The Asteroid — 8

Chapter Eight — Aaloo

This is a multi-chapter ‘hard’ science fiction novel about two and a half explorers in the not-too-distant future.

For Chapter One, see link below.

The ship was falling forward again, with the prow more or less pointing directly at Target. As they entered Saturnia's Fiefdom, Theseus had become a zero-gee environment again. Lhari and Vadym had enjoyed one last run in the outer ring, and now exercise was all elastic belts and resistance training until they turned around and went home in a month or so if all went to plan. Yoga was very adaptable to zero-gee and worked just fine with elastic belts anchored to various bulkheads once Lhari had worked out a rather complex system. The walls in the exercise room looked almost covered in rubber bands, like stepping into a jungle of rainbow-colored vines, but it worked.

On the bridge, Vadym looked out the curved glass of the navigation center at the immense starfield, his athletic frame held to the thin metal skeleton of the command chair, hands hovering over the green-blue glow of holographic control fields on either armrest. His azure eyes gazed out under a furrowed brow as he searched the starfield for his target, a tiny satellite of Saturn — an asteroid somewhat temporarily caught in the gas giant’s gravity during its endless dance around the faint and distant Sun. Minutes pass by. There! A speck of light moving just slightly about the background of infinitely distant stars. The apparent motion was the combined effect of Theseus’s still considerable velocity and the asteroid's lazy whirl around the Queen of Planets.

“Phaedra, show me the data.” The hologram around him lit up with numbers, graphs, spectral readings, and more. They were very dim, and one had to focus to see them because the main view was still outside, and what a view it was. Most things in space are moving very quickly in a relative sense, but the distances and sizes compensate, and to an observer living in real time it is like watching an hour-long ballet stretched out over a year in slow motion. Vadym would memorize the view, then close his eyes for sixty seconds, and open them again. It had taken training, but he could now see the differences, and his mind would fill in the motion.

Sixty years ago, the AI would have done all the work on a ship like this. Sixty years ago, this ship wouldn’t even have a pilot on it — robots would have done all the work with no risk to human life necessary. The Wasting had changed all of that — AIs were strictly limited now to non-cognitive functions, devoid of initiative, a decision that was strictly enforced by the Earthers, the flatlanders, and mostly adhered to by the colony worlds of Luna, Ceres, Mars, and the various moons and other scientific and mining outposts around the Solar system. Three years and three billion lives have shown that humans must rely on themselves. Vadym held different views, and beyond the Asteroid Belt, laws, he had decided, didn’t apply.

Vadym preferred to think about the AI and the ship’s systems separately, keeping things all in their own bubbles of thought so that he could talk about doing something to the ship, and it wouldn’t begin to reflect that he was doing the same thing to Phaedra. Who couldn’t feel anything, of course?

“Phaedra,” he spoke clearly, calling upon the ship’s mind. “Return display to normal brightness.” The clear window slowly came alive with a rainbow of lines, instrument readouts, graphs, and trajectory arcs. The viewport offers him a 220’ view, a bubble of transparent lead-lined diamond from which he conducts his cosmic symphony. A faint yellow arrow in the upper left points to Saturn, marked by the crossed and hooked alchemy symbol for the ringed giant from centuries ago, before humanity even knew what the bright, moving wanderers in the sky actually were. Now, he was looking at data, and the universe itself was only the background. The numbers painted just as vibrant of an image as the reality beyond the glass did, like a mechanic looking at an engine and then reading a technical manual about the same machine. Same information, different format.

Near the center of the expanse appeared the label “Target.” The asteroid had a name, of course. Still, it was a meaningless one assigned by some database that included a bunch of quasi-random letters and numbers that nobody could sanely remember. On top of that, its very existence was concealed in those databases, searchable only if one already knew where it was and what it was called. “Target” was much more manageable.

