The dusty ice sheets were speckled and splashed, rainbow-mottled, pocked and scoured.
Carl Osborn spun his workpod and vectored down toward Halley Core. He flew away from the razor-sharp dawnline, aiming for the north pole where their base was finally taking shape.
The grainy gray and brown surface was changing rapidly now. Like tiny, fat ants, mechs moved over it, preparing docking areas and mooring towers. Spiders hammered holes into the ice, their endless microwave zzzzzzttts leaking faintly into some of the data channels. Carl muttered a quick correcting command to his suit's comm filler control and the interference stopped.
Shaft 3 was nearly finished, a yawning pit like a dead eye socket. The first group of sleep slots would be going down that way soon. A kilometer of sheltering ice would shield the sleepers from the fatal sting of cosmic rays and the sleeting solar storms.
Random gouges surrounded the shaft. Discharging mech fuel cells had pitted the crusty ice. Broken gear lay where teams had dropped it. Chem spills had condensed into powdery green and yellow splotches. Discarded girders and sonic cartridges and shockjackets lay everywhere. What mankind would study, Carl thought wryly, he first messes up.
Just barely visible over the curved horizon, now slowly coming into view along the dawnline, were the black gas-suppression panels. They were an ongoing experiment, armored against the high-velocity dust streams and designed to generate electricity from sunlight. Their shadows reduced the outgassing from one eighth of Halley Core's surface, introducing an asymmetry in the boiloff. The panels could be turned so that they trapped heat, too, increasing the outgassing on the night side of the core. The net effect was a faint, persistent push that could alter the comet's orbit, given time.
Or so the story went. To Carl the big black panels had been one solid week of grunt labor. They were too delicate to let the mechs do more than hold them in place, while he and Lani Nguyen and Jeffers had mounted them to the robo-arms that would turn them. The astroengineers were still tinkering with the gimmicks piling up data to analyze during the long outbound voyage.
It was hard to tell what was an intentional experiment and what was yesterday's garbage. He wondered how messy Halley Core could get. In nearly eighty years they might thoroughly trash even this much ice.
Carl could see a thin black stripe coming out of shadow at the dawnline -- the polar cable. It wrapped around Halley Core, pole to pole, and joined the equatorial cable at a perfect right angle, but separated by several meters for safety. The rails provided swift ways to zip around the surface. Still, Carl seldom used them. He liked to get free of the bleak ice, swim in serene blackness above it all.
Between him and the slowly spinning, potato-shaped iceworld were the swarming mechs he supervised. He thumbed instructions into his lap console, muttering code phrases automatically, making the distant dots turn their burden -- a huge orange cylinder. Its smooth sheen reflected glinting sunlight.
-- Channel D to Osborn. Real pretty, uh? -- Jeffers sent from below.
"Well..."
Awful color, he thought. And it's the inner-corridor lining. We'll have to look at it for seventy years.
The mechs dropped lower, angling the cylinder for Shaft 3, following his instructions. The potato-like shape of Halley Core revolved every fifty-two hours, just fast enough to make readjustment necessary as they approached. Subliming gas still rose from some of the active patches the scientists called "Sekanina-Larson" regions, making visibility hazy and creating a hazard of high-velocity dust. The thin fog blurred images at this distance -- 8.3 kilometers, his board said -- and made it hard to use his automatic aligning program.
He had backup on the Edmund, in case of a malf. Fine, in theory. But by the time he got somebody online, the mechs might dutifully try to stuff the cylinder into a hill of ice. Despite Virginia's earnest faith, computers could do only so much. From there on you had to eyeball it.
"Bringing it in slow," he sent.
-- Looks vectored up just a hair. Two clicks too high along the local y-axis, -- Jeffers replied.
Carl looked down, recalibrated, saw that Jeffers was right. "Damn."
-- You okay? --
"Yeah. Just keep those beacons going."
The four laser aligners bracketed Shaft 3 clearly, and Carl turned the mechs into configuration using the bright markers. A touch of delta V, a compensating torque. His board approved the shift. Good. But now the irregular ice was looming fast, and --
Gravity. He'd forgotten the damn gravity. Halley Core had only a ten-thousandth of Earth's pull... but in his half-hour descent from the solar-sail freighter the momentum had built... slow but steady... He punched in a correction, watching the equations ripple across his board.
Lights flashed red. "I'm braking," he sent, and fired the mechs' retros.
Damn the gravity anyway. Carl had been at Encke, worked around the rocky comet nucleus for weeks. It had been just like any deepspace work -- sometimes almost an elaborate waltz, smooth and sure, and a lot of grunt and sweat at crucial moments. Still, it was basically easy if you watched that your vectors matched, didn't push anything except at its center of mass, worked steadily, kept your head.
But Encke was a runt. An old prune of a comet, broiled by its long stay in the inner solar system. Halley had a lot more mass, mostly ice. On the surface you never noticed the slight tug, but coming in like this, taking your time to aim carefully, that ten-thousandth of a G could add up.
The mechs' blue jets fanned against the backdrop of ice, slowing the cargo. Carl saw suddenly that it wasn't enough. The ponderous, hundred-meter-long cylinder was coming in too fast.
