Portal-eARC (19 page)

“This one’s good,” she reported. “I’ll finish checking the last two; if they pass, we’re good for re-assembly when everything else is. Joe, how are you doing?”

That was a double question; given how many times her husband had been the receiving end of near-lethal accidents, she couldn’t help but worry, but he was also working on other aspects of getting
Athena
back up.

“Me personally, the leg aches like a bastard today, but Dr. Masters says there’s every indication of fast healing working, and I don’t need to baby it anymore, so that’s good; hole like that could’ve taken a lot longer to get better than a week or two.” His smile lit up a corner of her display and she felt immediately less tense. “I’ve just finished re-attaching
Athena
’s main control cables, and everything checks out. Mia’s working on part of the linkage for
Odin
but she’s going to run
Athena
through a full workup in a couple hours. Unless she finds anything wonky, we should be good to start redeploy soon.”

“What about the piping?”

“Making progress,” Larry replied promptly. “We’ve cleared a hundred and forty-six meters of the stuff so far, clean-cut the one end in prep for splicing, and as we clear it we’re stowing it neatly indoors to keep it as flexible as possible.”

“Good work. At that rate we should have it clear by, what, this time tomorrow?”

“Think so.”

“A.J., what have we got? I gave you the day you asked for after getting
Athena
out and doing the major repairs.”

“It’s…big. Really big.” A.J.’s voice held both the irrational yet common pride of a discoverer in the thing that he’s discovered, and unwilling awe. “It’s a pretty smooth tunnel that’s triangular in general cross-section. Near as I can tell, with some input from Larry, Anthony, and some of our brains way back home at the IRI, the impact theory has to be the explanation. Looks like what we have are three huge chunks of ice that clumped on top of each other, leaving this void—which was probably even bigger back then—and then they froze up in this position. Incline’s only a few degrees, but the path got broken up, probably by crustal movements—some of those look like they’re almost
circular
, dunno how
that
would work—”

“Heated ice and convection currents, maybe,” Larry put in. “Different states of ice might interact in funny ways.”

“Maybe. Anyway, the path turns out to be sort of like a half-spiral made from long straight sticks laid together at angles, and it goes a long way down. I’m still getting trace water vapor coming up from the lower reaches, which makes me wonder if this thing actually gets down near the ocean itself.

“But you want the kicker?”

Ah, A.J., you and your sense of drama. But you wouldn’t be you without it
. “Of course we do. What’s your big secret, A.J.?”

“The last part of the half-spiral almost reaches the surface only about a kilometer over
that
way,” he caused an arrow to materialize on the display, overlaying a map of the crash site. “And it’s got a crust so thin on it that you could break through with a few charges.”

She blinked, realizing what he was saying. “A.J., do you mean to say that
we
can get into that tunnel?”

“Not just
us
. I said, this thing’s
big
, easily large enough for that rover that
Munin
has on board.”

“Mr. Baker,” came the deep tones of General Hohenheim, “are you suggesting that some of us might actually
drive
into the interior of Europa?”

“And call yourself Arne Saknussemm! Why not, General? As Maddie said, we’re here to do science as well, and exploring the interior of another world rather than just looking at whatever’s exposed as we drill through it, that should be useful, I’d think.” He grinned. “Besides, it’d be kinda neat to think that we’d actually get to
use
that rover for what it was meant for, rather than looking at it as a potential emergency refuge or extra reactor or source of spare parts.”

“I thought you
had
cannibalized part of the rover,” Dan said from the
Odin
.

“We almost did, yeah, but turned out not to need to. LGT-1 is still fully operational, or should be once we prep her.”

“I certainly won’t say the idea’s ridiculous,” Madeline said cautiously. “We have the tools, the rover was meant for exploring low-gravity worlds, and while we have work to do there will also be significant down-time once
Athena
is back in business. A.J., you said the slope was reasonably gentle—that means quite a jaunt. If we assume that it goes to the subsurface ocean, and the minimum distance below us for that ocean is a kilometer, the total length of your path will be several tens of kilometers, am I right?”

