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.

Frontier Medicine

“…the medical bays were relatively small; each colony pod had ten or so, not counting the prefab-packs still in storage. They could be rigged onto M-1010 catepillar rigs to create mobile medico stations, which proved useful during the initial stages of colonial construction.”

It was simple enough – a procedure practiced for hundreds of years, the doctors said. Sanna was nonetheless nervous, and the rest of the colony with her. She felt the weight of anticipation upon her, as heady as the painkillers.

“Okay, Sanna,” the doctor spoke to her, “we’re performing a lower uterine segment section. One cut, right across here.”

Sanna saw the doctor’s arm move, but could not feel the gloved finger draw a line across her abdomen. Her heartbeat quickened. She remember the epidural anesthetic, even if the doctor didn’t.

“Right above the bladder. There will be less blood loss, and it’s much easier for us to repair.”

Sweat had clustered on Sanna’s brow; someone wiped it away. She wished Lia had been here. She conjured Lia’s face, and imagined him stroking her jawline, whispering reassurances. Lia replaced the doctor, drowned him out entirely: she heard nothing of the caesarian hysterectomy, the effect of interstellar deceleration on her placenta and uterus, or the statistics of miscarriages since leaving Sol.

Sanna blinked at the light, mounted on an articulated arm, which the doctor positioned over her. The vitals software beeped and clicked; she heard her own heartbeat pounding in her ears and emulated by the monitors in a shrill monotone. She felt dizzy, hot, like she would pass out; she wondered if this was anaesthesia, or analgesia, or simple fatigue.

There were no contractions, of course. Her pregnancy had been complicated – by the tail-end of Quoqasi’s deceleration, by planetfall, by the effects of rationing. These were the somatic problems; Lia’s death so close to full term was the most worrying. Sanna had been carefully monitored throughout her pregnancy, particularly after planetfall. When Lia was killed in the mining accident, the doctors began to prepare for surgery.

There was one quick, confident motion; a transverse cut across her swollen belly.

The anesthetist scrutinized her readouts. She couldn’t see her smile, of course, but read comfort in her eyes and the way they softened at their outer edges. Sanna stared into her eyes, desperate for human contact; the anesthetist reassured her without any words.

A sheet was draped across her body, below her breasts; above this she saw the doctor lift a purple mass, sticky with amniotic fluid. There was a cough, more of a choked splutter, and then the beep of her heartbeat and the buzz of electronics were replaced by a febrile, urgent crying.

Tears came to Sanna’s eyes, tears of joy and of sorrow, as, she saw, they came to the eyes of the doctors and nurses.

The doctor clipped and cut the umbilical cord. When her child was brought to her, Sanna again feared fainting. She looked into his eyes, grey like marble and misted over, but alive and curious.

“Peregrine White,” Sanna whispered. “Peregrine White Winslow.”

The anesthetist leaned over to her. “He’s the first child of a new generation. This place is really home for him – he’ll never know Earth, or the light of Sol, or even the Ship. All he will know is Fram; everything else will be legend, the stuff the old-timers talk about.”

Sanna was lost. This child, her child, was the first for the Colony. For the first time she felt the importance of this child’s life – the first human to be born under a different sun.

“Miss Winslow,” the doctor said evenly, “In this moment, in this theatre, we’re at a milestone for the species. A hundred a fifty billion humans have existed throughout our history, up to this point – but your son is the first of us to be born away from the cradle of our species…”

She knew that she should feel proud, moved, happy, but she felt those emotions only as a background, projected dimly on her consciousness. All Sanna wanted was for Lia to be there, to hold his son, even just for a moment…

A Few Eggs

“…COIL mining was only a short-term initiative, at least using the MMRs. They’re very unstable machines, many parts seem faulty…or have next to nothing in the way of durability, not to mention a severe lack of safety features.

…Once the May’ gets here, we can leave these temperamental pressure-cookers to the dogs.”

When we had our first accident with the MMRs, we got off pretty lightly. One of the chlorine lines burst, overwhelming the crew on the gantry stacks. We lost more than a dozen people straight away, though it could have been much worse. The chlorine or the iodine could have mixed, the oxygen byproduct could have exploded, or the two components of the COIL could have met in uncontrolled circumstances and we’d have lost the whole rig.