He ordered the lower portwise mech to turn and thrust at full bore. The unit spun, fired its reserve.
-- What the hell you -- Jeffers began.
"Clear the shaft!"
-- What --
"Clear it!"
Standard procedure was to bring cargo to rest about fifty meters out, then nudge it in. His board said that was impossible. Instinct told him to try for something else.
He jetted forward, nearly caught up with the cylinder. A touch from the tower starboard mech, two quick torques here, a jolt sidewise to line her up --
An arrow from on high, aimed at a puckered black circle.
The orange cylinder struck the lip of Shaft 3, slowed -- broke off an edge of ice -- and drove on in, scattering flakes off into space.
Bull's-eye, he rejoiced as the cylinder disappeared within the hole.
Jeffers cried out, -- Hey! What's the idea? --
"She got away from me."
-- Hell she did! You're showin' off, is all --
Carl pulsed his own jets and landed easily, feet down. "Don't I wish! Nope, I just corrected at the last minute. Figured it was better to try for a clean hit than to burn fuel decelerating. Especially since I couldn't stop it anyway."
Jeffers shook his head, exasperated. -- Show-off, -- he insisted, and went to check for rips in the material.
There weren't any. Slick and snagproof, fiberthread could wriggle around sharp edges, which made it good for lining the snaking tunnels inside Halley Core.
The fifteen members of the Life Support Installation Group had ten days to honeycomb a fraction of the north polar region, line the shafts and tunnels with pressure-tight insulation, then flush it with air. Not long enough. And all that time the newly awakened scientists aboard the Edmund would be chafing.
Even with 112 mechs it was going to be a tight schedule. There were only so many hands to guide them. The entire expedition had only 67 "live" members at present. Nearly 300 more lay in the sleep slots, their body temperatures hovering within a degree above freezing.
Overhead, the spindly tugs waited with their human cargo. Their immense, gossamer solar sails were furled now, not needed for seventy years. Beside the whalelike Edmund, the silvery Sekanina, Delsemme, and Whipple looked like patient barracuda.
Still no word on the Newburn, Carl thought. How could it have gotten lost?
-- You guys all right? -- Lani Nguyen's light, tinkling voice came from somewhere.
Carl looked around and found the speck rapidly growing as she sped along the polar cable. She had one arm clamped on the stay-carry while she waved with the other, looking remarkably like a bird skimming the ground with only one wing flapping.
-- Jess fine, -- Jeffers sent.
-- I thought I heard some trouble.... --
She cut free of the cable and vectored their way, adroitly turning to shift her center of mass and avoid picking up any spin from the jet thrust. She's good, Carl thought. Damn good. Lani's light delicacy belied a firmly muscled physique. But why come to check on a minor malf?
"Nothing much to it," he answered.
-- Well, I was finished, just on my way inside. -- She landed with catlike agility ten meters away, kicking up only a small cloud of dust. -- Want to take a break? --
-- Can't, -- Jeffers said. -- We got to check out the tube, see it gets unsprung right. --
Lani looked at Carl. -- That's routine. It shouldn't take two. --
Carl said, "Cruz is riding our ass on safety."
She studied him through their dust-marred helmets. -- Sure? You're due to go off shift. --
-- Hey, I'm not working alone, li'l lady, -- Jeffers said goodnaturedly but firmly.
She shrugged. -- Okay. Just wanted a little R and R. I'm running a fraction ahead of schedule. --
-- See you tonight, then. -- Jeffers eyed her appreciatively but she seemed not to notice.
-- Right, -- she said to Carl. -- Tonight. --
She lifted off gracefully and headed for the main shaft.
-- Wouldn't mind that at all, -- Jeffers said dreamily on a closed comm channel. Carl ignored him.
-- We'll have to be thinkin' about pairin' off pretty soon now. --
"You'll be an icicle in a month."
-- Man has to plan ahead. --
"Think you can get her to share a shift with you?" Carl answered.
-- Might. Gonna be cold and lonely, later on. --
Carl laughed. "Your idea of foreplay is six beers and a game of pool. She's not your type."
-- Necessity makes funny bedfellows, isn't that what Shakespeare said? --
"Stick to grunt work, it's your strong suit." He gave Jeffers a friendly shove toward the shaft entrance.
-- Can't blame a man for tryin'. --
"Come on, your tongue is hanging out."
They flew their mechs ahead of them, down through the hollow center of the orange cylinder, popping free restrainer clips as they went. The fiberthread tube unflexed, articulating in sheets along the original axis. Every two minutes it extruded from itself a hundred-meter segment, automatically pressure-sealed the ends, and began pushing out another -- each barely narrower than the one before. To Carl, it resembled a gaudy tube-worm that continuously regenerated itself, burrowing into an apple.
Side tunnels took more care. The mechs cut holes for the intersections, fuse-sealed them, and deployed the smaller tube extruders. Carl and Jeffers had to maneuver them into place, yoke and unyoke, check joints and seals, and be sure nothing snagged on an outcropping of rock or jagged ice. In the tunnels chunks of icy cometary agglomerate rubbed off -- the mechs were sometimes clumsy -- and floated freely through the dark spaces, striking multi-colored halos around the spot torches the men carried. It was steady, meticulous, tiring work, even in near-zero gravity.
