by G. R. Cooper
“Wait,” said Eric, “you’re leaving? I’m going to keep hunting.”
“And if you find something, let us know,” Jordi said, walking toward the bridge exit.
“Yeah, dude. See you later. Rock on!” They left the bridge.
“What. The. Fuck?” Eric asked, exasperated. He couldn’t believe that they’d just leave like that. That they just wanted to be in at the kill. Sure, that was fun. But that was just a part of it. The hunt, the suspense of the hunt, was what gave the kill the sweetness, was what pushed the excitement levels. Americans just didn’t understand that, he thought, everything for them had to be instant gratification. They couldn’t see the payoff as being more satisfying if it was earned.
He looked to the sensor station, saw that Jordi’s process was running. He shifted to the weapon’s station. Gray Eagle hadn’t reloaded the missile bays, so Eric selected enough missiles from the ship’s store and started the loading process. That should take a couple of minutes. He then opened the mercantile page and ordered more missiles for the ship’s store. They’d be automatically loaded next time in port. He began to think.
What he really wanted, now that he had the hedgehog, was a really good absorbent cladding for the Westy. Then he could stake out the pirate hunting grounds much more closely without worrying about whether a lurking pirate would be scared away by a visual scan of the area. He could lay to within a few million kilometers and know within a few seconds of an attack by a pirate. Then he could jump in on the bastard before he’d even had time to loot the cargo ship. He began doing some mental calculations to determine when he could afford the purchase.
“Sir,” interrupted his executive officer, “we’re receiving a hail.”
“Open it,” said Eric distractedly. He smiled, then frowned when he saw who it was.
“What do you want, Taipan?”
“I just wanted to thank you,” Taipan said, “for avenging my shipment.”
“What?”
“That pirate you just killed. He attacked my cargo ship. He stole my CO2 delivery. I just wanted to thank you for blowing him out of the water, as it were.”
“I didn’t fucking do it for you,” Eric snarled.
“In any case,” said Taipan cheerfully, “I hope you continue make this system dangerous for pirates and safe for honest businessmen like myself.” He smiled, “One thing, though.”
“Yes,” growled Eric, impatiently, “What?”
“Before you shot him?”
Taipan paused.
“Get on with it,” Eric grated.
“Did he say ‘Please don’t shoot me’?”
Chapter 7
Duncan closed the connection between the Shepherd Moon and the HMS Westy. He smiled, ruefully.
“Why do I feel the need to taunt that asshole?” he asked himself. “Because he’s an asshole,” he answered himself truthfully.
“Clive,” he continued, “replace that shipment of dry ice.”
“Yes, sir. It’s slightly less expensive in India.”
“Go ahead,” laughed Duncan, “but it doesn’t really matter. That stuff is cheap.” He thought, “Then again, we’ll need a butt-load of it to terraform the third planet.”
“What should we name the planet?” he mused.
“As long as the name doesn’t violate the most strict profanity filter, you can name it whatever you like. Once. The name can’t be changed after the universal navigation maps are updated.”
Duncan looked at the unnamed rock floating in front of him. He laughed, “Maybe I should call you the ‘Westy sucks balls’.”
“That would come up against the filter, I’m afraid,” said Clive. “The name must conform with the ESRB and PEGI guidelines for child friendliness.”
“I was only joking,” said Duncan. But he wondered what he should name it. Once he began the improvement process, he would earn that right. “I’ll have to think about that,” he muttered.
The Shepherd Moon entered orbit around the third planet. A polar orbit. The planet, like the Earth, had a noticeable axial tilt. The Earth’s was around twenty-four degrees, this planet a few degrees less. Also Earth-like, the planet had ‘north’ and ‘south’ poles; likely resting places for frozen elements. Elements necessary for terraforming the planet.
“Clive, activate cloaking, please.” He didn’t want anyone to sneak up on him while he was busy with the search.
