Critical Mass, page 32
Tighe nodded.
“How long has she been dead?”
Dr. Ohana answered. “Rigor mortis had set in by the time she was recovered. So at least an hour or two.”
“J.T., you found her?”
“No. Chelsie Birk did. When Milena didn’t respond to chat, Chelsie went to investigate her RFID location.”
“That was reckless. It could have cost us our comms specialist as well.” Jin scanned the group. “From now on, if anyone goes missing or goes silent, we activate a general alert, and I want to be notified immediately.” He rubbed his tired eyes. “This was my fault.”
“You can’t be everywhere. There were procedures.”
“What good is that to her family?” Jin stared at the body for several moments. “I gather the entire crew knows by now. And the international observers.”
Ohana and Josephson nodded.
Tighe said, “They all know how dangerous it is out here. These systems and procedures are all new. There’s going to be some hard lessons learned.”
Jin sighed. “We are out here to try and save two people, and already one other person is dead.”
Dr. Josephson spoke to Jin. “That brings up a good point: Jackie and I need to establish a station morgue. You three need to give us a location—preferably somewhere naturally cold and dark. We were thinking one of the unused docking bay airlocks.”
Tighe said, “Hm. Just don’t accidentally send the new arrivals through it.”
The others stared at Tighe.
“That wasn’t a joke.”
Jin turned back to Josephson. “Do it, Liz. But prep Milena’s remains for the journey back to Earth. The supply cycler swings by in less than a week. We will need to keep her frozen en route, and arrange with mission control to contact her next of kin.”
Chindarkar added, “We should inform Lukas. There will most likely be liability exposure. A death certificate. Earth authorities to deal with.” She paused. “What about the rest of the crew? I think we should have a memorial service. Have us say a few words.”
Jin pondered this. “Yes. You are right. This woman is dead because of us. Because of our decision to be here.”
Tighe said, “It was Milena’s decision, too.”
Chindarkar gave him a look. “No one is saying it wasn’t, but we did cause this place to be built in order to rescue our friends. Others will be doing that math, even if you don’t.”
“I don’t think that’s the only calculation that matters.”
Jin held up his hand. “We leave that for another day. Right now we should mourn her loss and make certain it does not happen again. James, please use your expertise on air mixtures to review our safety procedures in utility spaces.”
Tighe nodded. “I’ll see to it.”
He turned to Josephson and Ohana. “Please take care of Milena’s remains, and we will prepare a service.”
* * *
—
The memorial for Jakubec was subdued and involved the South Hab crew lining up in front of crew quarters as the flight surgeons rolled the wrapped body past on a gurney. They halted at the elevator lobby while Jin spoke a few words about the fragility of life and the importance of what they were doing out here.
“The best way to honor Milena’s sacrifice is to succeed in establishing a permanent human presence in deep space.”
And with that, Milena Jakubec’s remains were sent to the cold and darkness of an airlock to await the transit craft that would bear her to the lunar cycler—and from there to home.
* * *
—
Tighe’s third dawn as a telepresence robot on the Moon saw the sun rise as a piercing white light that crested the lunar hills to the east. Unlike soothing Earthly sunrises, dawn on the Moon was the arrival of a nuclear furnace. The transition between dangerous cold and searing heat was not gradual.
A significant amount of construction work was still underway at Morra Base, although none of the buildings were complete. Tighe’s Talos robot glanced from the flat roof of the Brick House southeast, past the cableway to Jin’s and Yak’s Talos robots, which moved about the metal frame of the Launch House. That structure was slowly taking shape at the margins of its L-shaped floor plan, and bolted to the decking were pieces of complex machinery that Ecklund had worked with Nicolau Ivorra and Hoshiko Sato to manufacture up on Clarke Station. Tighe did not comprehend—and fortunately did not have to comprehend—most of it. Ecklund did, and his Talos robot maneuvered in and around the equipment in the semidarkness. Then he looked up. “Guys, be careful. The sun’s almost up.”
