by Marti Ward
Under the protocol, three message drones had been concurrently packed, redundantly, with blood and tissue samples as Al collected them during his assigned medical tests and biological experiments. As always, the scientists back in Sol liked to have actual samples, and were reluctant to trust the remote analyses if there was any opportunity to verify them locally. Two of the three drones had been kept in an EmProbe with a deadman self-launch protocol in case something happened to Casindra, or it failed to receive two regular updates. It would normally hang around for 2 hours scanning for survivors and clues to what went wrong, then set course for the Gate. But now he had sent that EmProbe to the Gate anyway, denoted EMP-G, so that there would be message drones at the Gate when he was due to send the next message, even in the absence of any incoming drone.
The protocol was that Casindra’s next message drone was to be dispatched within two weeks of receipt of a message from Ida, or otherwise within 12 to 14 weeks of their previous message to Ida – that way his twelve M-drones should last the entire 48 month extended mission timeframe even without receiving any back (except that the protocol had been overridden at the last minute and two were used in the wormhole to test their latest and evidently not greatest modifications). EMP-G would fast track three message drones back to PTL5 within four weeks (two MDs with samples, one empty).
Sideris and Al had decided the gate probe EMP-G would then stay at PTL4 and act as a gate relay station – it would receive their daily log updates and upload them into the drones, which could then be sent through the wormhole on command, within an hour for most positions in the inner system… or, again, on a deadman’s schedule if it failed to receive two scheduled updates from Casindra. The aim of course was for it to relay reports and analyses radioed through during their exploration of the Goldilocks planets, with the physical samples expected to follow in due course.
They had three remaining EmProbes: two were loaded with Volcans carrying robot miners for Petra and on their return would be retasked for Ardesco and New Eden; the third was loaded with two Volcans and an M-drone and designated for Tenebra. The general idea was that these EMPs would eventually return with samples to the Gate and then either return to their designated planet or Lagrangian, or be available for allocation to other tasks.
Ideally there should always be an EmProbe and a couple of M-drones in the vicinity of the PTL4 gate array, as well as an EMP at the other stable Lagrangian at PTL5 for relay use when PTL4 was eclipsed with respect to Casindra. But at the moment, Sideris was willing to commit just the one for the whole Tenebra orbit – he really wanted to keep an EmProbe with him at all times, which was one more reason he was reluctant to send two EMPs off to Petra without Casindra.
Sideris wasn’t sure if Solar Command realized this, but based on his reading it should be possible to use a mirror on Casindra, or a second EmProbe, to send the M-drone directly to SJL4 by a slow wormhole – it would take 11 months gating with the LETO mirror, or 44 months with a second EMP mirror, as effective speed was directly proportional to the diameter of both the onboard mirror and the gating mirror. In an emergency, the EmProbe could potentially carry the M-drone and the basketball-court sized gym home to SJR-5 – that would only work if he could install a cryounit down there… The so-called escape pod was designed to keep him alive in space for at most a day or two, and then to protect him as he crash landed back onto Earth. It was not designed to allow him to survive months or years in the deadly cold of space or the absolute cold of the cavum.
The three message drones on EMP-G would keep them in their scheduled contact for another year – but hopefully well before then, MDs would be coming back regularly with news. Otherwise, he’d have to divert another EmProbe from its planetary duties.
Al wasn’t particularly concerned about the wormhole and the communications – he agreed that it was likely just them running late with the gate upgrade. But somehow Sideris couldn’t help assigning him human attributes and thinking that he was a bit too involved with his own experiments to care. Al was investigating whether there was any effect of the acceleration changes on his experimental subjects.
Since dispatching EMP-G, the gravitational vectors were a little different, as they sped up from near Praelium’s orbit to dive down to Tenebra. Sideris had noticed that the cats did notice the jerks as the acceleration switched in or out, positive or negative. But he had also seen some behavioral change. While accelerating, they tended to sleep against the aft bulkhead of their cabin, but now they were decelerating the cats were sleeping up against the cryoelectronics rack. Al’s comment was that they should also consider whether this is because it is on the forward side of the compartment, or because it is warmer – which was not clear as they had made the change to a seasonal cycle around the same time as they commenced acceleration.
The other interesting change related to the cats mating behavior, and that did seem to confirm Al’s theory – they’d been through gravitational shifts several times before, so it appeared they had successfully created mating season.
Chapter Four
Tenebra bypass
Sideris
31 January 2076 06:00
Yet another message probe was overdue – maybe one failed to navigate the wormhole, but two?
Sideris realized that he was making decisions that affected the whole future of Mankind – Earthkind even – just on the basis of some reports from a handful of dumb unmanned probes, and in the absence of regular contact with Solar Command. Sure the unmanned probes had had AI on board, but nothing as sophisticated as Al, nothing that understood the implications behind the exploration. After all, the first of the secret Paradisi probes were sent fifty years ago, and even the most recent had been sent over a decade ago: they took up to ten years to navigate to their specified planet, do their surveys, and return to the Gate; they could navigate using basic transfer orbits, record sensor data from orbit, and dispatch message drones through the Gate, and that was about it.
