A Princess of the Aerie (27 page)

Anything that it didn’t currently pay to smelt went off the tunable-matter plates and into the heavy slag that Dujuv was pumping
down. (Because they were mainly extracting light elements today, the residue was much heavier than the raw stuff coming out
of the ground.)

An hour went by, and the only event of any interest was a spike of molybdenum in the mix. Per instructions, Jak reset three
plates to capture moly instead of nitrogen. This was a matter of pointing at options on a screen, and took less than a minute,
but at least it felt like work. Jak watched as the newly assigned plates began their too-fast-to-see do-si-do in and out of
the flowing magma, each exiting plate wiping off two kilograms of moly dust onto the rollers—nothing like the tonnes of aluminum
and oxygen shuffling out, or the dozens of kilograms of nitrogen, but still, according to the rolling util meter, every forty
seconds the quacco was earning the price of a big sack of potatoes.

Kyffimna came back shortly after to ask, “How’s it all going?”

“Dull but fine,” Jak said.

“Dull
is
fine.”

“Can you stand another stupid question?”

“I live for ’em.”

“Well, then why don’t you just split up all the rock you run through? The tunable-matter plates can extract any kind of atom,
and every atom is salable at
some
price, right, even if you aren’t going to get much for it.”

Kyffimna chuckled. “How many years of school have you had?”

“Uh, four years dev school, eight years gen school, and two years at the Academy—uh, fourteen.”

“At least they taught you to add. Must’ve skipped some economics. A plate can only extract one element at a time. If a plate
is extracting something cheap, like silicon, so that it passes up extracting something valuable, like thorium, you lose money.
You want to get all you can of the highest-priced stuff, so you take that out first and allocate as many plates as it takes
to get it all. Then you extract the most valuable stuff that’s left in the slag, then the most valuable after that, and sooner
or later you’re down to something marginal that you don’t take all of.”

“But there’s stuff like gold and uranium in there—not much, but the NMR shows it.”

“A plate doesn’t cycle till it’s full, and you have to have enough of whatever you’re extracting in there to support at least
two cycles per second or you run the risk of cooking the plate in the heat.”

Jak looked again at the immense tank, half the size of a soccer field, and the blur of plates flying in and out of it. “Not
a dumb question this time, I hope. I bet there are a lot of accidents around anything that big, moving that fast.”

“Not dumb at all, and the answer is yes. Don’t be one of them. Precesses the hell out of your pizos and their production goes
way down for days afterwards. Not to mention that if there’s anything left of you the rest of us have to clean it up.”

Jak shuddered, then realized. “And I see what they meant in all those songs about getting slagged. That molten rock would
dissolve anything in a pressure suit, and the suit itself, masen? You’d end up in solution in it.”

“Sort of. First suit cooling would fail, then the temp would go way up inside so you’d, um, steam, basically, in your own
juices—half a minute to turn you into Jak au Jus—then in another minute the suit would rupture.”

She wandered off to talk with Dujuv. Jak noticed that it was much, much easier to concentrate on his job than it had been.
The blur of the separator plates continued, and the flow of molten rock never slowed.

She spent a while with Dujuv, and then with Shadow, and seemed happy enough with both. Before going, she stopped by Jak again
and said, “You all are doing fine as far as I can see. I’ll stop by at the end of the shift and see how things are going,
and just look over your shoulder while you walk through shutdown, but that’s pretty much a formality. Pop wants to have another
little talk tonight, he and some other older heets think they have some ideas. You haven’t heard from your uncle yet?”

“No, which is unusual. Usually when I ask that heet to talk, I don’t get another word in for hours. And I’ve never known him
to be at a loss for an idea.” Jak added mentally,
as long as quality of the idea is not an issue.

“All right.” She seemed to be about to get back into the little five-wheeler and take off, but then she said, “Uh, can I ask
you something?”

“Sure.”

“Um, your friend Dujuv. Does he have a demmy?”

“He’s kind of, well, carrying a torch for someone, but she’s been all done with him for a long time,” Jak said, figuring the
truth would be the simplest.

“Oh. And, uh … what does he like?”

