Heart of the Comet

by MadMaxAU

Lani laughed, but finished with a sniff and a shake of her head. Virginia reached out delicately with one manipulator arm and touched the spacesuit’s insulated sleeve. The other woman nodded and they moved pack tent under the stars to fetch the last crate.

  They had tugged the hulking container halfway back to the airlock structure when a light fanned forth from the lift doors following a spurting ivory cloud of released gas.

  A tall, bulky, spacesuited figure emerged. Virginia recognise Carl Osborn from his languid, graceful movement along the guide cable even before she could make out the name-chop on his suit’s tabard.

  —Hello, Carl, —Lani sent.

  “Right on time, I see,” Virginia added.

  Carl stopped abruptly.

  —Virginia! Are you up here? Well, well, just couldn’t keep away from me, could you? —

  He bowed to her mech. —Nice day for a stroll on the surface. You should tell me, next time you plan to come up. —

  At last Carl turned and nodded to his teammate.

  —Hi, Lani. Careful with that end, it’s drooping. —

  —Oh. Sorry, Carl. I’ll get it. —

  Actually, Carl should have addressed the living person before speaking to the one who was present only in waldo. Lani Nguyen’s helmet had opaqued under the bright glare of the sun, so Virginia could not make out the girl’s reaction. But she had her suspicions.

  “I’ll leave you here with Heaven’s Gift to spacedrift women, Lani,” Virginia sent. “I’m sure he’s capable of doing good work, if watched carefully.”

  Carl’s back was to the sun, so his faceplate was clear. Virginia saw him blink and hurry to speak.

  —Why don’t you come along, Virginia? We’ve been running into some interesting sintered and recrystallized formations as we dig deeper into the core. They’re unlike anything we’ve encountered until now. —

  Virginia had to admit that, even as she found them overeager and embarrassing, Carl’s attentions nonetheless pleased her. The man was so damned attractive . . . in the movie hero sort of way.

  If that type of hero had been what she was looking for . . . but no, it wasn’t. Not in this life. Not right now.

  She made the mech execute an imitation of a curtsy. “That sounds exciting, Carl. I’ll inform Saul Lintz. He and Joao Quiverian are the cometologists on duty, this watch. I’m sure they’ll be eager to see your pix and get your samples.”

  Carl frowned sourly. That obviously wasn’t what he’d had in mind.

  “See you around, Carl. Good luck, Lani.”

  She engaged the release procedure, allowing the mech’s onboard systems to take over as her own teleoperated presence flowed back into the deeply buried laboratory where her body lay. The images faded, but before they departed completely and the lights came on, she saw that Carl still watched “her” . . . and Lani Nguyen watched Carl.

  CARL

  Their torches were blue blades of light cutting the seething fog.

  “Hold steady. It’ll clear in a minute,” Carl sent.

  Lani Nguyen sank a spike into a crusty chunk of water ice for stability. —What an eruption! It must have been bottled up in there a billion years.—

  They had been finishing off a fresh tunnel. Mechs had done the initial work a week before, roughing it out, but it was better for humans to do the mop-up; mechs had an odd way of leaving dangerous knife-edged ruts.

  The two of them had been using their lasers on low fan mode, trimming and scouring away jutting ice. The occasional boulder they had to chip around, or boil loose with lasers on tightbeam. Then they would nudge it back to the nearest tunnel intersection, where a mech would add it to the dumpster.

  Lani had been prying at a chair-sized rock when Carl said laconically, “Remember Umolanda.” She had nodded, moving carefully, tugging—and suddenly it had sprung free, under pressure from behind. Pearly fog spurted forth.

  Lani fruitlessly fanned at the vapor. —You figure it’s another aluminum-melt vault?

  So far the expedition had found fourteen pockets, each containing vapor and even a little liquid. Carl peered through the hole.

  A bubbling pool simmered at the bottom of a wide, spherical room. Fog rose from it in gouts and gusts. Multicolored steam still poured out frothing. “Damn! Looks like soup’s on.”

