by Ginger Booth
“How’s it going, Judge?” Ben asked cheerfully.
“Ben! Your crew’s a bunch of royal jerks, you know that?”
“Substitute teacher effect,” Remi growled behind him. “I hate acting captain.”
Ben laughed. “My crew is wonderful! Professional, brilliant, and skilled!”
“They took a vote and decided they’re done replanting the engine room. They’d rather take a day off.”
“Did you threaten to sic Wilder on them?”
“Wilder started it, the swine. So cap, you mind if I take Merchant out for a spin? Thought I’d refill our fuel tanks while you’re busy.”
“Ah, Remi? Is this straightforward?” Ben asked the engineer. Remi fueled the tender at Loki’s depot. Ben hadn’t been there, close up. Merchant held position above playing gunship escort while Remi and Joey tackled the fueling chore.
“Don’t scratch the paint,” was the engineer’s verdict.
Merchant wasn’t painted.
“Go for it,” the captain ordered. “I tried calling you from inside the asteroid, by the way. Like we thought – our comms can’t get through the rock. So be back for pickup around seventeen hundred. Don’t be late.”
“Will do, cap!”
Ben turned to survey Remi’s heap of gear. Aside from both of their tool boxes, he selected five spare air tanks, a 4-liter water thermos, arc lights, and a heater. “Camping for a week?”
“Mine tunnels are tricky. I get paranoid.”
“No battery packs?” the amused captain teased, only partly in jest. At these temperatures, if their suit batteries failed, they’d freeze to death in a handful of minutes.
“Surrounded by wiring!” Remi pursed his lips, changed his mind, and added batteries to the pile. “This should be enough.”
Ben started to reply with another quip, but thought better of it. The installation wasn’t really a mine. But Remi was the expert in excavated asteroids. His call.
The captain brought up the schematic they’d evolved so far and considered it. Loki couldn’t provide them a real map. He provided a drawing of the connections, but nothing to scale, just a bare undirected graph. Nodes indicated a functional unit like ‘CPU room’ or ‘nanofab’. Edges denoted the strongest connections to logically adjoining units. But they’d already seen that this wasn’t related to the corridor layout, since the data buses drilled through stone walls. Essentially they traveled the trash alleys, the servant halls, of little interest to Loki. “How did you figure half a klick to the wafer fab?”
“I guessed.”
“OK.” The captain rose and helped him divide the supplies into two hard packs to attach to the grav sleds. “Then let us go spelunking!”
19
Ben set his grav generator to Mahina standard 1/6th g and bounded his grav sled from the shuttle to the hole into the asteroid. Remi, more adept with a sled, started flying his at dead slow from the start. He arced up and vanished first down into the hole.
For all his years in space, Ben’s heart wanted a door here. Instead he got a funnel-shaped hole. Because the internal corridors required no door to keep out the vacuum. And one direction was as good as any other. Though for practical purposes, all corners were rounded.
He killed his grav and pushed himself through the T-intersection funnel turn with his legs, to match Remi’s arbitrary choice of ‘up’ inside the round tunnel. Only then did he start his laden sled, which he rode like the handlebars of a bicycle, including the basket, minus the bike, legs trailing uselessly behind.
Remi waited for him at the first branching, where the inward feed tunnel met the corridor they visited first. “Can you find my mark?”
“No. Let’s map instead of mark.” The captain declared this location as his origin, dropped a marker on it, and shared it with Remi. The HUD, head’s up display, showed inside his helmet, though he used his tablet to input the map. “No good?”
His companion wobbled his head. “It’s good. Ah, there!” He pointed to a mark by Ben’s left knee, visible only by the slight luster of grey pencil graphite against grey rock. “I mark it when we enter before.”
Ben contemplated just how hard it was to see that mark even with Remi pointing straight at it. “Got goo?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. Every engineer carried the assorted gels to cut metal in space. He pulled out a yellow-capped tube and drew a big zero on the wall. Then he looked up and down the corridor they’d just visited. He thought they’d gone right, but wasn’t sure. “Which way?” He added a line as Remi directed – the opposite direction from his guess. Then he capped the yellow gel and opened the green, to draw over the same lines and activate the dissolving action. Which proved not especially powerful against stone. But he etched a groove a millimeter deep.
