“…the KOVTAR-3C was nicknamed “Webfoot”, due to the additional stabiliser plates adorning its feet and the subsequent comparison to the biped locomation of waterfowl. The slide-crane module was attached to a basic KOVTAR-3 biped chassis, with a counterweight section situated behind the main engine manifold. Reinforced legs meant the Webfoot mobilised in a slow, lumbering way; each footfall accompanied by a sharp hiss and a blast from the suspension valves. With a gross lift limit of fifty tonnes, the Webfoot was an essential part of colonial construction projects. Incidently, it was around the Webfoot where the phraseology for KOVTAR-related accidents or breakdowns took root; any incident being subsequently referred to as ‘Duck a l’orange!’.”
“Wow, look at that,” said Zimmerman.
Yi looked up from the tablet. When the tip of his stylus left the screen, the schematics, covered in scrawled notes, blacked out into standby mode.
Yi followed Zimmerman’s outstretched finger. He pointed into the sky, where dots of brown-yellow light were moving. These were silicate remnants of Amundsen, probably no larger than a Sprat, gliding across the red bowl of the sky. But Yi saw a smaller, brighter light among them – this was an orbiter, rolling over its axis, one of its arrow-shaped wings catching the light of Alpha B.
Yi returned to the tablet. There was a marshalling yard, by the side of the carbon ribbon, where the flatbeds were dumping the prefab boxes shipped from the colonies. Of course the arterial had been started on both ends, but did not yet meet in the middle; the flatbeds coming from the old Alpha-2 site were caught in the regolith between when the lead vehicle bogged in a drift and threw its gears. It looked like the KOVTARs would have to unload the lead truck while the other two ground toward their original destination; Yi had to find space in the marshalling yard for the components.
There was a spark of light from Zimmerman’s faceplate – arc welders, the magnesium white light flickering from the shell of the ground station. The base was completed, although the elevator station and the port facilities were still prefabricated frameworks, and the loading platform hadn’t even been started. There were three buildings under construction, and the foundation for a fourth being laid; these were skeletons encased in scaffolding, lit by welders and crawling with regolith-smeared e-suits.
There were two and a half weeks remaining until the supply ship arrived in orbit of Fram. Zimmerman, his head forever turned to the sky, spent each evening searching for the fusion torch of the decelerating Mayflower. For now he was content to watch the orbiter trace a line across the sky – as stressed as Yi was with the timetable for the ground station, he knew those vacuum-sucking orbiter crews were pulling multiple EVAs each day to clear NFO space, and slip the tether into perfect, geosynchronous orbit directly over his head.
One of those lights, behind the spiraling orbiter, could well be that asteroid: rockets flaring at its nose and decelerating with each orbit until, just before the May arrived, it would be in position and ready to spool down the carbon nanotube ribbon to the ground station.
“Zimmerman,” Yi said, snapping his assistant out of his stargazing, “let’s get two of the Webfoots out to those jackasses stuck in the dust. We’ll stick those crates here and here, but we’ll have to move the lift hydraulics over there…”
With his stylus and with the schematics of the half-built ground station, Yi set to work.
