by Stephen Moss
Birgit: ‘great. stay tethered.’
He was already sliding around the outside of the module. He would, of course, stay tethered. Well, most of the time. It would take an age to get where he was going if he didn’t break the rules, you know, just the once.
He unclipped from the bay module he had exited from and kicked off. He was aiming for one of the wreckers that they had maneuvered into position earlier. As he departed the side of the module, he pinged mini-minnie to take over control of the RCR from her.
He had been practicing this for days. A moment later he was looking at himself through the wrecker’s ‘eyes,’ and looking at the wrecker through his own. A strange sensation but … if he did it right.
He moved his arm out and the wrecker mimicked the move. Not mirrored, but mimicked. As Rob’s left hand reached out, the wrecker’s left arm did the same, or rather its gaping maul reached out, its huge, three-fingered hand bunching into a fist bigger than Rob’s head.
With their arms outstretched, he came up on the big robot, angling his elbow as they came together, the two arms linking and closing as Rob swung around. In his eagerness to get a hold, Rob was careful not to exert too much pressure with the wrecker. The big machine could crush his arm easily, armor or no.
He quickly reattached his tether.
Birgit: ‘i saw that.’
Rob: ‘¿i don’t know what you mean?’
She smiled to herself and shook her head. Then she checked the timer. It was not so much a timer as a visualized countdown built of tasks. A carefully choreographed dance that ended in a single equation too chaotic to calculate with certainty. Impact would go how it would go. They would just have to hope they were ready when it did.
Minnie:
They all braced. Birgit’s wrecker subtly checked Rob’s tether, both to confirm it was secure and to calculate if she could catch it if it came loose. As the model ran in her mind, the gas released explosively from five points along the station’s multiple modules. There was no sound, but the jolt ran through them, at first in slow motion then with more strength. As the momentum shifted, the three bodies hanging on to the station’s hull wafted like reeds in the wind.
A pause. Then one more tiny burst from three nodules to adjust, and their rotation was stopped relative to the approaching moon.
Rob: ‘well done, mini-minnie.’
Mini-Minnie:
Birgit cringed. It was so rote with this Minnie. So fake. She shook her head, but her frustration was not really with the amalgam. She missed her friend, her daughter. She missed watching her learn and grow. She missed it more than she could have imagined, especially as she sensed her daughter struggling back home.
Well, hopefully not for much longer. Like a drifter in sight of the shore, she dreamt of the bounty that waited there. So close now, she only had to navigate the approach, to survive the breakers.
Mini-Minnie: ‘rotation aligned with separation angle to 0.015%. adjusting equations. rerunning …’
Birgit: ‘we are good, mini-minnie. this is well within parameters.’
They all held their breath. It would not be long now. Birgit’s wrecker turned its sensors to the coming monolith. A sheer wall of rock in space. It was daunting. Her mind instinctively fought a sickening sensation that they were falling. But they were not. This was not a landing, this was a slow-motion car crash.
It came up. It came up, growing and growing until it filled their vision, seemingly covering the space in front of them. Not much longer now. Not much farther at all. Jesus but this thing was big now they were up close. At eleven kilometers across it was less than a speck in cosmic terms, just a particle of dust next to its planetary neighbors, which were themselves just protons circling the atomic minuteness of our single sun, lost to negligibility in the endless universe.
But from here, it was definitely big enough. Holy crap it was big enough, thought Birgit. They were aiming for a crater on its northern end. Not out of choice. They’d had very little say in the matter. Getting here at all had been an exercise in madness that only their singular lack of other options had made feasible. And the next part would be no different.
Minnie:
This time Birgit actually moved, flipping her wrecker’s arms over while her legs and prehensile feet remained firmly gripping their bar holds, so she could close one fat paw around Rob’s tether.
He did not say anything. It annoyed him for a split second before he realized the tenderness of this massive beast’s gesture, the poignancy of its possessor’s act as the point of no return came. When it did come, it did so with a bone jarring bass thrum that vibrated through their bodies, both real and machine. It was an almost terrible sight. Seven-eighths of their world ejected in a moment, ejected off in two directions at once.
