PROLOGUE
June 2027
Kennedy Space Center, Florida
“Ten, nine, eight,” the OuterTek webcast presenter said over the video feed as Captain Michael DePresti watched the numbers at the bottom of his launch console count down towards T-0.
Everything had been building towards this moment for the last three years.
As the ILIAD mission’s Shrike Heavy rocket government mission integration manager (GMIM), DePresti had worked his ass off to integrate the NASA payload headed to Venus with the rocket that it sat atop, visible at LC-39a outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of the historic control center that had commanded the Apollo and Shuttle missions of years past.
The sun was setting behind them and the Atlantic Ocean, a deep blue expanse to the east, stood as a beautiful backdrop to the most exciting moment in spaceflight: a rocket launch.
His heart pounded at a million beats per second in his chest.
“Seven, six, five.”
DePresti took a deep breath. It had not been an easy journey to get here. Keeping NASA, the Space Force, and OuterTek in line had seemed impossible at times. But they had made it.
“Four, three…”
He snuck a peak at the graph pinned to the top-left monitor at his quad-screen console, a line chart continually updated with live numbers from the rocket.
Just an hour before, he had been alerted by his Aerospace mission assurance lead that a string of sensors on the rocket’s second stage were giving odd readings. The man, an older Ph.D. following along from Space Systems Command’s (SSC) STARS facility in El Segundo, had explained to DePresti that there wasn’t much danger to the rocket—the numbers were all in-family from previous launches.
However, these parts, mostly thermistors and pressure sensors, gave different values than expected from SSC and Aerospace’s rigorous pedigree review before the launch campaign. The sensitive payload needed to remain in certain temperature, pressure, and cleanliness ranges in order to prevent damage. If the sensors weren’t working as planned, the billion-dollar mission’s success was in jeopardy.
There was no reason the numbers would be anything other than expected, especially with a mature launch vehicle like the Shrike Heavy. If the sensor values remained in-family, the launch could proceed as planned. If any of them jumped, the rocket’s flight computer would abort at T-1 second and the launch vehicle would remain on the pad. And he had given the OK to go ahead with the flight.
DePresti swallowed a lump in his throat. He was okay with a recycle and another launch attempt in a few days once all of the consumables had been replenished, but his parents had flown in from Philadelphia to watch the launch from a site just south of LC-39a on Banana River. Their flight back was tomorrow morning, and if the Shrike Heavy remained on the ground, they would miss his launch.
“Two, one, ignition.”
The Shrike Heavy’s twenty-seven main engines ignited their blend of RP-1 and LOx in a carefully planned sequence. The blast from the faraway pad was so brilliant that DePresti had to shield his eyes with his hand. He looked up at the graph showing the second-stage sensors in question. They were still within the system’s limits, but still not what he had expected to see.
“Liftoff.”
The giant rocket—the most powerful in the world—lifted off of the pad on its twenty-first mission.
Hoots, hollers, and cheers went up from around the firing room. “We are off the pad,” the presenter said with a thousand-watt grin.
“Liftoff,” DePresti echoed to himself with a smile of his own.
He high-fived his boss’ boss—Colonel Chad Hawke, seated at the console next to him—and returned to his monitor.
This mission wasn’t over yet.
This was one of the most complicated mission profiles that any rocket could fly. The Shrike Heavy’s second stage would place the Aering-built ILIAD payload, consisting of a relay satellite and landing module containing two humanoid robots and their associated ground support gear, in a temporary transfer orbit, then at just the right moment do an intense burn that would place the stage on a hyperbolic path that would hopefully put them around Venus in just a few months. A lot of things needed to happen for the payload to arrive there safely.
He used his phone to text his girlfriend, an Aering engineer who would be one of the future remote operators of the robots. But she didn’t respond, likely busy with her own part of the mission.
DePresti put his cellphone down and made a landline call to the Aerospace lead, located at a hangar at the neighboring Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The other man should have been in the room with him but had been pushed to an overflow location due to higher-priority VIPs. “Are you watching this?” he asked.
“You bet I am,” the other man said. “It’s one hell of a launch.”
He smiled. “Any concerns?”
“Everything looks okay from here. We’ll continue to monitor that string on stage 2.”
“Thanks,” DePresti said. He ended the call.
