Riddled Space Read online

  “I wanted to talk with you first, sir, before I approached the rest of the men. No use getting their hopes up.” He was calming down, reverting to his normal taciturn mien. “A small pilot project, using only the aluminum and iron produced from the works. Be a good start.”

  Lee thought for a minute, gazing at the framed image of the moon hanging on the wall of his office. “A full plant?”

  “Maybe more,” added McCrary. “Moon's got KREEP terranes, thorium deposits. If we can bootstrap this once, we can do it twice. Mining the Procellarium for rare earth elements would more than pay for us.”

  His head in a whirl, Lee sat down. “Send me a proposal, but let's get The Works up and running first.”

  If. If we could not just survive, but thrive? Subby would have to eat his words for once. We could be on par with Chaffee, rather than a parasite. McCrary's got some good ideas, but he's also cautious. The man won't promise something he can't deliver.

  Lee stared at the smooth rock on his desk, willing serenity into his excited mind. The Commander must project calm at all times. Calm was a long time arriving.

  Speaker to Bolts

  UNSOC Space Station Roger B. Chaffee, August 7 2080, 2000 hrs

  Panjar tapped lightly on the bulkhead outside the Chief Engineer's Office. John, his eyes roaming over the Engineer Status monitors, looked over.

  “Panjar! What brings you here?”

  Panjar floated into the office and cocked his head to the right. “Chief, with your permission, I'd like to check out Lucy. She's sounding kinda grumpy.”

  John ran through his mental files, trying to remember what bit of machinery Panjar had named Lucy. “Sorry, Panjar, I don't recall Lucy.”

  The slight, humble Indonesian nodded. “I understand. Lucy is the general air handler for the Engineer cubic.”

  John nodded. “I see. Now that you mention it, there has been a bit of subsonic thundering lately.”

  “I think she needs a little conditioning on her seals.”

  “Go ahead. Just let us know beforehand. If you shut Lucy down, we're going to have to set up some kind of fan arrangement or we'll smother in our own exhaust. Why the name Lucy, anyway?”

  Panjar turned a deeper shade of brown. “I, ah, once watched one of your American shows from a hundred years ago. A woman named Lucy was trying to work at some kind of candy factory and kept eating the candy and falling behind. Our Lucy is trying to service the demands of engineers, who are always fiddling with the thermostats in their compartments. Sometimes she, too, falls behind.”

  John cudgeled his brain. Lucy…Lucy…wait—Lucille Ball? He burst out laughing. “I saw the same thing, oh, had to be thirty-five years ago!” He wiped his eyes. “Ahhhh. Well. You didn't come here to talk about the air handler, did you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Panjar, call me John,” Hodges said.

  “It wouldn't be right, sir,” said Panjar, who was very conscious of rank, official or otherwise. “Sir, I came to ask you if I could conduct an experiment.”

  John gave the monitors one careful look, then spun his body to face Panjar. “What did you have in mind?”

  “Sir, we get Mooncans a lot. Sometimes, we have things to ship to the Moon. That's where the Orbital Transfer Vehicle comes in. But sometimes, we have to wait weeks before it's worth sending Betsy to the Moon because of the fuel requirements.”

  “You're thinking of sending Mooncans back? Those little 'sparkler' retrorockets don't have the necessary energy to fly to the Moon without taking weeks just to get there. They also don't have the fuel to make the landing.” John resisted the urge to pull up a study that he and a few UNSOC engineers had been working on that confirmed his assessment.

  “Forgive me sir, but you may have overlooked something.”

  “Really.” John was getting tired of this roundabout conversation. “Panjar, I've got a lot on my plate today. Can we cut out all the polite parts and just get to the nitty-gritty? What do you want to do?”

  Panjar looked a little hurt, but plowed on. “I would like to take the motors out of three Mooncans and cluster them. I believe that should be enough to soft-land one loaded Mooncan on the Lunar surface, if that's the only burn the motors have to perform.”

  “Maybe,” admitted John. “There's still the problem of getting them there. How do you plan to do that?”

  “I want to use a tether, sir.”

