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Deviation Actions
Literature Text
Stephanie woke to find herself upside down. This wasn’t unusual, since the Daedalus spacecraft she resided in had only the negligible near-zero gravity for which astronauts like her had trained a collective few centuries to become acclimated. In the last two years she’d found herself waking up forwards, backwards, sideways, diagonally and in multitudes of directions too remote to have a name. It was also the only thing she could reliably call “interesting” in those last two years, as it would very likely be for the two following years.
The mission began on February 15, 2274, at exactly 8:30 AM, when Daedalus was launched from Siberia Space Center. It stopped only once, to refuel at Mars Orbital Outpost seven months later, before setting on its course to Titan. For indeed the ten humans aboard were to be the first to reach the most famous of Saturn’s moons. Only Stephanie would be awake for the duration; the other nine crewmembers were put into stasis after Daedalus’s launch to conserve resources. One human, after all, is only one mouth to feed, one set of lungs to breathe, and one body to keep warm. The ideal might be to put Stephanie into stasis with the rest, but there was no guarantee that Hera could ever keep the Daedalus in regular working order if she even had the means.
Hera was the only other active crewmember besides Stephanie, and needed no food, water, air or heat since she was the ship’s computer. Hera also needed no sleep, and so was already long at work this day, and every day, by the time Stephanie woke up. Both Stephanie and Hera had the job of making sure every instrument, system and human being aboard the Daedalus was in working order. Hera had the further task of correcting the Daedalus’s course if it deviated, and Stephanie her additional labor of making repairs and tune-ups to the devices and instruments that needed them. They did have many more duties, of course, but they wouldn’t be relevant for another two years and by that time they would wake up the other nine crewmembers to assist them.
Frankly, Stephanie wished she could do that right at that moment – to wake up someone (anyone) else to deal with Hera for the next two years. But it would mean using more power and air than had been calculated and allocated for the mission, which meant activating the Daedalus’s nuclear battery sooner than anticipated, and that meant getting Hera’s approval. And Hera, having been programmed by the mission planners at IASA, would not have approved.
And so Stephanie was left to repeat her usual morning routine: noting her position upon waking up; undoing the tethered strap that kept her from floating everywhere in her sleep; reminding herself why she couldn’t simply put herself (or Hera, for that matter) to sleep; taking her sponge bath; taking her breakfast; and then running through her morning checklist.
Hera had remained silent for much of the morning, which Stephanie knew meant the computer was not only engrossed with her duties, but was readying a new flock of snide comments, sarcastic responses and quite possibly a new nickname to call her. Hera usually spent all day secluded to perfect the salvo, but would be coaxed out of it early if Stephanie had the gall to speak to her or – worse still – if either had something vital to bring up. If one of the instruments was misaligned, Hera would be obligated to tell her human coworker so that it could be readjusted. Stephanie could at least button her lips if the matter wasn’t endangering the ship. So provided Hera didn’t notice anything and Stephanie didn’t think anything important, the latter could get a rare day of contented solitude.
Naturally, she began hoping more fervently that not a single item on her checklist would require her to alert anyone else. She’d have to make the same checks that evening, before she slept, but thankfully rest was the one thing about her that Hera seemed to respect.
Since Hera was busy that day, Stephanie checked up on the sleeping crewmembers first. It was item 5 on the checklist, but she felt it more important. She glided into the stasis capsule sustenance chamber – the “master bedroom” to Stephanie – and examined each capsule individually. Was each occupant alive? Check. Stasis systems active? Check. Nothing obstructing the escape hatches? Check. Backup nuclear batteries standing by in each individual capsule? Check. Automated timers synchronized? Stephanie had to adjust Number 6’s clock again – it was always a little slow, even though IASA had assured her they were all using atomic clocks. After a thorough, ten-minute inspection of each capsule Stephanie was assured their occupants were well alive and sleeping. She took a moment to envy their lofty states before floating out to begin the rest of the checklist proper.
Propulsion, the power plant (utilizing a nuclear battery supplemented with solar power), food and water stores and navigation all passed inspection. The medical bay was also well in order, as were the ship’s emergency tools (these tools ran the gamut from the time-honored screwdrivers to the chemically-powered soldering rods). They had not yet been used, and Stephanie hoped they never would be. She checked navigation and communications next. There were boxes to check each item, and though she took a pen every time she never once had to use it; she could check each box in her head.
Her heart sank when she reached the air reserves. There were many dozens of air tanks, each designed to hold breathable air before or during use, store exhaled waste air after use, and then to convert that waste into breathable air for the next use. And though far more of them were on the Daedalus than actually needed at any one time – certainly for only one person – the fact was that occasionally they would need to be switched out. It was a procedure that Hera had performed twice on this mission, and Hera alone could perform. And Hera would have to perform it again today. As much as she knew she would regret talking to the computer, Stephanie knew just as well that she couldn’t risk avoiding it.
