Boundary 2: Threshold (12 page)

"I would suppose, then, that anything lying along the centerline of those 'tubes' would be subject to very intense radiation—even greater than ambient?"

"Quite so. And true to an extent with the suits. The field does not focus the beam very far, of course, and once the deflected particles leave the field they may be dispersed by the main magnetosphere, which will of course predominate away from the immediate area of the ship."

"The suits appear to have a rather nonsymmetric field, however." Hohenheim gestured, and an image of the
Odin
's outer-system worksuits appeared. While not very different from traditional suits of this kind, there was one obvious change: a hole, about the diameter of a man's fist, running through the area where many older suits simply had an oblong backpacklike box to carry air supply. In these suits, that area was divided by the hole.

"Magnetic metamaterials work has allowed us to effectively shape the fields to some extent. The radiation would normally pass through the center of a symmetrical field—which would, unfortunately, include a large part of the astronaut. By biasing the field, the deflected radiation can be sent through a less . . . crucial location." She smiled at him. "And the Bemmies themselves gave us the superconductor that makes it possible to build the shielding this small."

"And to do much of the other work involved," agreed Hohenheim. He didn't follow the exact details of the sciences involved, but he didn't need to. What was important was understanding how the changes in technology affected capabilities and approaches. Metamaterial sciences, which had really taken off in the late part of the twentieth century, involved studying how specific variants in the structure of a material, rather than its precise composition, could affect its physical properties. Metamaterials in optics had demonstrated bizarre properties, including negative indices of refraction, optical magnetism, and others, and it was clear that something of the kind was responsible for the operation of the Bemmie room-temperature superconductor material. Similarly, magnetic metamaterials had shown the ability to affect magnetic fields in ways simple changes in composition couldn't.

"There will be some effects on the drive in the deep magnetosphere," Castillo noted. "Well, to be precise, not on the drive itself, but the deflected particles will be imparting some sort of thrust. You must make sure this is taken into account at all times."

"Understood. It is something of a magnetic sail by default—no action without an equal and opposite reaction. If we are deflecting and redirecting energetic particles, their deflection exerts a force on us." He pointed to the rear of the main central body. "The main nuclear rocket nozzle—"

"Ah, yes. Because the
Odin
may wish to use far more power in bursts from the reactor than
Nike
did, we have had to build a better cooling and protective system for the nuclear rocket's exhaust. It cools itself to some extent, but there is much heat in that area. Also, the main water tankage is spaced around the base of the mass-driver ribs and around the main engine area to provide additional radiation shielding. The wide spacing of the hab sections from both the main body and the active drive areas of the ribs minimizes any exposure to hard radiation from either the nuclear reactor or the mass-driver."

"Hard radiation from the mass-driver?"

"Most likely not much." Castillo blinked and for a moment her eyes didn't seem to want to meet his, but she continued before he could be sure. "Still, as they say, it is better to be safe. Magnetically accelerating material to high speeds can produce X-rays or even gamma radiation, depending on how much mass, how high the acceleration, and other factors."

Hohenheim wondered what she wasn't telling him. The general was no political innocent and did not doubt his instincts. At the same time, the regulations were clear, and he knew the United States had been carrying out its inspections with clockwork regularity and undoubted thoroughness. There should not be any major surprises hidden on his ship.

"Bioforming colonization?" Bruce repeated. "I dunno that one, Helen."

"It's sort of the reverse of terraforming," A.J. said. "Dunno who was the first to come up with it. The oldest story I read based on the idea was something by James Blish.
The Seedling Stars
. Basically, instead of trying to change the world you're going to, you change the lifeforms you're bringing to the world to fit the environment."

"So
that's
why they had the big bio labs all over the place?" Jackie asked. "Trying to make an entire biosphere for Ceres?"

Helen nodded. "Actually, they had to be doing some terraforming—xenoforming, I suppose I should say—on Ceres as well as bioforming on the various species. Ceres is frozen and would normally stay that way."

Jake took up the narrative. "Right. While results are very preliminary, we've also located several places where it appeared they were doing excavations and, possibly, waste disposal. That's given us a general timeline of the Bemmie presence on Ceres, at least in the sense of a knowledge of what events came first. Exactly what attracted them here we don't know. Helen presumes that they were interested in the high water content and could somehow determine that from a distance."

"We'd already guessed how much water was here years ago," Larry reminded him. "So it's no stretch to assume that Bemmie could do it at least as well or better."

"Okay, then we'll assume that. Where was I? Oh, yes. The damage this base suffered in the war, unfortunately, appears to have been in the area of the original Bemmius landings. However, they first tunneled down a kilometer or so, as you know, and reached the water-ice layer. The crust of Ceres is astonishingly thin, at least in this area. Larry"—he nodded to the astrophysicist—"says it's just enough to keep the water from all subliming away."

"Actually, my guess is that it's at least half the stuff that's left after it's done a lot of subliming away—the dirt and so on, plus whatever's accreted on the surface since," Larry put in. "Wouldn't be surprised if Ceres used to be a few kilometers bigger and had an ice surface, then lost it over billions of years. Sort of a very, very slow-motion comet."

"Anyway," Jake resumed, "they set up and started doing a lot of excavation. It looks to me like they were pretty clear what they intended to do from the start. There are signs that expansion of the underground areas was essentially constantly ongoing. The bioengineering labs were actually laid out a long time beforehand, but not equipped and used until a lot later. Jackie looked over a lot of the things we found in some of the other chambers, and she thinks that a large amount of their engineering was going into making something to melt the ice."