Too bad it was a nuisance to paint in vacuum. A graffiti spray can would be ideal.
“I like it,” Remi approved. “After you.”
Ben was afraid of that, but took the lead. The corridor gave him the creeps, perfectly round and faintly striated, as though a rock-dissolving worm digested its way through. It gradually curved in the direction he mentally dubbed as down. On the plus side, this meant his headlamp reached ahead as far as he could see. Less pleasing, more funnels led off to side rooms in random directions, including gaping holes ‘beneath’ him.
“Stop,” Remi requested. Ben powered off his sled and backtracked to where the engineer peered into a chamber. “Data storage?”
His headlamp played across spiral shelving much like the processor chamber, but with shelves as deep as corpsicle containers, spaced only a handspan apart. If the processor chamber looked like shelf fungus, this reminded him more of mushroom gills. The chamber was enormous, like a 100 meter long tube, half that across. They peered into it from 1/3 of the way from one end. Its axis canted 40 degrees from the corridor they traveled.
Which made Ben’s pilot orientation grumpy. But he marked it. “There are lots of these.”
Remi barked a laugh. “Yes. Volatile memory.”
“In what sense?” Nothing in this room struck Ben as a volatile.
“Fast memory,” Remi clarified. “Not like a storage device. Instantaneous.”
Ben reasoned, “Not instantaneous. Super-conductor speed, yes, but only within this rock. Then conversion to light beam for transmission to another asteroid. So is this what a brontobyte looks like?”
Remi sighed. “Maybe a petabyte. Working memory. To serve a room of processors.”
“Maybe it’s like a hologram,” Ben suggested. “Any fragment contains the whole. And we could slice out any section of this rock and he could rebuild the rest. No?”
“No,” Remi agreed. “Nanofab.”
They remounted their steeds. Soon after, about 350 meters from their zero point, Ben halted at a branch in the tube, each arm equally angled. Just as wide as the mother tunnel, both sloped ‘down’. Their logical schematic gave either an equal chance of being the right choice.
“Right hand rule,” Remi decreed. He did the honors with the gels this time, drawing an arrow on the right hand wall pointing in their direction of travel. Ben figured out how he wanted to render the 3D intersection on his 2D map.
They resumed and made another 250 meters by Ben’s sled meter before meeting a six-way branch. “Thoughts?” Ben invited.
Remi immediately pulled out his gels to etch the way back, before they could get disoriented. Then he pointed to a wending left-up corridor. “But maybe we check each? To first room?”
“Depth first search,” Ben decreed. “And we don’t split up. Ever.” He got busy with his tablet on the mapping. Remi finished marking the new corridor before he was done, because Ben decided his initial sketch approach wasn’t working for him, and switched to a 3D model. “We’re past a half klick. Are you checking each chamber?”
“I saw a new type, back four holes maybe. Spider storage. Maybe hundreds of robots.”
Ben shuddered. “Glad I missed it.”
After 150 meters, their
choice of corridor bent sharply ‘down’, then dead-ended into a smelter chamber, extracting pure metals from raw rock. Remi parked his sled and wandered in entranced, to watch the robots pulverize, sort, and melt. He took refuge against a pile of dross as a new load of gravel arrived from another tunnel, a self-driving balloon-tired cart about the size of a half-container. Ben reoriented to match the cart’s apparent ‘down’, then cried out in warning.
Remi hastily retreated to the door to rejoin him, just before the cart dumped its contents where he’d been standing. Judging from the dumping behavior, the cart’s gravity was independent of the ‘floor.’ It latched onto a bar and cut its gravity for the gravel to spill out its open top. The cart-bot waited until the deposited gravel quit sliding around, then restored its previous gravity, unlatched, and returned from whence it came.
Then a flock of spidery robots unfolded from a heap and converged to sort rocks. They simply grabbed a piece of rock, classified it, and threw it in a choice of directions to join a different pile. The entire floor seemed to have light grav plating simply to keep the rocks from bouncing around too much.
