FREE STORIES 2012(37)

The halls of the Liberty ring with curses as all manner of stumbles, trips, drops, and falls have painted us all in a palette of bruise-purple.

But it had to be done: Diana is pregnant.

She told us at union   two weeks ago. She was concerned about the effect of weightlessness on the unborn child and so petitioned the group for the construction of a centrifugal exercise chamber.

Claire suggested one better. She announced that she had been studying the mineralogical maps of the comet and had found what she called a possible counterweight: a large mass of ice that was thoroughly marbled with useful minerals that she believed could be cut free relatively easily.

Claire proposed freeing the mass and using it as a counterweight to set the Liberty spinning again. It would mean free flight and so we would have to use fuel to hold station with Tempel. But that wasn't so much of a problem. We’re now producing kilogrammes of methane and free hydrogen every few days. Barely enough to coat the inside of the fuel tanks and not nearly enough to take us home, but more than enough for station keeping.

And so it was back on the lances. More detailed work this time, and more dangerous. The counterweight massed close to half a million tonnes. Over a period of weeks we cut away at the surrounding ice and placed shaped charges around its remaining supports.

We were all aboard ship and in pressure suits, helmets on but visors raised when Tom Barischoff fired the charges. It was a supreme anticlimax: the explosion, buffered by half a million tonnes of ice was little more than a ripple to bend the fronds of our aeroponic walls.

Amy DeLuca never got to fly her lander down to the Martian surface, but she did get to pilot a comet, or at least a fragment of one. The explosion had set us moving away from Tempel at the rate of a few centimetres a second. The Liberty--never a sportster at the best of times--was a sluggish tugboat hauling a half a million tonne barge. It took hours to rise clear of Tempel.

Over the next few weeks we slowly started to set the giant mass spinning. We used mirrors to vaporise chunks of the surface, forming a fog of out-gassing volatiles that slowly became a mini comet’s tail as the counterweight started to move.

We were aiming for 0.52RPM: enough to give us our 0.15G at full tether extension. 0.52RPM was not much. It equated to a speed on the surface of about nine kilometres per hour.

Once that magic number was achieved, we gathered again in the storm shelter. Everyone except Claire was in spacesuits. She had opted for comfort and wore shorts and a t-shirt with the NASA logo that read, STOP THE WORLD, I WANT TO GET OFF!.

We all listened in on the intercom as Craig Rowe took the left-hand jumpseat in our underused bridge and slowly let out the tether, leaving the lander attached to the counterweight while the bulk of the ice-clad Liberty eased away at low thrust. We must have looked like a spider extending on a gossamer thread from a slowly spinning globe of muddy ice.

There was an embarrassing flatulent chorus as our internal organs negotiated for space inside our bodies. And with that fanfare, gravity returned.





Personal Log: Lori Rowe - Engineer’s Mate

Date: 21/08/2042 (+5 years, 8 months, 16 days)

Distance From Earth: 0.835AU





Today we had the first death in the manned space programme since Columbia and it was all my fault.

It was a routine operation. My team was on the counterweight, mining a particularly rich seam of aluminium oxide dust. Grunt work, nothing that we hadn't done a score of times before. Fumi was helping secure the power cables for my lance. One minute he was fine, the next I turned round to look at him and saw the inside of his visor splattered with vomit. A light blinked on his chest plate, low oxygen.

It took us forty minutes to get him back to the Liberty. His body was limp: limbs splayed out like a human starfish by the internal pressure of his suit. We had to manhandle him inside the small airlock like we were bringing in a chunk of ice, which in a way we were.

Fumi was dead.

Diana read out the autopsy at union   that evening. He died peacefully, she said. A bad regulator in his suit slowly asphyxiated him. So slowly, he never even realised there was a problem. He would have just felt a bit light-headed and fainted inside his suit. The vomit I saw was just a reflex, he was probably past saving even then. There was nothing we could have done, but Tom suggested a thorough overhaul of all the suits to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.

There is an unspoken convention at union  : everyone attends and everyone stays until the end. Dinner is a politics-free zone, but after that comes a town hall meeting. If someone is criticizing you or your department, tough. You get the right of reply, but no-one dodges the issue. Everyone gets a chance to be heard. It’s worked pretty well so far.