Portal-eARC (8 page)

Helen restrained another giggle. Larry’s protest was of course mostly
pro forma
and exaggerated the stereotype; on Earth, the best observatories were generally in areas of the world which remained both remote and challenging, while any space-based operation required top-flight fitness; Larry had shown his physical capabilities while helping to build Ares’ fledgling colony. “Is this thing built like our shelters on Mars?”

“Not really,” A.J. said. He wasn’t physically participating, but mainly because he was once more being the nerve center for coordinating several operations at once; it was something ideally suited to him and Maddie had made sure to emphasize that, both to prevent anyone else from resenting the sensor expert’s apparent indolence (not that many were likely to) and just as importantly to prevent
him
from feeling guilty that he was inside while most other people were doing “real work.”

“On Mars,” A.J. continued, while Helen and the others finished spreading out the largest of the shelter units
Munin
had been carrying, “we used mostly the old ‘tuna can’ hab units, like the ones we lived in on the way here to Jupiter system, plus the Cascade-SAIC designed subsurface inflatables. But there we could take advantage of the Martian soil, bury stuff underground and insulate with the native material.

“Here on Europa, we’re dealing with ice frozen so solid that digging through it is like trying to take a shovel to steel.
Athena
can cut through it, yeah, but can you imagine how long it’d take to keep repositioning and running
Athena
in order to clear out anything of reasonable size? So we can’t really go underground, at least not for quite a while.”

“Actually, the original plan would put us underground anyway,” Horst said, “but the excavation equipment was supposed to be brought down from
Odin
after the lander had verified the site, and the space for it was taken up by a lot of the additional supplies the General had us load up to make it a viable lifeboat.”

“Yes,” Anthony said. “We are lucky, I think, that these shelters stayed on board.”

“All right, Maddie, you’ll have to set the first holddowns,” Helen said, seeing that they had the fifteen meter long, ten meter wide structure spread out fairly well. “I think we can stretch it out a bit after you get a couple in place to keep it from sliding all over.”

“On it,” Madeline said. To set something down well into the steel-hard ice required something more complex and forceful than the standard tent stake, and that was why it was Maddie’s job; the hold-down units were a combination of shaped-charge and spike, blowing a small hole into the ice and inserting a long spike which then extended anchor points.

“So to finish answering your question,” A.J. continued, “These are more self-contained—though they need some power run to them from
Munin
or some other source—and designed for
much
more extreme environments. There’s a big difference between operating in even a relatively thin atmosphere like Mars and going to hard vacuum, and sitting on ice that’s cold enough to liquify air is another major difference. You’ve got a
lot
of specialized LTP aerogel insulation in the floor, carbonan-reinforced puncture-resistant layered synthetic walls—interior and exterior—plus a lot of built-in amenities. Well, ‘amenities’ by the Spartan standards of the Outer System; we don’t have a Jacuzzi in any of these. But there’s power, air filtration and renewal, temperature control, all the stuff to make it liveable…and give us a
lot
more space while we’re here.”

Helen cut in the private channel. “Which I am
so
looking forward to.
”

She saw A.J. grin and wink in her VRD. “I want to lay claim to our own hab unit again. And I know Maddie and Joe want theirs back…” he glanced sideways and she could guess where he was looking. “And it’s hard for Horst and Jackie when there’s like no privacy at all!”

Ain’t that the truth,
she thought. The two married couples in the group had established and assumed relationships, and the rest of the “castaways of Europa” had assumed and arranged—without, as far as Helen could call, even being
asked
directly—for occasional hours of privacy for those two pairs.

As Horst and Jackie had pretty much just
begun
the dance back…Good
Lord
, a year and a half ago…during
Odin
’s visit to Ceres, and had minimal chance for privacy since, no such automatic arrangements had materialized. It wasn’t beyond the pale that another couple might materialize within their midst, either; Helen had no idea of the preferences or interests of the others from
Odin
, but—as Madeline had once mentioned to her—with two other women and (counting the General) seven other men in a highly emotionally-charged environment, she’d be surprised to see
nothing
else happening.

