On to the Asteroid Read online

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  CHAPTER 70

  EPILOGUE

  AFTERWORD

  ON TO THE

  ASTEROID

  Travis S. Taylor

  Les Johnson

  On to the Asteroid

  Travis S. Taylor and Les Johnson

  LOOMING DESTRUCTION FROM SPACE!

  It's the beginning of a new golden age of space exploration. Finally, humanity is taking the commercialization of space to the next level—mining asteroids. The new gold rush of the commercial space era has begun.

  Another commercial venture, an attempt to put a hotel on the Moon, is seeking the space tourism gold of the ultra wealthy. And it seems as if the dream of finally sending people to Mars is finally going to happen using a ship propelled by a powerful nuclear rocket.

  But space travel isn’t cut and dry, and there is nothing routine about it. In order to mine an asteroid the goal is to bring it closer to Earth, but orbital mechanics are tricky and close to Earth proves to be far too close for comfort—with looming destruction from space about to become a grim reality. Now astronauts, scientists, engineers, and people in all the burgeoning space businesses must team together to stop the asteroid before it is too late for humanity and the planet it calls home.

  BAEN BOOKS by TRAVIS S. TAYLOR & LES JOHNSON

  Back to the Moon

  On to the Asteroid

  FICTION by TRAVIS S. TAYLOR

  The Tau Ceti Agenda Series

  One Day on Mars

  The Tau Ceti Agenda

  One Good Soldier

  Trail of Evil

  Kill Before Dying (forthcoming)

  Warp Speed Series

  Warp Speed

  The Quantum Connection

  with John Ringo

  Vorpal Blade

  Manxome Foe

  Claws That Catch

  Von Neumann’s War

  BAEN BOOKS NONFICTION by TRAVIS S. TAYLOR

  New American Space Plan

  The Science Behind The Secret

  Alien Invasion: How to Defend Earth (with Bob Boan)

  BAEN BOOKS by LES JOHNSON

  with Ben Bova

  Rescue Mode

  Edited by Les Johnson and Jack McDevitt

  Going Interstellar

  On to the Asteroid

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Travis S. Taylor & Les Johnson

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4767-8152-5

  Cover art by Sam Kennedy

  First printing, August 2016

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Taylor, Travis S., author. | Johnson, Les (Charles Les), author.

  Title: On to the asteroid / Travis S. Taylor & Les Johnson.

  Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016018024 | ISBN 9781476781525 (hardback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / High Tech. | FICTION / Science

  Fiction / Adventure. | FICTION / Science Fiction / General. | GSAFD:

  Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3620.A98 O5 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016018024

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-515-1

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  I would like to dedicate this book to the dinosaurs.

  If they’d have had a space program, they might

  have survived. Hopefully, we’ll learn the lesson

  from their misfortune rather than repeat it.

  —Travis

  The women and men of the

  NASA MSFC Advanced Concepts Office.

  These are the people who can make dreams real.

  —Les

  PROLOGUE

  Summer along Lake Baikal was a glorious time for the boy and his family. The brutal winter was over and the longer days of summer were upon them. The lake was crystal clear and almost completely still, reflecting the light of the sunlike gems set in an expensive ring that might belong to a Czarina. The morning was cool, about fifty degrees, and the boy was outside doing his chores. His father was tending the cattle and his mother was busy weeding the garden they kept behind the modest house in which he and his three siblings lived with their parents.

  Not much happened during the all-too-short summers in Siberia. The snow and ice melted and the darkness that seemed to define their lives for most of the year took a vacation. The skies tended to be clear and blue during the day and filled with the mysterious stars at night. The boy’s father would often tell his children stories about his ancestors, whom he claimed were nobles in exile, as they sat around their cooking fire in the long twilight so typical of northern latitudes. None in the family had received a formal education and they didn’t expect that any of them would ever do so. They were farmers and farmers they would remain.

