“Since it has been nearly fifteen years since the dwarf was discovered, the general public has become somewhat complacent. Until people look up and see the dwarf growing in the sky and the tidal surges and earthquakes start, everyone is blowing the whole thing off. When the shit starts hitting the fan people are going to panic. I seriously doubt that half our countries population will voluntarily re-locate in advance. Then, when the troubles start, people will be screaming for rescue from their own stupidity. The more advanced the country, the more complicated it is going to get. I really worry about our countries ability to maintain the shuttle launch sites during the encounter. If knocked out they would probably be off line for at least a year or two afterwards. I think all of you, especially you General Seale, need to do some under the table planning to make sure you could continue to function for a couple of years without regular supply. Your assets in space are going to be vitally important when the dwarf passes through the asteroid belt and the Oort cloud.”
“I had a computer simulation run that none of you are aware of. It estimated that in the next one hundred years that we will have between eight and eleven rocks of dinosaur killer size that will impact the Earth. It also predicted three to four dozen rocks big enough to cause regional devastation will come our way. The Earth is already going to be reeling from the change in its orbit, and the close encounter of the dwarf. Those rocks must all be intercepted and stopped. Hopefully, we might even be able to capture some of them for mining and processing. The others need to be sent into the sun or at least put into a non-threatening orbit. Although of lesser importance, we need to also protect Mars and the new planet Elpis from impacts. Someday, we may have the ability to visit and colonize those planets and we don’t want them all busted up before then.”
“So gentlemen, and gentle lady, I raise a drink to you and wish you luck in your endeavors. You have a huge part to play in the continued existence of our race. Your job is not going to be boring, and it will probably have its moments of sphincter clinching terror, but you must press on and do what you have been trained to do. Now, I believe my wife has prepared a delicious meal for us. Let’s eat and enjoy our time together.”
Chapter 37
February 24th, 2033
Mars Orbit
Colonel Mike Pierce “stood”, if you could call it that, as he planted a US flag on the surface of Phobos. He knew that on board the Paula Montgomery, the video cameras were recording the moment when humans made footprints somewhere in the solar system other than on Earth or the moon. He was presently fifty seven million miles from Earth, and the first human to touch the surface of Phobos, the larger of Mar’s two moons. It was a misnomer to say that he was standing as Phobos had no gravity to speak of, and if not for the two pitons with a connecting cord that his feet were wedged under, he would drift off into space with the slightest movement. The view of Mars in the background did make for a good picture though, and he felt a distinct bond with Neil Armstrong, the first human that had stepped onto the surface of the moon.
After he stood and saluted the flag, he posed for the pictures as he looked back at his ship. The USSF ship Paula Montgomery was the first Mars Transfer ship and had been named for the late President who had drastically stepped up the National Space Program budget that made construction of the ship possible. The ship was presently floating parked and positioned about three hundred meters away from the surface of Phobos. The ship was over his head and except for occasional maneuvering thrusters firing to maintain position she seemed to just hang there. She had a remarkable resemblance to the Lunar Tugs that he had first test flown a few years ago except that instead of the Nuclear/Thermal propulsion system she used a high powered VASIMR ion propulsion system. She carried a crew of twenty one and had made the trip to Mars orbit in a little over forty days. Although she could only accelerate at a little more than a tenth of a G at full power, she could do it continuously for up to six months if needed before she exhausted her fuel.
Mike and his friend Hank had been chosen as pilot and co-pilot with the addition of Lieutenant Kristy Nichols as the flight engineer. The rest of the crew was made up of specialists from both NASA and Space Force. Their mission, besides the testing of the ship, was to choose a site on Phobos for the proposed base to be built there. Mike pulled out his own video camera and pointed it back toward the ship. As it hung there in space, the vista of Mars was spread out beyond it. It was frustrating that they were this close to Mars and no expedition would be going to land there on the surface of Mars any time in the foreseeable future. It was a shame that President Montgomery, whom the ship had been named after, had no children or family that he could send this video to. They would have been proud.
