Foothold, page 16
part #1 of Foothold Series
We were born a century too late, thought Heidi, both John and I. There was nothing she liked better than putting machines together with her hands, but these days everything was designed by computers and assembled by robots. She thought back to her childhood, and her first memory of what was to become a lifelong fascination. Her father was a civil engineer, supervising construction robots on his workdays. At home though, he had constructed a workshop at the bottom of their garden in Heidelberg for all manner of tinkering.
Heidi from Heidelberg she thought, remembering being teased by her cousins when they visited them in Frankfurt. When she was very little, she was never allowed in Vati’s workshop, which to a little girl who worshipped her father seemed like the end of the world. She knew now that he just wanted to prevent her being hurt by his tools, but at the time she was devastated. But little girls learn quickly how to manipulate their fathers into getting what they wanted, no matter how stern they appear. With a smile she remembered that day that she cried with heartbreaking sobs outside his workshop door after breaking away from Mutti and running after him. With a resigned look to her mother, her father had relented after making her promise not to touch anything. Nodding her head solemnly, she’d been carried inside and perched on the edge of his workbench. Inside, the workshop was like nothing she could have imagined. Painted white, everything was clean and ordered, tools well oiled and gleaming on racks, drawers containing every type of screw and fastener ever invented, or so it seemed. The project for that day was to strip and repair an irrigation pump for their little garden. Fascinated, she watched as her father worked, methodically disassembling the pump and setting each screw and component aside neatly. Order and precision, she learned, was the key to being a good engineer.
From that day forward, she spent as much time as possible with her father in what became “their” workshop. She soon progressed from observer to assistant, and as her father realized that she loved working with her hands just as much as he did, she gained her first project of her very own, a kitset robot doll.
Order, precision, simplicity and elegance. Her father’s words became her philosophy. She went on to study engineering at University, but there was no call for engineers to actually build anything anymore, a source of disappointment in her professional life. But the very thing that made her a professional misfit was her entry to the colonization program - her brilliance and understanding of repairing mechanical devices pushed her to the front of the selection list for the Hope’s crew. Her Vati would be proud, she thought. Was proud, she corrected. He had been there to see her off all those years ago, and she had a final farewell message in her email that had been waiting for 26 years when she woke up in the Tau Ceti system.
She gave the probe an affectionate pat and entered the command on her pad to load it into the launch tube.
“Heidi to Bridge.”
“Bridge here,” Grace responded.
“Probe one is ready for launch.”
“Roger, thanks Heidi.”
Heidi smiled as she watched the probe loading. “Fly now,” she whispered. “I’ll see you again on the surface.”
And I’m going to recycle your alloys when I do, she thought, ever the practical engineer winning over sentiment.
***
“Probe launched,” Grace announced. The screen showed the probe exiting the launch bay attached to the hold and disappearing into the distance. As it diminished to a white dot in the distance there was a bright glow as its maneuvering thrusters ignited to slow it to a lower orbit.
“35 minutes to atmospheric entry,” Grace announced. “We’re going to lose it in a minute.”
As the probe decelerated and dropped to a lower orbit, it sped up relative to the Hope, and would soon pass beyond their communications horizon.
“Time to landing?” David enquired.
“47 minutes,” Grace replied, “give or take. It’s hard to be precise the first time on a new planet.” She grinned – “I can’t believe I’m saying that! We’ll regain signal just after it lands.”
The probe was programmed to land on a plain about 25 kilometers inland from the east coast on the northern part of the eastern continent. In their current orbit, they would pass into communications range within the hour.
As the probe disappeared from view of the Hope, its maneuvering thrusters fired several more times as it lined up for atmospheric entry. The thruster package detached from the nose of the cone-shaped lander once this was achieved, and moments later the bite of the atmosphere was felt against the lander’s heat shield. Soon it was glowing red-hot as it slowed rapidly from orbital velocity to a leisurely 200kph. Control thrusters fired in short bursts as its flight control system continued to aim the lander towards its designated landing site. 5000 meters above land, the landing radar confirmed the landing site and passed control to the final descent controller. High-resolution cameras tracked the descent of the lander and locked onto an exact landing site clear of large rocks or other debris. At 1000 meters the 8 descent thrusters ignited perfectly, and slowed descent to only 100kph, before throttling back to precisely control the final approach. Four landing legs deployed. At only 100 meters above land, the engines throttled up to bring the lander to a complete stop a few centimeters above the ground, and then cut off. The lander touched down gently on its legs and waited a few minutes for the dust to settle before deploying a suite of cameras and test analysis tools from its nose cone, and waited for its masters to make contact.
Time seemed to crawl by while they waited. David was able to imagine any number of reasons why the probe could fail, not the least of which was that its 45-year-old systems hadn’t lasted the distance. Finally, the Hope came into radio range of the probe.