Bruce sat up suddenly. "That'd take one bloody lot of power, mate."

Jackie nodded. "And there's a lot of machines down there that might be generators. It'll be a long time before I'm sure, but . . . we might finally be able to say fusion power is less than twenty years away and mean it."

"Hot damn!" A.J. said. "That'd pay for this little junket, all right."

"They'd been working on that area for a pretty long time—must have been years—before the war hit. The bioengineering labs had only been going for a considerably shorter time."

"They managed some impressive work in that time, too," Larry said. "According to some scans I had A.J. run in the critical underground areas, I think they managed to liquify something close to a cubic mile, as well as several much smaller volumes, and were using them as a testing ground for the products of the labs."

"Were they working just on what we might call 'lower' lifeforms, or were they engineering themselves, too?" A.J. asked Helen.

"The labs we've found so far seem to have been working only on things ranging from microscopic to, oh, maybe the equivalent of fish. But I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually intended to make modified versions of themselves. It's one of the obvious ways to colonize." Helen looked abstracted. "Some of the modifications are interesting. There's a whole class of creatures that appear to be adapted to sessile forms from forms that were not originally sessile. It's going to take a lot of biologists to figure out exactly what they were doing, but this is a bonanza for us. We may be able to derive a significant portion of their genome from all this material. They're not using DNA or RNA as we know them, exactly, but they have similar self-replicating molecular blueprints, and the work they were doing here indicates they understood that blueprint very, very well."

"Sounds like we've got a fair dinkum of a report to send back home. Anything else?"

"Jackie and me found what looks like another ship or shuttle bay," A.J. said. "There's something in there, all right, but I'm still trying to figure out what. I mean, it's got to be a ship of some kind, but it's not the same as the model we found on Mars, or the damaged whatever-they-weres on Phobos. Once I get done I'll be sending the data to Joe and the others to see what they can get out of it."

He looked annoyed. "What's the problem, A.J.?" Helen asked, knowing that look of frustration.

He shook his head. "I think . . . there's something almost
familiar
about the damn thing, but I can't quite put my finger on it."

She laughed. "Don't worry about it. If you stop trying to remember it, maybe it'll come to you. Anyway, Bruce, Jake, and I will finish up a report—Jackie will provide the tech appendices—and you can encrypt it and send it off to the IRI and Ares."

"Great!" Bruce gave a wide grin. "Tell you what—everyone's got shore leave for a day after that."

They stared at him wryly. "We're already
on
the shore, if that's what you want to call it."

"Oh, right then. How about just celebratin' with an extra Joe dinner all around?"

"Now
there's
a treat, Captain!" Helen said, grinning back. Joe Buckley's spacegoing cuisine, suitably enhanced by Maddie's input, had become the standard for good food in space. Given that the other spacefaring nations were adopting his menus, Helen suspected that Joe was probably starting to see some considerable income from the use of his processes and recipes. One couldn't carry only "Joe" dinners for supplies, though, so they tended to be kept for special occasions and perhaps once or twice a week, like old-fashioned Sunday dinner.

"With that as motivation, I'll get this report finished today," Jake concurred. "Jackie?"

"The technical appendix is almost done. So start thawing out the Lobster Supreme—I'm hungry!"

"Righto," Bruce said. "Now, you blokes know I have to take
Nobel
back real soon—like as soon as we've topped off her tanks?"

"Yes, we do," Helen said, glancing at the others to make sure they all remembered. "Who's going? You and Jackie, I know."

"I am." That came from Tim Edwards, another of the original
Nike
crew who'd become a part of the IRI as a technician and all-around handyman. He formed part of the semipermanent crew of
Nobel
.

Josh Saddler raised his hand. "I'm going, too." Josh was the youngest of the group to visit Ceres, an environmental engineer with an artistic bent who kept an eye on the life-support systems both here in the Ceres base and on
Nobel
. His decorative wall paintings also tended to brighten any place he visited, and were always signed with a cartoonish sketched face of the type that A.J. called "bishonen" ("pretty boy"). The image was appropriate, Helen thought. Josh looked something like A.J. had when he was twenty-five (and to be fair to her husband, he still looked rather like that).

A couple of others acknowledged that they'd be going. "Still . . . that's going to be quite a few months knocking around that ship mostly alone. And we'll be pretty thin around here, too."

"Can't be helped, mate. The IRI needs us back home, an' I can't run the Tuna Wheel by my lonesome." Jackie tried to kick him under the table, which he managed to avoid. "Besides, you'll need me to go out an' bring you some more helpers, right?"

"That would be a good thing. And other replacement luxuries, for sure."

"Then just look at it as a chance to get shut of my Strine for a while," he said, grinning.

Helen and the others laughed. "Hell, that's one of the things we'll miss," she said. They knew that Bruce deliberately exaggerated his dialect, but that was part of the fun.

" 'Strewth. You blokes just need to learn how to sling the lingo."

"No," A.J. said, "there's something just not the same. I wouldn't hang a faked da Vinci on the wall, and a phony Aussie just won't cut it, either."

Bruce blinked and then chortled. "Well, I'll be blowed. Never thought I'd be compared to a priceless piece of art."

"Well," A.J. said with that sideways grin that showed he'd gotten the response he wanted, "you certainly are a piece of work, anyway."

"Ouch. Now I know why I'm leavin', mate. In fact, I think I'd better go right now. And I'm takin' all the Joe Dinners with me."

Helen and Jackie gasped in mock horror. "Someone block the exits!"

NEBULA STORM