by Bob Blanton
“That was so cool,” the twins said. “Can’t we go next time?”
“I’ll tell you what,” Catie said. “You behave yourself until we’re finished setting the engines tomorrow, and we’ll take you out and let you stand on the asteroid and play around in space a bit. But we’re going to put safety lines on you.”
“Yeah!”
After lunch, Natalia lugged the reactor to the cargo door. While she was doing that, Liz and Catie strung lines from the Lynx to the anchors they’d used to level the spot. After everything was ready, Natalia connected the lines to the reactor then gave it a gentle push out of the Lynx. Liz and Catie pulled the lines in as the reactor floated down. By the time it reached the surface, Natalia was there to slow its momentum and help it settle into place.
“That wasn’t too hard,” Natalia said.
“That was the easy one,” Liz laughed. “The first gravity drive has to go about one hundred fifty meters away.”
“But the same principle,” Natalia said. “We’ll hook long lines to it, I’ll push, and you guys reel it in. There’s nothing in the way, so it’s a straight shot.”
“Do you want to place the engines now, or set the reactor?”
“I like repeating steps,” Natalia said. “That way, you don’t forget what you did last time. So, let’s place the engines today. We’ll rest up tonight and think about what we need to do to set things tomorrow.”
“You do the thinking; I’m going to sleep,” Liz said.
“Right, we’ll figure out how to set them tomorrow,” Natalia said with a laugh.
It took them a little over three hours to move the engines, about an hour each. They left each of them anchored to the asteroid and made their way back inside the Lynx. They shed their exosuits in the cargo hold and made their way into the main cabin.
“Dinner will be ready in one hour,” Samantha said. “Are you guys going to shower?”
“I think that was a hint,” Natalia said as she sniffed her shipsuit.
“Nattie, you go first, you worked the hardest. If we run out of time, they’ll be able to put up with one of us through dinner,” Liz suggested.
“I’m not sure whether you’re being nice or insulting me,” Natalia said.
Liz sputtered a bit as she realized she’d essentially said Natalia stunk more than she or Catie did. Natalia laughed at her, “Gotcha. I’m glad to go first, I love the way those jets pulse on my muscles.” She was already halfway out of her shipsuit by the time she reached the shower.
“Did you girls do your lessons?” Catie asked.
“We worked on geometry,” Samantha said. “It seemed to be a good thing to do with the object lesson playing out in front of them.”
“Yeah, we learned about arcs and circles. We already knew about lines,” the twins said.
After dinner, the twins called their mother and showed her videos of the work on the asteroid. Catie called her father; after a brief chat and an update on their progress, she handed him off to Samantha while she stretched out on her couch and strapped herself down to sleep.
Day 6
“Are we ready to go anchor those babies down?” Natalia asked as the three women were suiting up.
“I’m ready,” Liz said. “Natalia, do I need to lug that driver around?”
“Yes, we’ll just set the big anchors like we did the small ones, blast a pilot hole and drive them in. But, I’m pretty sure you’ll have to use the driver to set them,” Natalia said.
“Darn it, I was hoping I didn’t have to lug this thing around after not using it all day yesterday,” Liz said.
“You and Catie grab the big anchors. We’ll tie them down next to the reactor until we need them, but that’ll save us having to open up the cargo hold every time we need more.”
Catie and Liz each grabbed eight of the big corkscrew anchors, Natalia grabbed the blaster, and they made their way down to the asteroid again for the second day of work. After tying the extra anchors down, Liz went back for the dreaded driver.
After lashing down the anchors, Catie laid the template for the reactor over the pad they’d leveled yesterday. She marked the positions for the three anchors with a shot of paint. She rolled the template back up, stuck it in the pouch on her tool belt, and signaled to Natalia that she was ready. Liz brought one of the big anchors over, and Natalia lined the blaster up with the first mark. She set the power down to the lowest level and started firing. She kept raising the power level up to make the hole deeper and wider, but after only a few seconds, she was floating up off the surface, pushed by the kickback of the blaster.
Catie pulled a small anchor out of her tool pouch, “I thought that might happen.”
Natalia used her thrusters to bring her back down to the surface, drilled a small hole for the anchor, which Catie pressed the anchor into and then turned it with the wrench to secure it. Then using that anchor to hold her down, Natalia went back to drilling the hole. She gave Liz a nod when she calculated it was big enough, and Liz drove the anchor into the hole and attached the driver to it. She used the anchor Catie had secured to push against as the driver cranked the anchor down.
They repeated the process twice more, then Catie and Liz grabbed the lines from the reactor and secured themselves to the two farthest anchors. Natalia released the reactor and coaxed it along to the pad as Liz and Catie reeled their lines in. They had to adjust the anchor plates on two of the corners to get the reactor to fit down over them. Then they locked the reactor into place.
“Okay, we just have to do that three more times,” Natalia said. “Any preference on which one we do first?”
“Let’s do the left one,” Liz said. “Just to be different.”
“Sure,” Natalia said.
Liz grabbed five anchors, and Catie grabbed another five.
“Why an extra?” Liz asked.
“A spare, in case we break one or something.”
