Grapes

"The CA-772 Grape orbital utility pods were plentiful around the space facilities above Fram, proving to be of great use during the Texas crisis.  Pilots found their versatility in their relative simplicity; a primary computer-simulation projected itself upon the inside of the iconic domed cockpit, giving a stark vector-driven interpretation of the outside vacuum and objects.  Pilots appreciated this Spartan representation, with the ability to toggle target rendering of objects via distance in varying levels of overlay.  The Grape itself was powered via solar panels, which fed into the small ion propulsion engine and life support systems.  While not the most comfortable of vehicles, they offered a level of reliability and ruggedness unparalleled over Fram."

Eyes and Ears

“The MOPAD (Multiple Operation Personnel Aerial Drone), or ‘Moppet’, was designed initially as a geological survey unit to aid small groups of scientists and geologists in expeditions.  With a carbon frame, advanced photo-voltaic surface and a utilitarian onboard computer, the MOPAD quickly populated the fringes of the colonial outposts.  Trailing behind scientists and vehicle operators, they became the cybernetic pets of the new world.”

I watched a gust of wind come towards me over the regolith. Pulverised dust whipped from the tops of dunelets. The heat of the nearer Alpha B generated wind fronts which circled the planet; these were complicated by the lesser heat of the diminishing Alpha A.

I turned back to the Sprat. A line of footsteps were traced in the duricrust, from my vantage point back to Gingrich and the Sprat. Aside from the pattering of micrometeorites, this duricrust had not changed in billions of years.

Gingrich lifted a Moppet into the air; it drifted slowly upwards and away from her. It hovered at a point between Gingrich and myself, about three metres above the regolith. From my position, I could hear its soft engine.

“Where do you want to start?” Gingrich asked. Although she was maybe twenty meters from me, her voice was loud in my earpiece.

I looked at the panorama before me. I stood on the crest of a small elevation; before me was relatively flat, grey-brown regolith, stretched to the horizon. There were a series of hills off to my right and left, either formed over a basalt seam or the remains of the ridgeline marking a much larger crater.

“Well the benches need to be fifty meters wide.”

I looked at the GPS display on my tablet. This signal was relayed to me by the Moppet. The drone was connected to the GPS system directly through Port Mayflower, while also relaying a wireless connection with the Colonies’ computer over the southern horizon.

I pointed to the north, toward the far end of the elevation I was standing atop. “Let’s try up there. GPS says seventy five meters.”

Gingrich clambered back aboard the Sprat and kicked it over. She moved it north, to where I had pointed. This saved hauling the bulky seismic probe that distance on foot. The Moppet defaulted to hover above me while Gingrich drove the short distance.

Images from the growing satellite network deployed in orbit showed good signs of a vein of iron and nickel in this area. The seismic probe would confirm this, and if the vein were as close to the surface as satellite imagery suggested, an open-cut mine would be developed here.

In my ear, I could hear Gingrich groaning with the effort of unloading the A44 by herself. I turned around and looked back to the south, toward the Colonies. There was no glow of light on the horizon to mark their presence. Instead I watched a bead of light, a climber suspended on the elevator ribbon, moving slowly higher into the ruddy sky.

I held the view a moment too long.

“Come on,” I said to the Moppet. “Let’s get started.”

As You Like It

“The AMUF-VL2 (Articulated Modular Universal Frame – Variable Locomotion: 2 modes) almost shelved the KOVTAR walkers the moment they were unpacked.  Referred to affectionately as "Ayli", itself an irreverent acronym of As You Like It, the machine offered complete customisation as a factory standard.  Manufactured by Karst, the industry giant behind the KOVTAR, the Ayli was easy to assemble, calibrate and operate.  Offering both upright and tracked movement, the machine fast became a common sight in all areas of the colony.”

Sze Leng filed into the Alpha-3 workshop, on the ground floor of the colony pod.

The workshop was now tucked just behind the cargo bays. The bays were most of the time open to the elements and atmosphere of Fram; the workshop was however pressurised, as it was difficult to service machinery with hands in gloves and faces behind breathers.

Sze Leng was grateful to be out of her e-suit, and could see that the others who had gathered in the workshop were too. Some absently scratched at their backs of their heads where the straps dug into the scalp.