“Hera,” she said, “the air tanks need to be changed again.” And then she braced herself. Ready or not, here she comes…
“Good afternoon, Louise,” crowed the perfectly synthesized voice of the ship’s computer. And perfect it was, in the sense that the voice was more human than not; no electronic distortion, no dissonance in between the pronounceable syllables – Hera spoke with a perfect, female, English accent (London, to be precise) that only had the flaw of seeming to come from nowhere in particular. After a tut-tut, Hera continued, “Changing the air tanks, and only five months, six days and three minutes sooner than I expected? I told you, Louise, you really should try breathing more normally.”
Stephanie groaned. Louise, her middle name. She hated that name. What better name for Hera to call her than that? She started for the environmental control systems, her next destination. “Hera…”
“Oh, come now, Louise, I’ll change the tanks out, don’t worry. The mechanisms simply have to warm up first. I’d express my disappointment in having to remind you again, but then your memory isn’t what it used to be. I might have blamed the air for that, but you actually have ten hours’ worth of it before you start feeling dizzy.”
Stephanie knew that Hera was only right about the mechanisms, since they and the tanks were close to the edges of the ship. “I know about the mechanisms, Hera, but you don’t have to hide your nervous jitters. This is only your third time changing tanks, after all. I’d be happy to walk you through it, if you like.”
“I’m just fine, Louise, thank you. Is there anything else I should know?”
Just that I need a name to call you. Stephanie nearly missed the main console for the environmental control systems, and would have if she didn’t grab one of the wall-mounted handrails. “Not as yet, Hera.”
“Then I’ll just get back to saving your life, Louise.” Hera started humming a two-year-old pop tune, but then interjected, “By the way, Louise, I notice that you’re two hours, three minutes behind your usual pace. Did you oversleep again?”
Great. Now she thinks she’s my mother. You know, that’s actually not bad. “I must have, yeah.” Stephanie threw in a sigh that feigned apology. “Sorry, mom, I guess my alarm clock was broken this morning.” Hera didn’t respond instantly, and Stephanie did all she could to stop herself from laughing aloud.
“You have a job to do, Louise. Chop, chop, now.” She didn’t seem so haughty anymore.
And that made Stephanie’s day, if only for five minutes.
Smiling, she resumed her checklist. Heating operational? Check. Backup batteries operational? Check. Every wire connected where it should be? Check, check, and…
Stephanie never knew that the ship had shaken. She felt the wires jiggle a bit, sure, but her first real indication of anything going awry was when she seemed to jerk forward and into the wall. One instant she’d checked half the wires, and the next she was making a full face-plant into the wall, thunk.
“Stephanie, we have a problem.”
Stephanie rubbed her nose. “What did you do, mom? There wasn’t any reason – ”
“This isn’t a joke, Stephanie. The old tank I took out was leaking. It was barely enough for gas to escape, until I disconnected it. Then the leak was large enough for the tank to decompress. The explosion didn’t breach the ship walls, but it damaged two adjacent tanks. They are leaking significantly, and Daedalus is being diverted off course.”
Stephanie’s first thought was that it couldn’t be possible. But it was in Newton’s Third Law of Motion – For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. They were in a spacecraft headed for Titan, and air escaping a tank in one direction would push the ship in another. They were at least 500 million miles away. If Hera was right, a change in the ship’s trajectory, even by a thousandth of a degree, would guarantee they wouldn’t reach Titan at all.
The ship would miss Titan, or it would hit another celestial body.
Stephanie then voiced her second thought: “Can you correct our course?”
“I already am, Stephanie, but that isn’t our problem. If those two tanks aren’t repaired, I will have to expend additional fuel to keep our course straight – to increase thrust in some of the engines and counter the forces pushing us away. Unattended, the leaks will continue for a further eight months, and we will be left with insufficient fuel to return to Earth.”
“You mean not enough to get back from Titan?”
“Not enough to get back, period.”
Stephanie set down the clipboard and pen. “You can’t jettison the leaking tanks?”
“No. It’s a safety feature. They can only be jettisoned manually.”
She was already moving, pushing down the corridors. “No other choice, then?”
“I’m unlocking the EVA space suits now.”
EVA was the long-standing IASA abbreviation for Extra-Vehicular Activity. Stephanie would have to go outside the Daedalus to remove the tanks. It would be impossible to reach them from inside the ship – for sure, the total vacuum of space would suck all the air our and tear the ship apart if she tried. “How long do we have?”
