Kinsella (Kinsella Universe Book 1) (14 page)

He turned to Stephanie.  “Professor, how expensive are the modifications to Benko-Chang turbines to allow them to travel faster than light?”

“Nil, sir.  Slightly higher power consumption, slightly different numbers on magnetic field strengths and vortice spins.”

The new woman sighed.  Stephanie thought there were tears in her eyes.  “I take no pride, no pleasure, in what you’ve asked me to do in the event I was called, Mr. President.  But I will do it.”

“That, Celia, is all I ask of anyone.”

The woman turned to Stephanie Kinsella.  “I don’t suppose you’d like to engage in a small wager?  You guess how much money I have in my wallet and I will kiss some serious bootie in your name until the end of time.  If you miss, I get your slot on
Ad Astra
.”

“Folding bills or change too?” Stephanie asked.

The woman blinked, started to say something, and then swallowed.  “Bills.”

“You are middle-aged woman without a wedding ring.  You are careful, cautious and self-assured.  That means either a fifty or a hundred dollar bill.  Odds are you live in one of the tonier suburbs of DC.  So, there’s a folded hundred dollar bill that you never use, except in emergencies, tucked in between some pictures.  Other than that, you don’t have any cash.”

“Kiss, kiss,” the woman said, laughing.

“Every time you see the President, Miss Bonaventure, I’d like you to remind him what a sterling person I am, not to exceed once a week.”  Stephanie reached for her purse, pulled out her wallet, and extracted a folded hundred dollar bill from between pictures of her mother and father and waved it for all to see.

Everyone laughed.

The President waved at Stephanie.  “I assume that this means you want to change the first mission itinerary.”

“Yes, sir.  Obviously, first we will do a considerable amount of due diligence and research before we put a full crew aboard and head out.  But I’d like to propose Tau Ceti as a destination, after Mars.  It will significantly extend the mission time, from a week to a month, but
Ad Astra
will be provisioned for a year.”

“You understand that my purpose in coming here this weekend was to congratulate you on your progress, and then name the Air Force general who will command the mission, and the Air Force colonel who will command
Ad Astra
?”

“And I told you that I’m a big girl, that you are the man who makes the decisions.  I am not pleased with this one.  So, sir, I have this.”

She delved into her purse and pulled out a thick wad of paper.  She put it face down on the table and slid it towards the President.  He caught it, and only belatedly did his Secret Service agents react.  The President growled at them, and they went back to their places, all of their eyes now on Stephanie.

He read the cover page and lifted an eyebrow.  Then he flipped the first pages over and started in on the executive summary.

The Chief of Staff spoke after five minutes.  “Sir?  We have a schedule and we’re already well behind.”

The President looked up at him without speaking, then turned to Stephanie.  “Well, at least there is one project I’m tolerably sure you don’t want to be co-opted in the tiniest bit for.”

“Roger that,” Stephanie told him.  “Just food for thought.  I want nothing to do with it.  Ever.”

Much later the President turned to John Gilly at the luau in the President’s honor that evening.  “I was surprised not to have roast suckling pig.  Not that Beijing Duck isn’t welcome.”

John Gilly laughed.  “Sir, Professor Kinsella dictated the menu.”

The President looked at him, frowning.

John Gilly kissed his Naval career goodbye.  “Sir, she’s serving you dead duck.”

“Ah!  I don’t suppose one of the legs was broken?”

“A lame dead duck?  I think she takes that as a given.”

“Well, in eight months or so, the new presidential campaign starts in earnest.  The only way that I’m a dead duck now derails
Ad Astra
.  The only way I get to be a lame duck is if I decide not to run, which isn’t going to happen, or a couple of years from now if I win the election.”

“What was the new proposal she gave you, sir?” John asked.

The President smiled thinly.  “It’s well above your pay-grade, John.  Way beyond.  A few minutes ago I was thinking that if I didn’t run, I could leave this to my successor.  Except you don’t get where I am unless you have an ego a mile wide and a mile deep.  I’ll find a way to deal with it.”

