Патрик Томлинсон - Children of the Divide

Instead of Luna, Varr was more like Ceres, or even Pluto from back in the Sol system. Between the wildly elliptical orbit and the moon’s composition, the consensus among the Ark’s astronomy department was that it had been captured by Gaia several billion years earlier as it plunged towards the system primary, likely disturbed from its orbit by the outward migration of the ice giant Tau Ceti F, before it too found a stable orbit to call home.

With each hop, Jian sailed effortlessly several meters above the surface. Indeed, it was almost impossible not to. In such a shallow gravity well, he weighed scarcely four kilos, vac suit included. Each footfall sent out a little plume of dust, pulverized into a fine powder from billions of years of micro, and not so micro, meteorite impacts. But he didn’t take long to adapt to it. Considering the amount of time he’d spent in zero gee aboard the Ark over his lifetime, it felt almost natural.

Madeja said into the plant link.

The rest of the expedition stopped at the edge of the cliff and leaned over to inspect it. Jian rolled his eyes. Instead of slowing down to stop, he took two long hops to build up momentum, then hurdled over the crevasse. He arced through the sky in a perfect parabola, easily clearing the icy canyon and landing on the far side with meters to spare.

2 .>

Tentatively, the first of them backed up and charged at the divide, jumped, and landed with room in reserve. Three more made the leap without incident. Then, it was Madeja’s turn.

She stood at the edge, wringing her hands nervously. she said into the group link.

Jian said.

Rakunas objected.

Rakunas answered.

Jian returned his attention to Madeja.

Atlantis ,> Jian said, losing patience.

Madeja said. She took quite a few long hops back, then paused.

someone said into the comlink.

Madeja winced, then started to run, building up speed and height with each bounding leap. But she misjudged her final jump, landing and pushing off almost five meters from the edge of the cliff. At first, it looked like her parabola would be high enough to clear the icy schism, but as she reached her apex and started to drift down, the augmented reality display projecting her trajectory into his vision said she was going to come up almost a meter short.

“Shit,” he said aloud inside his helmet. Jian took three small hops and got right up to the edge, then kicked his legs out from under him and floated down into the dust flat on his stomach.

Madeja shouted through the plant.

Jian stretched out his left arm as far as the range of motion in his suit’s shoulder joint would let him and scrambled for grip with his free hand.

With barely a meter left to fall, Madeja reached out in a panic. But in freefall, the wild flailing of her arms caused her entire body to rotate around her center of mass, quickly spinning her outstretched hand out of his reach. With her back now facing him, Jian made one last, desperate lunge for the grab handle on the top of her suit’s life support backpack before she slipped into the inky black of the yawning chasm.

Jian managed only to get two fingers on it, but in the weak gravity two was more than enough.

Jian said.

Madeja went obediently limp as Jian firmed up his grip on her backpack handle. With almost no effort, he flexed his arm and tossed her entire body up and out of the ravine.

For just a moment, he felt like a superhero.

He was not a strong man by any measure of the word, but with Madeja effectively weighing in at less than four kilos, it was easier than throwing a baby. Not that Jian would ever throw a baby. But his ego, not caring about the details, swelled up a notch anyway.

Rakunas shouted into the com as the rest of the team bounced up to help both Jian and Madeja to their feet.

Jian lied and turned to Madeja.

Madeja took a moment to regain her composure before answering.

Jian nodded.

The rest of the jaunt to the stricken harvester was, mercifully, uneventful. The machine itself was enormous, nearly the length of the shuttle from which they’d arrived. Each one had taken a dozen shuttle flights to deliver the components to Varr’s surface for reassembly. With six wheels and an articulated body, it looked like a strange, gargantuan insect. Its “head” rested on two of its wheels and mounted a broad, shallow scoop to shovel up the first several centimeters of regolith for processing further back in the beast’s body. Only a thin layer of dust needed to be collected, because the lion’s share of the fusible Helium-3 that rained down from the system primary in the form of solar wind was trapped there.

Once inside, a series of sifters and vaporizers separated the individual helium atoms for capture, along with a handful of other useful elements and compounds, and were routed into storage containers for later collection. The remaining dust was then spread out the back of the harvester and combed to cover any trace of the machine’s passing.

That feature had been retrofitted to the harvesters out of respect to the Atlantians, who had insisted that any disturbances to Varr’s surface be mended before they would grant permission for the endeavor. It was the face of one of their Gods, after all. Such considerations had not been important when the harvesters had been built to stripmine Earth’s moon, which was just as doomed by Nibiru as mankind’s homeworld had been.

The resurfacer wasn’t the only field modification the harvesters had gone through. Despite their size, their weight was a problem, or more accurately, their lack of it. They’d been designed to operate in one-sixth standard gravity, and while that didn’t seem like much, it was still nearly five times greater than Varr’s environment. Huge concrete slabs made of thermally fused regolith had been strapped to their backs to give their wheels enough purchase to push through the dust. Likewise, metal paddles had been fixed to the wheels themselves for extra grip on the silty surface.

It was probably a combination of the extra weight and the sharp wheels that had caused the roof of the hidden cave to collapse as the harvester rolled over it. Jian came near the edge and prodded at the ground with his foot to make sure it wasn’t about to give way. It held. Still, to be safe, he hooked a line to the harvester’s hull with a carabiner and instructed the rest of his team to do the same.

Their lidar scans from orbit had pegged the cavern’s depth at around thirty meters. Peering in through the hole, it looked more like sixty.

Well, nothing for it, Jian thought as he let his line play out all the way to the bottom. The distance was safe to jump in only three percent gravity, but he clipped a repelling arrestor to the line anyway. No such thing as too careful. With a flourish befitting his new superhero status, Jian stepped off the ledge, rotated to face his teammates, and saluted as he plunged out of sight.

Slowly.

Very , slowly.

He didn’t so much plunge as… sink. By the time he was halfway down the shaft, Jian was already bored. He hoped for some vivid hallucinations a la Alice’s visions as she tumbled down the rabbit hole, but none were forthcoming. He finally touched down many seconds after stepping off, his boots sending out little clouds of dust which flew off in perfect little parabolas before settling down again. His helmet’s floodlights bounced around the chamber, illuminating it with a dim glow and giving him a sense of its proportions. It wasn’t much bigger across than it was deep, but if it had a back wall his suit’s lights couldn’t find it. Debris from the roof collapse littered the floor like discarded building blocks.