"I did. But sir, you don't think he meant…"
"Peter." Peter closed his mouth, startled by the command in his abbot's voice. "Two years ago, one of Ian's imaginary friends dictated a formula for a new room-temperature superconductor to him. We synthesized the alloy, and it worked. Late this past spring, another imaginary friend told him there was a way to engineer the Hilbert Drive so that no damaging energy is released in the fold. He's trying to explain to us what it is, but Ian hasn't learned enough physics yet to understand. Still, he understands the implications, and that's when he started designing his star-travelling airframe."
"But he's only a kid..."
"He's much more than that. Twelve days ago, a courier pilot brought word from Nemo Station that Ian's imaginary advisors told him of a massive starcraft that would fold into our system at a point just behind Shiva, the gas giant orbiting six hundred million klicks out. Our astronomers put a good scope on Shiva, and we saw the fold reflected on two of Shiva's moons. If it travels at continuous one-G boost, that starcraft should be in orbit around Hell by now or very soon. We'll know shortly."
"So you think Bilenda…"
"What I'm saying is that he's providing information he can't possibly generate on his own. His 'imaginary friends' have never been wrong. Never."
Snitzius' eyes held Peter's until Peter wanted to look away. "What did he say to you, sir?"
"He said, 'You will be with her again soon.'"
On the broad front surface of a two-meter-high plate glass tank, a diagrammatic image of the globe of Hell was displayed, complete with longitude and latitude lines. The image was rotating so that it turned once in only a few seconds.
"Colleagues, imagine a bicycle wheel with a diameter one third the diameter of Hell."
The speaker was Andrea Kiril, senior astrophysicist at Nemo Station, and in charge of the observatory on one of Volcania's two peaks. She tapped a key on the lectern keyboard, and a many-spoked bicycle wheel appeared on the screen beside the image of Hell.
"Forty-six hundred klicks. That's some wheel," Nutmeg said.
"Now imagine the bicycle wheel lying in Hell's equatorial plane, its rim just touching Hell at Hell's equator." The wheel slid smoothly into position, and when its rim touched the planet, the wheel began to turn. "Further imagine that the wheel is rotating such that where the rim touches Hell's surface, wheel and planet are moving at precisely the same speed." On the screen, Hell and the cyclopean wheel turned in unison, as though meshed like gears.
"Now imagine that all the spokes vanish, save two." On the screen, the wheel's rim now turned against Hell's equator, but only two glinting silver spokes ran from the rim to the wheel's hub, directly opposite one another. "Observe the ends of the spokes as they travel with the wheel."
Peter watched the wheel carefully. When the end of one spoke came into contact with Hell, a red spot appeared on Hell's equator at the contact point. A few seconds later, when the opposite spoke came into contact with Hell's equator, a yellow spot appeared on Hell's surface. As the wheel rotated and the spokes alternately touched Hell's equator, six spots appeared, red/yellow/ red/yellow/red/yellow.
Andrea pointed to the screen, her dark brown eyes flashing beneath her crown of white hair. "The spokes touch the planet's equator at six points. And if the diameter of the wheel is just so, the spokes will always touch the same points on the equator. Now, the rim of the wheel will fade away." She tapped more keys, and the gray circle of the imaginary rim faded to black and then vanished. The spokes remained, as did the hub where they met, all moving smoothly around the equator of Hell, touching the planet only at the red or yellow spots.
"My friends, this is an excellent working drawing of the Hans Moravec."
Snitzius and his team watched the image on the screen in silence for some time. Andrea tapped again on her keyboard, and the image vanished. In its place appeared a photo of a cylinder in space, with a red-brown planet in the background. "This is the hub of the Moravec skyhook during the two years it synced with Mars, ferrying rare-earth ore from the surface to orbit. The cylinder you see is the hub at the center of the cable; it's about fifty meters long and twelve in diameter. The hub contained command-and-control electronics and quarters for a crew of four. In this view you can barely see the buckyrope cables extending from opposing points on its equator. They're woven of buckytube carbon fibers, extruded continuously from a nanoshaper and molecularly perfect. The cable is twelve centimeters thick at its center, and tapers to one centimeter at the ends."
