Pain streaked through her head as she instinctively tried to roll her eyes. As she regained her composure she made herself a promise to stop being so stubborn and just embrace the Datanet chip.
“But wasn't he hurt? I don’t understand, how long was I out?”
“About an hour or so. He looked fine to me, little skinny for my taste, though,” Sara winked at her. “I'm probably just jealous though, I don't get any bedside checkups.
As the fog in her mind persisted, Pia gave up fighting and decided she must have imagined Zee’s injury.
Recuperating was not nearly as boring as she anticipated. While she was healing, the rest of the crew had all lurched into high gear, filling the comm lines and Datanet with plenty of interesting information. As she lay in Sara's bunk, her mind flew through the cables and networks of Cerex. Her implant let her expand her thoughts wider until data came to her as easily as breathing. Inhale: the data was scoured, organized, threads followed, records made. Breathe out: requests sent, comm links established, old data purged.
Soil samples had come back off the scales for useful volatiles. There were numerous salt compounds and ice layers that extended for nearly ten meters in depth at spots. Cerex herself had helped by gouging a path that deep during the landing. Now the walls of the crash impact looked like a layer cake.
This is what really set things in motion for the Cerex crew. The entire spacecraft had been coiled up waiting with all her real talents hidden in deep storage until now. As different parts of the ship came alive and stretched their gears and circuitry, Pia’s chip could follow it all in beautiful detail.
After the initial reconnaissance phase that mirrored what had happened at Ahuna Mons, this time the activity kept ramping up with each passing hour. With so much raw material right on the surface, Theo skipped the drill rigs and set up one large plastic domed processing station.
Gabe had a growing fleet of rovers to scoop up a cubic meter at a time of the soft upper layers of Ceres. They delivered their load to Theo’s station, which in turn began heating and separating the soil.
The real magic began once these initial processed materials were brought back onboard. The entire STEM labs were buzzing with excitement as they could finally get their hands on the industrial size 3-D printers waiting on the lower storage decks. Bulk supplies of basic materials such as carbon, silicon, and hydrogen were transformed within minutes into parts for everything from rovers and drones to solar cells and simple buildings.
The only setback in moving from Ahuna Mons to Occator was the mist from the frequent geyser plumes. It didn't seem like much when viewed from CereSat, but at ground level the mist gathered in the crater basin and made everything look a bit blurry and faded.
Some began affectionately calling their new home the Fog Bowl, but Lara was not among them. Solar generation was cut in half by the gauzy atmosphere, and she was devising a battery charging station to be installed high up on the nearest crater edge.
Lara couldn't keep up with the energy demands, so Theo fashioned a rudimentary engine to brute force some extra energy for the printers.
Once her concussion had cleared, Pia was eager to get back to her forest. There was so much to clean up, starting with the bee colonies. After overruling some objections, she decided to go take a look and get back to work. Much to her surprise, the bulk of the debris had already been cleared away.
Looking up from the entry hatch, the full scope of how far she fell really sank in for her. Pia said a little prayer thanking Ceres for such weak gravity, or else she would have been a pancake.
She decided the best way to get over any fear she still had was to get climbing again right away. Even on only one healthy foot, she could do her Wonder Woman jumps from platform to platform. Fear was quickly replaced by embarrassment that she managed to get herself hurt in this gravity. Literally the only way to do it was to fall straight down where you can't reach anything to push off of...just as she did. Her playful grinning turned to a grimace each time she caught herself on a platform and her broken ribs were flexed.
The bee hives had been her biggest concern, but other than an overabundance of honey they were doing fine. Better than fine, in fact, as the two colonies which were destroyed during the crash seemed to have joined up with the remaining ones. She had barely finished clearing the honey from the hives when Miller barked at her through the comm.
'Enough playtime. If you’re clear to work, you need to ditch that garden and come help Zee with the life support systems.'
So much for resting up, she thought. 'On my way to STEM deck, Commander.'
