“Unlike mine right now. What happened, Malenfant?”
“They shot at us.”
“Who?”
“The squid. The damn squid. They fired a ball of water at us, hit the starboard solar panel. Ripped it clean off.” Which explained the dimmed power. “Took some work with the attitude thrusters to kill the spin, bring us under control.”
She heard the subdued pride in his voice. It was Malenfant’s first deep-space emergency, and he’d come through it; he was proud of himself. Even in the depths of peril there was a little boy buried deep in there, a boy who had always wanted to be a spaceman, under all the sublimation and rationalization of adulthood.
“So where does that leave us?”
He shrugged. “Things got more complicated. We can’t make it home on one panel and the nuke reactor. Maybe we can get more photovoltaic material from the surface, rig something up—”
“Or maybe not.”
He eyed her. “Right now we’re a long way from home, Emma. Come see the view.”
Michael, with his sharper eyes, had been the first to see, on Cruithne’s surface, the drops of gold.
The habitats were snuggled into the cups of deep craters, squeezed into ridges, lying in shadows and sunlight. It was as if the asteroid’s black, dusty surface had been splashed by a spray from some furnace: a spray of heavy, languid, hemispherical drops of gold. And sections of the asteroid were coated in what looked like foil: sheets extending from the droplets that clung to Cruithne’s wrinkled surface or hanging suspended in space from great ramshackle frames.
Malenfant pointed at the Cruithne image. “I think that must be the original Nautilus.” It was a bubble bigger than the rest, more irregularly shaped, nestled into a crater. The droplet’s meniscus was bound together by a geodesic netting, and the whole thing was tethered to the asteroid’s dusty surface by cables. There was a stack of clumpy machinery near the bubble, abandoned; perhaps that had once been the rest of the ship.
“I guess those sheets spread over the surface are solar arrays,” she said.
Cornelius nodded. “Manufactured from asteroid materials.”
“I don’t see any connections between the bubbles.”
Malenfant shrugged, distracted. “Maybe the squid tunnel through the asteroid. Inside the bubbles you’d be radiation-shielded by the water; that wouldn’t apply on the surface… How have they tethered those new bubbles to the regolith? I don’t see the netting we used on the Nautilus.”
“They don’t have any metals,” Cornelius said. “Because we didn’t show them how to extract metals. Only organic products, including plastics. I guess they just found a way to tether without metal cables and pitons.”
They watched the asteroid turn, slowly, a barbecue potato on an invisible spit, bringing more of the bubble habitats into view.
She said, “There are so many”
“Yes.” Cornelius sounded awed. “To have covered so much of the asteroid in a few months… and we don’t know how far they’ve spread through the interior. They must be spreading exponentially.”
“Breeding,” Malenfant said.
“Obviously,” Cornelius snapped impatiently. “But the point is they must be keeping most of each spawned batch alive. Remember what Dan Ystebo told us about the first generation: the four smart cephalopods among the dozens of dumb ones?”
“So,” Emma said, “if most of the squid now are being kept alive—”
“They must be mostly smart.” Cornelius looked frightened.
“No wonder they need to keep building new habitats,” Malenfant said.
“But it isn’t enough,” Cornelius said. “Pretty soon they’re going to run out of asteroid.”
“Then what?”
“They are stranded on this rock in the sky. I guess they’ll turn on each other. There will be wars.”
“How long?” Malenfant said. “How long have we got before they eat up the asteroid?”
Cornelius shrugged. “Months at most.”
Malenfant grunted. “Then the hell with it. We can stay here for twenty days. If we haven’t got what we wanted and got out of here by then, we’re going to be dead anyhow.”
In a softscreen, Emma saw, something swam.
It was small, sleek, compact. It slid easily back and forth, its arms stretched before it, its carapace pulsing with languid colours. It had a cruel grace that frightened Emma. Its hide shimmered with patterns, complex, obviously information-packed.
“You’re talking to them,” Emma said to Cornelius.
“We’re trying.”