Theseus. He knew the ship by smell, touch, sound, and, if you believed in such things, instinct. If he concentrated, he would hear tiny soft noises all over the ship, its heartbeat, breathing, digestion, all the processes that one would associate with a living being. A soft whisper of air constantly cycling, the heavily muffled sound of the central fan pushing the air, cycling the CO2 and O2. A barely detectable hiss of hydraulics opening a valve here, closing one there, maintaining the center of gravity by moving water stores around the outer sections of the hull where it doubled as light radiation shielding. A distant clank of metal, a hatch releasing, the quick puff hiss of an airlock opening, and the clacking of the sensor module extending from the hull. The new sounds were more conscious: the light touch of Lhari pushing off from a bulkhead, the faint puff of air as she entered a compartment, and the sound of water flowing to her shower… that thought distracted him.

His hand stretched out onto the diamond window in front of him, and he could feel the subsonic hum of the fusion reactor coolant pumps; he could smell the delicate balance of amine in the air, which kept CO2 far below what flatlanders breathe, 20 to 40 ppm, and O2 maintained at a slightly higher percentage, though under the pressure one would feel at the top of Mount Everest. No ship was totally airtight — there are always leaks somewhere, and the lower the internal pressure, the less leakage would get out into the void.

He could feel it all, consciously when he wanted to, and subconsciously always. It was home.

He reached out with both hands and pulled the little brackets around “Target” closer to him, and the image expanded to the limits of the ship’s telescopes. It was an oblong potato, slightly smaller on one side, and tumbling chaotically. He watched it for a moment, then closed his eyes, but when he opened them, it wasn’t as his mind had expected it to be. The movement was wrong, somehow. Off-center. He made a mental note of it.

The rock was brown and grey, and all the tones in between with tiny patches of white — water ice or dry ice. The surface was smooth dust, pockmarked by tiny craters; there were precisely zero large rocks or outcroppings of solid material visible. It was difficult to judge from this distance; there is no scale in space, but the craters were abnormally smallish.

The potato tumbled seemingly at random, and Vadym watched it carefully. The spin was slow in all directions, no more than a revolution per day. That would make things much easier since objects placed on the surface would tend to stay where they were, and a slower rotation makes landing easier.

Lahri inhaled deeply, closing her eyes, feeling stretched. She was suspended like the Vitruvian Man in a web of elastic bands anchored to the bulkheads. Inhale. Stretch arms inward, pulling and folding at the waist, fingers grasping the soles of her feet. Hold. Breathe. In. Out. Count to ten once per exhale.

Sweat evaporates quickly through her sportswear into the cool air of the gravity ring. Outside the window behind her head, the starfield whips by as the crew quarters rotate. Saturn. Milky Way. Stars. Emptiness. Saturn. Twenty-seven seconds per rotation.

Her long black hair flows freely around her head, rustling slightly in the breeze from the air system. Her body is bent in half at the waist, and carefully, she relaxes, her hands moving outward slowly, maintaining the even tension between hands and feet. Pull inward, hold, and breathe, and count.

The new routine was different every time as she learned new ways to do old motions. The ancient gurus of India had never planned on zero-gee in their texts. Lahri never pauses, never allows herself a break, forcing tired and aching muscles into the difficult poses. Warrior pose with her body being pulled apart by rubber bands, hit different muscle groups. She stretched the tendons and relishes and appreciates the pain. With each breath, the potency of the pain dilutes and falls away.

To relax was to release and be pulled by the bands on her wrists and ankles.

The sweat is coming faster than it evaporates now, a shine of moisture above her upper lip glistening on umber skin. Deep brown eyes focus on the invisible infinity as her mind concentrates on the perfect fluidity of physical motion.

In her mind, she visualizes the physics of the situation. She imagines the cold-hot vacuum only inches away and the tube in front of her body leading to the ship’s center. She closes her eyes. In the distance, she hears an airlock open somewhere aft — the sensor pod. Vadym is already hard at work.

Lahri waits for five more minutes as her metabolism drops and her muscles calm, her breathing deep and falling into a normal rhythm. Releasing the bands and grabbing the forward ladder, she pushes effortlessly inward into the cylinder above her, passing into the center of the first outer level, her sleeping quarters and private space.

