The Imperative Chronicles, Books One and Two: The Mars Imperative & The Tesserene Imperative

by Mark Terence Chapman

  Upon closer inspection of P5M6, we found that the TB signature was just slightly off from what we’d thought it was, making it impossible to be a source of tesserene. Perhaps our readings were influenced by interference from the planet itself, which was an emitter of TB radiation as well. That left us with only three more possibles among this planet’s moons. At least we hadn’t used much thruster fuel thus far, which meant we’d still be able to return to the asteroid belt for some additional mining if the last three moons didn’t pan out.

  Hmm. “Pan out.” That’s good ol’ placer mining terminology from the California gold rush days. The technology had changed quite a bit since then, but the desire to strike it rich was still the driving force behind what we were doing out there.

  * * * *

  “Scanning P5M2.” Sparks reported. “Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets. Round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows.” So much for Sparks’ vaunted air of professionalism. He was getting as loopy as the rest of us. Too much staring at sensor readings can have that effect after a while.

  On the holoscreen the craggy moon looked somewhat like Earth’s, spattered with craters—but only 1,120 kilometers across, about a third of Luna’s girth. P5M2 was the second largest moon orbiting Richie, and the largest of the ones showing TB signatures. Behind P5M2 was the incredible sight of ol’ Richie himself filling the screen, bilious yellow-green clouds chasing each other around the planet at nearly two hundred KPH—hurricane force winds on Earth.

  “Holy sh—!” Sparks began. He lost all trace of professional detachment and spoke in a rush. “I mean…I’m picking up strong indications of tesserene down there. When I say “strong” I mean tons of the stuff, lots of tons of the stuff. Gentlemen, I think we just found the mother lode!”

  We all looked at each other in stunned, wide-eyed silence for a moment, before Sparks yelled, “Yee-ha!”

  In an instant we were all dancing a jig around the bridge—not very well, given the tight confines—whooping and hollering at the top of our lungs.

  “Mr. Clinkscales,” began Cap in all seriousness. Then he broke into the biggest grin I’d ever seen on his craggy face. “I suggest you find us some coordinates where we can land the pod and begin extracting!”

  Sparks’ fingers flew across his console.

  * * * *

  “Cap, this could get tricky,” said Tom. “It appears the tesserene is buried well below the surface—probably like that first moon.”

  Cap frowned. “Wait a minute—how can you be sure it’s tesserene this time, if you couldn’t before?”

  “That’s where we caught a huge break—maybe the one you were asking for weeks ago. It appears that an asteroid or comet, or something, struck the moon right over the tesserene deposit and blew a hole in the crust, exposing the ore.”

  “Brilliant! So what’s the problem?”

  “Most of it is still well below the surface, and there’s a lot of rubble around the hole. I’m not sure how close we can get the pod and the extractor to it, or how much of it we can reach with the extractor.”

  “If we can get to the hole, can we reach enough tesserene to fill our holds?” Cap asked.

  “Possibly, but probably not.”

  “So what are you complaining about? Even if we fill our holds a tenth of the way with refined tesserene, that’s more than has ever been found in one place in the history of spaceflight!”

  Tom’s eyes opened wide. “You’re right! I hadn’t thought of it that way.” His frown turned into a lopsided grin.

  * * * *

  Unlike an asteroid, where we could maneuver within meters of its surface, with a decent sized moon we had no choice but to land. Even from a geostationary orbit, the conduit is much too short.

  The pods can’t ferry much ore at a time—which is why we tended to stick to asteroids, where we could use the conveyor. Generally, we just reported the locations of ore deposits on a moon. But the capability was there should we need it. This was one of those times.

  Because of the difficult terrain in the crater, there was only one safe place to land the pod—right in the center, near where the tesserene was exposed. Tom and Guido took the extractor down in the pod, while I prepared the refinery and Cap and Sparks manned the bridge. Because we couldn’t do the extraction from orbit, we had to do it the hard way: land, extract some ore, load it in the pod, return to Shamu, unload, and return for another load.