  Lani frowned prettily. —Primordial soup, yeah. Lintz and Malenkov are all ga-ga over it. —

  “Keeps em out of, our hair”

  —I’ll bet Quiverian’s having nightmares over those two finding all sorts of juicy stuff about his comet. —

  As he watched, she brushed at a splotch of gooey purple on her sleeve. —Eccch. God knows what this stuff is. —

  Carl grinned. Lani preferred the austere simplicity of space work, the Newtonian mechanics of straight lines and known vectors; of sun-scoured steel and bare, clean surfaces. Not the murk and splatter of tunnel work.

  “Isn’t it wonderful, what creation can do with just a few simple molecules?” He kept a poker face. He had been feeling a bit odd ever since meeting Virginia’s mech on the surface hours ago. The mech and Lani had seemed engrossed in a heart-to-heart and had clammed up right away on his arrival. Maybe he could tease Lani into telling him what was bothering Virginia.

  —It’s not funny, Carl. This gunk could get into a joint, stiffen it up. —

  “It’ll evaporate.”

  —Yeah? So how come it didn’t boil away four billion years back? —

  “It’s been under pressure.”

  —But everything must’ve frozen down after the early days. —

  “Probably. This was just a flying iceberg for billions of years, out beyond Neptune. But back when the solar nebula condensed there was a lot of aluminum 26 in Halley; Chem Section reported finding the decay products, remember?”

  —Oh yeah, residue from the same supernova that triggered formation of the solar system. —

  “So they say. Anyway, that aluminum-isotope decay melted these chambers. Might’ve kept things percolating long enough to cook up those exotic chemicals and prelife forms Lintz found. I dunno.”

  Lani widened the opening with a pick. —Then when Halley got bumped into its present orbit, the sun warmed up these hot spots again? Waves of heat every perihelion summer? —

  Carl shrugged. “Must’ve.” He couldn’t think of a way to maneuver this conversation over to Virginia’s secrets.

  —Last year’s heat from the sun—that must still be seeping down through the ice, adding just enough to keep these local hot spots liquid. —

  “Right. Malenkov and Vidor measured the temperature wave.”

  The fountain sputtered, died. Cottony clouds swirled, thinned, escaped down the corridor behind them and into the oblivion of space.

  “Let’s have a look.” Carl knocked a last rock out of the way and wriggled into the chamber beyond. He fanned his torch around—and gasped.

  Crystalline facets sprouted everywhere. Points gleamed ruby red, emerald, burnt orange. Wherever he turned his helmet lamps, refracted light came back in brilliant splinters.

  —A crystal palace, — Lani said softly as she followed. —How lovely. —

  “The colors!”

  —Concentrations of metals? Magnesium? Platinum nodules? Cobalt? The pinks, the purples! —

  “Here, take some pictures. Our suit heat alone might melt it.”

  —Think so? — Lani handed him her torch and moved away, unhooking her camera. —Look, I can see images of myself in the big crystals. They must be a meter across easy. —

  Carl picked his way gingerly, walking lightly on his toes. The peaked pyramids of delicate arsene blue looked particularly dangerous. They worked in skinsuits, thin and flexible enough for difficult jobs, derived from the same woven chain molecules as the corridor liner. Still, a really sharp edge could slice through.

  Carl peered ahead, squinting against the rainbow ribbons of light that seemed to focus on him. He remembered an optics problem from Caltech, over a decade ago. If you wer
e inside a reflecting sphere, what would you see? How many images? The natural impulse was to start adding up reflections of reflections of reflections, ad infinitum. The true answer was that you’d see only one image.

  Not here, though. Every refraction fed others, giving a myriad swarm of tiny technicolored Carls. They moved as he did, insects of every color hovering in a cloud beyond reach.

  Dizzying. Thousands of Lanis, each earnestly working a camera. Between them was a dark spot. He gave a small push and glided over to it.

  “Hey. Some kind of fracture here.”

  —Careful of these sharp ones, Carl. —

  “Yeah.”

  He flipped slowly and brought his head down into the hole. “Looks like it goes on.”

  —Very far? —

  “Dunno. Some runny brown stuff back in there. Looks wet.”

