Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

2040BA allowed Julia to compromise between the two.

The relays of astronaut crews she sent out to 2040BA took two years to capture it. They detonated strategically-placed ten-megaton electron-compression devices at its bulbous end, altering its orbital track and increasing its long-axis rotation.

“I wanted to use nukes,” Julia had confided to Greg and Eleanor once the mission was underway. “Use up all the old superpower arsenals. That would have given people something they could understand and appreciate. The old age visibly going out in a blaze of glory to usher in the new. Now wouldn’t that be a sight?”

She needn’t have worried. People interpreted the asteroid’s arrival as the symbol of the new age. It brought hope to a psychologically leaden world. A technophilic coup d’etat, signalling the end of the worst aspects of the Warming. When you looked up you could see that there was somebody who had the guts and the drive to achieve something again, instead of just muddling through the way things had been going for nearly two decades. The somebody being Julia. It was the capture mission more than anything else-her inheritance, the giga-conductor monopoly, Peterborough’s incredible renewal-that catapulted her into the global public limelight.

The last three months of 2040BA’s journey became the greatest spectator event in human history. Greg had always wondered if it was coincidence that the final electron-compression device was detonated above night-time Europe. Julia working a subtle PR ploy, or Royan crowning their achievement with a typical brass neck gesture? Whichever, after that Julia’s kudos hit the stratosphere.

He could still remember the Last Blast party, it was country-wide. New Year’s Eve plonked down in the middle of a sultry cloudless August night. Hambleton had hosted a street barbecue, the whole village sitting round trestle tables in front of the church. Christine had been about five, but they’d let her stay up.

Eleven thirty-seven: the time was tattooed in his mind. 2040BA was a star brighter than Venus, then the last electron-compression device went off, stabilizing its orbit. A ten-megaton explosion, jetting out an incandescent plume of vaporized rock. The discharge had lasted for about a minute, growing as broad as a full moon before fading to violet and dispersing. They had all watched in silence, children, adults, pensioners, looking straight up; Greg inanely waiting to hear a distant rumble from the explosion.

The mining machines Julia sent up to Earth’s new moonlet cut out a cylindrical chamber five kilometres long and three in diameter, Hyde Cavern. Rotation gave it an Earth-standard gravity. Solar furnaces liberated oxygen from New London’s rock. Event Horizon crews collected the shale smear, shoving it through giant distillation modules, refining all the chemicals necessary for a working biosphere.

Hyde Cavern was given an atmosphere, water, light, warmth, gene-tailored food plants, insects, and soil bacteria. Engineering teams from Event Horizon and various kombinates’ space industry divisions moved in, and began refining the ore in earnest. Microgee-processing factories were boosted up from their low orbit to swarm in attendance; it was cheaper to use New London as a dormitory for the operating crews than costly habitation stations.

Greg could see New London itself through Anastasia’s windscreen, a dark head to the archipelago of high-albedo orbs. The rock’s long axis was orientated north/south, so that it rolled along its orbit. A counter-rotating docking spindle extended a kilometre and a half out of the southern hub, supporting a diamond-shaped solar cell array four kilometres square. The northern hub had a similar spindle, ending in a concave circular solar mirror five kilometres in diameter. It was built up from hexagonal sections a hundred metres across, with a speckle pattern of tiny black spots showing the holes that had been torn in them down the years. A focusing mirror hung two kilometres over the centre, sending the collected beam back down through an aperture in the middle. As he watched, one of the orbs peeped slowly over the mirror’s rim like a small sun rising above the horizon.

The orb was part of the excavation from the second chamber which was currently being hollowed out. A larger one than Hyde Cavern this time, eight kilometres long. The mining machines which cut through the ore crushed it into a residue of fine sand that was a mixture of metal powder and rock dust. It was impelled along the northern hub’s spindle into the foundry plant at its tip, where the mirror focus was aimed. The intense heat combined the rock and metal into a glutinous magma which the foundry crews called slowsilver. It was done for convenience, in freefall any liquid was easier to control and direct than a river of sand, and after mining came the problem of storage.

The slowsilver was pumped through one of a bagpipe array of extrusion pipes out into space in the shadow of the mirror, where it was allowed to accrete until it formed a globe fifty metres in diameter. Then after the outer shell had cooled and solidified the pipe disengaged, setting it loose. The foundry produced a hundred and forty orbs a day, a constant emission of metallic spawn.

Julia had no option but to store the second cavern detritus in this fashion, New London’s refineries and microgee materials-processing modules could only consume a fraction of the mining machines’ daily output. So the orbs accumulated in the archipelago, tens of thousands of them, like an elongated globular cluster staining space behind the asteroid. Some of them were nearly pure silver, others had abstract rainbow swirls frozen into their surface where exotic salts and minerals had curdled and reacted from the heat.

Refinery complexes floated round the fringes of the archipelago; big cylindrical modules, two hundred metres long, forty wide, hanging behind a kilometre-wide solar mirror. Perspective was difficult out here, part of his mind saw the refineries as chrome water lilies drifting on a velvet ocean. Almost an op art canvas. Space hardware had an inherent harshness, he thought, every square centimetre was functional, precise, there were no cool shades nor half colours, white and silver ruled supreme.

There was an annular tug departing one of the refineries, an open three-hundred-metre-diameter ring of girders with a drive unit at the centre, starting its three-month inward spiral to low Earth orbit. Ten foamedsteel lifting bodies were attached to the outside of the ring, blunt-nose triangles, massing three thousand tonnes, but with a density lighter than water. Spaceborn birds which would be dropped into the atmosphere and glide to a splashdown by one of the two permanent recovery fleets on station in the Pacific, or the one in the Atlantic.

Anastasia was heading in for New London’s southern hub. This end of the asteroid was covered in long thermal-dump panels, radiating out from a central crater like aluminium impact rays. Two spherical Dragonflight transfer liners were docked halfway down the spindle. A steady flow of small tugs and personnel commuters was berthing and disengaging, carrying crews and cargoes between New London and the clusters of microgee modules holding. station south of its main solar panel.

Greg tried to draw the image of New London inside his mind, to capture its essence, sketching out the crumpled dusty surface, small high-walled craters. Hyde Cavern: gaping emptiness surrounded by thick shadow folds of solid rock, the second chamber, mushroom shaped, unfinished. Shafts and rail tunnels knitted the two chambers together, black gossamer lines cutting through the two-kilometre rock barrier, looping underneath the valley floors in complex twists; there were buried fresh-water reservoirs and surge chambers, caverns housing reserves of oxygen and nitrogen.