Патрик Томлинсон - Children of the Divide

Jian looked up at the hole in the roof and visualized landing just past the lip. Ninety percent of achieving anything was simply believing it was possible. At least that had been the bullshit he’d been fed growing up. In the zero gee he’d grown up with onboard the Ark, the leap would have been assured success. At the bottom of Gaia’s gravity well, he wouldn’t be able to clear a full meter of vertical. But here in the three percent gee of Varr’s gravity, he had no idea what to expect.

A leap of faith, then. Not like it would be his first. Jian swallowed hard and crouched down for the attempt, pumping his leg muscles like he would in the gym before a particularly heavy lift. Then he leapt for all he was worth. In such low gravity, it felt more like pushing off from a wall in the Ark. The sensation of his momentum slowing was so slight as to almost be imperceptible to his inner ears. But his eyes could spot the loss even as he ascended through the cavern to superhuman heights. As the lip approached, he slowed to a crawl, until he came to a relative stop three short meters shy of the top. He seemingly hovered there for a long moment, like a famous coyote just after stepping away from the cliff, before he started to fall back to the floor. Jian reached out and tried to get a handhold, but the ice was too smooth and offered nothing to grip.

Jian had quite a bit of time to dwell on falling short as he slowly fell back to the floor. After coming so close, he was sorely tempted to make another attempt. Maybe if he stacked a couple of extra meters of rocks to launch from. No, there wasn’t enough gravity to keep them stable.

Jian’s gaze settled lazily on the coil of rope they’d carelessly dropped at the conclusion of the last mission. It was useless, of course. With no one to throw it up to, and nothing to anchor it to… unless he tied it off to something heavy that could, no, that was stupid. Anything he tied it to would need to be at least as massive as Jian himself for him to have any chance to pull himself up, and if he couldn’t leap his body weight out of this hole, he sure as shit wasn’t throwing his bodyweight out.

If only he had a grappling hook, or some bit of equipment or debris that could be modified to fit the task. Polly seemed to sense his frustration and appeared on top of the rock next to Jian’s face. He turned his little three-eyed head quizzically, like a kitten. A jet black, six-legged kitten with ice picks for feet. Jian understood why everyone else had taken an immediate dislike and distrust to the drone. Its bodyplan tripped way too many instinctual prejudices against insects, spiders, and swarms of glossy black things in general. The fact was Polly looked like what a kid might draw if you asked them to draw a scary spider monster, and he…

Jian craned his own head. “You look like a grappling hook.”

Polly looked on curiously, unable to hear Jian’s words through the vacuum, but attentive nonetheless. Jian thought through the idea. Polly was tiny, but in this gravity, Jian’s effective weight, even with the suit, was low, probably no more than six kilos or so. Another kilo for the weight of the rope… yes, it was feasible. Now he just needed to get Polly to understand what he wanted.

Jian bounced over to the coiled rope and dug through it until he found an end, then waved at Polly to join him. The drone scurried across the floor in a hurry until he sat perched on Jian’s knee.

“OK, little bugger. Let’s see how clever you really are.” Jian began the demonstration of the plan with exaggerated hand gestures, pointing at Polly, then imitating his limbs with fingers bent into hooks. Then he placed the rope in his palm and pretended to crawl up the wall with it before leveling off at the top and clamping down. Then Jian pointed at himself and made a rope-climbing motion with his hands. The demonstration concluded, Jian leaned back against the ice wall and waited.

Polly looked at him, then at the end of rope, then at the wall. His survey complete, he looked back at Jian and winked a green eye, then reached out and grabbed the end of the rope and sort of… absorbed it. The rope sank into Polly’s abdomen like it was being swallowed by tar. As soon as the process was complete, Polly jumped off Jian’s leg and sprinted up the icy wall like a scalded cat, the rope undulating behind him like a tail.

Jian shook his head in disbelief. “Really clever, is the answer.”

Ten minutes later, they were both safely back inside the Buran . But Jian faced a new problem. The com equipment he needed to spread word of his discovery doubled as a backdoor Flight on the Ark could use to steal c c control of the shuttle and drag him back to his father and his judgment.

His only chance was the coms whisker laser which couldn’t be hacked or intercepted by anyone but the intended target, in this case, a receiving station in Shambhala. From there, he could log into the local web and connect with anyone through the plant network.

There was one problem; the whisker laser on the Buran was designed for use at distances of geo-synch and below. Varr’s position relative to the surface of Gaia was currently an order of magnitude greater than that.

Jian checked the clock. Gaia’s rotation had brought the Shambhala receiver into range three hours ago. That meant he had another two and a half hours to find enough power to increase the laser’s output tenfold, without blowing it up, before the relative angle between his emitter and the city became too obtuse to maintain a connection.

No pressure.

Jian lambasted himself for not thinking this phase of the mission through earlier. He’d had a day and a half during the trip over here to make and test the necessary modifications. Why the hell hadn’t he?

Because you didn’t actually believe you’d get this far , an angry, judgmental part of his psyche answered. You came out here to run away, not to save anyone. That was just your excuse .

“Fuck off,” Jian said to, well, himself. He’d never felt so alone, so isolated. It was starting to play tricks on his consciousness. He floated over to the com station and pulled up the whisker laser interface on the physical panel. He could do it all through his plant, of course, but he wanted tactile contact. Jian enjoyed punching the buttons himself.

The com laser emitter was stowed away in the shuttle’s cargo bay. The sensitive optics needed protection from the intense heat and pressures of atmospheric reentry. With the omnidirectional UHF radio being the shuttle’s main communication’s system, the whisker laser was a redundancy, and afterthought. Using it meant depressurizing the cargo compartment, opening the first leaf of outer doors, and extending the emitter on the shuttle’s multi-axis boom.

The cycle took seven painful minutes to complete. Time Jian spent shutting down non-critical systems to free up power for the connection attempt.

[WHISKER COM SYSTEM ONLINE.]

“Oh thank Cuut,” Jian announced to the heavens. Before he got really crazy, Jian decided to run the laser at normal power, on the outside chance the engineers who’d built it had wildly understated its true capabilities. Wouldn’t be the first time they’d held a little somethin’ somethin’ in reserve for a rainy day.

[CONNECTION FAILURE. INSUFFICIENT SIGNAL STRENGTH.]

Well, that answered that.

Jian moved over to one of the fuse and bus panels and consulted a series of wiring diagrams to make sure he wasn’t about to turn off his air supply. He rerouted power from the navigation system – which wasn’t doing anything of use at the moment – the collision avoidance radar, the cargo bay heaters, and the UHF radio system he’d already sabotaged and dumped it all into the whisker laser, quadrupling its output. An act that in and of itself required Jian to spend another twenty minutes overriding half a dozen safety protocols.