The rocket was completely out of view of the windows, so he tracked its progress on the webcast and via a live trajectory feed on his computer. Thankfully, using his four monitors, he could keep track of the sensors he was worried about on one while watching it ascend on another.
Most of the team was still taking it all in. Col Hawke and a few OuterTek executives were in the process of making plans for a post-launch party. Other side conversations popped up around him, but he kept his focus on his console.
Most of their jobs were done. The rocket did all of the work now. They just needed to make sure that it kept doing its job.
A few minutes later, the side cores shut off and separated using small quantities of explosives. They started their trajectory back to a pair of landing sites located at the far south end of the geographic cape.
The center core continued on with the second stage and payload on top of it.
DePresti started cycling through the different video feeds available at his workstation. There was a view of the bottom of the rocket, showing the curvature of the Earth as it ascended. Another one showed the payload inside of its fairing, and yet another displayed the interior second-stage LOx tank, the blue-purple liquid pulsing in a mesmerizing fashion.
He made another call back to the Aerospace lead. Everything was still good, the engineer insisted. No concerns about the payload or launch vehicle. Everything was proceeding as planned.
The Space Force captain let out a sigh of relief, releasing all of the pent-up pressure built up inside of him. All of the hard work that he had put in was finally paying off. The Shrike Heavy was well past max-q, the point of maximum aerodynamic pressure on the launch vehicle and had passed the Karman line into outer space.
The next step was stage separation. The main booster separated from the second stage and began its oath to an autonomous landing barge located out in the middle of the South Atlantic.
A few minutes after that, the ground team prepared to jettison the fairing that encapsulated the payload, the two halves of which would then float down using parachutes to be captured by specially equipped ships downrange near the barge. After that, the payload would be exposed to the cold vacuum of space.
Everything was still going according to plan.
DePresti noticed something odd at about twenty seconds before that event. His mission clock, which had been counting forward from T-0, was now counting backward.
He wiggled his computer mouse to see if his terminal had frozen or locked up. Nope, everything was fine. DePresti’s eyes shot up to the graph showing the sensor data that he and his team were concerned about.
They were all normal except for one, a thermistor string along the raceway. It had been showing normal temperatures but was now displaying readings that were out-of-family.
DePresti quickly switched to the anomaly net. “GMIM here, seeing some weird data,” he said, then let the button go.
As he got a muffled response from one of the OuterTek engineers, a gasp went up from around the room.
Up on the screen, on the left side, the presenter had just announced that the fairings had been jettisoned. However, the live feed from within the encapsulated stack showed a dark fairing still attached to the second stage.
DePresti’s mouth hung open in shock. A million possibilities, all negative, went through his mind. Had the video frozen? They’d had issues on the static fire with helium purges messing with the cameras, perhaps that had happened again.
He deftly hit a few shortcuts on the keyboard to pull up a different video feed.
It wasn’t a video problem. The second stage LOx tank still pulsied in a mesmerizing fashion.
“What the hell,” he said under his breath.
The woman on the screen was just as shocked as he was.
“Cut that feed out,” one of the OuterTek executives yelled.
“Anomaly team to the net,” Col Hawke ordered. “Figure out what the fuck is going on.”
DePresti switched his headset over to the government-only anomaly voice net as the webcast team pulled all the video feeds down, including on his monitor.
“Everything looks normal,” a senior Aerospace engineer told Hawke. “Not sure why the video isn’t matching the sensor feed.”
DePresti watched Hawke look up at the OuterTek launch crew, all of whom had calmed down from the initial shock, then back to his PC. “They’re not worried here.”
“Webcast team is bugged out though,” another Space Force officer, this one physically located at the OuterTek plant in Hawthorne, reported. “They’re running scared around the control room.”
“What about the technical team?” DePresti asked.
“Same as y’all there, troubleshooting, but not worked up too much,” the other officer replied. “The telemetry is good, and there haven’t been any reported explosions picked up by OPIR.”
“My money is on a camera going out,” another Aerospace technical lead chimed in.
After a few minutes of technical discussion, one of the OuterTek engineers walked over to Hawke and DePresti. “We’re going to outbrief in thirty seconds,” she told the two military officers. “They finished their investigation.”
DePresti nodded and switched over to the contractor’s voice channel.
