Future Chron Universe Book 6 - From The Earth Series Book 6 - Circle Of Retribution - Chapters 11-15

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Chapter 11

Gardener had practiced a couple of simulations. He hadn't been rusty at all. Since it would have been Maxine's flight, she was there to help. Even Lance came by. But surprisingly, Lt. Macland did not show up even though he was the officer in charge of simulations.

After his last practice, Maxine remarked on the Lieutenant's absence. “I wonder where Lt. Macland has been keeping himself. I've never seen or heard of a simulation run that he didn't watch over.”

“I don't know,” said Gardener. “But with or without him, I think I'm ready for my flight. At least I had you to help me, Maxine, thanks.”

“You're welcome, Gardener. I haven't forgotten that you did the same thing for me when I was in your situation.”

“Well, the flight is early tomorrow. I'm going to have a light dinner in my room and mail mom and dad. Will I see you in the mornin,g Maxine?”

“Sure, get plenty of rest, it's a long ride.”

Gardener ate his dinner and finished the letter early. He lay down to go to sleep. But unusually, he didn't go right to sleep. He thought about the flight. He thought about his mom and dad. He wondered where Lt. Macland had been the last two weeks. He thought about Saturn waiting for him, beautiful but dangerous. He was wondering about what the Saturn weather report would be when he drifted off to sleep.

Lt. Macland had finally reappeared. He was in the flight control room as Gardener was going through final flight checks.

This take-off would be a little different from the simulator. The ASCs were hybrid ships. Jet motors would power the takeoff and climb to the top of the main haze layer. At that point, the nuclear-thermal rockets would kick in, and kick was the correct word. The ASC would leave Titan's atmosphere at several hundred kilometers and, if all went well, be on its way to a trans-Saturn insertion orbit.

Gardener's job was to get ASC1 off the ground and into the atmosphere, where the ANI would take over with Gardener monitoring.

“Flight, this is ASC1. Pre-flight checklist nominal, preparing for roll.”

“Roger ASC1, clear for roll.”

Gardener lifted the ASC into the air flawlessly. He was passing through ten kilometers in altitude when he heard flight control calling.

“ASC1, this is flight control. We monitor that you have not passed control to the ANI, is that correct?”

“ASC1 to flight, passing control now.” Gardener had been so excited about actually flying again that he had forgotten to pass control to the ANI as required in the flight manual. He reluctantly did so.

From here to almost one hundred kilometers, he would just be along for the ride. At one hundred kilometers, the ASC would be above the main haze layer, and most of the atmosphere of Titan and it would be time to switch from jets to the nuclear-thermals. It would take less than five minutes to reach the switch-over point at the skimmer's rate of climb.

Gardner made sure the ANI switched to the nuclear-thermal rocket at the exact moment prescribed in the flight manual. He felt the kick for real this time as the rocket began its burn. The ANI positioned the ASC1 almost vertical.

“ASC1, you are go for trans-Saturn insertion, over.”

“Roge,r flight control, go for trans-Saturn insertion.”

The drop to Saturn would take about three days as the ASC would be under power all the time. 

About the time it took to first reach the Earth's moon.

Gardener wouldn't have much to do until the time came to place the ASC1 into flight position in the upper atmosphere of Saturn. Until then, he would sleep, eat, and monitor the automatic guidance system. As far as entertaining himself, he would have to be satisfied with Maxine's choices. No one, not even Gardener, had thought about changing out the personalized entertainment choices.

Chapter 12

Who would have thought Maxine liked such mushy movies, thought Gardener. After three days of watching Maxine's video library, Gardener was ready for the excitement of orbital insertion at Saturn, even though it would be handled by the ANI. 

He could see the tops of Saturn's cloud layers as the ASC1 pitched over to retrofire the nuclear-thermal rocket. Then he felt the g-forces as the rocket decelerated the ship into a high parking orbit. The ship soon fired another short burn to lower the ASC1 from the parking orbit to the top of Saturn's atmosphere. The ship then pitched back again. The needed adjustment in velocity would now be handled by methane-oxygen retro-rockets because the ship would be “flying” into a denser and denser atmospheric soup and would need to present its streamlined silhouette to the increasing winds.

Once in the denser atmosphere (though denser is a relative term; it was still quite empty) of Saturn Gardener could see the flight surfaces come to life from watching the instrument readings. He could now begin the mining operations. 

Gardener informed flight control that mining operations had begun. He got an affirmative about eight seconds later owing to the round-trip time delay for the radio waves to cover the millions of kilometers between Saturn and Titan.

There wasn't much to do now but monitor the He3 accumulation. Gardener decided to give it an hour before checking. Back after using the zero-gravity shower facility, Gardener checked on the load of He3. He requested the ANI to estimate the time to full load. Four days was the answer. Not a bad time range, but not good either.