“That’s right. I think it’s averaging about three degrees, which is pretty gentle for this kind of setting, and would mean that if it’s a kilometer down you’ve got about thirty, thirty-five kilometers of tunnel to drive down.”

“I wouldn’t mind taking a look-see,” Larry said slowly, “But what about the quakes?”

A.J.’s image shrugged. “Well, yeah, that’s a danger, but look at it this way; near as we can tell this thing’s stayed open for several thousand years, it
probably
isn’t going to collapse on you guys in the next month.”

“I still don’t like the thought of the possibility,” Madeline said firmly. “What if it
did
happen?”

“Well…we’d lose the rover, probably.”

“Just the rover?”

“He’s right,” Joe said. “Unless the whole thing came down and just crushed them—and in this gravity I wouldn’t bet against the rover being able to keep itself reasonably intact, at least for a while—the worst that’s likely to happen is that the way back gets blocked off.”

She raised an eyebrow at Joe’s image. “That sounds rather grim to
me
, given that it would be an airless, frozen passage with no replacement air or food. Water I’ll give you.”

“Oh! Oh! I know the answer to this one!” Jackie’s voice cut in. “
Athena
.”

“My thoughts exactly,” A.J. agreed. “As long as the rover’s got reasonable supplies on board, all we need to do is reposition
Athena
over the tunnel near where the rover’s stuck and melt down, then bring up everyone through the borehole.
Athena
’s borehole won’t let the rover come up, but it’s more than wide enough for a person. And we already have multiple tests and proof that she can cut fast and reliably through ice of whatever depth we’ve sent her to.”

“What do you think, General?” Madeline said finally. “It
is
your equipment, after all.”

He chuckled. “Agent Fathom, here we are a good socialist collective and we have contributed what we have to the common cause.” He looked thoughtful. “Once
Athena
is clearly working again there will have to be several trips to
Odin
to supply reaction mass, and all of us appear to be approaching completion in the basic survival and preparation tasks. There will be much more, as you say, down-time. So perhaps it should be literal
down
time for some of us?”

She heard A.J. snort at the General’s pun. “If you’re comfortable with it, I have no problem,” she said.

“Comfortable…perhaps not. There are many dangers. But we did not come these hundreds of millions of kilometers to be comfortable
or
safe, but to learn, and we have the equipment and the personnel to do the job.”

“Thank you, General. Joe, you helped direct similar operations back on Mars when we got
Thoat
running, so I’ll put you in charge of setting this operation up as well, once the other essential work’s completed.”

“Great! We’ll figure out who to send when the time comes, I guess.”

She nodded. “Some choices are obvious. I’m thinking no more than four people, though.”

“Mmm-hm.” Joe sounded slightly distracted, so she didn’t say any more; he might be working on auxiliary components of
Athena.

Midway through checking the next support, she heard a triumphant
Ha!
from Joe. “Something good? Athena running?”

“Hm? Oh, I wasn’t working on her. Just trying to figure something out, and I got it perfect.”

She smiled fondly. “And what was that?”

“Well, LGT-1 isn’t much of a name, so if I’m going to be getting her ready to roll, she needed a name, and given what we’re doing with her, it became obvious.”

A terrible foreboding stole over her, but she couldn’t stop the question from slipping out. “And the name is…?”

“
Deep Thoat
, of course.”

Divorce is always an option,
she reminded herself as she heard A.J. dissolve into juvenile snickers.
Always an option.

Chapter 24.

“Careful!” Joe said reflexively as the huge assembly wobbled.

“Sorry,” Horst said from the other side. “It is not easy, moving this thing while keeping it steady. Not exactly the best-balanced object we’ve moved.”

He couldn’t argue that.
Nebula Storm
’s rocket nozzle, once meant as a replacement for
Nobel
’s in case of damage, was a massive, bell-shaped assembly that looked deceptively simple from the outside. However, there were complex channels built into the bell to keep it cooled below critical temperatures, control and sensor runs, and other components embedded inside. The nozzle was essentially symmetrical radially, but much heavier towards the narrow end, and they didn’t have any transport vehicle to move something nearly that big; it was nearly as far across as one of the smaller inflated hab units, and twice as tall.

