Torino Nine Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title page

  Copyright page

  In memory

  Torino Nine

  Quotation

  Prologue - Goodbye Seattle

  PART I - Elysium

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Picture: Mission plan

  Chapter Four

  PART II - Interception

  Picture: USSV Mesa

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  PART III - Ulysses

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Picture: USSV Ulysses

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  PART IV - The Kingdom of Shadows

  Picture: Deck plans

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Background Material

  Background Notes

  USAC inventory

  Glossary

  Select bibliography and further reading

  Most massive asteroids

  One year later ...

  Below Mercury

  TORINO NINE

  MARK ANSON

  GF

  Glenn Field Publishing

  First published 2017 by Glenn Field Publishing

  Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk

  Copyright © Mark Anson 2017

  All illustrations by the author.

  Cover illustration: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

  Quotation from ‘And death shall have no dominion’

  © The estate of Dylan Thomas 1933. Used by permission.

  The right of Mark Anson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-9568898-6-7 (Paperback edition)

  ISBN 978-0-9568898-7-4 (Kindle edition)

  First Edition

  www.glennfield.co.uk

  In memory of

  Trevor H. Anson

  1933–2016

  Torino Nine

  Though they go mad they shall be sane,

  Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again

  —Dylan Thomas, ‘And death shall have no dominion’

  PROLOGUE – GOODBYE SEATTLE

  It happened, but not like anyone expected.

  February 20, 2119 had been a typical winter Monday in the city of Seattle, on the western seaboard of the United States – grey, overcast and cold. The inhabitants of the suburbs and outlying towns spent the early hours travelling to work, lamenting the end of the weekend, the traffic, the endless road works, and the grey cloud hanging over the city. Their minds were on what they needed to do when they got to work, or if they were going to be late dropping the kids off at school, or how they were going to afford the work needed on the house.

  Clutching coffees in cardboard containers, the office workers tramped into the downtown office building and shopping malls, and made their way up elevators and along corridors to their places of work. It was an unremarkable day, in an unremarkable life, in a cold, grey city.

  At just before 10:30, workers whose windows faced north looked up; an intense white light – ‘like a flashbulb going off’ as some later described it – flared briefly underneath the lowering grey clouds, and was as quickly extinguished. If anyone wondered what it was, they had only forty seconds to consider this before the blast wave rolled across the city and shattered every window. The concussion wave knocked everyone outside off their feet as glass rained down on the streets, and the hammer blow of the noise – ‘like the biggest damn thunderclap you ever heard in your life’ – left a deafening silence across the city.

  The clouds evaporated in the eerie quiet, and for a minute, the Sun shone through in a stunning blue sky, lending the scene an unearthly calm, punctuated by the sound of thousands of car alarms. At about this time, the Coastguard stations in the port area saw the wave heading towards them. Fifty metres high, greenish-black, and spotted with a foam of wood and rubble from the demolished coastal communities, it hurtled towards the city.

  It took several seconds for the stunned onlookers to realise that they were looking at a gigantic tsunami, heading straight for them. A few emergency calls made it through before the wave hit; but the most common response when the recordings were played back was just the one incredulous word: ‘What?’ repeated by people who couldn’t take in what the yelling voices were telling them.

  It didn’t matter anyway; there was nothing that anyone could have done. On ‘2/20’, as the day became known, virtually all of Seattle was inundated and demolished by the tsunami from an unknown seventy-metre wide space rock whose orbit intersected Earth’s surface in the waters of Puget Sound. It blew apart on impact with an explosive power of twenty megatons of TNT, sending out a colossal wave of water that inundated the area for nearly a thousand square kilometres, and delivering a death toll rivalling that visited on Hiroshima almost two centuries earlier.

  Countless communities were wiped out completely, and the epicentres of engineering and technology in the area suffered such damage that rebuilding took a decade.

  The waters had hardly subsided before the recriminations started. The survey of Near Earth Objects, completed in 2021 and repeated every twenty years since then, had given Earth a clean bill of health for the risk of a collision with any objects greater than a hundred metres across. Ironically, the next survey was being performed when the object hit. It was clear that the United States had been living under a century-old illusion of safety, and a much smaller object, undetected against the sky, had caused massive damage to a major city.

  If evidence had been lacking before, there was no doubt now. The greatest danger to civilised life on the planet was not other humans, but an unexpected encounter with another comparatively small asteroid travelling at stupendous speeds. For a nation that had suffered an ignominious and drawn-out end to their manned space programme, and watched Chinese astronauts be the first to stand on the surface of Mars, it was the last straw. And the United States wasn’t going to wait for a consensus view on the subject before doing something about it.