  —Yuk. Leave it for the bio boys. —

  “Check.” He righted himself. drifting lazily over a glinting field of steepled crystals. “Hey, it’s lunchtime.”

  —Let’s eat here. —

  “Could get good hot chow back at sleep-slot one “

  She grimaced. —And unsuit just to get inside? Roast pheasant with chestnut sauce wouldn’t be worth having to wipe up this mess an extra time. —

  They tethered from the nominal ceiling and broke out food tubes. “Even self-heated, this stuff is pretty bad,” Carl grumbled.

  —It’s worth it to me, just to be away from the others. —

  “Yeah, know what you mean.”

  Their ration was stored in their backpacks, heated there and available by sucking on a tube that emerged near the chin. Eating was not an elegant process. Lani had a curious natural daintiness that made her turn away for each gulp of the light, aromatic broth. She floated with her arms and knees tucked in gracefully, an economical cross-limbed Asian sitting posture, more elegant than the usual spacers crouch. Carl smiled. She was a hard worker, lean and lithe, with steady, remorseless energy.

  —I enjoy getting off by ourselves. —

  “Uh-huh.”

  —Particularly in such a lovely, well . . . jeweled palace. —

  “Right. Damn pretty.” Carl wondered vaguely about Virginia.

  —Do we have to tell anyone about it? —

  “Huh?”

  —Couldn’t it be a place . . . just for us? —

  “Uh, why?”

  —To get away. We could come here and bask in the light and, well, have time to talk. —

  Carl didn’t feel comfortable with this turn of the conversation. “Look, somebody’d find it fast enough. I mean, we’d have to leave a port exit in the insulation, to get back in here ourselves.”

  —Not if we disguised it some way. —

  Carl struggled for a reply, some technical reason why it wouldn’t work. “You mean, mark it as a pressure hatch? Something like that?”

  —I suppose so. — She studied him intently but said no more.

  After a long pause Carl spoke again. “Somebody’d notice. It’d be just like Samuelson to come by, check on us. Pop the seal and make the discovery for himself.”

  —You think so? —

  “Sure, he’s a straitlaced, um, type.” He had barely stopped himself from saying a straitlaced, by-the-book Ortho. Lani was an Ortho, too, but one of the good ones.

  —I suppose we should report it to Planetary. —

  “Yeah, Quiverian’ll blow his buttons.”

  —Still . . . I would like to have, you know, a retreat. —

  “Plenty of volume in Halley—almost three hundred cubic kilometers.” He couldn’t imagine wanting to spend time sitting in an ice-walled hole, even if it did get you away from the rest of the dozen people in the First Watch. Better to go outside if you wanted that. Have the whole solar system to look at.

  —Well, perhaps later, then. We could do it all ourselves, without the mechs. — Lani looked at him with a doelike, expectant gaze. Carl glanced away nervously.

  “I dunno. Might have to insulate it.”

  Unless he could steer the talk to Virginia, he wanted to deflect conversation away from personal things, to keep their relationship friendly but strictly professional. He started talking about the insulation problem, how much worse it was here than on Encke.

  Humans liked temperatures around three hundred degrees Absolute, but some of the frozen gases boiled away in a furious phase transformation around a hundred degrees. Even a casual brush from a skinsuit would bring an answering puff of gas. Maintaining that two-hundred-degree differential had meant developing flexible, layered insulators. The merest breath of air would evaporate the very walls from an uninsulated chamber.

  There would always be some boiloff, so the tunnel system had to let the vapor escape toward the surface, where it vented to free space. At the same time, controlled harvesting of the ice was the key to the expedition’s success. The biosphere needed a flux of water, gases, even the metals and grit contaminating the comet. So some of the boiloff was recovered, filtered to keep the cyanide level down, and cycled back into the habitats.

  Without a virtually labor-free system to supply fluids and gases, there would have to be more people awake and working. That, in turn, would put more demand on the biomatrix, which drove a spiral of costs. This was the fundamental reason why living inside Halley Core was essential. As usual, profit and loss had the final say.

