Really good pills.
10.
Becca was annoyed with herself. She was about to take a trip that maybe one person in a million got to make, that every techie dreamed of, and she couldn’t stop thinking about heat flow integrals. A symptom, she thought, of her obsessiveness. On the job, it worked to her advantage. At times, though, it got in the way.
Like now. Intellectually, she’d love to get the full launch experience. But the heat problem… it nagged, and nagged, and nagged.
She’d been running herself ragged. The government had tried to make her life as easy as possible. The transfer from Minneapolis to Georgetown had been seamless. Her new condo was a slightly scary demonstration of the government’s ability to read a single individual’s habits and tastes, purely through available databases.
Because it was perfect, right down to the smart door.
The door read her implants, unlocked and opened itself, and closed itself behind her. She could mumble out a shopping list—for anything, from food to clothing—and the door would arrange for it to be delivered, and then would keep an eye on the delivery cart. It was like having a perfect invisible doorman, whom she never had to be nice to or remember on holidays.
The government apparently also got her a housekeeper, although she’d never met that person: the only reason she knew of his/her existence was that when she got home, her clothes had been washed and ironed, and the apartment was spotless. If she dropped a crumb from the always-available crumb cake, and left it on the counter, the crumb would be gone the next time she got home.
The only thing the door, and the government, couldn’t get her was the one thing she most desperately needed: time. There was plenty of money—she’d told Vintner that she needed a better workslate, and six hours later, she got the best one that she’d ever heard of. He just couldn’t get her another three hours in the day, or an extension on the flight deadline.
Planetary alignments defined the launch window. The shortest and fastest trip meant launching in November, only eight months away, or December of the next year. Santeros wanted to go this year, but every engineer involved had told her that was impossible. Doing it in twenty-one months would be hard enough.
What was causing her sleepless nights, and obsession with integrals, was that she wasn’t convinced that twenty-one months was enough time. Pushed by presidential imperative, the DARPA engineers were proposing what at first glance seemed like a harebrained scheme: take the two habitat modules from U.S. Space Station Three, build it a new back end with a nuclear power plant and some heavy-duty electric-ion rockets called VASIMRs, strap on several thousand tons of water to provide oxygen and hydrogen for the VASIMRs, and off they went to Saturn.
Except that they wanted to get this all built in less than two years and they wanted the trip to take less than five months. And that was mildly insane.
No laws of physics were broken, it was simply an impossibly tight deadline and an unreasonably large amount of power. If they’d told her she had three years to get the ship built, and two years to get to Saturn, no sweat.
That’s what she told them.
In turn, they fed her details of the Chinese Mars mission, and just how good the Chinese were at large-scale orbital spaceship construction, and how long they thought they had before the Chinese might find out that something was up at Saturn, and how fast the Chinese might be able to get there once they did.
With an ETA of a little over two years, the DARPA brains were pretty confident they could beat the Chinese. Five years? Might as well not even try.
Rock and a hard place.
The amount of power involved was unreasonable. Not impossible, just unreasonable, comparable to the amount used by the entire Twin Cities.
The reactors themselves weren’t a problem. There were designs dating back to the twentieth century that could generate enough heat in a space not much bigger than her kitchenette. She knew how to get that heat out of the reactor with a pressurized liquid sodium cycle; that was also well-understood tech. Getting the turbines and generators down to a workable size was a bit of a do, but Vintner had people working on that and they claimed they had the matter in hand.
But what came after the turbines?
There are some laws of nature that can’t be ignored: thermal electric power plants generate lots of waste heat. Gigawatts of it have to go somewhere out of the system, and Becca didn’t have the luxury of building some honking big cooling towers to dissipate it. Size and weight were at a premium, and you couldn’t carry along all that cooling water to boil off. The water alone would weigh millions of tons.
So now she was using the super-slate to run simulations for increasingly unlikely and experimental cooling systems and getting more and more frustrated with it. She heard the flight attendant talking about the flight schedule, but paid no attention. What to do with the fucking heat? How do you get it out?
The possibilities were looking thinner and thinner: she almost didn’t notice that she was being spoken to, until the flight attendant touched her arm. “Everything okay, Dr. Johansson? You all set for takeoff? You look uncomfortable. Is the seat adjusting correctly for you?”
“It’s fine. I was running some engineering stuff in my head.”
“Most people don’t do their best thinking under two-plus gees. Maybe you should just relax and enjoy the flight up. You’ll have plenty of time once we make orbit to do work.”
Not really, Becca thought, as the flight attendant moved away.
Time!
The intercom pinged a two-minute warning. The cabin attendant took her station at the front of the cabin, looking back at them. A backward-facing seat, pulling negative gees? That had to hurt, Becca thought. The flight attendant must be tougher than she looked.
The thirty-second warning sounded. Becca took a last look around and saw green lights blink on over every seat in the cabin: smartcams scanned each seat and verified that there were no loose objects lying about and that each passenger was safely positioned and properly strapped in. The last preflight check complete, the computer system unlocked and armed the engines. The pilot started the cradle’s engines and the cabin filled with the throaty two-tone note of turbine whine and exhaust thunder.
Takeoff was a lot like that of any commercial jet. The Galahad accelerated a little harder and lifted off the runway sooner, but then the shuttle reared back and started on a thirty-degree climb as the hybrid engines throttled up. They passed the ten-kilometer altitude mark at better than Mach 1, a minute and a half into the flight. The acceleration picked up, and the monitor over the flight attendant’s head said 2.2 gees of force were pushing Becca back into her chair.
A little more than a minute later, they hit Mach 3 as they slammed through thirty kilometers. The smartfoam that cradled Becca’s head and neck prevented her from turning her head, but the high-res 3-D display in front of her gave her a clearer view than the thick-paned window to her left. Becca thought she could make out the curvature of the hazy powder-blue horizon under a sky that was rapidly transitioning from deep indigo to black.
In even less time, they reached Mach 5 and sixty kilometers. The cradle’s hybrid engines had given up the increasingly futile task of trying to suck in oxygen from an almost nonexistent atmosphere, and were now running in pure rocket mode, gulping down their tanks of liquid oxygen and hydrogen.
Five minutes into the flight, the Galahad reached an altitude of a hundred kilometers and a velocity of 3.5 kilometers per second, running hot in essentially airless space, so the speed of sound no longer meant much. The cradle’s fuel was exhausted, save for that needed to safely return to the Mojave Spaceport, and the pilot hit the disconnect. The cradle dropped away with a thunk, turning for its return to Mojave. Galahad proceeded under its own engine power, steadily gaining altitude and velocity. Becca gratefully noted it was a less grueling procession; she no longer felt like she was trying to bench-press her own weight.