“I could spend hours in here,” Remi breathed.
Ben contemplated how little he wanted to waltz through that maelstrom of flinging stones. “Me not so much.” He counted three outward tunnels, in addition to the one they lurked in. “Is this mining? Or excavation? Both,” he decided.
“Those piles on the surface,” Remi theorized. “Dross.” He took out his tablet and showed Ben an image of the entrance holes. Sure enough, each had a ring of hills around it, much like the pyramids flanking Mahina’s phosphate mines. Those hills were few and low near the entrance where the shuttle parked. “Surface elapsed distance?”
“Maybe point-six klicks now,” Ben decided, consulting his map. “The closest entrance to ours was two kilometers. That one. Why?”
“There’s another way to that exit,” Remi theorized. “Because we never meet an ore cart. Maybe.”
They watched the spider-bots in companionable silence. After 5 minutes, Ben decided he’d been a good sport long enough. “Loki can explain their process to you. Just ask.”
But Remi pointed to upper-center, where the largest pile grew. Another bot trundled to life, reminding Ben of a 12-meter pot-bellied stove, or a troll. Suddenly a star drive blazed forth, bathing the previously pitch-black chamber in brightness ten times as powerful as a Mahina Thursday sun.
Ben instantly turned his back and screwed his eyes shut. Red and white blobs danced across his retinas. He took a peek between swimming figures to check that yes, his helmet had now adjusted to sunlight. “Enough of the smelter.”
“Agreed.” A few squirts of power carried them back to the jellyfish intersection. They ruled out the two adjacent tunnels to the smelter, figuring they served new excavation. Remi selected one of the two remaining roads, while Ben labeled this one SM, elaborating ‘SM = smelter’ on his map.
And they sledded onward. This next tunnel veered to the left and up, if Ben’s internal reckoning wasn’t completely scrambled by now. He paused at a door on the ‘ceiling’ and cast his light around.
He didn’t get far at divining what was in there before Remi screamed. “Ben! Run!” He looked around, helmet lamp obligingly shifting, to find an ore bucket-bot bearing down upon him. Those things left precious little free space around them in the corridor. In instant decision, he flipped the sled and fled in the direction he’d come from, assuming Remi was right ahead of him. At the six-way, he elected an adjacent tunnel, one they hadn’t tried yet, and hoped the ore-bot chose another.
It continued straight at him.
He goosed the sled again, this time slipping into the first side room he came across, but stuck to the doorway. A quick glance confirmed no smelting, no mining in this chamber. What did happen in this chamber, he hadn’t a clue. But static electrical arcs danced across the interior. He wasn’t going in there. “Remi? Can you hear me?”
No answer. The ore-bot trundled by, disconcertingly at 120 degrees to the orientation he’d favored. Ben inched his head out to confirm no further trucks were about to run him over. That confirmed, he headed straight back to the six-way. “Remi?” That time he got a faint response, possibly a French obscenity, but too faint to hear the rest. He paused to mark his tunnel, Z for Zap. “I’m at the six-way intersection.”
Remi’s reply came clearly this time. “Why go there? Any side room is good!”
“There were things moving in my side room. The smelter was deadly. The next had pocket lightning. It isn’t true that side rooms are safe!”
“Lightning?”
“See Z for Zap on map.”
The engineer kvetched at him the whole way back to the lightning room, which he insisted on seeing for himself. The two of them lay in the funnel mouth watching the mesmerizing blue arcs. They spun theories about what this could possibly be doing. Ben’s favorite was a non-repeating random number generator. But Remi’s suggestion of electrolysis seemed more likely. Unfortunately the lightning was so bright that their helmets dimmed for protection. They couldn’t see a damned thing in there, as to what the lightning accomplished.
“I like this corridor,” his companion decided, pushing cautiously backward from the door to their waiting sleds. “Electrolysis. Nanofab. Maybe related.”
The next chamber proved a robotic bat cave, for all Ben could see. He tossed in a spare washer from his toolbelt and winged a ‘bat.’ This caused a domino reaction whereby bats unfurled, stepped sideways, and knocked the next ro-bat into doing the same.