The station, such as it now was, slowed noticeably with the move. Computers assessed the separation.
Birgit: ‘that went as well as could be hoped. calculating orbital paths now. mars elliptical orbit probable on arm two. chance of recoverability 17%.’
She chose not to mention that the package’s aphelion would not be for over three years. Oh well. They did not need it. They would just have to get even cozier with each other than they already had. The fact was that it had worked. Now the wall was coming at them much more slowly, and their mass was that much lower, low enough, perhaps, that it could be wrestled to a stop as they connected with the moon’s surface.
She watched as the two module clusters flew apart, each larger than the one they now called home. Each stripped of all they could take with them, their supplies, processing equipment, and oxygen reserves either stuffed into the crew module or latched onto it.
Rob: ‘approaching push-off range. confirming anchor sites.’
In their shared views of the looming grey surface ahead of them, a series of potential holds were reassessed as they approached. The regolith was not thick here, spectral imaging told them that, and the rock underneath that inches-thick layer of moon dust was riddled with cracks and crevices. Their picture began filling with assessed targets, and now Rob started assigning them.
Birgit looked at her primary site. Minnie looked through the eyes of the second wrecker at it. They all maneuvered into position and braced.
Rob: ‘there they are, folks. attach tether extensions. brace for kickoff. minnie, count us down when you’re ready.’
Even the act of kicking off had to be timed to perfection. The two wreckers lined up at either end of the module, while Rob got into position in the middle. He would go last, in case he had to correct for some acquired spin when the wreckers launched themselves at the moon’s surface.
Minnie:
They both pushed off as one, Birgit and Rob using every ounce of their machine limbs’ power. The module visibly slowed once more as they threw themselves at the great rock, flipping as they did so, two massive metal gorillas flinging themselves at the pocket-world ahead of them. They flew at the massif, their big hands and feet opening and reaching out in front of them, getting ready for the coming impact.
Without realizing, both Rob and Birgit closed their eyes. Then, with massive thuds, they connected. Each was instantly lost in a cloud of millennia-year-old dust as it was riled up, bellowing and swirling around them, and then a moment later they were propelling back upward. Having expended their momentum into the ground, sapping some more of the module’s in the process, and now they were coming back at it once more, their tethers gathering and whirling in elastic coils around them as they came back out.
They were on track. But no, wait, in the haze and moment Birgit had miscalculated. She would not reconnect cleanly, but at an oblique angle. Birgit and Minnie scrambled to adjust, and Rob was moving.
Rob: ‘minnie, take over wrecker two, i am moving to intercept wrecker one.’
And he was pulling himself along the surface of the module, grabbing
and tugging at it, grappling with all his augmented might and then, at the last moment before flinging off from it, he was grabbing at Wrecker One’s tether, loose now, gathering as the bulky machine came back up at them. It was threatening to unbalance them completely, to drag the module at an unplanned angle and send it into a spin.
If they came at this wrong, if they impacted on the module’s ends, then they might damage the airlock. Then the whole process would be for nothing. They would have to live out their rest of their brief, miserable lives in their suits, staring at canisters of food they could not eat.
He hurled himself outward into the void, pulling at the tether as he went, gathering it frantically to himself. He had to get purchase. They were getting close now. The wrecker would be passing the module soon. It could reach out, it could grab on, but if it did it would send the whole module spinning.
Birgit: ‘¿rob, what are you doing? come back. that won’t work. your own tether is too short. you will …’
Even as she said it she regretted it. She knew what he would do. He was trying to use his own momentum to drag the wrecker back on track before they collided. It was only a matter of seconds left. But before he got the wrecker’s longer tether taught, his own would spring, taking all his precious momentum with it.
Birgit: ‘don’t you fucking dare detach that tether!’
But he was doing it. In a flash he was loose and pulling at the wrecker’s tether once more.
Minnie: