Parker's Folly (11 page)

Shit! Reagan is right,
Rodriguez realized. “Listen up! Everyone get flat against the bulkhead. Do it now!”

“What about those crates? Won't they slide aft as well?” asked Doc White.

The Gunny looked closely at the nearest crate and noticed that the crates were strapped to their pallets and the pallets were locked to the deck with stout semi-circular metal clamps. “Looks like the pallets are clamped to the deck. I can't believe that the astronauts flying this thing would let crap rattle around in their cargo hold during blastoff. Against the bulkhead people.”

Lt. Merryweather was still standing next to the exterior door and behind a large crate that half blocked the entrance when the door had been open. Rodriguez noticed that the cylindrical metal clamps that secured the other pallets to the deck were missing from the crate in front of the Lieutenant. “Lieutenant! Get away from the crate!” Then the cargo bay tipped on end.

The Gunny had been standing about a foot from the aft bulkhead. She was slammed against it on her side as the bulkhead became the new floor. Sharp pain coursed through her arm and shoulder. Looking sideways along the bulkhead, two of the Marines who had been lying prone slid into the wall and crumpled up. Beyond them, the Lieutenant slammed face down into the wall from about four feet away, followed immediately by the heavy unsecured crate.

There were snapping sounds, but it was hard to tell if they were from the crate or the Lieutenant's bones breaking. Lying pinned against the bulkhead, immobilized by the crushing acceleration, Rodriguez could see Lt. Merryweather's arm sticking out from under the crate, his hand bent back, its fingers arched in pain.

The Gunny struggled with all her strength and managed to roll onto her back. Over the roaring background noise, she could hear moaning on either side. Staring up at the cargo bay, as the suffocating hand of six gravities tried to push her through the bulkhead wall, she thought,
we have really screwed the pooch on this one.

The Chief Marshal looked back out the window just in time to see two bent, 70 by 90 foot hangar doors flutter through the air like spastic butterflies. The silver object that had exited the hangar seconds ago was a blur, already more than a kilometer away and rapidly disappearing, due east.

“I'd step back from the window if I were you, gentlemen,” TK offered, grinning like the cat that ate the canary. The party of lawmen looked back at the smiling old man just in time for the arriving sonic boom to shatter every window in the house.

As they were picking themselves back up off the floor, brushing off the shards of glass, the lawmen heard the old man say with great satisfaction: “damn fools, that weren't no rocket ship, that was a by God spaceship.”

TK Parker's spaceship surged forward with the acceleration of a top fuel dragster or a fighter jet being catapulted from the deck of an aircraft carrier. A force equivalent to six times that of normal Earth gravity pressed the bridge crew back into their padded seats. Parker's Folly was unarguably and irrevocably under way.

The massive vessel was accelerating at 60 m/sec
2
– slightly more than six gravities. One second after helmsman Vincent initiated forward flight, Parker's Folly had traveled 30 meters and was moving at 216 km/hr. She had tossed the hangar doors aside as if they were made of paper and the forward quarter of her hull was outside the building.

Two seconds after launch, the ship had all but cleared the hangar and was traveling at 432 km/hour. Six seconds, a tenth of a minute into the flight, Folly was over a kilometer from the hangar,
headed east across the flat Texas scrub. She had just broken the sound barrier and was moving at nearly 1300 km/hr.

Following a course headed straight for San Angelo, the local elevation dropped but the land became progressively more hilly. Riding on the gravitational cushion created by the repulsor array, the ship undulated over minor wrinkles in the terrain. Things would get dangerous rapidly if the ship did not gain altitude, and quickly.

On the bridge, the crew was partially incapacitated by the sudden and unexpectedly strong acceleration. Between ragged breaths of air, the Captain gasped “cut... back... engines... now.”

The helmsmen's chairs had controls built into their armrest much like a modern fighter jet. Billy Ray was able to focus enough to reduce drive thrust until the ship was just maintaining its forward velocity.

With the acceleration dropping to zero, the Captain quickly accessed their situation. The tan and brown country side was rushing by in a blur. “Give us a bit more altitude, Mr. Vincent.”