  Keeping locks and ports from leaking heat to the nearby ice was tricky, tedious labor that Carl disliked. He belabored this point for several minutes, not because he liked to gripe, but because he couldn’t think of any other way to keep control of the conversation. At last he wound down. There was a long, uncomfortable silence.

  —I was hoping we could find some time alone together, —Lani said simply, though she blinked several times.

  “I . . . yeah, I got that.”

  —You have felt it? —

  “Well . . “

  —I have known you three years now. Long enough to learn how special you are. — Her eyes were large, black, and as deep as a pool. She was being direct and clear and it obviously took an effort of will not to look away. He could see that she had rehearsed this.

  “There . . . there isn’t anything so great about me. I like space work. It’s my life, same as you.”

  —We have much in common. —

  “Yes, we do.”

  —In the long times we will spend on watch together perhaps…—Her gaze faltered.

  “Look, I think a great deal of you, Lani.”

  —I am happy of that. — But her face had lost its pensive, focused look. Her certainty was fading. And there isn’t a dammed thing I can do about it, he thought. There’s no way I can give her the answer she wants.

  “But, I mean, I don’t . . . really . . . think of you that way.”

  She stiffened. —Oh. —

  She isn’t any better at talk like this than I am. She misses my hints. So I have to say it straight out and that hurts her. Damn! “You’re . . . a great teammate, sure as hell you are.”

  Her long eyelashes batted several times. The thin, broad mouth twisted ruefully. —Thank you. —

  “God, I don’t mean to . . . to brush you off or anything.”

  —There is no need to be concerned. You are speaking the truth, as you must. —

  “You really are attractive, too, I don’t mean anything like that.”

  Now that he thought about it, she was quite good-looking. Serving a sixteen-month watch, she’s thinking about pairing off. They all would be. Still, he simply had not thought of her as more than a co-worker. Why?

  Somehow, she simply wasn’t his type. No instant attraction, no zip.

  Or was that a habit he had picked up—rejecting nearly all women if he didn’t get a buzz off them immediately? Carl avoided Lani’s gaze, took a draw on his feed tube. Even on his Earthside holidays, he had always been careful to keep affairs sharply defined. Groundlings liked the pizzazz of space; there were plenty of groupies. It was easy
to let them know he was interested in two weeks of sex and laughs and fun in the sun, period. Sometimes he’d been tempted to keep a woman’s number, give her a ring next time he was down . . . but once back in orbit cool ambition ruled. He never called.

  Opportunity favored the prepared mind, as the old cliché had it, but opportunity in space also favored the uncommitted soul. If a long mission came around, those with family ties found it hard to go. And the Psychological Review Board took that into account, lowered your rating. They claimed otherwise, but everybody knew the truth. All that went into his calculations. And sure enough, the big chance—Halley—had come around, vindicating his strategy.

  Then too, Lani was an Ortho. Likes should marry likes.

  Virginia, now, she was smart, sexy, and a Percell. Plenty of zip there. Best to stick to your own kind. Except for holidays Earthside, he had followed that policy ever since his teenage randiness wore off and he had time to actually think. There were enough Percell women in space to keep him occupied.

  As much as he tried to take a middle ground in the Ortho-Percell conflict, his personal life was something else. And while it was smart for a Percell to maintain that everybody was the same, that didn’t mean you could ignore human nature. He was sure that even after the stupidity of the Ortho governments Earthside had run its course, the human race would eventually have to split. The Orthos would always be edgy with Percells—that was natural. Better the two breeds kept their distance—by making space mostly a Percell domain. Cross-breeding wasn’t going to solve anything, just worsen it.

  “There’s no reason we can’t work together, be friends.” He held out a gloved hand toward her.

  She grasped it tightly. Through her bright blue skinsuit he could feel an intense, clutching desire in her. Her body gave away what her face had concealed. Gently, he released her hand.

  —I . . . had hoped. —

  “I, I can see. . . .”

  —There will not be many of us awake on each watch. —

  He frowned. “Yeah. We’ll have to work out the rotation.”

  —Yes. It will require . . . public discussion. — She sniffed, made to brush her nose with her hand, and stopped when her glove touched her helmet. She had to use the drip catcher behind the glassine plate. —I . . . —