“Deal with what, sir?” John asked.

The President smiled and shook his head.

Chapter 7 — Help Is On the Way

Stephanie Kinsella was standing at her white board contemplating a series of equations when Captain John Gilly knocked on her door.  “Professor?”

“Captain Gilly!  What brings you forth from the bowels of the Pentagon?”

She was tolerably sure from his serious mien why he’d come.  Thus she was surprised when he walked across her office and stood at the window, looking out across the highway to the dirty gray sand of the beach, the surf breaking at the water’s edge, and across the blue sea to the ship building a mile out on the ocean.

Ad Astra
, he knew, was finished with acceptance testing.  Several times it had lifted out of the water, hovered for a time and then settled back.  Then they had taken the ship up to high orbit, spent six hours in space and returned.

“If I had a window like this at the Pentagon,” he told her quietly, “I’d never get any work done.  I’d spend my days with my nose pressed against the glass, like a four-year-old.”

“What brings you to Blue Hawaii, Captain?” Stephanie asked, trying to keep her voice light.

She could see him visibly hesitate, and then he turned to face her.

“We have a situation, in Space Service parlance.”

“Someone needs help,” Stephanie translated for him.

“Someone needs help,” the Navy captain confirmed.  He sighed.

“You built six spaceships, albeit simple ones, in four and a half months.  The Space Service hopes to have their first ship online here shortly, in the next two months — the
Ad Astra
.”  He waved out the window. 
Ad Astra
had taken twenty-one months to get this far.

It was, Stephanie thought, nearly enough to make a grown naval officer cry.  The Space Service was still in “the design phase” for other spacecraft.  In spite of her warnings and barbed criticism, the Space Service had inherited every bad habit from not only the Air Force, but NASA as well.

Lockheed flew spacecraft; Boeing did as well.  In addition to those companies, a dozen other American aviation firms, including small ones, flew spacecraft.  There were another thirty or so companies and twice that many governments around the world building spacecraft.  And ships for the Space Service were still in the design stage, nearly two years on.  They did fly ships and missions, but the ships were leased.

The reason so many people needed rescuing was, of course, because not all of those designs were safe.  And what people did, even with the safe designs, was relatively risky.

“What is it this time?” Stephanie asked, trying not to be rude.

“A mixed American and Canadian group put together a habitat.  They built it here on Earth, turbines and all.  They flew it and twenty-nine people to set up their first installation on the Fore Trojan asteroids of Jupiter.  Unlike the party that went to the Aft Trojans, these people actually landed on the surface of one of the asteroids.  Their engineers told them that there was sufficient insulation to keep the installation from conducting heat to the ground.

“They were wrong.  Two days ago, the cold front reached the warning sensors they put in, in case the engineers were wrong.  In theory, they then had another two weeks before the cold would reach the installation.  Plenty of time, they thought, to depart with their fans and rethink.

“Except when they tried to lift, they found the installation was vacuum welded to the asteroid, and further, the physical connections to the sensors have accelerated the cold wave.  They have another two days, tops, before everyone turns into Popsicles.”

He looked at her steadily.

“You know my rules, Captain.  I’ll call in my scientists and engineers and we’ll render an opinion, aye or nay.”

“This is a lot of people, Stephanie.”

“Feel free, Captain, to walk out the front door and hop into a Space Service spacecraft and have a go yourself.”

“Please, you have to say yes,” he implored.

“No,” she said with finality.  “I’ll follow the process.  If the answer there is yes, then we’ll do it.  Otherwise, the ‘No’ stands.”

“Okay.”

Stephanie reached for the phone.  “Howard, please call the emergency team to my office, forthwith.”

In a few minutes, half a dozen young men, two older men, and two women sat ready to take notes.  John Gilly explained the basic situation.