Off to the side was a pallet freshly shipped to A-3 from Charlotte. It had checkerboard stencilling along the vertices. The rectangular face of the pallet facing Sze Leng was also stencilled with KARST AMUF-VL2 in a chipped white paint. Three vehicles had been unloaded, and mechanics were scurrying about them.

“Gather in,” came the quartermaster’s instructions. Sze Leng and her colleagues packed in closer to the quartermaster, who found a tool box to stand on. There were about a dozen KOVTAR drivers gathered around his tool box, all dressed in the standard grey fatigues.

“New toys from the supply ship,” the quartermaster started succinctly. He pronounced toys with a Jovian lilt – toyis – that bespoke his Asian ancestry more so than his features. “You fine folk will be the first in Alpha-3 to be checked out on them.”

One of the drivers down the front spoke up. “I saw one of these back Home. They’re not that different to what we’ve got now.”

The quartermaster smiled. “They’re new for us, but back home they’re probably as outdated as our earliest KOVTARs.” He shrugged. “Five years’ lag.”

Immediately Sze Leng spotted a series of improvements. Two of the vehicles parked close to their pallet were in various states of assembly – the control pod of one was being hoisted atop the frame, while another was being charged from a wheeled battery pod on the ground. Each vehicle would have reached to the knee joint of a KOVTAR.

“First thing you’ll notice is the size. Smaller than the KOVTARs, these MMU-Ts won’t entirely replace the ones we have now. Much as you might want them to. More like supplement them. Take the tasks the KOVTARs aren’t meant for so that they can focus on what they’re good at.”

The quartermaster stepped down from his tool box and ushered the group to the closest walker. Sze Leng spoke up.

“MMU-T, sir?”

“Manned Manoeuvring Unit – Terrestrial. The mechanics like that term, ‘mutts.’ Drivers might like something else. I’ve heard ‘ayli’ – ‘as you like it.’ Properly called the AMUF-VL2.”

He stopped next to the left leg of the Ayli. This vehicle was the closest to completion among those being assembled.

“See also the new movement system. Retains the hydraulic bipedal system, but here we have a pair of treads” – he pointed at each shin of the Ayli – “which can deploy on hard and paved surfaces. The MMU-T can achieve much higher ground speeds on, say, our carbon highways, or the cargo bays of the colony pods.”

One of the drivers asked: “how do the tracks hold up in the regolith?”

“Not much better than the COIL rig, I’m afraid,” the quartermaster replied. “But these give you more options. We don’t expect to use these too far from the colonies, at any rate. Not the deep-ranging kind of missions we’ve given to the KOVTARs. Those missions will go to the Sprats unless the terrain is dicey. KOVTARs are now mostly for construction or heavy lifting in places the UC can’t be.”

The quartermaster took a step forward and leant against the roll bar projected forward from the Ayli’s chassis. “Like the Webfoot, these front bars have impressive load-bearing capacity. Modular, too – we can fit slide cranes, a manipulator, forklift, even a scaled-back COIL. Also like the Webfoot, you can see that the footpads when in bipedal locomotion stabilise the weight of the walker and disperse it evenly. Much lower track-to-weight ratio than the stock-standard KOVTAR. Which is pretty important, because the power plant is smaller.”

Sze Leng was impressed.

“Three sixty-degree vantage from the canopy. More comfortable than what you’re used to, too, especially when lowered for tracked movement. As you can see over here” – the quartermaster pointed at the Ayli whose control pod was being winched onto its dorsal surface – “the canopy is fitted separately to the chassis. This means that we can mount it on a more efficient suspension system.”

“No more punches in the back?” Sze Leng asked.

The quartermaster smiled. “You’ll still feel each footfall if running at top speed. But at the power levels you’ll use most often, you could sit up there all day and not burden me with your whining.”

The quartermaster took a step back. “Right, who wants to go first? The controls are pretty similar to what you’re used to, as you can see here. Sticks on this side control your gears…”

Across the Sea of Stars

It had been almost a month since Mayflower had arrived.

It was a slow process to bring the material down from Wilbur to Charlotte. The ribbon that connected the two was much shorter than those which had been built on Earth; Fram was a smaller world, with less gravity and thus a lesser exit velocity, and possessed a longer rotational period. This meant that it took less than a day for a climber to run the length of the ribbon, compared to the week it took to run the length of the Earth elevators.

