Infinity's End by Jonathan Strahan

Author:Jonathan Strahan
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd

I STAYED AWAKE for a month, alone in trans-Neptunian space. That was the fourth month of our twenty-four-month mission.

Then we both slept away much of the rest of the featureless journey. All this was routine. You rotate in and out of coldsleep to save consumables and your own sanity, and focus on the interesting bits.

I was the first to be woken the next time, at the start of our twenty-first month—by which time we were just thirty-some astronomical units or so out from the target. From Voga, planet of gold.

I spent that twenty-first month checking out stuff, and puzzling over Gulliver’s Travels.

I went over the ship from bow to stern, even though I had every faith in our craft, a tried and trusted development of centuries-old technologies. The Reid Malenfant was like an arrow, with a fat blade and sprawling fletches, and a bunch of balloons stuck to the shaft. The “blade” was our living quarters, a roughly conical hab module containing us, our coldsleep pods, and assorted junk, that sat on top of a service module cum lander, which contained the infrastructure of the closed-loop life support system that kept us alive, as well as a propulsion stage and other essentials.

The arrow’s shaft contained our interplanetary propulsion engine, technically known as a magnetoplasma rocket. Our propellant was hydrogen, stored as a liquid in those balloon tanks along the shaft. We had a compact fusion reactor whose energies ionised the hydrogen to plasma using powerful radio blasts—the fletches at the rear of the arrow were radiator panels, dumping waste heat from this process—and the plasma, bearing an electrical charge, was then grabbed by a magnetic field and hurled out the back. The system was mature technology and ran smoothly, and gave us our cruise velocity of five hundred kilometres a second.

As I said, such a ship, with such a performance, purring along, would get you to Mars and back in a few days or weeks. Even the Jovian system, five astronomical units from the Sun, was within reasonably easy reach. But it would take us two years to get to Voga. To get there in a more sensible time, we would have needed a much more powerful drive—a propellant driven directly by a fusion reaction, maybe, or even by matter-antimatter annihilation. Once we had been developing such drives, but progress stalled when the Chaos came, and industry had to prioritise more urgent needs such as food printers—indeed the whole complex of industrial civilisation came close to collapsing altogether. When we came out of that, the will was gone. And that was why we were crawling out to the Kuiper Belt in an Earth-Mars transport.

And hence our enforced layover at Voga, once we got there. Our low exhaust velocity gave us significant problems with fuel loads. To slow down our twenty-six-tonne dry mass from our cruise speed would take nearly twice as much mass in hydrogen fuel. And to accelerate our dry mass plus our deceleration fuel up to our cruise velocity in the first place had taken nearly twice that total in fuel, again.

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