BOUNDARY(37)

"True, true. But it's an artistic kind of cruelty. I'll make it up to you, whenever you're back from digging. You name the place, I'll pay the check. Joe and Jackie could even join us, if you time it right."



"I'd love to see them again. I know they've been busy in their training, though."



"Don't worry about it. They can get enough time off to drop in and see an old friend, I guarantee you." A.J. started in on the salad. "If this really bothers you, I can cut off. I mostly needed company while I was waiting with nothing much to do."



"It doesn't really bother me. But I probably should get back to work."



"No problem. Thanks for taking the time. Now, and before."



"Anytime. Later, A.J. Let me know how everything goes!"



"I will."



The image of the paleontologist vanished, and A.J. dug in. Now that he realized how excited he was, he was impatient to get back. There were things to do, and he was the one to do them!





Chapter 14




Release of ISM units completed successfully. All units showing on the green."



"That's the way to do it," A.J. said triumphantly. "Okay, time to get to real work."



A.J. checked the release pattern and observed that the Faeries were in proper station-keeping mode with respect to each other. Pirate was already moving away to a safe distance preparatory to making its final deorbit burn.



That was fine with A.J.. He knew what he was going to do with the Faeries, but he wanted to tweak all the instructions to reflect exactly the situation around Mars. The release had occurred just one hundred and sixty thousand meters from Phobos—a bit less than a hundred miles.



The Faeries were equipped with electric or, as A.J. preferred to call them, "ion" drive systems. They were low in actual thrust—the optimized designs on the Faeries would, at full power, shove the sensor platforms forward with an acceleration of all of one-fiftieth of a gravity. But the ion drives made up for it with specific impulse ratings that were beyond even the wildest fantasies of nuclear rocket enthusiasts, measured not in hundreds but in thousands of seconds. That made it possible for objects like the Faeries, which were small enough that A.J. could have picked them up and carried them, to hold sufficient reaction mass to travel significant distances and stop at their destinations. It was critical to give them that ability, since the availability of high-thrust drives such as compressed gas, rockets, or similar approaches was tremendously limited on small probes.



As everything was on the green, A.J. was going to have one of the Faeries—Ariel—run ahead of the pack, trying to reach Phobos at maximum speed, while the others would take much more leisurely approaches. This would be a test of the Faeries' navigation skills, the precision of his programming and the engineering departments' design work, and of the efficiency and precision of the drive system. At that distance . . .



Close enough for minimal orbital mechanics to take part, 1/2at2, we get . . . um . . . a little over twenty-one minutes, full acceleration for 10.66 minutes and a smidge, flip and decel for same amount of time.



The other Faeries—Titania, Tinkerbell, Sugarplum, and Rane—would follow at a more sedate pace, getting to their stations around Phobos in a few hours. He worked the precise numbers and course data carefully, then transmitted the orders to the Faerie Fleet.



"Well, in a while we'll start seeing some action," he said, leaning back and glancing around. "Say, about an hour. Though if you'll watch Titania and Rane's transmissions, you'll get to see the Pirate do its burn and start true deorbit. They'll try to hold the image as long as possible, another test we programmed in them before we started. That will demonstrate how well they can track. Tink's doing some GPR on Phobos before approach, while Sugarplum will be seeing if I can get good returns from Mars with the same equipment. Probably not, but it's worth a try."



"Where's Pirate landing?"



"We're combining science and sightseeing. Landing track will take Pirate right down the Valles Marineris, and our target landing site is somewhere near the Melas Chasma. There's a lot of interesting possibilities to be found at the bottom of the Valles, and Melas Chasma has some of the best potential for all sorts of stuff, including mineral finds of various sorts. You'd have to ask some of the others back at Ares for more details. I'm not as up on that as on other things."



"How long do you think you'll be working here tonight?" Diane asked, curious.



A.J. laughed. "Possibly all night. Or until the caffeine runs out. I may not be able to control them like a video game, but watching what they're doing and making decisions as I start getting a real picture of what Phobos is like is a job that can't be entirely left to machines. I don't think I'm going to want to just hand it over to automatics for quite a while yet. Until I know what I'm dealing with, I won't—and the Faeries won't—know what the best approaches are, especially for locating the best places to land the base materials."