An inset window appeared on the screen. "Here is the cable-end configuration as arranged for the Martian mining operation. The bowl-shaped portion is attached to the cable end. The bowl has grapple fingers that grip the cylinder beneath it. The cylinders you see here are modules to carry cargo; basically, ore buckets. An empty module touches down at a designated point on Mars' equator. It's released, and then a full module is rolled beneath the grapple fingers. The grapples take hold, and then the cable lifts it vertically into the sky at almost three Earth G's.
"At the opposite end of the cycle, when the cable end reaches its greatest distance from the planet, the full module is released, and a shuttle tug positions an empty module so that the grapples can take it back down to the surface on the next swing. The full module incorporates an iron pellet railgun thruster and guidance module, which transfers the module from Mars orbit to Earth orbit. Most of the delta-v that moved the buckets to Earth came from the inertial force of the Moravec's motion. It's the ancient dream of a skyhook, efficient surface-to-orbit transportation without rockets."
"Question," Nutmeg raised her hand. Andrea nodded. "How much time does it spend on the ground?"
Andrea grinned. "If the cable stays taut, about ten seconds. But…the bowl cavity is there for a reason. Depending on how the orbit is adjusted, the landing spot can be higher than where the end of the cable would ordinarily fall. The cable is then furled neatly in the bowl cavity as the cable continues to 'pay down' into the bowl. Then after the orbital minimum, the cable 'pays out' from the bowl until the container once again lifts. This buys a certain amount of time. On Mars, this time was stretched to almost two minutes. It's limited by the cable-furling capacity of the bowl cavity."
"So we don't get much time to steal this thing."
Andrea nodded. "Miss, depending on how Earth sets up the Moravec's orbit, you may get almost no time to do anything."
"Hey, I'm fast. Peter, you game?"
Peter nodded, his chin on one hand.
You want a thrill? My guess is you'll get a thrill.
|I'd enjoy a thrill. I'm not sure I'd enjoy dying.|
That's never bothered you before.
|Shut up.|
"The Hans Moravec worked very well in Mars service, and we feel it's also a natural for transportation to and from Hell's surface, because it's basically a pair of ore buckets on the ends of very long cables. The buckets themselves need little or no intelligence while they're attached to the cables. Although they have electrical systems, including their own zero-point generators and electromagnetic railguns for thrust, those systems can be turned off during the time the containers are inside the atmosphere where the maggots are. The time inside Hell's magnetopause is actually very short. The containers enter the atmosphere at supersonic speed, and touch down in less than two hundred seconds. Assume at most a hundred seconds on the ground, and another two hundred seconds back up to the magnetopause, tops."
"Whoa," said a dark-haired young man with a golden dagger on his lapel, identical to the one Nutmeg wore. "This thing hauls ass."
"It hauls more than ass, Mike," said Andrea. "Due to the inertial forces of the Morovec's rotation, the ends of that cable are going at a continually accelerated clip of over two Hell Gs. That doesn't include the acceleration of gravity. During lift from the surface, you're looking at just under three Hell Gs. Plan to spend five minutes at that acceleration before it slacks off to a trifling two Gs again."
Nutmeg sat
erect in her seat and rubbed her hands together. "Hey. At three Gs I'm still lighter than a lot of people I eat with at Dinnerhall. This should be a snap."
Snitzius turned toward her. "Margaret, I think you misunderstand. Your mission is twofold: You are first to keep Geyl Shreve from boarding the Moravec at all costs—without killing her if you can avoid it. We want her alive for questioning. And what you see here on the screen is the Hans Moravec before it was complete. There is considerably more to steal than this. Andrea, please continue."
The screen cleared, and the white-haired woman went on. "The Hans Moravec as I have shown it to you is a skyhook only; basically a long cable with a control cabin at its center. It was constructed in Mars orbit in 2109. After star travel was perfected in 2112, it was suggested that the Moravec could be put to better use ferrying ore from planets with more heavy metals than Mars, and especially rare earths. Numenor was found to be rich in heavy metals. The problem, obviously, was getting the skyhook there. You can't slap a Hilbert drive on something that's forty seven hundred klicks long and a quarter-meter wide. The cable needs to be furled neatly around something, and buckyrope thicker than a centimeter or two doesn't bend very far before compression damage weakens some of the tubes. The Moravec's engineers wanted a rope reel a kilometer in diameter, and got seriously laughed at. Then somebody realized that 22096 Gwyllion was sitting in Mars' leading Trojan point, waiting to be ground up and shipped to Earth."
