S Morden - One Way

He was going to take a few minutes, on his own, to calm down. Because otherwise he’d end up doing something even more stupid, and he didn’t want that. Not now.

[Internal memo: Project Sparta team to Bruno Tiller 7/6/2040 (transcribed from paper-only copy)]

Minimum crew requirements

On the assumption that we send zero (0) robots and use zero (0) automatic systems, and using a working estimate of between one hundred and twenty (120) and one hundred and fifty (150) man-hours to build a single (1) hab section, pressurize it, fit it out and make it habitable, from scratch:

(We require an accurate figure as to the number of man-hours required.)

However, based on the above figures, we are currently recommending that the crew during the build phase is no less than six, and no more than eight. This assumes a minimum input per crew member of eight (8) man-hours per sol, rising to twelve (12) man-hours per sol after initial hab erection.

The build phase is therefore expected to last something longer than a month, but no more than two.

Following completion of the base modules and infrastructure, there will be a testing phase to ensure all components function as predicted and any potential faults are identified and rectified: it is expected that the labor requirements will fall to between four (4) and six (6) man-hours per sol per crew.

The testing phase is expected to last no more than a month.

Thereafter the base moves into maintenance mode. It is estimated at that point that the labor requirements fall to essentially zero (0).

It is therefore anticipated that the active phase of construction will last no longer than three (3) months.

It was the first time that all of them had been awake. All, except Marcy. It chewed at him. Yes, it had been an accident. Her air scrubber had worked perfectly for eight and three quarter hours and then failed. He wasn’t to blame. No one was to blame. They’d both been at the very ends of their life-support systems. It could have been her leaving him to die.

And still it grumbled in his guts, like a bad meal, refusing to quieten down and let him be.

If Frank had thought there might be a change of plan due to where they’d landed, and that they’d be building the base around the ship, he was wrong. Brack asserted that everything had to be constructed on the original site, nearly a mile and a half away, at the bottom end of the valley that had deposited the shelf of material—the Heights—that they’d landed on. That there was a valley, and that it had been formed by running water, enough to wash down the debris from the top of the volcano to the bottom, was strange enough to think about, but the valley itself went all the way to the top of the volcano, some thirty miles continuously uphill, and a climb of nearly fifteen thousand feet.

There’d been a river on Mars, and Dee called it the Santa Clara.

They grumbled about the site, because it was a forty-minute walk away, but it wasn’t anything they could alter. That’s where NASA wanted their base, and apparently that was where it had to be built.

“Can’t we, you know, move the ship closer?” asked Zeus.

Brack made his lips go thin. “You a spaceship pilot?”

“I guess that’s a no. I thought perhaps you might be.”

“Suit up, Number Seven. You got work to do.”

Declan cleared his throat. The dry, reduced atmosphere seemed to have stopped him sweating, but he still habitually rubbed his hands together. A nervous thing, maybe.

“About that,” he said. “I’ve been thinking.”

“You’ve been thinking?” crowed Brack, but uncharacteristically Declan cut him off.

“Someone has to fix the fact that XO plowed our solar farm into the ground and broke it, leaving us terminally short of power. And when I say terminal, I mean we could die if we don’t fix it. So if you’ll do me the kindness of shutting the fuck up and listening, I’ll tell you how we’re going to do just that.”

No one said anything, waiting on Brack’s reaction to the challenge inherent in Declan’s voice. The lowest floor, with seven of them crushed in together, was closer than any of them were comfortable with.

It didn’t come, and some of the tension ebbed away.

“We get three kilowatts of power from the RTG, but that thing is belching out heat like a high school furnace. A hundred kilowatts, according to the specifications. Do I need to explain to anyone what a hundred kilowatts looks like? No? Good. We lose all that because it’s a by-product: it goes straight up the chimney. What I’m proposing is that we use that waste energy to heat the habs.”

“Go on,” said Zeus. He was thinking, too, the tattoos on his forehead crowding together.

“It’s a big-ass lump of fissile material, so let’s treat it as a nuclear pile. We run pipes with cold water around the cooling fins, heat the water, port it around the habs, then back out when it’s cold again. Closed system. No losses. If we’re smart we can make it entirely passive, no moving parts, everything gravity-fed.”

“So we’d heat the habs,” said Zero, “but what about the electrics? What about my lights?”

“A substantial part of the energy budget is earmarked for heating at night, because it gets cold enough to freeze the air. If we can get that energy from another source, we can use what’s left to do the other things we want. It’s not perfect, but it’ll work. There’s only two problems.”

“Pipes,” said Zeus.

“And water,” added Frank, “assuming you mean regular water.”

“We could run it on pressurized liquid CO 2. But water’s better. There are degrees of sophistication, but the more surface area we get in contact with the fins, the hotter the water gets. In an ideal world, we’d submerge the whole damn thing in a tank of water and boil it and make steam and run turbines off it. We’d have so much electricity and hot water it’d be like the swankiest condo ever.”

“This water’s not going to be radioactive, is it?” asked Zero.

“No. Sealed unit.”

“And how long is this going to last us?”

“We’ll all be dead long before it gives out. The specs say eighty years before there’s a noticeable drop in performance. Once the water maker’s up and running, we can get as much of that as we want. Now, it might be all we have to do is stick a big pan of it on top of the RTG. But we need the pipework. Preferably insulated pipework, but we can bury the pipes to whack out most of the diurnal range.”

“The what?”

“Geez, Zero. Difference in the daytime and night-time temperatures.”

“I knew that.”

Declan coughed, wiped his hands. “Pipes, people. Can we take anything from here?”

“No. You cannot,” said Brack.

“First it’s the power, now it’s the pipes. This ship is going nowhere, right? We should be cannibalizing it for parts.” Declan was standing opposite Brack, flanked by Zeus and Zero. Reason dictated that in a fight between the cons and their jailer, there was going to be only one outcome, and Frank really didn’t want to have to stand between them, though he would for his ticket home. But it was Declan who backed down. “Fine. Anyone else?”

“The r-rocket motors,” said Dee. “On the supplies.”

“That’s… not a bad idea. That’ll be good quality shit right there. What do the rockets burn?” When no one offered an answer Declan shrugged. “We can look it up, or talk to Earth. But there’ll be pressure vessels and pumps and valves in all of them. Flush out the fuel, and we’re good to go.”

“How much time is this going to take?” asked Brack. “And what are you going to have to put holes in to make it?”

“I don’t know, and I’m guessing a couple, if we have to. We’re working at five psi, and we’ve got what we need to seal that. If we’ve enough pipework to make a secondary system then we won’t even have to do that. This is going to make the difference between dying and not dying, so we’re just going to have to wear the extra work. There’s going to be some maintenance: if the water freezes, it’ll block the pipes, and we’ll need to build in a pressure valve to the hot-water tank.”