The Hundred Gram Mission Read Online Free Page A

tower .
    He pushed off again, a human dirigible.
    It was 4.56 billion years old, leftover packaging from the birth of the solar system. It had failed the gravitational draft of the protoplanets. Except for pity-taps of gravity, it was all alone. After eons even the inner solar system becomes a small town, though. Sooner or later, it would run into the Earth.
    Halfway across the ravine, Elijah was still rising. He looked down and saw only darkness.  In that darkness was palladium, iron, even water ice. It was a miner’s buffet table, and it would allow truly obese constructions.
    "How are those calculations coming along?"
    "If I’d known we’d be running them all again, I’d have written a damn program."
    "We should write that program anyway. That’s at least five frours work." He pronounced it frowers .
    "Five frours, easy. Seven or eight if we made it user-friendly."
    Mental work and puzzles passed time. This mattered when basically sealed in a small room for a month. They had become very good at finding problems to frown over, for hours. A frowning hour was a ‘frower.’  A frowning day though, was a ‘whole fucking day.’
    He reached the second beacon. Dust and sand erupted around his boots, forming a cloud. The motes glowed green with each pulse. He looked out to see the flashing of the third and final beacon.
    "The third beacon isn’t working." He tugged the safety line, hard. It stayed taut. "The line is still attached to the piling, though."
    "The microquake must have damaged it. If the beacon’s broken, the mass driver is certainly wrecked, too. Come on back."
    "We don’t know that. If the mass driver’s been knocked out of place, it might still fire."
    "It’s ten finicky meters of superconducting rail."
    "Which, out here, weighs next to nothing. We could toss it out the window and it would land fine. It’s still drawing power, isn’t it?"
    "Yes it is. And so is the beacon, for some reason."
    "Then they’re probably just buried under some dirt. I’ll dig that shit out and be done in five minutes."
    "It’s unsafe, Elijah. You could get caught in a quake, the deposit is already warm."
    "Actually no, it will have completely refrozen. Since the last rotation nothing in the hydrocarbon bed, has a high heat capacity."
    "How can you know that?"
    "Because it would have boiled away, billions of years ago. AT 43 boils and cools, every rotation. The volatiles boil, cause quakes, and then the whole system refreezes. Every rotation. Even when close to the sun. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be having the quakes at all."
    "Look, I’m just not comfortable with this."
    "Alright. How are the calculations coming?"
    "They’ll be done a lot quicker if we’re both doing them."
    "Then this is still our best bet. Look, I’m doing this. The science is solid. Quit worrying, and I’ll take care of this."
    He leapt off the mound.
     
    Mass Driver Seven was a silver tube, thick as a car and longer than a house. It rested on struts, angled upwards like a WWI artillery gun. Its rear disappeared into a shaft, six meters deep. Thick cables tangled around the opening, a mess of black snakes. The instrument panels on the generator glowed yellow. Powerful lights were strung from poles around the site.
    Ice and snow crunched under Elijah’s boots. He could almost pretend he was on a snowy Boston road. One of the shitty ones that didn’t get ploughed often enough. The snow field stretched around him, as far as the lights could reveal.  It hadn’t been there when they had worked on the site. But then, there hadn’t been a six meter deep shaft, either.  The gas bubbles had vented through it. Slowly, but gradually building in pressure. The shaft became a snow fountain. Then, worked loose, Mass Driver Seven had climbed out as well.
    The struts needed repair and more bolts went into the shaft walls. Other than that, there had been hardly any damage. Seven would survive the next few quakes, till the snowfield became an evaporatating