A large shower is on the forward bulkhead in her quarters, three meters across. It can be used in zero-gee, but it isn’t as pleasant. The fusion reactor provides unlimited recycling of water, and long showers are one of the few luxuries of ship life. She strips off the pants and top, grabs a white cotton towel, and steps into the shower, closing the clear door behind her. A touch plate on the forward wall opens the rain, which doesn’t fall, but sprays against her body from a thousand tiny holes, the large drops forming and being pulled downward into more holes on the opposite wall, where air and water are sucked back into the system for recycling.. She starts the shower hot, and steam fills the shower, fogging the glass and turning the air into a soft gray.

Ten minutes later, she emerges, water still dripping from her hair as she rubs off the water with the imperial-sized towel that would double as a blanket. Droplets of water float in the air and coalesce into larger drops, which are then pulled into vents. The humidity escaping from the shower is quickly swallowed up by the ventilation system and recycled back into the water stores. She hovers in front of a full-length mirror on the opposite wall and looks herself over. Her hair is too long; she thinks — it’s time to cut it short again. Long hair is a luxury, and she constantly finds strands of it floating about the ship in the oddest places. Her skin is getting lighter, now a uniform latte brown instead of the deep charcoal black she wears when in the inner system to protect from the Sun.

The ship’s air is cool on her hot skin, and she carefully folds the towel in half, again and a third time, and then ties it neatly over one of the rungs on the ladder. She walks across the chamber and opens a drawer in the wall, taking out grooming supplies — a toothbrush, nail clippers, and a CRISPY pill. She opens the next drawer, exposing a small wash sink; she pulls a sip of water from a transparent tube into her mouth and swallows the pill. She thinks of the tiny viral bots in the pill that will spread throughout her body, from toes to head, repairing DNA damaged by cosmic rays, policing the cell reproduction to destroy harmful cancers, and attacking harmful bacteria. She then brushes her teeth and sits on the floor to trim back the nail growth.

One more look in the mirror, spinning around to see herself from all angles, and she smiles to herself. At twenty-seven, she is in peak form.

She goes down/outward again to her sleeping compartment and lifts up the bed, pulling out a bright green long-sleeved flight suit with a deep orange racing stripe along the outer sleeves and running down to her ankles. A pair of matching socks with magnetic soles completes the outfit. She steps into the flight suit, zipping it up the front, pulls the socks on, and then ascends to the center of the ship and flies her way into the next compartment forward, her lab, pushing lightly off of handholds and bulkheads in the zero-gee. Her black hair hovers around her face like a smoky halo.

She can see Vadym in the next chamber forward, looking at a brown rock on his own holodisplay. She diverts her attention to her own lab. The windows in the cylindrical area are covered by holodisplays of flatlander scenes — a barren moonscape, a view of a mountain lake somewhere in Europe, the savannah of Africa, and a rainforest.

A large holographic display covers nearly a quarter of the outward wall, ten meters wide and six high, gently curving to follow the ship’s contours. As she floats to the center of the room, the display brightens and is quickly covered in countless variables concerning Target. Dimensions, spin rate, apparent mass, albedo, and reflectivity across the spectrum. It is currently outward of their position, but once they are closer, she can get readings on frequency transparency across the radio band. The radar isn’t showing much from this distance, just a rough outline.

Lahri watches the projection of the asteroid for a minute. Something is catching her attention, but she isn’t sure exactly what it is. Using her hands to manipulate the hologram, she pulls it closer and holds the tiny photonic model of the asteroid just in front of her at arm’s length. It spins slowly in the air, just slightly transparent. She rewinds the image to the moment the ship started taking footage forty minutes earlier. The spin is slow, barely moving a few degrees in all that time. Unusual for such a small object, but not unheard of.

“Phaedra, simulate the rotation of Target, and display at sixty times normal speed.”

The image in front of her starts to spin more quickly. Yes, something here is a little off.

“Phaedra, simulate rotation so that one day is ten seconds.”

The image spins faster and seemingly more chaotic. Watching it fast forward, the spin on three axes is a complicated affair. One revolution per six seconds on X, per four seconds on Y, and something like a full minute on Z. The Z axis is the long one, running the length of the five-kilometer rock. X and Y lengths vary considerably, from three at the ends to under two klicks in the center. It’s completely unstable.

