Diamonds in the Sky (13 page)

“Like I said, we want to get in fast and get out, before it bounces off NEA-238,” Jake said. If he was right and this rock turned out to have mining potential, his tagging it could be just what he needed to break out of the ranks of the junior surveyors. A lot of Earth-approaching asteroids had been nudged by robot boosters together into this Near-Earth cluster, but not many of them had been studied in detail yet. He had a feeling about this one. “Look — haven’t I logged, like two hundred asteroid landings? What are you worried abou — oh crap, what’s that?”

An alarm honked, the spaceboat jerked, and there was suddenly a much-too-bright flare of rocket exhaust in his peripheral vision. Jake glanced at the control board, then outside — and was horrified to see a bright jet of flame shooting sideways out of the boat. Sideways! He slapped the cutoff, checked for signs of fire — there were none — then hastily rechecked his approach speed. He’d been okay before, but not any longer. He’d just lost his main engine. Without that for braking, he was definitely approaching too fast.

“Rrrr, you just shut off our rocket,” Sam said, squirming around behind him. “Why’d you do that?”

“Had to,” Jake said with a gulp, trying not to betray the fear that was rising in his throat. Think fast now! “Looks like we’ve got to use the attitude thrusters for braking.”

“But they’re — isn’t that just for emerg—”

“This is an emergency!” Jake disengaged the computer from the thrusters. He needed them all firing in the same direction to brake. “Okay — almost — hold on now!” The thrusters sputtered, and he felt a push, slowing them. But not nearly enough.

“You aren’t doing this to impress me, are you?” cried Sam.

“No!” He shut up and focused on the asteroid swelling before them. Oh jeez, too fast! Trying not to panic, he kicked in thrust to the right. The asteroid mushroomed before them, and they glanced in with a bone-jarring crack. They bounced in a flat arc, sending a cloud of dust spraying from the surface — and for a moment, he thought they’d skip off entirely. But no … they bounced twice again, before skidding and shuddering to a stop. The dust they’d kicked up arced slowly back down in the feeble gravity.

Jake gasped and slumped in relief. Then he put out a spacesuit-gloved hand to check the readouts on the console — and got a jolt of electricity through his spacesuit glove. “Yow!” He rocked back as sparks shot from the console. “What the—?” He punched the master cutoff — but too late, his console was smoking. It must have been the dust, carrying an electrostatic charge — powerful enough to short out his instruments. “I need to vent! Are you sealed in?” he yelled. As soon as he heard Sam’s yes, he popped the canopy and pushed it open. The cockpit atmosphere puffed out, taking the smoke with it.

“Rrr, I’m okay. Are you okay?” came a muffled voice behind him.

He blinked. “Yeah, I’m all right. Dunno about the boat, though.” He poked tentatively at the console and switched the master back on. Nothing. At all. No power, no comm, no nav, no thrusters. Air in his suit was still flowing, at least. Looking out the cockpit window at the surface of the asteroid, he was grateful that the dust had cushioned their impact. But they needed help — and soon. He keyed his spacesuit comm. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is scout EX-71, can anyone hear me?” He repeated the call half a dozen times. But there was no answer, and he knew perfectly well there wasn’t going to be one. His suit comm didn’t have the range.

Turning his head, he squinted through his helmet visor. Earth was about the size of a tennis ball, white and blue against the black of space. It was about ten days away by direct flight, if they had a ship designed and fueled for such a trip, which they didn’t. He turned his head the other way to pick out the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia. A bit of directional calculation confirmed that their sightline to the mining survey base was presently blocked by the asteroid. Well, it was sixteen hours away under normal thrust, with a working rocket — which they didn’t have, anymore.

And just under two days from here — without any rocket power at all — was asteroid NEA-238, on a collision course. “I wish I’d listened to you,” he muttered to Sam. Sam had wanted him to stick to his filed flight plan, instead of detouring to follow his
instinct
on this new rock.

“Me, too. Am I being a bad dog if I suggest we get out and check for damage?” Sam said, nudging him in the back of the helmet.

