Critical Mass, page 22
Tighe thought it sounded cumbersome and preferred simple numbers, but the compass motif did have a certain nautical-historical appeal. And the naming of yet-to-be-built compartments was hardly worth worrying about; at this point their survival wasn’t assured, much less completing the station.
After they’d toured the South Hab, the team returned to the docked transit vehicle and off-loaded a couple hundred kilos of gear and supplies—which was easy work in microgravity. This included all the provisions, first-aid kits, meds, sleeping bags, flight suits, auxiliary MCP suits, life support packs, a small, foldable microwave oven, tools and equipment, and hundreds of other necessities and minor conveniences, carefully packed by Lacroix’s mission control team and surreptitiously loaded aboard the cargo rocket back at Satish Dhawan. They’d already inventoried and organized it on the Rosette, and the elevator was large enough that they were able to send it down to the South Hab in a single trip.
Not long after, they unrolled their sleeping bags on foam mats in the elevator landing near the top of the stairs, since it seemed like a good idea to be near an exit. There were also two sealed hatches at either end of the South Hab—one spinward and the other anti-spinward, but beyond the bulkheads there lay only the vacuum of space and exposed girders—at least until neighboring compartments were built out. With the station rotating once every twenty-two seconds, anyone exiting that way was likely to be hurled from the station and out into deep space.
After establishing a base camp in South Hab, Tighe and Chindarkar went to inspect the North Hab to be certain it was also fully operational and habitable, while Jin remained back in South Hab, unpacking their gear.
Hab-to-hab travel on Clarke Station was much simpler than traveling between habitats on the Konstantin. There were no winch lines, multiple airlocks, or transfer tunnels, just a simple elevator ride, then a brief microgravity hand-over-hand transfer in the pressurized core over to the north elevator bank, and then another brief elevator ride “down” into North Hab’s spin-gravity well. For safety reasons (since they hadn’t been to North Hab before), they’d both donned MCPs.
The elevators worked fine, and in just a few minutes, Tighe and Chindarkar stood on the H4 elevator landing of North Hab, overlooking an identical, echoey, empty steel-walled compartment illuminated by LED lights. After once again confirming pressure and air mixture, they removed their helmets.
Tighe took in the scene. “We could host a damned racquetball tournament in here.”
“We’ll need the room when more crew arrive.”
“Come on. Not this much room.”
“It’s a spinning wheel, J.T. It needs to be symmetrical, or it would be imbalanced. Speaking of . . .” She examined the landing. “We should split our provisions and emergency gear between here and South Hab for the next couple of weeks—in case there’s a structural failure and we need to decamp in a hurry.”
“Good thinking.”
After returning to South Hab, they subdivided their gear in preparation for the transfer. Now jacked in to the station’s network, they had multi-gigabit-bandwith laser communications with Ascension Island mission control, using NASA’s open-source DTN protocol. Jin navigated the familiar Catalyst entertainment UI and instantiated a shared virtual big-screen TV. Being close to Earth—unlike the asteroid Ryugu—they could now enjoy live television and radio, and since the sound only played in their earphones, it didn’t echo maddeningly in the hard shell of the huge compartment.
Since it was New Year’s Day, the news channels briefly covered festivities around the world—but soon moved on to reports of violent clashes as waves of climate refugees pressed on the borders of eastern and southern Europe. Then the continued drought in Africa and the Middle East. Then typhoons in the South Pacific.
It was 2039—one year closer to the return of the asteroid Ryugu. But also one year more of record temperatures, droughts, and storms back on Earth.
The trio heralded in the new year with reconstituted apple juice. Sitting cross-legged on the metal deck of the landing, Chindarkar held up her plastic cup for a somber toast. “To absent friends.”
Tighe and Jin lifted their cups. “Hear, hear.”
Given their eventful day and the uncertainties that lay ahead, they soon extinguished the virtual TV and went to sleep.
Tighe’s dreams were turbulent—feeling himself fall helplessly and endlessly—and he awoke in the middle of the night with a start. Then found it difficult to get back to sleep.
The next morning, on his first use of a steel toilet down at H1, Tighe was dismayed to watch it clog up. “Oh, come on . . .”
Jin called from the elevator landing high above. “You should not have waited so long.”
“Very funny.” Tighe stabbed at the flush control, but the toilet just overflowed. “For chrissakes.” He looked up. “Do we have something I can use as a plunger?”
It wound up taking half an hour and a consultation with mission control to clear the waste line. After which mission control sent up the day’s task list, detailing the build-out of the station’s interior walls, flooring, and ceiling panels on H1 level for both the North and South Habs. Although the station had water tanks, pumps, and moving weights to maintain the center of rotation as people and matériel moved between habs, the building materials were significant enough that their move had to be staggered to each hab. In preparation, Kerner’s team already had the CVD mill outside the station producing light-gauge steel framing pieces by the dozen in accordance with a very precise interior design plan. Likewise, they were producing unique thin steel floor panels to cover the irregular gaps between the voronoi tessellated floor beams. The subsequent upper floors of each hab would rest upon this lighter interior framework, though there would be a plenum between floors to allow for an eventual drop ceiling, with HVAC ducting inputs and returns. To make the task manageable, every metal piece was numbered and had to go into place like a puzzle. Teleoperated mules were already transferring those pieces into a freight airlock in Clarke Station’s docking bay for the team to pick up.