  The boy had a few friends, and they planned to get together later in the day, after their chores were behind them, to go fishing and perhaps swimming in the lake—as cold as it was, it was far warmer and tempting now than at any other time of the year. He looked forward to these outings with his friends. They were a welcome respite from his work and t
he unpleasant habits of his older sister. Since she turned fourteen, she had become almost unbearable to be around. All she seemed to think and talk about were boys. The boy, himself only ten, promised himself that when he turned fourteen he wouldn’t spend all his time thinking and talking about girls. NEVER.

  He was clearing debris from the previous week’s storm from the outer part of the field, near the lake, when the column of blinding blue light flashed across the sky to the north. It was brighter than the sun, and its light reflected from the surface of the lake was blinding. There was no sound and that, more than the light, disturbed the boy. He dropped the branches he’d gathered and began running toward the house. He could see his sister just outside the house staring dumbfounded into the sky. His father was emerging from the barn and appeared to be looking for the source of the light that had undoubtedly brightened its interior.

  He had just reached his sister, the one about whom he had just been complaining, when the shock wave struck them. Time passed in what seemed like slow motion to the boy. He saw the debris at the front of the blast wave only moments before it reached him, yet it seemed like several minutes. Dirt, debris, and even water were being thrown into the air as what seemed like a wall of air reached them standing just beside their house. He had to cover his eyes to protect them from the dust and dirt in the air. He then heard the sound of the house being battered by the sudden gust of strong wind and saw parts of the roof flying off, along with the window shutters and much of the siding that covered the right side of the house. The sound was as deafening as the light had been blinding. He was terrified.

  Simultaneously with the arrival of the shock wave, the ground trembled like in an earthquake. What the wind had not blown over, the shaking Earth did its best to tumble. The cook stand collapsed onto the fire that had been lit this morning to cook breakfast and much of the fence the boy’s father was building shook out of the postholes and onto the ground.

  After it—whatever “it” was—had passed, the boy and his family were all alive and mostly uninjured. The damage to their property was significant but repairable, and aside from there being some exciting tales exchanged with their neighbors, who had similar experiences, the most lasting effects of the mysterious light and ensuing storm were the stories.

  Only a few hundred miles away it was a completely different story. Resulting from what scientists would later estimate was the equivalent of a ten-megaton nuclear bomb—or one about one thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima but without the nuclear radiation—a meteor or a comet had crossed paths with the Earth, entered the atmosphere and exploded just before impact at an altitude of about five miles. The affected area beneath the blast was over eight hundred square miles, and, fortunately, it was mostly uninhabited. The boy and his family were in one of the closest villages to the impact zone and because they weren’t within it, they survived. Eighty million trees and the animals living among them weren’t so lucky. The damage within the zone where the object exploded was nearly complete.

  The year was 1908, and it was just another day in the life of the solar system.

  CHAPTER 1

  Gesling estimated that he had less than two minutes to live. The status board in front of him was lit up like a Christmas tree, one decorated with all red lights, and if the klaxon didn’t stop sounding soon, he thought he might die before the lander impacted the surface of the Moon in what company parlance would deem “a hard landing.” To Gesling, the best he could hope for now was a just a “hard” landing. Unless he did something soon, he was going to crash.

  Time did seem to slow down, though his life wasn’t passing before his eyes. He wasn’t thinking of his last night with his wife Carolyn, or of his parents and childhood. He was completely focused on saving his own skin and the multi-hundred-million-dollar investment that was the lander he was piloting to the surface of the Moon. There wasn’t much time.

  Just a few minutes before, the situation board was all green and he had initiated the main engine burn that would take him and the lander from lunar orbit to a powered descent and landing on the Moon. This test flight was part of Space Excursions’ latest commercial space venture and one that would set the stage for landing tourists at the world’s first hotel on the surface of the Moon with a year. He and his copilot, Bill Stetson, had rehearsed the mission for months and they thought they’d run through a simulation of just about everything that could possibly go wrong. Everything but whatever-the-hell had just caused the main engine to shut down after beginning the deorbit maneuver. Thanks to the laws derived by Mr. Newton, he and the lander were going to land on the Moon. The only question left at this point was just how hard the landing would be.

