The Orphan in Near-Space (The Space Orphan Book 2)

by Laer Carroll

  The hole before them was about a half-mile wide and, being quite old, had a flat bottom of dust and debris from nearby meteoroid impacts. It was only 100 or so feet deep in the middle and maybe half that near the rim.

  About 50 feet from the edge of the crater were three buildings, little more than big boxes of metal with tops covered in a foot of protective Moon dirt. One housed the experimental setup, one a garage and equipment shelter, and one a crew habitat. The habitat had air and power in it, as did the access tunnel from the garage, or so the remote readouts back in the City had said. The shelter and the habitat both had dark-blue solar panels atop them. In two opposite directions were larger solar arrays connected to the center of the site with dirt-covered cables.

  Nicole, standing and looking over Jane's shoulder where she sat in the co-pilot's seat, said, "Doesn't look like much, does it?"

  "No, dear," said Jane who had dropped back into the biological part of HER body. "But we hope it's good enough to get the job done.

  "Klaus, think you want to chance taking a floater route to our new home?"

  He'd been looking at the road over the low lip of the crater downhill. It was a zig-zag cut into the sloping side of the crater.

  "It looks like I can make it. Best to find out now if we can count on getting up and down the slope on floater alone while we still have enough power for the space jets. But I'm going to ready them and keep my finger on the emergency liftoff button while we go down."

  Jane saw no reason to backstop Klaus by becoming JANE and so ready to take over in an emergency. It would be a disservice to her people not to let them fail and recover from their failure. In the long careers they likely had before them they would need those learning experiences.

  "OK," said Klaus. "Everyone back in their seats and strap in."

  Nicole and Ricky obeyed the order. Kate was already strapped in and busy with her vear connected to her SuperSmart phone doing her job as Exec.

  Jane glanced back at the three crew members, turned back to Klaus.

  "They're all secure, Lieutenant. Proceed."

  "Yes, Sir."

  He took a deep breath, let it out, and engaged the floater drive. He'd set the trailer down on its mechanical feet while the trailer was at rest. He left the feet extended when the trailer lifted off.

  Jane, observing him as he drove, noted with approval that he had a slight adrenaline flow going but only enough to keep him fully alert.

  The trip down the road was slow but steady. The road's surface showed no signs of crumbling as the floater field pressed down on it and a few inches beneath. The road did not shift at all and the zigzag course proceeded steadily. It took about fifteen minutes to get down to the crater floor.

  "Good job, Lieutenant. Now let's get to the vehicle shelter and connected to the habitat."

  "The engineers did a good job on the access route. It helped a lot that they embedded a reinforcement framework under it."

  "Good to know. Did you hear that, crew? You'll be driving up and down it too."

  From behind her there came a couple of Yeses and an "Aye, aye, Captin Sor."

  Inside the shelter the accordion access tunnel engaged fully and easily with the airlock door of the trailer. This let them go directly into and eventually out of the habitat without the lengthy process of using the trailer's airlock or that of the habitat.

  Jane led the way and stopped just inside and to one side of the habitat's inner airlock door. Her four crew members joined her and they all looked around at the aired-up habitat.

  The first room was large, a combination living room and dining area. Beyond it in one direction was the door to a kitchen. To another was a hall further into the habitat.

  They followed Jane as she briefly explored the building that she and her crew had designed, then overseen its construction by robots. They all knew the habitat well through virtual reality but the actual reality felt strange anyway. Jane said so. Everyone else chimed in agreement or nodded.

  They went down the hallway to its end, passing by a control room and a combination cleaning room and toilet which used only small amounts of water. At the end were ten bedrooms. Each room was set up to house two people but the crew each selected a room to themselves. Jane took the room nearest the control room and living room. Kate took the room nearest her.

  Back in the central hall Jane said, "Now, split up and do a detailed check of everything. I'll take the control room."

  She nodded at Kate and left her supervising the inspections. She went into the control room and became Jane+Robot+habitat+garage. All checked out so SHE dropped back into HER biological part.

  The others were still busy so she went back through the access tunnel alone and brought two big feed packs in the trailer, one for hot and the other for cold contents, into the living room. She had them opened and their contents set up on a folding table when the first of the inspectors came into the room. The others followed shortly and everyone sat to chow down.

  Nicole was the first to finish and called dibs on the restroom. She wanted to get out of her spacesuit and pee, she said.

  Jane nodded and the rest agreed. Long-use spacesuits had urinary connections that everyone disliked and which were almost never mentioned in popular media, a catheter for women and a sheath for men. Nicole came back shortly clad only in her spacesuit liner.

  Jane said, "I'm going to allow another person to come back in a suit liner. But as soon as the third person goes to the restroom whoever has been out of their suit longest has to return to it."

  Virtual coin flips on Jane's SuperSmart decided the order of the rest of her crew, then Jane followed. She didn't really need to go. Her body apparently had been engineered to sharply minimize her need to eliminate anything. But she'd long ago decided to mimic Earth-human normal behavior.

