Adam's Rings

by Matthew D. White

  With the speed and position where it needed to be, Adam followed by an even scan across the outer ring of pods, until he hit the heavy booster storage. The collar came into view and he steadied it on the far side of the viewing port, inching closer with each successive revolution. As they turned and the side of the station dropped into shadow, he felt them connect and then lock into place. His hands went loose and felt the lander be carried along for the ride.

  He wanted to brag to Draco, but to be honest, it was a far more harrowing experience than he had realized. A wrong move was enough to puncture the skin of the station and do serious damage to their mission, if not downright cripple their functionality. The idea of using a multi-caster to either seal a hole or cut away another pod was not a concept Adam particularly wanted to explore.

  The connection lights flickered green in the cabin and Adam eased back on the controls, deftly lifting the heavy booster stage free from the station. The addition of the positioning jets assisted in maneuvering the ship, but there was no hiding the fact that the booster had added a significant load to the tiny craft. As he reoriented himself, Adam again brought the lander about to the hydrogen draw, transferred his ration of fuel, and lined the ship up for the orbital burn.

  “So far so good,” Adam remarked as he entered the final parameters into his navigation system. “No words of wisdom? Think I’m making a mistake?”

  “Negative. Your parameters will allow an unaided flyby of the moon, which you can modify for a closer pass upon arrival. Don’t die and force me to replace you.”

  “Noted,” Adam said. “Counting down to launch.”

  He felt the engines ignite, and with a growing force, again push him into the back of his seat. They arced high and wide, steering far clear of the deadly debris field that made up the closest ring.

  As the minutes passed by and the acceleration began to even out, Adam chanced a look through the observational window to his right. Unlike most every other time he had scanned his field of stars, this time he caught the full reflection of the inner ring network. At his altitude above the uncountable smear of rocks and ice, he couldn’t catch the divisions between particles. Instead, Adam watched the full glory of the structure unfold as a single, unified blanket of sun and starlight, as if he were flying above an abstract plain of perfect, glowing bliss.

  He occasionally caught minute undulations in the density of the particles, coming across as brighter or dimmer bands, but never to the point where he could see any stars through the structure. Adam tried to liken it to staring at a vinyl record or the visual representation of a sound wave, but nothing in his experience did it justice. His mind wandered, concerned with the possibility that he had missed an equally large number of amazing sights during his stay, which had been drowned in the minutia of his daily survival.

  Erin would likely be the first in line to mock his artistic impression of the experience, but at the moment, he didn’t mind her potential judgment. Adam rested his head against the back of the seat and sighed in quiet contentment as he watched the glowing bands flicker by. Against the brilliant painted backdrop, he felt at home.

  ***

  The flight came to drift into its fifth and final day, after several bouts of nervous rest on the part of the traveler. Somehow, knowing that he could no longer lean on the expertise of Draco kept Adam on his toes, partially expecting at any moment to arrive at his destination and be required to work on the landing. To be fair, he could see the outline of Janus at only the two-day mark, as its silver reflection was easy to spot as it rose above the ring. As he continued in his pursuit of the object, the last of the ring’s structure fell away, leaving him careening through deep, unfamiliar space between the bands.

  As smooth and seamless as any orbit he attempted, the cragged face of the derelict moon drifted into view as the lander approached. Pulling back on his speed, Adam began the slow descent into the body’s nearly nonexistent gravity well. At about a fifth of a percent of Earth’s normal pull, the orbital maneuver was closer to his attempt at catching the booster stage than anything resembling the assumption of a stable position above solid ground.

  Adam’s plan had called for him to make a single pass of the surface to construct an image of the body before making a determination for his eventual landing site. The strategy disintegrated quickly as he realized there was relatively no space that wasn’t already occupied by a bevy of impact craters, in most cases packed many layers deep. He cursed under his breath as the radar returned its calculations on the stability of the surface, the necessary few square meters of ground possessing under five degrees of inclination rapidly becoming an illusion.

  He drifted closer to the misshapen orb as the estimated altitude marked on his screen continued to click down. Managing the descent was relatively straightforward in the weak gravitational field, although the perturbations in the surface contributed to a bit of instability. He caught sight of a flat spot below, a shallow ridge between two craters, and caged his view on the potential location for landing.

  Adam’s hand flinched above the control, unexpectedly jerking the lander to the side. He cursed again, reversing the thrust, but couldn’t overcome the force. The gentle ridge was gone as quickly as it appeared and the ship was still sinking fast. Evening out the slope, the lander sunk below the rim of the massive, ancient impact, and Adam knew he was nearly out of space to maneuver.

  Rather than eating through more fuel to pull back and make a second pass, he opted to hit the center of the topmost crater he could make out. The first one that caught his eye was coming up quick and appeared to be about fifty feet wide with a relatively flat trough in the center. Good Enough, Adam thought to himself, and with a final burst from the engines, planted his ship upright on the alien ground. The lander instantly sank, the weight of the booster stage compacting the last two feet of surface dust and ice.

  As the rumble of the engines dissipated, Adam held his breath, listening for any secondary movements. There were none; the lander was evidently stable and secure upon its resting place.