“It’s OK! The probe has landed successfully!” Grace announced as a telemetry link was established. There were cheers from the rest of the crew as they celebrated their success.
The atmosphere in the room was tense as they waited for the preliminary analysis to come in. They were all by now attuned to the idea that this was their new home, and the only thing that could change this would be bad news from the surface.
Grace pulled up the summary report from the initial burst of data that had been received from the surface. As one, they craned forward to read the results.
“Gravity… 0.8124 of earth normal,” Grace read out. “Air pressure – 87kPa…”
“Wow, that’s quite high,” Nigel said.
“The atmosphere is deeper than Earth’s,” Nathalie explained. “The scale height is much deeper. Even though the gravity is lower, the atmosphere is heavy.”
“Besides, it’s a nice day,” Josh added with a grin.
Everyone else smiled in response. It was hard not to be excited about what they were seeing. To back up Josh’s comment, a high-resolution picture of the surface was now scrolling down the screen next to the data report. It showed a sandy grey surface studded with small black stones, against a brilliant blue sky, with some wispy white clouds in the distance.
“Yes,” Grace agreed. “Surface temperature is 26.3 degrees Celsius, so it would be a nice day out.”
“Look at that,” Josh exclaimed, looking at the image with a huge grin on his face. “Does that look familiar to anyone else?”
The picture did look very much like an image from Earth, perhaps near a beach with grey/black sands, the only major difference being the complete absence of any signs of life.
“Hmmm… that sky color – doesn’t it look a little… off?” John asked.
They all looked closer. The sky did indeed seem to have a very slight greenish tinge to it.
“It’s the atmosphere,” Nathalie explained. “It’s deeper, meaning there is more opportunity for scattering, and probably more dust. We’re seeing some longer wavelengths scattered so it’s not quite the same.”
“Huh. I guess we can live with it,” Josh said.
“You have a choice?” Veronika asked dryly.
“No,” he answered, his smile showing that he cared not at all about the prospect of a blue-green sky. “It’s hardly noticeable anyway.”
Grace resumed her narration as the byplay settled again. “Composition… nitrogen, 78.3%. Carbon dioxide, 17.7%. Oxygen, 2.79%. Also, some Neon, Argon, Helium, etc – about 1%. No methane.” She looked up to a circle of happy faces. “It all looks… almost too good to be true. We can’t breathe the atmosphere, but…”
“We can fix that pretty quickly,” Josh finished. “All we need to do is plant trees.”
“And we’ll be able to walk on the surface with lightweight respirators,” Heidi put in. “We can make those easily with the fabs.”
There was an excited buzz in the room as they all broke into discussion about what they could do. David cut into the conversations to get everyone focused back to their immediate tasks.
“OK, OK!” he called. “Does anyone see any reason not to pop the rover?”
No one did.
“Heidi?” Can you send the command please?”
Down on the planet’s surface, the lander received its new instructions and activated the rover, opening the egress hatch as it did. The hatch pivoted down from the side of the lander to make a ramp for the rover. A few minutes later, the lander released the wheel locks anchoring the rover to the lander floor, and the rover edged carefully down the ramp and onto the planet’s surface. There it paused, as though taking in the vista of the alien planet, although in reality running self-checks. Then, a number of instruments were deployed from its sleek black-and-white body, and it settled down to analyze its immediate environment.
***
A week passed, full of busy analysis of the telemetry streaming up from the lander and its rover, as the Hope passed over the probe approximately twice every three hours.
The rover had ranged freely over the area around the landing site under the guidance of its onboard intelligent software, with an occasional hint from the Hope when something interesting caught their eye.
Once again, the crew had gathered to discuss their next steps, in their favored informal meeting place in the galley.
David opened the proceedings.
“Well, we all know what’s been happening over the past week, has anyone got anything to add?”
There had been many impromptu meetings and discussions as the results from the probe analysis had come in, and the rover ordered to examine a wider and wider area.
There were shakes of heads around the table.
“Any signs of life found in the past day?” David asked with a note of hope in his voice.
Nathalie shook her head. “None. But the instruments on the rover are not that good. Once we get to the surface we can start a more comprehensive search.”
David nodded. “OK, then I propose we proceed to landing and settlement. Any objections?”
There was an undercurrent of excitement in the room as no one demurred. They all realized that they had at last come to the critical moment that would decide their futures.
“It’s not like we can go back now,” Josh said.
David drew a breath. Josh had provided him with the opening he had been waiting for.
“There is something else I need to tell you.”
There was a subtle change of mood in the room as the others caught the tone of his voice.
Something wasn’t right.
“You may have noticed that the stream of updates from Earth has tailed off lately. Since we woke up in the Tau Ceti system there has been very little news.”
As the others thought about it, they realized that he was right, they just hadn’t noticed as there had been an enormous backlog of data to work through, plus they had all been busy with their mission.