Releasing his harness, he floated out onto the step-down ledge. He bounced a little to gauge the gravity — not much — then turned to help Sam with his harness. The smartmutt’s black-and-white face was just visible through the helmet faceplate. When Jake released the buckle, the border collie launched himself up and out of the cockpit, gliding in a graceful arc to the asteroid surface. In his spacesuit with the air and power pack on his back, he looked less like a dog than a small cargo pod with legs. Nonetheless, he managed well in microgravity, and he swung his head around now, assessing the local conditions. He reared up momentarily on his hind legs. “Not much to hold us here. We should move carefully.” He started nosing around the outside of the broken spaceship.

Jake followed.

* * *

It didn’t take long to tally up the bad news. The main rocket had burned through the side of its combustion chamber and was useless. It was a miracle it hadn’t blown up. The thrusters were dead. So there was no way they could fly back to base under their own power. Also, the hard landing had cracked the hull casing under the electronics, and the short caused by the electrically charged dust had indeed taken out all communications, as well as computer and nav.

“Bones,” Sam said, sitting disconsolately by Jake.

“Well,” Jake said, “at least we know the transmitter’s beyond repair, so we won’t waste time with it.”

Sam cocked his head inside the helmet. “Oofff. Are you saying that to reassure me?”

“Not really. Just saying … we need to think of another approach. And we don’t have much time. What — two days? No, eighteen hours.”

“But — rrfffff — people will come looking?” Sam’s encased tail slapped once, hopefully, in the silence.

Jake’s face burned. “When we don’t report in, yeah. But they’ll look in the wrong place. I feel really dumb now, not calling in the course change.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I just wanted to get this first look, without anyone yelling at me, before it was too late. I know it was stupid, but you have no idea how much I want to—”

“Get promoted, so they don’t treat you like a kid. I know.” Sam swung his head around, pointing with his nose at the flank of the survey boat. “What else have we got in there? Anything that can make a signal?”

“Let’s look.” Jake started opening the side compartments. “We need to pull the sled out first. Stand back.” He yanked a couple of levers to free the cradle arms holding the large sample sled, then slid the unit out until the flat sled stuck out from the hull, a foot off the ground, like a wide gangplank. “I wonder if this thing still has power.”

“Thought all the power was dead,” Sam said.

“This is separate. It’s got a small zeep converter, for its levitator.”

“You mean one of those quantum vacuum thingies?”

“Zero point energy. Yeah.” Jake switched the unit on and released it from its cradle. The sled — a flat, rectangular pallet with an opening and some gear in the center — sank until it floated, bobbing slightly, about six inches off the ground. A flat plate on the underside provided the levitation, drawing energy for its repulsive force from the virtual particles that flickered continuously in and out of existence in the apparently empty vacuum of space.

“If that thing can float like that, can’t we use it somehow to get off this rock?” The border collie lifted his elongated faceplate-covered nose, as though to sniff the thing.

“Thing is,” Jake explained, “this is the only thing it’s good for — floating just off the ground. It’s great for that, because it doesn’t need batteries or fuel. But it’s strictly a local effect — close to that levitator plate. As soon it gets more than a few inches off the ground, the effect disappears.”

“So if we tried to ride it—”

“It’d be a really short flight. We can jump higher than this thing can float.” Jake turned the unit off and it settled to the ground.

“Rrmmf. Squirrels and bones.” Sam started to raise his spacesuited leg to the sled, then apparently thought better of it.

“Anyway, we’re wasting time.” Jake stuck his head into the compartment. “There must be something in here we could signal home with.” There wasn’t. He opened the next compartment. “A laser of some kind would be nice, like a torch laser. But I don’t see anything. This prospecting scanner has a laser inside it, but we’d have to tear it apart to get at it. There ought to be some flares or something.”

“Any spare communicators?” the dog asked.

“I wish. You know how in the old days, there used to be redundancy?”

“I wasn’t there.”

“Well, that was the old days. Wait! Here are some flares!” With a rush of hope, he pulled the box out and examined the contents. His heart sank. “For marking landing areas. Probably not bright enough for anyone to see back at base. We can try, though.” He set the box aside and pulled out everything that looked as though it could possibly be useful. “We’d better take stock…”

* * *

The shadows were already long; soon, the sun set and they paused to rest. The inventory was bleak. The little boat was meant for short-range surveys, close to the base-station. Jake had taken them a little further afield than the boat really was equipped for — which would have been all right if the crash landing hadn’t taken out so many of the onboard systems. They not only had to worry about a collision in fifteen hours with asteroid NEA-238, they also had dwindling power. Oxygen and water weren’t immediate worries, but their power was limited mostly to the packs that recharged their suits. The boat’s fuel cell was producing only a trickle, which put the last nail in the coffin of any hope of getting away on the boat.