The last thing they needed to do was tear through the residential areas around San Angelo at sixty feet doing 2,000 miles an hour. The Captain pulled up the standard flight profile for Low Earth Orbit insertion. “Folly, adjust LEO insertion profile based on our current position and velocity. Get us up to about 350 kilometers. Pass the profile to the helm.”

“Roger, Captain.”

“Mr. Vincent. Take us to LEO.”

“Aye, aye, Captain. Low Earth Orbit coming right up,” the lanky Texan confirmed. The g-forces returned as the ship's nose came up and the racing landscape fell away. The tan and brown blur that had been sweeping past the ship's transparent bow receded and quickly turned into a shrinking aerial view of the heart of Texas.

The horizon acquired curvature while the sky outside turned from tan, to light blue, to deep blue and finally to black. As the ship slipped from Earth's grasp and reached for the unbounded freedom of space a cry could be heard from the helm. Billy Ray Vincent, Texas born and bred, could not help but yell:

“Yeeeeeee Haaaaaawwwwww!”

Part Two

At Christ Church in Canterbury, about an hour after sunset on the 18
th
of June,
Ano Domini 1178
, a band of five novice monks were observing the new crescent Moon. Suddenly, a flaming torch sprang up on the edge of the bright crescent, spewing out fire on the limb of the Moon. The monks cried out in terror as the body of the moon “writhed and throbbed like a wounded snake.”

The phenomenon recurred several more times as the observers cowered. Later that same year, famed chronicler Fratello Gervase—known as Gervase of Canterbury, himself a monk at Christ Church—wrote down the five monks' recounting of those frightening events:

“This year on the Sunday before the Feast of Saint John the Baptist, after sunset when the moon was first seen, a marvellous sign was seen by five or more men sitting facing it. Now, there was a clear new moon, as was usual at that phase, its horns extended to the east; and behold suddenly the upper horn was divided in two. Out of the middle of its division a burning torch sprang, throwing out a long way, flames, coals and sparks. As well, the moon's body which was lower, twisted as though anxious, and in the words of those who told me and had seen it with their own eyes, the moon palpitated like a pummelled snake. After this it returned to its proper state. This vicissitude repeated itself a dozen times or more, namely that the fire took on tormented forms variously at random, and afterwards returned to its prior state. Even after these vicissitudes, from horn to horn, that means along its length, it became semi-black. This to me who writes this was told by those men who with their own eyes saw it, and who are willing to swear an oath that they have not added to nor falsified the above written.”

In later years, scientists hypothesized that the monks had observed an asteroid shower striking the Moon. In fact, some say it was the impact that created the lunar crater Giordano Bruno. Many astronomers accepted that the well-chronicled event coincided with the formation the crater, the youngest substantial impact feature on the Moon.

Even more recently, new astronomical calculations have brought this theory into doubt. Based on the size of the crater—measuring 22 kilometers across—the impacting asteroid must have been between one and three kilometers wide. Such an asteroid impacting on Earth would threaten the existence of human civilization.

 If an impact had blasted a crater as large as Giordano Bruno into the Moon's northeast limb, it would have ejected large volumes of rocky material. This would have caused a week-long meteor shower, raining down 50,000 meteors each hour as ten million tons of rock pelted the entire Earth. Yet no vigilant 12
th
century sky watcher in Europe, Arabia or China reported such a storm.

It has been suggested that those five ancient sky-watchers might have seen the fiery display of a meteor traveling along their line of sight rather than an impact on the moon. But perhaps not. The monks' description does not match that of an earthly meteor shower, which medieval observers were well acquainted with. If it was not a meteor or an impact event, what could have caused the heavenly spectacle that one observer called “a dragon on the limb of the moon?”

Lieutenant Colonel Ludmilla Stefanovna Tropsha of the
Voenno-Vozdushnye Sily
—the Russian Federation Air Forces—looked out the observation window at the blue and white planet slowly turning below her.
Well Luda,
she thought to herself,
this was the thing you wanted most in the world, I hope it was worth it.