Mike pulled his feet from under the tether and gently fired a few puffs from his EVA backpack. He started slowly drifting back to the ship as a cloud of dust stirred up from the packs thrusters started slowly dispersing. That dust, he knew, was going to be a problem. “Montgomery, I am on my way back,” he radioed to the ship. “EVA parties are approved for disembarkation as soon as the Bumblebees are undocked and fueled.”
“Roger that,” came back from Lt. Nichols.
Mike smiled. The personal dynamics between Major Hank Jenkins, his co-pilot and best friend, and Lt. Kristy Nichols on the flight from Earth had been quite amusing to watch. Although the Paula Montgomery had four other females on her crew, in pure physical presence, they could not hold a torch to the gorgeous and physically fit flight engineer. The interesting part of it all was that Hank had hit on her one day at Farside base and had been so re-soundly rejected that he still grumbled constantly about it. Although they had maintained a professional demeanor and pretended to hold each other in disdain, it was obvious to Mike and the rest of the crew that they were attracted to each other. It would be interesting to see how their relationship played out on the way home he thought as he entered the ships airlock and cycled the hatch shut behind him.
…
Mike sat in his cockpit seat monitoring the EVA presently in process. Hank was out in one of the Bumblebees with three of the mission engineers. The Bumblebee was floating about ten feet above the surface of Phobos with two of the engineers holding onto the Bumblebee’s work frame while the third engineer was waist deep in regolith on the surface of Phobos. Things were not going well. Previous studies of Phobos had shown that between the surface of Phobos and the actual harder inner core of the moonlet there was about ten to one hundred meters of loosely packed regolith. Radar probes conducted since their arrival showed an average of about twenty to thirty meters of the dusty regolith coating the surface of the moonlet. The regolith was causing no ends of problems. Since there was no gravity, the slightest disturbance caused a cloud of it to rise and it took forever to dissipate. A puff of maneuvering gas from one of the bumblebees caused a huge fog of the fine dust to rise and severely limited visibility. You could not dig a hole in the stuff because the sides collapsed as fast as you could dig. They had tried spraying the sides of a hole with a soapy water solution that one of the mission specialists had concocted and it had worked until the hole was about five feet deep and then it collapsed. The result of that experiment was the engineer now waist deep in the stuff. Hank was trying to use the bumblebee to pull him free.
Hank was cursing up a storm in the cockpit of the Bumblebee. The Bumblebee was a small open frame work and excursion ship that was about ten feet long and about five feet around. They were called Bumblebees by the astronauts because of the stubby wing looking platform on top of it that astronauts could ride on or cargo could be attached to. They had four short stubby landing legs and the rear legs had small tanks on them that appeared to mimic the pollen sacs on the rear legs of terrestrial insect bumblebees. At the front was a small open cockpit big enough for one pilot. At the moment, Hank was trying to hold the bumblebee in position while tugging upwards on a lanyard passed underneath the stuck man’s arms. The other two engineers were holding on and leaning over the side of the Bumblebe
e trying to give directions to Hank. Suddenly, the man’s legs popped free and he flew up and collided with the bottom of the Bumblebee. The Bumblebee rebounded away spinning wildly and the two engineers on top were holding on for all they were worth. The newly freed man was trying to pull himself free of the lanyard and swung under one of the thrusters just as it fired. He was sent spinning off away from the Bumblebee when the thruster exhaust hit him.
Mike sat up straight in alarm. “Jenkins, this is the Montgomery, what is your status?”
“I am ok,” said the space suited engineer as he drifted away. I will need someone to come get me though. I do not have an EVA pack on.”
“Bumblebee one, this is Montgomery, are you guys ok?”
Mike could see that Hank had the Bumblebee just about back under control. “I have control again,” said Hank. “We may need to refuel to go after Jenkins though.”
