by MadMaxAU
Saul nodded, hurriedly. “I’m sorry. It’s just that . . . well, you never show yourselves. The others fear you so.”
“As we fear them. But you are Ssssaul. The Doc c. We c-come to you with hurt.”
Saul was about to ask them to come into the lab when the lead weirder opened a gap in its foliage and brought forth a small brown bundle. Whimpering sounds came from it.
“C can you fix x x?”
The otter had a broken leg. It writhed and bit at the one holding it, to no apparent effect.
“Of course,” Saul said as he stood up and pressed the thumb-code plate by the door. “Bring her in. This shouldn’t take long.”
Except for Lani and an occasional mech, nobody else but him had ever crossed this threshold. Saul was sure that nobody stranger ever would again.
But then, he had never been very good at predicting.
It was an hour after the Weirders had left that he found himself standing beside the master cloning chamber, with his mind made up. There were sound scientific reasons to proceed with the experiment. The colony needed it. Humanity needed it
He nodded. “JonVon, I want to set up a secret data base.”
CARL
If he squinted against the sun’s hard knot of yellow, the icescape lay before him like a land of dreams. Armies of men and mechs surged across the slashed, stained territory. They towed long cylinders of buffed steel and alabaster aluminum oxide, or swiveled great clumps of electrical gear, or tugged transformers that, made to operate in cold vacuum, looked more like crusty brain coral than loops of gleaming copper and iron.
The laboring gangs sped across ice that was gouged and split, great troughs dug deeply into it, cut and formed and hammered. At regular spacings Jim Vidor had erected spindly towers by melting, force forming, and refreezing water into crystalline struts, levels, braces.
Cobwebbed strands connected jutting, orange tinged fingers of flash wedded crystals. Ice had little shear strength, and well only under compression. It was impossible to believe that the arabesques were merely functional. Still, Carl had no doubt that Vidor, if pressed, would be able to come up with an explanation for each extruded, delicate strand, every corbelled arch, all the spindly weaving art of it.
Carl had not asked. Humans could not stick remorselessly to the narrow and practical; anyone of skill yearned to express something deep and abiding through his craftsmanship. Perhaps it was the impulse to leave an idiosyncratic, quirky dab of self on the most enduring things they made. Probably it was something deeper, tied to the spirit that had brought a lone tribe of primates so far out from their own warm. moist world
Carl remembered the opening lines of a poem Virginia had shown him months before. Somehow they had stuck with him.
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair.
Omens for good sailing. The poem had something to do with beaches and oceans, and Virginia had sensed some resonance in him for those images. Voyaging out here, sailing against gravity’s tide, resembled the grand old days of seagoing craft. They had tapped a fraction of the sun’s raw photon wind to control the comet’s outgassing, in the first months after landing. Then they ran before that wind, using sunlight only to yield electricity. The crucial time was coming now, when their iceworld craft had to be pushed into a fresh orbit, a new course charted.
He smiled at himself. Clinging to the sea analogy, eh? All because you’re deep in your bones a spacer, and can’t forget it. Ever since losing the Edmund, you’ve been yearning for a ship. This chunk of ice and iron is all you’ve got left.
It was so obvious, Virginia had seen it. She had told him that poetry was a consolation, and to his surprise he had found himself enjoying some of the stuff she transferred into his display. That would’ve been utterly impossible for the brash, self involved spacer he had been thirty five years ago. He’d aged only seven years in that time, but that span had a weight of its own. His younger self now seemed distant, almost implausibly blind.
I hope Virginia can’t see too well into me. She’ll find out soon enough how much all this hope and euphoria are false, based on an unavoidable lie ....
He didn’t like to recall that. He shook his head and moved across the ice, taking long strides, surveying the work. Keep busy. Don’t think too much; it’s not your strong suit.
Carl circled around a gang of laboring mechs to reach the long trench of Launcher 6. A completed flinger filled the scooped out, obliquely descending trough. Two engineers were testing a flywheel made from Halley iron.
