Adam's Rings

by Matthew D. White

  Adam worked for half an hour before pausing to check his progress. He had scraped away a wide swath of the ground around the smelter and opened the cabinet to check the collectors. Inside, a pair of five-gallon glass containers waited and he scanned their contents. The leftward one contained about ten inches of clean water distilled from the process, with the other holding half that much of tiny, silver beads.

  “That’s it?” Adam asked himself, resting his burning arms on the top of the machine. The ground was obviously far more porous than he had expected, containing more empty space than anything else per unit of volume. It was more akin to sea foam than rock. He shuddered at the thought of how long it’d take him to fill the stock of containers, and if the geniuses who designed the system had considered how long the operation would take, given the tools available.

  The body of the equipment bay towered over the site, casting the ground into deep shadow as the moon tumbled away from the sun. Adam’s mind churned over the task as he attempted to estimate the number of trips it would take to fill the hold. The number was staggering if not utterly depressing, so he doubled his effort to fabricate a workaround. He needed to be able to feed more into the smelter with each cycle.

  An auger or drill would do the job, but it was too complicated for what he had in mind. All he really needed was something larger than the entrenching tool to help speed up the activity.

  He stopped and grabbed the glass container before making toward the airlock and going for the forge. Adam felt a plan take shape in his mind as he dumped the payload of metal beads into the device’s hopper. Burning the precious cargo was a risky maneuver, he knew, but Adam considered it a measured investment.

  Using the forge’s control system, he drew out and modeled a primitive scoop, somewhere between a combat shield and a split length of pipe, and set it to build. The machine hummed to life and slid down its substantial gantry, depositing thin lines of glowing slag across the bed from a nozzle the size of a pencil point. Each pass cooled in moments to a dull silver, thanks to the fans aimed at the trailing side of the head which served to support the successive layers. It took only minutes before it began to curve up on the ends, pull back in on itself, and close off with a cylindrical handle across the top.

  Adam paced the room as he anxiously waited for the process to complete and the metal to cool to the touch. Once the gantry retracted and the indicators died away, he tested the material with the back of his hand before pulling it free. The device was thicker than sheet metal but nearly weightless on the tiny moon, possessing enough rigidity to maintain its shape under load. Adam turned it about in his hands before pressing the leading edge into the ground in an attempt to make the material fail.

  It held his miniscule body weight, and he leaned across the trailing edge, letting it balance him on his stomach. He laughed, lightly drifting back to his feet. “I’d call that a success,” he remarked to himself, going for the airlock and the rest of his suit. “Draco, you’d be proud. I didn’t even need you looking over my shoulder.”

  Far out of range, his instructor failed to respond.

  Outside, Adam replaced the glass collection vessels and went for the far side of the smelter. He shoveled up a towering load of the crystalline ground and, without care to the weight, deposited it into the collection bin. The ground vibrated again under his feet, but the pile went down quickly, and he went for another, moving faster than he had before.

  The process took minutes before he had cleared out a wide swath of the airy terrain, wisely choosing to flatten the ground around him instead of digging a hole. Especially prudent, he figured, since there was no way of knowing how much of the material he’d need to recover. He filled the collection jars twice with water and once with the iron slag before the machine began to remind him about a depleted fuel cell.

  A blinking indicator on the side of the smelter tipped him off to the problem, and he inspected the controls as it stole his attention from the shoveling. “Okay, that’s a new one,” Adam remarked as he scrolled through the open processes listed on the control panel, looking for the problem. He stopped at the fuel indicator, which unexpectedly listed the cell as dipping below five percent capacity.

  It seemed off, Adam thought initially, as if he had only partially charged it before starting on the mission, but at least he had a fair amount of semi-refined material already processed. “That’s fine, Draco, if you don’t want to fully load up the ship before I leave. That’s nice of you.”

  The setback wouldn’t yield a lost cause; he could run a power line from the terminal on the lander and have more than enough to complete the job. Adam returned to the equipment bay and came back with the cable, laying it out and restarting his process.

  He chewed up three more hours loading the icy material into the smelter, clearing off two more containers full of the ore before giving thought to the time. No warning blared from the smelter, but a general alarm flickered to life inside of his helmet.

  The sight was enough to make his blood run cold, as the single light included a range of life-ending possibilities. He dropped the scoop where he stood and bounded for the smelter, shutting it down as an initial precaution. Nothing moved in the silence, and he traced the cable back to the lander with his eyes as a new dimension of panic set in.

  Quicker than before, Adam threw himself through the airlock and felt the lights above flicker, turning in the same movement to the flight deck, where he was greeted by another horrifying realization.

  Again, the general fuel supply was dangerously low and blaring a warning. Instinctively, he ran down the bank of powered systems, shutting each one down before he wasted any more of the precious resource. Down went the lights, the navigation, comms, life support, all of it. The suit would keep him alive until he could assess the situation.

