The Sunborn (35 page)

J
ULIA FELT WAN
,
PALE
,
SAD
.
Her breath came slowly, as if dredged up from far below.

They were drifting now on minimal thrust. It seemed plausible that the magnetic creatures were drawn to the plasma of their fusion drive, for some reason. So this coasting was an experiment. The Beings seemed to have withdrawn. Viktor had ordered double watches, looking in all directions and in every wave band they had. The ship rang with tension. They all needed time to recoup. Veronique’s death had shattered their peace of mind. They all knew it was dangerous out here, but
this…

And what of those creatures? Downloading Jordin’s improvements on the signal/noise software that Earthside had sent to upgrade Wiseguy helped. The
High Flyer
crew numbly looked at the images traced out by the weak cyclotron emission.

The wormlike thing that had electrocuted Veronique was moving away, shredded and pocked. Beyond it, the entire sky seemed filled with dim images of many more. The scale of them, implied by the intensity and apparent size… Her mind boggled.

So huge, they were like gods. Or were they worse?
Could
they be the eaters of all the gods that humanity had ever imagined? Brrrr…

Only hours after Veronique’s death, when they had to get back to work—a spacecraft under boost needs tending—did Hiroshi discover that their antennas were dead. External cameras showed that they were fused. The intensity of the current-voltage surges had simply melted their fragile wire webs. So they had to fix those, and right away. If their attackers returned,
High Flyer
needed to know about it. Hiroshi was aft, getting the robots set up.

Viktor worked beside her as she stared mutely at the images. Ever the practical one, he was assembling radar images of their vicinity. “This one looks good,” he said.

“Oh?” She came out of her daze. A pale greenish blotch swelled in one of the side screens. “An iceteroid?”

“We better try to refuel. That last time, I burned up a lot of water.”

In the end all long-distance rockets are steam rockets. Whether liquid hydrogen married to liquid oxygen, or water passing by slabs of hot plutonium, or through a fusion-burning core, they all flashed into plumes of steam.

Real space commerce demanded high energy efficiency. Realization of this returned to NASA in 2005, with the hesitant first steps of Project Prometheus (every bureaucracy loves resplendent names). The first rush of Mars exploration had proved the essential principle: refuel at the destination. Don’t haul reaction mass with you. Nuclear rockets are far easier to refuel because they only need water—easy to pump, and easy to find, if you pick the right destination. Nearly all the inner solar system is dry as a bone. If ordinary sidewalk concrete were on the moon, it would be mined for its water, because everything around it would be far drier.

Mars is another story. It bore out the general rule that the lighter elements had been blown outward by the radiation pressure of the early, hot sun, soon after its birth. This dried the worlds forming nearby and wetted those farther out—principally the gas giants, whose thick atmospheres churn with ices and gases. Mars proved to be wetter overall than Earth, though without much atmosphere. Not massive enough to hold on to its atmosphere for long, its crust had been sucked dry by the near vacuum. But beneath the crust are thick slabs of ice, and at the poles lie snow and even glaciers. So explorers there can readily refuel by melting the buried ice and pumping it into their tanks.

In time the moons of Jupiter and the other gas giants would become similar gas stations, though they orbit far down into the gravitational well of those massive worlds, demanding a lot of delta-V, tens of kilometers a second, just to get to them. This makes Pluto a surprisingly easy mission destination. Small, deeply cold, with a large ice moon like a younger twin, it takes only a km/sec delta-V to land upon.

Of course, the ice was rock-hard, taking a lot of therms to melt. But the nuke had therms to spare. And beyond it, now, the refueling targets were even easier.

“What’s its size?” she asked.

“Looks to be two three seven klicks diameter,” Viktor read off the flickering scale. “Surface grav, maybe a hundredth of a g.”

Easy to approach and hang alongside. Hard labor, lugging the hoses around, melting that incredibly tough, deep-frozen ice. But it would be R&R, too. As her mother used to say,
Your mind working too much? Use your hands instead.

“How far?”

Viktor beamed. “Two days flight, with some time for delta-V. I was worried maybe we not find much ice near this bow shock.”

“Enough time to fix the antennas?” Julia asked.

“Some, anyway.” Viktor grimaced. “We’ll have to run the all-’bot teams. And get them ready to operate on this iceteroid, too.”

Julia finally managed to rouse herself from her lethargic depression. She had lost team members in the long decades on Mars, starting in the first expedition, with the two who had ventured into Vent A on their own. But never quite so brutally. And never to an enemy other than carelessness and bad luck. “I’ll go help.”

Veronique had been principally in charge of the robots. Her loss meant they would all have to pitch in. Hiroshi volunteered right away. Julia found in the first hour that she was rusty. She had telepresence skills learned in the generations of workbots sent to Mars, but these were the very latest designs and built for different tasks. In the flight outward Veronique had done too much of the work and tutored too little. But then, they had all been infernally busy. A new ship is a fresh menu of troubles.

On
High Flyer
robots did maintenance and repairs outside and in the fusion region. If they got hot near the reactor, they then cooled off in a shielded vault, nestled beside the huge water cylinders, until ready to use again. They never entered the living quarters. If they themselves needed repair, the work was done by other semiautonomous robots, operating under smart telepresence.

“How’re they looking?” she asked Hiroshi in the midpod, between life systems and the water columns.

“Cranky.” He looked distracted, punching in commands to a big, cylindrical stack of multipurpose armatures. The many arms made it look like a very dangerous Swiss Army knife with jets attached.