The machines would deliver momentum at a precisely calculated rate and angle. At first they would fire parallel to the equator, to slow and finally halt Halley’s fifty hour spin. After that, the launcher would pivot about an axis buried in the trench, bringing it nearly perpendicular to the equator, in line with Halley’s center of mass. Then would begin the long stuttering bursts which would, delivered over years, add minute increments of momentum to Halley’s slow, stately swerve at aphelion. All the launchers, pulsing endlessly, would sum up to the Nudge.
— Real pretty, uh? —
Carl saw Jeffers approaching with an easy, practiced lope. His suit tabard was a crossed pliers and wrench in a cube, stained and spotted.
“Beautiful. Is it tested out? Ready for horizontal mounting?”
— Sure. Sets in there jest fine, any angle you want. Mechs’ll get it duty-mounted soon’s testing’s over. —
Jeffers grinned happily. He was the mainstay of the Nudge, finding solutions to problems with a quick, expert savvy. He worked eighteen-hour shifts without a sign of fatigue. The factory at A Level, humming away now with robos making replacement parts for launchers and rockets, wouldn’t exist without Jeffers. Carl remembered when the man had put in the minimum, wrapping himself in holotapes or pornstims, blotting out the reality of where he was. Work was what he had needed. To Carl, that alone was reason enough to do all this, even if his friend surely suspected that it was all a farce ....
— Every crew’s ahead of schedule. Even puttin’ in extra time, without me askin’. —
“We’ve finally got something to work for.” Carl said it without meeting Jeffers’s eye.
— Damn right. —
A manager mech approached, an extra dome perched atop its carapace in a makeshift kluge. Virginia’s add ons worked marvelously, making the mechs and robos far more versatile, but they weren’t elegant. The mech winked its lamp to attract their attention and sent, — Launcher 6 complete. Human tech Osaka states that the device is ready, for formal testing. —
Jeffers nodded. — Fire the sucker! —
Warning gongs sounded over the comm line. Everywhere on the surface, teams stopped work and climbed out of pits to watch. Their suits were scratched, worn, discolored, patched with homemade parts.
A ping ping ping of warmup rippled over the comm frequencies, thin ringing echoes of the charging now under way in the trench. Carl peered at the tip of the launcher, which jutted free of the ice nearby, pointing at the sky.
He felt prickly excitement, gathering tension. If they’d made some mistake in the design, in assembly…
A small tremor came through his feet. A rattle in the microwave, a skreee—and the unit discharged.
Simultaneously, a vague haze appeared et the mouth of the launcher. He wondered what was wrong, until he suddenly realized that the firing rate of the flinging tube was several capsules per second— and he was seeing the blur of their passing.
That was all. No roar, no belching smoke. The launchers were designed to operate with near perfect efficiency, to generate as little waste heat as possible. If even a fraction of a percent of the launching energy seeped into the surrounding ice, it would evaporate away the structural support, producing dislocations, unbalancing the carefully configured momentum-matching of the accelerator segments. Long before the ice was gone, the ratcheting instability of the drive tubes would jerk and thrash them into twisted steel.
But
the flinger functioned smoothly. A cheer rose across the comm lines. People raised their arms in victory salutes as far as Carl could see, dancing on the grimy ice, leaping high into the blackness. Only the mechs continued stoically about their tasks, oblivious that humans had at last clasped the helm of this ice ship. Halley was no longer just a tumbling dirty snowball in the long night. She was now a spacecraft.
Jeffers was babbling excitedly, repeating operating parameters as he read them off his helmet display. Carl could follow some of the rapidfire reciting— kilo amperes surging in low impedance circuits, voltages building to sharp peaks and then collapsing as each slug passed, leaching the energy of inductive electric and magnetic fields. Energy poured into the capsules, electrodynamic momentum flowing like a fluid at the speed of light.
Only electrical acceleration was efficient enough to avoid the waste-heat problem, to avoid slowly melting the comet itself. For the moment there were ample piles of iron at the north pole, mined in the first year of the expedition, but deep beneath each launcher was a mech mining operation, where in constricted caverns the robots dug and processed more of the comet’s natural, ancient metal.
