Rockhoppers Ch. 05

"How're we looking, Grubs?"

"We're fine on consumable fuel, skipper. New equipment masses more than the empty hold did but we more than make up for it with no full hold on the return trip. We could burn at 5G for a year."

"All right. I'm sending Faith down to you, she's done all the orbital math she can until we're close enough for scanners to pick up something. Take her and Josh and three or four tons of the seed iron. I want you to three to fire up the smelter and do a dry run through of getting a rail section built for when we spot a rock. Are the fins up to that?"

The engineer grunts and a few back of the hand calculations. "It'll barely warm them up. I can push a lot more metal than that before we start getting toasty in here."

"We only have about a hundred tons of seed. I don't want to waste it, but I also don't want the first time we do this to be when we're on approach to a rock. Use your best judgment. I'd like to get through it today and put us all on ice by tomorrow, but we can spare a couple of days now more gracefully than we can later."

"Aye, skipper."

Grubs glances the main engineering display, casting his eye for the thousandth time today over the slowly moving numbers and graphs that represented the physical health of the Rockhopper. They are three days out from Jupiter, which now just looks like a tiny half moon on the monitor in the mess. Hell, at these distances the sun was starting to just look like a bright star.

Skittering mechanical thuds several dozen yards behind him tell him that Josh is practicing with the spiders. The things move with creepy syncopation, but Grubs gets a weird sort of chief-engineer-spic-and-span pleasure watching them perfectly move a stack of iron ingots in a swarm back and forth across the space Josh is working in.

Looking over, he sees that the boy has the metric ton of ingots stacked in a cube, and the spiders sitting across the bay. Josh taps a command into his locater, and the bots immediately swarm past Grubs and on to the top of the ingots, so coordinated that not a single leg from one so much as brushes any of the others. In a moment they separate, and the stack of iron is gone, as if by magic. As they skitter past the chief engineer once more he sees that each one is carrying four or five of the ten kilogram bars. When they reach their starting point, they clump up again and several seconds later the cube of iron has reappeared and the spiders are returning to their individual bays.

"Prettily done, lad," said the engineer as he approaches his nephew, "Shame iron doesn't come out of the rocks in nice bricks."

Josh grins at his granduncle. "Doesn't matter how it comes, Chief. I get these things now. "

Grubs claps the younger man on the back "That's what I like to hear, lad."

They both look over at the sound of someone opening the bay access. Faith walks through and spots them.

As she heads towards them, Grubs says, "Come on then, lets find out if your confidence is misplaced."

----

Eight hours later, Nomi walks into the engineering bay, which she knows from monitoring readouts for the last hour is a good four or five degrees warmer than the rest of the ship at this point, but the temperature has remained steady since the radiator fins began shedding the differential. Grubs hadn't been wrong about his efficiency estimate.

She finds her three crewman going over a pair of extremely shiny and massive rails. The manufactory is powered down and Josh is on his knees taking watching as he directs one of the spiders to take soundings of the still-too-hot-to-touch metal and talks to the others. Nomi can see waves of heat still rising from the rail.

Grubs looks up at her approach and grins. "Like clockwork, captain. This crew is ready to drink the iron from a rock like milk from a mother's teat."

She winces at the imagery, but she's also pleased. "The 'Hopper looks fine from my chair too, Grubs. Well done on the charting, Faith."

"Thank you, Captain."

"Josh, Faith, I intend to put the two of you on ice at the beginning of shift tomorrow. Grubs and I will run a couple of high-G tests of the engine, then we'll go down too. I'm going to have the coffins wake us back up in a month if the scanners don't find a problem before then. Get those rails secured so they'll be ready when we need them on the rock."

Grubs speaks up, "Still thinking two gravities for the trip out, Nomi?"

"That's what Faith's math is based on. Our window to start the burn is about five days, so we have a lot of slack if something comes up, but everything is looking good for now. All of you go catch a shower and clean up. I'll cook tonight."

----

Dinner in the mess has an air of celebration. The crew has worked hard to get the Rockhopper this far, and everyone is in a good mood. Grubs brings up a bottle of bourbon Stella had given him before they'd left Galileo, and everyone has a glass, although Faith makes a face at her first experience with hard liquor.

