What If Crater

 

 

Fram was unfolded before the orbiter. The horizon curved far ahead of the ship, its atmosphere highlighted by the glare of Alpha B. Within this thin arc of light we could see the tops of clouds, wispy structures of trace gases silhouetted by the glare which lit the atmosphere. Below us was a ravaged landscape, reduced to a distant beauty by the altitude of the orbiter: there were craters and ridges and plains of frozen magma, lit by the dim glow of the binary.

It felt good to have space beneath us again, oddly; after so long in the Quoqasi, we all went insane with the prospect of open landscapes just beyond the bulkhead of our Outposts, with suns and moons and stars above us. Yet it was somehow comforting to be here again, above the world and removed from the problems which plagued the burgeoning society struggling to exist below us.

Behind us the last of the boosters was burning up in Fram’s atmosphere. The orbiter reached its aphelion hundreds of kilometers below the Amundsen Ring. Here the particle density was negligible, a few hundred particles per cubic meter, and certainly nothing large enough to damage the orbiter.

The computer was updating the database constructed by observations from the planet – tagging the candidates for our mission, and constructing pathways for our orbiter to slowly slingshot up out of Fram’s gravity well and into the ring system. Within our field of view the computer had tagged half a dozen objects greater than a kilometer in diameter, and of these two would need orbital adjustment. Of course, these were the largest chunks, other than what remained of Amundsen itself: most of the ring was composed of very small rocks and dust particles which were large enough to affect light, but small enough to be completely vaporised by Fram’s atmosphere on entry.

We had a week of work ahead of us, at least. Ground observations had marked almost two dozen objects in total that would have to be moved into higher, more stable orbits so that they wouldn’t come crashing down on our planet, and we were bound to find more now that we were up here. That involved dozens of EVAs, attaching mirrored blankets to the smaller objects (so that the ground-based solar stations could push these objects up and away from the planet) and strapping rockets to the larger rocks. Each object, too, would be tagged with a radio transponder, so we could keep much better track of them from the ground.

We would do a few orbits of Fram before we went to work, updating the mission profiles with all the information we gathered with each pass. Most of the crew was running checks of the orbiter’s systems: hardware, firmware and software. The ship had been bundled up in the Quoqasi for years and in the storage facilities of Alpha-1 for almost two months. It had performed well, ten minutes after take-off, given that last time its propulsion systems or CLSS had been used, the ship was four and a half light years away.

The Quoqasi was coming into view, in a slower orbit a few kilometers beneath us. It was in a slow, lateral, counter-clockwise spin, obviously abandoned.

“Oh my God!”

We looked over at Oria, who was suspended mid-air and staring through the ventral viewport. We followed her gaze. There, dominating our current view of Fram, was an ugly furrow dug into the crust of the planet. It was massive – the computer overlaid projections of size onto the image, continually updated as the orbiter moved and it was better able to judge the angles and depth of what it was recording. There was a trench carved along a three hundred and fifty kilometer length of the planet, ending in a half crater that built up into a mountain range in the shape of a semi-circle which capped the furrow. The crater was almost eighty kilometers in diameter.

At the base of the crater, becoming increasingly visible as the planet turned beneath our orbiter, was a smashed and pulverised mass of material, built up at the base of the crater but spread liberally along the trench and sprayed outside both the furrow and the crater along distinct ejecta lines. This was obviously the impactor, or what remained of it, splashed by the shallow impact which had created this feature.

The computer overlaid new projections on our screens – spectroscopic lines showed the impactor was mostly water ice, and it was huge. So huge that the flash from its impact accounted for almost all the atmospheric hydrogen we’d found.

We argued for a while how we had missed this impact site; it was easily the largest feature on Fram, almost ten times the size of Hiroshima Crater. It had obviously occurred sometime between the first robotic probes from Sol, decades ago, and the arrival of the Quoqasi.

If we’d known about it, surely we would have settled here, instead of the other side of the planet.

We would leave arguments about how to access this resource, and what to do with it, to the people on the planet below. We had a job to do, and this savage impact site only reminded us of why we were up here, looking down on a world of craters.

Much later, we learned that the unofficial name for this impactor would be “What If Crater” – instead of fostering hope that we would make it, it embodied all of the revisionist dissatisfaction with how hard life on Fram was becoming…