Until the accident, we’d relied on trauma kits and first aid to deal with the injuries that cropped up: cuts, bruises, sprains, concussions, a broken leg. Suddenly we were dealing with things our e-suits couldn’t handle, or at least mitigate. Our inability to respond quickly was what cost those fifteen people their lives.

As with everything in the past fortnight, the hardware was the easiest part to fix. It’s strange to think that, a few weeks ago, all we thought of was spare parts and inventories. Sure, we still had frightening supply problems – we were all hungry from rationing, after all. And we were still on a knife-edge in terms of our capability to maintain even our basic existence, much less the expansion timetable we had for the arrival of the Mayflower.

But a chlorine line and a pump was easier to replace than fifteen of us. We weren’t Home; we’d left Home with five thousand people and, as awful as it was, our numbers where being whittled away by the harshness of our new life. Now, we were hyperaware of our own frailties, of how far from our Home we had come, of how alone and isolated we were, and of how close we were to collapsing under the weight of our own, human ambitions.

Home. Nobody called that star on the edge of Cassiopeia “Sol”, not anymore. It was “Home”, even for those of us dedicated to Fram and to Alpha Centauri and to seeing out what we had started here, in this place, whether that ended with the expansion of human civilization into other stars systems, or the slow death of a preemptive reach for the stars. I wonder, if we even live out the year, how many generations it will take to breed out that habit.

Birth of a Settlement

“…The colony pods were designed to be completely modular upon deployment. Once the kilometre-long vessels had blazed through the atmosphere and settled upon the surface, their structural options opened up exponentially. Specific modules, such as meteorological and aerospace laboratories, were elevated and stacked up in the higher sections of the pod, while geo-survey stations were constructed at the end of unfurled carbon-fibre road tiles, away from the thunderous activity within the colony pod-cum-settlement and all that entailed in its expansion.”

 

It took fifteen minutes for the crawler to travel the half dozen kilometers from the new Alpha-2 site to Alpha-1. It would have taken twice that time if not for the carbon arterial which connected the two sites. Gina took some small pleasure in those fifteen minutes, a pleasure that went beyond simple convenience – it was pride, she realized, pride in those highways, the first of the projects entirely manufactured on Fram’s surface, from materials mined from Fram itself.

The Alpha-2 site was so far the only colony entirely connected by the carbon ribbons. Alpha-2 had been connected to every other colony through sheer necessity: it had been the first, simply because it made the relocation effort, already immense, that much easier and more efficient.

As the crawler drew closer to Alpha-1, though, Gina saw the progress made connecting that site to the others – perfectly straight lines fanned out from beneath the colony’s courtyard, tracing black parabolic arcs over the horizon toward the deep-core mining site, the launch facility, and toward the elevator ground station. Vehicles moved across these, she noticed, diminished by the distance.

The crawler fell into the deeper of the shadows cast by the superstructure of Alpha-1, cast by the nearer and brighter of the twin stars. Gina saw towers silhouetted in the brown light; atop the weather and radar stations she saw dishes, made of fine mesh, rotating. Although the modular components which had spread over the upper surface of the colony pod were entirely prefabricated, they impressed her no less than did the carbon highway upon on which the crawler’s caterpillar tracks now grinded.

These rectilinear shapes stretched far into the sky, like skyscrapers did in the magnificent cities on Earth. Where those buildings had been rooted to the surface of Earth, these component towers were based atop an immense slab itself almost half the height of the skyscrapers back Home. A kilometer in length, the colony pods, the foundation of these growing cities, were a hundred meters tall once embedded in the duricrust of Fram.

Gina also felt a pang of regret, and envy. The relocation of Alpha-2 had meant leaving the colony pod, borne across the light years by the Quoqasi, at the original site. It had simply been impossible to move, once it fell from orbit and grounded itself. It had been a near-impossible feat of logistics and raw payload capacity to relocate the fusion plant, and all the prefabricated components which kept the colonists of Alpha-2 alive. The immense size of the colony pod was the central feature of the other colonies – indeed, it was also a foundation for all subsequent expansion. By comparison, the collection of buildings and domes – separated by regolith-washed carbon sheets – which made up Alpha-2 looked ramshackle, primitive, like a clutch of Mongol yurts.