“Phaedra, isolate the spin along each axis and display separately.” The image of the rock splits, and tiny blue letters appear above each. Now, the spins are uniform, like a planetary axis. The z-axis is stable to the right. X and Y are still tumbling chaotically, but now it becomes obvious that their center of gravity is not in between the two bulbous ends of the rock but instead well within the slightly thicker of the two ends. The asteroid is nearly empty on one side and must be filled with lead on the other.

“Phaedra, simulate the center of mass for Target.”

A blue and black ball appears inside the image of the brown-grey asteroid, centered along the Z axis, well off to one side and deep within the slightly larger of the two bulges. Despite the two lumps being nearly identical in size, only varying by less than ten percent, the slightly larger half is nearly eighty percent of the mass.

Rotation anomaly. Vadym will want to know about that.

She pushes the three rotating bodies away with her right hand, and they retreat into one corner of the display. She pulls another group of instruments with her left, bringing them up with reach. Another image of the slowly rotating Target hovers in front of Lahri, this one in real-time. Beneath it is a long white sine wave increasing in frequency from left to right — the entire EM spectrum from radio to gamma waves. With an outstretched pinky and thumb, she pulls out the radio spectrum, and the image of the asteroid goes solid black, disappearing. Using her finger, she slowly pulls from the left, lower frequencies, towards the microwave band to the right. The image turns a ghostly gray, but the resolution is poor and blocky, and the image is incomplete. She pushes the radio band back into the spectrum and pulls out infrared through ultraviolet. Starting in the deep red, she watches as one end of the asteroid glows slightly orange near the center of gravity. Strange. And albedo artifact? Perhaps that section is darker, covered in some sort of carbon dust that absorbs more sunlight.

The surface temperature ranges from 60K to 84K. That’s a significant range for a free-floating rock one and a half billion kilometers from the Sun. 60–68K is expected. The warmest section is the larger bulge. So, that larger lump is too heavy and too warm.

Not that 84K is warm. Nitrogen would boil on that rock. But only in the tropical region.

She slides the spectrum farther, skipping over visible light — Vadym can see what it looks like. In the ultraviolet, there isn’t much to see. As she widens the spectrum covering ultraviolet, x-rays, and gamma rays, the rock is covered in glittering white and neon blue scintillations — a fog of cosmic rays bombarding the surface.

In one corner of the display is a periodic table, which she now enlarges under the floating hologram, the columns sorted by color. Starting in the upper left, she slowly scrolls through the elements, from hydrogen down to gold, one by one, noting the concentrations. This wouldn’t reveal the interior makeup but could give an idea of the surface composition — no surprises here — mostly silicon, carbon, and traces of metals. Combining the elements revealed water ice and some dry ice, frozen carbon dioxide.

Something has to be disturbing the center of mass. Most likely, this rock was once two separate asteroids that came together, obviously at low velocity, and became one. the heavier one must be rich in iron and heavy elements to offset the center of mass. However, until they knew the total mass of the rock more accurately, it was anyone’s guess. Lahri isn’t one to guess when data would answer the question soon enough.

Vadym watches Target spinning in space. Light flickers off the glass hemisphere, and Vadym turns his head. Lahri, in her green and orange jumpsuit, floats in the center of the neighboring capsule, surrounded by the flickering lights and colors of her science. Her hands move too quickly, her eyes darting back and forth from charts to graphs to false-color images of the space rock. Vadym could follow her discussions and research if she slowed it down to a tenth of her normal speed, but watching her work in isolation was a pleasure. Graceful genius.

Her body moves slightly back and forth as her breath pulls her forward, inhales, then pushes harder backward and exhales. Every few breaths, she makes a swimming motion with her arms, a breaststroke, to hold the position in the dead center of the chamber. The holograms follow her back and forth, maintaining a solid rainbow of knowledge that covers a large part of the compartment. Her hair floats up and behind her like a dark storm cloud to the lightning of electrical impulses racing through her mind, reflected only in minuscule half-expressions racing across her face. Puzzlement. Confirmation. Satisfaction. A grin. Impatience as the next data set materializes. She is enchanting.