“We’re going to have to tap whatever power we can get from the sled,” Jake muttered, “and see if we can cannibalize that laser.” The asteroid had a slow rotation rate, and they had some time yet before the base-station would come up over the horizon. At that point they would try to signal with the flares, with a makeshift laser, or with anything else they could manage.

While Jake worked by the light of a small lantern, Sam, with his border-collie can-do spirit, determinedly kept at his job; he was going to keep Jake’s morale up by pummeling him with questions. At first he quizzed Jake on what he was doing, but Jake growled at that, and the dog switched tactics. “So, is that nice girl in Analysis ever going to notice that you like her? She treats me real nice. Wufff.”

Jake looked up from a tangle of wire and glared. “If we get back alive, you can introduce us.” He cursed at the useless hardware in his hands. “Sometimes I think you dogs were more useful before we gave you speech.”

The dog bobbed his head away and looked out at the stars. He coughed as if he’d gotten something stuck in his throat. “Okay, no talk about girls. And you don’t want me to ask what you’re going to do with that wire, even if you do get it hooked up…”

“I’m trying to feed power to the batteries, and hope it keeps us from freezing, and maybe lets us fire up a laser.”

“Oh.” Sam didn’t sound convinced.

“Talk about something else. Distract me.”

“Hoo — hmmm. You want to talk about the elections coming up back home?”

“No!”

“Okay, then.” Sam turned his head, as if searching the dark of space around them for ideas. “All right, I got it. I got it. This thing’s been on my mind ever since I heard about it.”

“Oh yeah, what’s that?”

The dog made a whuffing noise. “Well … it’s about space. You know how space is big? Really, really big?”

“Ya-a-ah.”

“Listen, you asked to be distracted … and there’s something that’s always bothered me. About the universe.”

“The universe!” Jake looked up. “What about the universe?”

The dog sighed. “It’s such a mind-boggling concept, you know? The universe. It’s so huge. We sit here and look out at it, and I can’t even wrap my mind around it.”

“Maybe dogs weren’t meant to think of such lofty things.”

Sam snorted in derision. “Like you understand it so well. I may just be a gene-spliced mutt with a chip in my head, but that doesn’t mean I can’t wonder about the awesome grandeur of space.”

“I—”

“Don’t even start. Like this crazy business about the universe expanding—”

“It is expanding.”

“I know that. And it’s expanding faster all the time. What’s that all about, anyway? Even though gravity’s sucking on the universe, trying to make it crunch back down?”

Jake glanced up again, frowning. “Well, yeah. That’s because there’s a force—”

“I know, I know. I read about it. Dark something. Dark emissary? Dark—”

“Energy. Dark energy,” Jake said.

“No, that’s not it. Wouldn’t make any sense. Dark enigma?”

“No. I mean, yes — it’s an enigma. That’s not what it’s called, though.”

“Dark matter,” the dog guessed.

“Dark matter doesn’t push the universe apart. In fact, dark matter helps hold the galaxies together.”

“Grrrr. I thought that was strings.”

Jake squinted in the dim light at the lengthening line of half-untangled wire in his hand.
I really don’t know what I’m doing
, he thought. Finally he reacted to what the dog had said. “No, string theory’s different.”

“Grrrrrr. Maybe dark superglue holds the galaxies together, then.”

Jake laughed. “Okay, I’ll buy that.”

“So what is it that’s pushing everything apart?”

“I told you. Dark energy.”

“Wullll … what kind of name is that? Isn’t energy supposed to be light? Like glowing stuff? And fire?”

“Yeah, usually. But—”

“Bombs. They make a lot of light. And noise. Ka-boom!” The dog sneezed. “So how can this other energy be dark?”

Jake finally had the wire untangled. He began stretching it from the sled to the battery bay. “I guess that’s the point. They called it dark because nobody can see it. They can’t even measure it directly. It’s too subtle, I guess.” Should he connect this wire straight to the battery?