Liz nodded her head and continued to follow Catie, keying off the flag they had set yesterday.
They worked for an hour to set the first engine and moved onto the next. They completed the other two in forty-five minutes each and were heading back to the ship for lunch only three-and-one-half hours after they started their EVA.
“We’re getting good at this,” Natalia said as they were climbing back into the Lynx.
“The next two are going to be harder, especially the iron asteroid. We’re going to have to really work to set the anchors on it,” Catie said.
“That’s why we have that driver,” Natalia said. “I might have to run the driver when we get to those.”
“Hey, I’m not that big a wimp!” Liz said as she slugged Natalia on the shoulder. She winced a little as her hand impacted Natalia’s exosuit armor.
“Should have waited for me to get this suit off,” Natalia laughed as she made her way to the airlock.
“I don’t think it would have made much difference,” Liz muttered.
Lunch was a simple affair of sandwiches and fries. The twins were very excited about getting to go out onto the asteroid afterward, so Samantha had kept things simple.
“Are you guys finished?” Samantha asked quietly, giving the twins a cautious glance.
“No, we still have to string the power cables,” Catie said. “But Nattie and I can do that ourselves if you and Liz will watch the twins.”
Samantha gave a sigh of relief. “Good, they are really excited.”
“I can tell.”
After lunch, everybody suited up. Natalia had everyone do a buddy check, with an adult checking each of the twins despite their protestations that they were buddies and could check themselves.
After getting ADI to take a suitable picture of everyone standing on the asteroid next to the reactor, Catie and Natalia went back up to the Lynx to grab the cables. Catie attached a line to an anchor and carried it back up with her.
“Geez, these things are big,” Natalia said as she hefted one of the coils of wire. It was a twisted set of w
ires about three centimeters in diameter. The coil was a meter in diameter.
“And just think, they’re superconductors. Imagine how big they’d be if they were copper,” Catie said.
“Yeah, let’s figure how we do this before we start.”
“I’m assuming we’ll take them all down, tie them to the reactor. Take one, attach it, and then anchor it right next to the reactor. We can use one of the plasma torches since we’re only going to be setting the small anchors.”
“How do we unroll this thing?” Natalia asked.
“I guess we don’t want to try to roll it along the surface.”
“How about we put some kind of stick through the center, then we each hold one end and fly over to the engine. It should just unroll itself.”
“I agree, let’s try it,” Catie said as she looked around for a suitable stick. “You know, it doesn’t have to be a stick, why don’t we use a short piece of safety line. Then we can just attach it to our exosuit and have our hands free.”
“Perfect,” Natalia said as she grabbed a short piece of line. “I’ll feed these three down to you if you’ll tie them down when they get there. I don’t think we have to worry about them bouncing a bit.”
“Okay.”
Soon they had the three coils of powerline down to the asteroid and were heading off toward the first engine, the first powerline spooling out behind them. It only took them two hours to wire up the three engines and secure the power lines with anchors.
When they got back from securing the last one, the twins were bouncing between the asteroid and the Lynx. They would push off of the asteroid; flip in midair, hitting the Lynx with their feet; and push back to the asteroid, repeating the process. They were going at a pretty fast clip by the time Catie and Natalia got back.
“Whoa, aren’t they going a bit fast?” Catie asked.
“Not really,” Samantha said. “If they miss, they land on their butts, and that’s armored. They’ve only over-rotated twice.”
“What else have they done?”
“They tried walking, got really frustrated with that. Then they played catch for a while. After that, they decided they could fly around in circles using their safety as a pivot. Liz had to move one of their anchors so they wouldn’t hit each other. Anyway, that got boring. This takes more skill and is keeping them occupied.”
One of the twins saw Catie and didn’t push off when she hit the Lynx. She let her bounce carry her back to the asteroid while she reeled in her anchor line. “Hey, Catie, what do you think?”
“I think you two are naturals,” Catie said. “Those astronauts on the space station don’t have a thing over you two.”
The twins giggled at Catie as one reeled the other back in.
“Are we done?” Liz asked.
“Just need to have ADI run the system check,” Catie said.
“Running,” ADI said.
Day 9 – Board meeting – June 10th
“Our first interplanetary meeting,” Marc said as they all sat down for the board meeting. “Catie, Samantha, and Liz are on the Lynx and will be attending remotely. First, I’d like to congratulate our astronauts on their progress, both in accomplishing their mission and making history. We’ll get an update in a moment. Blake, where are we?”
“We’ve finished quad three, and quad four is ready to have infrastructure installed. We’ll be putting the plumbing in tomorrow,” Blake said. “Our airstrip on the east end is finished. I’ll be finishing quad one of section two as soon as I can so we can make it longer.”
“Manufacturing capacity here on Delphi City?” Marc asked.
“We have maxed out the space we set aside for manufacturing on section one, but that includes the facilities where we’ll start manufacturing the Oryxes. The first one should be off the line next week,” Blake announced. “It’ll probably be done before you get back, Catie.”
“That’s good, but I would like to be there for the testing,” Catie said.
“We’ll have to see how the timing goes. Our wind tunnel is up,” Blake said. “That’s a huge amount of space, but it sure is nice to see those Lynxes fly in the tunnel before we have to send them out with a pilot.”