As he orbited, he began his scan of the poles. He found, beneath both poles, large deposits of frozen CO2. Dry ice. Mostly subterranean, but with a largish percentage above ground.
“Well,” he laughed, “I guess I can cancel that dry ice order.”
“Done,” said Clive.
“Thanks.” He continued scanning. The large amounts of dry ice on the planet opened other avenues of development for him. He brought up the game’s wiki page, the header page for terraforming.
The primary method used to create an atmosphere was to generate a large volume of greenhouse gasses. One of the ways that his terraforming kit could do that was to breed and seed large, unbelievably large, numbers of methanogens; microorganisms in the domain Archaea - the same domain as the chemolithotrophs happily living in his ship’s ore ‘smelter’. Like its cousin, the methanogen seemed intelligently designed just for human space exploration.
The methanogens, Methanothermobacter wolfeii, Methanosarcina barkeri - Duncan, his eyes glazing, skipped past the list of various species - consumed CO2 and excreted methane. They are anaerobic - that is they don’t require oxygen - they don’t require organic nutrients, and they don’t photosynthesize so they can live underground; they’re the ideal tool for unlocking the global warming potential of frozen CO2 at the poles by turning it into methane gas.
The terraforming kit, which Duncan would place near one of the poles as soon as he determined which had the greater ‘stash’ of dry ice, would breed the bacteria and, through drones, seed various areas around the poles with the carbon munching beasties.
Once the planet began to warm, the frozen CO2, both at the poles and spread in smaller quantities throughout the soil all over the planet, would sublimate - go from a solid directly into a gas - and increase the warming effect; carbon dioxide, like methane, was a greenhouse gas.
After the greenhouse gasses had raised the temperature of the planet, even by only a few degrees, the atmospheric pressure would increase, increasing the ‘efficiency’ of the greenhouse gas generation which would, in turn increase the atmospheric pressure. Those two processes would feed each other enough that Duncan could begin introducing other gasses.
Ammonia, for example, could probably be mined in sufficient quantities in the outer part of the system and brought to the planet. Another greenhouse gas, it was also mostly nitrogen in weight. The nitrogen would act as a ‘buffer gas’ in the burgeoning atmosphere, adding to the pressure of the system and acting to control the rate of combustion of oxygen.
Nitrogen was the most common element in the Earth’s atmosphere; it’s what kept the entire atmosphere’s supply of oxygen from being consumed in a single exothermic orgy every time a flame source was introduced. And adding oxygen was the next step after that in the terraformation process, so a buffer gas was a prerequisite.
Next the terraforming kit’s ecopoiesis modules would kick in. Small canisters containing extremophile photosynthetic algae and cyanobacteria would be seeded, as global conditions were met. These modules, solar powered biodomes, would settle on and drill themselves partway into the planet’s surface. The microbes would then feed on the local soil and elements and expel oxygen into the atmosphere. Part of Duncan’s responsibility would be to ensure that the kit was fed with the resources required to build the uncountable number of modules needed.
In addition to the smaller biodomes that the terraforming kit created and spread, Duncan could purchase larger, inhabitable, biodomes that would not only dramatically increase the oxygen output for his entire, planetwide, system, they would also attract the first c
olonists. In this case, mostly scientists who would increase the efficiency of the process at the cost of regular and, Duncan assumed, expensive resupply missions to provide food, water and whatever else the scientists-cum-colonists required.
Duncan opened the technology tree for the terraforming process. It was, in effect, just like any other RTS, or real time strategy, game. He had a cascading series of technical improvements he could build or buy, each with its own resource requirements. It was, though, huge. Much larger than any other RTS he’d played.
Everything he’d just read about was described in a large branching array as large as most games, and that was only the first step. He’d still have to see about seeding the soil with the nutrients required for life to propagate, then introduce enough liquid water into the system to feed it.
Those tech trees were near as deep as the first. And then, he saw, after all of that, he could look into adding flora and then fauna into the planet.