We wanted to bring down as much material as we could with our limited number of climbers. This meant that we had to intersperse the payload-laden climbers so as not to stress the cable: the closer our laden climbers were to the Wilbur counterweight, the greater the lean in the cable as coriolis force produced by Fram’s rotation acted upon the mass of the climber. We joked that one day we would not have to worry ourselves with this effect – as with each of our shuttle launches, the ascent of a climber robbed Fram of a fraction of its rotational momentum. At some indeterminate point billions of years in Fram’s future, assuming the space elevator continued to run, Fram’s orbit would slow to a halt.

We were powering the climbers by using the solar farm on the surface, which was not the most efficient method and reduced our capabilities further. Eventually we hoped to power the cable itself, using the conductivity of the carbon nanotube. Plans were drawn up in which the Quoqasi’s fusion plant, now useless, would be moved down to the surface and installed at Charlotte Station.

And so we unpacked Mayflower, day by day shuffling more material down to the surface.

Already Charlotte had grown into a bustling hive of activity, spread over hectares of carbon sheeting. KOVTARs worked at unloading the climbers during the night. In the marshalling yards were pallets filled with new equipment: fixed-wing cargo planes and their associated launch loops, a new generation of integrated tracked-biped walkers, over the horizon radars, hydroponic domes, mining lasers, and more. Most important were the tanks of consumables, twice as tall as a KOVTAR. These were painted according to their contents: blue for oxygen, green for nitrogen, red for deuterium, purple for iodine. Their edges were stencilled with checkers and their faces with the chemical symbol of their contents. These would open up of closed-loop life support systems and give us a redundancy we hadn’t enjoyed since leaving Jupiter, or power the fusion plants for years to come.

While the crew of Port Mayflower worked to unload our supply ship and send this material down to the surface, our orbiters went to work disconnecting components of the Mayflower’s payload. A pair of probes were nestled in the lee of the May’s cargo modules, fore of the drive stack. It had taken a fortnight to safely cut through the remains of its protective sheath of ice and disconnect them from the Mayflower, and another fortnight to perform diagnostic checks of their hardware.

These probes were themselves larger than an orbiter, each the size of a naval cruiser. They were of a similar dark grey to the hull of the orbiters, although sections of the engine were the lighter white-gray of beryllium. The nose of each probe was a cluster of instruments, spectroscopes, enormous optical and radio telescopes, and repeller fields like those which shielded the Quoqasi and Mayflower from the interstellar medium. Buried in the hull behind these were the probes’ central computers, replete with communications systems. Just behind the bulbous nose was a ring of a dozen small spheres, situated at points of the hour on a clock around the probe’s nose. These were sub-probes which would launch from the mother probe once targets had been identified.

The defining feature of each of these probes was the payload stage. Around the midsection of each probe were six spheres, each a hundred and fifty meters in diameter, clustered around the fusion engine like berries on a stalk. Here was the reaction mass which powered the fusion rocket that spurted from the aft of each probe. Three tanks carried deuterium while another three carried helium-3, mined from Europa and Luna respectively.

These probes were designed to travel on from Alpha Centauri, to two more points of light in our sky.

Their targets had been selected long ago, after the decision had been made to colonise Alpha Centauri. Their targets were closer to Fram than they were to Earth, but only just so; sending them to us with the Mayflower hadn’t saved them a great distance. Rather, carried by the Mayflower, they saved reaction mass that could otherwise be spent travelling to their targets faster.

Their targets were a pair of M1 class red dwarfs about three to four times as far from Alpha Centauri as Alpha Centauri was from Earth. We had a number of designations for these stars, depending on whether one ascribed to the Gliese catalogue of nearby stars, or the Bonner Durchmusterung catalogue, or the Draper, or the Hipparchos… Despite these various catalogue designations, we had no names for these stars.

One probe was to be sent to BD +15° 2620, otherwise known as Gl 526; the other to Gl 832, itself also known as HD 204961. These stars were respectively just under seventeen and a half light years and fourteen light years from Fram.

The probes would cover the distance at much greater speed than had the Quoqasi. Unencumbered by fragile humans and with a bounty of reaction mass upon which to draw, their fusion rockets would propel them at twenty-five gees of acceleration for four weeks. This would take each probe up to .90c – nine tenths the speed of light – a speed at which each would cruise before decelerating by a similar force and for a similar period at the conclusion of its interstellar flight.