After that, Stephanie steepled her fingers.  “About now, the process calls for you to leave, Captain.  We don’t usually allow outsiders to observe our deliberations.  We don’t want to be second-guessed.  It’s already happened, but we prefer our discussions to be done in private.  However, from the first day you walked into my office, I’ve considered you a friend, a colleague, and above all, not an outsider.  If it is your wish, you may remain.”

“Please, Professor,” he said formally.

Stephanie turned to one of the older men.  “Howard, your quick professional estimate of hazards.”

“We can’t land,” he told her.  “There’s no way to know what would happen.  We’d look like total fools if the rescue ship vacuum welded itself and we had another couple of people to rescue.  I might add that the rescue will require all of those rescued to be in vacuum gear.  The only way to fit that many people into one of our vehicles would be to stack them like cord wood”

The man was nearly sixty, a grizzled, white-haired, crew-cut former NASA manager, who had punched the sky the day Stephanie hired him, yelling, “Free at last!  Free at last!”

“There will be serious life support problems as well, Stephanie.  We have life support connections for a dozen passengers, but for this we’ll need nearly thirty.  They will have to swap early and often, and be very, very careful.  We will have to significantly add to the quantity of cabin oxygen we have available, as well.  Fuel will be a problem.  That far from the sun, kerosene has an annoying habit of turning to jelly when it gets cold and it will get cold.

“The airframe is problematical as well.  We’ve always operated inside Mars’s orbit, up to now.  The spacecraft engineering isn’t adequate to deal with the temperatures they will find beyond Mars.  In theory, we can run heaters and keep everything warm, but if there’s a glitch, well... they won’t be toast.”

“Wanda?” Stephanie asked one of the women.

“We can do the life support modifications quickly, and if we kluge, odds are we can get a second set of connections as well.  Those people aren’t going to be able to move around, and will have to stay in their pressure suits for a couple of days.  I don’t know what kind they have, but odds are, they’ll need a pottie break and a shower, right away, after they return.

“Fuel — I don’t know what we can do about fuel supply.  The orbit is going to be tricky, because it’s the Fore Trojans.  We already know that there is a lot of debris in the area around the Trojans.  The safe approach velocity is going to be continually decreasing as the vehicle approaches the destination.  A few hundred kilometers an hour at the end, and that will be pushing it.”

“What about going faster than light?” Captain Gilly interjected.

Wanda looked at Stephanie who nodded for Wanda to explain.

“Captain, the Earth orbits around the sun with a velocity of 29.8 kilometers per second.  Jupiter, and by definition, the Trojans, only move at 13.1 kilometers per second.  Which means our ships need a delta V of 16.7 kilometers per second, each way.  Plus, we need 11.2 kilometers per second of delta V to get off Earth.

“At the energy levels necessary for a quick transit, there is simply not sufficient fuel for that much delta V.”

Stephanie spoke up.  “John, at three g’s, what we’d need for this, that’s like flying a fighter on afterburner for half an hour.  It goes through fuel like gangbusters and there is a measurable risk that something will break.”

“How did that fellow get to Mars, then?”

Wanda fielded that without asking for permission.  “Sir, Mar’s orbital velocity is 24.1 kilometers per second, only 5.7 kilometers per second different from Earth’s.  The pilot was careful to fly out of the atmosphere, conserving as much fuel as possible and flew for a landing, and flew when he took off.  He arrived home with 18% of his fuel remaining.  We consider 20% the rock bottom acceptable minimum in regular operation.”

She looked Stephanie in the eye.  “Professor, I don’t think if we launched this second we could get there in two days.  Two and a half days, at the very least, and the ship would be pushing it.  And it’ll take us at least a day to prepare the vehicle.”

There were additional comments, but it was clear to John Gilly what the decision was going to be.  Finally, it was back to Stephanie and he looked at her.

“I think it’s pretty clear what the consensus is,” he told Stephanie.

