“I don’t know…”
“And his pilot’s an expert. She won’t do anything foolish.”
Cardenas either wasn’t listening to him or not hearing. “Once those nanos kick in,” she said, “there’s no stopping them. They’ll take the radiation shield apart, atom by atom, and then—”
“They won’t have the time,” Humphries insisted. “You forget how fast Starpower goes. They’ll zip back here in a few days.”
“Still…” Cardenas looked utterly unconvinced.
Trying to sound unconcerned, Humphries said, “Look, I know this is a dirty trick to play on Randolph. But that’s the business world. I want his mission to fail so I can buy out his company on the cheap. I don’t want to kill him! I’m not a murderer.”
Not yet, he added silently. But I’m going to be. And I’m going to have to silence this woman before her guilt trip makes her warn Randolph.
Unbidden, the thought of Amanda came to him. It only hardened his resolve. He’s making me kill her. Randolph deserves to die. He’s forced me to kill Amanda.
As he looked across the table at Kris Cardenas, so troubled, her eyes focused on god-knows-what, Humphries nodded to himself. If I leave her alone she’ll warn Randolph. She’ll ruin everything. I can’t let her do that.
SOLAR STORM
The Apollo missions to the Moon in the mid-twentieth century were timed to avoid periods when the Sun was likely to erupt with a flare that would drench the solar system with killing levels of hard radiation.
Later, spacecraft shuttling between the Earth and the Moon simply scurried for shelter when a solar storm struck. They either returned to the protection that the Earth’s magnetic field provides against the storm’s lashing hail of protons and electrons, or they landed on the Moon and their crews sought shelter underground.
The earliest spacecraft to carry humans beyond the Earth-Moon system had no such options available to them, for their transit times to Mars were so long that they would inevitably encounter a solar storm while weeks or months away from a safe haven. Thus they were outfitted with storm shelters, special compartments in which the crew could be protected from the intense radiation spewed out by a solar flare. The first explorers sent to Mars spent days on end cooped up in their spacecraft’s cramped “storm cellar,” until the high-energy particles of the storm’s plasma cloud finally passed them by.
Starpower 1 had no storm cellar. The entire crew module was protected in the same manner that a storm shelter would have been. The module was lined with thin wires of an exotic yttrium-based compound that formed a superconducting magnet which generated a permanent magnetic field around the crew module, a miniature version of the Earth’s magnetic field. Yet the superconductor could not produce a magnetic field strong enough to deflect the solar storm’s most dangerous killers, the high-energy protons.
When faced with a vast cloud of deadly subatomic particles blasted out by a solar flare, the ship was charged to a high positive electrostatic potential by a pair of electron guns. The energetic protons in the cloud were repelled by the ship’s positive charge. The magnetic field was strong enough to deflect the cloud’s lighter, less energetic electrons—and thus keep the negatively-charged electrons from ruining the ship’s positive charge.
Safely cocooned inside the protective magnetic field, the crew of Starpower 1 watched the swift approach of the storm’s plasma cloud.
“Be here in another six hours,” Pancho announced, pulling off her headset as she swiveled the command pilot’s chair to face Dan.
He frowned at the news. “That’s for certain?”
“Certain as they can be. Early-warning spacecraft in Mercury co-orbit have plotted out the cloud. Unless there’s a great big kink in the interplanetary field, it’s gonna roll right over us.”
Nodding, Dan said, “The electron guns are ready to go.”
“Better start ’em up,” she said. “No sense waitin’ till the last minute.”
“Right.” Dan stepped through the hatch, into the empty wardroom, and headed aft, where the electron guns were housed. Pancho could control them from the bridge, but Dan wanted to be there in case any problems cropped up.
“And send Amanda up here, will you?” Pancho called to him. “I gotta take a break.”