Forever more the inhabitants of Alpha-2 would be at a disadvantage. Already they’d slipped far behind the others in development, and relied heavily on the other sites for consumables, resources, even maintenance. The other sites had begun to develop their specialties – Alpha-1 the embryonic space program and solar fields; Alpha-3 the manufacturing powerhouse of the four colonies; and Alpha-4, responsible for both the deep-core and open-cut mines. There were projections circling in the soviets of the mid-term economic decline of Alpha-2, including social projections placing the citizens of Alpha-2 in a nightmarish second-class.

Each time Gina, representative of the Alpha-2 soviet, visited another of the colonies, she felt the regret of the one poor decision made by her contemporaries which had precipitated this situation. But for now there was nothing that could be done – everyone was struggling, everyone was on rations, everyone was tired, and everyone was doubtful of the future.

She saw workers, clad in e-suits, erecting more equipment atop one of the domes which studded that part of Alpha-1 immediately above the vehicle park. The colony had become the seat of the upper soviet, that which nominally governed the entire colonization effort on Fram. The capital was growing, exponentially, while Gina’s own fell further and further behind…

 

Field Work

“…the e-suits were standard issue, meaning if it didn’t fit, lock, zip or shut, it was up to you to make it fit, lock, zip or shut. The outpost maintenance crews were already overworked with stopping the breakdowns within the vehicle fleet, so kickers, such as the surveyors, the science teams etc., all had to do custom repairs and upgrade modding themselves. This led to a broad variation on the e-suit practicality and aesthetics, as each division worked on their own design to make their job just that little bit easier.”

It was a one-man mission, although it was a two-person job. Ruslan was exhausted. There were more vehicles in the repair shop than not, which was nothing new. So it was appropriate, then, that without enough two-person vehicles to drag this far out from the grid, the second person for the job would be requisitioned by the vehicle shop to help clear the backlog of repairs.

And so here was Ruslan, alone, clocking dozens of kilometers and hours on a KOVTAR scantily refitted with disposable sheets over its leg actuators, hoping not to break down this far from the colonies.

He was a good twenty-five klicks from the nearest of the colony pods. This far out, spectroscopic studies from orbit had shown a good probability of metals subducted beneath basalt sheets. Every few kilometers Ruslan would park the KOVTAR, set up the drill equipment strapped to the rear cabin of the walker, and take a core sample. It was tough, though laborious, work. Two people were needed to manhandle the equipment, although he managed that well enough alone; more of a concern for him, though, was the need for somebody else were something to happen to him, so far from help.

He put these thoughts to the back of his mind. The treasure was out here, somewhere, seeded beneath the regolith during the formation of Fram billions of years ago, waiting those geologic ages of inactivity for his drill piece to bore through the basalt of great impactors.

Ruslan had a good eight hours of oxygen left of the eighteen hour maximum reservoir carried by the e-suits. He would have power enough to last through the thickened twilight of Fram’s night, although even in the absence of sunlight for the photosynthetic receptors, he could in emergencies link with the power source of the KOVTAR. During the last nine hours his e-suit had fed hungrily on the light of Alpha B, and had converted that energy and the waste products of his body into stores of genetically-engineered algae. This algae produced oxygen, extending the suit’s so-called “battery life” by fifty percent; it was also edible, though the taste and consistency deterred most.

He had only two more samples to take; despite this, the exhaustion was piling on his shoulders and pooling behind his eyes. Ruslan, not for the first time, found himself missing Home. Even during the worst times in the fresh water mines, work was never such a bone-jarring, spirit-crushing affair. There was such little redundancy built into the enterprise of colonizing other stars that merely existing required sacrifices not made by humans for generations.

And then the KOVTAR crested a ridge, and Ruslan caught his breath. He was instantly reminded what it was all for.