  This method is inherently slower and more tedious than the direct way. Plus, a lunar extraction meant consuming more thruster fuel due to the frequent round-trips between the moon and Shamu. On the other hand, with the gravity being only .11G, or one-ninth of Earth-normal, it wouldn’t take all that much fuel to get up and down each trip.

  As the pod descended over the sizable depression in the center of the crater, those of us aboard Shamu watched what Tom and Guido saw, via their helmet cams.

  “Uh, guys?” Guido said.

  There was a tremor in his voice that I had never heard before. He pointed down at the center of the crater sixty meters below.

  “Yeah, so it’s a crater. We’ve seen plenty of impact—”

  Then it hit me. It wasn’t just an impact crater we were looking at. Inside it was a pit—a mining pit—with tiers cut into the rock in stair-step fashion.

  After a long silence, Tom, our geologist, spoke. “It can’t possibly be a natural formation—there’s no weather out here to erode the rock, even if rock could be eroded into such sharply delineated tiers. It has to be man-made.

  “Or…somebody-made, anyway.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Overpopulation—Population pressures forced China and India to look elsewhere for natural resources, resulting in their joint invasion of northern Australia in 2163. Only a timely compromise proposed by Secretary General of the United Nations Simon M’butu averted a potential global conflict. Via the Darwin Accord, Australia ceded most of its sparsely populated Northern Territory province to the Asian Alliance. The 1.15 million sq. kilometers gained was enough additional land to temporarily relieve much of the population pressure in China and India. However, at the rate Earth’s population kept increasing, it appeared inevitable that the lack of land and natural resources would eventually lead to warfare once again, somewhere on Earth.

  — Excerpt from Encyclopedia Solaris, 2194

  * * * *

  For the second time in the past few hours, we were stunned.

  After a moment of silence, Guido spoke in a rush. “What should we do, Cap? Stay down here or come back up?” There was a note of panic in his voice.

  “Give me a minute to digest this, would you?” was Cap’s terse response. A moment later, he said, “Go ahead and land—somewhere away from the crater—while I think about it. Save your fuel.”

  “Aye, Cap.”

  “What do you say now, Sparks?” Tom said, in a mocking tone. “Do you think this is the work of one of the lost missions, too?”

  Sparks wasn’t taking the bait. “I’m still not convinced that the bootprint on A124 wasn’t human, but there’s no doubt in my mind that this mine is alien. We’ve all been at this game long enough to know that ships from Earth all use similar technology for mining in space. The rock in this mine clearly hasn’t been ground up. It looks like it’s been sliced into neat blocks with a giant scalpel, or an immensely powerful laser, or something else capable of extremely straight, clean cuts. We definitely aren’t the first guests to arrive at this party.”

  Sparks’ pithy analysis broke the mood and we all began talking at once.

  “Who do you think did this?” “Are they still around?” “What do we do if they come back? We’re unarmed!” “Even if we were armed, what good do you think any weapons we might have would do against an alien warship?” “Warship? What warship?” “Do you think they’re planning an invasion?”

  Everyone’s words ran together as we interrupted one another. The hysteria grew as one wild idea replaced another. I confess that I was
as guilty as anyone.

  “PIPE DOWN!” Cap bellowed. “We won’t be able to figure anything out until you ladies stop clucking like hens!”

  That calmed us down in a hurry. Cap almost never raises his voice, but when he does, it means he’s really ticked off. I didn’t know about anyone else, but I was feeling pretty embarrassed at how I’d let my emotions run away like that.

  Guido, now on the moon, sat in the pod with Tom. Clearly he was still spooked. “I say we mine the tesserene as fast as we can and get the hell out of here. We won’t be getting any bonuses if the aliens come back and cut us up like they did this rock. What if they’re lying in wait for us?”