“In fact, there has been quite a bit more information than you’ve realized, but it has been coming to me only on a private, encrypted channel.”
Now he had their undivided attention. David paused for a moment to gather his thoughts before continuing.
“You’re probably now wondering why I haven’t shared any of this with you. The truth is, the news hasn’t been good, and the view of the mission psych staff was that it would be best to pick the right time. I think that time has now come.” He sighed, his eyebrows slanting up a little. “Earth is not doing well.” He looked sad as he contemplated what he had to say next.
“We all knew that the Earth was undergoing climate changes, but they’ve been worse that any of us expected, worse even than some of the more pessimistic estimates. To put it bluntly, there has been a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions. The Earth is now in serious trouble.”
David reached for the video remote and pulled up an image on the screen. It was a shot taken of a planet from a high orbit. It took a couple of moments for everyone to realize that is was Earth they were looking at, and not some new alien world. The image slowly rotated to reveal the full horror of what had happened to their home world.
“Mein Gott!” Heidi exclaimed involuntarily. The others all had stunned expressions on their faces. The Earth they were looking at was hard to recognize. By the time they had departed, there was rarely any ice at the North Pole but now the familiar white ice cap in the south was also gone, replaced with a scattering of large islands. Coastlines were unfamiliar, blurred versions of the ones they all remembered. The middle of the planet was a scorched tan and brown desert, with a thin line of green at the top of the northern hemisphere and only splashes of green at the bottom of South America and the South Island of New Zealand, and the new islands of Antarctica.
“The middle of the planet – nearly all of it in fact – is now uninhabitable,” David said solemnly. The surviving population has migrated to the northern or southern habitable regions, or gone off world.”
Grace’s mouth was hanging open, her eyebrows raised. She clearly was having a hard time processing the news.
“Surviving population?”
David paused again, and they could see what he had to say was difficult for him.
“The population density of the surviving colonies is very high,” he said finally. “The total population is just under,” he paused again, as if he couldn’t believe what he was about to say, “200 million people.”
Nobody said a thing for a long moment. When they’d left Earth orbit the population had been just over 10 billion people – about 200 million more, in fact. In the space of 70 years, 10 billion people had vanished from the face of the Earth.
“What… how did it happen?” John ventured finally.
David’s expression darkened. “The migration was slow to start with. But the pace of change accelerated, and, well, people are people. When there are too many people for few resources… war happens.” He looked grim. “The wars became worse and worse. Many nations took the opportunities to settle old scores. Escalations became inevitable. Finally, it seems that the remaining nuclear powers decided among themselves that they would cull the heavily populated areas of the planet, apart of course from their own. They also hoped they could bring on a nuclear winter that would buy them time. Most of the Earth – the middle band – is now a radioactive desert.”
Stunned silence was starting to turn to disbelief and denial. “This cannot be so,” Nathalie exclaimed, tears welling in her eyes. “It can’t be this bad, not in only 45 years…” her voice trailed off, and the emotion took away her control. Her chest convulsed with a sudden sob. Nigel reached for her and she buried her head in his chest. “And who remains?”, Nigel asked as he comforted Nathalie. “Who is alive in those green zones?”
“There are only a few nations left now,” David said sadly. “Up north, Russia now occupies what’s left of Scandinavia, absorbing what was left of the native populations, plus northern Greenland. The rest of Europe has squeezed into southern Greenland and Iceland, and have formed a single European nation. The United States annexed Canada and has reformed a government across 14 new states. Argentina… survived, in the south, although they took in many refugees from the northern countries, especially Brazil. They are in the most trouble, with far too many people for their area. Australia and New Zealand have combined to form a new nation in the mountains of New Zealand’s south island. The Chinese annexed Antarctica, and would be suffering like the Argentinians except they only have a small remaining population. All in all, it’s as bad as you could imagine.”
“What about Africa?” Josh asked. David just shook his head.
“There’s one more thing,” he said. They all looked at him, a picture of misery. Grace held his hand tightly. “Earth is now focused on surviving,” he continued. “Two weeks ago, transmissions from Earth stopped. The last information I received was that the deep space network was failing and there was no way it could be repaired.”
He held his chin up and looked at them all bravely. “As Josh said, we can’t go back. We’re on our own now.”
Sol System
June 7, 2096
Carla strode into Edward’s office on board the Inspiration.
“The report from Samantha is ready for your review, Edward.”
Edward nodded. “Bring it up on screen. Let’s review it together.”
Samantha looked tired. Understandable, thought Edward, a rare hint of sympathy coloring his thoughts. A global nuclear war can do that to a person.
Despite the stress of the current situation Samantha maintained a professional appearance and delivery.
“The conditions on Earth remain desperate. There have been no further exchanges of nuclear weapons, although we are sure that some have been withheld. The remaining populations are migrating north and south, as predicted. We do not anticipate that many of those will survive.”