Tighe studied the parts manifest. “Why didn’t they have the construction robots do this work, too?”
Chindarkar answered, “I’m guessing they had to pressurize the hull as soon as possible—so we could occupy the station before anyone else arrives.”
Jin tested a battery-powered hand tool. “The holes are predrilled. We just screw the pieces in place. This should be fast work.”
Chindarkar looked around. “It will be nice to have floors for the showers and toilets, but what about sound baffling and wall panels?”
Jin shook his head. “Only framing for now. Panels come later. When we can print textiles.”
“In other words: this echo’s going to be with us for a while.”
The next few days, they worked together installing the numbered steel panels between floor beams on H1. Tighe found the work satisfying, and by the end of the first day they had the entire South Hab floor installed, along with silicone caulking around the shower drains and other fittings. The next day they did the same in North Hab. The following days saw them assembling thin-gauge steel framing, HVAC ducting, and LED lighting, installing it according to mission control’s blueprint—which they projected in place using the augmented-reality feature of their crystal glasses.
They used this same AR capability as a guide to spray-paint large white arrows to the hull walls. These pointed in the direction of the station’s spin—or “spinward.” The arrows were repeated several times along the compartment’s length and stood the full height of one interior floor. They’d had something similar on the Konstantin, and physiological research indicated that a visible reference to the direction of rotation helped crews avoid sickness from the Coriolis effect when moving about. Tighe’s experience confirmed that hypothesis, and in any event it provided some visual interest.
After almost a week of hard work, they finally had an enclosed H1 floor in both the North and South Habs, each bisected by interior metal framing that laid out corridors, bathrooms, a kitchen, storage, sleeping quarters, and equipment rooms on an identical floor plan. The ceiling of steel panels was also the floor of H2, which still had no walls—and a very high ceiling above, due to the missing H3 and H4 floors. The spiral staircase and the elevator allowed them to move quickly between levels.
However, they needed furnishings to make South Hab livable, even in the short term. So mission control directed the team to twin large-format 3D printers mounted in the walls of the station’s pressurized core. Beyond the wall—out in the depressurized docking bay—tanks of polymer pellets synthesized from the robot tug framework served as feedstock for the printers, which produced the components for a plastic table and folding chairs, followed by panels for plastic storage cabinets—all from 3D models in the station’s blueprint library.
While the parts printed, the team located the computer core of the station, the pressure door to which was located next to the 3D printing bay. Inside, rack-mounted servers stood in rows with cooling units recirculating to radiator fins on the station exterior. The computers must have been sent up from Earth by Joyce back in the mid-2030s and kept in lunar orbit.
If Adisa was here, Tighe thought, he would already have the server room well in hand. However, since the three of them were not technical wizards, they merely noted its location in the event of an emergency—because it was also their radiation storm shelter.
After the 3D printing runs finished, the team carried the plastic components back to South Hab and worked together to assemble a long plastic table, chairs, and storage cabinets—setting them up near the elevator doors on the newly installed floor of level H2. It was like a curving loft apartment walled in steel.
As the team continued to prepare the station, mission control brought them through long task lists each day. The antennas and rotating arrays Tighe had seen mounted near the power plant on the station’s axis were an entire scanning and communications suite. By contrast to the Ryugu asteroid mining expedition, mission control thought it likely that Clarke Station might have unannounced guests—being located just a week’s journey from Earth—and so, with the aid of onboard radar and Joyce’s constellation of lunar satellites, Clarke Station’s situational awareness extended across the entirety of lunar orbit.
Soon Tighe and the others were accustomed to the radar signatures and timing of the other objects orbiting the Moon—NASA’s Lunar Gateway, the Chinese-Russian Chang’e station, and a collection of lunar satellites—several of them defunct. A couple even followed a Lissajous orbit around L2 similar to their own, although tens of thousands of kilometers distant.
Also different from the Konstantin was that Clarke Station had security locks on all exterior and interior hatchways, designed to prevent casual intrusions—although, clearly they would not hold back determined attackers. Still, it was nice to know they could lock the doors. Cislunar space had become a more competitive domain since they’d been away.
Then there was spacecraft maintenance—a fact of spacefaring life they’d all grown accustomed to out at Ryugu. Mission control stepped them through maintaining Clarke Station’s much more robust oxygen generation and CO2-scrubbing equipment. The ionic carbon dioxide removal system was quite different from the Konstantin’s and capable of scrubbing much larger air volumes, which was necessary since Clarke Station would eventually house many more people, and contained a greater pressurized volume. Eventually the station would have fifteen of these units, but for now had only two.