Vadym hovers in the airlock space between the chambers, enjoying watching her at work. Such a change over the first impression that she had left him with when they first met.

She turns and looks at him for an instant, acknowledging his presence, and then returns to her work. After a few seconds, she starts speaking, but the words fly past Vadym, as he assumed she was talking to Phaedra.

“Pardon? I’m sorry, I was …”

“I said, I’ve finished all I can do from here.” she pushes the holograms away from her and, with a wide swimmer’s stroke, pulls herself slowly towards the overhead, grabbing onto a handhold. “There are some very interesting qualities.”

“Oh… It looks like a lot of other space rocks… Except for one thing, of course.” Vadym smiles slyly, “It’s ours!” and he raises his hand in a mock gesture of clinking champagne glasses.

“Other than that.” she dismisses his humor, ignoring his enthusiasm. “The center of mass is wrong. It’s all off to one side. It will make landing difficult, I imagine.”

“Not too much. The rotation is pretty slow. I’ve landed on worse.” Replies Vadym, a little hurt at the curt dismissal. It’s time to celebrate: halfway point and all that.

“Well, that’s not the only thing. You saw how it is shaped like two lumps of clay smashed together, with a little bridge in between them? Well, the larger lump is warmer than it should be. Might be radioactive.”

“Really? Well, we can take better measurements when we are closer and send down a Geiger counter on a drone.” Vadym thought he would try again. “I have a bottle of champagne saved up. Would you like to share a glass?”

“Why?” She looks at him quizzically and pushes herself away from him and towards the opposite passage.

Vadym considers the question. “To celebrate! We’ve arrived!”

“Let’s see what we’ve arrived at first.” and she moves as though to push off in the aft direction, but hesitates. “We will celebrate after breakfast?”

Vadym smiles slightly and nods, and Lhari disappears into the ship, moving aft towards the garden chamber.

Vadym turns back to the command console and clears the screen again.

“Display tracking data, motion relative to Theseus.” The display lights up again, dimming the distant stars and adding little yellow and green tails to every nearby object, highlighting its movement relative to Theseus. Target’s tail is invisible, hidden on the far side — Theseus is closing in directly towards the little rock. Vadym reaches out with one finger and touches the track; little numbers surround it. It was approaching at four meters per second. Theseus pulls one centimeter per second squared but can do so continuously with the fuel on board for many years. It seems like a crawl when trying to break orbit around Earth, taking many days to get free of the gravity well. But space travel is all about patience.

He ran the numbers through Phaedra and came up with an approach vector. Suicide burn would begin in three hours and last for about an hour and a half. At that time, they would fall into a parallel course with Target — not really an orbit, as the gravity well is too shallow — and rest about a thousand meters retrograde of its lazy, distant orbit around Saturn.

Matching orbits is tricky business. First, they had to match Saturn’s orbit around the Sun, then match Target’s orbit around Saturn, and then try to keep close to the errant moonlet without running into it or drifting away from it. He sets the course correction to slow the ship, and the reaction wheels hum just aft of the hydroponics bay, pushing against… what exactly? What is a gyroscope pushing against? Space itself? The ship begins a leisurely 180-degree turn.

Vadym leaves the bridge and floats aft to the garden, where Lhari is already collecting breakfast from the myriad of genetically engineered plants growing around her. She is gathering for both of them, a ritual of friendship that stirs a deep memory in Vadym, a shadow of humanity’s history. The gift of food, even symbolic, is sacred.

“We should name it.” Suggests Vadym. “Something other than Target, now that we can see it.”

Lhari reaches deep into the foliage of a dark green, broad-leafed plant and pulls out a potato. She tosses it to him, and he returns her a questioning glance. “Raw potato for breakfast?”

“No, silly, Aaloo.” She smiles. “It means potato in Hindi.”

“It’s a beautiful word for such a common thing.”

“That’s what we should name it.”

“Aaloo.” Vadym says it out loud, like testing the feel on his tongue. “It’s breaking tradition, but I’ve no objection.”

“If you want to name it for a cartoon character…” Lhari laments, leaving the idea open.

“No, no. Aaloo it is. I like it.”

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Chapter 9 linked below! (only 4 more!)