  He took note of the hydrogen fuel’s reading and realized it was already deep in the red as the screen dimmed to black. As the last system died down, he was left in silence, save for his own jagged breathing. The room fell dark and motionless, lit only by an acute beam of light refracting through the windows. “It’s not so bad,” Adam finally said out loud, thoroughly unconvincingly. “Let’s just see how much I need to get back.”

  The active boards and calculator on the flight deck were a non-starter, he already knew, but there was always the white board in the equipment pod. He ran through the equations for powering each operation: standing up the ship, getting it off the ground and back to speed, then the deceleration and capture back at Draco. With a few estimates along with the lessons from the AI’s unending lectures, the budget came into focus, significantly into the negative.

  Adam cursed under his breath at the negative result, erased it and started again to find the same conclusion. The number stared back as he came to grips with its conclusion. “Well that was really stupid,” he finally managed. The frustration begot fear, which started gnawing on his chest with every passing moment. Between non-stop firing of the smelter for the better part of the day, not to mention the forge, he had used more than triple his estimate for the excursion without even taking note along the way. The fuel cells should have been the first sign that something was amiss.

  Adam thought through his options. A rescue would be a slim chance as he’d need a train of luck to get Erin out to the moon with enough fuel to get them both home. There was no sense in going halfway. Something else had to give. He started cutting power to individual systems in the hope the equation would balance.

  Communications was an easy kill, as he could in theory give Draco only a few minutes’ heads up before arrival, but he’d need at least a few synchronized navigation points to make the flight at all. Adam then cut out the life support lines going to the equipment pod, assuming that he’d be able to survive the trip confined to the flight deck or his suit.

  It was a vicious cycle, Adam knew, to allow himself to lose control. If he grew afraid, he’d make mistakes, the equation would diverge, and he’d be stuck doing it over agai
n and piling new fear atop the old. He thought through the course of events once more and made a better guess for combining the pivoting of the lander with its liftoff rather than making them discrete operations.

  The math looked promising as he worked and the result did so as well. He’d arrive at Draco with one-point-three percent of the liquid hydrogen fuel remaining. Optimizing the trajectory a bit closer to the theoretical maximum netted him another half percent and Adam stopped at the conclusion. Survival was possible so he set to work.

  Pulling the smelter back into the heavy equipment pod was just as easy as extracting it earlier that day, but with the growing stress, Adam felt a line of sweat creep across his face. While he would have normally ignored the sensation easily, the fact that he wanted to push the feeling aside made the layer of stinging salt that much more irritating.

  On the flight deck and locked out from the trailing pod, having given in to the conclusion that it’d ice over with stale air before he hit Draco, Adam rehearsed the combination of controls for as long as he could spare in order to limit the idle time for the power generator. Once satisfied, he committed to the action and activated the navigation system followed by the primary engines, in a smooth movement opening the primary thruster behind him.

  The cabin rumbled as the craft slid forward and pitched upward, away from the tiny moon. It locked on the path to the station, and Adam cut the power as it hit his specified velocity. He released a deep breath along with the controls and again shut down all active systems across the flight deck to conserve the last of the fuel. By his latest estimation, it would take eighteen hours to make the trip. Adam leaned back, intent on conserving energy, as much as making the time pass.

  Every second of the flight was agonizing, surrounded by blank screens and the fear that he’d made a terrible mistake. At the ten-hour point, Adam chanced a look with the navigation system to confirm he was still within his specified flight path. There was no more than a second’s worth of a burn left to nudge the lander, and if he waited too long to make a correction, it wouldn’t be nearly enough.

  Two hours later, and with what he estimated a clear line of sight to the station, Adam activated the communication array. Without taking his hand from the control, he recorded the message. “Draco, it’s me. I’m a few hours out but at bingo fuel and won’t be able to stop. I’ll need you to catch me. Comms going off.”

  Back to waiting, he was.

  Condensation had formed on every surface around the deck and more had started within Adam’s mask. “So close,” he mumbled to himself, wishing to wipe the streaks that wrecked what was left of his vision. He blinked, focusing on his surroundings. It wasn’t just the droplets; his sight had begun to narrow. Carbon dioxide had built up to a dangerous level and time was short before he’d lose consciousness forever. Adam refused the thought.

  Without options, he activated life support and threw back his visor as the filters activated, gulping in the freezing air and what could be found for oxygen despite the cold. He watched the power meter slide down and killed the generator with one percent left in reserve to maneuver.

  Once there were minutes left, Adam chanced the navigation system one last time and set himself for a correction. He could see instantly the ship had strayed from the path, either via his fault or that of the environment, but there was only one way to correct it. Aiming for the station, he dropped the trigger for the maneuvering jets with the plan of simultaneously slowing him down, as well as correcting the vector. It went quick before sputtering and cutting off, leaving Adam alone and in the dark.

  He was out of tricks, Adam decided, and leaned against the front window, hoping to catch sight of the station. It was there, hanging in the distance like a shirt button suspended by an invisible thread—close yet still out of reach. He couldn’t adjust the flight anymore; if he missed the arm, he’d have to ditch the entire lander.