He’d be working on this with help from Phani and, he thought likely, his friend Jamie, a RTS connoisseur, for the next year. Once all of that was done, he could begin ‘playing’ the colonization RTS; which looked, if anything, even more complex, deep and, he thought, fun than the first game.
Duncan stood and began walking from the bridge. The return had come back - the north pole had, by a fair margin, the larger amount of dry ice. He walked through the exit.
“Destination?”
“Hangar.”
He had already transferred the terraforming kit from the hold on the Shepherd Moon to its shuttle, which he now entered. Sitting at the pilot’s station, he began the process of starting the shuttle’s engines.
He didn’t bother with charging the life support systems - since he was going to EVA on the planet anyway, he was already wearing his heavy armor and helmet. The suit had enough juice to keep him alive for days in the hostile atmosphere. Or ‘non-atmosphere’, he thought grimly. He would also be saved, this way, of the hassle of depressurising and repressurising the shuttle for his excursions on the planet.
The engines having been prodded to life, Duncan lifted the shuttle from the hangar bay floor.
“Open the pod bay doors, Hal,” he laughed. The Shepherd Moon’s hangar bay doors began to open. He nudged the throttle, sending the shuttle through the doors with a few feet to spare on either side. The doors began to close once he was clear.
“Time,” Duncan said to himself, “to begin seeding this genesis project!”
Chapter 8
Duncan focused on keeping the shuttle through the virtual representation of his course as he entered the minimal atmosphere. Four transparent planes, stretching into the distance toward the vanishing point of the landing site, passed from the top, bottom, and sides of his viewscreen as he guided the ship toward the planet.
As the ship descended, the buffeting, never that heavy, eased as he approached his chosen landing spot, on the southern edge of the north polar dry-ice cap. He could have let the autopilot control the ship; he even could have directed this entire operation to completion remotely from the bridge of the Shepherd Moon.
“No way,” said Duncan to himself, “this is too damn much fun.”
He flared the shuttle, at the last second, as it reached the surface. The heat from his engine sublimated a patch of frozen CO2 underneath the shuttle, enveloping him in a thick ephemeral cloud. He shut down the engines, then exited the cockpit for the shuttle’s cargo hold.
He moved past the low, tracked terraforming kit. It looked, Duncan thought, a bit like a Mars rover from his youth. It would wheel itself, once Duncan opened the cargo bay door, out onto the surface of the planet to the point that he’d designated as the source for his planned planetary transformation.
Duncan reached the shuttle door controls, made sure he was cleared to the side, and pressed the button. The door, hinged at the top, lifted from the bottom. As it rotated up, Duncan took his first unrestricted look at the planet’s surface.
A short stretch of reddish, probably iron-rust impregnated, soil stretched to the near edge of the ice sheet. Duncan had chosen this location for several reasons; the obvious being the proximity to the dry ice it needed. The second reason was that it was currently ‘winter’ in the northern hemisphere of the planet, so the ice sheet was likely at its furthest reaches. He wasn’t worried so much about the ice sheet receding in summer, leaving it further from the terraforming station, as he would have been that placing near the southern sheet, currently in summer and probably contracted, would expand during the cold months, enveloping the station in ice.
He had no reason to believe that the station would be harmed by being encased in an encroaching ice sheet - for all he knew that wouldn’t be a problem. But he didn’t want to risk it.
“Hell,” he said to himself, rethinking the placement decision process for at least the tenth time, “I don’t even know if dry-ice sheets expand and contract the way the Earth’s water glaciers do.” It might not be a problem, but it wasn’t a decision he felt comfortable gambling a five million credit piece of machinery on.
Duncan followed the robot as it left the shuttle, slowly moving forward on its four ‘wheels’; each wheel was really three bogey wheels, a triangle spread with two on the ground and one centered above them, encircled by a studded track. The four wheels, independently suspended, made easy work of the regolith and small rocks that peppered the ground. As Duncan trailed, he looked around, taking advantage of the view offered through his perfectly clear helmet.