So they were having to essentially drag it to the
Munin
’s bay with improvised rails and rollers. “I feel like an Egyptian pyramid slave.” A.J. said, pushing with what feeble leverage Europa allowed.

“Actually,” Maddie said from her vantage point ahead, “the Egyptians didn’t
use
slaves for the Pyramids, at least for the most part. They were public works projects constructed by regular, paid workers, something like the large construction projects in the 1930s.”

“Really?” A.J. sounded startled. “I didn’t know that.”

“I’d say I was surprised,” said Madeline, “but alas, A.J., I’ve long since resigned myself to the fact that your education has…interesting gaps.”

“Everyone has ‘interesting gaps’ from someone’s point of view,” A.J. retorted, but his defensive tone, Joe was pleased to note, was much less strident than it used to be.

“The only ‘gap’ I’m interested in is whether this thing’s going to
fit
in the landing bay. I know the measurements say it should, but this nozzle seems bigger every time I look at it,” Jackie muttered; the low-voiced comment was still picked up and transmitted by her helmet microphone.

“It will fit,” Joe assured her confidently. “Now that we got
Deep Thoat
out of the bay. Wouldn’t have before.”

“Stop calling it that! It’s the
Zarathustra
.You’re
sure
the connectors will mate up?” Jackie continued. “On
Odin
, I mean. I know I’ve asked before, but…”

“Brett?”

A couple of seconds later, Brett Tamahori answered. “I’ll guarantee it. I compared the as-built adapters with the designs, and then with the actual connectors on your nozzle, using A.J.’s high-res models made from the actual thing. It’s all well within tolerances.”

Brett rarely made such sweepingly confident pronouncements—anyone doing models knew how the real world could trip you up—so just hearing him state things so clearly with no “weaseling” made Joe and, he guessed, the others feel a long more comfortable.

“All right, everyone,” said Maddie, having moved two of the rails slightly. “Another shot…one, two…”

On “three” Joe threw his strength into pushing, as did the others around the rocket nozzle. This time it slid smoothly forward several meters, and Joe nearly lost his footing trying to keep up; his leg gave a twinge, but that didn’t really bother him; the fact he COULD push was proof enough that he was pretty much healed. “Whoa, slow down! Damn, this really-low-gravity thing is a pain.”

“Tell me about it,” said A.J. dryly. Joe saw that his friend was skidding slowly across the ice; as he watched, A.J. hit one of the ripples in the surface and was launched on a slow-motion arc into the nonexistent air. The sensor expert took advantage of his position to rotate his body and landed in a better position to slow himself down. A few moments later he was slowly bounding-walking his way back. The chuckles at his predicament had mostly died down by then.

“How long will it take to get the nozzle fastened on and working?” Helen asked.

“Well,” Jackie answered after a speed-of-light pause, “just putting it on will take a couple of days since that’s regular spacewalk work. Once it’s on we’re going to do a
lot
of very carefully calculated tests to ramp us up to full functionality…figure a couple of weeks. No reason to rush and every reason to take it slow when this is the
only
nozzle we’ve got left.”

“How about the
Nebula Storm
coupling setup?”

“Still working on that, and it probably won’t get finished until after we’ve verified the nozzle working.”

“Once that is done,” Hohenheim said, joining the conversation, “we will need one more load of water, if your prior calculations are correct, and then
Odin
will move to orbit around Europa. After that, we will finish filling
Odin
’s tanks as much as possible before preparing for the final maneuver which will bring
Nebula Storm
back to space and bring
Munin
home at last.” Joe could
hear
the smile in General Hohenheim’s voice, and felt it on his face as well as Hohenheim spoke so matter-of-factly about the final steps in their bootstrap-based rescue. “With
Athena
continuing to run well, we now have no reason to fear any other immediate disasters. Have you selected the crew for
Zarathustra
’s exploration of the interior?”

“We have,” Maddie answered, gesturing for another, more careful, push that moved the nozzle forward about one meter. “Either Larry or Anthony was an obvious first choice, and they elected to choose which by a random method, which Larry won.