The Ice Moon Explorer

by Navin Weeraratne

  “Instrument packages? What kind?”

  “Nothing fancy. Simple, cheap devices like transponders, cubesats, and pocket rovers. They’ll study the asteroids and do some simple prospecting.”

  “Intent to occupy!”

  “The mission is not just to capture an asteroid and park it nearby,” said Damien, “But also, to make legal claims to the most valuable NEOs known.”

  Daryl sat back and whistled.

  “The cost estimate is much lower that I had expected.”

  “We plan to use off the shelf components,” said Damien. “Huawei modules and a Boeing engine. And a lot of money is saved by the crew. It’s just me and Elijah, we both have pilot’s licenses with instrument ratings. We’ll fly without pay, but instead a corresponding share of the new equity. All Spektorov Investment would have to do, is pay for the parts and the launch.”

  “If it goes well, you’ll part own a company with the single biggest reserve of rare metals in the inner solar system,” said Elijah. “And if it goes very well, all the best reserves in the inner solar system.”

  Daryl beamed and looked between the two, nodding.

  “Gentleman, this has been a great meeting. Thank you for taking the time to explain the specifics of your business plan. I’d like to fund your venture. You’ll have the contract in the morning. Please look it over and let me know if its agreeable to you.”

  He turned around and waved at the bartender.

  “Another round for us, on me. We’re going to take over the world!”

  The bartender smiled. It wasn’t the first time someone had said that in the Muddy Charles, and meant it.

  “Dude!” Damien bounced along the street, “We are in. We’re so fucking in!”

  Elijah shook his head and raised an eyebrow. It was drizzling in Harvard Square. People hopped under awnings or clustered around store entrances. A street performer juggled on, undaunted.

  “What?” Damien stopped, his expression fell. “He said yes!”

  “I don’t know man.”

  “What’s not to know? He’s the first VC we’ve spoken to who even knows what an asteroid, is. He gets it! He gets the whole business model!”

  “You don’t think that’s a bit suspicious?”

  “Suspicious?!” Damien rolled his eyes. “What is wrong with you? He’s a venture capitalist who isn’t some old geezer who only understands nano-bio, and you want to find a problem with that?”

  Elijah shrugged. “Look, we’ve had to jump through a lot of hoops just to get the dignity of kinda-sorta- rejections. He quizzed our numbers, but that was it. He didn’t talk about safety. He didn’t talk nearly enough about the legal issues.”

  “So? He was excited! He wants this to happen. Why are you raining our parade here? We’ve finally got a VC who wants to do business with us! Shit, he’s sending us a contract.”

  “Yeah. I guess you’re right. I just can’t really believe it’s finally happening, and so quickly.”

  Damien patted his arm.

  “Sun-Star Prospecting is going places, Mr. Newman. We’re fucking going to space, and we’re going to fucking own it!”

  One day later, Somerville, Massachusetts

  “God, I hate Somerville.”

  The man next to Damien snorted, and poured him more beer. The two toasted, and sat back in their lawn chairs. It was getting late, and the party was getting worse. Ageing hipsters drank PBR and gave them dirty looks through oversized, plastic-framed, glasses. It was a warm night; snooty groups dotted the yard. The barbecue still smelled of tofu dogs.

  “I got the feeling you don’t know too many people here,” said the other man. He wore a sports jacket and real leather shoes. He’d already been told off that evening by a pair of vegans.

  “Oh hell no. I’m here because of Elijah, my business partner. These are his girlfriend’s friends. He has to go, but he can’t stand them. So he asked me to come be his wingman at this party.”

  Sports Jacket looked around.

  “Well where is he?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Having a fight with his girlfriend, upstairs. Been half an hour and they’re still not done. They’re either still fighting, or they’ve started fucking. Either way, I’m stuck out here with Gentrification’s finest.”

  “Well, we’re both stuck out here.”

  “What about you?” Damien asked. “What brought you here?”

