Phase Space (4 page)

But Earth did not exist, nor even, yet, the sun. The garish light of the supernova washed, instead, over the thin tendrils of a gas cloud: cold, inert, stable.

And in any event no human telescope could have detected, rushing before the light storm, a single, delicate, spidery silhouette.

A fleeing craft.

In the confines of
Ehricke
’s airlock Oliver Greenberg put on his gloves and snapped home the connecting rings. Then he lifted his helmet over his head.

The ritual of the suit checklist was oddly comforting. In fact, it was just the old Shuttle EVA routine he’d undergone a half-dozen times, in an orbiter-class airlock just like this.

But the
Ehricke
was no dinged-up old orbiter, and right now he was far from low Earth orbit.

He felt his heart hammer under his suit’s layers.

Mike Weissman, on the hab-module’s upper deck, was monitoring him. ‘EV1, you have a go for depress.’

Greenberg turned the depress switch on the control panel. ‘Valve to zero.’ He heard a distant hiss. ‘Let’s motor.’ He twisted the handle of the outer airlock hatch and pushed.

Oliver Greenberg gazed out into space.

He moved out through the airlock’s round hatchway. There was a handrail and two slide wires that ran the length of the curving hull, and Greenberg tethered himself to them. It was a routine he’d practised a hundred times in the sims at Houston, a dozen times in LEO. There was no reason why now should be any different.

No reason, except that the Earth wasn’t where it should be.

In LEO, the Earth had been a bright floor beneath him all the time, as bright as a tropical sky. But out here, Earth was all of five million kilometres away, reduced to a blue button the size of a dime three or four arms-lengths away, and Greenberg was suspended in a huge three-hundred-sixty-degree planetarium just studded with stars, stars everywhere …

Everywhere, that is, except for one corner of the sky blocked by a vaguely elliptical shadow, sharp-edged, one rim picked out by the sun.

It was Ra-Shalom: Greenberg’s destination.

He was looking along the length of the
Ehricke’s
hab module. It was a tight cylinder, just ten metres long and seven wide, home to four crew for this year-long jaunt. The outer hull was crammed with equipment, sensors and antennae clustered over powder-white and gold insulating blankets. At the back of the hab module he could see the bulging upper domes of the big cryogenic fuel tanks, and when he turned the other way there was the Earth-return module, an Apollo-sized capsule stuck sideways under the canopy of the big aerobrake.

The whole thing was just a collection of cylinders and boxes and canopies, thrown together as if at random, a ropy piece of shit.

But in a vessel such as this, Americans planned to sail to Mars.

Not Oliver Greenberg, though.

One small step time, he thought.

He pulled himself tentatively along the slide wire and made his way to the PMU station, on the starboard side of the hab module. The Personal Manoeuvring Unit was a big backpack shaped like the back and arms of an armchair, with foldout head- and leg-rests on a tubular frame. Greenberg ran a quick check of the PMU’s systems. It was old Shuttle technology, cannibalized from the Manned Manoeuvring Units that had enabled crew to shoot around orbiter cargo bays. But today, it was being put to a use its designers never dreamed of.

He turned around, and backed into the PMU.

‘
Ehricke,
EV1,’ he said. ‘Suit latches closed.’

‘Copy that.’

He pulled the PMU’s arms out around him and closed his gloved hands around the hand-controllers on the end of the arms. He unlatched the folded-up body frame. He rested his neck against the big padded rest, and settled his feet against the narrow footpads at the bottom of the frame, so he was braced. Today’s EVA was just a test reconnaissance, but a full field expedition to Ra could last all of eight hours; the frame would help him keep his muscle movements down, and so reduce resource wastage.

Greenberg released his tethers. A little spring-loaded gadget gave him a shove in the back, gentle as a mother’s encouraging pat, and he floated away from the bulkhead.

… Suddenly he didn’t have hold of anything, and he was
falling.

Oh, shit, he thought.

He had become an independent spacecraft. The spidery frame of the PMU occulted the dusting of stars around him.

He tested out his propulsion systems.

He grasped his right-hand controller, and pushed it left. There was a soft tone in his helmet as the thruster worked; he saw a faint sparkle of exhaust crystals, to his right. In response to the thrust, he tipped a little to the left. He had four big fuel tanks on his back, and twenty-four small reaction control-system nozzles. In fact he had two systems, a heavy-duty hot gas bipropellant system – kerosene and nitric acid – for the big orbital changes he would have to make to reach Ra, and a cold-gas nitrogen thruster for close control at the surface of the rock.

When he started moving, he just kept on going, until he stopped himself with another blip of his thrusters.

Greenberg tipped himself up so he was facing Ra-Shalom, with the
Ehricke
behind him.

‘
Ehricke,
I’m preparing to head for Ra.’

‘We copy, Oliver.’

He fired his kerosene thruster and felt a small, firm shove in the small of his back. Computer graphics started to scroll across the inside of his face plate, updating burn parameters. He was actually changing orbit here, and he would have to go through a full rendezvous procedure to reach Ra. That was what had gotten him this job, in fact. Greenberg had flown several of the missions which docked a Shuttle orbiter with the old Mir, and then with the Space Station. He had even been chief astronaut, for a while.

Then the VentureStar had outdated his piloting skills, and he was grounded, at age fifty.