All the sacrifices, the failed marriage to Yuri, not having any children, fighting her way into what was left of the Russian space program. Fellow officers told her she was throwing her career away for a chance to fly in space, and then probably only once. The old fashioned Soyuz capsules only had room for three cosmonauts. One seat had to be for a Russian pilot. That left two seats for Russian scientists or to rent out, and the Americans and the Europeans paid millions in cash to transport their people to and from the ISS.

Lt. Col Tropsha was not a pilot, she was a medical doctor with a doctorate in Biology. Her trip was paid for by the rapidly dwindling funds of ROSCOSMOS, the Russian Federal Space Agency, the
Rodina's
equivalent of NASA. Of course, NASA had funding problems of its own—and no man-rated rockets of its own. If the Americans had somehow managed to continue flying their space shuttle, the three remaining people on board the ISS wouldn't be in this fix.

The Sun was acting up. A big sunspot “crackling with activity” had emerging over the Sun's eastern limb a week ago. Then NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded a surge of extreme ultraviolet radiation from the sunspot's magnetic canopy 24 hours ago. This was no minor solar radiation event, it was the worst solar eruption in a century.

Normally, solar storms do not affect people on Earth's surface. Radio communications may be disrupted and dramatic aurora displays may paint the night skies with ghostly dancing light, but generally there is no threat to those living on the planet's surface. In space, on the other hand, large solar explosions can potentially damage satellites and other spacecraft. Of course, as with everything in nature, there are exceptions.

On the morning of Thursday, September 1, 1859, English solar astronomer Richard Carrington noted the appearance of an enormous group of extraordinarily bright spots on the face of the Sun. Before dawn the next day, skies all over Earth erupted in brilliant auroras so intense that newspapers could be read as though it were daylight. Miners in Colorado stumbled out of bed and started preparing breakfast, thinking the Sun already up. Stunning auroras appeared even in tropical latitudes, painting the skies over Hawaii and the Bahamas blood red.

More troubling, ships' compasses no longer functioned properly, birds temporarily lost their ability to navigate and telegraph systems around the world were knocked out. Sparks from telegraph keys shocked their operators and set telegraph paper on fire. The Carrington Event's gigantic coronal mass ejection was sent directly toward Earth, taking only 18 hours to travel the 150 million kilometer distance. Quite remarkable, since such journeys normally take three to four days. The total energy emitted was equivalent to tens of millions of atomic bombs exploding at the same time.

This new solar eruption—thought not to be quite as powerful as the Carrington Event—was still monstrous, measuring more than X30 on the Solar Richter scale. Though the two scales cannot be directly compared, if the equivalent of the solar explosion were transferred to Earth it would register more than 17 on the terrestrial Richter scale.

The peak of the massive star quake had been detected 18 hours ago and, like the Carrington Event, the flair was aimed directly at Earth. The particle radiation from the eruption was predicted to reach Earth in about 8 hours. It not only represented a severe threat to all communications, terrestrial power grids, and satellites orbiting the planet, the predicted radiation levels were going to be deadly outside of the atmosphere. This meant that anyone trapped on the International Space Station was going to get fried, and trapped Luda and her two companions were.

Normally there were six people working on board the ISS, three  each for the pair of Soyuz “lifeboat” capsules docked at the station. Trouble was, when the alarm was raised to evacuate the station, one of the capsules malfunctioned. After consulting with mission control and among themselves, the six crew members drew straws. The three winners bade their companions a tearful good bye, boarded the working capsule and headed back to Earth and safety. The losers—Colonel Ivan
Kondratov
, scientist Hiroyuki Saito and Lt Colonel Tropsha—were left to their own devices, waiting for the Sun to kill them.

Colonel Ivan Alexievitch
Kondratov
was also a Russian officer, he would have been the pilot of the second escape capsule if the damned thing had been in working order. He was in the crew quarters, talking on the radio to his wife and children. Undoubtedly Ivan, ever the stoic Russian hero, was remaining calm while his wife and two daughters wept back on Earth. That didn't mean he was not as anguished as they were, just that, like most Russian men, he had emotional “issues,” as the Americans would say.