Gardener requested from flight control the approval that he take the ASC1 lower to increase the rate of He3 harvesting. Flight approved. Gardener commanded the ASC1 to lower its altitude.

Other ASC flights had flown lower for the same reason, but Gardener knew that there was danger in taking the ship too low. Too low, and the energy required to escape the atmospheric drag would become too great. The ANI on board was programmed to warn Gardener when he was about to breach the limits of operability, but no one had ever reached that limit, so the accuracy of the warning had never been tested.

Deeper in Saturn's atmosphere, the accumulation rate of He3 increased to a level that was acceptable to Gardener. He would be finished mining in two days instead of four. Gardener relayed the information to flight control. A slight buffeting was the only clue that the ship had gone deeper into the atmosphere.

Gardener settled in for his duty as the ship's babysitter; it would handle the routine chores of mining the He3. The ship would call Gardener if it encountered a situation it couldn't handle. Otherwise, Gardener was free to do as he wished until the mining operation was over. Gardener didn't wish to watch any more of Maxine's movies, so he settled for reading and working on a letter to his parents. Gardener informed his parents that he was in orbit around Saturn on a mining mission and everything was going fine. He asked if they had discovered anything about the issue he had written about in his last letter.

It was later that evening when Gardener received a letter in reply from his parents.

Dear Son. Your mother and I were so pleased to hear from you and that your mission is going well. We hope everything goes as planned and that you have a complete success.

Concerning that issue, you asked about. We have discovered something that may be of interest to you. The party you asked about is in a remote way linked to our family. As best we can tell, the party of interest had an ancestor that crossed paths with one of your ancestors a few decades ago. We suggest you look up an incident that occurred around that time with a UN ship called the Amity and your great-grandfather. Pay particular attention to what happened to the Captain of that ship after the incident, and you will know why his descendant, the person you asked us about, might display such an attitude towards you.

Good luck, son, hope to see you soon. - Mom and Dad.

Gardener looked over the letter again. Something involving an incident with Grandpa Martin. What could that be, wondered Gardener. He knew that his grandpa had helped open up the Asteroid Belt for mining, Martin even ended up being the miners' representative on Mars. Well, he had another day and a half to find out and not much else to do.

Because of the communication satellites now in Saturn orbit Gardener could do his research almost uninterrupted.  He found the connection between his family and Lt. Macland's family later in the evening. It seemed that Macland's grandfather on his mother's side and Gardener's grandfather, Martin, had crossed paths on an obscure asteroid.

Macland's ancestor was captain of the UN ship Amity when Gardener's grandpa Martin was just a young graduate of the Mars Academy. Martin had gone to the Asteroid Belt to warn the fledgling miners of the efforts of the UN to interfere with their mining claims. The UN ship had come to claim the Asteroid Belt for commercial interests, but in the guise of humanity in general.

Martin and the miners had opposed the crew of the Amity, and the ship had failed in its mission. The captain of the Amity, Lt. Macland's maternal grandfather, had his career cut short because of the failure. The family lost its influence and wealth soon thereafter. The old captain had always blamed Martin.

So that was the connection. If Lt. Macland had heard these complaints repeatedly as he grew up, perhaps he would hold resentment towards the descendants of Martin wherever he found them. Perhaps that was why Macland was always riding me and making my life difficult. 

Okay, I think I understand what's been going on, but for now, I have a mission to accomplish, and I need to get some rest.

Chapter 13

Gardener woke to alarms. He floated out of his bunk and quickly propelled himself the few feet to the flight deck. At first, it was hard to grasp the many alarms. Every system in the ship seemed to be in crisis. But Gardener took a deep breath and focused on first things.

And the first thing he was concerned with was the ship's flight status. He immediately canceled the audible alarms so he could concentrate. Focusing only on the flight systems, Gardener soon discovered that the skimmer was in perfect trim. Mining operations had suspended automatically, Gardener had no idea why. However, he could see that he had almost a full load of He3.

He next checked life support, navigation, external sensor nets, and other systems. All were in alarm, but none seemed to be outside normal operating parameters. None of the alarms would clear either. Gardener could think of only one way to get control of the situation: a system reboot.

He keyed in the reboot code and waited. The ANI restarted, each system coming online in nominal condition. Finally, the displays cleared, and everything seemed back to normal, except.

Except for the system memory, which showed an absence of data. The memory had been wiped clean. Gardener wasn't sure if it occurred during the reboot or before; he hadn't thought to run the diagnostics with all the distractions from the alarms. But now he set about to systematically run through all the diagnostics in the system.