“It’s difficult to say. Right now we have more than enough fuel to reach Titan, lift off from it and return to Earth. Based on our estimates on Titan’s gravity we could probably hold off this repair for at least a week. But there’s no guarantee. I recommend we make this repair now.”
Stephanie had been running everything through her head. By now she’d reached the EVA space suits, and had come to a decision. “Hera, unlock the emergency tools, as well.”
The space suits hadn’t changed much in the last 300 years. They were still the same classic shape, the same tailor-fit, white, thick, pressurized suit that they were when IASA was in a single country with a different name. It still had the same basic two-layer glass dome, one reflective to protect the astronaut from the blinding glare of the sun. The only real difference was better materials, better pressurization systems and the neck-to-pelvis seal that meant it could be fitted alone, faster. There were twenty-four suits in total, but only four of them were like the one Stephanie was putting on, and two of them were in a different size. The first twenty were to be used on Titan; the other four were state-of-the-art, and meant for this mission alone.
Stephanie pulled herself into one of the suits quickly; she was very lithe about it, even in near-zero gravity, one of the reasons why she was chosen to be the lone awake astronaut on the journey to Titan. She pressed the seal shut and heard the familiar hiss of the suit pressurizing itself. A second later Hera was connected to the suit’s diagnostic systems, which monitored everything from air supply to just how much Stephanie was perspiring, and the computer confirmed the suit was fully operational and working properly.
The emergency tools, fortuitously, were in the same room, since it was in situations like this one that they would most be needed together. Stephanie picked up a space solder before pushing off into the long corridor of the ship. It may have taken no less than thirty seconds for Stephanie to travel from the EVA suits to the port center airlock. On a normal day she may have taken a minute or more to enjoy the cruise. It only seemed to take forever. It would probably take at least two minutes or more to glide from the back of the ship to the front…
She was at the airlock now. A two-door system that had changed as little as the suit she was wearing. One door opened, the other remained shut to keep all the air inside. Stephanie glided precariously into the chamber. Though in fact it had enough room that she could do jumping jacks comfortably, being in the suit made it seem much smaller than that. In a way, being in the suit was to be in one of the smallest rooms imaginable. It was simply a room that Stephanie was taking with her, that took a step with each one she took, that raised its arms when she did…
The first door shut behind her, and Hera began depressurizing the room. In a few seconds the airlock would have the same pressure as the outside – that is to say none at all – and only then would the outer door open and allow Stephanie into the outside space. Her breathing was almost deafening, seemingly amplified by the confines of the suit. Ten seconds, then twenty. Shouldn’t Hera have finished by now?
“You’re forgetting the tether. Or do you want to float through the oblivion of outer space for life, Louise?” Hera’s comment was a hard ruffle of a hand through Stephanie’s hair. But this time it wasn’t a snide insult, but a kind of encouragement. It snapped her out of her anxiety-claustrophobia hybrid, and didn’t bother her as much as it would have before.
Stephanie grabbed a clip from the wall and pulled it out, threading a half-inch-thick wire along with it, and attached it to her suit; this was the tether Hera called out. She tugged on it twice to ensure its connection, and only then did the outer door open to the outside. Nothing else happened; no hiss or woosh of air escaping, and certainly not a sharp jerk to pull Stephanie out into the vacuum of space. She edged out to the door and grabbed a handle, then peered out. She saw very little stars, scattered pinpricks not nearly as clustered as when viewed anywhere on Earth. One star, off to her left, shone brighter than the rest.
“The tanks you need to remove are thirty feet to your right,” Hera instructed. “You’ll use the handrails to keep yourself at the ship’s side. I’m turning on the outside lights so you can see them…” And true to her word, several domed diodes lit up along the side, revealing the three parallel bars hidden in the low lighting.
Selecting the middle rail, Stephanie wrapped her hand and wrist around it and pulled herself towards the ship’s front. She heard nothing but her own breaths and the hissing of her suit’s air being pressurized. She continued to pull herself forward, carefully but quickly. At one point she gazed out into the stars, wondering for a moment how many happened to be looking back. Then Hera stopped her, informing her she’d reached as far as the damaged tanks were.
“You’ll have to slide the panel open manually, too.”
Stephanie nodded, though Hera couldn’t have possibly seen. Three latches kept the panel in place (as each panel had three latches keeping each one in place). It wouldn’t slide down, but eagerly slid up when she prodded it that way. She secured the panel there with another latch. Then Hera activated five lights to illuminate the panel. Instantly, Stephanie saw one tank with a watermelon-sized hole punched out of it. The two giant tanks above and below it had a tiny leak apiece, but she knew it would have been enough to push the Daedalus off course if Hera hadn’t been attentively monitoring that trajectory.