Tighe turned to face the lunar dawn and now noticed telltale particle levitation fuzzing the horizon. Portions of the haze zapped and arced against pipes, cables, and foundations or set outlines of equipment glowing like St. Elmo’s Fire.
Within the hour, the ground began to tremble, and soon the structures of Morra Base bucked and shimmied on their supports.
“Moonquake! Watch for gas leaks.” Ecklund’s robot clung to machinery.
“Bob, let the Talos software handle standing.” Tighe demonstrated as his robot’s legs automatically compensated for the shaking deck.
“Oh. Right.” Ecklund’s robot released its hold on a thick pipe, and his stance immediately stabilized.
In the distance, rocks tumbled down the slopes of Cape Bruce, leaving dust trails in their wake. The nearby plain undulated gently.
Ecklund’s robot looked around. “I think we’re going to be okay.”
“Is your kilometer-long mass-driver really going to be able to deal with this on a regular basis?”
“It’ll flex, and we’ll recalibrate it remotely.”
Tighe knew it wasn’t going to be that simple. There were always complications. If deep space had taught him anything, it was that.
The moonquake lasted nearly eight minutes and only stubbornly trailed off. By then the sun cast stark shadows over the mare.
Up on Clarke Station, Tighe removed his crystal glasses and rubbed his eyes. He was “back,” and the disorienting sensation of working in VR took a while to shake off. He’d been focused on Moon operations for so long he barely kept up with what was happening in real life around him. Looking across South Hab, he could see half a dozen of his colleagues, their crystal headsets opaque, moving their hands to manipulate unseen objects on the far side of the Moon. It was like a video-gaming club.
How he’d wound up here—how any of them had wound up here—seemed as surreal as their telepresence work, but the pace of lunar operations did not allow much time for reflection. So after a brief bio break, Tighe got back to work.
* * *
—
Several days later, Tighe, Yak, Jin, and Ecklund maneuvered their Talos robots around the under-construction Launch House, positioning an LSMS crane. Suspended from the crane was a 6-meter-long section of the mass-driver barrel. One meter in diameter, it was the first of 232 sections. For several months, Sato, Braam De Jong, and Wu Meiling had been building these intricate components up on Clarke Station, and Kangaroo landers had been delivering them at regular intervals, with the team stockpiling the sections in the “brickyard” next to the Launch House.
The interior of each mass-driver section was lined with conduction coils and electronic switching gear spaced at exact intervals and massed over 300 kilos—though in the Moon’s gravity it “weighed” only a sixth of that. Still, the team used the crane to raise it to the 8-meter height at which the mass-driver barrel left the Launch House wall. This height ensured that with pylons the mass-driver could run level across the slightly uneven lunar plain.
Tighe and Yak adjusted the crane manually on its wheels, shifting the suspended barrel section at Ecklund’s instructions, while his robot stood atop nearby machinery.
This first piece of the mass-driver’s 1.39-kilometer-long barrel had to be installed before completing the wall of the Launch House from which it would protrude—and which would contain the mass-driver’s electrical, control, and loading mechanisms. Computers would direct immense electrical energies, activating a series of thousands of conduction coils in a precise sequence to accelerate the payload mass down the pipe within an eddy current—all in slightly over a second, at 235 g’s.
Before any of that could happen, they still needed to add nitrogen cooling and electrical conduits along the entire length and build dozens of flexible, remotely adjustable trusses to support the hundreds of barrel sections that would traverse the landscape. In other words, there were still months of work ahead.
And due to a dozen complications, both major and minor, they were already two weeks behind schedule. Not much in the scheme of things, but Tighe knew that the mass-driver was just the first in a series of obstacles to overcome in building the rescue ship, and so his stress increased with every delay, no matter how small. The asteroid Ryugu would not wait.
