Normally, you’d use chaff against a missile, but I doubted I had anything like that on board. I had six mining drones, which were equipped with small SURGE drives of their own. Well, okay, maybe I could give the missile something else to blow up.
I activated and ejected two of the drones, with orders to ram the missile. As they flew toward my pursuer, I positioned them in a fore/aft configuration. Hopefully the lead drone would take the missile out; but if it missed, the second one would have better targeting information. I didn’t know if I’d have time to launch more drones if the first two failed.
A bright flash of light behind the ship saturated the rear camera. What the hell? That couldn’t be the missile, which was approaching from a different vector.
I waited a few seconds for the cameras to recover, then checked the rear view. The station was an expanding cloud of rapidly cooling debris. Dr. Landers’ voice transmission was still coming, so at least he hadn’t been on the station. The message now included “…quickly as you can. And disable…”
How could the station have blown up? All the missiles were accounted for. Speaking of which, I checked my rear view, where the drones were just coming up on the missile. The missile dodged the first drone, which told me it came with some intelligence. But the act of dodging forced the missile to commit. The second drone struck it at an angle, and the explosion destroyed both devices.
A quick systems check indicated that there had been no damage to Heaven-1 from all the excitement. I made sure everything was still properly stowed, then listened to the rest of Dr. Lander’s message.
“…your radio receiver. There’s a remote detonation device somewhere.”
Well, that’s double-plus ungood. I disabled the radio immediately, and for good measure I retracted the antenna dish. I did a quick long-range SUDDAR scan to look for any other surprises.
The area, which had been cleared for my expected launch, was a beehive of activity. I detected at least half a dozen ships, which my library identified as military. I also detected close to a dozen small signatures, moving at high speed, that were very likely more missiles. Fortunately, they seemed more interested in each other than in me.
So, someone shot a couple of missiles at me, someone else shot at them, someone else shot at the space station, and now we had something that looked very much like a naval engagement. Yeesh. It was time to leave, before I became interesting again.
I lined up my original planned departure vector and set the SURGE drive at a much more reasonable 2 g. That was still more than the mission plan had called for, and I was going to have to adjust for the squandered reactor fuel later.
With a mental sigh of relief, I began my journey to Epsilon Eridani.
Bob – August 17, 2133 – En Route
Epsilon Eridani is 10.52 light-years away from Sol. The specs indicated that the ship could run at 2g indefinitely with no ill effects, which would get me to my target star in a little over eleven years. However, I wanted to make a little side trip first. Saturn wasn’t directly in line with my flight plan, but I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to do a flyby.
Saturn had always been my favorite planet. I had watched every second of Voyager and Cassini video from the Saturn missions, over and over, until I wore the electrons out. Now I was able to go there myself and see it first-hand.
The side trip would take a bit over six days at a constant two-g acceleration, which would give me time to track down any booby traps. I unstowed the roamers and ordered a half-dozen of the smaller ones to trace the circuitry from the radio antennae on in. The most likely scenario would be a tap on the antenna cable that wouldn’t show up on the blueprints.
Sure enough, within a couple of hours, the roamers found some circuitry that didn’t show up on any diagrams. I sent in some of the gnat-sized roamers and tracked down a small explosives package, positioned where it would take out the primary computer system. Me, in other words.
The package had obviously been a rush job, and an improvisation at that. The explodey stuff—I assumed it was C4 or some future equivalent—had been stuck to the bulkhead with duct tape. Yeah, they still make duct tape. And it still holds the universe together.
As I stared through the roamer’s camera at this jury-rigged mess, I kept thinking, Don’t cut the red wire. Don’t cut the red wire. I may not have mentioned it before, but I really hate explosives at the best of times. And this wasn’t the best of times.
Rather than try anything fancy, I had a larger roamer disconnect the whole package as a unit and chuck it out an airlock. The small chance I might find a use for it wasn’t worth the stress of having it on board.
Once the booby-trap was removed, I set up some receiving equipment to record any incoming transmissions and isolated the whole assemblage from the rest of the system. I didn’t want to find out the hard way if there was some kind of trigger in my circuitry as well, but I also didn’t want to miss any transmissions. This way, I could save everything to play back later, once I’d cleaned house.
I was travelling at over 5000 km/s by the time I reached the second-largest planet in the solar system. Saturn was immense, and the rings were at close to maximum inclination. The horizontal bands of cloud circling Saturn’s visible surface weren’t as distinctive as those of Jupiter, but each band was wider than the Earth. From this distance I could see lightning flashes from storms that must have been tens of thousands of miles across. Swirls and eddies at the boundaries were literally big enough to drop the moon into. The shadow of the rings fell across the planet, and I could see that it wasn’t just a flat surface—the shadow dipped and bent as it lay across different levels and layers of cloud. I remembered all the science fiction books I’d read that had whole ecosystems floating around in the different layers, and I wondered if I’d find anything like that in my travels.
I made sure my trajectory would take me near Titan on the way past. The libraries indicated that primitive life had been found on Saturn’s largest moon, and the USE had set up a space station in order to study it. I wanted to see what I could see.
I turned off the drive, locked the long-focal-length telescope onto Titan and aimed the wide-field unit at Saturn. I took as much video as I could manage before my trajectory put me on the other side of the giant planet. Close-ups of the various moons, details of the rings, high-resolution shots of the high cloud formations on Saturn—I tried not to miss anything. JPL would have drooled over the footage.