“…One of the few vehicles that thrived on Fram’s surface, needing no initial retrofitting, was the Sprat-11, a two-man buggy with a remarkable load-bearing capacity of three-quarter tonne. They proved invaluable to maintenance crews tasked with the upkeep of the many remote-region sensor pylons that reported scientific data to the laboratories and monitoring stations at the colony. The Sprat-11 was perhaps the most efficient and rugged vehicle within the colonial motor pool, and would only prove itself further by becoming the trusted and reliable workhorse of the medical field-teams. The Sprat-11 chassis was also highly customisable, eventually leading to a broad variation in practical applications; from sporting excavator frames and forklift attachments to bristling with multi-band receivers and transferring data from isolated sensor fields back to the colony.”
The sky was ablaze with stars, bisected by the fuzz that was the planet’s ring. Cassiopeia had set, although Orion had risen far above the Sprat. We could see Betelgeuse and Mintaka and the whole Belt, but Rigel and Sirius were obscured by the ring. I kicked the buggy as hard as it could go. It was bounding off ridges of regolith with a spray of dirt and ice crystals. The engine over-revved after each jolt. I was grinning, of course, though I knew Gingrich, riding tandem behind me, was not. We’d both got our licenses on the same day, but I’d put in more hours, and so knew how to get more out of the Sprat than she did.
It was an automatic vehicle, with simple controls. It could be squirrely, though, especially in loose regolith or crunching along the lips of craters or ridgelines. Ours had been worked hard – almost every creak and rattle in the chassis, and strained growl of the engine, was my fault. There was a rock-strewn path up and out of a crater near Alpha-3 that I loved to belt the Sprat along; you had to hit the incline at just the right speed and with enough revs, or else it wouldn’t make it to the top.
Gingrinch, geo-caching behind me, overlaid our destination on the HUD in my faceplate. It appeared as a red triangle off to our left, with numbers counting down the distance as we approached, which I angled for immediately. The brakes were strong and in good order; I pushed down with pounds of pressure and the Sprat fishtailed to a stop. I kept pushing the brake until there was a click of the handbrake engaging.
Sensor Pylons were meant to be strapped beneath the crew cabin over the wheel clearance. But almost immediately we’d found that the all-terrain suspension of the Sprat, combined with Fram geography, meant that the wheels would at some point bounce up, carried by the loose suspension, and snap the Pylons. Now we stored them higher up on the frame, along the sides of the chassis, so that when stowed they became booms that locked to the sides of the driver and passenger seats. We unhooked these before we could dismount.
Gingrinch and I didn’t much like one another, which was one reason why I floored the Sprat so. We worked in silence, setting the Pylon into the regolith and initializing its systems. It was as close to night time as Fram got at this point in its orbit, and while both stars had set, their light still illuminated all the dust along the ecliptic. Every star was the same as Home, although there was only one pointer to Crux instead of two, and Home was now embedded in a constellation of its own.
Once the Pylon had been networked and was broadcasting telemetry, we headed back to the Sprat and on to our next waypoint. It didn’t have enough juice to kick over with the headlights on; I had to dim these and then start it. With a flick of methane ice billions of years old and, until now, undisturbed for that long, we headed off to the Northern Sky waypoint.