Malenfant growled. “We’re going way beyond the squid sign-language translator software Dan gave us. We need Dan himself. But he’s two hundred light-seconds away. And nobody is talking to us anyhow.”
Cornelius looked harassed. “Some of them think we’re from Earth. Some don’t think Earth even exists. Some think we’re here to trick them somehow.”
“You think the squid tried to kill us?”
“No,” Malenfant snapped. “If they’re smart enough to see us coming, to fire water bombs at us, they are smart enough to have destroyed us if they wanted to. They intended to disable us.”
“And they succeeded. But why?”
“Because they want something from us.” Malenfant grinned. “Why else? And that’s our angle. If we have something they want, we can trade.”
Cornelius snapped, “I can’t believe you’re seriously suggesting we negotiate.”
Malenfant, drifting in the air, spread his hands. “We’re trying to save our mission. We’re trying to save our lives. What can we do but talk?”
Emma said, “Have you figured out what it is they want?”
“That,” Cornelius said, “is the bad news.”
“Earth,” Reid Malenfant said.
“They know Earth, if it exists, is huge. Giant oceans, lots of room to breed. They want to be shown the way there. They want at least some of them to be released there, to breed, to build.”
Cornelius said tightly, “We ought to scrape those slugs off the face of this rock. They’re in our way.”
“They aren’t slugs,” Emma said evenly. “We put them here. And besides, we didn’t come here to fight a war.”
“We can’t give them Earth. They breed like an explosion. They already chewed their way through this asteroid, starting from nothing. They’d fill the world’s oceans in a decade. And they are smart, and getting smarter.”
Malenfant rubbed his eyes, looking tired. “We may not be able to stop them for long anyhow. Their eyes are better than ours, remember? It won’t be hard for them to develop astronomy. And they saw us coming; whatever we tell them, maybe they can track back and figure out where we came from.” He looked at Emma. “What a mess. I’m starting to think we should have stuck to robots.” He was kneading his temple, evidently thinking hard
Emma had to smile. Here they were in a disabled ship, approaching an asteroid occupied by a hostile force — and Reid Malenfant was still looking for the angle.
Malenfant snapped his fingers. “Okay. We stall them. Cornelius, I take it these guys aren’t going anywhere without metal-working technology. They already know how to make rocket fuel. With metal they can achieve electronics, computers maybe. Spaceflight.”
“So—”
“So we trade them metal-extraction technology. Trade them that for an unhindered landing and surface operations.”
Cornelius shook his head, the muscles of his neck standing out. “Malenfant, if you give them metal you set them loose.”
“We deal with that later. If you have a better alternative let’s hear it.”
The moment stretched.
Then Cornelius turned to his softscreen. “I’ll see what form of words I can come up with.”
Emma caught Malenfant’s arm. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
He grinned. “When did I ever? But we’re still in business, aren’t we?”
Whistling, he pulled himself down the firema
n’s pole to the meatware deck.
Mary Alpher
›Thank you for visiting my home page. I want to use this space to record my dissent at the national gung-ho mood right now- I am dismayed at the sending of troops to the near-Earth asteroid Cruithne.
›I’ve been writing and editing science fiction most of my working lifen and reading the stuff a lot longer than that-And this is not turning out to be the future I dreamed about.
›I wouldn’t call myself a Utopian. Nevertheless I always imagined, I think, on some level, that the future was going to be a better place than the present.
›In particular! space. I thought we might leave our guns and hatred and de-structiveness down in the murky depths of Earth, where they belong. Neil Armstrong was a civilian when he landed on the Moon, lile came in peace for all humankind. Remember that?
›I believed it. I believed — still believe — that we are, if not perfectible, at least improvable as a species. And that basic worldview, I think, informs much sf. Maybe all that was naive. Nevertheless I never dreamed that only our second expedition beyond the Earth-noon system should be a gunboat.
›0f course it’s not going to work. Anybody who thinks they can divert the course of the river of time with a few gunshots is much more naive than I ever was.
