Mercury
From CleanPosts
MERCURY
"Tell me why we're doing this again?"
For weeks a pair of landers spun gracefully around a common barycentre, held together by a thick cable two thousand feet long. The sun was a bloat- ed spinning blur growing ever hotter and brighter, but Major Karin "Bravo" Durr of the Israel Defense Force hunkered down out of the line of sight as the ferocious questing sunbeam scoured the inside of her lander like a searchlight.
And now as the mission drew near to its climax, a lesser light grew out there, the pinkish-grey half disk that was the planet Mercury. Yet only here, at the end, did Karin, who was really a 101 year old woman named Li- lith Gervasi, ask why.
And her wife Round Robyn, who was formerly Kim Lokken, found the question funny enough to elicit a laugh. "Isn't it a bit late in the game to ask that? Okay, Lil, I'll play along We're going to steal a bot from GenMat."
They spoke using a two-way video cable strung along the bundle connecting Lilith's lander to the other one carrying her partner. Their marriage was legally recognized in Pacifica, where it had been performed, but neither Israeli law nor American jurisprudence under the New Confederacy currently recognized their marriage. Robyn was indeed Lilith's wife in every sense of the word, and this was a remarkable thing because neither woman considered herself to be gay.
On IDF campaigns Lilith routinely offered candy to some of her men to keep all of them in an aggressive state that gave Bravo Battalion an extra edge. Some of the things her men did to gain her attention were quite dismaying to the enemies of Israel.
And Robyn had once been married to Jerry Shy Bear. In the middle of the previous century Robyn gave birth to a daughter named Joy, who was dead now from natural causes related to old age. Her husband was long dead as well, but decidedly not from natural causes.
Lilith summed up her feelings for Robyn succinctly one night after giving it much thought. She said, "I love you, of course, but I'm strictly hetero- sexual unless I'm alone together with you. Then I'm Robynsexual. Does that make any sense?"
For her part Robyn refused to pigeonhole herself with labels of gay, straight, bisexual, or what-have-you. Love was the greatest aphrodisiac ever invented, and Robyn would always be in love with Lilith, so she took every opportunity to be alone together with her, triggering Lil's powerful Robynsexuality.
But Lilith was slightly annoyed by Robyn's deliberate misunderstanding of her question. She said, "I didn't ask what we're going to do, I asked why we're going to do it."
"I explain it all in a letter I wrote to you which is back at the house at Bell Regio on Venus, in case I don't make it. There is a very high probability that we are going to die and this stunt won't work, by the way. I'm talking about True Death. That's why I'm doing it myself. I couldn't ask Hunky or Dory to do it for me, and you're here because, well, you're you. 'Nuff said."
"Back at our house, where?"
"Inside my Holy Buron, on the nightstand. If we both make it, I'll explain the whole thing to you in person. If I don't make it and you do, open the letter. And maybe read the Buron it's hiding in too, while you're at it, the Old Buron explains a lot of stuff."
"I've already read the New Buron," Lilith told her.
"Only because you're in it and you wanted to make sure I got everything right when I wrote it. Now if we both don't make it, then there won't be a bot, so there won't be a Hope, and the whole thing doesn't matter. You'll have to accept that for now, Lil. Are we still buddies?"
"Of course, Sugar. I'll even prove it to you with a little phone sex."
"You're on."
The heat rejection system in their highly-reflective landers was good, but not perfect. Early on the descent arc from Venus, Lilith and Robyn removed all of their clothing for the whole flight and found sufficient shade, but they were still quite toasty-warm.
Round Robyn was no elegant beauty like Lilith currently was, and she was a little on the chunky side, but hardly the obese butterball her nickname would suggest. The Round part actually referred to her immortality, her endless chain of serial lives that was the essential characteristic of Femina Caelestis. Robyn currently had an unruly, lofty helmet of jet black hair and preferred to say she was Rubenesque.