Their meal break was in a tunnel segment recently filled with air. They cracked their helmets and moored on a wall, enjoying the freedom even though the cold, tangy-flavored air cut sharply in their nostrils.
"Think you'll ever get used to it?" Jeffers asked, munching methodically on a self-warming ration bar. "Living in here?"
Carl shrugged. "Sure. The exercise wheel and electrical stimulation will take care of the low G, the docs say."
"Trust 'em for eighty years?" Jeffers's lean face seemed fitted for a skeptical expression; his mouth drooped down toward a pointed chin, eyes narrowed and quizzical. "Anyway, what I mean was the ice all around you. Feel how cold it is? And that's with all this insulation and our suit heaters goin' full bore."
"It'll warm up. That's a meter's insulation we just laid around this, remember."
"Gonna be a looong winter." Jeffers grinned. He would soon be swimming blissfully in the slots, and clearly relished the thought. Jeffers had been awake on the flight out. It had been boring, and now the work was hard and dangerous. He was ready for others to take over. The first watch.
Still, Carl couldn't understand the man's attitude.
"There's some risk in the slots, y'know. System malf, or --"
"I know, I know. My biochem might screw up in some way the experts missed out on. Or maybe you guys on watch throw a wrong switch, cut off my power, and the safeguards fail. Or an asteroid hits us all." He grinned again. "Still, it's a one-way trip across more'n a couple decades."
Carl frowned. "So?"
"I'd just as soon sleep through the dull part, accumulatin' Earthside pay." Jeffers's thin face twisted into a sardonic grin. "Comet farmin' in the outer system -- that'll be fun. But I can skip the kiss-ass politics."
"What do you mean?"
"C'mon, you're a Percell too. You know how this whole expedition's been set up."
"Uh... how?"
"The Orthos! They're running everything." Jeffers ticked off the names on his fingers. "Cruz, then Oakes, Matsudo, d'Amaria, Ould-Harrad, Quiverian. Every section head is an Ortho."
"So?"
"They think we're freaks!"
"Oh, come on."
"They do! Look at the way the Orthos are treating our people Earthside. Think these here are any different?"
"They aren't like that mob that burned down the center in Chile last week, if that's what you mean. Sure, I read about that stuff, and the other places. That's one reason I work in space, same as you."
"Space's no different."
"Sure it is. These Orth -- these people know they're really the same as us."
Jeffers said triumphantly, "But they aren't."
Carl smiled humorlessly. "Now who's being prejudiced?"
"Hell, you know we're not the same as them." Jeffers leaned forward, speaking earnestly. "Our bodies are better, that's for sure. And we're smarter, too. The tests show that."
"Hell they do."
"Can't argue with statistics!"
Carl grunted with irritation. "Look, we were boy wonders back when we were growing up -- before people started turning against us. All Percells were. Remember the scholarships? The special attention?"
"We earned that. We were smart."
Carl shook his head. "We turned out smart -- because of the VIP treatment."
"Naw. I've always been quicker than your typical Ortho, even if I don't bother to talk real well."
"And you are. But you're no better than people like Captain Cruz or Dr. Oakes." Carl got to his feet too rapidly and his velcro grips tore free of the fiberthread. He shot across the tunnel and banged his head against the ceiling.
"Damn!"
Jefters snickered but said nothing. Carl rubbed his head as he drifted back, but refused to let his irritation show any further. Jeffers was like too many Percells -- wrapped up in their own sense of persecution, picking at every imagined slight like a festering sore. Arguing with them just encouraged it.
"Open your eyes," his friend persisted. "Who've they got in the dangerous jobs like ours? Percells!"
"Because a lot of us are trained for zero G. We had the scholarships to get into it."
"Then why not put a Percell in charge of all Manual Operations?"
"Well... we're not old enough yet. No Percell is as experienced as Cruz or Ould-Harrad or --"
"Come on! Look at who's doing the outgassing experiments. And developing longterm sleep slotting. All Orthos."
"So?"
"That's where the real money'11 be! Learn how to steer comets with their own boiloff, show you can sleep and work in decade shifts -- and you can sell your talent anywhere in the system."
Carl couldn't help laughing. Jeffers sure did take the long view. "Come on, that's --"
"And what about Chem Section? If we turn up anything half as valuable as Enkon here. you know who 11 make out. And they're all Orthos, too, except Peters."
"We all signed patent agreements. Any techniques discovered, we all get a cut, after recouping basic expenses."
Jeffers's face contorted into a sour, sardonic mask. "The Orthos'll find a way around that."
Carl felt his own conviction wavering. What if he's right? But then he blotted out the thought. "Look, get off that line. We can't continue those stupid Earthside fights out here."
"We're not -- it's them."
Exasperated, Carl stuffed the remains of his lunch into his carry pouch. "Let's go -- I'd rather work than argue."
Continue reading sample 7, 8 and 9, or purchase Heart of the Comet.
The Real Culture War