›Thanks for your attention. Purchasing details and a sample chapter of my latest noveln Black Hole Love-, are available ‹here›
Emma Stoney:
“That was the thruster burn to null out our approach and cross-range velocities. Now we’re free-falling in on gyro lock. GRS is active and feeding to the computer, the radar altimeter is online and slaved to the guidance. Confirmed green board. All that jargon means things are good, people. Should hit the ground at walking speed, no need to worry at all…”
To the accompaniment of Malenfant’s competent, comforting commentary, with the grudging permission of the squid factions, O ‘Neill was on its final approach.
Cruithne rock slid past the windows of the zero G deck.
They were so close now Emma could see the texture of the surface: shaped by bombardment, crater upon crater, plains cracked open and reassembled, all of it coated with glistening black dust like a burned-out bombing range. And now when the attitude thrusters pulsed they raised up dust that drifted off into space or fell back in silent, slow fans.
We are already touching Cruithne, she thought. Disturbing it.
She had no sense of coming in for a landing. The gravitational pull of the asteroid was much too weak for that. The asteroid wasn’t down but straight ahead of her, a curving wall, pockmarked, wrinkled. It was more like a docking, as if she were riding a small boat toward some immense, dusty, oceangoing liner.
Michael was staring at the asteroid, eyes wide, mouth hanging open. On impulse Emma took his hand and held it to her breast.
Cornelius said, “There go the penetrators.”
Emma saw the penetrators snake out from O’NeiWs hull. They were miniature spacecraft shaped like golf tees, three or four feet long, trailing steel hawsers. Each had an armored exterior and a body packed solid with sensors — computers, heating devices, thermometers, seismometers, comms equipment to transmit data along the hawsers to the O ‘Neill. She could see the pulse of the tiny rockets in the penetrators’ tails, a spray of exhaust crystals that receded from the asteroid in perfectly straight lines, shining in the sun.
The penetrators hit the asteroid surface at six hundred miles an hour, as hard as an antitank round, and disappeared in puffs of black regolith. Soon there were smoke rings, neatly circular, rising from the crater floor, with slack hawsers trailing back to the spacecraft. The penetrators, after suffering a deceleration of maybe ten thousand G, had come to rest six feet under Cruithne’s surface.
Designing a probe that could return precise science data and yet survive being driven at speed into a rock wall was quite a feat, a project on which Bootstrap had spent a lot of money. But right now science lay in the future. The penetrators’ main purpose was fixing the O’Neill to Cruithne’s surface, mooring the ship like a smack to a pier.
Now Emma heard a whirr of winches. Languid vibrations snaked along the cables, and she could see the surface inch closer. One penetrator came loose in a puff of dust; its cable went slack and coiled away, out of sight.
There was the softest of shudders, a brief blur of dust.
Then there was only silence and stillness — and a piece of Cruithne framed in the window.
Malenfant came clambering up the fireman’s pole, his face split by a grin. “The O ‘Neill has landed.” He hugged her; she could see Michael was grinning, responding to Malenfant’s vigor and happiness.
“Now,” Malenfant said. “Now we go to work.”
The chains of fireflies, as they hauled giant loads of regolith like so many metallic dung beetles, were comical and inspiring.
Emma was amazed how quickly the fireflies were able to work in the peculiar environment of Cruithne. Autonomously controlled, with surprising grace and skill, they levered their way across the surface with their tethers and pitons and claws. And the low gravity allowed them to shift large masses with ease.
It was just hours before Emma was able to crawl through a tight fabric tunnel from the O ‘Neill and into the new dome.
She stood up and looked around. She was standing on plastic sheeting that merged seamlessly with the walls. The whole thing was just a fabric bubble thirty feet wide at the base, like an all-in-one plastic tent. The roof above her, ten feet up at its tallest, was a pale translucent yellow, supported by air pressure. The fireflies had thrown a cable net over the roof and then shoveled regolith over that, to a depth of three feet, for radiation shielding. Equipment, transferred from O ‘Neill, was piled up in the center of the dome.
