The windows of the board room rattled as a rocket launched off in the distance. Michael Penderton smiled to himself. The sound of profit. He stood facing the window, arms clasped behind his back, finger tapping subconsciously on his watch, watching the exhaust plume work its way into the sky. Behind him his Chief Engineer was wrapping up his review of the report.
Finally the man cleared his throat. Michael turned and raised his eyebrows. “Well?”
“You said you received this report from Cardano, Phil Cardano?”
“I said my office cameras copied the document he showed me."
“Eh, well I was being a little generous in my language,” the engineer said. “A very interesting report. If this is accurate it means any ship in our fleet - every ion ship - would have the legs to reach Mars, even most of the main-belt asteroids. You’d have to fit a hell of a lot of extra propellant in the main tanks, or even bring some external tanks. But you could get there.”
“Do you think the report’s accurate?"
“Cardano has a very good reputation as a ship’s engineer. This would be well within his wheelhouse, although it’s strange to see it as a side project. But yes, there’s no reason to think these numbers are wrong.”
Sitting down across from the engineer, Michael drummed his fingers on his desk as he thought. Mars. Imagine the publicity. Translunar Aerospace Ship Arrives at Mars, First Humans in Martian Orbit.
“I’d like you to clear your afternoon,” Michael said, looking up. “I have a few hypothetical questions that could use an engineer’s perspective...”
* * *
Stepping out of the car, Harold shielded his eyes from the noonday sun. It was like stepping onto the surface of Mercury. This had better be worth it, he thought. On the other side, Phil was stretching after the long drive. In front of them was a shabby looking lab building, exactly what he’d expected when he heard the name of the third-rate university they’d be visiting. A few other buildings were scattered around, and beyond that was nothing but sun-blasted desert.
Posters covered the walls of the empty hallways, describing the trivial results of the staff research here. Now and then they passed one of the small labs, and he would catch Phil lingering at the windows, trying to glimpse the equipment in the dark rooms.
“Come on, we’re not here for sightseeing,” Harold said.
At the end of the hall, one of the labs had the door propped open. A wedge of light escaped the door and fell out onto the dusty hallway. They stepped inside.
Surrounding the room on all sides were tables stacked with equipment. One side of the room was dominated by a large glass sphere. Sitting next to it was a woman at her computer. She was engrossed in her work, and didn’t notice them walk in.
Phil cleared his throat and the woman started.
“You actually showed up,” she said. “Somehow I wasn’t expecting that.” She stood up and shook their hands. “Hi, I’m Stacey Vernier. Welcome to my little slice of paradise.”
“Pleasure to meet you,” Phil said. “I’m Phil Cardano and this is my associate, Harold Davies.”
“Nice to meet you,” Harold said.
Phil looked around the room for a moment, probably moments from asking for a tour of the whole building. “Lovely lab you have here, do you often work on your weekends?”
“Normally no,” Vernier said, smiling slightly. “But I’ve been working on some new grant proposals and that takes time away from my research. I’ve gotten into a bad habit of trying to catch up during my weekends. And of course it isn’t every day I get visitors from across the country.” A subtle change passed over her face and she seemed to regard the pair of them with scrutiny, and something else that was unreadable.
“So you boys are going to Mars, huh? It’s about time somebody tried it again. I was nine when Martian Successor IV happened. I was crushed, I was so sure I was about to see the first humans land on Mars.”
“Everyone was,” Harold said. “Phil and I were crewing together when we got the news. Nobody on that ship went unscathed that day.”
“It’s true,” Phil said, giving a wry chuckle. “Ever since then it’s been my mission in life, maybe a little bit of an obsession, to figure out how to make it there safely. And I think we just about have it nailed it down.
“As I said in my email, we have some unique concerns with our mission profile. The class of ship we want to use has an enormous radar cross section, and we’ll be venturing outside the normal lanes of translunar traffic.” He raised his eyebrows. “We realized we’d be interfering with radio telescopes based on Earth. Having something so big and reflective - in the radio spectrum that is - would be potentially very disruptive to astronomers here on Earth...”
It was all a lie. Harold was willing to bet Phil would blind every observatory on Earth if it meant getting to Mars.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Vernier was an expert in plasma-based stealth technology. It’s what they’d driven all this way for. You could - in theory - surround a ship or satellite in a temporary field of dense plasma. Tune the properties just right - density, temperature, ionization ratio - and you could completely absorb a specific band of radio or microwave radiation, effectively erasing the vehicle from ISTO’s deep space tracking network. Get it wrong though, and you’ve got a perfect radio reflector, a flashing mirror guaranteed to get anyone’s attention.
“You’d think the military would be more interested in this,” Harold said. “I’m surprised you haven’t been recruited to some national lab by now.”
“Oh they were,” Vernier said. “And they would have - about 50 years ago. It turns out there isn’t much of an application for a stealth vehicle that needs a constant top-off of xenon gas in the tanks to stay hidden.” She grinned and headed to a bookshelf, handing Harold an ancient-looking binder. “All we have here is based on declassified research from before I was born.”
Harold flipped through the yellowing pages. Had the engineers that worked on this really given up, or had they figured out some solution that made all this research obsolete? What were they planning to put in space that they wanted to hide so badly?
