“This is ridiculous,” said Koros III. “There would have to be millions of these Easter Island heads to border the entire northern ocean.”
“We count four million, two hundred three thousand, five hundred and nine,” said Asteague/Che. “But the construction is incomplete. Note this photograph taken some months ago during Mars’s closest approach.”
A myriad of tiny, blurry forms pulled what might be a great stone head on rollers. The stone face was looking skyward, its shadow-eyes staring straight into the space telescope. The tiny figures appeared to be attached to the heads by multiple cables, pulling them along, Mahnmut thought, like Egyptian slaves hauling a pyramid block.
“Human workers?” said Orphu. “Or robots?”
“We think neither,” said Ri Po. “The size is wrong. And you notice the coloring of the figures on the spectral analysis bands.”
“Green?” said Mahnmut. He liked literary puzzles, not real-life ones. “Green robots?”
“Or a species of small green humanoids not previously encountered,” Asteague/Che said seriously.
Orphus of Io rumbled subsonic laughter. “LGM,” he said aloud.
[ ? ] sent Mahnmut.
Little Green Men, Orphu of Io sent on the common band and rumbled again.
“Why were we called here?” Mahnmut asked Asteague/Che. “What does this terraforming have to do with us?”
The integrator returned the window to transparency. The bands of Jupiter and plains of Europan ice in the evening light looked dull and muted after all the vibrant inner-system blues and whites. “We’re sending a team to Mars to investigate this and report back,” said Asteague/Che. “You’ve been chosen. You can say ‘no’ now.”
The four remained silent on all communications spectra.
“I said ‘report back,’ “ continued the prime integrator, “but not necessarily ‘come back.’ We have no sure way of returning you to the Jovian system. Please signal if you would like to be replaced on this mission.”
All four remained silent.
“All right,” said the Europan integrator. “You’ll download the specifics of the expedition in a few minutes, but let me cover the high points. We will use Mahnmut’s submersible for the actual surveillance on the planet. Ri Po and Orphu will map from orbit while Mahnmut and Koros III go to the surface. We’re especially interested in activity on and around Mons Olympos, the largest volcano. Quantum-shift activity there has been massive and inexplicable. Mahnmut will deliver Koros III to the coastline, and our Ganymedan friend will carry out reconnaissance.”
Mahnmut knew from his records and readings that Lost Age humans had signaled pending interruption by clearing their throats. He made a throat-clearing noise. “You have to excuse my stupidity, but how do we get The Dark Lady—my submersible—to Mars?”
“That’s not a stupid question,” said the integrator. “Orphu of Io?”
The giant armored horseshoe crab shifted on its repellors so that various black lenses looked at Mahnmut. “It’s been centuries since we’ve sent anything in-system. And anything delivered the old-fashioned way would take half a Jovian year. We’ve decided to use the scissors.”
Ri Po shifted in his slab niche. “I thought the scissors were going to be used only for interstellar exploration.”
“The Five Moons Consortium has decided that this takes precedence,” said Orphu of Io.
“I presume there will be some sort of spacecraft,” said Koros III. “Or are you going to fling us one after the other, naked, like so many chickens fired from a trebuchet?”
Orphu’s subsonic rumble shook the slab. He obviously liked Koros’ image.
Mahnmut had to access the common net. A trebuchet was a Lost Age human siege engine from their Level Two civilizations—pre-steam—mechanical but much more powerful than a mere catapult, able to launch huge boulders more than a mile.
“A spacecraft exists,” said Asteague/Che. “It has been designed to reach Mars in a few days and configured to hold Mahnmut’s submersible. The spacecraft has an atmospheric entry package for Mahnmut’s submersible—The Dark Lady .”
“Reach Mars in a few days,” repeated Ri Po. “What are the delta-v factors leaving Io’s flux tube?”
“Just under three thousand gravities,” said the integrator. “Earth g’s.”
Mahnmut, who had never experienced a gravity-load greater than Europa’s less than one-seventh Earth-g, tried to imagine 21,000 such g’s. He couldn’t.
“During acceleration, the ship, including The Dark Lady, will be packed with gel,” said Orphu of Io. “We’ll be as comfy as circuit chips in a gelatin mold.” It was obvious that Orphu had been involved in planning the spacecraft and Ri Po in observing the two worlds. Koros III had probably had advance warning about his command role in such an expedition. It seemed to Mahnmut that only he had been left out of the preparation for this mission, probably because his role—driving The Dark Lady through the Martian seas—was so unimportant. Perhaps, he thought, I should opt out of this expedition after all.
Proust? he tightbeamed the big Ionian.
Too bad we aren’t going to Earth, my friend. We could visit Stratford-on-Avon. Buy a souvenir mug.
It was an old joke between them, but in the present context, it seemed funny again. Mahnmut tightbeamed a decent simulacrum of Orphu’s heavy laughter and the big construct rumbled so heavily in return that all four of the others could hear it through the thick air.
Ri Po was not laughing. He was obviously computing. “Such a scissors’ fling would give us an initial velocity of almost two-tenths light speed, and even after drastic magnetic scoop deceleration in-system, we’ll have an approach velocity of about one-thousandth light speed—more than 300 kilometers per second. We’ll get to Mars quickly enough, even while it’s on the far side of the sun as it is now. But has anyone given any thought as to how we might slow down once we get there?”
“Yes,” said Orphu of Io, his rumbling abating. “We’ve given that some thought.”
Even after thirty Jovian years of existence, Mahnmut had no one to say good-bye to on Europa. His exploration partner, Urtzweil, had been destroyed in a closing lead near Pwyll Crater eighteen J-years earlier, and Mahnmut had grown close to no other conscious entity since then.
Sixteen hours after the conference, Conamara Chaos Central ordered dedicated orbital tugs to lift The Dark Lady out of an open lead and boost it into orbit, where hard-vac moravecs, supervised by Orphu of Io, tucked the submersible into the waiting Marscraft and let ancient inter-lunar induction haulers truck the stack downhill to Io. Mahnmut and the other three expedition moravecs had briefly discussed naming the spacecraft, but imagination failed them, the impulse faded, and from that point on they referred to it only as “the ship.”
Like most spacecraft constructed by moravecs in the thousands of years since spacefaring began, the ship was something less than elegant, at least by classical standards. It was one hundred and fifteen meters long and was comprised primarily of buckycarbon girders, with wrinkled radiation-shield fabric wrapped around module niches, semiautonomous sniffer probes, scores of antennae, sensors, and cables. This ship was notably different from Jovian-system machines primarily because of its gleaming magnetic dipole core and its sporty outrider deflectors. Packed away in its lumpy snout were four fusion engine bells and the five horns of the Matloff/Fennelly scoop. A ten-meter-wide pimple on the stern held the folded boron sail. Neither scoop nor sail would be needed until the deceleration part of the journey and the fusion engines had nothing to do with the acceleration phase of the mission.