'Try again. Down on storage deck two, I'm updating your ship map...now.' Pia bristled at his tone, but was distracted by an update warning as her current ship maps changed suddenly. They were showing three entire new floors down in deep storage.
‘How the hell did that just happen?!’ She struggled to make sense of it while sliding down a plastic wire zipline she had set up to ease the climbing.
Now that she was fully adjusted to her chip, the idea that the information it gave her could be wrong or hidden seemed unsettling. Though it immediately made sense logically to her, the thought had naively never crossed her mind before now.
When she arrived at the right deck, she had to wait as Zee unlocked an impressive door security panel to let her inside. The room was one cavernous whole, with only the central Spine obstructing the view across. This was beneath her forest floor level, close to where the main engines had been anchored.
All around the level there were enormous machines of the sort that only exist in the secret labs of nameless corporations. They reminded Pia of the hulking computer mainframes from a century ago. She was getting ready to search out Zee at some hidden terminal when out he slid from underneath the one by her feet.
“Holy hell!” She spit out, startled half to death, then groaned as her ribs protested the sudden movement.
Zee jumped up and rushed to her side, gently placing one arm on her shoulder and the other on the small of her back to help steady her. The gesture could easily have been unwanted, but he seemed so genuinely concerned that it came off as very caring. Once she had ceased tightening her lips in pain, he stepped back again, slowly this time.
“It seems I can't stop hurting you. I'm so so sorry for the ship tilt. It won't happen again, I promise. I'll do a quick verbal check with everyone to be sure next time I make a move like that.”
She let out a sigh and blew her hair up out of her face. “Maybe just check in with me. The rest of the crew seem to be well aware of these things.”
“I will,” he promised sweetly. Then off he went to the nearby terminal of the machine he had been working underneath. “C'mon, you've gotta see this.”
He hopped into a leather swivel chair and began typing in instructions. She leaned over his shoulder, but whatever he was telling the computer wasn't in any language she knew.
“This is life support?" Pia asked. "Miller told me to help you out, but I'm afraid I don't know any computer languages.”
Zee was momentarily lost in thought, but then swiveled back around towards her with a giddy grin on his face.
“You’re our resident plant expert, chem genius, all around Bio Pia, right?
“Biopia,” she chuckled, “I kinda like that. But yeah, I know nothing about these beasts though.” She patted the side of the impressive machine beside them.
“Maybe not, but you had better start learning. These babies will be feeding us soon. Absolutely the edge of the cutting edge in tech. I would stay here all day if I could, but Miller is getting paranoid about our defenses not being ready.”
“Zee,” she grabbed his face carefully with one hand, steadying his focus on her, “what are they?”
“Sorry, food printers! Remember the terminals back at the Natocorps facility? Tinker toys compared to these. Most food printers take complex organic molecule chains and sort of paint with them. These are a game changer. They can synthesize almost any molecu
le or substance as long as they are provided the raw materials. Imagine being able to produce food on demand using inorganic base materials."
Zee was excited, and paced around as he explained, "Theo and Gabe have already begun to process serious amounts of hydrogen, along with lesser amounts of dozens of other chemicals. Air and water generators are up and running. Beautiful as you...it is...the garden I mean, it’s going obsolete.”
She ignored the slip up and pressed her case. “So what am I supposed to do, flip a switch and watch a screen or something? If this is Miller’s way of punishing me, he can shove it.”
“It’s not like that, Pia."
“Biopia,” she teased.
Zee smiled widely. “He really does need you. These printers are astounding, but they’re also temperamental as shit, pardon my French. The chem tech that goes on here is way out of my league. You're the only one who’ll be able to follow what’s going on and make any adjustments.”
Pia sighed long and slowly. “So...what, am I supposed to start reading, I don't know, a manual or something?”
“You always underestimate the power you have right at your fingertips. Try to calm your thoughts, this is going to feel weird.”