A factory on A Level made lightweight buckets of a special superconducting polymer. These were loaded with iron and other heavy wastes. Each metal filled dollop became a bullet. Conveyors fed these with unrelenting precision into the flinger barrel, where the surging voltages clasped each pellet and flung it to enormous speeds— ten thousand kilometers per second, nearly three percent of the speed of light. Launcher 6 was a cosmic machine gun, firing slugs that would reach the nearest stars in a few centuries.
We could have built starships, if we’d only had the nerve, Carl thought. Maybe someday.
Such was the mass of Halley that even these enormous speeds were barely sufficient for the task of piloting. Carl tuned in to an engineering frequency and herd a staccato braaap braaap braaap as each pellet picked up its miniboosts in the flinger column. Launcher 6 was the first of fifty-two that would soon ring Halley, stuttering forth their kilogram pellets for five years. Aphelion, when the comet head paused like a ballet dancer at the peak of his leap, was the most efficient time to divert Halley. Fully ten millionths of the comet’s entire mass had to be ejected. That demanded dozens of mechs supervising the mining and smelting of iron, minirobots to toil beside the endless conveyor belts, subroutines and expert programs to catch every snag, each hitch in the unending stuttering fever of the Nudge.
“Goddamn,” Carl said. “It works.” He felt a rush of relief and realized he had been clenching his hands.
The cheering went on. Even this demonstration, which would run for a mere few hours, was slowing Halley’s primordial spin, minutely altering its long gliding ellipse.
— Runnin’ smooth, too, — Jeffers said, grinning happily.
— Come on down to Launcher Five. I’ve got a nice li’1 pivot rigged there, keeps the flinger tube from comin’ unglued. We figured—
Jeffers stopped abruptly as a geyser of steam boiled from an ice tower nearby. Vidor’s intricate cross hatching of blue and ivory exploded in a shower of fog and glinting, tumbling remnants.
— Goddamn! —
— What? What’s happenin’? —
“Laser!” Carl flattened himself against the grimy ground. “Get down everybody!”
— What the hell— who’d go and—
“Arcists!” Carl realized “They must’ve heard the successful test over comm.”
Jeffers shouted, — But why? I thought Quiverian agreed. —
“Damned if I know.”
All across the field, people were ducking for cover. An ice tower farther away dissolved silently into mist. This time Carl saw the flash of light as the beam struck.
“They’re firing from that hill— over there. South twenty five degrees of west.”
Jeffers squinted at a distant speck atop a heap of leftover slag from one of the mining operations.
—They moved one of those big industrials. Tryin’ to hit Six, but those things, they don’t aim all that good. —
The comm rang with outrage.
A bolt gouged into ice near a crouching form and Carl heard a startled tied cry of pain.
“Takeda! Get that woman sealed and to first aid!”
Carl crouched behind a hummock and watched fierce laser bolts send fountains spurting skyward. “Bastards!”
— We gotta do somethin’. —
“I could have Virginia send some mechs around behind, outflank them . . . .”
— Yeah, right, — Jeffers said.
“No, wait. . .” He checked Virginia’s channel. A hiss. It was cut off. Of course. Only an idiot would attack without cutting off the defender’s source of support.
Another wail of pain over the comm.
Carl nudged Jeffers’s shoulder. “Launcher Six can you pivot it?”
— What? —
“Tip Six down? Aim it at the horizon?”
Jeffers looked surprised. — The safeties aren’t in. I dunno . . . that’s a pretty low angle. —
“Try it!”
As Jeffers crawled into the launcher trench, the ice tower fulcrum for Launcher 5 exploded behind them, sending cables and cowlings into a slow, fluid fall to the surface. Lost components, lost construction time, hurt crew— people who were his responsibility. Carl glowered at the distant dots working around the laser cannon, a murderous anger building in him.