Besides, even without the romantic pairings, there was plenty of reason to want a few hours away from anyone else.

Maddie arrived next to her. “Stand
very
still.” The smaller spacesuited figure bent down, did something with her hands; Helen felt a sharp shock or vibration through the soles of her boots, and a moment later Madeline straightened up. “Okay, let go.”

The material tried to pull back but the spike held firm. “All right, then. Let’s all get the rest of them stretched out and set at intervals. Watch for the indicator tags.”

“You mean the square over the hold-downs?” Anthony asked. “It looks just gray and has not changed ever since we started working.”

“That’s because we haven’t had any part of it anchored,” Madeline answered. “The indicators sense tension and extension along the length in two dimensions. When they’re pulled to the right distance and tension levels, that gray square will turn bright green. Pull too far and it’ll go red. If you’re too far off angle, determined by the way the spikes and other walls are set, it will start going either yellow for an angle that’s too acute, or blue for one that’s too obtuse. So you want to get each square as perfect bright green as you can before I lock it down.”

“Understood.”

The process took another hour and a half, by which time Helen was starting to feel awfully tired. Low gravity reduced the weight of the suits, but the mass remained, and it was actually in some ways a lot harder to move around in low-g with extra mass all over you—especially if you were trying to pull or drag things that didn’t want to move to begin with.

But as soon as the last spike was in place, she heard Maddie signal A.J. “Okay, A.J., check status. If everything’s green, pull the trigger.”

“Checking now…nice job, everyone. That thing’s within a
very
small percentage of being perfectly straight on all sides.” A pause. “Maddie, the third spike near the center of the far wall—away from
Munin
—didn’t set right. For some reason the anchor points didn’t deploy.”

“I can’t move the hold-down, though. What do I do?”

“Pull the first spike, then take a new one and just disarm the charge, then put it down the hole and I’ll trigger it; hopefully it will deploy the anchor points. Normally I wouldn’t really care about
one
being not perfectly set, but we’re still not sure how heavy the quakes are going to get, and I don’t want to take chances.”

Neither do I,
Helen agreed silently. A few minutes passed before A.J. confirmed the substitution had gone well. “A.J.,” she began, “what if there’s a
big
quake—one that really rearranges the landscape?”

A.J. shrugged. “Honestly? We may be totally screwed. Imagine one of these cracks opening up for a second. I think we have to assume we won’t get something really big—like Richter 8. A 5 or 6 we can probably handle, though it’s possible it would hurt
something
. But we need the space—for work, and for our sanity—and that shelter’s built tough; I think it can take anything the rest of us can.” He spoke more loudly and was broadcast to the whole group. “All right, I’m activating the shelter.”

Helen stepped back; almost instantly she saw the almost shapeless mass, staked out in a rectangular pattern, begin to stir.

“Active composite elements responding. Constructing first level wall grid.” The sides of the perimeter began to rise systematically, a low wall coming up almost as though being elevated from below. It reached a height of about one and a half meters before stopping. “First level wall grid complete. Interlocking supports connecting…connected…locked. Structure is solid! Looks like the design’s working! Starting second level wall grid with reinforcement elements.”

The shelter continued to raise itself under A.J.’s direction; the main walls were three meters high, with the roof curving gently to a maximum height of four and a half meters. “That’s deceptive, though,” A.J. noted. Insulation, structural flex capabilities, internal wiring and such, plus lots of cushioning and redundancy in the structure and leakproofing, make the walls about half a meter thick now that it’s assembled.”

Completed, Helen had to admit it looked pretty impressive up close; spaced-out transparent aerogel-filled windows would admit light and a view to the rooms that made up the interior (it could be divided up several ways). This was going to give them large, open, brand-new spaces where all of them could go around without suits. But
most
importantly…“A.J.? How long?”

“After you get the power line connected? I’d say…about an hour and a half.