Also, there was the mass equalization system (or MES), which was designed to maintain the station’s center of rotation by equalizing the mass along the outer ring. Imbalances could happen as people and equipment moved around the station, and so a combined system of water pumps with storage tanks, and a more robust system of computer-controlled metallic weights on rails running along the exterior of the station’s ring, permitted precise, ongoing adjustment dependent on how mass was distributed along the torus. At present the rail-mounted weights were inactive since only two compartments out of sixteen were finished; instead, pumps moved water between a several-thousand-liter storage tank in the core and smaller thousand-liter polymer tanks in the South and North Habs to equalize mass between them. The same system also provided water and waste removal—albeit on separate lines—for the showers, sinks, and toilets, with the solar furnace providing limitless hot water.
The entire system was managed remotely by mission control, but maintenance tasks still had to be handled by on-site crew. However, the ability to take a long hot shower at the end of the day as well as brush one’s teeth and—most of all—use a normal toilet, made the effort worthwhile.
Nonetheless, plumbing problems soon began to appear. During showers, instead of draining, a pool of water would accumulate. Toilets often backed up, and while mission control worked to find the source of these problems, the team was directed to use the toilets in the North Hab whenever possible, to avoid fecal matter fouling the air of their living area.
“That’s not a solution, Gabriel,” Jin said to Lacroix over a video link. “And sooner or later this is going to become a health risk.”
“I realize that, Han. Rest assured, the engineers are working on the problem.”
After more than a week at Clarke Station, the team had fallen into a familiar rhythm from their days sharing a hab on the Konstantin. Conditions here were, for the moment, more Spartan than the Konstantin, but there was loads more room in case they needed personal space—which wasn’t often. Instead, they took comfort in one another’s companionship. Jin in particular seemed to be much more at ease now that he was again in deep space, and Tighe noticed he had a ready smile most of the time—something he seldom saw from Jin on Earth.
Ten days into the new year they received news from mission control that a team of seven, led by Sevastian Yakovlev, would be joining them on Clarke Station, lifting off in one of Burkette’s Starion rockets from Florida’s Space Coast in a few weeks. Their capsule would rendezvous with the Rosette cycler during its next swing through low Earth orbit, arriving a week later near EM-L2. It would require still another day for the crew to reach Clarke Station from there, and while the thought of having friends on the station was uplifting, it also raised questions.
Over breakfast, Jin voiced his apprehension. “I am surprised that Yak and his team were approved to launch out of the Cape—when we were banned everywhere from launch. What do you suppose this means? What do the Americans expect from us in return?”
Tighe muttered, “In other words: What did Lukas promise them?”
“Exactly. I thought Catalyst was insolvent again. How are we paying for seven seats on a commercial launch? What is that . . . two hundred million USD?”
“I can’t imagine Catalyst stock is worthless anymore. Look around you.”
Chindarkar stirred rehydrated fruit into her oatmeal as she pondered the question. “Up until now, the superpowers probably suspected one another of building this station. Perhaps they want to curry favor with us. Now that we’re up here.”
Tighe said, “That’s great, but we don’t have time for political games. We have work to do. Ryugu will come round again before you know it.”
“You don’t seriously think Earth powers will just leave us alone, do you?”
“No, which is why we have locks on all the hatches.”
“As if that’s going to solve anything.”
Jin frowned. “Let us hope it does not come to that.”
Within the hour they received word that Lukas Rochat wanted a videoconference. So they placed a webcam on the plastic conference table at H2 and instantiated a virtual screen at the far end. Moments later Rochat appeared, sitting in some sort of secure room back on Earth.
“Good morning. It’s good to see you all arrived safely. I’m calling to update you on the status of operations.”
Jin asked, “How did you get Yak and his team’s launch cleared with the US?”
“Before we discuss the upcoming arrival of your colleagues, you should know that the Cislunar Commodity Exchange will soon go live up there on Clarke Station.”
“Commodity exchange? Lukas, we are not ‘exchanging’ anything. What are you talking about?”
Tighe added, “We barely have life support up here. We’re living in an empty cargo hold.”
Chindarkar frowned. “You’d better not be screwing around again, Lukas.”
He held up his hands. “The CCE is merely a financial construct for the moment.”
“ ‘For the moment.’ That’s the part that has me worried.”
“It may sound frivolous, but you will need an economic system up there that’s able to resist wealth and power concentrations here on Earth, and which can also bypass Earth sanctions. We have designed such a system.”
They considered this.
Jin asked, “Who is we?”
Tighe waved the question away. “Look, we aren’t anywhere close to building a new financial system out here. Can we please discuss the incoming team?”
“Of course. I just didn’t want the CCE to be a complete surprise.”
“When does the new team arrive, and what did you promise the US to get them cleared for launch out of the Cape?”
“A seven-person crew, designated ‘Blue Team,’ will arrive at Clarke Station on January 29—about three weeks from today. And in answer to your question: we had to make two substitutions to be cleared for launch.”
