Solar Flare, page 15
“Wouldn't dream of it, Issy. In fact, we'll be wrapping up before last orders. Prepare to come in.”
I switched back to the familiar voice of command. “It'll be fifteen minutes before Issy is on board. What's up, Greg?”
“We have an outage on two-seven-b.” Twenty-seven: a low number, one of the older umbrellas. Now famous, I guess, with a lower case f. “Routing navigational guidance and uploading latest diagnostics. How’s the view up there today?”
“Spectacular.” Another glorious sunrise, the sixth of the day. Below I could make out the northern tip of Australia. I tapped the pinned picture of my three nieces, Claire, Emma, and Grace, sending them my love. “You should visit.”
“I might just do that. Two-seven-b is going a little fast for you, Sally. Going to have to burn some to match.”
I checked the nav. Usually the AI calculates the most efficient path, and for efficient, read “slow.” This was an early bath and a fast intercept. “Any reason for the rush, Greg? Is no-one closer?”
“Actually, yes: Beta Four is in attendance. But they've hit a snag and would appreciate your assistance.”
My stomach fluttered. A snag, in space, had a nasty habit of unraveling. It wasn't being pitched as a rescue mission, but two-shuttle repair jobs were rare, even if Greg was treating this one as nothing more than a courtesy call.
“Roger that. Course laid in. Speak later, Greg.”
* * *
They called us “umbrella men,” even though just under two-thirds of us were women and what we looked after were more like parasols. Strictly, more like the large, flimsy, reflective disks photographers' assistants use to bounce light around.
Down on Earth, the shadows the umbrellas cast are what they were best known for. The momentary dimming of the sun as a dark spot traveled rapidly across its surface, no more intrusive than the passing of a thin cloud and just as brief. Small potatoes compared to the massive re-greening projects. It's trees that are helping to undo damage centuries in the making. And just as the new forests take time to fill their allotted spaces, there's a new umbrella in orbit every three to four days. Another bright oval speeding through the sky after dusk and before dawn. Another umbrella for us to commission, and further down the line, to maintain.
Fleeting shadows weren't the primary purpose of the growing array of solar reflectors. They were just the most obvious.
* * *
Issy stuck her head into the shuttle control cabin as I was pulling diagnostics, trying to work out what we were dealing with. Her face still marked from her helmet, well overdue a sleep session, and post-EVA ravenous, I reluctantly filled her in. Reluctant because, though it'd take the best part of an hour to rendezvous with the stricken umbrella, and there was nothing much to do before then except worry, she wouldn't sleep once she heard the news.
But I couldn't not. I'd checked who was on the other shuttle's roster: Alexei and Lillian. I hadn't worked with either of them, but Issy, who was two years deeper into her seven-year tour than I was, had.
“We're to assist Beta Four with an outage. It seems they're struggling,” I told her.
“Oh.” She pulled a face, wrinkled her nose. “Don't much like the sound of that.”
“Me neither. But we'll be rendezvousing as two-seven-b heads into shadow. I guess that's why command pressed the accelerator, though they don't seem overly concerned.”
“They're not up here.”
I snorted at that, but my Nigerian partner had a point. There weren't many jobs quite as hazardous as umbrella repair. Space was unforgiving. By the time my tour ended and I got to visit the sleek memorial lifting out of the grassy mound outside of ground command, how many new names would have been added? How many would I recognize?
Issy stifled a yawn. “Is it your turn, or mine?”
The two-person crew of a service shuttle alternated EVA duties, someone always at the helm. On USS-A and USS-B, the two Medium Earth Orbit space stations that supported the umbrella project, EVA's were two-person jobs. But we didn't have the astronauts for that. Preparing a new crew took seven years training for a seven-year tour. And few made the grade or lasted the distance.
It wasn't just repairs. Each new umbrella took two shuttle crews and two consecutive six-hour EVAs. While they're being commissioned, the umbrellas are orientated perpendicular to the sun, that way the optics and central turret remain in shade. They're only spun into position—and given the slow, steady rotation so that, like a sunflower, they always face the sun—when they're good to go.
