The day started like any other, cold shower, soggy toast, luke warm coffee, all the things that reminded me of why I did what I did.
As I punched up through the stratosphere, heading for the LEO waystation known as “Brizillianwax” because of its shiny bald backside that always pointed at the Sun, I wondered for the hundredth time how to break the cycle – work, too little pay, Life, too many expenses!
I had enough fuel for one and a half trips, and then that was it – have to sell the rig for what ever I could get, and slink off into the sunset like so many before me.
The commercial Space market had offered so much promise at the start, big NASA contracts, satellite launches worth millions, in-orbit repair and maintenance, the outer worlds were our oyster!
Then some twelve year old had invented the Space Elevator, and suddenly getting stuff up and down cost less than a $1 a pound, and all us “early adopters” who had mortgaged ourselves to the hilt buying reusable rockets and space vehicles were faced with a continual discount race just to stay alive.
This trip was a classic example – SMS in the middle of the night, open contract, 5 minutes to bid, lowest bid wins, no guarantee of anything other than a full load back down and a depressingly small payment on survival.
As the rocket motors cut off, and weightlessness settled into the cramped cockpit like a foggy blanket, I searched the near sky for anything radiating in any bandwidth.
One of the joys of Low Earth Orbit flying was the sheer volume of detritus zooming around with gay abandon in eccentric orbits, just lying in wait for an unsuspecting victim to smash into an make their day. NASA claimed to track all of them, but everyone knew that anything smaller than a half-centimeter fragment didn’t show up on the scans, and since the last disaster that had taken out a Russian Space Station when an out-of-control automated supply vessel had rammed it at seventeen thousand miles an hour, there were now another few zillion pieces of space junk out for revenge.
As we arced over into our initial orbit path, I called the station, just to see if they were awake.
“Bravo-one-niner, shuttle papa-vickot-ten-ten in the grove, request attachment.” Up here, static was a thing of the past, what with digital everything controlling everything and everybody, twenty-four-seven, fifty-two. The silence was absolute, as most of the communication these days was computer to computer. Human beings very much played a supporting role to the machines, because the sheer economics of commercialized Space dictated the lowest cost option wherever possible. The only reason slugs like me and a very few others had a gig at all is that the automatics couldn’t launch on demand yet, because the requirement didn’t pay enough! And sometimes a specific cargo warranted the extra expense of a human watch-dog as a back up – to prevent further economic loss, you understand, not for anything positive!
Even my docking would be automated, with me sitting in the seat like so much baggage, because if the truth be known, very few people at the top trusted human beings to do more than take out the garbage, which is what my trip was all about. Radioactive waste back to an earth station for reprocessing, something the big boys didn’t want anywhere near their precious automated space planes and shuttles.
Which defied logic, if you think about it, if you don’t trust someone why give them the worst possible cargo to do with what they liked?
I could sell it to terrorists, make a bomb with it, drop it on a few million heads as I streamed in to land, the possibilities were endless, my imagination ran riot for a few seconds, until a dull mechanical voice cut into my musings.
“Shuttle papa-vickot-ten-ten you are locked on, docking time zero-niner-four-five, track Blue-seven, confirm dead hands?”
“Papa-vicktor-ten-ten affirmative,” I replied, holding my gloved hands up to the constant scanner every ship had as a matter of course. In this game you were on camera one hundred percent of the time, no exceptions, because in Space you were as trusted only as far as they could see you!
In the distance, the silver blob that was “Brizillianwax” flared into view as the Sun pushed up over the Earth’s horizon. On my heads-up display a long blue line showed my path to the landing bay, so all I had to do now was sit back and relax, and pretend to enjoy the scenery.
I started to think about how to change the pattern that was inexorably swallowing my options as each minute ticked down. I had applied for a thousand jobs, all through the highly computerized systems that now controlled everyone’s future, but had only had the one reply.
And a very short one at that. Face to face via a secure video link tomorrow morning at ten hundred hours, my side to be from a physical location that I could only reach by surface airtrain with a lot of effort. This in itself suggested a perchance for security, and an almost complete lack of understanding about surface conditions on the Earth at the moment, because since the North Koreans had gone ballistic, literally, over one third of the world was uninhabitable, for around the next twenty five thousand years, or so we were told.