“But for you, it’s probably going to be at least another hour after that,” he continued, and she could see him grinning. “Because I think our esteemed leader is willing to pull rank AND her extreme badass nature in order to be the first one to get a real, if low-gravity, shower!”

Chapter 10.

“Even with the reactor scrammed, the radiation in there’s
gotta
fry the dust, A.J.,” Brett said doubtfully, looking on as Jackie prepared to pour approximately three liters of Faerie Dust into an instrumented funnel-shape that was positioned above
Nebula Storm
’s main reactor, fitting precisely into the small but fatal hole in the casing.

“Oh, no doubt about that,” A.J. agreed cheerfully, and Horst continued for him, “And if we had not access to the many tons of drive dust made for
Odin
, maybe we would not be risking our most versatile sensing method this way, at least not yet. But the drive dust was meant for long-term space exposure and was hardened by some complex metamaterial design to resist a great deal of radiation. Mostly beta radiation, admittedly, and I would caution against betting that it will survive long inside a nuclear reactor, but it should last long enough to give us the data we need.”

The problem was, of course, that opening up a fueled nuclear reactor whose core had been punched was not something one did casually; in fact, with the tools available to the combined expedition it was something that only the insane or the desperate would attempt. Still, even something crazy was better attempted with the maximal amount of knowledge.

A.J. felt he’d redeemed himself slightly after his prior blindness to the simple solution of his Faerie Dust’s mobility, by realizing that the tougher, simpler drive dust would provide a sacrificial method to obtain a clear idea of what the precise condition of the core was. A few devices back on Earth might have been able to look straight through the reactor casing, but—after all—the casing was specifically designed to
prevent
radiation of any kind from getting through it. While that was meant mostly to prevent radiation from leaking out, it was equally efficient at preventing any radiation from getting
in
.

He was actually pretty proud of how he’d solved the problem of knowing
what
they hit. Jackie and Brett had managed to put together a detailed model of the original reactor and core, and simulated what the drive dust motes would “see” as they encountered the various components. While there wasn’t really enough data for the drive dust to identify, say, uranium versus steel in isolation—unlike his bleeding-edge Faerie Dust, it wasn’t built with multimodal sensor components—but the way in which high-speed impacts would break the pieces apart would still yield a fairly good rule-of-thumb heuristic to recognize the different types of things expected inside the reactor.

So A.J. would run his custom sensor analysis software on the drive dust as it worked its way, probably quickly degrading, through the reactor casing, and then when he’d processed the data as best he could, he’d send to to Brett’s model, where the interior would be mapped out and—with luck—the precise nature, position, and extent of the damage caused by Fitzgerald’s last shot would finally be known, allowing them to proceed with precision; possibly they’d even be able to figure out a way to do the repair without actually having to
open
the casing, working through the already-extant hole as though doing a laparoscopy.

“Ready, A.J.?” Jackie asked.

A.J. checked all the displays in his VRD. “Telemetry’s good for the whole mass. Since we’re in vacuum we don’t need to worry about any of the messy reactions that can happen in a reactor that’s been breached. Yep, we’re go.”

“Brett?”

The New Zealander gave her a thumbs-up. “Model’s ready to take input as fast as A.J. can feed it to me.”

“All right. Starting the pour…now.”

In Europa’s roughly 1/8th gravity, the speed of the almost liquid mass of drive dust motes looked more like the lazy flow of stage fog off the edge of a stage, dreamlike, unreal. But there was nothing unreal about the torrent of data that abruptly filled the bandwidth A.J. had allocated. “Data stream coming in loud and clear.” Another running tally started to rise. “Yeah, it’s
lousy
with rads in there. Attrition rate is already noticeable. Progress isn’t terribly fast, though. The motes are using gravity assist where they can, but that core’s packed pretty tight. Lessee…” He made some basic assumptions, plotted things again. “Yeah, it’s definitely going to be eating into the supply
fast
. Horst, I think we’ll need twice that much to finish the scan, get it set up, would you?”