Lately Robyn and Lilith had to settle for a direct link by cable, mind-to- mind, which Femina Caelestis called Sharing. Lilith and Robyn called it phone sex. The physical and emotional joy of the Sharing was so profound it inevitably set up a sexual response, like certain strings of a piano vibrating after a person's shout.
The pleasure of Sharing defied all description, just as an orgasm did, but to illustrate the relative intensities of the two experiences, Robyn once said the cascade of multiple orgasms that inevitably followed the Sharing was like the runny nose one got after taking a polar bear swim in the nude.
When the Mercury mission was being planned, some of the Bunners warned Lilith and Robyn of the danger of experiencing the True Death should both of them fail and be destroyed. There would be no way to carry or transmit their final memories back to Femina Caelestis, and therefore no chance of executing mind upload into a fresh body.
To be sure, recent copies of their memories could be restored from back- up, but if the Mercury raid failed there would be no unbroken thread of continuity from this life to the next.
The fear of True Death was an unhealthy obsession of the Gina series, Lilith always thought. She herself had experienced the death of her original body in 1956, when she stormed a seaside battery at the tip of the Sinai Peninsula, but she picked herself up and moved on, in the unique way of Femina Caelestis.
Lilith certainly still felt like herself, and if there was an original self that ceased to exist when a Egyptian shell exploded that day, she couldn't prove it. Lilith thought about it sometimes but she certainly didn't brood on the subject.
As for Round Robyn, in hypo-static union with Binah, she held that for all individuals who existed outside of the Land We Know, including elohim such as herself, there was probably no post mortem consciousness. So even the language of the Gina series when they worried about experiencing True Death was very likely misleading.
Lilith was very good at analyzing aerial reconnaissance imagery live, under time pressure. In the planning sessions Round Robyn told Hunky, Dory, and the Bunners, "Lil here is a genius-level tactician. When she gets on the scene she will just know what to do. And I'm going because Project Hope is my project."
So all the objections of the Ginas withered away into a low-level murmuring. And there was no doubt the Hope project was the biggest game Femina Caelestis had going right now. There were many hurdles to jump but the pay- off would be almost beyond imagination.
Mercury was close enough now that the stable images coming from the counter-rotating cameras were beginning to provide useful detail. Lilith had to work fast, because if the pair of landers did not separate soon, they would both spin down and smack right onto the face of the planet.
When Lilith found a candidate "situation" she piped it down to Robyn over the cable, along with the latitude and longitude of the scene so it could be fed to fire-control.
Robyn wasn't on the mission just to keep Lilith company, she was the one who was going to take the shot.
Hundreds of sun-driven steerable laser beams leaped from the surface of Mercury, providing remote spot power to ships and space stations scattered all across the System, so long as the Russian company whose name translated to General Materials got paid.
Laser beams were impossible to see from the side in the vacuum of space, of course (bad science fiction movies like the Galaxy's Fall trilogy notwithstanding), so avoiding them was going to be purely a matter of luck on the part of Robyn and Lilith.
Aside from the pink tinge, most of Mercury was cratered and looked remarkably like Earth's moon. But nineteen percent of the surface of Mercury was featureless, smooth, and grey. This was the area already covered by solar panels which converted the fierce sunlight falling on the planet into electric power. And that power in turn drove the lasers.
General Materials boasted they would cover the entire planet someday, and they would have ten thousand tracking lasers powering every ship in the Solar system. It was a bold dream, and it was well within their grasp.
For it was not men who were turning Mercury into a vast powerhouse, but automated refineries crawling eternally toward the west in two groups strung along the day-night terminator, each one accompanied by an army of Bots running at a brisk jog. The combination of Mercury's slow 59-day rotation and 88-day revolution resulted in a zenith-to-zenith synodic Mercury "day" of 176 Earth days, and that meant each group had to average between four and five miles per hour to remain in the twilight zone between day and night.