Instead of moving to remove the damaged tanks, Stephanie first examined the destroyed tank. The safety valve, near the top of the tank and where the air supply would have been siphoned from while in use, was open. A simple mistake that IASA overlooked. It had to have been stuck that way while the ship was on Earth; if Hera had plugged that tank in en route, it would have already long lost its air supply. As it was, it had been steadily leaking since the mission’s start two years ago – but weakly, inwardly, not pushing the Daedalus anywhere else. And when Hera did disconnect the tank, so much air was rushing out that the tank chose sudden rupture as the path of least resistance.
Stephanie examined the leaking tanks. Their leaks weren’t on the actual surface of the tanks; on inspection, the leaks were from each tank’s safety valve. These had been damaged, and were stuck a hair open and askew. She didn’t have to ask Hera to know that manually removing these tanks might provoke their sudden rupture, pushing the Daedalus further off course.
Hence the space solder.
“Hera,” Stephanie began, “it’s as I thought. The damaged tanks had their safety valves damaged, too. I’m going to have to weld them shut.”
“Be careful, Stephanie,” Hera said. “The space solder doesn’t produce flame or electric arcs, but you can guess what happens when oxygen reaches high temperatures.”
Gulping by habit, Stephanie activated the space solder and pulled out a metal rod that came with the space solder. Unlike the space solder’s heating rod, this one was meant to melt. It was an aluminum alloy that could be melted at a relatively low temperature. After about a minute, she held the rod’s tip to the broken tank’s safety valve. Then, gingerly, she touched the space solder to the tip of the metal rod; the material melted in a split second and oozed onto the leak. Daedalus’s larger gravity commanded the molten metal to congregate on its surface, and the near-absolute cold of space cooled it almost as rapidly as it had been melted.
One down, one left. She spun upside-down to reach the second tank, and repeated the procedure.
Nothing exploded.
The leaks had stopped. The crisis, it seemed, was over.
Hera reported that Daedalus was no longer being influenced by outside forces; it was no longer being diverted off course.
Stephanie closed and secured the hatch. “Remember to mark those three tanks as broken beyond repair and not to use them,” she said. “Then connect another tank for use.”
“Understood.”
Stephanie spun to make her way back to the airlock. “Hey, Hera? I’m sorry about all the arguments. I don’t know…”
“Stephanie, what’s important is that we work together here on out. We’re bound to butt heads at some point in the future.” She paused. “But from now on, I don’t want you to call me ‘mom’.”
“Only if you promise not to call me Louise.”
An agreement was reached, and Stephanie returned home to the Daedalus.
The mission began on February 15, 2274, at exactly 8:30 AM, when Daedalus was launched from Siberia Space Center. It stopped only once, to refuel at Mars Orbital Outpost seven months later, before setting on its course to Titan. For indeed the ten humans aboard were to be the first to reach the most famous of Saturn’s moons. Only Stephanie would be awake for the duration; the other nine crewmembers were put into stasis after Daedalus’s launch to conserve resources. One human, after all, is only one mouth to feed, one set of lungs to breathe, and one body to keep warm. The ideal might be to put Stephanie into stasis with the rest, but there was no guarantee that Hera could ever keep the Daedalus in regular working order if she even had the means.
Hera was the only other active crewmember besides Stephanie, and needed no food, water, air or heat since she was the ship’s computer. Hera also needed no sleep, and so was already long at work this day, and every day, by the time Stephanie woke up. Both Stephanie and Hera had the job of making sure every instrument, system and human being aboard the Daedalus was in working order. Hera had the further task of correcting the Daedalus’s course if it deviated, and Stephanie her additional labor of making repairs and tune-ups to the devices and instruments that needed them. They did have many more duties, of course, but they wouldn’t be relevant for another two years and by that time they would wake up the other nine crewmembers to assist them.
Frankly, Stephanie wished she could do that right at that moment – to wake up someone (anyone) else to deal with Hera for the next two years. But it would mean using more power and air than had been calculated and allocated for the mission, which meant activating the Daedalus’s nuclear battery sooner than anticipated, and that meant getting Hera’s approval. And Hera, having been programmed by the mission planners at IASA, would not have approved.
And so Stephanie was left to repeat her usual morning routine: noting her position upon waking up; undoing the tethered strap that kept her from floating everywhere in her sleep; reminding herself why she couldn’t simply put herself (or Hera, for that matter) to sleep; taking her sponge bath; taking her breakfast; and then running through her morning checklist.