  “Calm down, Guido!” Cap ordered. “For all we know, no one’s been to this moon in the last ten thousand years. Look at all the impact rubble in the pit. I’d say it’s highly unlikely that anyone’s going to show up in the next few days.”

  That thought seemed to relax Guido a bit. I heard him take a deep breath before responding. “Okay, Cap. I’ll be…I’m, I’m fine.”

  Cap wasn’t finished. “Sparks, let’s have an ultrahigh-resolution scan of the moon. If there’s anyone here besides us I want to know about it!”

  “Aye, Cap!”

  “And you, Swede, get down to the refinery and have it ready to go. We may have to extract and run.”

  “Aye, Cap!” I loped out of the bridge and down the main passageway toward Engineering. I continued to monitor what was happening on the moon from the Engineering console and the intercom as I prepared the refinery.

  Cap continued. “Tom, can you take the pod back up to, say, a hundred meters and take a look around the area?”

  “Can do. Are we looking for anything in particular?”

  “No, but before we decide what to do next, we need to know the situation down there.”

  “Got it. Okay, here goes.”

  Through the helmet cams we were able to see the surrounding area in great detail. Although there wasn’t much direct sunlight this far from Richelieu, there was plenty of light coming from the glowing gasses of Richie in the background. The effect was significantly brighter than a full moon back on Earth.

  Tom completed one circuit of the mine. We saw nothing but moon rock.

  “Try spiraling out gradually to, say, a kilometer from the pit.”

  “Okay, Cap.”

  It took nearly an hour to gradually work his way out that far, going beyond the crater walls and moving slowly enough that we all got a good view of the surface. Tom and Guido each looked out opposite sides of the pod, giving us two views of everything. For all that, there still was nothing to see but the naked surface of the moon.

  “Guido, are you satisfied that there aren’t any marauding aliens hiding in the crater?” Cap asked. “Sparks says the sensors show nothing that we can’t see for ourselves. We’re all alone here. Not only that, but judging by the debris field in and around the crater, it hasn’t been touched in at least two to three million years.”

  “Yeah. That helps. Thanks, Cap.”

  “Do you two feel up to continuing the extractor setup?”

  “Absolutely!”

  “You bet!”

  “Right then,” Cap concluded. “Keep me posted.”

  * * * *

  “Shamu, we’re all set to begin extraction,” Tom radioed, a couple of hours later.

  “Roger Pod 2. Proceed.” Cap replied.

  The extractor bit into the tesserene ore. Soon pulverized rock was inching its way up the conduit to the cargo area of the pod. In slightly more than two hours the pod was full and it was time to return to Shamu with the cargo. This is where the loss of Pod 1 really hurt. We could have begun loading ore into that pod on the ground with a second crew while Pod 2 was unloading aboard ship. Instead, we had to shut down the extractor while Tom and Guido returned to Shamu.

  After Pod 2 landed in the bay, Tom hooked up the refinery conduit to the pod’s cargo hold.

  “All set, Swede.”

  At that, I triggered the refinery to begin ingesting the ground ore from the pod.

  “Good work, lads. Go take a break,” Cap called over the intercom. “Sparks and I will take the next run.”

  “Thanks, Cap. We could use a hot meal,” Guido replied.

  I broke in at that point. “I left you some food in the galley’s warmer. I’ll come join you in a bit.”

  In less than thirty minutes, the refinery had finished ingesting its own meal and was ready for more. Cap and Sparks were already in the pod, ready to go once I detached the conduit.

  “Good hunting!” I watched the pod on the holoscreen as it dwindled into the distance.

  * * * *

  We continued in this fashion for another two days, rotating shifts, with breaks only for meals and sleep. On one hand, we didn’t want to hang around any longer than necessary, just in case the aliens returned, angry that we were raiding their mine. On the other, it wouldn’t do to make a careless mistake at this point and get someone hurt.