It was a few minutes before he got the results and felt a first twinge of fear. All the diagnostics showed a loss of mission information. There were no navigational coordinates, no flight history before the reboot, no communications parameters, nothing in the system that could be used to fly the ship. Gardener was surprised that such a complete loss of data could happen. He knew he would need to restore all the systems. That was when he got his second twinge of fear.

The system refused to restore, and when Gardener ran memory diagnostics, it showed that there wasn't any data in the backup memory to restore. 

“Impossible,” Gardener said aloud.

There was no re-initialization then, there was no restoring navigational coordinates, no restoring the flight plan, no communications because the radio was software-based, the ANI would work, but it would not be able to take the ship to Titan without the flight plan, everything would have to be entered manually now. He tried the comm anyway, no response.

No one has ever flown one of these in space without navigational automation. No one has ever even flown one out of the atmosphere of Saturn.

He closed his eyes a moment.

Well, I guess I will have to unless I can restore the data lost.

The flying characteristics of the ASC were solid. The ship would trim itself with input from the ANI or human pilot if needed. As long as it was set up in the proper orientation, it was a dream to fly. Gardener felt good about his chances.

He glanced at the instrument panel. I've got all the flight instruments necessary, he thought. The vertical speed and attitude indicator were the primary readouts needed; they seemed to be working fine. He looked around himself at the rest of the cockpit. He got up and got his helmet, attached the breather, and strapped himself tightly to the pilot's seat, just in case. He took the flight controls.

The ASC1 responded deftly. Gardener set the ship up for a slow climb. It would take some time to reach the upper atmosphere where the nuclear-thermal rocket could fire with full thrust. Then Gardener would be in orbit but essentially lost as to the location of Titan. He would have to figure out how to navigate without the benefit of automation or communications.

The more Gardener thought about it, the more he realized that he had no chance to recreate the trajectory he needed without the computer memory. Even the inertial navigational system memory had been lost. Had it been available, he would have at least have had a chance to recreate the trajectory needed. The inertial system recorded the complete mission trajectory basically by knowing the set-point (Titan) and using gyroscopes and accelerometers to track the subsequent path. The programs necessary for such calculations were still in the non-volatile memory; they just needed the raw data and time to do the calculations.

Just the raw data, that's all I need.

Then it occurred to him. His Annie had all the necessary sensors built in. It had a positioning system that could provide the set-point. It would have been logging the sensor data from the start of the mission, even before. The only question, was it still powered and did it have enough memory to hold all that data?

Gardener unbuckled and pushed off to his bunk. There, he took the Annie from its velcro hold-down and brought up the navigation app. It was still running. He stopped it immediately. He wanted as much of the initial navigation data as possible; he didn't care about the most recent flight data. The original trajectory, especially Titan departure to Saturn orbit insertion, was the important thing. If he had that, he could find his way back to the base.

Chapter 14

Gardener mated his Annie to the ship's ANI system. He downloaded the sensor data, he started the navigation program that would turn the data into a flight trajectory. The program estimated twenty-five minutes until conclusion. Gardener was hungry, he would snack while he waited for the program to finish.

After his snack, he studied the results graphically. The flight path he had been following was clearly shown. The only problem was that the data ran out before Titan was achieved. The Annie had started overwriting the oldest data when memory space was needed. Still, it was good enough to get the ASC1 out of Saturn's atmosphere and onto a trajectory that should bring it close to Titan. Gardener now set the program to reverse the trajectory and provide the orbital parameters he would need to create a flight plan, especially the needed velocity to leave Saturn orbit for a transfer orbit to Titan. A transfer orbit would take longer than a powered rendezvous but it was simpler to calculate and implement.

Once the ANI had finished its calculations, Gardener had about an hour to get to orbital altitude, where he could fire the rocket and enter transfer to Titan. The ANI would conduct the firing sequence, Gardener could relax, maybe for the first time since he noticed the ship alarms.

The interval gave him time to think about how this latest problem fit in with his problems with Lt. Macland. 

The chance that the memory loss occurred randomly is slim to none. Too many backup systems had to fail to let such a thing happen. Could Lt. Macland have engineered such a failure? 

Gardener didn't know; he didn't think Macland had such capability, but he couldn't be sure. 

If I get back... When I get back. I'll have to investigate the connection.

The ANI start-up of the nuclear-thermal rocket went flawlessly. It would take three times longer to get back since a transfer orbit was unpowered. Nine days was a long time, but supplies were adequate if carefully handled, and Gardener knew he should be able to get back to Titan, or at least in its vicinity. Just enough time for a rest and maybe finish watching the rest of Maxine's awful vids. 