  At his forward vantage point, Adam tried to guess at the spacing. The pessimistic, followed by the realistic corners of his brain screamed that he was flying wide and would miss the station entirely. Or, that he was too close and would plow the craft clear through the nearest ring and doom the mission anyway. Adam’s head was pounding from the atmosphere and went for the airlock, unable to see through the condensation-soaked glass. There was a slim chance to save the orbiter.

  The floor of the pod could have been outside, for as cold and barren it felt as Adam floated toward the hatch. He cycled the mechanical latches and spun the outer lock away, leaving him looking square into deep space. Peering down the skin of the pod, Adam saw the base approach. Solutions converged and he was well beyond the reach of the capture arm; he’d have to jump.

  Adam planted his feet on the edge, trying to decide how to time a leap that would get him to the rings and not smash him against the hull like a rotten vegetable. He took a deep breath, braced his feet, and felt a colossal jolt.

  In front of the ship, Draco’s second lander had made positive contact and promptly blasted every maneuvering engine to slow the wayward craft. The deceleration threw Adam into the front of the airlock and he held tight to the side, lest he slide over the edge. His heart raced as the service arm swung by above his head and connected with the pod, bringing it to a stop beside the station.

  The docking bay’s airlock came into view around the spinning ring, with the outside hatch already open and decked with service lights on all sides. It was a ten-foot gap, and Adam made the jump, his eyes providing no more vision than if through a drink straw. He felt nothing, then the controls to the hatch, which he grabbed for and held on tight as the actuator pulled it closed, shutting him inside.

  The light of Draco’s docking bay was nothing short of angelic as the airlock cycled. Adam pawed at his visor, trying to get at the oxygenated air on the other side of the glass. It released and a wave of warmth flowed across his stinging face. He took a single step forward, basking in the glow, waiting for his vision to return along with feeling to his arms, but felt a growing numbness instead. “Oh. Gravity,” he mumbled as the last bit of blood remaining in his head was pulled away by the newfound earth-normal field. The last pinhole of light turned to black and Adam collapsed upon the deck.

  ***

  Consciousness forced its way back into Adam’s head some hours later. His first sensation was that of his head being held aloft, supported by a burning pressure on his throat. He opened his eyes to find the floor of the docking bay an inch from his eyes and the bottom seal of his helmet braced between it and his neck.

  “Welcome aboard, Captain.”

  “Nice to see you too,” Adam said, rolling onto his back.

  “Please explain to me why I needed to pull you off a dead lander after you nearly asphyxiated?”

  “Mission dictated. I had to run the smelter forever to get enough ore for the probe shields. That was some estimate of the draw you provided. Also needed to fire the forge to build some tools.”

  “I see,” Draco replied. “Why did you insist on running it off the lander’s generator? It’s a fraction as efficient as the hydrogen draw’s micro-fusion reactor.”

  “Pan is about as dense as aerogel. I’d have needed to fill the whole pod five times over to get what I just got in one trip.”

  “And it nearly killed you.”

  Adam flexed his fingers, relieved at the tactile feedback from his gloves, which had replaced the static numbness. “Agreed. I should have found another way to do it.”

  “Maybe next time start with harvesting closer pieces of the rings without the aid of gravity, until you can gauge the density of the rest.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Other than the obvious, how are you feeling?”

  “Sore and starving. It feels like my stomach is on fire.”

  “That I can better assist you with. Once you’ve recovered, you left a mess in the equipment pod that will need to be cleaned up before you can begin constructing the surface probe’s shield. I’ve also added a line to the technical
order reminding you to bring extra fuel before any future explorative missions.”

  “Thanks. You’re too kind,” Adam said, preparing himself to get to his feet and face the aftermath of his foolishness. “Whatever you do, don’t tell Dr. Moroder.”

  The Master

  The package was undoubtedly the ugliest science experiment to ever grace the stars: A sphere of low-grade iron nearly three feet across, covered with conformal sensors and antennas and protecting a small core of dedicated electronics pulled from the generalized frame of an orbital probe. Adam was nearly embarrassed of the sight of it sitting on the bench in the fabrication shop.

  His messy welds from the multi-caster had been smoothed over as best as he was able, but their scars and jittery lines were still evident. For the first time in a long while, there was nothing else to be done. “Last check; you’re saying it works?” he asked Draco.

  “That is correct. You are ready for deployment.”

  “Excellent. No sense putting this off any further,” Adam said, pulling a small bundle of test leads from inside the ball and placing the sealed lid in place. Here he was, on the far edge of space, building a diving bell by hand as if he was straight out of the nineteenth century. He had to laugh as he tightened down the fasteners mounted around the access cap. Once complete, he used a small valve to fill the assembly with distilled water from the moon to give it a fighting chance against the crushing pressure within the planet.

  He positioned the heavy probe near the external access port and locked it in place before making his way through the station, back to his command center. The model of Saturn’s internal structure was still illuminating the display in the way he had left it hours earlier, and he scanned across the image one more time.