She glanced at the timepiece etched indelibly under her left thumbnail. “How about twenty minutes of diversion, Johnny?” Virginia lifted a cable from the console and bared a whitish bump at the back of her head. When the connection clicked home, the symbols on the screen were accompanied by a rich voice inside her head.
POETRY, VIRGINIA?
She answered quickly with an impulsive thread of verse:
The line to her acoustic nerve hummed:
MIXED STYLES, VIRGINIA?
DOES THE SECOND PART APPLY TO LOVE?
She blushed. “Oh hush, silly. Come on now. Let’s take a look at your conversation subroutines.”
CARL
The dusty ice sheets were speckled and splashed, rainbow-mottled, packed and scoured.
Carl Osborn spun his workpod and vectored down toward Halley Core. He flew away from the razor-sharp dawnline, aiming for the north pole where their base was finally taking shape.
The grainy gray and brown surface was changing rapidly now. Like tiny, fat ants, mechs moved over it, preparing docking areas and mooring towers. Spiders hammered holes into the ice, their endless microwave zzzzzzttts leaking faintly into some of the data channels. Carl muttered a quick correcting command to his suit’s comm filter control and the interference stopped.
Shaft 3 was nearly finished, a yawning pit like a dead eye socket. The first group of sleep slots would be going down that way soon. A kilometer of sheltering ice would shield the sleepers from the fatal sting of cosmic rays and the sleeting solar storms.
Random gouges surrounded the shaft. Discharging mech fuel cells had pitted the crusty ice. Broken gear lay where teams had dropped it. Chem spills had condensed into powdery green and yellow splotches. Discarded girders and sonic cartridges and shockjackets lay everywhere. What mankind would study Carl thought wryly, he first messes up.
Just barely visible over the curved horizon, now slowly coming into view along the dawnline, were the black gas-suppression panels. They were an ongoing experiment, armored against the high velocity dust streams and designed to generate electricity from sunlight. Their shadows reduced the outgassing from one-eighth of Halley Core’s surface, introducing an asymmetry in the boiloff. The panels could be turned so that they trapped heat, too, increasing the outgassing on the night side of the core. The net effect was a faint, persistent push that could alter the comet’s orbit, given time.
Or so the story went. To Carl the big black panels had been one solid week of grunt labor. They were too delicate to let the mechs do more than hold them in place, while he and Lani Nguyen and Jeffers had mounted them to the robo-arms that would turn them. The astroengineers were still tinkering with the gimmicks piling up data to analyze during the long outbound voyage.
It was hard to tell what was an intentional experiment and what was yesterday’s garbage. He wondered how messy Halley Core could get. In nearly eighty years they might thoroughly trash even this much ice.
Carl could see a thin black stripe coming out of shadow at the dawnline—the polar cable. It wrapped around Halley Core, pole to pole, and joined the equatorial cable at a perfect right angle, but separated by several meters for safety. The rails provided swift ways to zip around the surface. Still, Carl seldom used them. He liked to get free of the bleak ice, swim in serene blackness above it all.
Between him and the slowly spinning, potato-shaped iceworld were the swarming mechs he supervised. He thumbed instructions into his lap console, muttering code phrases automatically, making the distant dots turn their burden—a huge orange cylinder. Its smooth sheen reflected glinting sunlight.
—Channel D to Osborn. Real pretty, uh?—Jeffers sent from below.
“Well …”
Awful color, he thought. And it’s the inner-corridor lining. We’ll have to look at it for seventy years.
The mechs dropped lower, angling the cylinder for Shaft 3, following his instructions. The potato-like shape of Halley Core revolved every fifty-two hours, just fast enough to make readjustment necessary as they approached. Subliming gas still rose from some of the active patches the scientists called “Sekanina-Larson” regions, making visibility hazy and creating a hazard of high-velocity dust. The thin fog blurred images at this distance—8.3 kilometers, his board said-and made it hard to use his automatic aligning program.
He had backup on the Edmund, in case of a malf. Fine, in theory. But by the time he got somebody online, the mechs might dutifully try to stuff the cylinder into a hill of ice. Despite Virginia ’s earnest faith, computers could do only so much. From there on you had to eyeball it.
“Bringing it in slow,” he sent.
—Looks vectored up just a hair. Two clicks too high along the local y-axis,— Jeffers replied.
Carl looked down, recalibrated, saw that Jeffers was right. “Damn.”
—You okay?—
“Yeah. Just keep those beacons going.”
The four laser aligners bracketed Shaft 3 clearly, and Carl turned the mechs into configuration using the bright markers. A touch of delta V, a compensating torque. His board approved the shift. Good. But now the irregular ice was looming fast, and—
Gravity. He’d forgotten the damn gravity. Halley Core had only a ten-thousandth of Earth’s pull…but in his half-hour decent from the solar-sail freighter the momentum had built…slow but steady…He punched in a correction, watching the equations ripple across his board.
Lights flashed red. “I’m braking;” he sent, and fired the mechs’ retros.
Damn the gravity anyway. Carl had been at Encke, worked around the rocky comet nucleus for weeks. It had been just like any deep space work—sometimes almost an elaborate waltz, smooth and sure, and a lot of grunt and sweat at crucial moments. Still, it was basically easy if you watched that your vectors matched, didn’t push anything except at its center of mass, worked steadily, kept your head.
But Encke was a runt. An old prune of a comet, broiled by its long stay in the inner solar system. Halley had a lot more mass, mostly ice. On the surface you never noticed the slight tug, but coming in like this, taking your time to aim carefully, that ten-thousandth of a G could add up.
The mechs’ blue jets fanned against the backdrop of ice, slowing the cargo. Carl saw suddenly that it wasn’t enough. The ponderous, hundred-meter-long cylinder was coming in too fast.
He ordered the lower portwise mech to turn and thrust at full bore. The unit spun, fired its reserve.
—What the hell you— Jeffers began.
“Clear the shaft!”
— What—
“Clear it!”
Standard procedure was to bring cargo to rest about fifty meters out, then nudge it in. His board said that was impossible. Instinct told him to try for something else.
He jetted forward, nearly caught up with the cylinder. A touch from the lower starboard mech, two quick torques here, a jolt sidewise to line her up—
An arrow from on high, aimed at a puckered black circle.
The orange cylinder struck the lip of Shaft 3, slowed—broke off an edge of ice—and drove on in, scattering flakes off into space.
Bull’s-eye, he rejoiced as the cylinder disappeared within the hole.