  John looked at him for a moment. “Tethers? Didn't they have all kinds of problems with them back in the days of the Space Shuttle? NASA shelved the idea and it was never revived.”

  “That's because they didn't have Roque and microgravity, sir. I, ah, approached him the other day and asked him if he could grow single-crystal iron fibers and, if so, how long he could make them. He laughed and said he could make them as long as we want.”

  John considered. Single-crystal iron, SCFe, was one of the strongest materials known and was once a candidate for the cable on an orbital elevator. Then came carbon nanotubes, and SCFe had languished in obscurity for decades.

  “Why iron?” John asked. “Wouldn't you rather have carbon nanotube fiber?”

  “No, sir. You see, the tether must also be electrically conductive.”

  John peered at Panjar. “That's a dangerous game, Panjar. Ever see what happens outside when we get a burst of solar wind?”

  Panjar nodded rapidly, setting his whole body to oscillating up and down in freefall. “Yes, yes, I know. I got the idea when I heard Molly snapping and popping during the last solar storm.”

  John refused to ask what Molly was. “I assume you fixed her grounding circuits.”

  Panjar smiled. “It was when I saw the arc damage that I thought of a tether. You see...”

  John held up his hand. “Just tell me why the tether has to be conductive.”

  “To keep the Chaffee at the same altitude in the sky, sir. I am presuming you don't want UNSOC to know what we're doing.”

  “Probably not or they'd forbid us from doing it again. But how do you keep us at the same altitude? Wait. Wait. I think I see what you've got in mind. Pump electricity into the tether itself, making it push against the Earth's magnetic field?”

  Panjar looked ecstatic. “Exactly! It's so elegant!”

  John scanned the board once more, then looked at the watch schedule, reaching for his commpad. “I'm going to have to hear all of this, from the top, and I can't do this while worrying about the blinky lights. Carstairs? You're on watch, right? I've got to drop offline here. Keep an eye on the Engineer Status board, would ya? Be back in a few. Thanks!” John locked his screens and unbelted from his perch.

  “Panjar, I know you would never come to me without every detail worked out. So, let's get to a conference cubic, and I'll go over this with you. I have the feeling that we'll want to send Collins some trade their way for once.”

  The problem was basic, as most difficult problems are. The Moon could easily send items to Low Earth Orbit, where the Chaffee was, using a magnet launcher anchored to the Moon. But the Chaffee couldn't use anything but rockets to send anything to the Moon. And rockets were bright and noticeable and attracted questions from UNSOC.

  The Moon's solution was simple and straightforward. When UNSOC built the Collins base, they also laid out a series of electromagnets in a straight line on the Lunar surface. The MoonCans, made of iron, lay on an aluminum rail that passed through the electromagnets. The first electromagnet was energized, pulling the Mooncan towards it. Just before it got there, the drive computer turned the juice off for the first magnet, and turned on the second one. Then the third, and so forth. By varying the electricity pumped into the magnets, the Lineac, as it was officially known, would send the MoonCans into precisely determined orbits to end up at the Chaffee. Small motors on the MoonCans took care of any final nudges needed to rendezvous with the space station.

  The Chaffee's problem was far more difficult. To send anything anywhere, the Chaffee's engineers needed a rocket. Rockets needed
fuel and oxidizer, shipped up from Earth. Or, they had to vaporize the LOX painfully baked out of Lunar soil by the Moondogs in the Collins. Neither was a satisfactory solution, especially as the commanders of the two installations had some shipments they didn't want UNSOC to know about.

  If Panjar could figure out a way to slingshot cargo to the Moon, then two-way trade with the Collins and the Chaffee could finally happen.

  In the end, it was too big a test for John Hodges to perform without the approval of the commander. He had to wait for Lisa Daniels to fly up to the Chaffee and officially take command.

  Panjar understood the reason for the delay, and went back to caring for Lucy and Molly and all of the other machinery that he had named and counted amongst his friends.

  New Commander, Same Problems

  UNSOC Space Station Roger B. Chaffee, September 24 2080, 0900 hrs

  “Attention on deck!”