“Montgomery, this is Bumblebee two, we were in route back to you and we can catch him. We have his transponder on screen and a visual. We are at sixty percent fuel.”
“Very well Lt. Nichols, bring Jenkins back home. I want all EVA personnel to return to the Montgomery. We need to talk about this and see if we can come up with any ideas.”
After everyone was back on board, Mike had the crew muster in the galley area. Although the habitat deck that contained the galley and living quarters was too small for everyone to stand when it was spun up for centrifugal gravity, in zero gravity that was not an issue. People could hang from the walls and overhead anywhere they wanted. “Alright everyone, listen up. We have been here a week now, and other than getting a bunch of samples, we have not come up with a solution for the regolith. We need some ideas. Space Force needs a base here but it cannot be built on top of the regolith. We need a way to tunnel down to the rocky core so that we can excavate some cavities for the future base. So far, everything we have tried has failed.”
Specialist Johnson spoke up, “If we were able to mix the regolith into the regocrete, or the regolith based concrete using the same technique they are using on the moon, we could construct a regocrete tunnel all the way down to the core. We need a way to hold the walls in place while the regocrete hardens. Some type of mold to hold the mixture in position as the epoxy dried would be ideal.”
“How much of the epoxy do we have on board?” asked Mike. “We have about one thousand gallons in four two hundred and fifty gallon tanks,” volunteered specialist Samantha Teal. “We were going to leave the tanks behind for the follow on construction mission.”
“How long does it take the regocrete to harden?” asked Lt. Nichols.
“Once you mix the regolith with the epoxy it sets up in about forty five minutes. In two hours it is as hard as pre-stressed concrete,” answered Specialist Jenkins.
“And how thick of a wall does it need to be to hold atmospheric pressure?” asked the Lieutenant.
“Technically, an inch of thickness will hold one atmosphere with no difficulty. The walls of the lunar bases are one foot thick to help protect the interior from micrometeorites, but they have no shortage of either the epoxy or regolith. They have premade molds of various sizes and shapes so it is no problem for them at all. We just do not have the molds we need,” replied Jenkins.
“Maybe we do have some molds,” said Lt Nichols. Those tanks are about six feet in diameter. If we took two of them, emptied them, and cut the ends off, then we would have two circular molds. We could cut one of them into sections. Then, we could dig out a hole and stabilize the regolith with sections of the tank bracing the sides so they do not collapse. Once we get all sides up and in place, we can mount the other mold inside of that one, pump the cavity full of the regocrete mixture, let it harden, pull off the inner mold and repeat process as we go down,” she said as she looked around triumphantly.
“That would work great,” said Hank, “for one section. Then, you are out of molds and you only have the two. It would not be a very deep tunnel,” he smirked at Lieutenant Nichols. Mike winced. If the angry hurt look she gave Hank had been changed into the equivalent energy in a laser beam, Hank would have vaporized instantly.
“Wait,” said specialist Teal. She drifted into the center of the galley as her brow crunched up in thought. Suddenly, she brightened up. “We can do it that way, sort of. Yes, it will work. We have thirty-five emergency escape bubbles on board. Each of those is six feet in diameter when it is pressurized. We could dig down six feet temporarily stabilizing the regolith with some epoxy as we go. Once we have the cavity, we can inflate a bubble to hold the regolith in place. Then, we use the pieces of the inner mold that the Lieutenant was thinking of. The Kevlar skin of the bubble will keep the regolith pressed out. The person in the bubble can put the inner mold up, pump the epoxy and regolith mixture in the space between the bubble wall and the mold and let it harden. Peel off the inner mold, depressurize the bubble, cut the ends out of it, and repeat. We should have bubbles enough to get down to the core doing that. Bingo, we have a tunnel using your process Lieutenant.”
Everyone was talking excitedly about the prospect of building the tunnel. Mike held up his hand to quiet everyone down. “I am sure that Alpha Control would not give approval for us to use the emergency escape bubbles as molds,” he cautioned everyone.
