Eric Flint - Threshold

Jackie said. "It's got an actual gravity well that we're going to feel, not like Phobos, where we could shuttle back and forth without hardly noticing the cost." Jake brightened. "But that'sgood. Phobos had so little that you couldn't rely on anything having remained in place for you to study properly. Ceres will have kept things where they belong. Hopefully they had disposal areas, and there will be remnants of their entire range of activity." Helen nodded. Even more in some ways than her own paleontology, archaeology relied on the forensic approach of examining objects in context; said context was hard to verify in microgravity. "Good in some ways, bad in others, Jake. As you probably know." She glanced over at the others. "What's escape velocity from Ceres?" She knew she'd heard the answer before, but it hadn't really registered. A.J., predictably, answered first.

"About half a kilometer per second. Not much compared to Earth or Mars, but definitely not irrelevant like Phobos. Unless and until we can get things set up down there to produce us extra fuel-probably from the water, if there is any-we'll have to be very, very careful about how many trips we make." "I could try to land 'er," Bruce said, grinning. A.J. shuddered. "No, thanks. I know you and I set up that sim, just to see what would happen, but there's many things that could go wrong. Anddid go wrong in the sims, early on." "Are you serious?"

Larry demanded, staring across the bridge ofNobel at A.J. and Bruce.

The bridge, unlikeNike' s photo-op-ready installation, was just a control room with viewscreens, safely buried in the middle ofNobel' s blocky central body. "You could landNobel on Ceres?" The Australian captain ofNobel flashed Larry a devilish grin. "Well, like A.J. says, mate, too many things could go wrong to risk it if we don't have to, but the sims show that this old girl could take the strain. She's built for accel up to a quarter-g under the right conditions, remember, and Ceresian-" "Cererian or Cererine, if you please," the astrophysicist corrected pedantically. "Cerelian, whatever, mate, gravity is only about a ninth of that-about one thirty-sixth Earth's.

But the landing would be dicey, I admit, so I'm not quite so keen to try it as I might have sounded. Nice to know we could if we had to, though." "I suppose," Helen agreed. The idea that the fourteen-hundred-foot ship could land and take off from the miniature planet below was, indeed, oddly comforting, despite the obvious risks in ever actually trying it. "So are we go for scouting the target area?" Helen asked. "By remote at first, as usual," A.J. said breezily. "Once more, you will all be hanging on my every word, awaiting my blessing on your perilous enterprises." "Hey, Mr. Ego, we're not a whole A.U. away this time," Larry pointed out. "At this distance I can do an awful lot with the sensors onNobel." "Which I designed, programmed, tested, and helped install. OW!" The "OW" came as a result of Helen kicking A.J.'s shin. "You are getting too old to act theenfant terrible, A.J., and try to one-up everyone. And that wouldn't have hurt if you'd been wearing your suit." A.J. tried to look loftily defiant and only succeeded in looking like a three-year-old being scolded. He opened his mouth to say something but reconsidered under Helen's watchful eye. "We'll still want A.J.'s remotes to pave the way," Jackie said finally. "I'm sure we'll be able to pinpoint good target locations from up here, but the fact is that there's only a few of us, and so we're going to be pretty dependent on remotes and robots to keep things running." "At least we've finally got a power source with a density that makes it really feasible, thanks to Bemmie and Barb Meyer, bless her stubborn heart."

"Powercarrier, A.J., not source," Jackie corrected automatically.

"But it is nice to not be worrying so much about how we can cram enough power into one of your gadgets to let it pull off its tricks, and instead spend a lot of the space on more gadget." What A.J. and Jackie were referring to, Helen knew, was one of the first major fruits of the Bemmius explorations. The material Barbara Meyer and her colleagues had discovered-and whose attempted transmission had revealed Madeline Fathom's covert mission-had indeed turned out to be the holy grail of electrical work, a room-temperature superconductor.

The existence of such a material had sent both physicists and chemists running back to their theories to try to find a way to explain the stuff; the engineers had turned instead to discovering how to manufacture it. It had taken a few years, because it appeared that the stuff's unique properties depended both on its odd composition (carbon, boron, silicon, gold, and a smattering of rare-earth elements) and its microstructure. For energy storage, a room-temperature superconductor with high current capacity offered a near-perfect battery; in essence, one shoved electrical energy in and it stayed there, chasing its tail near the speed of light, until you took it out, with minimal losses in either direction. There were some issues with magnetic fields and so on, but after the engineering was done, the result was a battery with an energy density a couple of orders of magnitude greater than even the best chemical fuel cells or batteries. These super-batteries weren't generally available quite yet, but the Institute and Ares had managed to get a cooperative contract with the manufacturers in exchange for a small custom run. So far, Jackie had been ecstatic over the results. The other major advance from the Phobos/Mars expeditions was in the area of nanodesign. A.J.'s conjecture about the noteplaques had turned out to be correct, and analysis of the plaques, the precise structural design of the superconductor material, and other unusual features of Bemmie design had given nanodesigners (including Dust-Storm Technology) a major leg up in that area. Helen knew A.J. had a large batch of the latest "smart dust" with him; from some of his comments, she suspected that he'd have married these sensor motes if they came with more attractive exterior construction. A.J. was agreeing with Jackie.

"Ceres is actually going to be a major pain in some ways. It's not small enough to treat as basically a weightless spinning rock, like Phobos, and it's got none of the good stuff of a planet like Earth or even Mars. I can't walk normally there, but I also can't float along without worrying about maintaining altitude." He leaned back, wiggling his fingers in that rippling motion that showed he was controlling something through his VRD. "So instead of Faeries, this time I had to make Locusts." Having seen the squat, squarish-bodied drones with their spidery legs, Helen still thought "Toads" would have been a better name for the Cerean… no, Cererine exploration vehicles.

But like any parent, A.J. had the right to name his creations. "So they'll bounce over the surface, right?" "Sort of. That sounds like something bounding along going real fast. I really want them to use the legs mostly as altitude maintenance. They can do a pretty good jump if they have to, of course, but an even glide is more what I like to see for surveying places. At least this time I can also scatter Faerie Dust in appropriate locations, now that we've licked the vacuum issues. And with the power storage capabilities on the Locusts, we've got more direct physical options for exploring recalcitrant alien installations." "You mean we can bust open doors if we have to."

"Within limits, and 'bust open' sounds awfully crude. I would prefer to use more subtle means for many reasons, not the least of which being that we might break something worthwhile." "We will most definitely be using more subtle means," Jake declared darkly. "No more of this Indiana Jones breaking and entering." "Yeah, yeah, Jake, we know, you already got your changes logged into the procedure book. And I still might have to use force in some cases. You guys have been known to use bulldozers." A.J. was studying readouts in the thin air before him. "No immediate signs of the base. It was, I suppose, too much to hope for that there'd be a clear landing area with markings.