"You'll come to appreciate it, lass. Till, then, more for me!"

Faith laughs along with everyone else and braves another sip. She looks over her glass at these three people she's known less than two months, her new surrogate family.

'Well', she thinks, glancing at Josh and smiling to herself, 'maybe not family so much.'

Later, after the party breaks up and everyone has headed to their cabin, Faith slips back into her shipsuit and pads barefoot down the corridor to a different cabin. She knocks, and in a moment Josh opens the door.

"Hi." she says.

He looks at her for a moment, then smiles and says, "Hi."

She slips inside and he seals the hatch on the empty corridor.

----

The next morning Grubs looks up from his unaccustomed spot in the astrogators' seat as Nomi squirms through the lower access back onto the bridge. "Got the kids all tucked in?"

As she settles into the command seat and begins strapping herself down, Nomi says, "Yeah, both on ice as of a few minutes ago. Can't say I don't envy them, I shouldn't have had so much of your bourbon last night. Really not looking forward to high G."

"Just means you'll black out before you throw up, lass. We don't need long burns. Four of them a minute each over the next hour will give us our numbers. Doing this at all is almost overkill, given the 'Hoppers ratings, but I won't argue against it. The burns are all laid in."

"Might as well." Punching a couple of keys on her console, she orders cycle to begin. Both of them are immediately swaddled as their chairs and straps distend to cushion them in high G, and moments later the first burn makes both of them rethink their attitude towards both liquor and breakfast.

Sixty painful seconds later, swallowing her gorge and capable of comfortable speech again, Nomi says "Still with me, Chief?"

"Aye, though not particularly happy about it. Boards are green, though. Next burn in thirteen and a half."

"God help us."

----

Looking at the readouts on the third coffin to be occupied that morning in the mausoleum, Nomi satisfies herself that Grubs went into stasis with as much grace as he ever did (which is very little, and with a lot of grumbling).

Checking her locater one last time just to make sure the Rockhopper is as ready as it can be to spend the next month by itself, she opens her own coffin and starts getting ready for stasis.

When she's hooked up and ready to slide herself in, she takes one last look up at the ceiling, at her beloved ship. She kisses her fingertips and touches the bulkhead.

Then she grabs the opening and slides the coffin home.

----

Faith's eyes snap open. Nomi is grinning down at her. "Up and at-em, kid, you found us one without even looking."

Faith blinks and sits up, accidentally pushing herself out of the coffin. The captain snags her by a leg and pulls her down before she fouls any her IV connections. Micro-gravity, which meant they were under minimal thrust. Looking around the mausoleum to see Josh and Grubs disconnecting themselves from their own coffins.

She asks, "We made it?"

"About 35 AU out, in a solar orbit. There's a nice fat rock catching up to us at a couple of kilometers a minute. We've got about eight hours before you and I need to start maneuvers."

Faith glances at her locater. "Seventy days."

"Yup. I woke up yesterday and spent it going over the scans. Hardly had to do any burns to slow us down and put us in the path of that rock. It's not huge, and it's only partially ferrous, but it's got zero axial tilt. Rotation is pretty swift, though, too much to try to slow down, even with our thrusters, so we'll be spitting slugs only during a certain window each time it spins. Go grab a shower and meet me on the bridge and we'll start working on the math."

"Yes, Captain."

As Faith pulls herself out of the mausoleum in careful movements, headed towards her cabin, Grubs swims over to Nomi with practiced ease. "I heard all that. Me and the boy will get the 'Hopper ready for touchdown."

Nomi nods. "Great. Scans estimate it's about 60% ferrous metal, with a margin of twenty percent either way. It's got a lot of dust around it refracting the scans pretty badly. Point is, there's a chance the magnets won't have anything to hold onto where we touch down, so be ready to grapple, too."

Grubs rolls his eyes. "You want to tell me how to balance the the coils, too?"

Nomi laughs. "Sorry, old man. The kids being around have me in teaching mode. Go tend to your baby."

The engineer grunts and leaves the room, drawing Josh along in his wake.

----

"Skipper, I'm not liking these scans, I can't get a handle on how much metal is in the rock. I think it's best to just start off with the grapples."

"I agree, Chief. Any issues with the site I marked?"