  “Just meeting up with some friends from Tufts. They wanted to come for this party, so here we are. They’re busy hitting on random women who aren’t interested, so here I am, drinking in a corner.”

  “Did you go to Tufts?”

  “Yeah, Fletcher School. I focused on venture capital contracts. A big investor wants to screw you and steal your business? I’m the guy who reads the small print he’ll try and use.”

  Damien sat up, eyes wide.

  “No way? Hey, I’ve a contract that I need to go over, one with a venture capitalist.”

  “Seriously?” Sports Jacket grinned. “It’s a small world. Have you got someone who’ll take a look at it for you?”

  “I haven’t asked anyone yet. Just got it today.”

  “Here,” he reached into his pocket and pulled out a card. “I’d be happy to take a look at it for you, on Monday.”

  Damien read the card. “Sam Snyder. Good to meet you, Sam Snyder,” the two shook hands. “I hate to be crass but how much would that set me back?”

  “You stick around and babysit me till my useless friends crash and burn, and we’ll call it covered.”

  “It’s a deal,” he held up his party cup. “To highly convenient coincidences!”

  They toasted.

  One Year Later, Asteroid 2034 AT 43

  “I got nothing on number Seven.”

  The Huawei Work Module was large and brightly lit. Equipment was tucked in plastic bags, Velcroed to the walls. Touch consoles docked in handy ports, with ergonomic sliding trays. In a corner was a (vintage) poster of what to do during a zombie holocaust. Elijah had taped a roll-up display screen on a table. Green dots lit up on his wire diagram map. One dot was red.

  “Nothing?” asked Damien.

  “Nothing. I can’t get a ping, and I’m not picking up the transponder.”

  “It is still drawing power?”

  “That it is.”

  “Thank God,” Damien untensed. “We can’t lose another mass driver.”

  “Can you check if there was a microquake there? Even if it’s still drawing power, it could still be damaged or knocked out of alignment.”

  Seismographs sprung into the air above Damien’s tablet.

  “Yeah, we had a one point six near there.”

  “It’s that fucking hydrocarbon ice. We’re too close to the sun; the alcohols boil every rotation.” He took off his baseball cap and got up slowly.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We need Seven back online,” Elijah said over his shoulder. “I’m going to suit up and head over there.”

  “There’s not enough time,” said Damien. “Sun’s coming up in an hour. It’s not safe with the ice melting.”

  “We have to get Seven back up.”

  “It can wait.”

  “What about the 0740 firing?”

  “We can make adjustments to fire without Seven.”

  “What are you, nuts?” Elijah’s smile was threadbare. “That’ll throw all the calculations. We’ll have to rework every single firing, and then get FAA approval. You want to do all that before 0740? What if the FAA says no? Damien, we’ll lose the whole mission.”

  The engineer said nothing for moment.

  “Well,” he said slowly, “we’d both better go.”

  “No, you should stay and monitor Seven,” Elijah climbed into his pressure suit. “We don’t know what the problem is, and we might get control back. Also, you should start reworking all the firings. If I can’t get Seven working, it’ll be our only option.”

  “It’s not safe, Elijah,” his a
rms were folded.

  “Sure, if we waste the rotation, arguing. I have to get done and be out by sun up. Now are you going to help me with this suit, or not?”

  Elijah Newman clipped himself to the safety line, and hopped across the ground.

  2034 AT 43’s surface was a grey with patchy black intervals. Mica and quartz dusts reflected his suit lights, like peeking buried diamonds. He floated for meters, his weight barely a percent of its Earth value. A hundred meters away, a green light flashed from a steel piling. The first waypoint on his trip around the world.

  He looked up, the stars filled his helmet and tried to get in.

  Focus on the mass driver, focus on the mass driver, he told himself. Getting distracted can wait till 0740.

  He remembered Joey Yen, an engineering student from Guangzhou he’d had classes with. Yen had borrowed money to buy luxury properties in Burma, betting on the Chinese tech bubble. He’d been right, and now lived in Monaco with his three (possibly four) girlfriends. But it had been a near thing. Joey had been ready to jump from a tower he said, if he’d bet wrong.