He dismounted, and walked a half dozen paces ahead of the machine. Ahead of him, the terrain sloped down steeply, running away into the distance toward a string of craters. To his left and right, several hundred meters away, ridges rose, framing the horizon with unnaturally sharp lines.

In the gap between these ridges, the ring of Fram rose from the horizon – a muddy brown arc which curled along the bowl of the sky at right angles to the horizon, up and above Ruslan’s shoulder. The ring was fuzzy, for the most part indistinct, but as he watched it now he saw larger pieces, in higher orbits, caught in the light of Alpha B, which was now below the horizon. He saw hundreds of these objects, brown rocks highlighted in bright golden lines, made misty by the dust of the ring.

Through the ring he could see Alpha A, from which Fram receded with each moment. Its light, diminished by the ring and by distance, was now like that of a full moon on Earth, or the light of Saturn through the night clouds of Titan. Its light caught the edges of the methane clouds above the horizon, and shot a spectrum of colours through these.

He looked down, to his feet. Rust-coloured regolith was ground into the surface of his e-suit, as far as his knees. Behind him he saw footprints, crisp in the duricrust – the only footprints for twenty-five kilometers, the only footprints in five billion years. His footprints.

Ruslan smiled, and felt all the worries of the world washed away by the beauty of the moment. But these moments had always existed here, on wind-swept Fram, for the billions of years it had existed and looped between the suns. Its moons had risen and set, eclipsed, and had been lit by the light of three stars for five billion years – yet human eyes had only seen these sights for less than three months.

Could such moments have ever existed, without mind, without consciousness, here to witness them, to appreciate them, to understand them? The thought enfolded Ruslan, dwarfed him. He was reminded of a puzzle posed to him when he was younger: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

This was why man went to the stars. This is why we walk the razor edge of dieback.

The crescent of Sverdrup crested the horizon, illuminated by the light of two suns. Complex shadows were cast across its surface.

Alpha-4 Mining Operations

“…what you’ve got is a fairly ungainly machine, the COIL Mobile Mining Rig is especially difficult to move around with any precision. It was originally a tracked vehicle, but we stripped it once the grit made it more of an issue to maintain. Moves at about twenty klicks an hour, fully loaded. We’ve found it seems easier if the chemical tanks are transported separately, and it keeps the strain off the deployment elevators in transit – the thing would be useless if it arrived at its destination with a warped or bowed elevator strut…”

“…automate the test burn of the COIL from the ad-hoc interface, and maintain safety protocol. Things have gone wrong with the COIL modules, so err on the side of caution. Once tested, vent the modules, deploy and connect a standard A44-10 module. Keep it on 4x scan, check it every fifteen or so. Keep it synced to your comms and store the packets on one of the drives in the modules hard disk. Commence forty-five minute bursts then wait for cool-off.”

“…remember to check and double-check the cleats and lining joins in the maintenance suit. Ensure every article has been inspected and cleared before use and before stowage. Also ensure the COIL module is deactivated, sluiced and syphoned from the main tank before any maintenance is completed on the rig. Watch your partner, keep an eye on the pressure and exhaust dials and keep the A44-10 cyclic to give you the heads-up if you’re about to hit something you shouldn’t…”

We kicked off mining ops at planetfall plus forty eight. That’s Solar days, of course, because no one had worked out a calendar for the crazy days Fram lived through this side of the barycenter. The first COIL MMR – we brought two – was set up east of Alpha-4, in the base of a crater named Yom Kippur where the regolith had been fused into a basalt sheet and, just ten meters beneath the surface, seismological surveys had found sublimated bedrock, fractured by the impact which created the crater. Core samples showed up lots of magnesium, aluminium, scraps of iron, and lots of fused oxygen: exactly what we needed.

It was nearly seven weeks after planetfall – two weeks since the massive operation to relocate Alpha-2 had wrapped up, and just over a month until the supply ship arrived in orbit.

The COIL was supposed to move twenty klicks an hour; Yom Kippur was only seven klicks from Alpha-4, but of course, the regolith completely frammed the caterpillar system. It ended up taking us two days to get the rig in place, including the time to strip the tracks, and to set up the refinery.