The vista, in all directions, went clearly to the horizon; there was little in the way of atmospheric gasses to dim the view. It gave the scene an oddly two dimensional, layered paper cutout, effect. Since this planet’s axis angle wasn’t as large as on the Earth, the sun managed to creep above the horizon for a few hours of daylight in this arctic winter. The light threw stark shadows on a mountain range to the south. He couldn’t tell how far away they were; they were either fairly close and small, or a range of Himalayas in the distance.
After a hundred meters, the robot stopped. It seemed to pause for a few seconds, then settle, as if finally resting, onto the ground. The left front and right rear wheels then rotated ninety degrees, and all four wheels began dragging sheets of solar cells outward. About ten meters in length, these sheets, once pulled into place, were thrust upward from below until they raised and rotated to face the sunlight. Each sheet was made up of meter square cells, and each cell was able to raise and rotate separately from the rest.
“Shit,” said Duncan, “that’s something I didn’t consider. Will it get enough sunlight at the poles to operate?”
“Yes sir,” answered the ever vigilant Clive, “they should be able to generate enough power to operate for at least seventy-five percent of each winter night. They will operate one hundred percent of the time during the other three seasons.”
“Thanks,” said Duncan, relieved. The station now looked like a large cross, twenty meters across. In the center, the heart of the station would breed and distribute, through its integrated drones, the microbe workers. As the terraformation process moved through its various phases, the station would inform Duncan of any resource requirements, including schedules for delivery. Eventually, this installation would look like a robot village, as it built and distributed the new modules. All in all, though, the process of establish this base, Duncan felt, was pretty anticlimactic.
“Still, it’s pretty damn cool,” he said as he looked at the cross shape that would transform this planet. He thought for a second, “Clive, please register this planet as ‘Shepherd’s Cross’.”
He smiled, returning to the shuttle.
The shuttle rendezvoused with the Shepherd Moon; at least where the shuttle instruments said the ship was. Duncan had turned off the option allowing him to see through his own ship’s cloaking as he felt somehow more comfortable seeing the ship how others would. Seeing that the cladding and cloaking was working both removed any doubt of their efficacy as well as re
minded him when they were not on.
“Clive,” he said over the radio, “please open the hangar doors.”
As though apparating out of nothing, a vertical line of light appeared in the dark starry sky. As the two doors spread apart, light shone out of the interior of the Shepherd Moon landing bay.
The doors open, it looked to Duncan like he was leaving a dark star-sprinkled room to enter one flooded with light. He nudged the shuttle forward, bringing it into a landing. As he cleared them, the hangar doors closed. Nozzles spread around the room at floor level began to hiss gas as the life-support system brought the room back up to livable standards.
He shut down the engines and pushed back his helmet faceplate. The noises of the ship, muted by the helmet, were now sharpened, louder. He finished with the shuttle and left through the door on the port side of the cockpit, through the hangar and then onto the bridge.
Duncan sat in the captain’s chair and brought up the helm and navigation controls; he was having too much fun to foist off the piloting of the ship onto the AI. He raised the throttles, brought the Shepherd Moon out of orbit. Still accelerating, he set a course for deeper space, outside of the Shepherd’s Cross gravity well.
“Shepherd’s Cross,” he laughed, “I’m starting to sense a theme.” He didn’t know why he’d chosen the name. It had just come to him as he’d seen the terraforming station unfold into the large cross. It was one of those serendipitous moments that somehow just felt ‘right’.
He moved to the navigation map, bringing up a list of predefined jump points for the station.
“The station,” he said to himself. “I can’t always just refer to it as ‘the station’.” He turned his head to look at his AI.
“Clive, name the station ‘Shepherd’s Crook’, please.”
The AI nodded. Duncan instantly felt a bit of regret. “It’s a stupid name,” he muttered, “but that doesn’t matter. Only Phani and I will ever know it.”