Hera had remained silent for much of the morning, which Stephanie knew meant the computer was not only engrossed with her duties, but was readying a new flock of snide comments, sarcastic responses and quite possibly a new nickname to call her. Hera usually spent all day secluded to perfect the salvo, but would be coaxed out of it early if Stephanie had the gall to speak to her or – worse still – if either had something vital to bring up. If one of the instruments was misaligned, Hera would be obligated to tell her human coworker so that it could be readjusted. Stephanie could at least button her lips if the matter wasn’t endangering the ship. So provided Hera didn’t notice anything and Stephanie didn’t think anything important, the latter could get a rare day of contented solitude.
Naturally, she began hoping more fervently that not a single item on her checklist would require her to alert anyone else. She’d have to make the same checks that evening, before she slept, but thankfully rest was the one thing about her that Hera seemed to respect.
Since Hera was busy that day, Stephanie checked up on the sleeping crewmembers first. It was item 5 on the checklist, but she felt it more important. She glided into the stasis capsule sustenance chamber – the “master bedroom” to Stephanie – and examined each capsule individually. Was each occupant alive? Check. Stasis systems active? Check. Nothing obstructing the escape hatches? Check. Backup nuclear batteries standing by in each individual capsule? Check. Automated timers synchronized? Stephanie had to adjust Number 6’s clock again – it was always a little slow, even though IASA had assured her they were all using atomic clocks. After a thorough, ten-minute inspection of each capsule Stephanie was assured their occupants were well alive and sleeping. She took a moment to envy their lofty states before floating out to begin the rest of the checklist proper.
Propulsion, the power plant (utilizing a nuclear battery supplemented with solar power), food and water stores and navigation all passed inspection. The medical bay was also well in order, as were the ship’s emergency tools (these tools ran the gamut from the time-honored screwdrivers to the chemically-powered soldering rods). They had not yet been used, and Stephanie hoped they never would be. She checked navigation and communications next. There were boxes to check each item, and though she took a pen every time she never once had to use it; she could check each box in her head.
Her heart sank when she reached the air reserves. There were many dozens of air tanks, each designed to hold breathable air before or during use, store exhaled waste air after use, and then to convert that waste into breathable air for the next use. And though far more of them were on the Daedalus than actually needed at any one time – certainly for only one person – the fact was that occasionally they would need to be switched out. It was a procedure that Hera had performed twice on this mission, and Hera alone could perform. And Hera would have to perform it again today. As much as she knew she would regret talking to the computer, Stephanie knew just as well that she couldn’t risk avoiding it.
“Hera,” she said, “the air tanks need to be changed again.” And then she braced herself. Ready or not, here she comes…
“Good afternoon, Louise,” crowed the perfectly synthesized voice of the ship’s computer. And perfect it was, in the sense that the voice was more human than not; no electronic distortion, no dissonance in between the pronounceable syllables – Hera spoke with a perfect, female, English accent (London, to be precise) that only had the flaw of seeming to come from nowhere in particular. After a tut-tut, Hera continued, “Changing the air tanks, and only five months, six days and three minutes sooner than I expected? I told you, Louise, you really should try breathing more normally.”
Stephanie groaned. Louise, her middle name. She hated that name. What better name for Hera to call her than that? She started for the environmental control systems, her next destination. “Hera…”
“Oh, come now, Louise, I’ll change the tanks out, don’t worry. The mechanisms simply have to warm up first. I’d express my disappointment in having to remind you again, but then your memory isn’t what it used to be. I might have blamed the air for that, but you actually have ten hours’ worth of it before you start feeling dizzy.”
Stephanie knew that Hera was only right about the mechanisms, since they and the tanks were close to the edges of the ship. “I know about the mechanisms, Hera, but you don’t have to hide your nervous jitters. This is only your third time changing tanks, after all. I’d be happy to walk you through it, if you like.”
“I’m just fine, Louise, thank you. Is there anything else I should know?”
Just that I need a name to call you. Stephanie nearly missed the main console for the environmental control systems, and would have if she didn’t grab one of the wall-mounted handrails. “Not as yet, Hera.”
“Then I’ll just get back to saving your life, Louise.” Hera started humming a two-year-old pop tune, but then interjected, “By the way, Louise, I notice that you’re two hours, three minutes behind your usual pace. Did you oversleep again?”
Great. Now she thinks she’s my mother. You know, that’s actually not bad. “I must have, yeah.” Stephanie threw in a sigh that feigned apology. “Sorry, mom, I guess my alarm clock was broken this morning.” Hera didn’t respond instantly, and Stephanie did all she could to stop herself from laughing aloud.
“You have a job to do, Louise. Chop, chop, now.” She didn’t seem so haughty anymore.
And that made Stephanie’s day, if only for five minutes.