The OuterTek launch director polled his team for their findings shortly after.
Everything was nominal, save for a string of video cameras that had gone out. The ones inside of the tanks had remained operational, as they hadn’t been put through a helium purge. The webcast was supposed to cut the feed when the cameras became unresponsive but instead hung with the last image received.
However, there would be no video for the rest of the launch.
“Just like an NRO launch,” Hawke grumbled, referring to the black-budget intelligence agency that developed, launched, and operated the nation’s spy satellites. They didn’t let either OuterTek or the American Rocket Alliance, the two main launch providers, show video on their webcasts after stage separation for national security purposes.
DePresti, along with everyone else in the firing room, breathed a sigh of relief.
He tried texting his girlfriend again but didn’t get a response.
Half an hour later, the second stage made its first burn into a transfer orbit. An hour and fifteen minutes after that, the second burn was made, putting the rocket stage and payload on a hyperbolic orbit toward the system’s second planet.
Another round of cheers went through the room.
DePresti took an offered champagne flute, engraved with the OuterTek logo, with a smile. He sat back in his chair and took a sip as an OuterTek VP passed out mission patches. A wave of relief washed over him as the telemetry anomaly from earlier and the video feed cutout were the farthest thing from his mind. It had been nothing short of a successful launch.
CHAPTER ONE
November 2027
El Segundo, California
“Come on!” Grace Parkowski screamed as she slammed her fists into the steering wheel of her year-old Toyota Camry.
The traffic on CA-1 was bad, worse than anything she’d seen since moving across the country from her home city of Wilmington, Delaware to the South Bay area almost five years ago.
The twenty-six-year-old aerospace engineer had left the townhouse of Mike DePresti—her boyfriend of just over a year—in Redondo Beach at seven AM, the same time she did every day, to get to her job at the Aering Space Systems facility in El Segundo.
Normally, Parkowski wouldn’t have laid on her car horn in frustration. Her supervisor, Dr. Jacob Pham, was more than accommodating. It was fairly common for people to show up late due to the crazy LA traffic.
But today was not like any other day.
On this Friday morning in the middle of November, Parkowski would virtually step onto the surface of Venus.
She would be the lone operator of one of the two ACHILLES humanoid robots on the ILIAD mission that had launched four months ago from Florida. The robots had landed on Venus just twenty-one days ago and before going through their initialization and characterization phase. They were now ready for the operators – like Parkowski – to control them through a virtual reality interface.
Parkowski’s shift “on the sticks” in the Aering parlance didn’t start until ten o’clock. But she had to run through the script with Dr. Pham before she could start her mission, and even getting herself into the VR gear was time-consuming. She had planned for an arrival time of eight o’clock, but the bumper-to-bumper status of Pacific Coast Highway was getting in her way. In addition, she had stayed up late to watch an NFL game that went well into overtime, waking up a little later than she had planned, and in retrospect the late night might not have been worth it.
Parkowski cursed and checked her makeup in the rearview mirror, then pulled her dirty-blonde ponytail slightly tighter. She had worked on different projects since she had arrived in the Los Angeles area, but none of them were as cool as this one. Parkowski had dedicated the last year of her life to learning every inch of the ACHILLES robot, every piece of software and hardware, and all of the procedures needed to operate it. She had been practicing in the VR gear for a few weeks now, and could probably do it in her sleep, but was anxious to get her first mission underway.
As a fast-riser within the aerospace company, she was angling for a promotion to a supervisory job within the next few years. Being late for her first mission wouldn’t kill her Aering career but it definitely wouldn’t help it either.
She tapped her left foot on the floor, a nervous habit she had learned from her father, and waited for the idling cars in front of her to go forward.
Finally, the old Chevy SUV in front of her moved six feet. Parkowski breathed a sigh and let her foot off the brake.
She took a moment to calm herself down and clear her head, taking in her surroundings. It was a beautiful day in Southern California. The sun shone brightly overhead, and a slight breeze came in from the Pacific.
Parkowski smiled. Just like the weather, everything was going to go well today. The mission was going to be a success, she was going to blow through its objectives and finish strong at its conclusion in the early part of the afternoon. Then, she would either go home and rest or go out to dinner with her boyfriend and his military unit at the nearby Rock & Brews to celebrate a going-away.
