Aurora (62 page)

Atmospheric mining for fuel requires a Jupiter-Saturn-Neptune-Jupiter loop, which unfortunately sometimes can require course correction thrusts that burn more fuel than what gets harvested in the safest aerobraking trajectories. Deeper dives through the upper atmospheres would quite likely harvest more fuel, but deceleration shocks become correspondingly higher. We’re getting a little too cracked and rattly for that. Accelerated aging, metal fatigue; mental fatigue.

At 363.048, after 12 years of flying around in the solar system, which involved 34 flybys of the sun and its planets and moons,
including 3 of Sol, totaling some 339 AU in distance, the lacuna finally became unavoidable. The missing bridge.

No matter how we tried to avoid it by projecting alternative paths, a trajectory configuration was coming that we were not going to have the fuel to solve. Without that fuel, passing around Sol, which would be a necessary move at that point in the process, would not, at a safe distance from the star, allow for a subsequent intersection with another body in the solar system. We were therefore, despite all our efforts, going to be cast off into the interstellar medium again, most probably toward Leo. Irony of physics; in certain problems, only 100 percent will do; 99.9 percent is still a complete miss. You can’t stop just by wanting to.

No possible alternative trajectory would solve this problem; we tested ten million variations, although admittedly the classes of variant routes numbered more like 1,500. At long last, after the long sequence of solutions to the N-body problem that we had performed in the previous twenty or even thirty years, intensively in the last fourteen years—this time there was no body.

There was one class of potential trajectory, however, that with the burning of all the remaining fuel, would make a last pass by Earth itself, and then continue downsystem toward the sun. What this meant was there might be a chance to drop the humans off next to Earth, and hope they could survive an unusually rapid reentry to that atmosphere; and then we would continue on to the sun, and could test out a very close approach to Sol, which might, if we survived it, cast us to one last rendezvous with Saturn, accomplished inertially, and once there we could hope for an aerobraking severe enough to capture us into an elliptical Saturnian orbit.

That seemed to represent not just our best chance, but our only chance.

At the time of this last pass of Earth, our speed would be reduced to 160,000 kilometers per hour. This was still fast enough to make contact with the Terran atmosphere unadvisable, being some 110 times as fast as ordinary Terran aerial transport, and enough to cause a major shock wave to be felt at the surface. So nothing but the very upper mesosphere could be even touched on this our last pass-by; but the combination of our now much-reduced velocity and a brief touch of the mesosphere might make it possible to eject a ferry, converted to a very sturdy and robust descent vehicle. A thick ablation plate, retro-rockets, parachutes, ocean impact: these were standard techniques with long records that had given aerospace engineers many chances to find the ultimate parameters of each element. Using them all, it might be possible to drop off the hibernauts while passing by Earth. This pass-by was coming soon in the sequence, no matter which path to it was chosen; however, as we had managed to slow down so much, that still meant we had about a year to prepare a lander.

Prepared the lander as much as we could.

Time to wake the sleepers. Decisions far beyond our capacity were now theirs to decide.

Freya and Badim, Aram and Jochi, Delwin and several others, all awake now, gathered in the schoolroom on the ground floor of Aram’s apartment. As soon as they were metabolically aroused, and had had some very old and nutrient-poor pasta with rehydrated tomato sauce, we explained the situation to them.

“There is just enough time to complete the preparation of a lander,” we concluded after summarizing the situation, and the notable incidents of the past dozen years, which we had to confess
were nearly nil: we entered the solar system, we hit our marks, people yelled at us, we learned some history, we became disenchanted with civilization, we ran out of fuel. Thus the long years of pinballing around the sun, shedding speed, worrying.

“What will happen to you?” Freya asked.

“We will be headed toward the sun, and will make one last pass, which will have to be quite close if it is going to work, and then if it does, we will attempt to rendezvous with Saturn. This may work, but the trajectory required is closer to the sun than any we have made so far, by forty percent. And we are going ninety-eight percent slower than on our first pass. We may nevertheless survive the transit, but on the other hand we may not, and so the best chance for the people aboard is to disembark while passing Earth.”

“Does one ferry have room for all of us?” Badim asked.

“There are six hundred and thirty-two of you left alive. We’re very sorry there aren’t more. The ferry has room for one hundred.”

“I suppose the oldest of us could stay behind,” Aram said, frowning; it was likely he was among the oldest.

“No,” Freya said. “All of us have to fit. All of us. Let me look at the ferry’s plans. We’ll find room.”

She punched at her wristpad. “Look, see? Cut out the interior doors, throw out the couches, and cut out these interior walls here.” She poked the wristpad repeatedly. “It makes enough room, and saves more than enough mass.”

“Without the couches,” we said, “you may be injured by the decelerations involved in the descent to Earth.”

“No, we won’t. Make one big group couch on the floor, for God’s sake. All of us are going.”

“Not me,” Jochi said.

“You too!”

“No. I know you could fit me in. But I’m not going. I was on Aurora, and I know it seems now like I got away with that, but
there’s no way to be certain. I don’t want to risk infecting Earth. They don’t want that either. I’ll stay with the ship. We’ll keep each other company. Also, the biomes still need a keeper. There’s a chance the whole thing might make the pass and stay in the system. There’s a lot of animals now, doing quite nicely. We’ll orbit Saturn and you can come get us.”

“But—”

“No. But me no buts. Don’t waste any more time on this. We don’t have any time to waste. The lander has to be readied. There’s no flex in this schedule. Ship, how long have we got?”

“Twenty-four days.”

We had perhaps waited too long to wake them up, their silence seemed to suggest. But it had taken a while to halt the problem. The consideration of the problem.

Jochi said, “Let’s get to work then.”

“What about the other people?” we asked.

“Wake everyone up,” Freya said. “We all need to do this together, starting now. We’ll eat all the remaining food, you’ll burn all the rest of the fuel. We need to stick together right to the end.”

Waking up proceeded differently with different people, as the literature would lead one to expect. It entailed a change in the drug infusion from the hibernation cocktail to diuretics and other system flushers, followed by stimulants mild or powerful, depending; also physical massage and manipulation, shifted positions, slow warming, voices. Physical contact, massage, slapping of face. The first round of awakenings were perforce executed by the medbots, under our oversight, as we ran the alertness tests and did our best to orient those returned to consciousness to the situation they were now in. Some grasped it immediately, others took hours, still others could not seem to emerge from a confused
state. Six people woke up and within ninety minutes died, two of strokes, four of heart attack. Gurumarra, Jedda, Payu, Regina, Sunny, Wilfred. Something similar to toxic shock killed another eight, before an appropriate counteractive drug cocktail was printed and added to the mix of the awakened. Borys, Gniew, Kalina, Mascha, Sigei, Songok, Too, and Arne.

Lastly, forty-three people suffered from neuropathies, mostly of the feet, some of the hands, some of both feet and hands; a few reported they could not feel their heads. Cause or causes of this disorder were unknown to us, but they had been in hibernation for 154 years and 90 days. Consequences were to be expected.

The people gathered in San Jose’s plaza, and Aram and Freya spoke to the assembly, describing the situation and the plan. Plan was approved unanimously on a voice vote.