All too quickly, New Eden had been named, and awarded all the attributes of paradise – based on little more than the fact that the planet was the right size and lay right in the middle of a Goldilocks zone. Lack of information and exploration, combined with plenty of desperation, self-preservation and self-aggrandizement… not a pretty combination.
Tenebra had been dismissed as unsuitable for human habitation and unsuitable for mining – due to the unfriendly environment as much as the economics of getting minerals back and forwards to New Eden. Nonetheless they already knew that its atmosphere had high quantities of methane and sulfur dioxide, as well as copious water vapor, a high load of carbon dioxide, and some free oxygen – and just as they did on Mars 50 years ago, they could easily set up Sabatier process fuel factories to convert water and carbon dioxide into methane and oxygen. Methane was one of the best chemical fuels, and with oxygen as well, chemical rockets could provide clean atmospheric thrusters as well as being able to achieve fairly cheap delta-V’s on and off transfer elliptics to and from New Eden. Even if there wasn’t much there worth mining, it did provide a reasonably cheap refueling station – if he hadn’t been tasked with upgrading the mirror as his top priority, he could just as easily have come straight here.
The PTL4 mirror was only needed for opening a wormhole back to Earth, not for exiting the cavum, and its stable location was part of a long term program to build up the mirror. The upgrade wasn’t of much advantage for his own mission, he’d have preferred to have set up the new mirror wherever he liked at any time he wanted to zip back to Sol – but now he couldn’t go home without making a long trip to the middle of nowhere. And radioing to the Gate was not going to be an option much longer with two failing to return. He was really getting quite uncomfortable at the idea that there were only two message drones left at the Gate, and he’d soon have to send one of them back to disappear in to the void – whether it was an astronomic void or a bureaucratic void he couldn’t really say, but he was beginning to suspect the latter, which was after
all far more vacuous…
Well I guess that’s why they have a human commander on the spot.
One thing he wasn’t concerned about was whether they approved of his modifications to the mission schedule. He was confident that they were changes for the better, and without new orders he couldn’t be accused of violating them, could he?
He’d ended up tasking Al with sending an EmProbe to Tenebra shortly after the one to the Gate – an advance party consisting of a couple of Volcans and an M-drone. That meant they would now have two EMPs in Tenebra’s orbit, making it harder to get cut off from the Gate due to eclipsing by the sun or the other planets. The two Volcans would explore the volcanos that peppered both hemispheres. The reports on their atmospheric passes were starting to come in, as they spiraled around the globe side-slipping off delta-V and height in S-turn banking maneuvers. One was concentrating on the northern hemisphere, and the other the southern. So far nothing unexpected, but the interesting finds will come when they take their dips into the lava.
The Volcans will also look carefully at hot springs – the lava can leach precious metals, including gold, silver and mercury, from the surrounding rocks, and these minerals can in turn accumulate in the heating waters that become geysers and springs. He wasn’t sure if or how long Casindra should stay in orbit there – it depended how long it took the Volcans to find anything worth mining. It didn’t really seem the kind of nature reserve he should head to the surface to explore.
Al
1 February 2076 05:00
Al was having fun! The dictionary wasn’t particularly helpful, but that seemed to be the word for the pleasure, the new learning experiences, the unexpected opportunities, the challenges, the successes, the discoveries…
He was glad the Captain had encouraged him to deviate via Petra and take personal command of the Volcans that were exploring Tenebra and would seed Petra. The Volcans had taken diving scoops of water from Tenebra’s equatorial ocean, and sent back their preliminary analyses. They’d gone on to the hot springs on the tropical land masses, and in both hemispheres had discovered unexpected constituents.
They’d found much higher concentrations of fluorides and bromides, and generally higher acidity, in the oceans than on Earth, and also much higher concentrations of platinum. The springs suggested viable concentrations of silver, copper, gold and platinum, and interestingly they showed signs of bacteria-like life that was resistant to the bactericidal properties of these metals, as well as actively decomposing the acidic sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and carbon dioxide in the presence of methane.
This raised several interesting possibilities – they could cultivate these bacteria to break down the poisonous corrosive atmosphere naturally, they could use them to generate biofuel, and if they could understand the genetics involved, there might even be the possibility of engineering mammalian lifeforms that could breathe the atmosphere, either through direct incorporation of relevant genes, or through some sort of symbiotic involvement of the te-bacteria – as he had designated them.
The moment was here to test the Volcans in the volcanoes they were named for. The northern drone would take the first dive. The combination of heat shielding and nanosilc would allow taking a scoop of magma from inside the cone of the largest volcano, high in the arctic region. He’d programmed the nanosilc for magnetic containment while the sample slowly cooled in a vacuum chamber – a large component was iron and nickel, each metal being sieved off one by one through a dynamic diamond nanotube mesh.
A surprising find was the granite and pegmatite-like composition of the lava, and the relative abundance of lithium and beryllium. There was a good chance they’d find emeralds in the northern continent.