  As the outgoing President put it in his memoirs some twenty years later: ‘The Asteroid Defense Program nearly beggared us as a nation. We had to build capabilities that had never existed before – manned bases on the Moon and Mars, a deep space interception fleet, refuelling facilities just about everywhere you looked, heavy lift into Earth orbit – the list never ended, and the costs just kept on going up. The European Trade Alliance and a few other nations helped us with our efforts, but most didn’t. And what made it harder to bear was that in nearly every case, saving the United States homeland from an asteroid impact saved the entire world.

  ‘What we never forgot, though, is that if a space object – an asteroid, or heaven forbid a comet – is very close when we detect it, then we might not be able to deflect it entirely, and it may still hit Earth. But as long as it didn’t hit the United States or our partners – well, quite frankly at that time I don’t think any
of us really gave a damn.’

  PART I

  Elysium

  CHAPTER ONE

  Clare Foster raised a gloved hand to her facemask, and shaded her eyes from the glare of the small but brilliant Sun. From out here, standing in the cold Martian air outside the sprawling buildings of Elysium Base, you could see north-west for nearly forty kilometres, down the wide gorge of the Elysium Fossae, and out onto the ochre-stained plains that stretched all the way to the horizon.

  One day, everything that she could see would be underwater, part of a huge sea, and waves would crash against the cliffs below her. The base behind her would be a port at the end of a huge deep-water inlet. Cargo ships would call here, bringing goods and supplies across the Elysian Sea to the deep-water docks, and the hills would echo to the thunder of the orbital shuttles lifting passengers and cargo up into orbit.

  But that time was a hundred years from now, and here in January 2148, Mars was a cold world with a thin atmosphere, leaving its long winter and moving into the spring of its two-year orbit round the Sun.

  Clare glanced behind herself to the northeast, to where the vast bulk of the atmosphere processors towered into the thin air, their higher ramparts touched by white frost. Two of them were operating, their yellowish plumes of fluorinated hydrocarbons vapour streaming up into the sky and trailing off to the south west. The third was under construction, its skeletal framework only part-complete. The processors – and seven others like them, scattered over the surface of Mars – had been running for eighty years now, manufacturing potent greenhouse gases to warm up the Martian atmosphere and release the trapped water and carbon dioxide in the subsurface glaciers. The atmosphere was still unable to support life, but it was now dense enough to go out onto the surface without a pressure suit. All you needed was an oxygen facemask and warm clothing. There were even lakes of turquoise, salt-laden water in some of the deeper gorges during the long Martian summer.

  It would be another century at least before the atmosphere and surface temperatures would show the bigger shifts that were needed for permanent seas and oceans to form from the frozen glaciers, and for oxygen-producing plants to start making the atmosphere breathable. Being able to walk outside under blue skies and feel the sea breeze in your hair was a very long way away, if it could be achieved at all, but Clare knew that she was standing here at the beginning of a whole new world, and that was enough for her.

  She turned back to the view of the plains, letting her eye rove over the huge sweep of land below her. Away in the distance, she could see the sandy blur of a dust storm, swirling against the ochre sky. This time of year, the Martian spring, was the worst time for storms. They built up quickly over the great plains, driven by the Coriolis winds in the thickening atmosphere. Occasionally there was a big one, severe enough to disrupt outside operations, and the base had to close down temporarily while the abrasive dust sleeted past outside.

  This spring was also one of the transit windows from Venus, when the two planets were in the right positions in their orbits for deep space voyages, which was why Clare was waiting here. For the next two weeks or so, Elysium Base would become one of the busiest ports in the Solar System. The deep space tugs would start to appear in the skies over Mars after their long voyage from the cloud-covered planet, and start moving their passengers and cargo down to the surface. There were no direct transit windows from Earth until February next year, and some of the passengers would have left home sixteen months ago in order to reach here, stopping off en route on one of the giant airborne carriers that circled over Venus.

  Clare had been a pilot based on board one of those carriers – the USSV Langley – six years ago, on her first assignment from training. Now, she was a captain in the elite Second Asteroid Interceptor Squadron, based here on Mars. Sent here six years ago, she had survived the intensive, eighteen-month training course that weeded out over half of the candidates. After a year back on Earth with the Home Squadron, she had returned to Mars last year as a captain in the United States Astronautics Corps, and her own command, the 13,000-tonne deep space interceptor USSV Mesa. It was somewhere up above her, high in Martian orbit, being refuelled and rearmed for its upcoming mission. Tomorrow, she was going to take it out of orbit, out into the wastes of space beyond Mars, to where the asteroids prowled in the dark.