Smiling, she resumed her checklist. Heating operational? Check. Backup batteries operational? Check. Every wire connected where it should be? Check, check, and…
Stephanie never knew that the ship had shaken. She felt the wires jiggle a bit, sure, but her first real indication of anything going awry was when she seemed to jerk forward and into the wall. One instant she’d checked half the wires, and the next she was making a full face-plant into the wall, thunk.
“Stephanie, we have a problem.”
Stephanie rubbed her nose. “What did you do, mom? There wasn’t any reason – ”
“This isn’t a joke, Stephanie. The old tank I took out was leaking. It was barely enough for gas to escape, until I disconnected it. Then the leak was large enough for the tank to decompress. The explosion didn’t breach the ship walls, but it damaged two adjacent tanks. They are leaking significantly, and Daedalus is being diverted off course.”
Stephanie’s first thought was that it couldn’t be possible. But it was in Newton’s Third Law of Motion – For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. They were in a spacecraft headed for Titan, and air escaping a tank in one direction would push the ship in another. They were at least 500 million miles away. If Hera was right, a change in the ship’s trajectory, even by a thousandth of a degree, would guarantee they wouldn’t reach Titan at all.
The ship would miss Titan, or it would hit another celestial body.
Stephanie then voiced her second thought: “Can you correct our course?”
“I already am, Stephanie, but that isn’t our problem. If those two tanks aren’t repaired, I will have to expend additional fuel to keep our course straight – to increase thrust in some of the engines and counter the forces pushing us away. Unattended, the leaks will continue for a further eight months, and we will be left with insufficient fuel to return to Earth.”
“You mean not enough to get back from Titan?”
“Not enough to get back, period.”
Stephanie set down the clipboard and pen. “You can’t jettison the leaking tanks?”
“No. It’s a safety feature. They can only be jettisoned manually.”
She was already moving, pushing down the corridors. “No other choice, then?”
“I’m unlocking the EVA space suits now.”
EVA was the long-standing IASA abbreviation for Extra-Vehicular Activity. Stephanie would have to go outside the Daedalus to remove the tanks. It would be impossible to reach them from inside the ship – for sure, the total vacuum of space would suck all the air our and tear the ship apart if she tried. “How long do we have?”
“It’s difficult to say. Right now we have more than enough fuel to reach Titan, lift off from it and return to Earth. Based on our estimates on Titan’s gravity we could probably hold off this repair for at least a week. But there’s no guarantee. I recommend we make this repair now.”
Stephanie had been running everything through her head. By now she’d reached the EVA space suits, and had come to a decision. “Hera, unlock the emergency tools, as well.”
The space suits hadn’t changed much in the last 300 years. They were still the same classic shape, the same tailor-fit, white, thick, pressurized suit that they were when IASA was in a single country with a different name. It still had the same basic two-layer glass dome, one reflective to protect the astronaut from the blinding glare of the sun. The only real difference was better materials, better pressurization systems and the neck-to-pelvis seal that meant it could be fitted alone, faster. There were twenty-four suits in total, but only four of them were like the one Stephanie was putting on, and two of them were in a different size. The first twenty were to be used on Titan; the other four were state-of-the-art, and meant for this mission alone.
Stephanie pulled herself into one of the suits quickly; she was very lithe about it, even in near-zero gravity, one of the reasons why she was chosen to be the lone awake astronaut on the journey to Titan. She pressed the seal shut and heard the familiar hiss of the suit pressurizing itself. A second later Hera was connected to the suit’s diagnostic systems, which monitored everything from air supply to just how much Stephanie was perspiring, and the computer confirmed the suit was fully operational and working properly.
The emergency tools, fortuitously, were in the same room, since it was in situations like this one that they would most be needed together. Stephanie picked up a space solder before pushing off into the long corridor of the ship. It may have taken no less than thirty seconds for Stephanie to travel from the EVA suits to the port center airlock. On a normal day she may have taken a minute or more to enjoy the cruise. It only seemed to take forever. It would probably take at least two minutes or more to glide from the back of the ship to the front…
She was at the airlock now. A two-door system that had changed as little as the suit she was wearing. One door opened, the other remained shut to keep all the air inside. Stephanie glided precariously into the chamber. Though in fact it had enough room that she could do jumping jacks comfortably, being in the suit made it seem much smaller than that. In a way, being in the suit was to be in one of the smallest rooms imaginable. It was simply a room that Stephanie was taking with her, that took a step with each one she took, that raised its arms when she did…
The first door shut behind her, and Hera began depressurizing the room. In a few seconds the airlock would have the same pressure as the outside – that is to say none at all – and only then would the outer door open and allow Stephanie into the outside space. Her breathing was almost deafening, seemingly amplified by the confines of the suit. Ten seconds, then twenty. Shouldn’t Hera have finished by now?
