“…the UC-104 roamed the desolate rubble-strewn plains, in its wake lay the stripped-back solar panels from the outpost ships. It was eventually destroyed upon the wasteland in a shower of debris from Amundsen as the moon arced over Fram; but its battered, shattered carcass remained to become a feature and monument to the stark world they had endeavoured to settle.”
I was watching the UC at work. The big boom crane swung across, stacking the solar panels where the KOVTARs – their light COILs replaced by load-bearing clamps mounted on stubby arms – could access them. This was raw functionality, broken down into utilitarianism and practicality and modular design; aesthetics were distant.
The KOVTARs and the UC had the easiest work of the terrain. Bipedal – quadrupedal, in the case of the heavy UC – locomotion suited this planet much better than did the caterpillars and wheels of the haulers and ATVs, though it was by no means the perfect answer to Fram. In the mid-term, the goal was to remove the Colony’s reliance on these latter altogether: arterials, constructed of carbon ribbon, would connect the Outposts, mining sites, supply depots and the spaceport; maybe we would even construct our own vehicles, the first of a new generation that we didn’t haul all the way from Sol in prefabricated pieces, walkers like the KOVTARs or maybe even hover vehicles, short-range aerial vehicles, VTOLs or helicopters, to take advantage of Fram’s thicker atmosphere…
But that was a way off. The Colony was still establishing itself, trying to subsist on what we’d brought and buy ourselves enough time to set up the infrastructure to start living off the resources of Fram.
The boom locked into place, and the winch, bearing the rhomboid shape of a solar cell panel, lowered to the pair of KOVTARs below.
We were weeks behind on our timetable, months in some areas. The spaceguard project was the most worrying: we weren’t sure if we’d have the anchor station in a suitable, stable orbit by the time the Mayflower arrived. Even work on these solar fields, our big project now that the mining rig was running, was going around-the-clock.
Eventually, these solar stations would reflect enough energy to power the anchor station in orbit. But for now we needed them not for energy (we had four of our own stars, bottled up behind magnetic fields) but to target the objects in the ring system above, wrapped in reflective blankets by our orbiter crew, and push them into more stable orbits.
The orbiter mission had identified dozens more objects that needed their orbits modified by us, many more than the ground stations had observed. We had a lot of work ahead of us. These stations needed to be ready within a week, so we could make NFO safe for the anchor station (and, not to mention, the skies safe for us kickers down here).
Another convoy of haulers came rumbling towards our base camp. More solar cells, stripped from the Outposts, were stacked in their trays, meters high. There were replacement crews, too, to keep the operation going through another shift. But there were no replacement KOVTARs, or a replacement UC – the operators could be rested, but we didn’t have enough machines to keep up with this timetable.
We’d been lucky so far, but surely something would break down soon. And when that happened, we probably didn’t have enough parts, or time, to recover…