The image now on the screen was that of a potato-shaped asteroid, dull gray and crater-pocked, alone against the starfields. "Gwyllion was two kilometers of almost pure nickel-iron inside a three-meter coating of dust, and had only modest quantities of rare earths. The dust, in fact, was richer ore than the asteroid itself. So Gwyllion was cut in half, stripped of its dust coating, and trimmed to symmetry with a UV laser."
The photo of the asteroid morphed to an animation, in which Gwyllion was sliced in two at its equator. One half faded from view. The remaining half was then set to rotating while a blue-white dazzle carved away its dusty surface and irregularities. What remained was a truncated ellipsoid of bright iron, like a glinting egg cut in half and stretched slightly in length.
"After losing fifteen percent of its mass to the trimming, what remained was eight hundred fifty meters in diameter, and eleven hundred meters long. Smaller and more precise UV lasers cut a bifilar groove around the outer surface of the asteroid, starting at the truncation surface and working toward the point, with an average of sixty centimeters between adjacent turns. With that large a reel to wind on, it only took a thousand bifilar turns to store forty six hundred klicks of buckyrope, in a single layer that required barely two thirds of the length of the asteroid.
"Robot milling machines followed the path of the bifiler groove, polishing the groove surfaces smooth, and cutting small inset rails into the surface beside the grooves. Furler robots would later follow those rails to guide the skyhook's buckyrope onto and off of the asteroid. Lasers and crude early nanodevices were used to hollow out cavities inside the asteroid half, and by its completion in 2120, what had been half of poor Gwyllion became the largest starcraft ever constructed. It was easily large enough to ferry both the skyhook and millions of tonnes of ore from star system to star system."
The animation became a three-D transparent diagram, showing tunnels and tanks for water and atmosphere, and hollows fitted out for human habitation.
"For propulsion within a star system, a seven-hundred-meter zero-point driven railgun was constructed along the long axis. Reaction mass was iron refined from the Moravec's own material into two-millimeter pellets by simple nanomachines, and magnetically accelerated to tremendous speeds. And finally, there is the necessary Hilbert drive around the equator of the craft's body. It was and remains the largest Hilbert drive ever constructed. At the time it was built, it contained fully five percent of all the ytterbium ever refined on Earth since it was first isolated in the 19th Century."
The screen cleared again. In place of the diagram was a video of a chopped-off half of a prolate ellipsoid, glinting with the blue-silver patina of vacuum-heated iron, hanging in space above the red-brown surface of Mars. The spider-silk strand of the buckyrope cable emerged from opposite points of its equator, where the original asteroid had been bisected. It rotated slowly as the team watched.
"One more refinement was added. To ferry passengers from the cable ends to the hub, disk-shaped vehicles called traversers were added to the tops of the bowl-shaped grappler assemblies, with two-meter holes through their centers to pass the cable. The traversers move along the cable by rocket power, never touching the cable that passes through them."
"22096 Gwyllion was solid nickel-iron. To reduce its mass somewhat, four cylindrical cavities were excavated through most of its length." The window split vertically, and a 3-D diagram appeared to the right of the video, showing the four cylindrical cavities inside the body of the Hans Moravec's half-egg, connected by a spiderweb of tiny passages. "These cavities were large enough to contain everything required to initiate a thriving interstellar colony, including five thousand people, supplies, and heavy machinery."
"Or an army," one of Snitzius' lieutenants pointed out glumly.
"Or enough cruise missles to turn our continent to slag," Nutmeg added.
"Or enough cruise missiles to turn Canada to slag," dark-eyed Mike the sicarius rejoined.