  The hatch opened, and for the observers at the airlock, it almost seemed like Lisa Daniels teleported herself from the interior of the shuttle to a position of near attention, magnetic boots clinging to the ferro-aluminum deck plate with the slightest of clicks. She unlocked and opened her visor.

  “Welcome aboard, Commander Daniels!” said John Hodges. He assayed a decent salute, which she crisply returned. He waited for her to undog her helmet and remove it. He remained at attention and addressed her in the standard formula adopted by the UN Military.

  “You have been appointed to command the UNSOC Space Station Roger B. Chaffee. Do you accept?” he intoned. What a load of crap. If she hadn't accepted, they never would have flown her up here.

  “I do,” she replied.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Commander Lisa Daniels!”

  The attendees gave her a smattering of applause.

  “At ease,” she called. “For God's sake, let's clear this compartment to let the rest of the folks out! We'll figure out some kind of reception later, okay?” People started floating away now that the show was over. Lisa leaned in. “John, if you have a minute, walk with me to the Commander's Office.” She reached down, turned off her magnetic boots, then expertly floated off towards her office.

  The corridor outside her office was somewhat cramped with the head of every department, as well as every major tenant, all there to see the new commander. John was firm but gentle in moving some of the civilians out of the way to allow Lisa to get to her office.

  “Folks, please,” he called. “Let Commander Daniels through.”

  The press of bodies parted, somewhat reluctantly, to allow her passage, but closed up behind her and pushed towards the office.

  When Lisa reached the cubic, she turned to address the crowd. “People! I know losing Commander Holt was a shock, and you've been treading water until UNSOC sent me up. Each one of you must be bursting with urgent business. I will get to everyone, senior staff first, then vendors, then department heads. Senior staff consists of Engineering, Astrogation, Operations, and Commissary. Let me get this spacesuit off, and the first meeting with senior staff will be at the top of the hour. Thank you for the welcome, but there's a lot of work to do, and I best get to it.”

  ***

  “It's good to see you again, Commander,” said John while the crowd dispersed. “Here, let me take those.” He filled her helmet with her gauntlets and stuck it on the Velcro patch near the hatch. He kept his back turned, his body filling the doorway, while she worked her way down to her copper and silver threaded tights and donned a generic coverall that he had placed on her perch.

  “You can turn around now, John. I'm decent. Thank you.”

  He turned to see her smiling at him, holding out her hand. He gripped her hand and shook it carefully. It wouldn't do to throw your commander into a bulkhead on the first day.

  “I wish I could hug you, like the old days, John. Command's different, though.”

  “I know,” he said. “Three weeks is enough for me! Everyone wants a piece of you, and the nagging, the stupid crap...” He stopped when Lisa held up her hand.

  “You no longer have to worry about that. First, though, even before I convene the senior staff, what's the number one problem up here?”

  John looked all around the office, touching his ears and mouth. Lisa nodded.

  “Right now, the problem is LOX. We're on maximum recycle, and we don't have much margin for error until the new shipments from the Collins arrive. Their tanks are deep underground, Commander Jeng and I decided it's better to store LOX there than here. We have about a two-month’s supply on-board, but some of the manufacturing processes require their own dedicated supply. We've had to loan them LOX from the main breathing bank on occasion, and I'd like to stop doing that. UNSOC gave us standing orders, right around when Holt retired, that nothing gets in the way of production.” He frowned, rotated his hand in a vertical circle like a clockhand, then did the eyes and ears touching again.

  Lisa gave him a thumbs up, then gave him the 'let your fingers do the walking' sign to understand that he had more to say, but would not do it here.

  “Well, I think we're getting close to the top of the hour. Shall we meet with the senior staff?”

  ***

  Lisa got similar reports from her senior staff. The worst problems were things already known to UNSOC—they were safe, solvable, predictable. When she met with them in the noisier parts of the ship, she got a true view of the state of the Chaffee. Nothing serious, but nothing that she could blow off, either.

  She looked in on the hydroponics setup with John Hodges.