  He reached the first piling, a monolith rising out of a slag hill. Its green lamp spun, pulsing like a lighthouse. There would be flights and landings on AT 43. A body large as a naval anchorage needed hazard lights.

  “Reached the first beacon,” he spoke into his helmet radio. “It’s pretty dark out here, would have been nice if we had some floods. I can see the second beacon, its working fine.”

  He looked down. An ancient collision cracked and fissured AT 43, putting a valley between him and the second beacon. The safety line flew across it, disappearing in the darkness.

  Be ready to jump from the tower.

  He pushed off again, a human dirigible.

  It was 4.56 billion years old, leftover packaging from the birth of the solar system. It had failed the gravitational draft of the protoplanets. Except for pity-taps of gravity, it was all alone. After eons even the inner solar system becomes a small town, though. Sooner or later, it would run into the Earth.

  Halfway across the ravine, Elijah was still rising. He looked down and saw only darkness. In that darkness was palladium, iron, even water ice. It was a miner’s buffet table, and it would allow truly obese constructions.

  “How are those calculations coming along?”

  “If I’d known we’d be running them all again, I’d have written a damn program.”

  “We should write that program anyway. That’s at least five frours work.” He pronounced it frowers.

  “Five frours, easy. Seven or eight if we made it user-friendly.”

  Mental work and puzzles passed time. This mattered when basically sealed in a small room for a summer. They had become very good at finding problems to frown over, for hours. A frowning hour was a ‘frower.’ A frowning day though, was a ‘whole fucking day.’

  He reached the second beacon. Dust and sand erupted around his boots, forming a cloud. The motes glowed green with each pulse. He looked out to see the flashing of the third and final beacon.

  “The third beacon isn’t working.” He tugged the safety line, hard. It stayed taut. “The line is still attached to the piling, though.”

  “The microquake must have damaged it. If the beacon’s broken, the mass driver is certainly wrecked, too. Come on back.”

  “We don’t know that. If the mass driver’s been knocked out of place, it might still fire.”

  “It’s ten finicky meters of superconducting rail.”

  “Which out here, weighs next to nothing. We could toss it out the window and it would land fine. It’s still drawing power, isn’t it?”

  “Yes it is. And so is the beacon, for some reason.”

  “Then they’re probably just buried under some dirt. I’ll dig that shit out and be done in five minutes.”

  “It’s unsafe, Elijah. You could get caught in a quake, the deposit is already warm.”

  “Actually no, it will have completely refrozen. Nothing in the hydrocarbon bed has a high heat capacity.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “Because it would have boiled away, billions of years ago. AT 43 boils and cools, every rotation. The volatiles boil, cause quakes, and then the whole system refreezes. Every rotation. Even when close to the sun. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be having the quakes at all.”

  “Look, I’m just not comfortable this.”

  “Alright. How are the calculations coming?”

  “They’ll be done a lot quicker if we’re both doing them.”

  “Then this is still our best bet. Look, I’m doing this. The science is solid. Quit worrying, and I’ll take care of this.”

  He leapt off the mound.

  Mass Driver Seven was a silver tube, thick as a car and longer than a house. It rested on struts, angled upwards like a WWI artillery gun. Its rear disappeared into a shaft, six meters deep. Thick cables tangled around the opening, a mess of black snakes. The instrument panels on the generator glowed yellow. Powerful lights were strung from poles around the site.

  Ice and snow crunched under Elijah’s boots. He could almost pretend he was on a snowy Boston road. One of the shitty ones that didn’t get ploughed often enough. The snow field stretched around him, as far as the lights could reveal. It hadn’t been there when they had worked on the site. But then, there hadn’t been a six meter deep shaft, either. The gas bubbles had vented through it. Slowly, but gradually building in pressure. The shaft became a snow fountain. Then, worked loose, Mass Driver Seven had climbed out as well.