  Everyone chatted on the couch and easy chairs until Jane said, "OK. My suit liner has dried out all the way. So back we all go into our suits. Let's go into the control room and run every system up to just before starting the experimental runs."

  The control room looked similar to ocean- and space-going bridges familiar to fans of military and sci-fi media. There was a far wall with one huge video screen flanked by two smaller ones. A narrow path would let a speaker stand in front of the wall and use a laser pointer on the screen. Outside it was a crescent of four workstations, each complete with a chair, vision screen, and a manual keyboard. Nearest the door was a short dais bearing a captain's seat with a workstation, it swung aside so that the captain could observe everything in the room.

  Everyone sat at their assigned station and brought it fully awake from Sleep. For the next two hours they ran through all the procedures of an experimental run except the very last step.

  When done the crew swung their ergonomic seats, which were minimal in a one-sixth gravity, to face their captain.

  Rick said, "Awfully tempting, isn't it, Cap? To just push the Go button."

  Jane stood up. "Not to me, Lieutenant. I've no slightest desire to experience the 'Marie Curie' fatal phenomenon, if there is one. Time to get back to the City. Now who gets to run the trailer? Who is our least experienced pilot?"

  All eyes turned toward Nicole, who dramatically groaned and rolled her eyes. But everyone knew she was secretly pleased. She'd passed all her vehicle certifications with top scores but was the least naturally talented in vehicle operation. She was determined to catch up with the rest.

  The Gang set to returning every facility of the room and the rest of the habitat to Sleep mode. Jane was the last out, having double-checked every action. At the air lock door she turned to look back at the habitat. She'd likely never set actual feet inside it again. The rest of their time on the Moon all their work would be done back in the City.

  Finally she closed the inner and outside habitat airlock doors and returned to their trailer.

  <>

  For practice Jane had Nicole drive up the zigzag path to the crater rim but once out of the crater had her lift o
ff on the trailer's space jets. It took them only about 30 minutes flying a hundred feet up to return to Luna City. They checked the trailer back in and went to the remote control room assigned to them. There each of them pressed a hand to the security plate beside the door to let them into the room and to record their entry.

  It was set up in the same bridge pattern as the actual control room on the Moon's far side except that instead of the flatscreens in the control room there was a heavy-duty vear headset. Instead of an actual keyboard there were data gloves which would mimic the feel of typing on real keyboards.

  Jane assumed the captain's seat and her crew members sat at the four virtual reality workstation positions. Everyone donned the remote control vear headsets and data gloves. Reaching over encrypted satellite data links to the experiment site they awoke the computers there from Sleep mode.

  Jane said, "Commencing shield experiments. Captain Jane Kuznetsov and crew in control positions." She gave the date and time. Her words and all their work would be stored in the experiment site's computers and also automatically backed up on a data server in a corner of the room.

  Jane said, "Lieutenant Hoffman, proceed with the experiment."

  "Yes, sir," said Klaus. "Proceeding."

  As they'd rehearsed the crew woke up the target at the experiment site. It was basically big square upright framework which would record any impacts on its surface.

  Next they woke up the shield generator. It was located in a big box sitting on the floor of the crater. The immaterial shield itself would be an invisible square above the box between the target and the gun shooting pellets at the target.

  The gun hardly deserved its dire name. It was more of a pea shooter which would throw pea-sized balls of compressed moon dust at the target. At the gun's lowest settings the pellets would fly no faster than a human could have thrown them.

  Klaus said, "All components in order, Captain."

  Jane said, "Fire the first shots."

  In Klaus's computer there was a long list of shots with data about each of them. The first ten would be without the shield generator on. This would establish a baseline against which all the following shots would be compared.

  This went as expected: ten different shots aimed at points on the target arranged in a circular pattern, one point at the center, four equally spaced around it, and five points arranged in a circle around the four. Each shot hit their point and the exact location and force of the impact was recorded onsite and in the City.

  "Fire the first shot of the second series of shots."

  Klaus took a deep breath and triggered the next shot by tapping a virtual button on the experiment's control panel. The signal traveled up to a lunacentric satellite and down to the experimental setup. With the gun-triggering command was a command to first bring up the shield between the gun and the target.

  Anyone observing the experiment with eyes or radar would see a slight shimmer come into existence as a square of space was converted to virtual matter. They would also see a pea-sized pellet of compressed moon dust strike the shield and puff into a disc of dust which fell to the surface in the slow fall of everything dropped on the Moon.

  In the Luna City control room what everyone observed was a string of numbers. The most important number was the trailing number: a bright red one.

  Several people burst into cheers. Klaus turned to Rick in the seat beside him and punched his upraised fist. Jane smiled and spoke.

  "At this date and time:" She gave them. "The first-ever virtual shield was successfully generated. We are now proceeding to explore the capabilities and limits of virtual shields.

  "Lieutenant Hoffman, fire the remaining nine shots of this second round of tests."

  "Yes, sir."

  The first shot had been aimed at the zero or "bulls-eye" of the target. The rest of the shots were aimed at the other points on the circular pattern on the target.