Normally, he would have loaded his Annie with his own video library, but he was too busy preparing for the mission. If he had loaded his entertainment, it might have taken the memory the data logger needed, and Gardener would have no way to get home. All of which made Maxine's videos seem better than before.

Nine days later, the last of the vids ended, and the transfer orbit was almost complete when Gardener began visually scanning for Titan. He found it easily and took the needed bearings so that the ANI could fly the ASC to it.

Once in orbit around Titan, finding the base would be a challenge without radio contact. He was wishing he could reboot the radio software and call base when he realized that the radio hardware itself was undamaged. He could switch it on, and it would provide a signal, unmodulated and without intelligence, but a signal that could be tracked by the satellite network orbiting Titan. And that would allow base rescue to find him even if he couldn't find them.

Gardener switched on the radio transmitter and waited. He monitored the ANI insertion of the ASC1 into orbit around Titan. From there, the orbit would be lowered until he would be flying the ASC1 in Titan's atmosphere again.

The switch from rocket to scramjet was made, and Gardener took over the controls from the ANI. He would fly the ASC1 below subsonic speed, where the jet engine could be started up. From there ,he would circle Titan, careful to maintain a minimum altitude above the highest elevations, just in case, until he found the base or base personnel found him.

After a couple of hours and sixteen hundred kilometers, Gardener was feeling very sleepy. He was just about to put the ASC1 under ANI control again when a flash off to his right caught his eye. It was the search beacon of an ASC craft. He flew the ASC1 closer until Gardener could see the pilot's face. With the visor up, Gardener could see the big smile on Maxine's face. Using hand signals she indicated for Gardener to follow her and she banked sharply. Gardener was right behind.

Chapter 15

The debriefing took days. The technicians couldn't explain the memory failure. They called it an unexplained anomaly. Maxine called it sabotage. And Lt. Macland, well, the Lieutenant had requested a transfer of duty and had left on the ship that Gardener was supposed to leave on. He had taken Gardener's seat.

Gardener sat down in the Captain's office for his final interview.

“Gardener,” began the Captain. “I don't have to tell you how impressed everyone is with the way you handled that mission. Your decision-making capability under such stress was remarkable. And the fact that you brought back a full load after facing such adversity has earned you the respect of the corporate board. They have empowered me to offer you whatever you want to stay on with the company. Either here as a pilot or back on Mars as an instructor for our ASC pilot school. Would you consider such an offer?”

“Captain, I have to be honest with you. I think the Corporation has failed in its due diligence to protect the pilots and others in their employ. I believe they did not do an adequate job of vetting certain personnel. And that has exposed us all to great dangers.”

“Now, Gardener, I understand your bitterness in this situation, but I assure you that the Corporation and its employees, and for that matter, the adjunct nature of my service here has all been carefully considered. We both know who you suspect, who you think caused this situation, but I can tell you the flight techs that went over your ship had no other goal than to find out what happened. They have personally expressed their concern that nothing was found, and they have gone out of their way to implement further safety measures to protect the ASC fleet even further. I ask that you not judge the whole organization on what one rogue agent may or may not have done.”

“Okay Captain, I won't, but let me ask you just one thing. What is going to happen with Lt. Macland?”

“Okay Gardener, I am going to tell you something that I'm not supposed to. I do ask that you not repeat what I am about to say.”

Gardener nodded OK.

“Lt. Macland is not going to be formally charged with any wrongdoing. He is going to be allowed to resign his commission voluntarily. If he does not resign his commission, he is going to serve the remainder of his enlistment on a communication relay asteroid in the Asteroid Belt. To say the least, it is a lonely and lowly assignment not usually given to officers.”

“I see,” said Gardener. “Well, without any hard evidence of wrongdoing, I suppose it is the best that the service can do. It is sufficient for me. I haven't any interest in closing the circle of retribution. Is that all, sir?”

“That's all, son,” said Captain Wingham. “Except I urge you to remain with the mission as long as possible. You are uniquely qualified for this assignment.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Outside the Captain's office, Gardener found Maxine waiting.

“Well?” she said. “What are they going to do about that rat Macland?”

“It's over, Maxine,” said Gardener.

“What do you mean it's over. After what he did to you.”

“I mean, it's time to move on.”

“Time to move on, is that it? Well Gardener, I always said you were crazy for expecting the best out of people and situations, and I still say it. But if you're satisfied with the outcome, then so am I. I know you well enough to know that your sense of justice has been satisfied, even if I don't know how. So what now?”

“Well, the corporate board has rewarded me for finishing the mission successfully and offered me whatever I want to stay with the company. I can stay here as lead pilot or I can return to Mars as head of pilot training school.”

“So which is it?” asked Maxine impatiently.

“Well, I always wanted to fly,” said Gardener with a smile.

END.