Just an epilogue to come, so far... but that might still leave a few unanswered questions.
To Grasp the Heavens
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Just an epilogue to come, so far... but that might still leave a few unanswered questions.
One installment left, and it will certainly feature a ship, or two...
Sorry to hear this fun story's actually ending, but this's definitely a fitting end!
The Space Age
Captain Vishinder Singh stared out through the porthole at the infinite blackness beyond, as every space-jammer does from time to time. Even after all these years, no-one had entirely solved the problem of sunlight reflecting around the edges of these observation windows, partly drowning out the light of the stars.
His is a unique mission, whose origins go back nearly eighty years to the dawn of the modern era. Every child knows of the change that had officially occurred on January 1st 2000, even though it had actually been backdated from a few years after that.
1997/Z9, always referred to as simply "The Comet", had dumped millions of tons of debris into the atmosphere. The planet had abruptly cooled, and equally importantly, weather patterns changed. He'd seen the pictures of the grey skies, the parched earth and the terrible famine that had followed. When the monsoon failed for the second year running, millions starved; not so much noticeably in public in the great cities, but quietly in the country. Despite desperate last-minute efforts to stockpile and educate, his poverty-ridden, overpopulated, underdeveloped nation hadn’t had the transport links, the farming technology or the organisation to cope with the sudden change in climate, at a time when everyone else around the world faced problems of their own. He had heard what it had been like; his own grandmother had been lucky, in the isolated backwater hamlet where she was born, she was the only baby girl to survive infancy in nearly two years. He didn’t like to think what had happened to the others, but the same story could be told by millions of families from across the chilled or parched subcontinent. It was a tragedy unparalleled in human history, but it turned out to be the making of India. The sheer scale of the horror and death had shocked the entire nation into action, overwhelming any sense of tradition.
The world had been saved by rich nations with access to space, and that lesson was well learned. Subsistence agriculture, tiny villages, spinning wheels and traditional fatalism were cast aside in favour of industry, education and science. The past seventy years had seen growth on a scale never seen before, and part of the reason he was out here was to find the resources needed to continue that expansion, not just on Earth, but also in Mangala, the Indian state on Mars.
Across the rest of the world, after those first few terrible years, there had been a boom too; in fact, there is an entire area of economic theory "Comet Boom", which tries to explain the phenomenal growth rates seen almost everywhere in the decades after the impacts. Fundamentally, there was a massive need for infrastructure and education, which led to wealth creation by (or at least in) the predominantly poorer nations of Earth. Initially, it stimulated demand for goods and services from the undamaged parts of the world, then allowed this "old world" to invest in the next generation of technologies, while the productivity of the less-developed economies skyrocketed. In a macabre irony, all of it was helped by the fact that the human race had abruptly become younger and fitter (and in the first generation, shorter, although the economic effects of that appear to be minimal).
In forty years, the world's economy grew by a factor of ten.
In turn, that had led to problems. Climatologists had initially feared that The Comet’s effect on the atmosphere would tip the world into a new Ice Age, and indeed in the ten years following the impacts, glaciers advanced and sea ice expanded, reflecting more of the sun’s rays out into space and reinforcing the savage winters that swept across the Northern Hemisphere. However, a global greenhouse effect soon began to overwhelm the cooling, as the burning of all types of fuel rose dramatically with the expansion of industry and increasing standards of living. Within twenty years, it was clear that the world would eventually overheat, rather than cool down. Along with other technological solutions, the need to put huge refractors into Earth orbit pushed aerospace capabilities to new heights, giving the space industry the boost it needed at a time when enthusiasm for the pragmatic and noble (but extremely expensive) effort to colonise new worlds was falling. It once again highlighted how space could offer resources and opportunities for all mankind, and embedded the idea of space exploration in the minds of a new generation.
From a purely physical point of view, the geological markers left by the comet’s debris weren't fully mapped until some years after the impacts. That debris is rich in exotic elements, stuff that is much more common in objects from space than in ordinary rocks, as well as the fallout from the crude nuclear weapons that had been used to defend the planet. As the dust settled, it had formed a line, an easily identifiable radiological and chemical trace all over the Earth that now marks a geological as well as an emotional boundary.
On 1st January 2000, the world left the Holocene Epoch, and entered the Astrocene, The Space Age, where man's actions and the resources of space would dominate the future evolution of the Earth.
The Captain’s mind flipped back to the present, as his professional instinct alerts him that it would soon be time for the next phase of their approach towards their destination. A few moments later, a soft chime followed by confirmation from the Navigation Officer indicated that the computer had switched its flight mode to near-field operations, where short-term orbital effects could be all but ignored.
They had been maintaining a positive lock on the target since yesterday, and a few hours ago the ship's Chadwick-Teller drive had been fired up to gently slow her down for the final approach over the last few thousand kilometres. The "Shangri-La" is one of the first ships equipped with these new high output fusion-neutron boosted drives, which burn Tritium, Deuterium and Lithium to heat the propellant directly. Although costly, they are lighter and more efficient than the giant, radiative D-D magnetic engines that power most cargo ships. He knew there were still a few liquid-fuelled hoppers on some of the airless worlds, but no-one had built an old-style fission drive for years. The Shangri-La is only his second command, and he still swells with pride at the day he was named Captain of such a cutting-edge ship. She needed to be that to be able to roam the solar system, and the cost of the latest technology could be repaid with a single rich asteroid claimed for the corporation.