It's possible to rotate them back for major maintenance. But it's not ideal. An umbrella is such a big, flimsy thing, with a wingspan of up to a kilometer, that even a simple maneuver takes a couple of days and consumes expensive tanks of attitude propellant. So, for most repairs and maintenance, work had to happen while an umbrella was in Earth shadow. A timed slot, and not a generous one.
Basically, we were stretched thin, up here looking down.
Issy had just pulled a double-maintenance. I'd been awake for longer, but with less to do, sat safe behind the shuttle controls. Being out there, having to think and rethink the consequences of every action, was always more tiring.
“My turn, I think,” I said.
Issy rewarded me with a weary smile. “Thanks, Sal.”
“Though, and this should make no difference, Alexei Guryanov is on Beta Four.”
“Huh.” She gave a little shrug. “Well, yeah. It does make a difference. But not a big one. He's a typical umbrella man, you know?”
I did know. Some men, especially those from traditional astronaut-producing countries like America and Russia, ended up with a superiority complex. Alexei must have rubbed Issy the wrong way during their stint as partners. And Issy was the best and easiest-going umbrella woman I'd worked with.
“I'll take the helm,” Issy offered. “Why don't you grab a bite before you suit up?”
“Sure, thanks. Want anything?”
“No, I'm fine. These the diagnostics for two-seven?”
“Yup. Knock yourself out.”
* * *
An umbrella is distinctly low tech, which is why they could be fabricated in the lower gravity of the moon, where they didn't need to be folded up (like an umbrella) and lugged out of Earth's gravity on a ginormous rocket while battling the bumpy atmosphere. Without the lunar base, there would be no umbrellas. And without the need for umbrellas, there would be no Lunar Base.
The computers, the laser gyros, the control and communications package—the brains—were the only parts of the umbrella manufactured on Earth. And wouldn't you know, those were the bits most likely to go wrong? This shouldn't be much of a surprise. There's not a lot that can go wrong, or wrong and fixable, with a giant parabolic mirror, the structure 3D printed on a massive scale from lunar regolith, the reflective surface a polymer nano-layer not unlike Saran wrap.
It's the bucket-sized brain that we umbrella men had to fix most often and, when I say fix, I mean swap out. Difficult to do much else in an EVA more than a thousand kilometers above the Earth.
For the older umbrellas, those that were first to launch over a dozen years ago now, we also resupplied the propellant that maintains their altitude, despite the steady push of the sun. That, too, was sourced from the moon, from ancient ice lurking at the back of darkened polar craters or just beneath the lunar soil. Less polluting than getting it from Earth, which was why we were doing all of this in the first place.
So, whenever an umbrella brain started glitching, or even looked like it was about to, we matched its orbit and swapped out the all-in-one electronics for a new set, carting the busted unit for full diagnostics or possible repair aboard one of the two Space Stations.
I make that sound easy, don't I?
* * *
In the cramped space behind the cockpit, where we slept, and exercised, and yes, went to the toilet (a process that proved endlessly fascinating to my nieces), I ate a light snack, just enough to take the edge off.
Issy was staring out of the shuttle window when I rejoined her. We were above the ocean, the blue shrouded in wisps of white. “Any clues?” I asked.
“Turret,” she said, still watching the world go by.
The turret was an umbrella's largest moving part. The concave shades, always pointing at the sun, directed the captured sunlight to the reflectors at the focal point of the shallow parabola. It was the turret optics that tilted and swiveled to send the beam of light to where it was wanted, whether that was in front of the dish, or through the turret to a similar set of computer-controlled reflectors on the reverse side. To switch from one set of optics to the other, the turret had to slide about ten meters. It did this twice every orbit, spending some of the time in forward position in Earth's shadow. Which was a good time to do core maintenance, assuming it could be finished in the thirty-five minutes or so of transit. We could extend that by overriding the turret switch, working in the shade the umbrella provided. Unless what we were fixing was the turret itself. Then things got tricky.