  “My goodness,” she said. “I remember when we were just growing algae in helium tanks. I am not kidding—we once salvaged the high-pressure helium bottles from all of the drop tanks the shuttles used. Stuck in a LED strip for lighting, and ran the airco return flow through them. The scientists on the ground thought all the air contaminants like ketones and aldehydes would dissolve in the water, get taken up by the algae, and huzzah, April-fresh air comes burbling out.”

  “Morons,” said John. “That stuff, in enough concentration, would kill the algae. Besides, I bet they thought that bubbling air is simple in free fall.”

  “It was a disaster. Oh, after a while we got the hang of it, but it was never any better, and in many ways, a lot worse, than just running the air through charcoal filters, as much of a pain in the butt that is. Still, I am pleased at how well the Chaffee has been coming along.” She raised her eyebrows at John, who nodded. They were in the clear in a presumably unbugged area of the station.

  “Damn, I've missed you, John Hodges,” she said, giving him a hug. “I hope you enjoyed it, it's the last one you'll get from me.”

  “I missed you too, Lisa. How's the family?”

  “Shep's wonderful, as usual. I just can't figure him out. I'm never around, yet he's always cheerful, even when I get jerked back to New York on UNSOC business. The kids are growing like weeds. How's Tyra and the kids?”

  “Oh, fine, fine,” John lied. He just didn't want to get into it at the moment. “College coming up. I'm glad Holt promoted me, I needed the extra coin to make tuition.”

  Lisa smiled. “Okay, now that we've got that out of the way, what's really screwed up in Engineering?”

  Not much, as it turned out. McCrary made the Chaffee run like a top. Hodges was more than competent enough to keep it in top form. He spent time discussing Panjar's experiment in detail.

  “So, if we work it right, Lisa, we can slingshot a Mooncan back at the Moon while losing zero altitude.”

  “Okay, so why haven't you done it yet? Why wait for me to come aboard?” A tiny frown line formed between her two eyebrows.

  “We have to get Roque to create, spin, and spool about three hundred kilometers of single-crystal iron fiber rope. The other problem is a bit more esoteric. When we unwind the tether, it will affect the position of this station in space. We will probably begin to rotate in reference to the fixed stars. If that happens, we'll experience differential microgravity on some
parts of the station. If the tether breaks, we could have catastrophic whiplash if the tether comes back and slices through the station.”

  “Sounds dangerous,” said Lisa. “If this is so risky, why even ask me? You must have some way of minimizing the risk if you're bracing me to approve it.”

  John chuckled. “We've been working together too long. I don't think we need the full three-hundred-kilometer tether, for instance. We can get by with less. What I do need you to do is approve Roque taking one of the iron Mooncans and making it into a tether. Next, Panjar and I have to do some serious math with UNSOC on the ground. You know what's going on downstairs better than I do. Can you give me a name and a method to get our math checked without Subby being the wiser? Finally, we've not even talked with the Collins about this. They need to know and approve before we even put the tether outside.”

  Lisa smiled. “No problem. Even if we never use the tether to sling Mooncans, I am sure that Roque will find a way to use it for something else. I've got a call with Lee later today. And I'll give you a way to talk with UNSOC on the sly.”

  John nodded, relieved. “Thanks, Commander. I better let you get going, before rumors spread about us being locked in here.”

  “Some people have too much time on their hands,” Lisa grumbled. “Take care, Chief. I'll see you around.”

  ***

  “Encrypted link established, Ma'am. Awaiting Commander Jeng.”

  Lisa looked over to the photophone link to the Moon. She adjusted her throat mike for optimal clarity. The fiber optic line hung in the air as it trailed from her office to the input jack of the communications laser pointed directly at the Moon. The screen showed a waiting pattern—essentially a panning camera over The Works. Moondogs were wrestling with components throughout the surface-mounted industrial site.

  Poor Angus. And his poor wife. I sure hope I don't have to do any Commanding Officer calls to someone on the ground, telling them that their loved one has died up in space.

  The screen showed some breakup and buffering before it settled on the calm face of Jeng Wo Lee, Commander of Moonbase Collins. By standard delayed broadcast convention, the calling party opened the conversation.