Here is some flash fiction from the Expansion Era. Technological development across the Solar System brings unique challenges.
Sandy died twenty-three minutes before he called for help. In that moment when we first heard his voice, saw his telemetry, and clenched our jaws, I still hoped I could change the past.
I couldn’t.
“Operations, Cronos Four, I’ve just lost control.” The handful of us sitting around the operations room in the Ephemeris Development Complex orbiting Earth took note in what, realistically, ought to have been incredibly boring. Colonel Sandy Arturo’s task to conduct a fly-by and scout potential locations for future settlement on Enceladus meant so little to so few it surprised me that anyone bothered to visit the operations center floor at all. Everything he and the three other Cronos pilots did, a drone and a computer could do, probably better.
None of that mattered to Ephemeris Engineering’s demonstration team. They built new ships they wanted to show off, and they paid the bills. So, we launched a nearly useless mission to the outer edges of the Solar System with hardly any witnesses. Only Ephemeris personnel and a handful of us from the Joint Committee to Explore the System populated the floor.
I first met Sandy, and started flying with him, for eleven years. I was the only one on the floor who really knew Sandy. Sure, he had been flying the prototype Marlin for a little over two years, and nearly everyone had monitored him through countless exercises and dry-runs, but I actually understood him. We’d flown up to the edge of the atmosphere until our engines gave out, then done it again. We’d lost friends together. We’d gotten drunk together. We’d quit the Air Force and joined Ephemeris together. When his wife left him, he called me in the middle of the night crying and making me promise never to tell a soul (sorry Sandy). When I decided to carry a solid-oak bookshelf down the stairs myself at forty-three years old, he’s the one I called when I was pinned to the floor. It took him an hour to get there, but he did. If I hadn’t ruptured a disc that day I’d be in one of the Cronos ships too. After I got pulled from flight status, I switched from Ephemeris to the JCESso I could keep working with Sandy.
I’m trying to say that, when he announced he’d lost control, I knew I’d never talk to him again. No one else on the floor recognized that his breathlessness, his lack of profanity, his lack of volume, gave more information than any of their gauges.
The gauges, however, went insane. Numbers spun. Alarms chimed. Strobes flashed.
Sandy kept reporting. “It feels like the port thruster assembly ruptured. I think something hit it.”
“Where is he?” I asked, trying to keep my panic, and the bile building in my throat, from spilling out onto the floor.
“Now? Or at transmission?” The navigation monitor needed to clarify. I’d begged Ephemeris to move the head of operations further out, perhaps to the new Ceres Station, to decrease the transmission lag. But they’d complained about the expense. The Cronos missions flew from Ceres. In fact, they flew from a giant Guppy freighter that took them all the way to Saturn. But engineers and executives pushing for this useless mission didn’t want to spend weeks in transit heading out there. So we ran everything from the comfort of Earth orbit. The freighter, Ceres Station, anyone further out tuned to the right frequency, they all learned how this would play out before we did. But they didn’t carry the people to do anything about it.
“At transmission.”
“He’s forty-one-thousand, six-hundred meters above the surface, and descending.”
Crashing, more like it. The numbers on the screen told me how he tumbled, slowly arcing towards the moon’s surface.
“I have no thruster fuel pressure in the port tank.” The numbers confirmed Sandy’s report. He knew that. He comprehended what would happen, but the test-pilot in him kept running through procedures. If it kept his mind of what appeared to be inevitable, it worked.
“What can he do?”
None of the Ephemeris engineers responded. They all stared at the data and muttered to themselves, hypothesizing about causation. I didn’t care about causation.
“What can he do?!” I shouted. I shouldn’t have, but I did.
They all turned and stared at me. “We think he flew through a geyser. The heat sensors…”
“I need you to tell me how he can save his ship.” I didn’t shout when I cut off the engineer. I pronounced each word as distinctly as possible through my clenched teeth.
“I can’t counteract the spin with my starboard thrusters.” Sandy called out.
One of the Ephemeris team stepped forward. “He could reprogram the thruster control system. He’d never counteract the spin completely, but he if he could get the system to stop trying and just point him up, he could at least activate the engine enough to escape his fall.”
“He’s a pilot in a crashing ship. He can’t reprogram the computer.”
A sound, strange to those uninitiated, echoed through the speakers. Sandy vomited. Hopefully not in his helmet so he could still see.
“We could code and force the update from here in a few minutes. It’s pretty simple.”
“So do it.”
In unison, the gauge monitors looked down at the floor. The engineers shifted from side to side on their feet. No one looked at me. No one said anything.
“What’s the problem?”
“Well… at this distance, the transmission takes sixty-three minutes, twenty-four-point-eight seconds. Each way.”
In that moment, my stomach fell completely. My legs, already tingling and shaking with adrenaline, would have given out had I not lowered myself to my comfortable, form-fitting executive chair in the center of the cavernous operations floor.
“At his last calculable trajectory, Colonel Aturo’s descent had forty-one minutes until he reached the surface.”
To their credit, no one stated the obvious. Everyone returned to his or her station, staring at the numbers. Silent.
“It’s outrageously white, C.J.” Sandy talked to me directly. He’d resigned himself. “When it’s not perfectly black. This spinning from blank to white, black to white, is killing my vision.” I remember thinking, good, he didn’t throw up in his helmet after all. That would be a disgusting way to spend your last half-hour.
“Sir?” Someone cautioned. I couldn’t tell who, fortunately for them. “We’re getting the telemetry and black-box feeds. Can we terminate…” My set jaw, my heavy breathing, my fingernails tearing at the armrest, something told them to stop asking to terminate the audio.
Not because of anger at them, but out of respect for my friend, I made everyone listen.