"Yes, enough!" Snitzius ordered. "You can see the Moravec's potential. We're not yet sure what its mission might be. Peter, I hope you follow my logic that it seems a bit extreme to take a craft like that out of the mothballs it's been in for two hundred years to pluck one woman off the surface of Hell."
"Sir, the Governor General of America is a bit extreme. I've, uhh, met her."
Snitzius nodded, his face grim. "Doubtless Miss Gorganis has had her suspicions about Hell for some time. My own theory is this: The Hans Moravec contains everything necessary to lay waste to Hell. Geyl Shreve was dropped on Hell to look around and decide if we're dangerous enough to risk a slaughter that might not be supported by every faction on Earth. Peter, you've indicated that you don't know Geyl well enough to discern her judgment about us. But if she boards the Hans Moravec, she could on that judgment turn loose an attack that would be the end of all of us. Hence your mission, Margaret. I want Geyl alive—but if it looks like you or your team cannot prevent her from attaining the Moravec, a bullet will be called for."
"Me and my guys don't like to lose, sir. Either me and Peter get on it or nobody does."
At dusk the following day, Peter and Nutmeg remained at a stone table under the sky long after the others had gone down to Dinnerhall. Peter found himself surprised at the speed with which the equatorial sky darkened, as well as slightly irritated at the Sangruse Device's constant explanations. The brightest stars were now laid out between the palms, against a background of deepening blue.
The day had been warm and humid, and the exercises the team had undergone were nothing if not physical. Nutmeg was wearing a thin white sacklike garment that hung badly on her small frame, Peter only a pair of white shorts.
"You know, they used to call that kind of dress a 'muumuu'," Peter said.
Nutmeg laughed. "No shit. Where'd you hear that?"
"The Sangruse Device told me. Anything I don't know, it tells me. I don't even have to ask."
"Mine only answers questions. Does yours make small talk?"
Small talk! If not for my unsolicited advice you'd be dead ten times over!
Peter tried to suppress a laugh. "It doesn't consider what it says small talk. And it gets annoyed when I tell it to shut up."
"Yeh. You don't want to get something like that pissed off."
Indeed!
She drew her legs up on the table bench and gripped her knees, and tilted her head back to scan the sky. "Yo! Enemy craft!"
Peter, alarmed, looked toward the east where she was staring. A brilliant white star was rising, brighter than Venus in Earth's morning sky
. His eyes adjusted to the glare, and he saw two fainter stars moving beside it, one on each side. If he kept his eyes on them for a few seconds, he could see that the smaller stars were themselves moving with respect to the dazzling star between them.
The Hans Moravec has begun deploying its cables and landing modules. We have at best one more day.
|We fly inland in the morning. I'm ready.|
"Hey, Peter, you spooked about this?"
Peter shrugged, and looked back down to the table top. "I'm spooked. Maybe not about this. Hey, we're just going to steal half a cubic kilometer of iron stuffed full of missiles, right?"
She chuckled, and wriggled her bare toes. "Yeh. I don't mind the missiles much. I just wonder what I'm gonna do if I get up there and find five thousand guys with guns. I'm a one-on-one kind of a babe, y'know?"
"You are for sure." Peter stared off toward the lights of Nemo Station's thatch-roofed buildings, miserable. Dare he mention what Ian had said? No.
"Peter, you need a night with your SI. Maybe two."
He turned back to Nutmeg. "Bilenda Paton was my SI."
Nutmeg's eyes grew wide. "Yikes! How'd you manage that!"
Peter grinned sourly. "Snitzius got in a bidding war over me with the Airhogs. Snitzius won."
Nutmeg nodded. "Snitzius always wins." She got up and went around the table, to stand in front of Peter. "Hey, you. I never tried anything this big before. I trained for close quarters. These ain't gonna be real close up there. I'm gonna do my best, but..."
"But…"
"…but I want one more ride. And I want it with you."
"Maybe you need a night with your SI."
She made a face, then reached out and tucked a finger into one of Peter's black curls. "My guy spends all day pumping iron. Lots of muscles. No brains, less guts. I've broke this law before. And if I get through this alive I'm gonna break it again. Hey, y'know, I got curls like this too...just not on my head." She reached down for the hem of the white garment she wore, and hiked it up to her neck and off.
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