Nucleation

by Kimberly Unger

  “You’ll be back when you’re ready to be back. Not the macho OP ‘I got this’ bullshit kind of ready, but really, actually ready.” Keller frowned, irritated. “You know better than that, right?”

  “I don’t think I’m going to be ‘really ready’ until I can get back up there and get my head around what I missed on the mission.” Until I can figure out who or what caused Ted’s death. The last part she kept to herself.

  “Have you had breakfast yet?” Keller asked abruptly. It took Helen a moment to switch gears to answer.

  “Not yet.”

  “Okay, let’s take a walk.” Keller abruptly got to his feet and left the cubicle, heading to the office’s outer door. Surprised, Helen followed, pausing only a moment to make sure anything personal had been swept into the drawers.

  Keller led the way down the carpeted corridor, the soles of his dress shoes making no sound. They passed the big picture windows that looked out onto the city, but rather than heading for the elevator, Keller turned the corner towards the interior of the building. At his approach, a door appeared in the hallway wall, one of the service doors, designed to be invisible unless there was an emergency.

  “The commissary’s only a few floors down and I missed my workout this morning; mind taking the stairs?”

  “Who the hell takes the stairs?” Helen started to ask, but Keller had already opened the door and stepped inside. Helen hesitated. The stairwells were dead-zones, cameras only, no access to James or the rest of the Far Reaches network. The perfect place to say things you can’t say.

  Helen followed Keller in, allowing the heavy door to close behind her with a click that echoed down the metal steps.

  “Bright and Mira are prepping for a second attempt,” Keller said without even looking back over his shoulder to see if she was there. Something in that idea made a shiver run through all the wires in Helen’s body.

  Keller started downward, not too fast and not too slow.

  “Already? Isn’t that pushing it?” She rattled down the stairs to catch up to him, trying to keep the disbelief out of her tone. “When are they going?”

  “As soon as possible, maybe a week, maybe less. And no, it’s not part of Line Drive proper, it’s a side-jaunt. The engineers want to get a second look at the Golfball.” Keller narrowed his eyes. He’d picked up on her concern; she could see it.

  “After the feedback problem gets addressed, right?”

  A long pause from Keller. An uncomfortably long pause.

  “AFTER, right?” Helen pushed for a yes or no. A clear answer.

  “Right now all Golfball- and Line Drive-related launches are officially on hold until they make a decision about the feedback you encountered, yes.” He was giving her the official, public line, but as an OP she knew better. Officially was a keyword, almost like a shorthand, that meant “this is what we are telling people while we are doing other shit under the table.”

  Panic fluttered. Helen felt it even through Doc’s magic no-care cocktail.

  “But we are on the clock here,” he continued urgently. “The payload launched, so in another month or so we are going to get the wake-up ping from the payload and we are going back out there again. We’ve got to use the Golfball to learn everything we can, even if we have to take a few risks.”

  “Officially?” Helen repeated sharply.

  “The Feeds are clean, there’s no reason not to try.” Keller looked at her closely. “This is bugging you, isn’t it.”

  “It wasn’t a technological glitch of some kind, Keller, and I know this wasn’t human error.”

  “I know, I know. Something ‘ate’ the Golfball. Your words. But if there was a sabotage attempt, we have to get ahold of those eenies and deconstruct who was behind it.”

  “I don’t know what it was. I do know we need to figure it out before Bright and Mira get out there and put their foot into it the way Ted and I did.” Helen didn’t know why the panic was rising, why she was suddenly, absolutely convinced that a second attempt was a suicide mission.

  Keller looked concerned. “Trust the team, Helen. We got this.”

  “I want to be there.” Helen gripped the railing to stop her hands from shaking. “From what I saw on the analysis side yesterday, no one has a clue about what caused that feedback.”

  “It’s just a quick jump back out to see if Mira and Bright can get some new data. Jump in, do a scan, empty the eenie traps, get out.”

  “And if that sound shows up again?” Helen dodged around Keller on the stairs, halting his downward progress.

  “It won’t. It was a one-time glitch.”

  Helen tried and failed to get Keller to look her in the eye. “And if it does?”

  “We’ll handle it. Trust your team. Which reminds me . . .” Keller stepped around her on the stair. “I cleared it with Hofstaeder to get you back into the training sims.”

  “You what?!” Helen’s apprehension was completely derailed, vanished at the unexpected revelation.

  “I’ve got you an hour in the training sim later this week, and if that goes well, I’ll get you another one the day after that. You’ve got to work on trainee level stuff to start, but I managed to convince her that keeping you offline, cold turkey, was going to be a problem for Line Drive. We can’t afford to retrain another OP right now, so she and I split the difference.”

  “Holy shit, Keller, thank you!” Even the no-care cocktail couldn’t dampen the sense that abruptly, suddenly, things were pointed in the right direction again. An entire new set of actions was now open and Helen’s mind tried, briefly, to explore each one. Her earlier focus on the new Golfball mission had been pushed to the bottom of the list.