At .90c, the probe to BD +15° 2620 would take nineteen years and two months to reach its destination; the probe to Gl 832 would take fifteen years and six months.

These stars were the next closest to Alpha Centauri on the road to a cluster of stars, coreward and trailing of Sol, which showed a good prospect for habitable planets. Surveys conducted from Sol using gravitational microlensing, observations of planetary transits of each star and variations in that star’s spectral lines had detected numerous orbiting gas giants. We knew, for instance, that Gl 832 had a gas giant named Bailey orbiting it at a distance of 3.4 AUs (we had named the planet but not yet its parent star). But our detection methods were limited by distance; the best way to determine if there were habitable, terrestrial planets around BD +15° 2620 and Gl 832  would be to get closer, or better yet, to visit the systems themselves.

The instruments buried in the nose of each probe would make observations of each system throughout its unpowered glide. These observations would be limited once each probe flipped end over end and decelerated; once this manoeuvre was complete, the probe would insert itself in an orbit that would bring it looping into the inner system. At this point the sub-probes would detach, and fire off to orbit and explore points of interest. They would send telemetry back to the mother probe, which would in turn tightbeam its findings back to Fram and to Earth. The most comprehensive of these findings, made while the probes orbited the target stars, wouldn’t reach us for thirty to forty years.

And so, as we continued to unload the materials sent to our colony by Earth, we prepared to send automated probes further on, across the sea of stars.

Our orbiters moved the probes half an AU from Fram before we sent the go order for the onboard computers to light the fusion torches. The workers unloading the latest material sent down from Port Mayflower noticed a new spark in the sky – at length this spark separated into two smaller points, one rushing toward a point eleven degrees down, the other seventeen degrees up, from the plane of the ecliptic…

 

 

A note on the use of the map in this post: this map was created by Winchell Chung of Project Rho, who kindly gave permission for its use to the authors of Orbital Shipyards. Copies of this map are available from Mr. Chung’s Project Rho Productions, and we highly recommend the quality of his work and direct our readers to his website and his store.

Planetfall +91

We had already drilled and installed pitons along the length of Wilbur; after we’d guided the Mayflower close to the body, we drew out tethers from her hull and connected them to the pitons. Then – with the ship’s thrusters, our orbiters as tugs, and by tightening the tension in the tethers – we drew the Mayflower in to attach to Wilbur. It took hours, but we didn’t want to compromise the hull or the integrity of Wilbur with our haste and eagerness.

Mayflower was a simply designed ship, even by comparison to the Quoqasi; she had a simple role, and was built to fulfill that role with a rugged reliability. In spreading its achievements to the planets of Sol, humanity had learned to value modular designs above anything sophisticated or specialized. Redundancy, reusability, and mission profiles were crucial; elegance was not. Both Quoqasi and Mayflower embodied this philosophy, although they magnified the scale, as befitted the first of mankind’s leaps across the darkness between stars.

Both ships comprised a drive stack which propelled the mission module – their drive stacks were of the same design and specifications, and in the modular nature of human design, they could thus be called sister ships, or of the same class. But their mission modules were vastly different.

Quoqasi carried a crew of human colonists, and the equipment and materials needed to begin life on another world: it was a colonization ship, composed of four separate colonization pods and all the apparatus needed to ensure their safety.

Mayflower, by contrast, was a supply ship. It required none of the equipment to maintain a crew – life support, complex redundancy navigation computers, communications gear, lifeboats, even sensors. Instead, where the Quoqasi hauled fragile humans and the pods which would begin the first cities in a new stellar system, the Mayflower carried raw payload. With only a preprogrammed course and basic telemetry data relayed from Sol behind it and the Quoqasi light months ahead of it, Mayflower had crossed the dark between Sol and Alpha Centauri alone.

Instead of the colony pods which clustered around the central spine of Quoqasi like berries on a stalk, Mayflower’s stack was enclosed in cargo pallets, serried in rank and level and size. These layers of cargo containers were enclosed by gantries and scaffolding – these were the prefabricated beginnings of Port Mayflower.

