Singularity's Ring (10 page)
Read Singularity's Ring Online
Authors: Paul Melko
“Tango-Five-Five, do you have your mark? Apollo, how are you doing?”
The voice was Aldo’s. I tuned him out. Of course I had the mark, ten minutes ago. We’d spent three days with our sled latched to Aldo’s clearing the local area of spider heads. Spider heads were all that remained after a spider had woven its life away building a few hundred meters of diamond line: the last state in a spider’s short life. If Dr. Buchanan could have designed them to burn themselves up in the atmosphere, he would have. As it was, someone had to go fetch them before they became a hazard to navigation. It was not the most prestigious of jobs.
Spiders had built the cable in geosynch, not far from the station. The gene-modded arachnids spun a line of diamond thread, cannibalizing their bodies as they weaved. They worked in multiples of three, building ten meters of cable each before expiring and leaving their heads dangling from the thread, where they could be collected by us. Every tool, device, and body was accounted for in space. Debris in orbit was death for accelerating craft.
Meda toggled the mic and said, “Tango-Five-Five: Yes, Aldo.” Her exasperation was all of ours. The mark was our spot on the cable. As we glided toward it, three other sleds were as well. Ours was one up from the bottommost.
“Just checking, Apollo.”
Hold on,
I sent.
I sent.
My podmates clutched handholds as the sled tilted. I glided the sled past the wire, then spun us around it as I damped rotational and orthogonal speed with a double flick of the thrusters.
“Careful, Apollo. The sled can slice the wire.” I ignored the radio; it was amplitude with no vector.
The sled stopped within ten centimeters of the wire. After days being latched to Aldo’s sled it had taken me just a few minutes to understand the dynamics of the sled by itself.
Show-off,
Meda sent.
Meda sent.
No,
I replied.
This is what I do.
I replied.
This is what I do.
We all have our talents. We are five that is one, a human composite, a pod. We had been built to a purpose two decades before, each of us designed to lend a strength to the whole. I was the specialized part that understood the Newtonian laws and mathematics intuitively, just as Meda was our voice, Moira our conscience, Strom our strength, and Manuel our hands. On Earth, my skills were muted.
Manuel glanced up at the nearest sled. The space hound was tapping the thruster, oscillating toward the wire from ten meters off. Strom rotated a camera toward Aldo maneuvering closer to the base mark, one of his sled’s hooked claws extended.
“Tango-One-Zero, taking the mark.”
Aldo’s claw slid through the ring and clamped shut.
“Tango-Five-Five, take your mark.”
Manuel slipped the fingers of his right hand into the hook controls. The claw slid forward, as if it were Manuel’s own fingers, and grabbed the ring. He ratcheted the claw down until the grip was tight. My hand trailed across Manuel’s left wrist, catching the feel of the claw, the strength and fluidity of the mechanical extension.
“Got it,” Meda said into the radio.
Above them Klada Ross and Flora Julet took their marks and radioed their status. Aldo’s sled would do half the heavy thrusting. We and Klada would dampen any oscillations in the wire. Flora would keep the wire taut and stop us as we neared the station.
“Tango-One-Zero, thrusting.”
A bump of acceleration as the cable pulled us down. The station was below us, toward the Earth, and antispin-ward. The pull of a higher orbit had slowly drawn the cable away, stretching it as the spiders did their slow work. Each of Columbus Station’s tethers grew twenty kilometers at a time as the spiders completed a section and the space dogs wrangled it into place. This section was destined for the Earth-bound cable. Slowly, piece by piece, the station would lower the inner cable down until it kissed the Earth, just as the final counterweight was latched to the far end. The total length was 62,000 kilometers: 42,000 to Earth and 20,000 past geosynch, where the speed of the daily rotation pulled everything away from the Earth at a quarter-gee.
The grip was loose and the sled tilted toward the cable. I touched the jets, righted the sled to avoid tangling. Then I applied another small spurt to keep the line taut.
“Tango-One-Zero, thrusting.”
Aldo was using more impulse to move the cable a little faster. Once we got halfway to the station, Flora Julet would apply the same thrust and bring the cable to rest relative to the cable joint it was to be connected to. Then Aldo would fasten the new section to the station cable, allowing the cable master to lower the cable another twenty kilometers. We had an hour before we reached the station.
Strom called up our orbital mechanics class notes; we were taking the class via desktop at the Institute. Until Columbus Station’s cable touched Earth, it was impossible to commute unless we traveled half the Earth to Sabah Station
and then from Borneo to North America. But that was fine with me; the more time we were in space, the better.
and then from Borneo to North America. But that was fine with me; the more time we were in space, the better.
I barely paid attention to my pod as they passed the notes between them in chemical memory. I stored some by habit, but the written equations were nothing to the lines of force embedded in my genes. Though I could share my thoughts with my pod, they could never see the universe the way I did. Separate, yet one.
“You guys are doing all right for a bunch of spider-head hunters,” Klada Ross said, his voice tinny over the private channel between us.
Irritation boiled among us, but Meda replied in a measured tone. “This could all be done by robot,” she said. “It’s hardly necessary for all four of us to be out here.”
“Well, groundling, you never know what’s going to happen up here. This isn’t like picking up spider heads.”
You belittled his job,
Moira sent.
Apologize.
Moira sent.
Apologize.
Meda glared at her twin sister, but nodded.
“You’re right, Klada. I wasn’t thinking it through.”
“Yeah, sometimes three heads are better than five.” Again I smelled the frustration in the space of the sled. Since we had arrived at the station, our order of five had been a point of contention. We’d been given the biggest sled, the biggest room, more emergency suits, more space, and the regular space hound trios had resented it. No one seemed willing to accept us as another hand; we couldn’t get past being a quintet with no skills.