  Cap called a meeting on the morning of the third day during breakfast. “Morning” and “day” were according to the ship’s chronometer, of course, and not the moon’s day/night cycle—it didn’t rotate and therefore had no day/night cycle. The part of P5M2 we were mining was in perpetual twilight, while other areas, which faced away from the planet, were eternally dark.

  Unlike some previous meetings where our lives hung in the balance, we were all relaxed, tired from our labors of the last few days, but at peace. This was what we lived for, what we worked so hard for. We were about to become fabulously wealthy and so far no vicious, two-headed, man-eating, insectoid aliens had attacked us.

  “Men, it seems like this mission has been nothing but a series of decisions. We have another one to make now, and I’m happy to say that this is a rather pleasant one. Tom tells me that we’ve just about reached the limits of how deep the extractor can dig. As yet, we’ve managed to process—how much, Swede?”

  “Nearly 16,500 tons of ore,” I replied.

  “And how much refined tesserene do we have in our holds right now?”

  “Eighty-four-point-three tons, including the 37 kilograms from A124. We should be able to refine a few more tons before we reach the limit of the extractor—maybe 87 or 88 tons in all.”

  “Tons?” Guido blurted, jaws agape. “Holy shit!”

  The previous world record for a tesserene strike had been just under 500 kilograms—half a metric ton.

  “Tons,” I confirmed. “Now close your mouth and let Cap finish.”

  “How much room do we have left in our holds?” Cap asked me.

  “CH1 is chock full of iron pellets. CH2, which has the tesserene, is 17 percent full; CH3 and CH4 are empty. Eleven of the 16 cargo bins aren’t being used at all.”

  Each cargo hold contained four removable bins, stacked two-by-two to facilitate unloading back at ODF Odyssey. Pouring molten metal into the bins would have made them difficult to unload and reuse, so the metal was first formed into pebble-sized pellets, which nestled nicely in the bins, like grain in a silo.

  “And there’s our dilemma,” Cap said. “We have a fortune in tesserene in our holds, but with room for plenty more cargo. There’s a lot more tesserene still on the moon below us—several times more than we were able to extract, but we can’t get to it. We don’t know whether there’s any extractable tesserene on the two remaining moons we haven’t yet visited, but we really don’t have enough thruster fuel left to do a lot of mining there anyway.

  “So, we have a choice: either we head home with what we have, or we go back to the asteroid belt for a few days and mine some of the iron or copper we found earlier. That won’t require much fuel. It’ll delay our return home by a week or so, and there’s the element of risk we always face, but it means returning with full holds of other raw materials that Earth is in desperate need of. Of course, we’re only talking about a few thousand tons—a drop in the bucket compared to the needs of the entire planet, but every bit hel
ps.”

  “As you say,” Sparks countered, “the additional cargo is peanuts to Earth, and besides, the big refinery ships can be here in a little over two weeks to begin operations if we leave now. However, if we spend another week in the belt before we return home, we’ll delay the major exploitation of these resources by that much, for the minor amount of metal we can bring home. It’s not like we need the money at this point. Not only do we have a fortune in tesserene in our holds, but the finder’s fee for the rest of the tesserene on this moon will add quite a bit more to the coffers.”

  “Excellent points,” Cap responded. “Does anyone else have a different view?”

  “Nah,” Tom shook his head. “I say we wrap up here, take a quick look at the last two moons that might have tesserene, so we can collect finder’s fees on those too if they come up positive, and then head for home.”

  “Everyone agree?” We all nodded. “Then the ayes have it.” Cap rapped on the table, with his spoon taking the place of a gavel, and the meeting was over. Still, we kept chatting as we finished the remains of our meal.

  “Good lord. Eighty-eight tons. Do you know what this means, Cap?” Sparks began.

  Cap looked puzzled. “Besides the fact that we’re all going to be fabulously wealthy?”

  “Besides that. Look at the big picture. It means we’re no longer bound to Earth for our survival. There’s enough tesserene here and down below to support thousands of ships for years to come. We can finally begin serious colonization of other worlds and give humanity some breathing room.”