“How is our school coming?” Marc asked.
“It will be ready this week, just need teachers,” Blake said.
“They’re coming,” Samantha said. “You should have some already. They’re actually the easiest to recruit. They love the idea of living in the tropics, a small community, and decent pay. Most are married, and fifty percent of the spouses are teachers, the rest are good candidates for Kal’s labor force. But we’re only talking about twenty teachers total for now.”
“Hey, I’ll take what I can get,” Kal said. “Now if fifty percent are married to another teacher, then one-third of them are not married to another teacher. So, I get seven or so.”
“Hey, who said he was stupid,” Liz joked. “He can do math in his head.”
Kal gave Liz a salute, or at least some people might think of it that way.
“Liz, since you’re out, I’ve gotten Dr. Zelbar started on the design of the superconductor matrices we want,” Marc said. “He’s excited about it, said to say hello. He’s also decided that he has to have a microgravity environment to make transparent polysteel. I’ve dissuaded him from asking NASA for time in ISS II, at least for now. Fred, how about a production update.”
“Cars are selling as fast as we make them. Johansson is asking for permission to start building the bigger model,” Fred said.
“Sam, do we have what we need from Honda?”
“Yes, I had ADI and Marcie take care of it yesterday. We’re good,” Sam replied.
“Then that’s a green light, Fred,” Marc said.
“Good,” Fred said. “Battery production has seen a six-fold increase since our first month. We’re now just managing to stay ahead of demand, but of course the new car model will change that, much less what’s going to happen now that Tata has started manufacturing trucks.”
“They’ve started building trucks already?” Samantha asked with surprise.
“Those guys are aggressive; they must have been working around the clock to get ready this fast. We’re ramping up fuel cells as fast as we can. The trucks will really define the demand for them.”
“Okay, Kal, anything on security?”
“We’re doing good. Things are staying nice and quiet. The teams are gelling well. It’s lots of fun, you’re missing out, Liz.”
“I think I’ll live,” Liz said. “But I’ll jump right in when we get back.”
“One last update before we have Catie give us her update on the mission,” Marc said. “Dr. Metra has developed a process for manufacturing the Alzheimer’s treatment. It produces the serum in a sealed tube that you insert into a syringe. If the nanites are exposed to air, or if they are not injected into a human body within thirty minutes, they fuse to the surface of the tube or to each other if they’re not in the tube. I think we can create a dispenser that will manufacture them on-demand so we can have them at remote sites. The dispenser will have failsafes and booby traps, so if any tampering is detected, the whole thing fuses into a useless blob.”
“That’s great, Daddy. When do you think it will be ready?” Catie asked.
“We have all the parts, so two months,” Marc answered.
“Thank you for working on this so hard,” Samantha said. “I’ll be ready to work out how to set the clinic up when I get back.”
“I was happy to do it. We all have friends and family impacted by it, and coming up with a cure is going to make everybody feel better about life. Now, for the pièce de résistance, our mission update from Catie,” Marc said, making a big show of handing off the meeting to her.
“We just sent the first asteroid toward Earth, it’s the ice one,” Catie said. “We’re looking for a good iron one as we speak. We’ve learned a couple of lessons. One, vocabulary: You’ll see the vocabulary we’ve included in the mission notes.
It’s critical; it’s easy to make a mistake. Second, training: you want to do training in a safe environment. Nobody can explain how microgravity feels. It’s nothing like swimming since you don’t get the same inertial effect. Water training doesn’t mean anything when you try to move about with nothing to slow you down once you start moving. The twins are adapting the fastest, they’re actually putting the rest of us to shame. I’m not sure we’ll be able to catch up to them no matter how much training and experience we get.”
“That’s a good point,” Marc said. “We’ll want to be sure and add some form of training before we expect our work crews to manage in space. We’ll talk about that at the next meeting. Okay, we’ll call it for the day.”
“By the way, we hired your guy, Catie,” Marc said.
“He’s not my guy. Liz is handling the scientists,” Catie said. “I just found him; I didn’t adopt him.”
Marc laughed. “Okay, I’ll cancel the introductions. Have fun out there.”
Day 11
Music woke Catie up, “What’s going on?” she asked as she looked about her.
“Good morning, Sweetie,” Marc said.
As Catie synced her comm, she saw that everyone was in the boardroom, everyone on Earth that is. Everyone in the Lynx was stirring awake; apparently, the music had been blasted into everyone’s comms.
“Why are you waking us up?” Catie asked.
“Yes, why?” demanded Samantha.
“ADI said you would be getting up from your nap about now,” Marc said in his defense.
“Maybe, but we would have been waking up to our own rhythms, not to the theme of ‘Close Encounters of a Third Kind’,” Samantha said.
“Well, I guess the date would only resonate with Blake and me, but this is the one-year anniversary of our discovering the Sakira,” Marc said. “In fact, according to ADI, it was one year ago at this exact moment in time that I was made the captain.”
“And because of that, you wanted to surprise us,” Samantha said.
“Surprise seemed to be appropriate for the occasion,” Marc said.