“Well, I’ve known him a long time,” Jak said, “and, uh—most of his demmies are kind of tiny. Little bitty girls, all of them.”

“Oh.” Kyffimna sounded very sad. “He’s a really nice heet. I was … oh, weehu, Jak, I’m no good at the discreet stuff. Of course
I was sounding you out—”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

She laughed and swatted his arm; it was like being batted playfully by a gorilla. “Well, anyway, I was just wondering if he
was slow to pick up a hint or something, or if he was mad because of some of the stupid things I said. I mean, I know you
all won’t be here long. Just … while you’re here … you know, he’s good-looking and he’s one toktru nice heet.”

“He’s about as good as they make,” Jak agreed, not sure what else to add, or whether that was just making it worse. “I don’t
like to carry bad news, but he’s pretty good about hints and things. I speck he probably got it. Probably it’s not anything
you said, though, if that helps you feel better. Masen?”

“Toktru masen. You’re blunt, Jak, but I needed it. Thanks.” She got on the five-wheeler and drove away.

At lunch break, as they ate in the cabin of the five-wheeler, Jak recounted the whole conversation to Dujuv, specking he’d
think it was funny that the big, strange-looking girl had taken such an interest in him.

After listening, Dujuv shook his head, wiped more sweat from his hairless scalp with a rag, and took another bite of his sandwich.
“Jak, you didn’t have to be
that
blunt with her, it probably hurt. And she’d have specked, eventually, pizo.”

“I’m just trying to help. I know she’s not attractive to you and you need to get some distance—”

“Jak, the only thing she’s done is like me. It’s not her fault that I don’t like her back the same way. It’s gonna hurt her
no matter what, and I’m sad enough about that without having you hurt her too.”

There was a crackle and bang overhead on the five-wheeler cab’s speakers. “Mayday, all channels, Northeast Caloris Territory,
Mayday, all channels. We’ve got a magma breakout in the southwest section of Crater Hamner, crew isolated from a vehicle and
in danger. All aid requested—”

“That’s over by the MLB facility on the opposite wall,” Durol Eldothaler’s voice said, in the speakers. “Move, people.”

Dujuv was at the controls in an instant; Shadow and Jak barely had time to belt in before the five-wheeler was spinning across
the waste country. Jak pulled off his suit glove and spoke directly to his purse. “Order everything into emergency shutdown
at the site we were working at,” he said. “I don’t know if we’ll be getting back there today, so shut down all the stuff that
was on standby for lunch.”

“Main separator chamber will be drained in ten minutes, shafts will be cleared in twenty minutes, and all above-surface slag
will be cooled in three hours. Subsurface magma may remain liquid for up to six days but is not estimated to pose a hazard.”

“Good.” Jak pressed the reward spot; his purse cheebled, indicating it felt rewarded and would try to do similar things in
the future. Then Jak pulled his glove, and then his gauntlet, back on over his purse. He looked around.

They were just passing the central pinnacle, joining a dozen other vehicles with Eldothaler Quacco insignia, all racing and
bouncing over the shattered, partly melted land. The combination of low gravity, loose light dust, and slick melted surfaces
meant that traction was sporadic and unpredictable. Dust flew away from the tractors in parabolic arcs, not sticking to itself
and unslowed by the air, a stream of tiny streaks like illustrations in a physics book. The five-, ten-, and fifteen-wheelers
bashed over the rough and lumpy ground, wheeled arms flying up and down as needed, sometimes skidding sideways or bounding
high on their legs like a hand flexing on a tabletop, sometimes running on only three legs with the other two raised high,
almost fastidiously, as if to step over a dirty spot. They were about halfway there.

Dujuv was on the com, getting directions, and he took a moment to say, “Helmets on and suit up. One of you do me, please.
We’ll probably have to pop the cabin open as soon as we get there. Sounds like they’re going to need lots of hands outside.”

Jak and Shadow closed suits and checked. Luckily, Dujuv had only removed his helmet and sweat cap to eat.