He tuned out the comm channels, where voices swelled and swamped one another. People called for lovers and friends, sputtering in impotent rage. Mechs asked innocently for orders. Then Virginia’s voice intruded on his private line. — What’s going on? Somebody jammed my channels. Who. . .?
“Get some weapons up here!”
— But, but, what’ll we use? —
“Those small lasers in Three B— that’s all we’ve got that we can move right away.”
— But won’t they just pick off anybody who comes close enough to use small lasers? —
Carl swore. She was right.
— I can send some big mechs from the north pole. —
“We’ll be toast by then!”
He whistled a search and contact command for Joao Quiverian and had a channel in seconds. “Quiverian! This is Osborn. You—“
The man’s voice was strained. —Those are not acting under my orders. Arcists they are, yes, but I cannot control them. —
“You expect us to believe that?”
— You must. It is the truth. —
Carl gritted his teeth. So the enemy was faceless. Anonymous. The people using those big lasers weren’t going to allow anyone else to take over the Nudge options, to try another orbit. With them it was all or nothing . . . and they would take all.
On the general comm, more screams as an invisible laser bolt struck a hillock and dissolved a deep pit into it. Carl saw a body roll away . . . someone hiding there.
He used command override on channel A. “Get those people off that slag mound by Launcher Two! All of you, take shelter down in the feeder tunnels.” A babble in reply. “And use ident codes if you want to be heard!”
He spoke a quick command in mech talk and the noise cut off as the channel controller went over to formal mode. Now suit radios would not even work until the system passed on your code-ordering. For a moment there was only an eerie hiss. Then, — Jones, BQ code to Osaka and Osborn. Leading party of five down to shaft now. —
— Lomax, DF code, to command. Got a good view from a safe height. Everyone P code your sitings to me. I’ll relay situation to Osborn. —
Carl nodded. A few good spacers who remembered their training were worth battalions.
Jeffers, GH code to Osborn Got it I think.—
“Osborn, GH code. Got what?”
— Jeffers, GH. I’m tipping the launcher down. Got to turn it toward the south. You line it up, okay? —
Carl realized that the steady hammering of Launcher 6 had stopped some time ago. Now, as he w
atched, the assembly turned laboriously toward the distant low hills, its snout tipping downward. Carl got to his feet and swiftly moved behind the slowly swiveling launcher. The only way he could think to aim the thing was to eyeball it directly, sighting along the barrel.
Great. Real high tech.
And the Arcists were undoubtedly watching them closely. Their objective must be this site. They had destroyed the easier targets while they were getting the range right. Launcher 6 was much harder to hit, buried in its trench. But now that it was slowly emerging…
He squatted down onto a patch of orange stain and closed one eye automatically, lining up the launcher barrel with the specks on the distant hill.
— Lomax, DF to Osborn. Got a tactical sketch of known enemy positions. Prepare to receive. They’re bunched up pretty close. —
Carl threw the picture over half his faceplate. Benchley’s rough drawing showed a main group and two wings— probably outlying spotters.
Not many of them. I count five. But they’ve got the best ground.
The Arcists were settled into a notch, taking advantage of the shelter. As he watched a bright blue flash winked— and he ducked automatically. Which was ridiculous; if he was in the full focus of the laser it would have blinded him instantly. Instead, they had aimed high. Only the fringing fields had struck him.
He checked Jeffers. Almost tipped enough . . .
He blinked to clear his vision; it didn’t help much. “Open her up!”
— I . . . I can’t just shoot that hillside with a full load! That’s a kilogram of iron at ten thousand KPS . . . it’d be like setting off a ten kiloton bomb! —
Carl thought furiously. “Empty casings! They only mass a couple grams. Have you got any?”
— Uh. Yeah. I’d better go at low power, too, — Jeffers said. — Take a minute . . . lessee . . . one percent setting . . . —
Someone screamed. Another near miss. “We’ve got to return fire. Open her up!”
— Okay, okay. — To his relief, Carl heard the braaap braaap braaap resume. The sound was different. Lower, rougher.