“I'd best apply sunblock,” I quipped, but Issy didn't return my smile.
“It looks like they're working in the turret.” Every maintenance job was different, no matter that the umbrellas were theoretically identical, no matter that the fixable failure modes fell into distinct categories. This one was shaping up to be a real oddity.
While most of our work was done on the backside of an umbrella, where computers and other parts sheltered from the heat of the sun, there wasn't anything in the turret except a slender spire—a long pole, basically—that threaded through it and emerged from the rear, piercing the hole like a sewing machine needle. It was there to make sure the turret was perfectly aligned. There weren't any moving parts in the spire to bother with and barely any electronics, just a magnetic sensor that detected if it was off-true. It was a pretty cramped space for an EVA, no room at all for an MMU—a manned maneuvering unit—and somewhere I'd been only in a simulation.
“Have you spoken to them?” I asked.
“Not yet. I was waiting for you.”
“How long to rendezvous?”
“Thirty minutes out.”
I nodded. It took a good fifteen minutes to suit up, and though that wouldn't stop me listening into the ongoing conversation, I'd be focused on two things and neglecting both. Chat first, covering as much ground as possible, suit up after. “OK, let's call them up and see what's what. And Issy? Patch in command.”
Always good to get another opinion, especially if there was a hot-head in the mix, even if Alexei was at worst only a lukewarm head.
* * *
The key to achieve net-zero, to decarbonizing the world, had turned out to be the energy density of renewables. How much land did you need to turn over to generate enough electricity to support our ever-growing needs? How much land that wasn't already being used for other purposes, like feeding our burgeoning population or regrowing forests?
We'd missed the 2050 deadline we'd set ourselves. But we had made massive progress, and part of that was down to the umbrellas. Though they only deflected one thousandth of one percent of the sun’s light from the surface of the Earth (meaning we'd need a thousand times the number of shades to negate mankind's influence entirely, which would take another twelve thousand years, unless we upped the deployment rate significantly), they were a step forward in the energy density issue.
Their reflective surfaces redirected the sun's rays to collecting stations dotted on the Earth's surface. Solar farms; either banks of thermophotovoltaics, or shallow lakes for photocatalytic electrolysis, or even arrays of mirrors with a steam turbine at their focal point. Different methods used in different countries, all boosted by umbrella light. It was like having a dozen suns in the sky instead of just the one. Umbrellas were in some ways even better than the sun: if the collection site was under cloud, the beams could be directed to one that wasn't. This was why the turret was key. That's where the sunlight was turned into a collimated beam and sent with AI-assisted accuracy down to Earth. The optics had to work perfectly. In the vacuum of space, heat was hard to shed, and even a small smudge or misalignment could result in massive failure, the mirrors warping and a turret quickly burning out.
It wasn't great for us umbrella men either.
* * *
“This is Beta Four, Lillian Wong at the con.” That meant it must be Alexei on the EVA. “Glad to have you here to back us up.”
“Copy that Beta Four. This is Issy Nwaigbo, with Sally Philips preparing for her EVA. Beta Four, ground control; what are we looking at?”
A moment of silence. Then: “I'll patch you through to Alexei for the latest.”
There was a hiss and a click, the distinctive helmet-muffled sound of an astronaut. “Alexei here, EVA on umbrella two-seven-b. We have a seized turret movement, while tackling a minor buckle in the needle, incurred during a full maintenance rotation a month ago. The buckle is pretty much straightened out, but the turret doesn't want to move, sensors indicate it's slipped position. And I can't get any force behind it while trying to get it back into place, not without putting the buckle back in it.”
It was a major problem doing pretty much anything in space: there was nothing to push against. Getting any real weight behind something, when you were weightless, was tricky. Most of the time, you coped as best you could—torque was provided by pistol grip tools, for example, pressure by clamps. But straightening something out that was warped was close to impossible.
“Roger that, Alexei. How long have you been out there?”
“Two orbits. Heading towards four hours.”