“Lemme see.” She started on prep.

None of the ship’s robots looked remotely human. A two-armed, two-legged ’bot would be maladapted here. Spindly ones operated in the zero-g sections near the axis, and on the hull when they were not boosting. Other bulky ones had multisocketed arms, so they could lurch from socket-hold to tie line in the rugged radiation environments of the drive. Slender, snaky forms labored to check and patch the vast water cells that had to be kept from freezing. Water circulated by sluggish pipes to the warming zone of the reactor, but the joints had a tendency to pop.

They were smart ’bots, of course, because they had bodies. This elementary point had eluded the twencen AI savants: intelligence builds up from sensory-motor experience, not from logical rules. Start with a body and build a mind.

So the rise of the robots, starting in the early twenty-first century, meant that form of AI came into its own. No more software and wiring diagrams; bring on the neural plasticity and learned patterning. A working robot was not a set of abstract reasoning software walking around in a metal skirt. It was instead a mind brought up on a diet of inertia, fraction, torque, and balance. All along through the 2020s and 2030s, machines learned from animals, not from logicians. In space they crawled and slithered and even flew—all using methods mimicked from worms and rattlers and octopi.

She told the hull ’bots to check for flaws and damage, delegating a special, spindly team with big hands to install faraday shields around the microwave antennas, once another team had replaced them. These were just wire cages, with grid spacing greater than the emitted micro-wavelengths. Since the big power they were getting came in far longer wavelengths, this should protect their comm gear against overload and blowout.

Robots grew up in a techno-universe that was getting embedded, smaller, sneakier, and everywhere.
High Flyer
was not made on the mode of the stalwart
Titanic,
splendid gray iron in hull and hammering engines. It was instead a moving bulk ruled by a nervous system of chips and ’bots—buggier, not just bigger.

“Hey, Viktor, we need zero g now,” she was finally able to send on comm. “Gotta get these ’bots out.”

“Was quick,” he said approvingly, and the rumble of the drive cut off. Julia clung to a beam, and the ’bots went into their automatic, gyro-stabilized positions, ready to work. She wished Hiroshi were there to help, but he was sedated.

Out the ’bot hatch they went—a long tube leading to an automatic air lock. They popped into space, got oriented, and started. Julia watched and corrected.

She could feel the whole system at work, in the working immersion pod. Tuning into the embedded, fixed sensors, she picked up the whole-body feel of the Swiss Army cylinder balanced intricately on a gas jet. It was remarkably like sensing the entire
High Flyer,
because the perception space was the same. When Viktor let her immerse in
High Flyer,
she could
feel
how its fusion flame adjusted its flight, sense the throb as pumps moved its arterial water and air through capillaries. She saw the framed scenes as artificial eyes peered into circuit tangles and even the fusion hellhole.

She would never forget the first time she saw their drive, from the inside. She had never paid much attention to fusion, believing—as the skeptics had said for half a century—that controlled fusion power plants lay twenty years ahead, and always would.

But the sudden advent of a high-quality fusion rocket made her hit the books—or rather, the Net—and fathom the magnetic doughnut that held the ions of boron and hydrogen. The ions snaked around the geometry and then slammed into each other, giving forth brimming radiation, spitting hot alpha particles out. Then the doughnut collapsed. Ions let fly. The rocket engine was this flickering, come-and-go doughnut, holding the plasma, then letting it fly as the doughnut died.

This called up the memory of scuba diving in Hawaii, on the north coast of Oahu, offshore Turtle Bay. The wonder of it had charmed her. Hanging upside down above a coral reef, she had learned to blow bubbles that, rising, formed into rings. They were magically exact, thinning into hoops a hand wide but of thickness less than a little finger.

Toroids,
she remembered from high school geometry. A fat one was like a doughnut. She floated thirty feet down, utterly relaxed, and watched the floppy bubbles shape themselves into beautiful rings, order emerging from chaos, another of nature’s miracles.

Like now: another doughnut of fierce fires, dying. The ions escaped down a magnetic gullet that became a throat, shaping the plasma into a ferocious fire that jetted out the back. The doughnut died, crumpled magnetic field lines sagging.
Another torus,
she remembered from Hawaii, seeing them shape magically into toroids, into rings. Nature found so many uses for the same geometries.

Tending the ’bots was not so romantic. When she switched the immersion pod to the ’bot world, she sensed the moving, momentary minds of the working ’bots. Those methodical programs puzzled over their driver problems, moving flanges and lifting hatches and turning tools—all to do the myriad minor jobs a giant needed. But a proper ship ’bot worked as a simple AI, all done below consciousness, please—like digestion and excretion, not suitable subjects for meaningful discourse.

They spent days on the litany of the big, complex ship—maintenance, maintenance, maintenance—before attempting any new mission. Days later, when Julia got back to their quarters, frazzed out, there was a vid tagged
Personal
from Axelrod.

She watched it with Viktor. Axelrod came on splendidly dressed, probably after some big corporate to-do. His suit was artfully formfitting, concealing the bulges that lower lunar gravity seemed to ordain, especially around the middle. But his smile was sunny, and she knew the look from experience. Self-satisfaction beamed forth, confidence radiating, and as he spoke, his voice fairly bubbled with gurgly chuckles. His teeth were perfect, and his smile broadened even further at the end of sentences, stretching as if the smile were shooting its cuffs.