Nothing was going to ruin her day.
After what seemed like an eternity the traffic started moving again. As she drove, she looked for the source of the delay but couldn’t find it. It was as if the collective sea of cars on the road had a mind of its own.
Parkowski got off the main road before taking a few back streets through a residential section of El Segundo to the Aering plant. She parked her car in the attached parking garage and made her way into the facility with plenty of time to spare.
“Morning, Bert,” she said to the security guard as she scanned her ID card at the reader at the entrance to her building.
“Good morning ma’am,” the elderly dark-skinned man replied from his desk. “How do you think your Birds are going to do this weekend?”
Parkowski gave a quick laugh, then shook her head. “I’m not sure. I think we’ve got a good chance against the Giants, it’s at home, but my boyfriend is worried. He thinks it’s a trap game.”
“I hope they win,” Bert responded. “My Rams are probably going to be in contention with New York for the seventh and final wild card.”
“Me too,” Parkowski said as she quickly stepped to the large, heavy door that controlled access to her part of the facility. She liked talking with the security team, especially football with Bert, but she was in a rush.
“Have a good weekend.”
“You too, ma’am.”
Parkowski walked down a wide, nondescript hallway with windows at the top of the walls near the ceiling, allowing the sun’s morning rays to fully illuminate the space without the help of artificial light. The building was part of an old Hughes plant that had been bought by Aering when the former company went bankrupt twenty-five years ago. Most of the multi-building facility was devoted to spacecraft design and production, but this particular edifice was home to the ILIAD project and the control of the ACHILLES robots.
She turned the corner and kept walking until she found the women’s locker room. There, she changed from her street clothes into a skintight black turtleneck and leggings. Parkowski thought that they looked like workout clothes, only tighter and made of a strange material that seemed to attract lint and dirt like a magnet.
Parkowski checked herself in the mirror. Her dark brown eyes looked tired, and the light makeup she had put on this morning didn’t do much to hide it. She didn’t feel particularly exhausted, but the bags under her eyes gave it away.
She made a mental note to go to bed earlier tonight regardless of her evening plans. It had been a long week. Hopefully, it didn’t affect her performance on today’s mission.
Shoeless, Parkowski went through an airlock at the far side of the locker room into a semi-clean room.
Originally a spacecraft high bay development area with forty-foot ceilings, it had been repurposed as a command center for the ACHILLES project. The space was sectioned off into multiple segments: a large cube farm for the scientists who were in theory guiding the mission, but in practice just reviewing data after it came in, a smaller one for the engineers working on the hardware and software of the ACHILLES robots, a lab area for the technicians, and a large section in the middle which appeared to be a small metal “stage” raised above the floor that almost looked out of place in the high-tech setting.
Just outside the high bay was a hallway with offices for the senior staff, as well as a pair of controlled rooms with cipher locks: one actively used and owned by NASA, another one, inactive, for a classified program that used to occupy the ACHILLES mission space.
About ten people were in the room, most of whom stood around the one person hooked up to the VR gear up the stage. A large clock hung in one corner like in her high school gym. Above the stage was a 100″ flat-panel monitor that displayed a rocky landscape, obviously the surface of Venus from the sensors of the robots.
It was seven fifty-five AM. She had made it.
Her supervisor and mentor stood underneath the giant television screen that towered over him. He smiled as Parkowski approached. “How are you doing this morning, Grace?” Dr. Jacob Pham asked.
“Just fine, Jake,” Parkowski responded. “How are you doing?”
The older Vietnamese-American man shrugged his shoulders. “Can’t complain. Another day, another dollar.”
“You’re not excited?” she asked.
He shook his head, then thought for a second. “I’m not excited for myself, but I’m definitely excited for you,” he told Parkowski, who at five-foot-eight stood a head taller than him. “I’ve been in and out of the gear and walking on Venus for the better part of two weeks. It’s no longer as new and fascinating as it was the first time I was in.”
Pham paused and took a breath. “It’s just after eight and your shift isn’t until ten,” he told Parkowski. “Let’s get you set up and we’ll walk through your mission before you have to get on the sticks. Does that sound good?”
“Sounds good,” she echoed her boss. “Let’s go.”
Ryan M. Patrick 