have I missed something?" he asked her. "Did I bore sight myself into a stupid mistake?"
"I concur with every step you've taken," Ginger told him. "Can we work the problem backward to see what is causing the difference?"
Demitri looked at her with astonishment and respect. "That's a great idea! Did that come from Melbourne or Stanford?"
Ginger's eyes twinkled. "Zulu, actually," she said. "My granddad made sure my thinking exceeded the box."
"You've got my Russian attention, Girl! Let's do it!"
In hindsight, Demitri could see how simple the approach was. In practice, it turned out to be more involved that either of them had realized at first. But a couple of hours later they both found themselves staring at a number floating in the Astrogation display: 81.73 kg.
"Bud' ya proklyat! (I'll be damned!)" Demitri exclaimed.
"Navernoe (Probably)," Ginger said with a wink that caused the Russian's heart to flutter.
"We'd better bring the Captain in on this," Demitri said.
#
They did, and Jon brought them up to speed about the flash communiqué, while simultaneously removing them from his list.
"Great job of independent confirmation," Jon told them. "We'll shut down the VASIMRs on schedule, get stabilized on the tether, and then address this."
They left his cabin to carry out their responsibilities, and Jon briefed Ari on the new development. Ten minutes before the scheduled shutdown, Jon took his position at the Command Console.
"Houston, it's Cassini. We calculate shutdown at eight-fifty-four-point-two zulu."
The transmission was just under a minute getting to Earth, and another slightly longer transit back. "It's CapCom…Houston concurs."
"Set it in for automatic shutdown, Ari."
"Roger that."
"Give me a mark for the log, Demitri."
"Three…two…one…Mark…engine shutdown."
"Engine has shut down," Ari said needlessly, as the ship went to zero-g at the moment of shutdown.
#
The shift to zero-g pulled Saeed from his meditations as he floated away from the deck along with some of the personal articles he had scattered around him. He knew that the ship would shift from acceleration to tethered status, and since he was at the center of rotation, that he would be virtually in free-fall until the deceleration leg some hundred days hence. He was prepared for the change, and once it was in effect, he would have the freedom to wander throughout the Box, since the Pullman would be a full two kilometers away.
The Box would be revolving at a bit over a half revolution per minute, producing a slight gravitational effect at the ends – five one-thousands of the force of gravity on Earth, or about one-quarter the gravity on Iapetus. It was not enough to matter, but it would move things away from the center.
Saeed settled back to await the unfolding of events. By the grace of Allah, he would remain undetected until it was time for him to act decisively in the defense of everything that was holy.
Chapter 4
The next deep-space trip would be done under acceleration all the way, Jon was sure of it. The next generation VASIMR would be capable of at least one half-g thrust. That would make the trip to Saturn last just under thirteen days. And eventually, the acceleration would be at one-g. That would make the one and a half billion kilometer trip take just a bit over nine days. For now, though, the best they could do was two days at one tenth-g. That left a two day braking leg at the end, and about 114 days of coasting. This particular trip was special, because Jupiter lay sixty-nine days ahead of them, and they intended to use its gravity to gain extra momentum and shorten their total coast time by about two weeks.
For now, however, the task at hand was the separation of the three modules, and their extension to the ends of a four kilometer tether. Jon had gathered the crew to the Canteen where they "sat" watching the holodisplay shimmering in the space around which they were hovering.
"With apologies to those of you who thoroughly understand this maneuver," Jon said, "I'm going to walk you all through it." Cassini II appeared in the center of the display. "As I am sure you have figured out, if we simply extend a two kilometer tether from the Box to the Pullman and start revolving about the Box, we will be upside down here in the Pullman. So here is how we solve this."
As Jon narrated, the Pullman in the holodisplay separated, and pulled back a few meters. This was accomplished with a compressed gas powered ram that gave the Pullman a small amount of independent momentum, and four arresting cables that stopped the motion after two meters. Then the arresting cables detached so that the Pullman was entirely disconnected from the rest of the spaceship. Using internal gyros, the Pullman rotated in a yaw or pitch mode for 180 degrees – Jon explained that the name was simply a way to distinguish one from the other, since their only difference was that each motion was at right angles to the other. Once the Pullman's nose was pointing directly at the Box, the end of the tether snaked across the two meter gap, and attached firmly to the Pullman nose socket. The tether mechanism then pulled the module back into tight contact with the Box, where clamps secured the connection. With the Pullman now oriented properly, gyros in all three modules coordinated their efforts to cause the entire spaceship to rotate about the center axis of the Box, until it was rotating at five and a third revolutions a minute, producing one-g at both ends of the ship. As soon as this was attained and stabilized, both the Pullman and Caboose disconnected from the Box, and the tether mechanisms slowly extended the tether in both directions, slowing the rotation in the same manner as a pirouetting ice skater extending her arms to slow her spin, until each length was two kilometers, and the rotation had reduced to two-thirds of a revolution per minute.
"This," Jon said, "would give the Pullman one-g, and keep the moving starscape sufficiently slow to prevent disorientation."
In the holodisplay, the tethered four kilometer long structure rotated slowly clockwise, like a magnificent bolo, against the star studded backdrop. "Any questions?"
"What keeps it like that, all stretched out?" Elke asked.
"Physics," Jon answered. "So long as nothing affects it from the outside, it will continue in exactly this configuration forever."
"Well…" Demitri lifted his eyebrows at Jon. Jon nodded a go-ahead. "Not quite forever," Demitri said. "The ship is still subject to the pull of the Sun's gravity, and increasingly that of Jupiter and then Saturn. It will need adjustment from time to time."
"What about Mars, Cherie?" Michele asked.
"Too far away," Demitri said. "Technically, it still has an effect, as does Earth, but we don't need to worry about that."