Grabbing small asteroids and comet nuclei to move them closer to practical mining orbits is becoming increasingly common, and occasionally there is the need to shift a potentially dangerous object from its path close to one of mankind’s many inhabited outposts. Since the development of quantum-keyed charges, the so-called “Q-Bomb”, every licenced exploration vessel such as his is legally required to carry nuclear explosives capable of deflecting or destroying such objects, and a call by SpaceWatch to intercept takes precedence over all other activities, even at risk to the ship or its crew.
Despite the wave of relief and celebration in the early days of March 1998, the human race was not quite done with The Comet. Most of it had missed Earth, but these pieces were flung onto a variety of trajectories by the planet’s gravity as they passed close to the surface. Some were catapulted out of the solar system altogether, while others were left on shorter-period orbits, which in time would come back to menace the inner solar system. The last significant fragment, still known as A-3, had been disposed of just eight years earlier. With its position known years in advance, there had been no need for desperate last-minute action, and a specially designed robot probe carrying 240 Megatons of explosives had matched courses and inserted the charges around the body of the fragment. They were then detonated 120 degrees before aphelion, pulverising the fragment and allowing solar radiation to blow the debris safely away. Even though it was on the opposite side of the Sun to Earth, for nearly three months the shining cloud of dust and ice had been one of the most impressive sights ever seen in the sky.
Once, man would have feared these signs from the heavens, perhaps rightly so as it turned out, but A-3 provided a spectacle to be admired and understood. It was not a sign of impending doom, it was a testament to man’s greatness; its presence made the world a safer place.
The ship’s multispectral mapping lidar is designed to characterise the shape, size and composition of asteroids, to help determine whether they are worth the expense of mining. Today however, it is scanning for something immeasurably more precious to mankind, even if technically, it is a load of old junk. They had been in the right position at the right time, and the company had chartered out the ship and crew to find this object and to start the process of bringing it home.
Once the scans come back, the computer almost instantly assembles them into an image laden with composition and contextual data. Even after the first glance, there is no longer any doubt as to what it is, not that there had been much doubt before.
Four hours later, he joins most of the rest of his crew, gazing out of the ship's windows or at the close-up results from the survey 'scopes. It is just possible to perceive motion, and the data confirms that the object is in a slow spin about both Y and Z-axes. That is as predicted; there had been rotating machinery on board that would have imparted torque as it spun down, and the rest of the spin could be put down to gas leaks from ports and valves. After dealing with tumbling asteroids, de-spinning a mere 160-metre long, 100-ton target would be no trouble. The Survey Officer quadruple-checks radiation readings, and they are still well within the expected band. Inside the ship’s shielded hull, they are of no concern, but even after all these years he wouldn't want to linger for too long in an unshielded suit next to those old engines. Not that the Shangri-La’s C-T drive would be much better in that respect.
For some reason, probably due to the impact of a random particle from outside the galaxy, the ship's long-range telescope chose that moment to reset itself. The hardware took just a second to restart before the set of crystal-clear images stabilised once more, showing the curious collection of girders and cylinders that they had come so far to retrieve.
He had seen a very similar shape before, as one of the countless millions who had visited the orbiting museum that had been built around the International Research Ship David Lutterell, the spacecraft that had departed Earth in 2013 on the second manned mission to Mars. As on the first Mars flight, part of the crew had been left on the surface, but this time they had years of supplies and all the equipment they needed to start building a permanent base. The human race has been a multi-planet species ever since. As better ships were built, the Lutterell had been reduced to little more than a cargo tug, but she had still played a part in setting up Port Waters, the first permanent human settlement near the Moon’s South Pole.
However noble these later missions might have been, the Lutterell been built as the USS Washington, the United States Navy’s first space weapons platform, intended to help guarantee the security of the old Western alliance during the turbulent years of the early 21st Century. Despite her military origins, her designers had an eye on the future, and had equipped her to carry out long missions to far-off targets. As the world situation stabilised, she was converted into an exploration vessel, leaving her sisters, the USS Texas and USS Massachusetts, and her “cousin” HMS Warspite to defend the skies of Earth against both human aggression and objects from space.
Washington’s five earlier half-sisters had a short life. Two were cancelled before construction even started. Another was destroyed in orbit by The Comet, while some of the systems fitted to Washington herself had originally been built for a fourth. Two members of the crew of the fifth ship are buried next to their Mars Rover, facing towards the view they chose to be their last. Debate still rages as to whether to preserve the rest of the IMM landing site, and the arguments become both more litigious and sillier every year, as the winds and dust of Mars’ thickening atmosphere erodes and covers what is left. The other four names may be revered, but the memorials to the men themselves could not be more varied. At his own request, the quietly self-effacing Captain Cartwright has nothing more than a small stone in a leafy English village, while across the Atlantic, the elegant needle of the Markham Monument adds a new level of symmetry to his country’s National Mall.
Like most of the rest of human race, the crew of the Shangri-La honour these men as heroes, but the monuments to them are, ultimately, just someone’s idea of how to commemorate history.
What they are looking at now is history.
Almost every life, every thought, every belief, everything that is human flows through that object. It is not just a piece of stone covered in words; she was there, she made the difference. Hull No.1 on Lloyds’ Register of Spacecraft and Satellites is the most valuable, the most important, the most famous ship mankind has ever built.
She is the Victorious, the ship that grasped the heavens, and pushed them safely aside.
I've really enjoyed all the stories in this setting. Others can assess the scientific details far better than I can, for me what matters most is that it's all internally consistent and easy to believe. I think this is in large part due to the quality of the writing - it really is very good, and I hope you do more of it. Excellent work all round!
Well. It’s been 4 years. Congratulations. It’s being remembered now, in 2022. This could be a movie. Well done.