When Mayflower was mated to Wilbur, our teams set to work cutting through the last of its ablative hull. Tonnes of ice, formed billions of years ago and a handful of light years away, were cut into rectilinear shapes, and cast aside. Later, when the space elevator was completed, we would lower this ice to the surface, where it would be injected into our closed-loop life support cycles; for now chunks of it formed a shell around the station, and these pieces circled Fram in their own orbits.

Then we began to unfurl the station structure – booms and cranes of scaffolding, which had enfolded the cargo components of the ship like the articulated arms of an insect, began to unfold, extend, and straighten. Mayflower’s hull became the main body of the orbital station, and its fusion engine became the power source. As these gantries unfolded into docking stations, our orbiters were able to put to berth, and the crews went to work pressurizing those sections of the Mayflower which would become the manned areas of the station.

Along with the structure of our orbital shipyards, Mayflower had brought with it a long spool of carbon nanotube, manufacture of which was far beyond our fledgling industrial capabilities. We began the slow process of uncoiling the ribbon from the ventral stack of Port Mayflower to Charlotte Station.

Port Mayflower took shape – facilities carried by the Mayflower blossomed across the surface of Wilbur, and arms extended at right angles from the Mayflower’s spindly hull. These arms formed the flanks of our space docks: the smallest would enclose our orbiters, the largest were the beginnings of drydocks for the construction of the planned systemships.

On the far side of Wilbur’s surface we had planned to dock Quoqasi. The two ships would have been equal in length, and would have bracketed the asteroid with their wiry forms; instead, Quoqasi’s dock was cut to half its length, and the salvaged drive stack berthed here. Somehow, through all the chaos of the last week, we hadn’t let the death of Quoqasi affect us; we had been too busy, too stressed, too worried, and this had distracted us from facing its loss. Now, though, seeing that half-length drydock, and in the absence of existential crises, it all hit home.

We turned our high-gain antenna toward Cassiopeia and transmitted a narrow-band message to Sol, thanking them for sending the Mayflower. We did this as a formality, a tradition – Mayflower had left Jupiter’s orbit five years ago, just after we had in Quoqasi; and any message we sent them today would not be heard by human ears for over four years, nor would we receive a reply for closer to nine. Along with our grief for the loss of Quoqasi was the melancholy that came with the realization that Mayflower was our last physical connection to Home.

We had received our first and only supply ship; there was nothing else to look forward to, no promise to hold out for, no outside influence to pin our hopes on. Now we were on our own.

Mopping Up

“…grazing the skies below, the orbital operations to recover debris from the Quoqasi destruction continued as Texas was chased down.  What couldn’t be salvaged was shunted into the atmosphere, to be burned up upon re-entry.  We had come too far to be ambushed later by rogue pieces of dead starship, travelling at a deadly speed…”

We brought six orbiters with us from Sol. Initially we’d only been able to put four in orbit, but once the mining site injected enough quartz, silica, and graphite into our resource pool for us to manufacture ceramic heat tiles, the last two were rushed into service.

Two went after Texas; two went after the decompressed stern of Quoqasi, still in a lateral spin after being sheared from the bow; two went out ahead to meet the Mayflower.

No human eyes had been laid on the Mayflower in five years. She was an automated starship, thrown from Sol three months after our own departure in the Quoqasi – she’d trailed us through the long, cold, interstellar night. We didn’t know what condition she was in, how she had fared through her trip, what her current mass was or how profound the Pioneer Anomaly had been on her voyage – we needed to know these things so that we could shunt her into a perfect orbit.

So the last two days before her arrival were the most hectic they had ever been at mission control. We had to calculate the May’s orbit, we had to clear that orbit of pieces of the wrecked Quoqasi, and we had to slingshot Texas the hell out of near Fram orbit for good. No one slept, not even the orbiter crews, which was dangerous and reckless but we had no other choice.

All this was further complicated thirty-two hours before orbital insertion – true to the nature of our existence on Fram to date, all our servers crashed, overloaded by the comms and data traffic between ground-based observation sites, satellites, the labs in the Colonies, and of course our intrepid orbiters. It took two hours to get everything back on line, during which objects in orbit were lost from our screens and the May rocketed ever closer to Fram.