"I don't see anywhere likelier, and it it's close enough to the equator that we don't have to worry about inducing tilt. The fact that it's not tidelocked yet most likely means whatever metal it's got is evenly distributed. It's a lot closer to a perfect sphere than most KBO's I've heard about."

"All right." Nomi keys the general com. "Be advised, everyone, the ship will be deploying grapples in..." she checks her display, "a little under five minutes. Faith, head up here. Boys, I'll give you a thirty second warning."

A few seconds later, Faith eels through the hatch and straps herself in.

"Okay kid, take a look at your secondary display. You see the highlighted region?"

"Yes, Captain."

"That's where I want to touch down. Since we're doing grapples instead of the kind of maneuvering a manual touchdown requires, I'm going to let you do the honors. I've unlocked the landing systems on your console. Find the interface and let me know when you've got reticules for the harpoons. You should get eight total."

A moment later, "I have them, Captain. Two are blue, six are yellow."

"Blue means they're set to use electromagnetic tethers. We want all of them to be yellow, the rock harpoons."

"I found it. Okay... okay. All are yellow."

"All right, the numbers indicate position, with numeral one being the nose of the ship, and five the tail. The others are in clockwise order, two through four starboard, the rest port. We can't get solid readings about the surface, so it's a crap-shoot anyway. Position all of the reticles to give us about fifty meters of clearance from their anchor points once we're drawn tight to the rock."

"Yes, Captain." Several minutes pass while the young pilot works.

"Okay, Captain, I think I've got them prepared. All of the cross-hairs are blinking."

"When the reticules go solid, that means they're in range and ready to fire. They may not all go solid at once, but try to wait until all eight are lit before deploying. Worst case, we wait another rotation.

"Yes, Captain."

Nomi glances at the chronometer and presses the com. "Two minutes, boys."

Turning back to Faith, she continues, "When you fire, your interface will gain an extra input. it will be bright red and unmistakable. If you hit it, it will detach the grapples from our end and we'll drift free. We have spares, but only do it if I tell you to, or if you think there's no other option to save the ship, ok, kid?"

"Yes, Captain." Faith's voice is steady, but her eyes betray her nerves.

Nomi grins. "Stop worrying so much. This is what being a mining pilot is all about."

A nervous chuckle. "Yes, Captain."

Nomi keys the com and says "Thirty seconds. You guys secure, Grubs?"

"Aye."

Nomi watches the chronometer while Faith watches her little targets. At almost the same time the clock hits zero, the ship shudders as she fires all eight massive grapples at once.

The sit in silence as the harpoons streak across the vacuum between the Rockhopper and her prey. Suddenly Faith speaks.

"Seven... no eight! All eight secure!"

Nomi hits the com. "Grapples secure, hold on."

She enters the command that will coordinate the grapple reels to keep the Rockhopper parallel to the surface as they draw the ship down. In a moment a second shudder and a sensation of reverse gravity settles on the ship as the slack disappears.

Five minutes and one eternity later, the ship gives a final jarring shake as it connects with the surface of the Kuiper belt object and the reels set their holding tension.

Nomi smiles at her young protege. "Congratulations, kid, we're alive. Let the boys know."

Her hands shaking with relief and unspent adrenaline, Faith keys the general com and says, with only a little waver, "Rockhopper is secure on the surface. Uh... lets push iron!"

Laughing, Nomi slips out of her straps and pulls herself through the hatch towards engineering.

----

The crew sits in the mess, where Josh has the display showing the POV of one of his spiders. They watch as it plants tiny shaped charges on the rock's surface and then backs off slightly before setting them off. Moving back, it sinks several of its limbs into the pocket holes created, and thus anchored, begins to chew into the surface of the rock with its plasma drill

"So I've made about two hundred total, which used a big chunk of our seed metals, but they're all deployed. This one is pretty close to the ship, so it's already taking samples, but it will take another twelve or fifteen hours for the rest of them to make it to their assigned areas."

"I'm having Josh arrange them in a more or less regular grid all over the rock," Nomi explains for Faith's benefit, "Grubs has given twenty of them about fifteen pounds of high explosive each."

Faith nods. "We're going to do a sounding, right?"