  Each shot was blocked by the shield. As before a lot of information was recorded, each time as a string of numbers. This include the size and mass of the shots, the exact location of the "unharmed" points on the target, and most of all lots of information about the shield such as the power used to generate it.

  Jane paused the experiment and ruminated over the information it had generated. The rest of the team did too, but only to satisfy their curiosity. They knew Jane with her unparalleled mathematical genius would tease out a lot more conclusions from the data than any of them could.

  "Well, team," she said after a few minutes. "The shield is working just as we predicted. Now let's run the next sets of experiments. Lieutenant Hoffman, initiate."

  "Yes, sir."

  For the next hour and a half hundreds of shots were fired and intercepted. Each shot was varied in how fast it was fired and how massy it was, from pellet size to marble size, from a few dozen miles per hour to a few hundred. The shield was varied in several ways, including its angle, up to 45 degrees vertically left or right, or tilted horizontally from 45 degrees up or down.

  Jane was fully engaged in interpreting the results. She began to see patterns in the data.

  By now it was almost 4:00 in the local afternoon. Jane called a halt.

  "Lieutenant Romero, tell the compactor robot to create the next four sets of test missiles."

  Nicole said, "Already working, sir. The first set is nearly complete and stockpiled near the gun. Then it will begin the next three sets."

  Far across the surface of the Moon a specially built robot was moving in a spiral behind the gun, scooping up Moon dust, sifting out solid objects above a certain size, and compressing the remaining dust into pellets.

  The pellets in the first set were the size of marbles. Three more spirals further away from the gun would produce larger ones, up to the size of baseballs. By the time the team returned to work the next day all four groups of "bullets" would be done and ready to be fired.

  "Good work, Lieutenant. That's it for today, crew. Let's go eat."

  She and her crew powered down the local and the remote parts of the experimental setup except for the bullet-making robot. It would power itself down when it was done.

  <>

  For the remainder of the week and most of the next the Gang worked. They gathered an enormous amount of data. Meanwhile they explored Luna City's entertainment resources.

  Jane marveled at how many there were. She'd always thought of the City as the base for all sorts of Lunar explorations and private businesses. It was. But the hotel consortium which was the majority stockholder of the City had intended it to be a resort for the wealthy of Earth. And largely succeeded.

  There were theaters, night clubs, lovely gardens, electronic games and courts for several kinds of sports. The latter had been designed to take advantage of the one-sixth gravity of the Moon. This was sometimes a hindrance as well. A struck tennis ball could go quite far, requiring lightweight almost invisible nets around each court to protect the audiences.

  The sports stadium, sized for an Earthly football field, had a similar problem with a similar solution. How that would work in actual practice was yet to be seen.

  Attempts to play Quidditch were quite popular, though they were more comedic than serious. There were too few people on the Moon with the time and inclination to form teams.

  One of those was Team K. It was made up of Jane and her crew plus a changing roster of two others from random guests to make up the seven for a full Quidditch team. So far Team K was the undisputed champions of the informal games being played each week.

  This was to be expected. All her crew were superb athletes in top condition. And it included Jane.

  On the skeletal flying motorbikes which were the "wizard's broomsticks" of Quidditch she could perform wonders. Flying upside down was as natural to her as flying upright. She could make abrupt changes of direction as if inertia did not exist for her. She always seemed to know when and where the three balls of the game were.

  She was so good that she suggested some penalties
be added to rules of the game for exceeding certain limits. Quidditch authorities back on Earth were debating them.

  <>

  Then on Thursday afternoon of the second week of experiments disaster struck.

  Chapter 14 - Antimatter

  Several anomalies in the results of running the shield experiments had been uncovered. Among others was the power curve. Jane's theory predicted a smooth increase in shield strength from a smooth increase in the power supplied to the shield generator. But the strength went up in jumps.

  Nicole's background in chemical engineering led her to guess that they were creating different kinds of virtual matter such as metals or non-metals. A jump in shield strength meant they were creating different virtual elements, some of them stronger than the others.

  They were exploring the upper limits of one of those power jumps when the signal to their vears and data gloves disappeared.

  Robot, ever vigilant for dangerous surprises, merged with Jane, taking Luna City into the gestalt with it.

  The super being turned HER attention to HER insides.

  Nothing was amiss, other than the routine minor problems any complex system was constantly handling, the human equivalents of random itches and accidental binding of clothing.

  There had been no moon quake. These were rare and minor. The Moon did not have the active geological upsets of Earth.

  There had been no nearby strikes of larger-than-usual meteorites hitting the Moon that would shake up and disrupt power or communications.

  There had been no hiccups in the power flowing into and through the city from its many solar power arrays and super batteries storing that power.

  JANE extended HER attention into the various sensor systems and communication systems connecting the City to the rest of the Moon and to Earth. There were no problems.

  Except one. The nearest comsat in lunacentric orbit above the Moon between JANE and the shield experiment site had shut down.

  SHE focused HER attention on it. Even as SHE did so it was waking up from a shutdown. It ran a set of self-test diagnostics. It concluded that a power surge in its circuits induced by a solar radiation burst had tripped an overload protection switch. Otherwise it was fully functional and so had returned to normal operation.