The orbiter crews did as much as they could without telemetry and guidance from the ground. But our plan with Texas had been to use the solid-fuel boosters in concert with the ground-based solar station. During those two hours the station couldn’t track Texas, and we lost precious time and a crucial amount of thrust. Fifteen minutes after our systems came back online, simulations showed what we had feared for five straight days – an eighty-six percent chance of coincidence between the orbit of Texas and the orbit of the Mayflower.

We thought of altering the asteroid’s orbit, if we couldn’t move it completely – a couple of degrees from its current latitude would swing it across Fram’s equator and, eventually, over several weeks, approach a circumpolar orbit. But it was an impermanent solution, made useless by the Mayflower’s own complex orbit: to avoid the ring of Fram, the May – like the Quoqasi had – would graze the atmosphere above the north pole, bleed away the last of its inertia through atmospheric breaking, and slide through its own circumpolar orbit until it could readjust its attitude to match the geostationary orbit of Wilbur, beneath the ring.

So instead we did something we probably should have tried all along, had we been as inventive in the hours after we’d lost the Quoqasi as we were forced to be in the hours before insertion. Counter to all conventional logic, we started maneuvering Texas lower, down towards Fram, and we put as much force behind it as we could.

Texas hit Fram’s atmosphere at a shallow angle, much shallower than the reentry of our orbiters. It slammed into the thick blanket of carbon dioxide which encircled our world, and started to break up and burn. We were terrified, nervous, anxious – our mainframe had crashed just hours earlier and we were all exhausted and deprived of sleep, so we feared our calculations could be wrong.

But then it happened: the altimeter climbed, confirmations came in from a dozen sources, and everyone in mission control cheered. Texas had skipped from the atmosphere like a stone across a pond, and our computer overlaid a red arc – a course projection – tracing a line from the icon of Texas back up into the ring.

“Sure looks good from up here,” came the disembodied voice from one of the orbiters salvaging Quoqasi. The voice was heavily chopped with static, and harsher syllables were distorted entirely. “Plenty of smoke still across the atmosphere, but I can see the thing rising. God, what a beautiful sight.”

“Amen to that,” replied a joyous capcom, over the shouting.

The Mayflower was in good condition, no worse than Quoqasi had been when it arrived. Its armour of Kuiper ice was largely intact, although pitted on a microscopic level by its passage through the cosmic medium. The orbiters could not immediately identify any weaknesses in this outer hull; most of it would ablate away when the May roared across the pole. We began to redeploy the Texas orbiters to meet the Mayflower – the four orbiters would work in tandem with each other and with the May’s own vernier rockets to guide the cargo ship into its complicated orbit.

At planetfall plus ninety-one, the Colonies stopped. There wasn’t a functioning e-suit still in the racks, an operating vehicle in the garage, nor anybody unable to get outside not clustered around a monitor to watch the televised broadcast of two points of light – one Wilbur and one the Mayflower – draw closer and inevitably together in the sky, until at last they merged and became one source of light…

Texas

 "…’Race Headquarters’ was the affectionate title given to Ground Station Alpha-1, a round-the-clock hive of activity dedicated to rectifying the mess made by the wayward rock known as Texas.  Fram’s top orbital engineers cross-checked data relays with the settlements’ best physicists as radio chatter from the orbital crews high above crackled endlessly.  Both Texas and the decaying Quoqasi needed cleaning up.  And fast…"

The rush was on.

Over the gentle curve of Fram’s horizon we could see Texas, the body we’d tagged and wrapped last week, and which had been sent spiraling downwards by those idiots in the solar station. Texas was another two hundred and sixty something orbits from entry into the atmosphere, and it was moving in a slow tumble – all the energy imparted by the Quoqasi when Texas smashed clean through her, eight hours ago.

I willed Texas closer, or rather, our orbiter closer to Texas. Time was running out. We’d catch up with the body in another two or three orbits, but by then it would be so deep in the gravity well of Fram that our solar station had no chance of moving it higher. We would have to dock and capture, EVA, strap solid-fuel boosters to it, and try and stabilize its orbit.

We didn’t have enough reaction mass to bring it out of the gravity well, only to stabilize its orbit. There was a rush because the lower it slipped with each orbit, the deeper it fell into the well, and the harder it was for us to stabilize the orbit. Texas wasn’t huge, nothing on the scale of the bodies that created What If or Hiroshima Craters, but it was a lot larger than the object which had ripped through Alpha-2, all those weeks and lifetimes ago.