By comparison, Ecklund seemed to be coming more alive every day as he worked. This was clearly the realization of a dream for him, and his enthusiasm and drive never seemed to falter, even when he was exhausted.
Still, Tighe couldn’t help but wonder what they’d do if Ecklund was wrong. If this machine didn’t work. No one had ever built a mass-driver this size—on the Moon or anywhere else—and in fact, there was no way to truly test it in the gravity and atmosphere of Earth. So Catalyst Corporation—or the CCE or whatever Lukas Rochat was calling them these days—had gone “all in” on Ecklund’s idea. Tighe just hoped smarter minds than him knew what they were doing.
Ecklund’s robot waved his arm. “Okay, bring it back . . . Straighten it out. We need the lugs in line.” Ecklund’s robot motioned. “Toward me. Slowly. That’s it! Hold it there.” His robot then used a battery-powered tool to silently affix dozens of thick bolts. Afterward, he walked across the coil section, examining the support truss, which was anchored at four points in the lunar soil 8 meters below. “Looks good!” He took a sight line toward the horizon with a laser. “Now just a couple hundred more to go.”
Tighe spotted a bright light in the sky behind Ecklund’s Talos.
“Kangaroo lander incoming.” Jin pointed and paused a moment, apparently to check manifest records. “Flight 29. Coil and pylon sections.”
Ecklund glanced up briefly. “Excellent! Once we get the hang of these, we’ll be able to keep up an operational tempo.” He patted the coil barrel. “We’re getting there, folks.”
Tighe had seen a couple dozen landers arrive and depart from Morra Base over the months, yet they still impressed him. He and the others stopped to watch it arcing downward and slow its descent atop a dagger of white-hot flame.
But then something went very wrong. The flame beneath it guttered and went out as the lander’s thrusters puffed madly.
“Oh no . . .” Ecklund’s robot put its hands onto its metal head. “No, no, no!”
The craft veered suddenly toward them from a height of several hundred meters.
“Heads up!”
“Goddamnit!”
They scattered.
Mission control’s voice cut in. “SK-Bravo self-destruct activated.”
And yet the craft did not self-destruct, but instead spun crazily end over end before it noiselessly impacted the lunar surface at several hundred kilometers per hour. Tighe stopped to watch as the silent fireball expanded, debris hurtling out in every direction at supersonic speeds.
“J.T.!” Yak’s robot grabbed his arm, pulling him to the ground as shards of metal and pieces of rock tumbled past them, piercing the corrugated wall of the Brick House and setting the cableway wires dancing when a support tower got hit. It was all eerily silent.
Jin called out, “I am offline! Something struck me.”
Ecklund groaned as his robot took cover behind the Launch House foundation. “No! We’re already behind schedule.”
In a few moments it was over—except for the flames, which billowed lazily for several moments in the low gravity before rapidly extinguishing as they consumed whatever oxidizer was available. Smoke and dust remained for a while afterward.
The regolith-covered robots stood up and approached the fallen “corpse” of Jin’s damaged Talos. Its jumper was torn open with the chest smashed by a catastrophic impact—but whatever hit it had apparently ricocheted away.
Yak’s robot knelt to pick up Jin’s Talos in the low gravity, like a fallen comrade. “We may be able to repair this.”
Using thermal optics, Tighe surveyed damage to the base. “The Brick House was hit, too. And the volatile extraction pipes. And the west wall. Also a cableway support.”
Ecklund was still shaking his robotic head in disbelief. “Damn it to hell . . .”
Yak said, “We will need to closely inspect entire site.”
Ecklund’s robot paced. “And we lost one of the landers—that’ll halve our transport capacity. Not to mention the loss of the payload this one was carrying.” He turned to Yak’s robot. “How many coil sections did SK-Bravo have on board?”
“Four.”