The two of them cracked up laughing.
The next few doors proved repeats of previously-seen models. At the next intersection, a 7-way, Remi selected a hall that doubled back toward Zap. This seemed a failed choice, opening onto a hard-core processor-and-memory neighborhood. Ben’s mental model of Loki’s brain grew to a chaotic attic, complete with bats in the belfry.
But the corridor gradually widened, turning into a vast cavern, no doorway. The guys parked the sleds – left them hanging in mid-air, or mid-airless – and cautiously slipped along opposite walls. Because things were moving in here. But not, mercifully, slinging through the vacuum. Sedate robot arms, attached to something like a conveyor belt, held stable devices over the belt. Ben sidled up carefully, making sure the arm didn’t rotate and attack him. When he gained confidence that it would stay put, he studied the items jerking past him on the belt. “Found it, Remi. Nanofab.”
“Très bien, bon c'est fantastique!”
Ben grimaced, but he caught the gist without translation. Instead he studied the plates as they chugged past. At first he thought they were silicon roughs, but then recalled the ‘nano’ part. A microprocessor he could probably recognize with the bare eye. But a nanoprocessor? He pulled out the highest magnification gizmo he carried on his toolbelt and scrutinized one. Every 10 seconds, his plate moved, but so far as he could tell, this belt was making identical ones, each an almost-rectangle, half as deep as the ‘volatile memory’ mushroom gills. Studied closely, he could certainly see the surface bore fine lines, but he couldn’t tell more than that.
He switched to watching the robot arm’s action. Plate arrived, device lowered. Device raised, next plate advanced. He cautiously edged around the robot to study a post-process plate. Shiny. “This arm deposits metal. I think.”
“Maybe etching to metal,” Remi corrected him absently. Ben turned to find the engineer ‘sitting’ in mid-airless, having absconded with a plate shaped for a helix of smaller radius than those on the belt Ben studied. Unsurprisingly, the engineer had a much better magnifier, suitable for scrutinizing micro-fractures. “That one deposits a layer of metal.” He waved vaguely toward a conveyor 60 degrees up from Ben’s. “This whole plate is a processor. I think.” He unfolded and swam his souvenir back to the sleds.
“This fab is beyond any on Mahina?” Ben suggested.
“Mahina, Sagamore, Denali, oh yes.” Remi turned back and gazed around t
he nanofab. “This changes everything.”
“Lot of that going around,” Ben said wistfully.
“The status quo was bad,” Remi reminded him. “Change is good. And I want finished plates. Follow that belt and I follow this one?” He flashed a boyish grin.
“Why not?” Ben allowed. Still leery of moving robots, he grav-hopped to the far side of the belt and began to follow it. By a hundred meters in, the plates took on a beautiful rose-gold tint with a holographic sheen on top. Then the next robot dumped a brassy layer on top. The belt split in two, with only a third continuing on Ben’s current side. He decided to stick with the rarer species, where further etching and deposition devices continued to build circuits. From here he could see that the belt ducked through a wall in the distance.
Long before either of them found a completed masterpiece, the end product found them. A robo-cart, of a more delicate disposition than the ore-carts, rolled past on the ‘ceiling’ relative to Ben, heading for the funnel they entered from.
Ben turned back to studying how a plate turned rose-gold. In delayed reaction, he thought Oh, hey, finished plates are in the cart.
His second reaction was, Does that cart stop for obstacles?
Because their sleds were parked in its way. “Remi! The sleds!”
Ben was already vaulting across now-three conveyor belts to save their transportation – along with their tools, air tanks, and batteries!
20
Ben raced Remi to catch up with the plate-cart before it slammed into their sleds. But this was easier said than done. The reason sensible miners used sleds, was that free-swimming through vacuum was slow, especially amid pointy obstacles.
Both veterans of many the EVA-ball game in the ship’s hold, they were better at this than most, especially Ben. But that was also a handicap. The express route to Ben’s sled was to switch his personal grav generator to fall in that direction, then reverse it before he smacked into a wall. But the manufacturing impediments in his path were many, and possibly fatal.
