David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

Under high magnification, Neptune’s equatorial bands made brown concentric circles, resembling a target.

Some Ubers still wanted to fire the Nudge to make Halley a Neptunian satellite. They could harvest gases from the upper atmosphere settle on the largest moon. Carl wondered idly what it would be like to live out his days with a slumbering green giant filling the sky. Not a lot like California, no. Maybe I should’ve gone into the insurance business. But he still hoped to see Earth’s blues, and reds, and autumn browns again…

—We see you.—An alert, young voice. Carl glanced around the edge but could spot no one ahead.

“It’s Carl Osborn. I’ve come to talk.”

—Got nothing to talk about. Jeffers told you our policy.—The voice was tense but determined.

“Who is that?” Carl whispered, touching helmets with Jeffers.

—Name’s Rostok. Saul revived him about ten, eleven months ago. Now he’s Quiverian’s number-two guy down here.—

“What’s he work on?”

Jeffers made a sour face. —Mounting the electromagnetic assemblies.—

“Oh, great:” A Nudge engineer. One of those had to go lunatic.

—If you come any closer we will not be responsible for the outcome.—

“Not responsible! What kind of crap is that?”

—We declare ourselves independent of Halley Command. —The voice was tighter, clipped.

—The hell you will!—Jeffers snapped before Carl could motion him to silence.

—We already have. And no Percell is going to tell us what to do!—

Carl breathed deeply. It did no good to blow up at asinine speeches; he had learned that the hard way, through these years. Jeffers was visibly grinding his teeth; Carl signaled him to stay quiet. “What… do you want?”

—Not food,—Rostok answered smugly. —We already have enough hydro set up here to feed ourselves. Found a nice thick vein of edible Halleyforms, too. Delicious. Feed ’em heat and they grow like crazy.—

So we can’t starve them out, Cart thought automatically.

—We want—hell, we already have! —control ofthe targeting of the Nudge.—

Jeffers jumped up. —You bastards! That’s our gear, our labor that built it. Rostok, you put in couple of months. The rest of us been buildn’ the EM guns for years ! I’m double-dammed if I’ll let some— uh!—

Jeffers grunted as Carl yanked him down. “ I ’ll do the talking.”

—Can it, Jeffers. We got the flingers, so we call the tune.—

“You have no right to determine the Nudge,” Carl said as calmly as he could.

—We got the flingers, and we represent Earth.—

“The hell you do. You represent nobody.”

—We speak for Earth. We won’t let you Percells take this plague carrier back into near-Earth orbit.—

Carl had hoped that, with the diseases checked, people would become more reasonable. Looks like it’s just given some of them the energy to be real sons of bitches again.

He opened in a reasonable tone. “That has to be decided in the Council. Look, Rostok, I’m coming out. I want to talk face to face.”

Carl stood and walked around the edge of the cylinder. Was there some movement around a jumble of crates on the horizon? He squinted, then thumbed up the telescopics. Yes—figures working at something, looking this way.

He heard mumbles on a side channel, then the clear voice of Joao Quiverian. —We warned you, Osborn.—

A sudden brilliance cut the dim sunlight. It was invisible in the vacuum but cast stark shadows where it lanced into a hummock nearby. Steam exploded, stones rattled on Carl’s helmet. A geyser burst nearby as a second laser bolt splashed the ice. Carl dived back behind the cylinder.

—That enough for you?—

Carl blinked, blinded by the glare.

Jeffers sent, —They’re usin’ those big industrial lasers—the spot welders. Cut the big girders with ’em. Can’t aim ’em much but Jeezus do they burn.

“Shit!”

—Don’t show yourself around here again.—

Another blazing burst streaked into nearby ice. Blue-white gas billowed into a swelling sphere.

“Damn,” Carl said grimly. “We can’t even use mechs against that—we’d lose too many. We need every one we’ve got for the Nudge.”

Jeffers grimaced and swore steadily. —Prob’ly smash up the flingers if we tried.—

“What the hell can we do?”

—That’s what I thought you’d know,—Jeffers said.

“Shit!”

Meetings. Carl fidgeted with his pen, shifted restlessly in his web-chair. Youcan judge the importance of a problem by how many endless meetings it generates.

He watched the wall weather as much as he could— luscious hills rising from Lake Como in northern Italy, with water-skiers cutting white V s in waters of ancient blue— but he had to appear to be intent, giving every faction its due attention. They were grouped in loose knots around the meeting room in Central. The Arcist insurrection had reopened the issue of Nudge targeting.

A Pandora’s box, Carl thought moodily. And all this had to happen just now, before I could speak privately to the important people, gather support for what I’ve got to announce. He bit at the end of his pen, a nervous gesture he had picked up sometime in the last year. With over two hundred revived crew, there are plenty of members for each faction. And I have to let them all have their say, exhaust the energy Quiverian’s stirred up. Worst possible timing… as usual.

They had been going nearly two hours now and the groups had lined up exactly as he could have predicted.

The most popular idea was the mission’s original flight plan: a Jupiter flyby on the return to the inner solar system, but before the comet approached too close to the sun. They could swoop deep into the giant planet’s gravity well like a race car in a steep turn, stealing vital momentum.

Using the south-pole flingers, they could aim the Jovian flyby to turn Halley into a short-period comet. That would make rescue from Earthspace easier and harvesting of Halley Core possible. The Plateau Three people favored the original plan, as did the solid majority of nonaligned crew.

The Ubers — the radical Percells led by Sergeov— wanted a different variant of the Jupiter flyby. Their final goal, though, was genuinely bizarre— to abandon the inner solar system entirely, and return to the spaces out here. Fire the Nudge at a low impulse, they said, and during the flyby pass over Jupiter, rather than ahead of it. That would loop them outward again to rendezvous with Neptune. Use the Nudge again to slow Halley and get captured. Become a moon. Spread out, colonize the rock and ice of Triton. A colony of supermen, perfecting themselves beneath a sky filled with a dm green ball of methane-streaked clouds.

Two vastly different plans, but both calling for rendezvous with Jupiter in 2135. Astronomy allowed many different destinations from that one gargantuan world.

The Plateau Three spacers and Sergeov’s Ubers wereunited in their need for a Jovian flyby, but they made uneasy allies. They differed about many other things, and gave each other guarded glances.

Carl had checked the mission requirements himself, not trusting anybody’s calculations. It would take a delta-V, a change in Halley’s current velocity, of 284 meters per second in the Nudge— aimed at 72 degrees north declination from the ecliptic. Not so easy. Possible, though, using thrusters located at the south pole.

Medieval societies squabbled over rarefied points of theology… and now we argue vector targeting. Equally pointless, maybe…