“Do you think so, John?” Stephanie asked gently.

“There’s no way to get there in time and there’s no way to get there safely, period.”

Stephanie waved at her staff.  “These folks are nice, bright people, Captain Gilly.  They are some of the brightest folks on the planet.  They specialize in going outside the box in their thinking.  I, however, go off the reservation.  I haven’t spoken my piece yet.”

There were chuckles.

“I’ve won my bet with NASA, John.  The ISS is a deader anyway; who cares about it?  I don’t need six spaceships, at least not those.

“So, a special knockdown price: think of it as the ultimate blue-light special.  I will sell five of my ships to the Space Service, today or tomorrow by noon, at my cost.  My accountants will work out the price, but I do believe it will come in at a lot less for all five, than what the last design study cost.

“I will not let my people fly this mission, but for a dollar consulting fee, I’ll tell the Space Service how it can be done as safely as is possible.”

Captain Gilly grimaced.  “I’ll need to use the phone.”

He was gone a quarter-hour.  “The President says I can spend up to a hundred million to rescue those people.”

Stephanie grinned at the captain.  “I can’t fool him, can I?  He knows I’d sell him the vehicles as is, and the Space Service would be responsible for the changes.

“Each vehicle has hard points, originally designed to be used for being towed on the ground.  What we will do is launch five of them in tandem.  A ship, call it Rescue Four, will burn sixty percent of its fuel taking the edge off their velocity and when that’s gone, they and another ship will break off from the rest.  Rescue Five uses sixty percent of its fuel to speed them back up, then a fifth to head back to Earth.  It will be relatively slow, but they should be able to brake adequately and at least achieve Earth orbit.

“Both of those ships will arrive home with adequate fuel margins.

“The other ships will, in the meantime, employ the FTL mode and jump close to the destination.  Their velocity should be reasonably safe.

“Out by the Fore Trojans, Rescue Two uses a third of its fuel to approach the asteroid, along with the ships linked to it.  Rescue One detaches, goes down and makes the rescue.  They then return to the other two, link up and use about half of their remaining fuel to accelerate towards Earth.  The last ship, Rescue Three, uses a like amount to get close.  The three vehicles arrive in the vicinity of Earth, and all of them would have acceptable fuel minimums.”

The man, Howard, laughed.  “Off the reservation, indeed!  That’ll work!  And to think, I used to work on multi-stage vehicles every damn day for more than thirty years!  Spoiled in less than two years!”

“Crews will have to come from the Space Service,” Stephanie told John, “and they will have the final say on how they want to use their spacecraft.”

Captain Gilly met her eye.  “I’ll get Space Service volunteers to fly the mission, Professor Kinsella.  The President authorized me, in the event that there was anything that needed to be done, to contract with you to see to it.”

A recognition that if the Space Service had to modify those spaceships, it would take three to four years to launch them, not a day.

“You understand that for that, I’ll not be charging a dollar?  It will be a bit more?”

The Navy captain nodded.

“Just so we’re all clear on this, Captain Gilly.  We’ll do what we can; I make no guarantees.  I’m 90% confident we’ll get a couple of the ships back.  I rate the odds of a successful rescue at vanishingly close to zero.”

He steadily returned her gaze, then spoke once again.  “I have to ask this, do you understand? 
Ad Astra
sits out there, ready to go.  What about it?”

“You mean, aside from the fact that the Space Service hasn’t certified
Ad Astra
except in experimental flight?  Aside from the fact that if something happens to her, the US suddenly has absolutely nothing up its interstellar sleeve for at least six months, and more likely a year?  And those ships would be desperate, marginal vehicles?”

“I was just asking.”

“I realize it will cause consternation to find me agreeing with the Space Service, John, but in this case I do. 
Ad Astra
is too large for this.  It would be significantly more difficult for
Ad Astra
to keep the required separation.  And the downside of an accident doesn’t bear thinking about.”