The rig was kicked off just after Alpha A had set – the only object in the sky was Alpha B, growing brighter by the week as Fram drew closer. A wind slowly kicked up after A-set. This would become more of a problem as Fram reached the extremes of its orbit: one star, whether it be B now or A in eighty years, would heat one face of the planet while the other star was too distant to heat the other. The wind was the result, great pressure systems the size of continents, as excited air particles moved from hot to cold.

Gaseous chlorine was mixed with molecular iodine and an aqueous mixture of hydrogen peroxide and potassium hydroxide. These chemicals were injected from the massive tanks, enclosed by gantries, which formed the superstructure of the rig. There was a burst of heat.

The laser burst itself was invisible, operating on infrared wavelengths. But we could see the results with each pulse: the regolith under the resonator was blown away, or fused into the basalt. With each burst, the products of the chemical reaction were separated by the rig: oxygen, water, and potassium salts were pumped away into tanks stacked at the far end of the rig, furthest from the refinery. These would be collected by the haulers and transported to the Outposts, to slowly open up the closed-loop life-support (CLLS) systems.

Slowly, the COIL rig made progress: there would be a supersonic pulse of laser energy, a blast of energy and heat, and then robotic arms would remove and sort the debris. It moved the slag off to the side, to be used later for construction of the carbon highways between the Outposts, mines, and spaceport, and the material to be processed was fed onto conveyor belts and moved down the length of the rig to the refinery.

A lot of people were standing around. It seemed as if all the e-suits in Alpha-4 were here, used by whoever could find a bureaucratic reason to be present for the deployment and firing of the Colony’s first mine. Many were searching the sky, looking for the supply ship or looking for Sol or simply enjoying the alien sky.

One of the rig’s maintenance teams had set up a sign on the upper gantry enclosing the chlorine stack; now that the rig had been firing for several minutes, a floodlight flickered on an lit up the sign. It said simply:

 

COIL MMR-001
brought to you by the
Engineering Corps of Alpha-4
“Keep HOPE Alive”

 

It was a pun – Human Outer Planetary Exploration was the over-arching term used to colonise the planets and moons of Sol in the heady days the species expanded from its homeworld. We were smiling, privately, unreadable to one another by the faceplates of our e-suits; and we all hoped the double-meaning would reach every colonist on Fram…

Supply & Demand

“…Nassimatissi was Quartermaster-Alpha for Outpost Alpha-3. He was the first to calculate and vocalise that, if things kept going the way they were; the colonial equipment continually being subjected to dust-related breakdowns, they wouldn’t have the propensity to expand at a rate requisite to an operational colony of that size.

The first stocks to rapidly drop in number were seals and filtration sleeves for the heavy movers. The KOVTARs kept throwing their actuator seals after gear aggravation by the dust, not to mention the maintenance they required after a few days out on the surface. The M-1010 catepillar tractors had a poorly designed engine manifold, at least for this landscape, which led to the fleet of twenty being garaged while the defects were patched up, dust-proofed and spot-welded. Stopping damage from happening was one thing, repairing what had already occurred was another.

…Nassimatissi hoped that the supply frame had more welding rods stowed within its silent bays. Vacuum caulk would stop a starship from turning inside out, but it wasn’t enough to put together an outpost or keep the ground fleet operational.”

We were working in the plant room when we saw the Colony’s QA – I couldn’t remember his name, but Mierhof insisted it was Nassimatissi. He was with QA4, too, of course, because the Alpha couldn’t work in the Outpost without the Outpost’s own Quartermaster present. Oddly, Alpha-4’s Quartermaster noticed us, but Nassimatissi did not.

We couldn’t eavesdrop in the plant room, of course, not near the massive carbon filters. The Quartermasters were walking between the filters, inspecting each of the spheres before moving to the next. There were sixteen spheres in this plant room, for Alpha-3’s hydroponic dome, each sphere easily the height of two men. The Quartermasters seemed to be checking the filtration: maybe someone got sick from the food, or maybe, with plans to connect each Outpost and our mining operations, we were running out of carbon, too.