  Methodically, Adam released the restraints and slowly rose to his feet, sensing the change in gravity from that of the station. The field on Janus was nigh-on nonexistent as he expected, with a fraction of what had been present on Draco, or anything he had remembered from his artificial memory of Earth. He flexed his feet, the tiny movement enough to propel him into the air in a slow-motion leap. He touched the ceiling only to gently drift back to the deck.

  Beyond the ring of tiny windows around the lander’s command center, Adam found himself at the bottom of a massive depression. The landscape was entirely comprised of grayish rock, dust, and ice, although he couldn’t tell for certain without a more thorough inspection. Saturn hung in the sky to his right in its ever-present stare upon his life, casting a gentle blanket of pale-yellow light across the features of the tidally-locked world.

  Adam was at once proud of his accomplishment, although at the same time dismayed that he had no one with which to share it. Draco would likely tell him whatever he wanted to hear, and it wasn’t as if Erin couldn’t counter anything he said with something far more technically impressive with soul-crushing wit. Making the journey was a step above a trained monkey, but to make full use of the time he needed to come back with results.

  Before committing the drill to a particular site, Adam had resolved to explore the surroundings in stages. At first, he’d go out alone and test the stability of the landscape, and then later return for the rest of the equipment. He got faster with each time he donned the mobility suit, and with the subdued effect of gravity, he accomplished the task in minutes before taking his first step beyond the lander’s protective skin.

  Hooking the cable from a dive reel to the lander’s skin and carrying a titanium survival shovel, Adam carefully passed through the airlock and maneuvered himself down the narrow ladder of the booster pod. Gingerly, he put his foot out to the ground and felt it give beneath his weight. He heard the subtle crunch
within the suit, as if he were walking upon a plain of frozen water vapor which long ago had coalesced into a semi-solid structure. Each step sank about eighteen inches, and Adam tested each one before committing to it, in his mind afraid that it would give out with one wrong move and send him tumbling into a subterranean precipice.

  He stopped a few yards out from his outpost and drove the spade by hand into the surface, pulling it back to reveal a complex structure of identifiable layers extending deep beneath the ground. Adam guessed as when each impact occurred, it carried with it a slightly different chemical makeup which contributed to the variations he could catch in the layers. Continuing to dredge deeper, he found more of the same, bringing him back to the idea that if the moon wasn’t a rocky body to begin with, it might have been ice and dust all the way down.

  Performing a full orbit of the lander within the watchful radius of the safety cable, Adam found no discernable change in the composition of the surface. The danger in his head began to subside as he figured that if a homogenous body didn’t collapse when the lander touched down, there was less of a chance of him becoming lost on foot. Even if he found himself tumbling into a hidden chamber, it wasn’t like he wouldn’t be able to launch himself free, either by the jets on his suit or by a forceful leap.

  With oxygen to spare in his suit, Adam began a hike to the closest crater wall, the only thing in his field of view that offered a change from the pounded icy landscape. Hitting the limit of his safety line, he detached it, placing the junction lightly on the ground before continuing the methodical advancement. His footsteps continually reminded him of his winters spent on Earth, crunching through the snowfall on the occasional frigid, subzero morning. While back then the sun would inevitably shine across a clear blue sky, refracting its light through billions of jeweled crystals at once, here the lifeless gaze of Saturn was ever present over his progress. As much as he appreciated the light, it brought no warmth to the vacuum.

  Continuing to test the force of gravity, Adam began to take wider steps, transitioning to shuffling leaps that propelled him easily forward through the nonexistent air. Coming in to land between each movement more closely resembled a kick off the bottom of a swimming pool instead of a slog through a wintery badland. He laughed as he progressed, hopping and skipping forward without consideration to the surroundings. No longer constrained by the walls of the pods, he extended his arms through the bounding steps and let himself sail free.

  ***

  Adam decided he had made a miscalculation in judging the distance. While from the air the crater had appeared to be nothing but a blip on the map, he had lost perspective on the snowy indentation now that he was on the ground. The walk had taken far longer than he had anticipated, although he had cleared a vast distance through his deft galloping along the way. The edge of the crater now towered above him in the midfield, blocking out a quarter of the sky as he approached the border of the site.

  He had been traversing up a wide incline across most of the crater’s base, and here at the top the last of the formation had caved in on itself, leaving a sheer wall upwards of a hundred feet in height. Adam’s first instinct was to clear the barricade with a strong jump assisted by the mobility jets within the suit, but he decided against such a rash action.

  Approaching the wall, he ran the sharpened spade down the inner face, revealing a complex stack of varying and competing shades of ice and rock. At once, he was looking at a history that spread millions of years, spanning all of humanity’s recorded history in a matter of inches, and had been waiting since the lighting of the sun for his arrival. He was quietly amazed at the thought, imagining the secrets that waited right beneath his keen eyes.

  Lengthening the cleaned area of the wall to continue the examination, Adam scraped away the horizontal ground to find more of the same structure, then continued above by hopping up and running the metal blade along the surface. He lightly came to a stop and drifted back to the ground, feeling his feet hit with a soft crunch.

  Then the ground gave way.

