“…grazing the skies below, the orbital operations to recover debris from the Quoqasi destruction continued as Texas was chased down. What couldn’t be salvaged was shunted into the atmosphere, to be burned up upon re-entry. We had come too far to be ambushed later by rogue pieces of dead starship, travelling at a deadly speed…”
We brought six orbiters with us from Sol. Initially we’d only been able to put four in orbit, but once the mining site injected enough quartz, silica, and graphite into our resource pool for us to manufacture ceramic heat tiles, the last two were rushed into service.
Two went after Texas; two went after the decompressed stern of Quoqasi, still in a lateral spin after being sheared from the bow; two went out ahead to meet the Mayflower.
No human eyes had been laid on the Mayflower in five years. She was an automated starship, thrown from Sol three months after our own departure in the Quoqasi – she’d trailed us through the long, cold, interstellar night. We didn’t know what condition she was in, how she had fared through her trip, what her current mass was or how profound the Pioneer Anomaly had been on her voyage – we needed to know these things so that we could shunt her into a perfect orbit.
So the last two days before her arrival were the most hectic they had ever been at mission control. We needed to calculate the May’s orbit, we needed to clear that orbit of pieces of the wrecked Quoqasi, and we needed to slingshot Texas the hell out of NFO for good. No one slept, not even the orbiter crews, which was dangerous and reckless but we had no other choice.
All this was further complicated thirty-two hours before orbital insertion – true to the nature of our existence on Fram to date, all our servers crashed, overloaded by the comms and data traffic between ground-based observation sites, satellites, the labs in the Colonies, and of course our intrepid orbiters. It took two hours to get everything back on line, during which objects in orbit were lost from our screens and the May rocketed ever closer to Fram.
The orbiter crews did as much as they could without telemetry and guidance from the ground. But our plan with Texas had been to use the solid-fuel boosters in concert with the ground-based solar station. During those two hours the station couldn’t track Texas, and we lost precious time and a crucial amount of thrust. Fifteen minutes after our systems came back online, simulations showed what we had feared for five straight days – an eighty-six percent chance of coincidence between the orbit of Texas and the orbit of the Mayflower.
We thought of altering the asteroid’s orbit, if we couldn’t move it completely – a couple of degrees from its current latitude would swing it across Fram’s equator and, eventually, over several weeks, approach a circumpolar orbit. But it was an impermanent solution, made useless by the Mayflower’s own complex orbit: to avoid the ring of Fram, the May – like the Quoqasi had – would graze the atmosphere above the north pole, bleed away the last of its inertia through atmospheric breaking, and slide through its own circumpolar orbit until it could readjust its attitude to match the geostationary orbit of Wilbur, beneath the ring.
So instead we did something we probably should have tried all along, had we been as inventive in the hours after we’d lost the Quoqasi as we were forced to be in the hours before insertion. Counter to all conventional logic, we started manoeuvring Texas lower, down towards Fram, and we put as much force behind it as we could.
Texas hit Fram’s atmosphere at a shallow angle, much shallower than the reentry of our orbiters. It slammed into the thick blanket of carbon dioxide which encircled our world, and started to break up and burn. We were terrified, nervous, anxious – our mainframe had crashed just hours earlier and we were all exhausted and deprived of sleep, so we feared our calculations could be wrong.
But then it happened: the altimeter climbed, confirmations came in from a dozen sources, and everyone in mission control cheered. Texas had skipped from the atmosphere like a stone across a pond, and our computer overlaid a red arc – a course projection – tracing a line from the icon of Texas back up into the ring.
“Sure looks good from up here,” came the disembodied voice from one of the orbiters salvaging Quoqasi. The voice was heavily chopped with static, and harsher syllables were distorted entirely. “Plenty of smoke still across the atmosphere, but I can see the thing rising. God, what a beautiful sight.”
“Amen to that,” replied a joyous capcom, over the shouting.
The Mayflower was in good condition, no worse than Quoqasi had been when it arrived. Its armour of Kuiper ice was largely intact, although pitted on a microscopic level by its passage through the cosmic medium. The orbiters could not immediately identify any weaknesses in this outer hull; most of it would ablate away when the May roared across the pole. We began to redeploy the Texas orbiters to meet the Mayflower – the four orbiters would work in tandem with each other and with the May’s own vernier rockets to guide the cargo ship into its orbit.
At planetfall plus ninety-one, the Colonies stopped. There wasn’t a functioning e-suit still in the racks, an operating vehicle in the garage, nor anybody unable to get outside not clustered around a monitor to watch the televised broadcast of two points of light – one Wilbur and one the Mayflower – draw closer and inevitably together in the sky, until at last they merged and became one source of light…