  And her mission, her job, was to move asteroids out of unsafe orbits, paths that could take them too close to Earth, the Moon, Mars, or any of the inhabited bases in the Inner Solar System. By detonating nuclear charges at carefully-chosen sites on the asteroids surface, or sometimes by physically pushing on them by brute force, she would deflect them from their natural orbits. And if they couldn’t be moved, then she had enough nuclear firepower at her command to blast them to kingdom come.

  A small group of onlookers had joined her outside the western airlock, gazing up into the south-western sky. The space tug Wichita had arrived in orbit some hours ago, and they were waiting to see the spaceplane bring the passengers in. Clare glanced at her watch – it was 16:00, so there were only a few minutes to go before the scheduled arrival.

  Clare could visualise the scene now aboard the spaceplane as it plummeted through the atmosphere, its skin turning a dull red as it braked its immense speed through friction with the air. She had piloted a spaceplane down through an atmosphere herself on more than one occasion, although never here on Mars. It was uneventful, apparently; unlike the thick, choppy atmospheres of Earth or Venus, there was little to disrupt a smooth descent.

  One of the onlookers gestured skywards. Clare’s eyes searched the sky, and then she saw what they were pointing at – a thin trail of smoke lit by the Sun, like a streak of high cloud. Clare knew to look ahead and forward of the re-entry track, until she found the tiny arrowhead-shape of the incoming spaceplane, moving against the sky. It was coming towards the base in a steep gliding descent, eating up the distance with every passing second.

  Clare’s hands moved slightly as she watched, imagining the view from the flight deck, her hands on the controls, remembering the landing drill. The spaceplane’s landing lights flicked on, three small stars in the sky. It was coming in fast now, and she could see the landing gear extending and locking in place, ready for touchdown.

  A winged vehicle like the spaceplane couldn’t generate enough lift from the thin air once it had slowed its descent to landing speeds; it needed additional thrust to keep it aloft. Clare saw the puffs of smoke as the ship’s three sets of landing thrusters ignited, and it settled out onto its course, moving slower now that it was being supported on its engines.

  It banked towards them, turning onto on its final approach to the landing pad. She could hear the high-pitched crackle of its engines, getting louder as it approached the base, and then it rose to a tremendous roar as it passed slowly overhead. She looked up at the dull glow from the red-hot engine nozzles, and the discoloured and soot-marked belly from its many re-entries.

  The spaceplane slowed to a halt, hovering in the air over the base landing pad. It hung there for a moment, the pilot moving it slightly to line up with the touchdown marks, and then lowered itself gradually onto the blackened concrete. A cloud of dust swirled across the landing field, picking out the beams from the spaceplane’s landing lights, as it settled down onto its landing gear. The noise of the engines died away, and it was down.

  With the landing over, the group began to disperse, heading back towards the airlock, but Clare remained for a while, watching through the chain link fence that surrounded the landing field. Dust continued to swirl round the spaceplane as it sat crouched on the pad, its engines still running. With a jerk, it released its brakes and rolled forwards, taxying along the concrete taxiway towards the main base and the docking gates.

  The landing pads were set well away from the base building in case of any landing accident, and it took a couple of minutes for the spaceplane to cover the distance and reach its assigned gate. It slowed as it drew up to the loading bridge, following th
e coloured light signals that guided the crew into the correct spot, and crept forward to a halt. The brakes went on, and finally the thin roar of the engines died away as they were shut down, and the drifting sheets of red dust settled to the ground.

  A small convoy of vehicles moved out from the shelter of the base buildings and approached the spaceplane, and a team of ramp handlers began hooking up hoses and power cables to the ship’s underside. The loading bridge came to life, and started to move towards the spaceplane’s main cabin hatch. Once it had been attached and pressurised, the passengers could disembark, although it would take some time for them to get through Martian immigration and pick up their luggage from the hold. While all this was going on, the spaceplane would be checked and refuelled, and a new flight crew would come on board and start preparing it for its return journey, back up to orbit and the waiting space tugs.

  The scene was reminiscent of that at any busy airport on Earth, except that all the ramp handlers were wearing facemasks, and the strange, otherworldly quality of the lighting.

  The sky, Clare thought, glancing upwards. If there’s one thing that defines this place, it’s got to be the sky. Right now, late afternoon, it was a bright orange-red, but the colour varied from rose to scarlet, depending on the time of day and the amount of dust in the air, and the light gave a strange and alien cast to the scene.

  Clare glanced at her watch again, and checked her air gauge. She had nearly thirty minutes of air remaining, but it was time to go back inside and meet the arriving passengers. She turned away from the scene and started walking back to the open airlock door, and the untidy jumble of low buildings that marked the base. A land ranger trundled past in the distance, its tyres kicking up plumes of dust against the sky.