  “Don’t thank me yet, you’ve still got to requalify. You’ve got to get clearance from Hofstaeder. Until you do both of those things, I expect you to bust your ass for the analysis team, figuring out how we keep from losing another NAV.” Keller took a moment to burst her bubble before stopping on the landing and passing his hand across the key panel to unlock it. Helen could just hear the whisper as his NFC chip shook hands with James to let them back out into Far Reaches.

  When they exited, Helen’s Insight chimed with a series of message icons and informational signs. She grabbed the scheduling icon from Keller first and jammed it into her calendar, blocking out the hour in the training sim before anything else could pop up and claim the time.

  “You know, you could just take the promotion with good grace,” Keller reiterated.

  “I could also find the perfect cat,” Helen responded, calling back to their previous conversation. “Thank you, Keller. This means a lot.”

  “C’mon, I’ll buy you a coffee while we’re still peers.”

  “You know the coffee here is free, right?” Helen asked.

  “I’ll make it a double, then.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The stacks of control pods resembled nothing so much as the capsule-hotels that plagued downtown Launch City, offering single-user isolation on an hourly basis. Each rack in the brightly lit room held five “coffins” on vertical rails so OPs could work in shifts. The room was always too cold for Helen’s liking, but today she felt the chill as anticipation, rather than server-dependent air conditioning.

  What she hadn’t counted on was the fear. Completely irrational, nipping at the back of her brain, fear. It told her if she got back into that coffin, she might not be coming back out again. Hofstaeder had taken her off the emo-blockers for the sake of her getting back into the coffins early. It meant she had to be on guard, examine each reaction a little more carefully.

  Don’t be stupid. OPs don’t die in coffins. Helen lied to herself to put the hesitation out of her mind. She shoved the idea that if a NAV could die, an OP could go even faster, back into a corner behind the thrill of being back where she belonged. She was not about to step back now, not when Keller had handed
her an opportunity.

  After a week offline, her Far-Reaches-blue supersuit was a little stiff and took a bit of adjustment. Once the conductive gel was pumped in, it warmed to body temperature and fit on the inside like a second skin. It served as one of the hundred points of feedback allowing her to transfer her body awareness to a nanofiber and titanium remote-operated waldo across a million miles or more. Or in op-speak, it meant she’d be far less likely to bump into things on the other end.

  “Welcome back, Vectorovich.” The on-duty tech waved her over to the stack. A quick punch of a button and the coffins cycled until an empty one stood ready, lid open, interior lights aglow. “Ready to get back in the saddle?”

  “You know it.” Helen placed her hands on either side of the open coffin and quickly levered herself inside to conceal her shaking. She knew perfectly well she would be under scrutiny. Hofstaeder and Keller would be going over her performance, looking for signs that she wasn’t ready to go back.

  The connection points between her shoulder blades were a centimeter lower than Far Reaches standard. Helen had to adapt, piling the coffin’s gel padding up behind her knees and scooching down until the magnetic connectors snapped together. The coffin screens lit up with the pre-mission display, time to entanglement counting down. She could see her outline reflected in the coffin above her, a humanoid shadow lit by the coffin’s interior glow.

  “Operator Vectorovich, are you ready to engage?” The tech read off the consent line and Helen stuck her arm up out of the coffin, thumb up in the universal symbol for HELL YES.

  “Preparing for full entanglement,” the tech replied.

  Helen heard the rasp of protective gloves on the touchscreen controls as the tech ordered the coffin’s computer to engage. She pulled her arm back as the coffin lid slid closed and the atmosphere started to pressurize. Helen could feel the change in her eardrums, in the back of her throat. The connectors along her spine opened up. She could feel the cold as nutrient fluid began to suffuse her veins, and the uncomfortable prickle as nerves fell asleep, then went numb. She closed her eyes and exhaled, a long deep breath, as the computer interface became the only thing she could see or feel or touch.

  The waldo they’d assigned her for this retraining mission wasn’t too much of a beater. The previous op had left it in good order. Slipping into a warmed up waldo was akin to finding the toilet seat already warm from someone else’s ass. It didn’t feel quite right. It took a few minutes until your brain caught up with what your body was feeling.

  Welcome to the cryo-spa of Capricorn216. The words scrolled across the bottom of her vision, a joke left by the previous operator. Helen let the marquee text run and snapped a screenshot for her personal file.

  “Mark local time 12:14:56. Station live, station live, station live.” The NAV’s clipped, abrupt tones were unfamiliar.

  They’ve teamed me up with a rookie, Helen realized. On a mission like this it shouldn’t matter much; she had to remember to be patient, to execute the requests exactly. Milk run, rookie NAV, should be simple enough. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but a boring run collecting mineral samples might just be what she needed.

  “Operator Helen Vectorovich, personal identifier T4T4-957. Waldo is live, beginning initialization protocols.” Helen dropped back into old habits like she’d never missed a mission day. The waldo’s responses were recorded, one by one, as she went through the checklist that had popped up in her line of sight.

  The spherical waldo was a surface-only drone, sensors and cameras built into an outer shell made of reconfigurable panels. It was nearly indestructible as long as you kept it from getting submerged in whatever liquid hell they’d dropped you next to. She shivered in recognition.