The comms booth was in the middle of Australia, which was fortunate, because my destination with my highly radioactive and publicity-shy load was the Gibber Desert, where a massive decontamination and storage facility had been built, to deal with cargos exactly like mine.
From the landing and deco area the video booth was a three-hour train ride, but luckily I could take an “on-demand” airtrain and get there before the appointed time providing everything in the next four house went to plan.
On my HUD the space station loomed like a big bright ball of fire, and around it I could see a frenzy of activity as Russian, Chinese, French, Iranian, American and Indian pods, rockets, and space planes docked and undocked, in an orchestrated electronic ballet beyond any human ability to control. The tolerances were just too tight, again driven by pure economics, because now more than ever before, the more you could do in the least amount of time, while minimizing your energy spend, the more dollars fell straight to the bottom line.
If you were at the right place on Earth, you could see a continuous line of flaming space craft entering the atmosphere a few minutes apart, splitting off at the last moment to their ultimate destinations like a fiery line of invaders, leaving their twin sonic booms far behind as they burnt up the sky.
The problem the Earth faced was way too many people, even though over three billion had died during the “Peninsular War”, as it was euphemistically called, compared to the volume of arable land used to produce food from.
Since the oceans had caught up with our stupidity in mismanaging climate change, nearly half of the worlds food basket was now under water, creating an economic and social pressure on the rest of the world like never before. 50 sq. meters of dry land sold for over a million new dollars, turning the majority of people into tenants and wage-slaves.
Which was why Space had become so important, so quickly, because it had been discovered back in the twenties that seed crops in hydroponic systems under zero gee or micro gravity could produce sixteen times their yield by volume in one tenth of the time that they could manage on Earth. So a whole new economy based on getting up to and back from massive space stations had evolved in less than thirty years, to the point where what little land was left down on Earth either had reclamation infrastructure, space infrastructure, or was radioactive.
In front of me, a giant arm suddenly reached out, and in-between puffs from my nose thrusters, locked onto my docking ring. In less than a minute we were attached, and three minutes after that, I felt the thud and jar of the pressure equalization process, and my instruments told me that ten tons of wasted radioactive material was being stacked in my cargo space. Then just as suddenly, the arm extended and pushed me down and out into the departing stream of vessels, letting me free-fall into a deorbit path.
The beauty of Space in many ways was the fact that any residual momentum you picked up tended to stay with you, so crazy as it might sound, when the arm threw me away from the station, the energy it imparted actually gave me both directional and attitudinal thrust, so all I had to do to get into the slot was burn my thrusters to roll over, then spin into a bottom down attitude, presenting my heat shield to the atmosphere still a hundred miles below.
We had made great strides in energy management in the last twenty odd years, so when I started to burn up entering the denser atmosphere, the heat would produce a quantum of energy that would be stored in my engine loops, to be used on the next flight. This technique didn’t give me back 100%, the Laws of Thermodynamics saw to that, but it did cut my costs down, and if I balanced it our just right, and maintained the highest possible trajectory inbound, I could actually maximize what energy I collected, and more than one pilot had skipped off the atmosphere and out back out into space trying to do just that!
I managed to fly a fairly decent profile, and as I swung over the Great Bight into the landing pattern I saw that I had recovered around forty three percent of my loop, so now I had enough fuel for just over two more trips before I headed off to the knackers yard. Of course, the ablative shield would not last that long, that was the price you paid for being clever.
Always a balancing act between what was really possible verses what I dreamed up in my graying head!
I followed a very large military vessel down that was still throwing off bits of burning heat shield like so many firecrackers, landed parallel to it on the massive desert floor, powered down, and then waited for the tug to collect me. Did I mention the only reason I was on board was to act as the safety backup? So little to do, and all that skill and knowledge I had accumulated over the years, what a waste. But this was Life, as we knew it in the mid twenty first century, so I looked forward to my impending train trip, and video call.
Who knows? Might be something interesting, might keep me out of the knackers yard, or it might just waste a day of my Life.
As the tug pulled me across the desert floor, I felt sad for myself and the rest of the human race, because we really had put ourselves into a negative position, will all our technology and robots. We had willingly given our power away to a few iconoclastic figureheads, and not paid attention to the fine print. And now we were but bit players in everyone else’s stories.
We jerked to a stop, and a long stained yellow walkway concertinaed out to the side of my plane, the invitation clear.
Time to go.
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