“Would you like to see a demonstration?” Vernier asked.
She led them to the large glass globe. Inside was a tiny ship, a mockup of a comms satellite on top of a plastic stand. It could have fit in the palm of Harold’s hand. Vernier flipped a couple switches. Nothing happened.
“Mr. Cardano, the lights please?”
Click.
In the darkness their eyes adjusted. A line of green plasma slowly became visible, streaming out from the back end of the satellite. A tiny ion source, modelling the full sized ion thrusters on a real satellite or ship.
An open window on Vernier’s computer screen read ‘CROSS SECTION: 100%’.
“There’s a small radar antenna built into the base, that cross section reading means that all the energy is getting reflected back from the satellite, getting picked up as a signal.
“The next constellation of comm satellites, the real next gen stuff, will be very disruptive to radio-frequency space telescopes. This is our solution.”
Typing a few commands on her keyboard triggered a change. The plasma stream from the tiny model was still there, but now it looked like a portion was being drawn off, forming a bubble of green light surrounding the whole thing. As they watched the shape morphed, tuning itself somehow until it reached a more complicated form. “Look,” she said, “it’s absorbing the incoming radio waves now.” She gestured at the screen, where the readout had dropped almost to zero. “It’s practically invisible.”
“I can still see it…”, Phil said.
“Smartass. The radar can’t see it, that’s the point. I want to put a system like this on every satellite in the upcoming constellation. They’ll be programmed to turn on when they’re passing over an observatory, and turn off when they aren’t. And the beautiful thing? Almost everything that flies is already carrying a plasma source - their ion thruster.”
Phil’s face was visible in the dim green glow of the plasma, he was focusing now, eyes locked on the tiny model as he spoke. “Could this be scaled up? Say to the size of a large container ship?”
“Something that big? It could be done,” Vernier said slowly. “The physics works at any scale, and the hardware would need to be re-engineered for a larger ship. But honestly, there wouldn’t be any point. As a rule of thumb, the amount of plasma you’d need increases with the cube of the vehicle’s length. That’s fine for small comms satellites, but every time you double the ship’s size you increase the plasma volume by a factor of eight. By the time you get up to the size of a container ship… it would drain your xenon tanks in seconds.”
She smiled at Phil. “Not everyone is this passionate about radio astronomy… which observatory is your favorite?”
“I… uh…,” Phil faltered. “They’re all so amazing it’s hard to pick. I’d hate for my plans with Mars to interfere with the scientific efforts to explore -”
She cut him off, her smile gone. “Which ones are you worried about interfering with? Which radio observatories? Can you be specific?”
Harold stared at Phil in disbelief. He hadn’t done his homework. Didn’t he think she would ask him a simple question like this? Moving over to Phil, he grabbed his arm while giving Vernier his best disarming smile. “I think we’ve taken up enough of your time today. Thank you for this demonstration, we’ll be headed out now.”
Phil turned sharply to him with his bushy eyebrows furrowed, then relaxed his face and nodded. “Yes, thank you, he added. Lovely lab you have here.”
Without another word they turned and headed into the hallway.
As they were pulling away in the car Harold caught a glimpse of Vernier stepping out to the parking lot after them. She watched them leave until they were out of sight.
After several miles, it seemed like they were in the clear.
“Incredible,” Harold said. “I can’t believe you walked into that so unprepared.” A moment of angry silence passed between them. “You could have gotten us exposed!”
Phil took his eyes off the road to glare at his passenger. “I could have handled it! I could have smoothed it over!”
“Like you smoothed it over with that pilot?”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about. Work with some of the egos in that room then come tell me how to run my organization.”
They came to a dusty crossroads, Phil slowed to a stop. He briefly checked the rearview mirror, maybe to see if Vernier had decided to follow them. In every direction stretched red-brown desert. In the distance the gentle curves of barren mountains rose out of the ground.
Phil gazed at the view for a long time. “I’ve always wondered what Mars looked like from the ground. Like what it really looks like, feels like. When I was younger we’d camp in the Nevada desert for a few days at a time. At night I’d sneak out of the tent, come out in the cold and I’d pretend I was standing on Mars. It felt like I was looking at the stars from another world.”
Shaking his head, Harold sighed. Mars seemed pretty far away right now. If they couldn’t hide the ship from the tracking network there was no point stealing it in the first place. They’d be intercepted and boarded at best, simply blown out of the sky at worst. A complicated method of suicide, just like he said in the first place. “What are the odds your people would be able to recreate Vernier’s work? Find a way to scale it up and hide our ship?”
“They could get it done, if it can be done. My engineers could do just about anything. But this? This would take years of work.” Phil pulled out his tablet and passed it to Harold.
“And we’re starting to run out of time.”
Harold looked down and saw a news article. “TRANSLUNAR AEROSPACE TO FLY MANNED MISSION TO MARS.”
“Those bastards at Translunar are stealing your plan,” he said. “They’re taking your work and using it for themselves! How are we supposed to beat them?”
Wordlessly, Phil pulled the car through the intersection and got back up to speed. Somewhere overhead the red planet got farther away.