Specialist Jenkins spoke up, “We have thirty five escape bubbles, and each of us would only need one if we had a decompression accident. That leaves fifteen spares at about six feet diameter each, giving us ninety feet or so of tunnel. We have found spots where the regolith is only twenty meters or sixty feet deep. That should be enough.”
“Maybe what Alpha control does not know, will not hurt them,” Hank interrupted. “I think we should give Lt. Nichol’s idea a try, it may work and it would be a waste to come all the way here and leave without a solution.”
Everyone looked at Hank in surprise. At first, he had tried to shoot down the Lieutenant’s idea, and now he was trying to convince them to use it.
“Let’s give it a try Colonel; if it does not work we only waste a couple of the bubbles,” said Hank.
Everyone looked at Mike in anticipation. The escape bubbles were round Kevlar spheres about six feet across. In case of a depressurizing compartment in a space ship, a person could grab one, shake it open, climb inside and peel the tape off the special epoxy seal at the opening of the bubble. The epoxy in the seal dried in about five seconds after the tape was removed and then the occupant pulled the pin on a small canister that would pressurize the bubble with oxygen. Carbon dioxide was scrubbed from the air in the bubble by a chemical in the canister as a small battery powered fan circulated the air through the canister. They were rated to keep one person alive for at least an hour in the event of emergency decompression. The hope was that someone could then rescue the trapped crewman before their oxygen ran out. There were thirty five of them scattered throughout the ship at easy to reach locations.
“All right,” Mike agreed. “But we use no more than five of the bubbles until we see how it works.”
Chapter 38
March 10th, 2033
Mars Orbit
Colonel Mike Pierce held on to the handgrip that had been put at the opening of the shaft and looked down its seventy foot length. It was funny how the mind worked. If you pictured yourself looking down into the tunnel, you got vertigo and your mind thought you were going to fall. If you changed your reference so that you imagined you were looking down a tunnel sideways you were fine. It had taken nearly two weeks, but using the technique cooked up by Lt. Nichols and several of the specialists, they had managed to build a regocrete shaft a little over sixty feet deep and almost six feet wide. They had finally hit the bedrock of the moon core then and had been chipping away through almost ten feet of solid rock since. Now, sonic probes indicated that there was a cavity in the rock that was at least as wide as the shaft less than six inches away. Scientists on Earth had long speculated that Phobos was full of such cavities as its apparent mass did not match up with its
size. Its mass was only about sixty percent of what it should be if it was solid rock. They were now awaiting his order to break through to the cavity now.
“Jenkins, this is Colonel Pierce. There is very little possibility that the cavity on the other side is pressurized but I want you fastened to a lanyard just in case. It would not take much pressure to shoot you out of the shaft like a bullet from a gun.”
Jenkins laughed. “Don’t worry sir, I have already taken one joy ride this mission and do not feel like taking another.”
Mike looked up. Lt. Nichols was at the controls of a Bumblebee floating about fifty feet away from the shaft, just in case. “Montgomery, this is Colonel Pierce. We are going to break through. Please start the telemetry feed.”
“We are standing by up here,” said Hank. I am ready to move the Montgomery if needed. Colonel, be aware that I can barely pick up Jenkins radio signal from here. The regolith is apparently shielding it out.”
“Same here, I can just barely make him out,” said Lt. Nichols.
“Roger that, I have a visual on him,” said Mike. “Do it Jenkins, let’s see what is on the other side.”
Specialist Jenkins started the jackhammer back up, braced himself, and starting chipping away at the rock. After about five minutes, the spade broke through into empty space. He stopped and radioed. “I am through, no gas escaping and I cannot see a wall on the other side. I am going to go ahead and open it up.” He re-started the jack hammer and in about twenty minutes he had the opening almost the size of the shaft. Securing the jackhammer, he grabbed a flashlight and pushed himself into the opening quickly disappearing into the blackness.
Dark Star Rising Second Edition (Pebbles in The Sky) Page 26