NASA was full of younger guys now, preparing for the LMP, the Lunar-Mars Programme that was at the heart of NASA’s current strategy, inspired by the evidence the sample-return probes had come up with of life on Mars.

This mission, a year-long jaunt to the near-Earth asteroid Ra-Shalom, was a shakedown test of the technologies that would be needed to get to Mars. Ra provided an intermediate goal, between lunar flights of a few weeks and the full Mars venture that would take years, setting major challenges in terms of life-support loop closure and systems reliability.

But there was also, he was told, good science to be done here.

Not that he gave a shit about that.

He was only here, tinkering with plumbing and goddamn pea plants, because nobody else in the Office had wanted to be distracted from the competition for places on the Mars flights to come.

The angle of the sun was changing, and the slanting light changed Ra from a flat silhouette to a potato-shaped rock in space, fat and solid. Ra’s surface was crumpled, split by ravines, punctured by craters of all sizes. There was one big baby that must have been a kilometre across, its walls spreading around the cramped horizon.

The rock was more than three kilometres long, spinning on its axis once every twenty hours. It was as black as coal dust. Ra-Shalom was a C-type asteroid – carbonaceous, fat with light elements, coated by carbon deposits. It had probably formed at the chilly outer rim of the asteroid belt. Ra was like a folded-over chunk of the Moon, its beat-up surface a record of this little body’s dismal, violent history.

At a computer prompt, he prepared for his final burn. ‘Ready for Terminal Initiation.’

‘Copy that, Oliver.’

One last time the kerosene thrusters fired, fat and full.

‘Okay, EV1,
Ehricke.
Coming up to your hundred-metre limit.’

‘Copy that.’

He came to a dead stop, a hundred metres from the surface of Ra-Shalom. The asteroid’s complex, battered surface was like a wall in front of him. He felt no tug of gravity – Ra’s G was less than a thousandth of Earth’s – it would take him more than two minutes to fall in to the surface from here, compared to a few seconds on Earth.

He was comfortable. The suit was quiet, warm, safe. He could hear the whir of his backpack’s twenty-thousand rpm fan. But he missed the squeaks and pops on the radio which he got used to in LEO as he drifted over UHF stations on the ground.

He blipped his cold-gas thrusters, and drifted forward. This wasn’t like coming in for a landing; it was more like walking towards a cliff face, which bulged gently out at him, its coal-like blackness oppressive. He made out more detail, craters overlaid on craters down to the limit of visibility.

He tweaked his trajectory once more, until he was heading for the centre of a big crater, away from any sharp-edged crater walls or boulder fields. Then he just let himself drift in, at a metre a second. If he used the thrusters any more he risked raising dust clouds that wouldn’t settle. There were four little landing legs at the corners of his frame; they popped out now, little spear-shaped penetrators designed to dig into the surface and hold him there.

The close horizon receded, and the cliff face turned into a wall that cut off half the universe.

He collided softly with Ra-Shalom.

The landing legs, throwing up dust, dug into the regolith with a grind that carried through the PMU structure. The dust hung about him. Greenberg was stuck here, clinging to the wall inside his PMU frame like a mountaineer to a rock face.

He turned on his helmet lamp. Impact glass glimmered.

Unexpectedly, wonder pricked him. Here was the primordial skin of Ra-Shalom, as old as the solar system, just centimetres before his face. He reached out and pushed his gloved hand into the surface, a monkey paw probing.

The surface was thick with regolith: a fine rock flour, littered with glassy agglutinates, asteroid rock shattered by aeons of bombardment. His fingers went in easily enough for a few centimetres – he could feel the stuff crunching under his pressure, as if he was digging into compacted snow – but then he came up against much more densely packed material, tamped down by the endless impacts.

He closed his fist and pulled out his hand. A cloud of dust came with it, gushing into his face like a hail of meteorites. He looked at the material he’d dug out. There were a few bigger grains here, he saw: it was breccia, bits of rock smashed up in multiple impacts, welded back together by impact glass. There was no gravity to speak of; the smallest movement sent the fragments drifting out of his palm.

His glove, pristine white a moment ago, was already caked black with dust. He knew the blackness came from carbon-rich compounds. There were hydrates too: water, locked up in the rock, just drifting around out here. In fact rocks like Ra were the only significant water deposits between Earth and Mars. It might prove possible to use the rock’s resources to close the loops of mass and energy circulating in
Ehricke’s
life support, even on this preliminary jaunt.

Ra could probably even support some kind of colony, off in the future. So it was said.

Greenberg had always preferred to leave the sci-fi stuff to the wackos in the fringe study groups in NASA, and focus on his checklist. Still, it was a nice thought.

He allowed himself a moment to savour this triumph. Maybe he would never get to Mars. But he was, after all, the first human to touch the surface of another world since Apollo 17.

He pushed his hand back into the pit he’d dug, ignoring the fresh dust he raised.

The cloud was scattered, thin and dark, across ten light years. It was gas laced with dust grains – three-quarters hydrogen, the rest helium, some trace elements – visible only to any observers as a shadow against the stars.

When the supernova’s gale of heavy particles washed over it, the cloud’s stability was lost. It began to fall in on itself.

In a ghostly inverse of the inciting supernova explosion, the core of the cloud heated up as material rained in upon it, its rotation speeding up, an increasingly powerful electromagnetic field whipping through the outer debris. The core began to glow, first at infra-red wavelengths, and then in visible light.

It was the first sunlight.