  The struts needed repair and more bolts went into the shaft walls. Other than that, there had been hardly any damage. Seven would survive the next few quakes, till the snowfield became a lake. They wouldn’t need it for that long.

  He crouched down and scooped some snow into a sampler. He felt it shake as the tiny centrifuge inside started.

  “You done yet?”

  “Just packing up my tools and taking some samples,” he replied. “It’s really pretty out here.”

  “Sun’s about to come up. That snow field is going to turn into a boiling cauldron.”

  “That will be hours from now. I should be done here in about ten minutes.”

  “You staying to watch sunrise?”

  “Damn right. It’s our own world, Damien. You should be out here, too. We might not get another chance to see something like this.”

  “If Seven misfires, and we don’t have plan B ready, you’re right. We certainly won’t. I woke Spektorov up, he’s making calls to the FAA right now.”

  “Won’t need it,” Elijah closed his drill kit.

  “Let’s hope not.”

  The sun doesn’t rise on a body without atmosphere. It struck – in just moments, the world was lit from horizon to horizon. He flinched at the brightness, even as his helmet polarized. The ground was as bright– the snow caught the sun and threw it back in his face.

  He peered about. He was on a jagged, rocky plain, dotted with elephant-sized craters. The snow stretched as far as he could see.

  Condensation began to form on his helmet, on the outside. He wiped it off, it turned to slush and ice in his glove.

  What the hell? That was fast, even for ethanol.

  The sampler display started flashing. He looked at it.

  85 percent ammonia.

  “How is sunrise looking?”

  All around him, the snow field was turning into mist.

  “Elijah?”

  “Sorry, it’s fine. Real pretty.”

  “Well, send me some video.”

  “Hang on. You’re the chemist in the team, quick question for you,” he made his way back to the safety cable. He felt the squelch of the slush through his boots. “What’s the specific heat capacity of ammonia?”

  “It changes depending on the state and temperature, but it’s quite high. Even higher than water. Why?”

  “Just wondering. I’d be pretty unlucky if this was an ammonia deposit, instead of alcohol.”

 
“Yes. It would just retain more and more heat from each rotation, and become violent, faster. But you’ll be fine. Like you said, it would have boiled off millions of years ago.”

  “You finished the calculations yet?”

  “Nearly. Another hour and I’ll be done. Why?”

  “Just keep working on them.”

  “Are you alright?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Be ready to jump from the tower.

  “The fuck you are. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong, Damien! Look I wouldn’t screw around over something this important.” He felt a vibration. It was the ground.

  “I’m just having second thoughts about Seven. Keep at it, I’ll be over shortly.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Don’t worry about me. Stay focused. Just do your part, and I’ll do mine.”

  Streams of liquid began jetting out Mass Driver Seven’s shaft. They spread into fountains of snow, hundreds of meters above.

  The ground began to shake. He tested the safety cable, and leapt.

  Six Weeks Later, Boston

  “Hey Charlie!” Damien banged on the glass door. Across at the reception sat a secretary and fat security guard. Neither smiled at him. Above their heads was a sign saying Sun Star Prospecting. “Hey Charlie, what gives?” Damien gestured to the lock. “It won’t swipe my key card.”

  The security guard walked over to the door, and looked at him through the glass.

  “I’m sorry Mr. Flores. I’m not to let you into the building.”

  “What? What the fuck? Is there a fire or something? What are you guys doing in there?”

  “Mr. Spektorov’s orders, Sir.”

  “Spektorov – “ he stopped, speechless. “Charlie, open the door now.”

  “I’m sorry I can’t do that Mr. Flores.”

  “This is your boss, giving you an order Charlie. Opening the fucking door to my fucking building, now!”

  “You’re not my boss anymore, Mr. Flores. You need to call legal.”

  Damien shouldered the door, rattling it.

  “Step away from the building, Sir! This is private property and I will call the police.”