Our projections put Texas, were we unsuccessful, crashing down about eight hundred kilometers north east of our settlement. A new crater would be punched in Fram’s surface, the latest in a long history of bombardment, fresh and crisp in the duricrust. Regolith would be thrown into the sky, carried by the wind storms gathering in strength the closer the planet drew to Alpha B and the further it receded from Alpha A. Light would diminish, the air would become as abrasive as the upper regolith, and we’d have no chance of unfurling the nanoribbon from Wilbur to Charlotte.

The Mayflower would be here in five days. Its fusion torch was now distinguishable from Sol, an arc second or two away from the star which had hurled it toward us, an optical binary in our skies. As it was, even if we stabilized the orbit of Texas, we had five days to send it back to where it came from: in its stable, lower orbit, our window for launch and recovery was ruined by the piece of misaligned rock, spinning around our planet just above the atmosphere.

Hundreds of kilometers ticked by as the orbiter rushed toward Texas. Fram slid by beneath – bland, featureless, a dusty world pocked by endless bombardment, swallowed by carbon dioxide and clouds of argon and methane.

Then we saw the Quoqasi, or rather, what was left of its forward section. It was below us, trailing ice crystals and debris. It had snapped just behind the centrifugal shucks for the colony pods – devoid of these and now its main drives, we saw only the forward repellers and a long, thin strut, the spine of the ship. The whole wreck was glowing a cherry red, brightening to highlight of pink and orange at the edges. And then flames leapt from all along its length – not flames, I realized, but superheated plasma, the atmosphere of Fram setting the wreck ablaze as it plummeted in an uncontrolled reentry.

We watched the ship which we had all boarded five years ago above Jupiter, the ship we’d lived within for all those years, the ship which had carried us across light years on the greatest adventure in human history – we watched this ship break up, section by section, level by level, and the component pieces scattered across a burning sky, trailing fire.

I set my eyes toward Texas, and counted down the kilometers.

Charlotte Station

Exactly one week before the Mayflower would arrive, the mining site cracked through the crust and started digging into the upper mantle. Immediately we started bringing up unprecedented amounts of silicone and aluminum, which partially offset how late these resources had started coming in.

Thankfully, some bright spark back Home had pushed for the essential components for the anchor station to be carried with us, prefabricated. At the cost of reaction mass we hauled most of the ground station with us: all that had to be built were the tethers to the body placed in geosynchronous orbit by our orbiters. We had started running simultaneous missions to get that part ready for the Mayflower, and at any time now we had at least two of our five orbiters up above us.

By the time we finished Charlotte Station, our impression on this ancient planet had grown to be quite considerable, though it must be said that it was much less than we had intended, six months after planetfall. There were four cities, growing out of, and over, the colony pods; we had an underground mine and were planning a second, open-cut site far to the north; an active spaceport with limited launch facilities; and now Charlotte, our ground station for the space elevator. Connecting these were the beginnings of our carbon highways, slowly spreading out from the cities like cracks in ice.

Our timetable, written by the same learned people who foresaw the need for a prefabricated ground station, put the completion of all components of the space elevator at a date already more than three weeks past. We had yet to extend the ribbon itself, made of carbon nanotubes, from Charlotte to Wilbur, that silicate hunk of Amundsen that we had captured and slipped into orbit directly above the ground station. And, of course, while the Mayflower was itself enclosed by the structure which would unfold to become our space station and shipyard, it still required a basic dock to tether itself to when it arrived, which we hadn’t finished.

It would be a close thing, but that had been how this colony had started, and got by in the time since. There was growing optimism in everyone here. Some of us began to believe that we had passed the worst of the bottleneck – that the arrival of the Mayflower would mean the end of rationing and the end of double-shifts. But this optimism was not yet widespread. Many still feared the one event which would instantly destroy our modest progress. More of us would simply not allow ourselves to hope.

And then one of our solar stations misaligned, nudging one of the objects tagged by the orbiters in the wrong direction. It orbited Fram sixteen times, each orbit dropping lower and lower, before it slammed into the Quoqasi – still in the orbit we had left it when we made planetfall. The ship which had borne us across the unimaginable distance between Sol and Alpha Centauri was snapped in two, and the entire bow section was decompressed…

KOVTAR-3C Webfoot

“…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.

 

Velt Patrol

“…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.