Before Pia could object, suddenly her mind felt like it got sucked down a deep well, with the real world quickly falling away. Schematics and instructions flooded past her, on their way to some storage spot in her chip.
Her face collapsed, mouth hanging open in a numbed ecstasy of pure thought. Slowly, life returned to her green eyes, blinking in an effort to claw her focus back to her physical surroundings.
“You ok, Pia?” Zee sounded far off. “Pia...can you hear me?”
The voice sounded odd coming from outside of her mind, but eventually she managed to respond.
“What. What? That was...what?” She stammered, as her mind was witnessing her mouth’s pathetic attempts to communicate with a mix of amusement and terror. She had never thought so clearly in her life, but if felt as if it had come at the expense of her entire physical well being.
“Oh shit, you’re not ok, are you?" Zee’s scruffy face was beginning to go ghostly white.
“What the hell did you just do to me, Xander?” She came out of her torpor as suddenly as she had entered it, to the great relief of Zee.
“Holy shit, quit scaring me like that!”
“That’s not a fucking answer, Zee!” But as she protested, the answer was already becoming apparent to her. “The machines, I know everything about them now. Jesus, I could build one from scratch if I wanted.”
“Direct File Transfer, DiFiT for short, and I'm assuming this was your first time?”
“Yup, you just took my DiFiT card, I guess,” she laughed. “You can do that again, anytime.”
“Listen, you have no idea how important the data is that I just gave you. Treat it with the proper respect, ok?”
Pia was slightly hurt at his cold shift. But she saw an earnestness in his demeanor that totally diffused the tension.
“I really do have to go, Miller is gonna have my head for taking so long down here with you.” And with that he turned and strode toward the open hatch. Before he climbed the ladder up out of the area, he hesitated and turned back.
His first steps were halting, then grew more confident as he got closer. Just as Pia thought he was going to collide into her, he did. A warm hand slid behind her back as he pressed up against her jumpsuit. Pia was stunned, but met his lips with hers without a second thought as his other hand grabbed up through her hair and held her close.
Then as he released her, he stepped back unsure. Her reddened cheeks and fire filled eyes buoyed his confidence. “I've been wanting to do that for a very long time.” He shot her a knowing smirk with a raised eyebrow, then turned again for the exit.
This time it was Pia who stopped him in his tracks, as she called out, “Hey!”
“Yeah?”
“I've been waiting for you to do that for a very long time, too.” Then her hair swung out widely as she flipped down onto her back and slid underneath the nearest printer. From underneath the machine she chided him, “Get back to work, McKinnon!”
Chapter 2
The next few weeks were a blur. The settlement grew exponentially, with resources coming in faster than they could be used. There were no immediate plans to ship anything other than precious metals and other rare elements back to Earth, so all the rest was being flipped directly into construction.
Pia spent the hours split between her newfound role as printer guru and her twice daily visits back to manage her treehouse, as she’d taken to calling it. The bees had fully assimilated to their new orientation, and the orphaned hives were all adopted successfully.
With food and life support effectively shifted away from her kingdom, she became a gardener for pleasure for the first time since she was a child. Nominally still a backup for the mission, the plants were kept thriving, but for now the rigorous measurements and adjusting could stop.
The printers became an astonishing new challenge for her mind to tackle. She quickly ran through prints of all the basic macromolecules in the only available manual, even managing to shave some time off most of them. Simple sugars and fats were appearing out of thin air, or at least it seemed so. The pulverized and roughly sorted surface of Ceres was transformed within a few hours and then used by the standard shipwide wall printers.
But most of all she thought of Zee, or at least she tried hard to not think about him. Cerex was a big ship, but not big enough to sneak off easily. In fact, the two hadn't spoken since their kiss.
At first she worried he had withdrawn back out of embarrassment or fear of getting caught. Then on the third day of hearing nothing at all, she felt his presence in her chip.