  Capricorn216 was a common training spot. The near-space rocky body contained enough frozen methane to power an off-world colony for decades or fuel the AI-driven drones that maintained the systems’ solitary jumpgate. Far Reaches had been mining the frozen methane here for a couple of decades. The surface was beyond freezing. Lakes of methane being prepared for harvesting posed a challenge for OPs who’d trained on waldos with legs. The crystalline slush around the edges of the lake melted under her belly as Helen rolled herself into position. She hunted for a clean space where the previous operators had not yet ground the ice into the substrate.

  The payload of eenies had been dropped onto the new mining site months ago. A couple of weeks of growth and they’d begun working to convert the methane ice to a stable liquid that could be shipped off site. The lakes and puddles were stunning on Helen’s color camera, even more so through the eye of the spectrograph.

  Helen continued her slow roll, enjoying the feeling of the ice crunching under her belly.

  “Operator Vectorovitch, you may proceed with list item one,” the NAV’s voice in her ear continued with the crisp tones, precise pronunciations.

  Oh great. One of those.

  There were many different kinds of NAVs. Some were chitchatty; you could count on them to keep you focused through conversation, dumb jokes and the like. Helen knew of one who read poetry by long dead deep-space miners. On the other end of the spectrum, you got the clinicians, those who lived and died by the list and barely gave you five words in between. Low-level training missions like this one often matched NAVs and OPs at random. Partnerships didn’t start to show up until year two or three, unless an OP and a NAV showed exceptional teamwork from the outset.

  I didn’t think they’d match me up with the “listy” type.

  “Confirmed. I’m just moving so we can get the best possible samples,” Helen replied.

  “Negative, Operator Vectorovitch.”

  What? “Repeat, please.”

  “Negative. All activities are to be constrained to list-specific items only.”

  “Have you seen how torn up it is over there? Any samples will be compromised,” Helen protested even as the list in the corner of her eye turned a dangerous shade of orange.

  Deep breaths. Helen reminded herself. She was going to have to adjust her own attitude. OPs were supposed to have leeway, the ability to judge situations on the fly. That was half the point of having a live operator running the waldo instead of an AI. Conflict between NAVs and OPs never ended well, even on a mission-by-mission basis, but sometimes the lesson had to be learned the hard way. I’m not supposed to be training NAVs out here, Helen groused in her own head.

  She had an opportunity to give a new NAV something to work with, to do some actual instruction. Under other circumstances that would be exactly what she would do. But the goal of these missions, for her, was re-credentialing. Her performance would be under review, which meant her goal had to be proving she could still do the job. Coloring outside the lines, even if it might help the NAV get some real-world experience, would likely be counted against her.

  Suck it up and comply, then.

  “Affirmative. Shall I return to the previous site, or shall I take the samples from here?”

  “Do not continue your trajectory. Retrieve your samples from your current coordinates. Deviation from the checklist has been noted and logged.”

  Fuckity fuck fuck fuck. “Confirmed.” Helen brought the waldo to a gentle stop and started the collection sequence. Its outside skin broke open and the panels folded back, revealing the robotic sample arm. The list returned to its original soft, glowing green. Helen snapped a set of images from the new sample site and attached them to the mission log. That, along with the sensor readings on the condition of the terrain, would serve to appeal the notation later.

  Notations weren’t the end of a career; any experienced operator collected a few dozen over the course of their lifetime. With Hofstaeder and Keller both keeping an eye on her performance, she’d wanted this run to be perfect.

  Alongside that idea, the chattering in her head began again. Here in the waldo it was easier to put it out of her head,
easier to ignore. It sounded much less like random noise and much more like communication. Helen found herself half listening, trying to pick out words she recognized as she went through the motions to follow the checklist.

  By the time the methane was all gone, the space rock would be a little more than a collection of loosely related rubble. At that point it would be ready for consumption by an entirely different class of tiny machines. Instead of wasting the millions of eenies that had been built for collecting the methane, they’d be broken down and re-purposed.

  Everything in space was disposable, recyclable, reusable if you had the right tools for it.

  Helen found herself poring over the eenie operating data while waiting for confirmation between list items. She took the opportunity to examine the characteristics of different types and their tasks. Reading helped keep the chatter in her head at bay.

  There was no waste. Every mite was set a task, and when it broke down or failed in its programming, it was consumed and recycled into another type of mite. There were no leftovers, no broken pieces.

  No dust. The thought sent a shiver down her spine, but she didn’t know why.

  “Confirmed samples, Operator Vectorovitch. Please proceed to protocol step five.”

  Helen suppressed a sigh as she moved to the next item on the list. According to the readout, she’d been on shift for half an hour already. Never been a clock watcher before. But this mission and her temporary NAV sucked all the fun out of riding the waldo. Even an AI could do a better banter than this.

  “Operator Vectorovitch, please begin item seven of your mission protocol.”

  Wait, what? Did I miss number six? The list turned orange again, again warning her about going off protocol. Item six showed the glowing green checkmark of completion. She didn’t remember completing the item.

  “Confirmed, NAV, sample taking has begun.”

  “Negative, Operator Vectrovitch. Please stop current activity and move to the new sample point.”