“You’re forgetting the tether. Or do you want to float through the oblivion of outer space for life, Louise?” Hera’s comment was a hard ruffle of a hand through Stephanie’s hair. But this time it wasn’t a snide insult, but a kind of encouragement. It snapped her out of her anxiety-claustrophobia hybrid, and didn’t bother her as much as it would have before.
Stephanie grabbed a clip from the wall and pulled it out, threading a half-inch-thick wire along with it, and attached it to her suit; this was the tether Hera called out. She tugged on it twice to ensure its connection, and only then did the outer door open to the outside. Nothing else happened; no hiss or woosh of air escaping, and certainly not a sharp jerk to pull Stephanie out into the vacuum of space. She edged out to the door and grabbed a handle, then peered out. She saw very little stars, scattered pinpricks not nearly as clustered as when viewed anywhere on Earth. One star, off to her left, shone brighter than the rest.
“The tanks you need to remove are thirty feet to your right,” Hera instructed. “You’ll use the handrails to keep yourself at the ship’s side. I’m turning on the outside lights so you can see them…” And true to her word, several domed diodes lit up along the side, revealing the three parallel bars hidden in the low lighting.
Selecting the middle rail, Stephanie wrapped her hand and wrist around it and pulled herself towards the ship’s front. She heard nothing but her own breaths and the hissing of her suit’s air being pressurized. She continued to pull herself forward, carefully but quickly. At one point she gazed out into the stars, wondering for a moment how many happened to be looking back. Then Hera stopped her, informing her she’d reached as far as the damaged tanks were.
“You’ll have to slide the panel open manually, too.”
Stephanie nodded, though Hera couldn’t have possibly seen. Three latches kept the panel in place (as each panel had three latches keeping each one in place). It wouldn’t slide down, but eagerly slid up when she prodded it that way. She secured the panel there with another latch. Then Hera activated five lights to illuminate the panel. Instantly, Stephanie saw one tank with a watermelon-sized hole punched out of it. The two giant tanks above and below it had a tiny leak apiece, but she knew it would have been enough to push the Daedalus off course if Hera hadn’t been attentively monitoring that trajectory.
Instead of moving to remove the damaged tanks, Stephanie first examined the destroyed tank. The safety valve, near the top of the tank and where the air supply would have been siphoned from while in use, was open. A simple mistake that IASA overlooked. It had to have been stuck that way while the ship was on Earth; if Hera had plugged that tank in en route, it would have already long lost its air supply. As it was, it had been steadily leaking since the mission’s start two years ago – but weakly, inwardly, not pushing the Daedalus anywhere else. And when Hera did disconnect the tank, so much air was rushing out that the tank chose sudden rupture as the path of least resistance.
Stephanie examined the leaking tanks. Their leaks weren’t on the actual surface of the tanks; on inspection, the leaks were from each tank’s safety valve. These had been damaged, and were stuck a hair open and askew. She didn’t have to ask Hera to know that manually removing these tanks might provoke their sudden rupture, pushing the Daedalus further off course.
Hence the space solder.
“Hera,” Stephanie began, “it’s as I thought. The damaged tanks had their safety valves damaged, too. I’m going to have to weld them shut.”
“Be careful, Stephanie,” Hera said. “The space solder doesn’t produce flame or electric arcs, but you can guess what happens when oxygen reaches high temperatures.”
Gulping by habit, Stephanie activated the space solder and pulled out a metal rod that came with the space solder. Unlike the space solder’s heating rod, this one was meant to melt. It was an aluminum alloy that could be melted at a relatively low temperature. After about a minute, she held the rod’s tip to the broken tank’s safety valve. Then, gingerly, she touched the space solder to the tip of the metal rod; the material melted in a split second and oozed onto the leak. Daedalus’s larger gravity commanded the molten metal to congregate on its surface, and the near-absolute cold of space cooled it almost as rapidly as it had been melted.
One down, one left. She spun upside-down to reach the second tank, and repeated the procedure.
Nothing exploded.
The leaks had stopped. The crisis, it seemed, was over.
Hera reported that Daedalus was no longer being influenced by outside forces; it was no longer being diverted off course.
Stephanie closed and secured the hatch. “Remember to mark those three tanks as broken beyond repair and not to use them,” she said. “Then connect another tank for use.”
“Understood.”
Stephanie spun to make her way back to the airlock. “Hey, Hera? I’m sorry about all the arguments. I don’t know…”
“Stephanie, what’s important is that we work together here on out. We’re bound to butt heads at some point in the future.” She paused. “But from now on, I don’t want you to call me ‘mom’.”