"Exactly. The explosives will be arranged in a fairly regular pattern all over the rock, and the spiders will drill and bury them about three meters into the surface. Then, over a couple of hours, they'll set them off, one at a time. Every spider on the rock will measure the precise moment and the intensity of the vibration from each explosion."

Grubs takes over. "Rock is just a bunch of different minerals, and what we're looking for is high concentrations of heavy ones, most importantly iron. When you shout on the ship, the vibrations of your voice moving through the atmosphere create waves our ears interpret as sound. Well, when sound moves through solids instead of gas, it moves a lot faster, but loses intensity proportionally."

"By checking how long the spiders take to receive each vibration from each blast, and with what intensity, we get a pretty accurate density survey of the interior of the rock. Between that and the core samples, we should be able to tell where best to send them to find the most iron."

Josh says, "I've actually already taken a look at some of the samples taken by the spiders really close to the ship, and they're 85% iron ore."

Nomi blinks. "That's a lot higher than I would have expected. I wonder why the surface scans were so contradictory."

"I don't know, captain. It may be we just happened to land on a rich deposit. We'll know a lot more in a couple of days when all the bots get back from the soundings."

"Do we know if this thing has a name?" Grubs asks.

Faith speaks up. "Not on any of our charts, but barely any KBO's are named. Only the very biggest, and ours is only five or six kilometers in diameter."

Nomi nods. "We were actually lucky to find a rocky one this fast. A lot of them are ice. Some of those will get mined like this too, when the colony is partially built. They'll need a lot of water, Earth tends to be jealous of those kinds of quantities."

"Well, can we pick a name then? I'm tired of calling it 'The Rock'."

Nomi says, "It was your charting that put us here, Faith, you pick one."

Faith pulls up one of the images from the initial scan survey Nomi had done. She points to a lumpy set of hillocks in the northern hemisphere. "See how this looks like a big nose, and a eyes? With the crater for a mouth?"

"Looks like an old man snoring." Josh quips.

Faith grins at him. "Exactly! I propose we name the rock Sleepy."

Grubs laughs. Nomi, smiling, says "Less gravitas than your average Roman godling, but I like it. Lets see if Josh can't wake Sleepy up with the soundings tomorrow."

----

"Will we feel anything?"

Faith is resting her chin on Josh's shoulder as they watch the readouts. The first controlled explosions for the sounding are set to begin in the next few minutes.

"No. The closest explosive pack is half a kilometer away. The vibrations will be too faint for us to feel, but the ship will pick them up."

They watch together as the timer reaches zero, and a second later the ship notes the explosion.

"So that's that. One every five minutes for the next hundred minutes. Lets go grab some food."

----

There are myriad ways to explore the stars. Most civilizations never leave the planet of their birth. Many more never explore beyond their home system.

Of the few that do slip the boundary of their home star, most kneel to the seemingly immutable laws governing the speed of light, and make compromises. Enormous ships ply the dark, bulbous as moons, their occupants living and dying thousands of times over before they finally arrive at a new star, so changed by the journey that their progenitors would no longer recognize them.

Others send mechanical representatives, moving at huge fractions of the speed of light, sending home images of the wonders they discover.

Some resign themselves to the shackles of lightspeed, but remain unwilling to eventually fade from the galaxy without making their mark. These do not send robots emissaries or generation ships. These send seeds.

----

Regular as a metronome, explosions tick all across the surface of the rock named Sleepy.

Regular, and thus, not natural.

Deep, at the core of the rocky sphere, enzymes mix with certain trace elements, and chemical heat blooms where the cold of the deep dark has reigned for uncounted millenia.

----

Two days later, Nomi, Josh and Faith are all going over the readings from the soundings in the mess. The last of the spiders had returned several hours earlier and uploaded its data payload. Grubs walks in, wiping his hands on a rag. "Well?"

Nomi sighs. "Weirdest numbers I've ever seen. All the shallow echos are fine, and indicate eighty to ninety percent iron, but none of the spiders ever picked up an echo from an explosion on the opposite side of the planet. Either there's a big void in the middle of this rock or the core is made of some superdense elements, like uranium or heavier.

"Radiation?" he asks, peering up at the display to look at the readouts himself.

"Just background, exactly what you would expect."

"This gives us numbers to a depth of... what, eight hundred meters, all over the rock?"