While the analysis was completing, he continued control of the second Volcan and performed a similar scoop in the major volcano of the southern hemisphere.
That left some pragmatic questions. Should Casindra enter orbit? Should the orbiting EmProbe pick up the two Volcans and their samples, and rendezvous with the Casindra? Or should they do a flypast and leave them behind to relay information back to the Gate? Or should they recall the EmProbe on its own? Al was intrigued by the way the Captain had not tried to find a solution that optimized either time or fuel, or even some kind of Pareto tradeoff of the variables. Instead he optimized something he called flexibility, which itself seemed to involve some kind of maximization of diversity. The Captain had found a region of the solution space that had many solutions that were no more than a factor of two from optimal in time and fuel, but allowed many variants that had them spending different times at the different planets – including none, their orders to the contrary notwithstanding.
The plan that they’d logged took almost three and a half years to complete with at least two weeks for each planet, and a lot more for some. But without doubling the fuel costs, there were strategies that could reduce it to under three years, or increase it to four years, and within this range it was possible to change the order of some planets or increase the amount of time they spent at others. This definition of flexibility clearly related to a secondary definition in his dictionary, ‘the ability to be easily modified’, but also to a third, ‘willingness to change or compromise’, while in a sense still fitting the one marked literal: ‘capable of bending’ their trajectory through time and space ‘without breaking’ the rules or their mission brief. Al was impressed!
But it did now mean that every time they reached a critical point they would have to revisit their decision – see if they wanted to exploit the flexibility by moving into an alternate plan and deviating from their logged course. And the first such point was Tenebra…
The original plan to enter orbit would get more and more difficult and expensive if they delayed the nudge into an appropriate elliptic. Al had scheduled the approach to Tenebra for the start of the Captain’s shift, and had noted that at that point they had the option either to slingshot past Tenebra towards Petra or to enter orbit. The Casindra was already accelerating up again towards what could either be orbital velocity or a weak elliptic slingshot that would catch up with Petra much faster than waiting for Tenebra to do so. Missing that opportunity would add a couple of months or a great deal of additional thorium burn.
This was a tradeoff of fuel against mission objectives – and it all came down to whether the LETO in orbit could be expected to provide significant value for fuel versus the information already gathered by the EmProbe and its Volcans. This in turn all came down to how well he, Al, had managed to deploy the Volcans in the time available…
Sideris
2 February 2076 05:30
Captain Sideris was already awake when the alarm started to play its gentle wakening theme, and he breathed in the smell of hot coffee, bacon and eggs that accompanied it.
Al would have been working through the night, nursemaiding his drones, and had considerately scheduled the Tenebra approach for the morning shift.
As he had his breakfast, he reviewed the reports from the Volcans – he wondered if Al knew he was doing that, how much did Al’s consciousness know about the subsumed and peripheral processing? Probably not a lot… It would be interesting to see!
The main advantage of going into orbit was they had the opportunity to provide extra resources for the collection and analysis of samples – and of course they had an unfathomably more powerful AI to run the mission than the little brother Al had on the EmProbe.
Originally Sideris was intending to spend a couple of weeks orbiting Tenebra, but the opportunity for a slingshot around Tenebra would save them months, or a ton of fuel. Well, a quarter of a tonne – this excursion to Petra would be the most expensive part of the trip by far without this slingshot maneuver. What was more important? Doing a few more orbits and getting more same old same old data from the Volcans?
They had already established that there was enough here to warrant a mining outpost, not to mention strategic opportunities in relation to the availability of fuel and the convenience
of the Tenebra Lagrangians for stockpiling minerals from Petra.
Petra was for some people the most important part of the mission – getting those robotic miners to work, mining and propagating and stockpiling was the key to establishing an industrial base in the system. And Ganesh certainly had a vested interest here and was keen that it had close human oversight.
Reading between the lines of the many reports he’d waded through over the past few months, most of the Founders seemed to put more store on maintaining their technological base and standard of living than understanding anything of the environment and ecology of the planets – and were confident that they already had enough information to solve whatever problems they found on any of the three Goldilocks planets. This was in no way a scientific endeavor. For them the issue was resources… time and resources…
A minority did argue that as New Eden was their new home, they needed much more information now about exactly how humans would fit in there. The first group felt that whatever ecosystem was there didn’t really matter, as they would have to disrupt it irrevocably anyway. The minority kept reminding them of their aim not to repeat the mistakes of the past – and this most definitely included the destruction of Earth, a downward spiral that had accelerated as Earth’s ecosystem had degraded.
And it was the majority that had sent an aeronautical engineer rather than an ecologist… or a mining engineer for that matter!
Sideris headed right to Vetbay A rather than directly onto the bridge – a habit he was sure Al was aware of. The cats were stalking around in front of the door waiting for him – not that they needed anything but his company: their food and water dishes were still half full after their morning replenishment. The calico, Simba, entwined around him from the front, while the male, Samba rubbed across the back of his legs, encouraging him further into the lab, closer to their cryobed.