'Hey there, Plant Queen.' She heard his voice as clearly as if he were right there next to her.
She concentrated just as she had practiced a dozen times each day, and she reached out with her mind until she found him. She sensed him through the electric maze of the ship, and saw his extensive glowing techno aura.
'Found you. And it’s Princess Printers now.'
'Ehh, maybe just Princesse.' Zee said.
'What are you doing? Need a break?'
'I wish. Trying to keep us safe here, how about you?'
'Well, I'm on track to figure out sucrose by this week.'
After a short mental silence she pushed on, 'that's right, I'm bringing sugar to Ceres! Aren't I sweet?' She was flailing awkwardly like a teenager on her first date, only worse because she couldn't even see his face. More silence.
When Zee finally responded, his voice came clipped and urgent. 'Pia, I think we're under attack. Get to the nearest exosuit and hold on tight.'
The now familiar icy panic flowed through her veins, but she did as he asked, and heard him repeat the warning on a shipwide channel as she searched for a suit. Near the exit ladder she found what she needed, a sturdy exosuit with helmet. They were not meant for prolonged work outside, but would keep you alive during emergency exposures. She slipped quickly into the sturdy Kevlar and jumped up into the ladder tunnel for cover.
She focused on the metal rungs near her face and managed to calm herself down. When she reached out with her mind towards Zee, an open link was awaiting her. Like a security feed, it showed Zee at his massive holoterminal on STEM deck, but also numerous other system feeds to which she didn't normally have access.
Long range radar and drone fleet orbitals flashed up for her, even the shipwide lockdown controls. 'I need you to have my back if things go badly, Pia. If I can't for any reason, I'm giving you my access codes to stabilize the ship and its life support.'
Pia was glad to hear Zee’s voice again, but recognized that distant tone instantly. He was concentrating on multiple different areas, and his voice came out as a hollow side note to his overloaded mind.
At first there didn't seem to be much to see. Topographical maps of Ceres speckled with what she imagined were exploratory r
overs and drones. Orbital readouts from CereSat. Ground layout of the expanded Occator base camp. The camera shot of Cerex herself caused her to do a double take, as it was completely encased in what looked like gray mud. Apparently a lot had changed while she tinkered in the basement with her printers.
In her periphery a growing series of flashing yellow circles caught her attention in the widest range cameras. They didn't appear to be moving, but it must have been because of the scale. As she watched closely, she spotted more highlighted specks slide across an imaginary line and gain their own yellow halos.
They seemed to be spread out across thousands of kilometers of space, but all came from the same direction, and all were heading their way.
She flipped onto the crew channel, expecting a now tiresome scolding from Miller, but also curious for any new information. The voice she heard was not Miller’s, but Vineland’s, confident as always but searching for facts like the rest of them.
'And we have no visual at all yet on what they are?' Charles asked.
'They’re not ours,' Miller responded, 'which means they're hostile.'
Theo unexpectedly broke though the chatter with his own update. 'Zee, defenses are primed and at your disposal.'
With so many objects to track and control, only Zee could handle the complexity. His voice was everywhere: in a private link to Pia, over the main comm, and in person with the techs near his terminal. 'Commander, I'm showing three groupings, each with a main ship and a few dozen subs. Still too far for detailed visuals, permission to engage at will?'
'Granted. Blow those bastards out of our sky.'
'Let’s see if any of them have a brain.' Zee's thin hands flew through virtual displays. 'Firing cannon now.'
No big explosion followed, which Pia realized was silly to expect in a virtual vacuum. Her private access showed her the cannon in question up on the rim of Occator. A simple machine apparently rigged up by Theo, it looked like an oversized potato gun. It built up pressure with gas, then released it to fire a projectile from a long rifling tube. Whatever it shot couldn't have been more than the size of a soccer ball, but in the absence of atmosphere to slow it down, it was moving at nearly three hundred meters per second.
Mission Cerex Boxset Page 8