Still, the cab was about as stable as skateboarding on an airplane wing. Fitting the sweatcap onto Dujuv would have been easy
if covering his eyes or folding his ears down had been all right, and getting his earphones on would have been a cinch if
they had ignored his cries of “Ouch!” and “Careful!” Shadow and Jak really only struggled in getting his head into the helmet,
straight, with the helmet locked down. (It would have been easy enough if Dujuv’s skull had been soft and flexible.) As it
was, however, it was a challenge, and they were less than a minute from arrival when a green light in Dujuv’s heads-up display
told them that he was okay to step into vacuum.

From the top of the next rise, the jagged rock wall of the crater, like the brutally twisted lower jaw of some ancient leviathan,
lunged up over the horizon.

Dujuv stopped behind the other vehicles, saying “Go to general freq twenty-two, that’s what everyone’s using,” popped the
door on the cab, jumped out, and ran up the line of parked vehicles, Jak and Shadow racing after. Clearly their tove had heard
something during the drive here that precessed him pretty badly.

Over the next low rise, they found a lake of magma, at least four hundred meters across as they faced its narrow side, slightly
more than a kilometer long, glowing white everywhere with just occasional red and yellow scum at its very edges. Almost in
the center of the lake, at least 150 meters from shore, was a small island of still-bare ground, no more than twenty meters
across, and on it, two human figures standing as close to the center as they could manage. At first Jak thought he was seeing
them waver from the rising heat between him and them; then he realized that that doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The two workers
were weaving as if drunk; the cooling systems on their suits must be close to overload.

“Where are their cooling fins? And why aren’t they using their rocables?” Jak asked, barely aware that he had spoken aloud.

Kyffimna answered, moving next to him and putting her helmet against his, to talk via conduction so that valuable radio-cellular
communications channels could be kept open. “They don’t have any of either and MLB wouldn’t have given them to them. MLB goes
into Bigpile all the time and just grabs up drunks and druggers for day labor. If you don’t have equipment of your own, you
work without it—they’re
toktru
nonunion,” Kyffimna explained. “We’re going to try for a rescue, but we need a creeper bridge, and that’s coming as fast
as it can, from the Thomagatz Quacco, they had one and there was a big freight rocket available, so right now it’s all a race
against time.”

“Who’s winning?”

“Us, barely. That island is sinking because it’s melting; there’s no more magma coming in. So as the magma cools, the island
should sink slower and slower, and maybe not sink all the way at all. That ought to give us time enough—if everything else
goes perfect and those two heets can keep standing up and stay in the middle of that island. Especially with this many hands
on the job—creeper bridges are one of those things where the more people you have, the faster it goes. And the Thomagatzes
are sending along four experienced techs to supervise.”

“Who’s paying for this?”

“Us and the Thomagatzes, for right now. Then we’ll send MLB a bill, which they’ll fight in court, because the only courts
around here are private, and they’ll eventually get it into some court with some judge they can buy or threaten, and they
won’t pay. And you’ll notice we don’t have any workers from the MLB side out here helping; because this is going to be a little
scary and dangerous—we’ll all have to work less than three meters above the magma, and if you take a dive into that your name
is sizzle-sizzle-pop. So the MLB heets are, let’s say, being a little shy about coming out to join us. So we’re losing a pile
of money and risking our lives, masen? Dak it now? But—look at that white-hot shit, Jak. Think about what it would feel like
to cook in your suit like a potato in foil. We can’t leave two living people in the middle of a rising magma lake, without
trying. We’d have to look at ourselves in the mirror afterward. There’s things a lot worse than being broke, or dead.”

“Rocket coming in, clear the area, five-minute warning,” came over the general freq. Everyone hurried back to their vehicles
for shelter from the sodium exhaust.

Since the door was pointed opposite the landing point, they left it open and did not bother to pressurize the cabin for the
short wait. They saw the white flare overhead grow bigger and bigger, then clearly head for the field behind them. Jak looked
out from the cabin window and saw the silent shiny shower, a perfect parabola of millions of silvery dust motes, glinting
in the sun like a wispy steel rainbow, arcing down to spatter the ground around them. It was the sodium condensing out of
the exhaust.

In the vacuum, it was soundless, but Jak felt a heavy vibration for just a moment through his feet as the rocket touched down
and shut off its engines. Then everyone ran to it.