The lighting, from yellow tritium bulbs, was utilitarian and harsh. There was a smell of burning, like autumn ash: that was asteroid dust, she knew, leaked into their hab environment despite all their precautions, thin fine stuff that was slowly oxidizing, burning in the air.
She knelt down. Regolith was visible through the floor, blurred lumps of coal-black rock. The crater floor had been scraped smooth by the fireflies before the dome was erected; she could see grooves and ridges where ancient ground had been raked like a flower bed in a suburban garden. She pushed a finger into the sheeting. It was very tough stuff, tougher than it looked; she was only able to make a dent of an inch or so. And as she pushed she felt herself lifting off the floor in reaction; Cruithne’s feeble gravity stuck her only gently to the ground.
Michael had crawled after her. He seemed relieved to be out of the ship. He started running around the perimeter of the dome — or rather he tried to run; with every step he went sailing into the air, bounced off the curving roof, and came floating back down again for another pace. After a few paces he started getting the hang of it, and he picked up speed, pacing and pushing against the ceiling confidently.
The shelter was crude. But Emma felt her spirits lift. After ninety days it was a profound relief not to be confined to the cramped metal cans of the O ‘Neill, for a while at least.
It also didn’t smell as bad as the O ‘Neill had become.
That night they had a party in the hab dome, raiding their precious store of candy bars and washing them down with Cruithne water.
The next day the four of them prepared to explore Cruithne.
Huddled together, they stripped naked — after ninety days, all shyness was gone, though Emma did feel unaccountably cold — and, clumsy in the low gravity, they began to help each other don their skinsuits.
Malenfant kept up a running stream of instructions. “Make sure you get it smoothed out. If the pressure isn’t distributed right you’ll have blood pooling.”
Emma’s skinsuit was just a light spandex coverall, like a cyclist’s gear. The material was surprisingly open mesh; if she held up her hand and stretched out her fingers she actually could see her flesh through fine holes in the weave. The spand
ex, a pale orange that turned blue around any rips, was used to avoid the outgassing and brittleness suffered by rubber in a vacuum. The suit had a hood and gloves and booties, and the pieces fit together with plastic zippers at her neck, wrists, and up her belly to her neck. The only thing she wore inside the suit was a catheter that would lead to a urine collection bag.
The light, comfortable skinsuits had replaced the old pressure garments — giant, stiff, body-shaped inflatable balloons — worn by earlier generations of space travelers. But it was important to have the skinsuit fit properly; the pressurization had to be equal all over her skin.
But this was actually old technology. Burn victims had long needed elasticated dressings that would apply a steady pressure over an extended area of the skin so that scarring occurred in a way beneficent to the patient. It didn’t surprise her to learn that an offshoot of Bootstrap had bought up a medical supply company from Toledo that had specialized in such stuff for decades and was now making a profit by selling better burn dressings back to the hospitals.
Over the top of the skinsuit came more layers, loose fitting and light. First there was a thermal-protection garment, a lacing of water-bearing tubes running over her flesh to keep her temperature even, and then a loose outer coverall, a micrometeorite protection garment. This actually had her name stitched on the breast, NASA-style: STONEY. She put on her bubble helmet with its gold sun visor, and her backpack, a neat little battery-powered rucksack with pumps and fans that could cycle the air and water around her suit for as long as twelve hours.
Now I actually look like an astronaut, she thought.
Malenfant made each of them, in turn, sit in their suits and go to vacuum in the hab’s small collapsible airlock. He called it the suits’ final acceptance test.
Then, the last checks complete, it was time to leave.
They squeezed into the airlock. Emma could feel oxygen blowing across her face, hear the warm hums and whirrs of her backpack.
Michael, beside her in the airlock, clutched her hand. But he showed no fear. He had seemed calm and controlled, in fact, since they had arrived at Cruithne. It was as if, now they had arrived, he knew why they were here, what they would find.
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