La Double Inconstance (2030–31) — Episode 9
17: Approach Phase: (Sylvia-X; Flaminia)
One way light delay is now eleven minutes; we are effectively on our own. Tania and I have settled into our little routines and rarely surprise or bother each other anymore. Our tastes in almost everything are very different. But now tension is amping up a bit. It’s getting more real. The operational part of the mission will commence in twenty days: the Adversary permitting.
My Sylvia here is getting concerned too. She was always technophobic - had no time for machines. She was Green by inclination and temperament. It was and is one of our areas of contention.
“André, do you ever ask yourself why you consented to leave your wife and child for more than a year to live in this tin can? Who are you making happy? You know you don’t care what’s out here, you’d rather be back in Marne-la-Vallée, right?”
She sounds like she’s channelling my disenchanted wife back home. This may even be true.
All the arguments from my own personal philosophy flash through my mind: our destiny in the universe; our need to defend ourselves from what’s ‘out there’ and so on. But I’d be wasting my breath with my wife; she doesn’t buy any of that stuff. She just wants a life lived in harmony with nature. Evolutionary biology suggests she has a case; emotionally she certainly has a case.
I don’t expect sweetness and light, hugs and kisses all the time. Couples disagree and argue. It’s necessary. And I understand, after so many months, that Sylvia back home is getting pretty desperate. Without Sylvia-here I’m sure I’d be the same.
But the arguments have been getting more frequent. A thought niggles at me: they’re all rather defeatist. I worry about Sylvia’s state of mind - which is surely what’s driving Sylvia-here.
Last night I woke up around 2 am. I was restless; Sylvia was unresponsive as if in deep sleep. I don’t know whether she needs sleep: she might be doing it just to stay in character.
I wandered out of our room and into the kitchen area - I suppose I was going to get a small drink, perhaps a whisky. I was rooting there amongst the bottles under the dim glow of the nightlights (I have to say I was naked) when I heard the slightest noise behind me, perhaps I just felt a touch of air.
I turned around and in the gloom I saw Tania’s elfin partner wearing just the tiniest nightdress, the thin fabric swaying off her small breasts. She just stood there, looking at me. I reckoned I knew exactly what that meant.
I tried to be sensible but… it was complicated and I was tired and my body knew what it must have. She slipped easily into my arms, into my embrace and I knew that she would do anything I wanted, anything at all. I turned her round, held her by the waist and leaned her over the table. I was possessed - an observer of my own body. It was over in seconds. I stood back panting; she daintily turned to face me. Our faces came together. She slowly licked her tongue along my lips.
“Our secret,” she whispered.
It was the first time I had heard her speak.
Then she left, sashaying back to Tania’s private space.
I sat on a kitchen chair sipping my whisky and feeling pretty good, frankly. Did I have worries over what I’d done?
A few: which were easy to brush away.
After all, she wasn’t a person, was she; she was a machine.
It didn’t count.
18: Approach Phase: (Tania; Flaminia)
We’re strapped into our acceleration couches. I’m completely relaxed, stretched out on the most comfy, supportive gel bed you can possibly imagine. I’m wearing a lycra coverall: thin and warm with no creases to tear at my flesh. A wrap-around visor provides a full VR interface to ship systems. My arms lie in soft sculpted channels with finger controls under my hands like a glove. I can function at 10 gee, endure 20 gee for minutes and survive in excess of 50 gee for a few seconds.
We’re doing a first-reconnaissance simulation. In this exercise the mother-ship is well behind us, two hundred thousand kilometres to our rear. Our detached module (in the simulation) is positioned at Lagrange point 3 with respect to Phobos; that is, we’re in the same orbit, but maintaining station on the far side of Mars so we have the bulk of the planet between us and the Adversary. I say L3 but it’s a joke: the gravity of Phobos is so small that there is no effective stability point here at all.
Still, keeping station is the least of our problems.
In the simulation we have two small satellites to serve as relays with our reconnaissance remote, which has quietly made its way to Phobos and then drifted down to the surface four kilometres from the Adversary’s camouflaged crater. Tania is in control: this is her field of expertise. My job is to fly the module.
So let me slightly rephrase that. The drone, satellites and the module itself all possess a high degree of intelligence. They know the mission and are aware of contingencies. Tania and I are senior officers in these scenarios. We set high-level objectives in conversation with the module-AI. The module-AI then tasks the remote systems. The round-trip light delay between us (via relay) and the drone on Phobos is 240 milliseconds. You’d notice that in a phone call. You can see why tactically we’re out of the loop.
In the simulation the drone is skip-floating in the low gravity towards the target. It pops up, takes a peek and then drops down again having made a few hundred metres. We don’t expect the drone to survive but we may learn something in the manner of its destruction. At least, that’s what the sim designers intend us to trial today.
For the time being nothing much is happening. The automation is firmly in control. I have a private, point-to-point link with Tania, not linked to the broader ship network. I use it to ask quietly, “What’s your friend called, the slim one?”
“Flaminia.”
“You knew her before the launch?”
“No, mine was Astrid.”
So she’s the big, bouncy one with the throaty laugh.
“It’s like you and Sylvia,” murmurs Tania, “We had a place together for a couple of years. She was OK with it.”
“So what about Flaminia, then?”
“Dunno. She was foisted on me at launch. I was happy to host her. Breaks up the day, doesn't it. She’s quiet, amusing sometimes, friendly; never any trouble.”
Quite a speech from Tania, this.
I open a channel to the ship.
“Ask Mission Control about Flaminia. Why was she brought on the mission?”
Half an hour later I am not much the wiser. Mission Control doesn't know why. She was part of the logistics/command package and loaded accordingly, signed off by programme management. There is no documentation as to any specific role; Mission Control suggests she may be included for redundancy. They concede there may be a classified aspect.
This is not entirely implausible. In the earliest years of spaceflight astronauts really were just ‘spam in a can’, meat brought along for the political ride, while the automation did everything. The test-pilot astronauts fought hard to get back control and eventually won. Soon they were indoctrinated in all the mission components and systems (months of training) and were able to actually fly the birds.
But the automation improved faster than humans could. Soon, more and more automation interposed itself between space-people and spacecraft operations. On a military flight like this there are many things we two are not cleared to know. The truth is: the module-AI is flying this mission. Tania and I are consultants, here for local advice when Earth is topically inaccessible. We know our place.
But Flaminia is a mission component I don’t yet understand.
The Phobos drone pops up: the enemy base is 600 metres away but all we can see is the crater wall ahead. Tania and I observe through the eyes of the drone, one hundred and twenty milliseconds behind real-time.
There is a flash on the rocky scree of the crater wall, an audible alarm and our screens suddenly wash out, the landscape replaced by imagery scrolling from the cameras on our relay satellites, slowed down a thousandfold. In the replay, a small dark object glides away from the crater wall and slides across the landscape. With infinitesimal gravity and no atmosphere its trajectory is a straight line. In super slow motion it coalesces with the drone and a bright flash explodes into a conical debris cloud, a shotgun blast departing Phobos at super escape velocity.
“Sixty kilometres per second,” says Tania, “I suppose it could have been some kind of super-railgun?”
“What did we learn?” I ask rhetorically.
“They have railguns?”
Or so our simulation designers imagine.
We eject from our couches and go for coffee.
The full story text can be found in my SF novel: here:
- "Donatien's Children" (2022) — as a PDF, and
- "Donatien's Children" (2022) — on Amazon for easier reading.