  Adam sensed the change beneath his feet, as if he felt the cracking of a sheet of ice, and spun about to catch himself. The minimal gravity didn’t keep up and the floor gave away, dropping him into the landscape up to his waist and then his arms. He shrieked in surprise, the fear of survival instantly spiking within his heart and silencing the juvenile sense of wonderment. He froze in place, buried in the icy dust to his chest, the shovel clamped in his right hand, willing his heart to stabilize. He breath was sharp and jagged yet he refused to move, at risk of causing the onset of a more dangerous condition.

  The image of him slowly being swallowed by the ground itself stoked a growing terror. Pushing down with his hands, he attempted to lift himself free, only to feel the ice collapse under his arms just as quickly, leaving him still trapped in place. “Great. Just great. It just won’t quit,” Adam muttered a second time. Here his idiotic self was, presenting one more chapter of the experience that would not be shared with Mission Control, Draco, nor the doctor on their next meeting.

  He attempted the push-off again with the same result, his hands driving through the porous soil with no resistance. Adam cursed again beneath his breath as he felt himself continue to sink, along with a growing depression that was forming to all sides. The ground took on the consistency of loose batting or frictionless pixie dust as he continued to paddle it away, sinking ever deeper. Adam felt himself losing the battle against the ground, as well as his mental state. With each tingle of surface movement that radiated through his fingertips, his heart rate quickened and panic began to rise. His eyes darted, desperately vying for a solution, while rejecting the screaming suggestion in his head to flail about and through brute determination, free himself.

  Adam cursed beneath his breath, forcing himself to remain still and not disturb the ground any more than he already had. “Draco, Erin…” he managed to whisper, hating the reality that through multiple layers of isolation, his voice wouldn’t be heard by anyone in this world or the next. A growing rumble built low beneath his feet, and Adam looked up to see the crater wall begin to shed its outer wrapping of loosely-applied material, sending it drifting down onto his head. He could feel his end approach, either being buried alive beneath the crumbling wall or having the moon’s loose surface swallow him whole.

  There was no time and he was out of options. In a single, fluid motion, Adam gathered his legs up and kicked downward while driving the face of the shovel into the compact layer of grit before him with all his energy. The force was enough to dislodge him and send him flying free, watching as the ground continue to collapse below with every passing second. Nearly breaking through escape velocity, Adam drifted higher, steadily gaining altitude above the wall as it dislodged more material and slid down to seal away the site of his very-near suicide.

  A quick burst from the jets within the suit righted him and sent the lone astronaut gliding back gently to the surface of the crater. Adam waited motionless within the suit as it dropped, afraid to move and come in too hard, thus disrupting another area of dissolved material. His heart never ceased its pounding as he drifted back, shaking inside his commanding officer’s uniform.

  For all the long months spent in orbit, Adam’s mind quickly threw away the skills of normal operation and immediately was overcome with the desire to be back on solid ground. He fought the reaction, staying light on the controls and forcing himself to let gravity take its time in pulling him back down. The dusty plain drifted by beneath his feet as he slid lower before his left foot caught the dirt.

  He skidded for a meter and tumbled into the ground, taking a deep gouge of material with him as his weight again compacted the terrain. Adam retreated quickly to the lander, recovering the safety line before continuing on to power up the boring rig.

  ***

  Retrieving the drill ended up being a straightforward maneuver in the minimal gravity. Adam was able to merely guide it through the tiny cabin before carrying it under one arm
down the access ladder. He sat the tool down a few meters from the lander, close enough to run a power cord and to make the chore of dragging out the boring tubes that much easier.

  After anchoring the device in place as best he could in the dusty landscape, Adam began the laborious process of feeding the extruded metal pipes into the top of the fancy contraption. Each three-meter-long segment took less than a minute to carve its path into the ground below, but after more than thirty of the units, the process began to slow, owing to the danger of binding the pipes and causing the spoliation of the whole exercise.

  Several hours passed and the fiftieth and final pipe hit its maximum depth, enabling Adam to feel a sense of relief wash across his chest. Maneuvering the pipes about had been a laborious task, and the base layer of his suit was soaked with sweat. Regardless, he was content to have the worst behind him. The system hadn’t broken along the way, and it hadn’t punctured some long-lost void to consume the operation whole without leaving a trace as to Adam’s existence.

  Switching modes, the rig began the laborious task of extracting all the captured material. As the individual pipes became exposed, Adam installed a cap on each end, marked the location, and began to line them up in order beside his worksite. The task became mechanical as additional hours continued to wear on, with him nearly losing his place in the sequence along the way multiple times over. As the final extension slid free, Adam capped the ends, filled with pride despite the exhaustion, and began to transfer the pile of tubes back into his habitat.

  The day grew to a close and Adam rested on the flight deck, staring out across the unchanging landscape. His landing site on Janus remained in the ever-present gaze of the planet, much as it had since the formation of the solar system or so he imagined. There was nothing in the virtue of his mere presence that was going to spur the floating body to suddenly grow active and put on a geological show. Despite the mind-bending reality of his life, the fact was clear that the universe was cold, empty, and dead. So much so that any wrong move would kill him without a single thought. Adam brushed the self-realization aside and focused on his successes.