Beacon
by Rick Shelley
Illustration by Vincent Di Fate
The first thing you do, you make sure you’ve got air to breathe. If there’s the slightest doubt of hull integrity, you hurry into a pressure suit. Everything else comes second.
Collision.
Ebeneezer’s Candle did not take a high-angle hit, but she shook enough to turn me inside out and keep my head throbbing for a long time. When I got around to noting such things, there was a lot of dried blood on my face and in my scalp on the left side, from getting knocked around.
Ebbie’s radars had given no warning of the debris hurtling our way. The reason for that was the same reason that we didn’t take a direct hit. The front third of Ebeneezer’s Candle was buried in a large cometary body and I didn’t have the remote sensor packets deployed yet. They had been crawling toward their positions when two chunks of rock and metal shattered the berg, and sent ice and dust banging along Ebbie’s body.
“Ebbie, talk to me,” I said once my eyes quit spinning. I was watching air-pressure dials, wondering what the devil had happened and whether I ought to get into my pressure suit.
“Ebbie? Talk to me, girl.” I know, it’s inconsistent and illogical to give a ship a man’s name and still refer to it, and to the computer’s personality mode, as female, but that’s the way it is. It’s not just me, I promise.
“Evaluating.” It could only have been my imagination, but Ebbie’s voice sounded weak, confused—the way I felt. But the fact that it had taken her so long to respond would have been worrisome had I had time to worry about it.
“What hit us?” I asked.
There was another pause before she answered, “An object.” If Ebbie were human, I would have said that it was a flip response, but I didn’t think that she was capable of that. She started flashing screens of data at me, and I had those to concentrate on over the next several minutes.
The hull remained gastight. Once Ebbie assured me of that, I let myself take a breath or two and slowed my heart rate. Biofeedback. You have to remain in control no matter how close you come to the edge or how badly you hurt. And it was time to switch apparent time modes. We had done the “minutes squeezed into seconds” of an adrenaline rush. That was no longer necessary. I closed my eyes for fifteen seconds, holding my breath, as I tried to focus and step down from the danger high.
“Damage report?” I asked. This time Ebbie was ready, both with the good news and the bad. I already knew about the hull.
“Magnetic fuel containment remains nominal,” Ebbie said. If the mag-barrels had given, I wouldn’t have been around to hear that report. It was only the development of an antimatter drive that had made the round-trip times practical for humans to wander out to the Oort Cloud. At that, we still only skim the inner surface, the first few light-days of the cloud.
“There is, however,” Ebbie continued, “damage to the primary exhaust cone, as well as damage to several maneuvering thrusters. We will be unable to boost for our return to Mars Base as is.”
“Alternatives?” I asked, swallowing hard over the news that Ebbie wouldn’t be able to head for home.
“Recommend course change for Shipwreck Station 117+9,” Ebbie said. “We can make that in twenty-seven hours at safe acceleration.”
I spent several minutes reviewing data, but there was no real doubt. “Do it,” I told Ebbie.
Nobody’ asked me, but Oort Cloud is the worst place name misnomer since Eric the Red named Greenland. The problem is that people have a very definite idea of what cloud means, even if they’ve never lived anywhere that has clouds. They think of fluffy atmospheric constructs too thick to see through, and somehow (in the case of the Oort, at least) impossible to penetrate. Or, if they’ve heard just a little about the area, they imagine a thick shell around the Solar System crammed full of dirty snowballs and rocks. Two seconds of thought should be enough for people to see the fallacies in that, but I guess a lot of folks don’t use that much time on anything that doesn’t concern them directly and immediately. If the Oort Cloud was that thick, we couldn’t see the stars through it.
Even in the depths of the Oort space is mostly very empty. There are all of those comets and asteroids, some of them quite large—or we wouldn’t be out here trying to make a living, but the truth is, we miners still have to hunt for good claims.
That’s not to say that, once in a while, the neighborhood can’t get too crowded for comfort. There is enough stuff on so many different tracks that there are collisions, and chain reactions. At times it can get too cloudlike for comfort.
I was near the end of my third deep expedition, so I knew the ropes. In the eight weeks since I had arrived from Mars, I had tagged six good claims—four rock and metal, two mostly volatiles—and boosted them toward rendezvous with catchers orbiting my home planet. People who have never done this for a living say that it’s all in the computers, but getting your package to its destination with minimal loss, and with minimal delta-vee for the catcher to overcome is as much art as number crunching. That’s why miners get half of the take, with the catcher and backer splitting the other 50 percent.
All I wanted now was one last good claim to boost home with. We always push the last one in.
I had found just what I had been looking for, a chunk of valuable ices three kilometers along its major axis, more than half that across the beam. Depending on how much my earlier claims assayed out for, and how my investments were doing, it might be enough to let me retire. Maybe some people mine the Oort for the sake of the job, but it has always been nothing more than a means to an end—a long and comfortable retirement—for me. The minute my accountant told me that I had enough to insure that, it would be “Good-bye candle ships” for me!
I had my candle nosed into the berg nicely, and was setting clamps to keep it in position, and moving the instrument remotes out when those chunks of metal ores collided with the berg.
Once I had confirmed that there was nothing I needed to do immediately, I went to my sleeping bag on the mid-deck and sealed myself in. There would be time for work, and worry, later. But until we reached the shipwreck station, it was better to husband my energy, and get as much sleep as possible.
There had been other damage to Ebbie, relatively minor stuff—seals stressed or cracked, bulkheads slightly deformed, even a couple of small leaks, but those had been patched automatically.
Candle ships are remarkably durable. They have to be, the way we use them. We push chunks of metal, rock, and ice around, many of them measured in kilometers. We make the long haul out and back in at accelerations of up to one-g, reaching peak velocities close to seven-tenths of the speed of light. There are millions of people on Mars, the Moon, and in expeditionary bases and space habitats sprinkled around the Solar System who depend on what we can provide to make it practical. It would be far too expensive, and destructive, to haul everything up from Earth.
“Tim, we will have company at the shipwreck station,” Ebbie said when she noted that I had awakened six hours later. “We were not the only ones caught in the Event.”
“A chain reaction?” I asked. You’ve probably seen the same demonstration I first saw when I was about eight years old. The bottom of a transparent cube is covered with old-fashioned backbreaking mousetraps, with table tennis balls resting on each. One more ball is dropped in the top, and pretty quickly all of the traps have been sprung and the balls are bouncing all over the place. A basic physics demonstration. Or, you might think of it as the break in a game of pocket billiards—in three dimensions with the balls ranging up to the size of mountains.