That wasn't so bad; EVAs can stretch to six hours or even longer if necessary. But Alexei was no doubt tired and frustrated, working alone and struggling. “We'll be happy to help. Command, what's the recommended course of action?”
“Issy, Sally. This one's a bit tricky. Ideally, we'd rotate the umbrella again for you—”
“But that would take too long?”
“Correct, Sal.” Once things started to go wrong on an umbrella, you had to fix them quick, before the problem got “baked” in. There were a dozen umbrellas which, for a variety of reasons, could no longer provide a tight beam, and had been “de-turreted” as a result. They still did the shading, but it always felt like a failure. I didn't want to add a thirteenth on our watch.
“So, we have a rather unorthodox suggestion, courtesy of Alexei, with the details thrashed out by our engineers. Sally, this will be your call, if it doesn't sound do-able we'll probably end up scratching this umbrella. We want Beta Seven to do a peripheral approach, and for you, Sally, to do an occlusion EVA to the turret and, um, push, while Alexei pulls.”
There was silence as Issy and I stared at each other. It was one of the cardinal rules of umbrella repair: you never approached an umbrella “sunny side up.” Because that was one problem with an umbrella: you couldn't turn it off.
“Command? What are the timings on that occlusion EVA?”
“We calculate ten minutes to get to the turret. That gives you…”
“Fifteen minutes?” I interrupted.
“A little longer, Sally; nineteen minutes, if you start the journey immediately before full occlusion.”
That was hardly any time at all. Any delay and I'd be stuck in front of a very large, very on, sunlamp. It wouldn't exactly be like being an ant under a magnifying glass, as long as I avoided the main beam, but it was more than my spacesuit was rated for and wouldn't be comfortable or, indeed, healthy for long, especially the closer I was to the umbrella center, to the turret.
“Command—” Issy leant towards the comms. “—what if I park the shuttle in an overlap rather than at the peripheral? Say, a hundred meters in? Beta Seven can take the punishment better than Sally can.”
“Uh, OK, let me just confirm…” There was a brief smatter of excited talk before someone hit the mute. Greg came back on a minute later. “Beta Seven, you are confirmed for a fifty-meter overlap. Repeat, no more than fifty meters. That'll give Sally an extra minute and save some MMU propellant. We don't think it should matter though—we think the turret will either budge quickly or not at all—but it's always good to have some slack, so thank you for the suggestion, Issy.”
She gave me a small shrug and I headed to the airlock to suit up. Mostly, you don't rush anything in space. Slow and steady, check and double-check. How many other rules were we, if not breaking, then bending, today?
As we waited for the damaged umbrella to dip into Earth shadow and Issy moved us into position, I thought of my nieces. They'd been so very young when I'd blasted into space. Too young, really, to understand what was going on. But they'd grown up a lot over the last three years, and were always excited to hear from me whenever I got the chance to video-call.
My sister worried about me, she probably kept better track than I did of the astronauts added to the memorial. But I made sure I kept things breezy whenever the nieces were online. It wasn't difficult. The twins were seven, and the older sibling just turned nine. It didn't matter how long it was since I'd last seen them, how long until my next R & R at Lunar Base, their first question would always be: “Have you seen the cat in the moon?”
The tabby cat, Apollo, was far more famous than any of us umbrella men. But then, there was only one of him. That we didn't make a splash on the news was because our jobs had become, if not commonplace, at least not remarkable. Barely anyone down on Earth knew our names or history, just the local newspapers where we grew up, and a few umbrella spotters. Most of them were harmless enthusiasts. A few were cranks with outlandish theories about what we were really doing up here, which were as impossible to disprove as they were to believe.
I made sure my nieces knew how important our work was. And, when people asked why I became an umbrella man, why I risked life and limb chasing shadows across the stars, I showed them that picture of those three nieces of mine, those three glimpses of the future.
* * *
“Two-minute warning, Sally,” Issy said. “We're in position, waiting for occlusion. Oh, and I gave you an extra twenty meters, but don't tell command.”