“Oh my god. Those will take weeks to rebuild—even if we have the extra components.” Several slow deep breaths were audible, mimicked by Ecklund’s Talos robot on the lunar surface. It pressed its hands together as if in meditation. “Center yourself, Robert. Release what you cannot control . . .” After a moment, Ecklund’s robot seemed calmer. Then it clapped its hands. “Right. We should see if there’s anything we can salvage. C’mon . . .”
Yak gently placed Jin’s broken Talos on the ground, then followed Ecklund.
Tighe watched them go—taking a moment to consider that construction of their rescue ship had just slipped further behind—even as the arrival of Ryugu came inexorably closer. As relentless a deadline as they’d ever faced.
He sighed and followed them toward the wreckage.
CHAPTER 28
Declaration
JUNE 16, 2039
Lukas Rochat took the podium at the head of the largest conference room in Catalyst Corporation’s offices. His audience was a standing-room-only crowd of government ministers, intelligence agents, scientists, and diplomats—nearly a hundred people in all—present for this invite-only event and all of whom wore a lanyard with their photo and name, indicating they’d been vetted and positively identified by Catalyst’s staff.
He nodded to the group. “Good morning. Let me begin by saying this is a briefing, not a press conference. Since the existence of Clarke Station on the far side of the Moon has not yet been officially acknowledged by any UN member nation, everything I discuss here today is off the record and will most likely be classified by your respective governments. I’m not certain how much longer that will be the case; however, Catalyst Corporation is, for the moment, maintaining this secrecy as a gesture of goodwill and to allow Earth governments time to prepare their public response. Please note that Catalyst does not acknowledge any legal requirement to maintain such secrecy.”
There was some murmuring in the crowd. Representatives from many nations were present—including those with observers already on board Clarke Station (the US, Canada, Russia, China, India, and Germany), but also attendees from France, the UK, Brazil, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Norway, as well as representatives from Space Titan companies: Starion, Zephyr, and Celestial Robotics, among others. Rochat noticed administrators and executives from major space agencies—including Erika Lisowski of NASA—standing along the back wall.
“My purpose here today is to inform government and corporate stakeholders of recent developments concerning the Cislunar Commodity Exchange headquartered on Clarke Station at EM-L2.”
More murmuring.
One man said, “That is not a lawful organization.”
“If I may continue . . .”
Another man shouted, “Mr. Rochat, can you comment on the recent death on Clarke Station and discuss the circumstances—?”
“Please hold your questions until I finish the briefing. Thank you.” He glanced down at his notes, although in truth he did so for effect. He had today’s agenda committed to memory.
He looked out at the expectant, though mostly unfriendly faces. “As the first fully off-world decentralized autonomous organization—or DAO—the Cislunar Commodity Exchange—hereafter the ‘CCE’—is asserting sovereignty over its operations in deep space and is establishing a blockchain ledger and legal framework for its market participants. The CCE blockchain as well as its transaction and settlement network will be maintained entirely off-world and, thus, not regulated by Earth institutions.”
Now discussions really broke out in the crowd.
Rochat spoke over them. “The details of the CCE’s legal framework will be made available to you in writing at the conclusion of this briefing. A basic tenet of that framework will be a commitment to abide by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—as well as the Artemis Accords and international maritime law, herein referenced as starting points for further legal precedents in deep space.”
He paused to let it sink in. “As a blockchain-based organization, the CCE will maintain indelible records of asset ownership off-world via non-fungible tokens and will conduct all financial transactions in its native cryptocurrency, the lūna coin. The number of lūna coins will be set by DAO governance token holders and backed by intrinsically valuable off-world commodities, energy, products, and services contained within the CCE marketplace. This issuance design is intended to produce relative stability vis-à-vis Earth markets, with creation of lūna coins naturally throttled by the time-to-market of newly available resources and energy, which allows for predictable and sustainable growth.
“Governance of the CCE itself will also be managed by DAO token holders—the majority of whom currently reside on Clarke Station. However, as the CCE’s capitalization and transaction volume increases, so, too, will governance tokens, and the governance stakeholder population.”