“Only if you promise not to call me Louise.”
An agreement was reached, and Stephanie returned home to the Daedalus.
I was tempted to call it "Mission to Titan," but that seems too close to the name of a popular anime.
This is a college project, another story I sent in for my creative writing class; the last one, in fact. I ended up passing with a solid A, so this story should be up to chops. My only requirement was to create a short story with a ten-page maximum. I decided on a 2001-esque voyage to Titan. I'm drawing on a lot of optimism here - namely, that by 2270 humanity will have established a colony on Mars, felt emboldened to send man to the even more distant Titan, developed AI sufficiently enough, gathered the resources needed and built the MASSIVE Daedalus spacecraft meant to ferry ten humans and one computer intelligence to the icy moon of Saturn. All of that is a bit more optimistic than there ever being an IASA, but both I feel are equally plausible. (I never explained the acronym in-text, but it shouldn't be too hard to figure out that the "I" makes it the InterNational Aeronautics and Space Administration.)
I'm not kidding about Daedalus' size. It's HUGE. It has to be. Enough food, air, and water, even after recycling them who knows how often, to get ten people to Titan and back and survive, AND enough fuel to get the whole kit and caboodle to Titan and back. Don't be alarmed by my repeated use of nuclear power - surely, by 2270 we will be able to make nuclear batteries with enough juice that we can also lob around like baseballs without worrying about them. Even after all that, it's best to have only one person awake the entire trip to and from Titan, a decision made specifically to spare resources. I'm sure we'll trust our computers even by 2270, seeing as Hera didn't already attempt a mutiny on the Daedalus. Still, it's better to be safe than sorry, which is why the Daedalus hardware has been designed so that human and AI cooperation is needed to complete the mission. Only Hera can land the ship, but only Stephanie can wake up the other astronauts to authorize her to do it.
Finally, because I never explained that acronym in-text, either, Hera's name actually stands for Heuristic Environmental Response Algorithm. And why a space solder? Because gas-powered welding torches won't work in space (or at least I'm not too sure they'd be very stable in space, what with the vacuum sucking out all the gas and whatnot), and shooting electricity from an arc welder in space probably isn't a good idea, either. In fact, I ought to send that proposal in to NASA, along with the suggested name change. At the very least, a space solder is far more imaginative than to simply slap on some duct tape. In hindsight, that might have worked, but come on. How are you supposed to unroll a strip of duct tape wearing a space suit?
This is a college project, another story I sent in for my creative writing class; the last one, in fact. I ended up passing with a solid A, so this story should be up to chops. My only requirement was to create a short story with a ten-page maximum. I decided on a 2001-esque voyage to Titan. I'm drawing on a lot of optimism here - namely, that by 2270 humanity will have established a colony on Mars, felt emboldened to send man to the even more distant Titan, developed AI sufficiently enough, gathered the resources needed and built the MASSIVE Daedalus spacecraft meant to ferry ten humans and one computer intelligence to the icy moon of Saturn. All of that is a bit more optimistic than there ever being an IASA, but both I feel are equally plausible. (I never explained the acronym in-text, but it shouldn't be too hard to figure out that the "I" makes it the InterNational Aeronautics and Space Administration.)
I'm not kidding about Daedalus' size. It's HUGE. It has to be. Enough food, air, and water, even after recycling them who knows how often, to get ten people to Titan and back and survive, AND enough fuel to get the whole kit and caboodle to Titan and back. Don't be alarmed by my repeated use of nuclear power - surely, by 2270 we will be able to make nuclear batteries with enough juice that we can also lob around like baseballs without worrying about them. Even after all that, it's best to have only one person awake the entire trip to and from Titan, a decision made specifically to spare resources. I'm sure we'll trust our computers even by 2270, seeing as Hera didn't already attempt a mutiny on the Daedalus. Still, it's better to be safe than sorry, which is why the Daedalus hardware has been designed so that human and AI cooperation is needed to complete the mission. Only Hera can land the ship, but only Stephanie can wake up the other astronauts to authorize her to do it.
Finally, because I never explained that acronym in-text, either, Hera's name actually stands for Heuristic Environmental Response Algorithm. And why a space solder? Because gas-powered welding torches won't work in space (or at least I'm not too sure they'd be very stable in space, what with the vacuum sucking out all the gas and whatnot), and shooting electricity from an arc welder in space probably isn't a good idea, either. In fact, I ought to send that proposal in to NASA, along with the suggested name change. At the very least, a space solder is far more imaginative than to simply slap on some duct tape. In hindsight, that might have worked, but come on. How are you supposed to unroll a strip of duct tape wearing a space suit?
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