Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

“There’s little use even looking at the other gas bags, they are too far out,” the captain noted. “And while the asteroid belts contain some of extraordinary size, I cannot at this point sense any with any sort of atmosphere that might be stable and life supporting, let alone old enough to develop anything. That leaves that inner monster. Of its many moons, two currently visible are planet sized with atmospheres, and indications are that they are within tolerances for sustaining life as we know it. A third might be on the other side at the moment.”

“So the Three Kings are moons. Curious that the monk who discovered them wouldn’t nail that down,” Nagel commented.

“Not necessarily. The survey was considerably garbled, and much of the information we did have was reconstructed and some of it interpreted,” Queson put in. “There certainly were suggestions of it in the report, but who would have thought that they would be three among many around some monster that size?”

“I’d like to know what stabilizes the temperatures on those worlds,” Nagel replied. “I mean, running the two visibles we can see, I get fairly reasonable surface and low atmospheric temps even on the night side. There’s some heat from the giant, which, like most of that type, is virtually a failed sun, but why don’t they broil when they get into real sunlight? There’s no way they can do both. It’s almost like they have thermostats.”

“Perhaps they do, in a way,” the captain said. “The combination of inert atmospheric gases might well interact with the sunlight on the other side to filter out some of the solar heat and disperse it. That is certainly true of the pretty blue and white one. I just ran a simulation, and the addition of sunlight to that mixture would almost create both a heat and light shield. You could almost think of it as a planet with a natural sunscreen. It’s still going to be very hot on the other side, but if you limited your activities to ‘night,’ when it was turned towards the planet and away from the sun, and took shelter during the day, you could live through it. It’s also got quite a lot of water, so think of it as a tropical steam bath.”

“That other one isn’t any steam bath,” Nagel pointed out.

“No, it’s mostly desert, and a cold desert at that, at least on this side of the planet, away from the sun. Still, there is considerable water, much as ice, on the surface, and a good atmospheric mix. It probably gets just cold enough to be nearly unbearable when it rounds the big one and gets hit by sunlight. I think it might well be a whole different world on the solar side. Warmer, liquid water, who knows what else? Heated up just enough to sustain it and anything on it that knows how to compensate during the cold outsystem time. Roughly thirty standard days on this side, about the same on the other. Our jungle world is faster, under fifteen days each side. Wonder what the third is like?”

“Well, it’s a long way from here, but I haven’t anything better to do,” Cross noted. “Let’s go see.”

“Moving in-system. I’m going to take a little extra time to leapfrog that nasty inner asteroid belt as much as possible. In the meantime, we’ve all got lots of new information to work with.”

“Any scan of radio or other broadcast signals from in-system?” An Li asked. “Or the remnants of other ships?”

“Hard to say on the ships. There’s nothing recognizable as a ship’s power signature, if that’s what you mean, not in orbit around any of them or in the visible system, but we’ve only seen half of it and haven’t begun to map things yet. There are life signs on both worlds, even the frozen one, but it’s much too far to tell what sort of life we’re talking about. The pretty blue and white one has a few surface energy signatures that could be ships of some kind, but, if they are, they aren’t big suckers. More like the shuttle we use to go from planet to orbit—only there are no evident ships in orbit, if you see what I mean. That says that they could be anything. The cold little desert one has a vast number of really odd energy signatures, no fixed locations, but there is simply nothing in my data that matches any of them. Could be your alien masterminds, but more likely it’s some kind of energy signatures from minerals or deep down interactions below the crust. I have no records of any readings like this before, but, then again, I’ve got hundreds of cases of readings just as bizarre and all turned out to be natural phenomena.”

We’ve all got aliens on the brain, Randi Queson thought to herself. Still, we had no such thoughts the last trip and look what we met up with. That cold little world there, for example, reminds me a little too much of where we’ve already been.

An Li’s “cut” caused by a flying something turned out to be a pretty nasty slash right across her forehead in a jagged and bloody shape. It was easily attended to, and they even had skin repair in the medical unit that would, over time, make it vanish completely. For the moment, she refused the full repairs, much to everyone’s surprise, and accepted only the treatment pack that would seal and heal it in a day or two. It would also leave a pretty nasty scar that would mar her delicate beauty, and if An Li was anything she was quite vain about that.

Randi’s “bruise” turned out to be a fracture, but, again, it was easily set within the medical unit. She would have very limited movement there and have to wear a healing splint for a few days, but, again, there would be no permanent damage. The fracture was clean and rather slight, not a full break but more a chip. As she was left-handed anyway, it wouldn’t crimp her style very much, and it was likely that both would be fine by the time they got close in on the big planet.

At least the monk scout’s information as far as it went was borne out. The pretty little moon was almost certainly what he’d called Balshazzar; the cold and inhospitable but still livable moon was Kaspar; and still among the missing was Melchior, supposedly much larger than the other two and far more active and violent a world. Kaspar was almost two thirds of the way through its cold side transverse, and Balshazzar about midway. It was likely that all three were within sight for at least a good part of their short “years,” so either Melchior had set just before they’d gotten there or it was due to show up any time now.

And show up it did.

Balshazzar was about 30,000 kilometers around, and the smaller Kaspar was a shade over 22,500 kilometers, but Melchior now was impressive in its own right.

Over 50,000 kilometers at the equator, it was certainly the king of moons even in this system. It was also a nearly impossible mixture of nasty and nice. Mostly ocean, it had one huge continent straddling the equator almost three quarters of the way around, but it didn’t look like anyplace you’d want to go for a vacation. The land was riddled with volcanoes, some huge, most active to some degree, and the entire continental mass was slightly on the move, shuddering here and there with volcanic earthquakes and causing huge fissures, some of which ran for hundreds of kilometers, opening up to reveal bright hot lava. It reminded Randi Queson of a giant jigsaw puzzle in which lava seemed to run at every junction of pieces, but there was sufficient motion that sometimes the pieces were so tightly fitted the meeting edges could not be seen.

It was also smoky, with a permanent cloud layer over a good share of the planet. Still, there were enough forces at work both below and in the gravitational effects of the big planet and other passing moons that the atmosphere was constantly in motion and there were often virtually clear spots. In most areas, though, and particularly in the highest volcanic ranges of the continent, it seemed to be raining all the time, often torrentially. There was certainly vegetation, though; the atmospheric mix, minerals in the volcanic soil, and warmth both from the planet and sun and from the near-surface volcanic activities fed a nearly perfect organic stew.