Do you blame them? We’re encroaching.
We’re here to help.
They didn’t ask for it.
I stayed out of the consensus, doing nothing more than keeping touch with Manuel and Meda, letting the thoughts course through me. People were chaotic forces, unknown perturbations.
We have to be strong.
Push back.
“I guess three heads are better for station work,” Meda said.
Klada didn’t respond at first, then said, “You keep thinking that when you’re out there in the great beyond, Captain.”
Too strong,
Strom sent.
Strom sent.
Seven weeks to go.
The sun caught the cable, and for a moment, we saw it descending down toward the surface, skirting the Ring and reaching toward the ground anchor. The abandoned Ring itself stood in our way, a blockade of space that we had to avoid carefully in all our comings and goings to space. The Columbus Station cable actually bowed as it passed within a kilometer to the starboard of the Ring.
Aldo’s voice came over the general frequency: “Flora, get ready to thrust.”
“Roger.”
The rest of the pod looked up for the puff of reaction gas, but I kept my hand on the controls. I would feel the thrust in the cable before they saw the frozen gas from Flora’s sled.
There it was, a tickle on the cable.
Wrong.
The force wasn’t what it should have been: jagged, not smooth.
“Aldo—”
Flora’s voice cut off and the cable went taut. The sled accelerated up. Then the line went loose again. I thrust back, keeping the line tight between Aldo and Klada. The image of Flora’s sled drifted to me, and I saw it spinning madly. Thruster malfunction. The speed of the turning meant Flora was under extreme gee-forces within the sled. She had jettisoned the cable quickly, smart thinking. Otherwise the cable might have wrapped around her like
cotton candy. The section of cable she had been hauling was slowly tumbling toward Klada.
cotton candy. The section of cable she had been hauling was slowly tumbling toward Klada.
Flora was drifting away, faster and faster, accelerating. I calculated her acceleration and realized she was flying on a trajectory far beyond the range of any rescue from the station.
I touched Manuel’s wrist, and thought coursed through us.
Too far for a rescue from Columbus Station in fifty seconds.
Too far for a rescue from us in three minutes.
We can reach her and get back to the station.
Our sled has more reaction mass. It’s bigger.
Klada and Aldo can handle the line.
We need to go now.
Go.
Manuel dropped the cable, and I accelerated the sled. I saw in a second the path that would intersect Flora’s sled. I saw the shortest arc, the least reaction mass that would get us there.
“Apollo! What are you doing?”
Ignore,
said Meda. There was no time for gathering permissions.
said Meda. There was no time for gathering permissions.
The pod was focused on me. I set them to task; they were extensions of myself which was in turn an extension of the sled. Manuel stood ready at the second claw. Moira watched Flora’s sled. Strom started handing out helmets and doing safety checks on the suits. Meda watched the panels, especially our fuel gauge. Each second was so much reaction mass lost to space.
“Apollo! Do you have a malfunction too?”
I felt Meda’s anger at the misunderstanding.
She toggled the radio. “No! We’re saving Flora!”
“Get back here! We can’t have two stranded sleds!”
Meda flicked the radio off.
Flora is trying to correct the sled,
Moira sent.
Moira sent.
I looked away from the controls for a second, saw that Flora was using her other maneuvering thrusters to compensate for the wild force of the malfunctioning one. But her timing was too slow, off by a second again and again, and the sled was moving farther away as she did it.
I recomputed her trajectory, saw how close we were to not having enough impulse to return to Columbus Station. I spread the problem before us in physics shorthand.
We paused to consider.
Continue on,
Meda said.
Meda said.
Agreed.
Fast consensus, urged ahead by the precarious nature of Flora’s situation. No one at Columbus Station was close enough to save her now but us.
Fast consensus, urged ahead by the precarious nature of Flora’s situation. No one at Columbus Station was close enough to save her now but us.
Seconds ticked on.
Her reaction mass is gone,
Meda reported.
Meda reported.
That meant her velocity was fixed, save for the force of her orbit. As she had shot toward the zenith and spinward, away from Earth, the centripetal force had increased and was pulling her farther and farther away. The orbit was unstable and Flora’s sled would accelerate beyond the moon and back again, in a bizarre dance, but not before she had long since died of hunger or asphyxiation. We had to catch her now.
I added a modicum of thrust. Twenty seconds until we would reach her.
Ten. The sled was looming above us, still spinning wildly, silently.
Get ready. Expect motion, maybe enough to get you sick,
I sent.
I sent.
I aimed our sled at the edge of the spinning top, damped our speed to zero relative to the outer edge spin, and tapped Flora’s sled with our claw.
Manuel latched on.
I slammed against the console. For a moment, all was black, and all I could smell was the confusion pheromone.
But then my vision began to clear. The disorientation fled into chaotic lines of force. Through the sounds of retching and the smell of vomit, the lines began to unravel. I started applying thrust: touch, touch, touch, to counter the wild gyrations.
But then my vision began to clear. The disorientation fled into chaotic lines of force. Through the sounds of retching and the smell of vomit, the lines began to unravel. I started applying thrust: touch, touch, touch, to counter the wild gyrations.
“Keep the claw tight!” I screamed at Manuel, but Manuel had let go of the claw, one hand clutching at the bulkhead, one at the straps of his seat belt, uselessly trying to steady himself.
With a loose coupling, it was harder to correct the spinning. I was using too much reaction mass.
Manuel, the claw has to be tight!
“I can’t!”
I couldn’t control both the sled and the claw. Manuel had to tighten the grip.
I built an image of the forces for Manuel, for the pod, a three-dimensional image of where we were, and how close we were to flying into empty space. Death by asphyxiation.
We need to tighten the claw’s grip,
I sent, as I passed the image around.
I sent, as I passed the image around.
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