Mierhof didn’t care – he seemed to think that, with our mining operations setting up, the Quartermaster-Alpha had better things to do than micromanage the hydroponic filtration of each Outpost of the Colony.

But I cared, because Nassimatissi, who had become somewhat of a celebrity across these fractured microcommunities, was not as impassive as he’d been made out. His face was furrowed, even when examining something as trivial as these carbon filters, with the edge of worry.

We had only five weeks to go until our supply ship arrived. They said that when Alpha A set, through a telescope, you could see the glow of the ship decelerating. People were excited, for different reasons: either for the resources, raw or prefabricated, which would ease the current bottleneck; or, more disturbingly, for the lifeboat the supply ship represented.

Our colony pods, now the center of our Outposts and the source of our warmth and light, would never again see the Quoqasi which bore them to this place. But once gutted of its supplies, our colony ship could carry half the planet’s population, and return Home.

Many had begun to feel that all of our setbacks and problems were pandemic, and emblematic of what was to logically come next: a dieback, mass death caused by the collapse of life-support loops or a reactor accident or an impactor. These were the people who saw the supply ship as a lifeboat to Sol.

I cared – no, I worried – only because Nassimatissi seemed resigned, even defeated. And that suggested he was one of these latter.

 

Outpost Alpha-2

“…one of the major setbacks on Fram was Outpost Alpha-2, settled one month after planetfall. Plagued by continual damage from falling orbital debris, Alpha was eventually scrapped and abandoned for a resettlement in a safer area, several kilometres away.”

The first deaths happened a few weeks after planetfall.

Alpha-2, the second of the four colonisation pods, which had set up on the highlands north of Alpha-3, was hit by a rock that, after burning up in the atmosphere, was hardly the size of a clenched fist. The colony lost five people, choked to death on a mixture of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen and argon. That brought the total numbers on Fram to 3, 994, although a woman over at Alpha-4 was seven months pregnant (there had been several miscarriages due to deceleration and atmospheric entry).

The rock missed the modules which composed the Outpost, and missed also the pod from Quoqasi. Instead it hit the airbridge which linked the fusion reactor, under the blister of the Quoqasi pod, to the hydroponics dome. If it had hit the fusion reactor, Humanity’s adventure in Alpha Centauri would have ended there.

Alpha-2 had been battered by micrometeorites since it had landed. The other three pods had put down either in the base of a crater, or at the base of the highlands which ran north of the ten-by-ten grid chosen from orbit to colonise. This way they were protected from the rain of rocks by Fram’s geography: anything from Amundsen would have to come in from the west (Amundsen’s orbit was retrograde), and the other Outposts kept themselves sheltered from that direction.

This way it wasn’t necessary to bury the Outposts in regolith, like the first colonies on Mars had to because of the solar wind. The debate now was to bury Alpha-2, or to relocate the entire Outpost, just five weeks after it was set up.

Eventually, the colonists elected to move the entire Outpost before it grew too big to be relocated. Extra habitat modules were erected at Alpha-1, Alpha-3 and Alpha-4 to house the nine hundred and ninety five people of Alpha-2 while the tractor haulers moved the modules into the base of a crater two klicks from Alpha-1 (the site of the original base camp established by the scout party launched from Quoqasi while it was still light-days from Alpha Centauri). Now the four Outposts formed a rough triangle, with Alpha-2 near the middle, and no outpost was more than five kilometers from another.

Nothing was really going to plan, yet. The KOVTARs were breaking down, the haulers had problems moving through the dust over such huge distances, the life-support systems of the other three Outposts were overworked, and everyone wanted to get outside and see the suns and moons and horizon after five years cooped up in a spaceship. There weren’t enough spare parts, there weren’t enough e-suits, and the deep-core mining wasn’t yet up and running, so there were no resources to produce replacements.

Slowly, a dark, subtle despair was setting in. The deaths at Alpha-2 exacerbated the feeling that, for some colonists at any rate, Fram was not like any other colonisation project in the Solar System – there, in even the most ambitious projects before Fram, help had been at hand, only a few months away. Fram was beginning to feel oppressively far from Home, and, once the supply ship arrived, the Colony would be entirely cut off from Sol…