  Gesling touched the screen in front of him and called up the latest engineering information about the ship’s systems, frantically trying to isolate the problem and figure out how to recover. The engine had shut down suddenly and that meant that the computer had detected an anomaly that would have resulted in an explosion if it hadn’t been shut down. The system was designed to prevent the worst case. In this situation, it may have avoided the worst case, but the second worst case replacing it was not much better.

  “Paul, listen up. I’m seeing the same data as you and I think I’ve found the problem.” That was the voice Bill Stetson, his copilot for the mission, who was on the module that remained in lunar orbit after Gesling and the lander had separated from it. Stetson was not just Gesling’s colleague, they were also friends. Bill had joined Space Excursions after retiring from NASA and was one of the few people in the world who had already walked on the Moon, albeit in a rescue mission just a few years ago. That had also been one that nearly ended in disaster.

  “I’m all ears, Bill. What have you got? Be quick, I’m in a bad way down here.”

  “You need to restart the main engine and it should be okay. The sensors in the LAD showed that a gas bubble was in the fuel line and they shut the engine down to prevent an explosion. For some reason the backup sensor, which doesn’t show any vapor, didn’t kick in and keep you going. We need to figure out why, but that doesn’t matter now. You need to cycle the engine and restart.”

  Stetson sounded cool and authoritative as he spoke. Gesling made a quick mental note that attributed his calm demeanor to his being an old school NASA astronaut who had faced crises like this before. Gesling felt anything but calm.

  “Cycling the engine now. And you’re sure there’s no vapor in the line?”

  “I give it a fifty-fifty chance. Seems to be a better chance than what you’ve got without the engine on and working.”

  “I’ll take it,” said Gesling as he completed the restart sequence on the liquid methane powered engine that would now either explode and end his life in literal blaze of glory or provide him with a mere hard landing on the lunar surface.

  He held his breath as the restart sequence completed and the red engine status light turned from red to yellow and he felt the harsh bump accompanying the engine’s start. He didn’t die, and he was relieved.

  “Hot damn! Bill, you saved my skin.”

  “All in a day’s work, my friend. Now just make sure nothing else goes wrong in the next few minutes. You’ve got a ship to land.”

  “Roger that,” said Gesling. He looked briefly around the spartan command center of the lander, watching red light after red light wink from red to yellow to green. All except for the one that was monitoring his descent rate. He was still dropping much too fast; the engine hadn’t yet had time to slow him to the speed at which he should be descending from this altitude. There was nothing he could do except wait for the burn to remove as much speed as possible before they touched the surface. In theory, when the landing gear touched the surface, the relative velocity of the lander should be zero. In theory…

  Gesling looked out the window at the starkly grey lunar landscape as he monitored his descent rate out of the corner of his eye on the screen in front of him. He could clearly see, with acuity alm
ost indescribable, the contrast between the lunar craters and surface features against the dark blackness of space. The sunlight reflecting from the lunar regolith was blinding, especially as the dust currently being kicked up from his ship’s engine crossed his line of sight, obscuring the features he was previously admiring. The lunar dust danced with random Brownian motion and vortices and swirls creating a chaotic ballet of flickering sunlight.

  A quick glance at the laser altimeter told him how high above the surface he was and from that how fast he was dropping. It wasn’t a perfect descent but at least the sensor showed that the descent rate of speed and the altitude were close to converging on zero—which would be a good thing as long as that convergence happened above the surface and not below. In other words, he hoped it happened before he smacked into the Moon. But the numbers hadn’t converged yet and that meant that he and the ship would touch the Moon, altitude zero, with a speed greater than zero—hopefully not too much greater than zero. On Earth, and in most casual conversation, this would be called a crash. On Earth, a crash you could walk away from and a bad landing you could still fly away from. A bad crash required an ambulance. Gesling was now hoping for a bad landing, but he’d settle for a crash provided it wasn’t a bad one. There weren’t any ambulances out there at four hundred thousand kilometers from Earth—at least none that could be there anytime soon.