And there in the twilight zone they had to stay, because neither Refinery nor Bot could store electricity. They generated power from the enormous heat difference between the rising (or setting) sun and the eternal shadow on the opposing side. Part of this power drove the treads of the Refineries (and the legs of the Bots) to cross the land, maintaining their relative angle with the sun, and what remained they could use to do other work.
One group of Refineries was called the Sunset Chasers, because they ran with the westering sun ever in their face. The land they crossed was still hot after three months of searing daylight. Mercury never ceased to smelt its own surface rocks, so there were small but ancient pools of liquid lead, cadmium, bismuth, tin, selenium, lithium, and zinc so buttery-soft a Bot could cut it with a knife.
And that is essentially what they did, ranging far from their mother Refinery to gather raw materials and bring them in to be processed into stacks of sorted ingots and even brand new working baby Bots.
But how the Refineries accomplished all that, the Russians knew not, nor even Belial who probably mindlessly assembled the first one from detailed procedures developed by other elohim long ago before he gave it to his hu- man clients.
Binah suspected Belial was withholding key information from the nearly in- finite base of elohim knowledge that he made available to Binah alone, on a read-only basis, and if that was true, it was a serious breach of their ancient bargain, possibly a deal-breaker. But Binah needed physical evidence before confronting Belial. That information was a side benefit of the raid.
Precisely on the other side of Mercury from the Sunset Chasers the Dawn Racers followed, running with the sun ever at their back. They faced a land which had endured three months of the utter cold of Mercury's night. From the raw materials left on the side of the road by the Sunset Chasers, the Dawn Racers manufactured photo-voltaic panels and had their Bots place them nearby and link them up to the growing network.
Half of a Sunset Chaser's new baby Bots were left behind to sleep through the night until a Dawn Racer came along to "adopt" it. And when the Refineries grew heavy enough from all the Bots bringing ore to them, they simply divided in two like an amoeba and divided their retinue of worker Bots between them. In a sense, the machines were alive.
This whole operation had run for fifty years with little intervention by General Materials. They needed only to clear obstructions from the path of the Refineries and collect the billions in solyad that came their way in payment.
Even their chief competitor, Round Robyn herself, acknowledged that GenMat provided a valuable service, offering clean power for light-sail ships, conventional ships, asteroids and far-flung space colonies on demand with- out the need to consume water like Femina Caelestis's own macro motors did. But should GenMat ever choose to become belligerent, a few dozen of those beams could be focused on a single target, a city perhaps, and wreak utter devastation. And the Russians were deliberately fostering a frightful dependence.
Many people were asking what GenMat intended to do with a million Bots when they were finished developing the planet. The Russian urge to reach for hydraulic empire was well known. There was a time earlier in the century when Russia controlled the energy sources for much of Europe, not always with benign results. Some said the Bots would be fitted with internal power supplies and become an irresistible army. Others said they would become a gigantic pool of ready labor which would throw millions of people into permanent unemployment.
All of these speculations and many more were gaining traction by the day among the ten billion people of the Organization of the Nations of Earth, or ONE. So GenMat sulked, and became reclusive, if a corporate entity could be imagined to display such behavior. Despite having hundreds of thousands of the the silvery little running robots, none were for sale, and it was made clear (by shooting some trespassers and thieves) that trespassers and thieves would be shot.
Lilith laid out her proposed scenario to Robyn on a screen. She used a black cursor to point out features on Mercury while she spoke. "There are six Refineries currently approaching a gap in this escarpment almost simultaneously, but the gap is only one lane wide."
This she said in the English accent she had never lost and which Robyn, who grew up in the American west, always found absolutely adorable.
"Where's the Bots?"
"They are too small to see right now. At any rate, if you hit this first Refinery here, just when it gets to the gap, there's going to be a dead hulk in the way when the second one gets there. And these other four will just add to the traffic jam."
"Okay, how does that help us?"
"Don't you see it? These are Sunset Chasers, Robyn. If they don't keep moving, night gets the jump on them. The Refineries are complete morons, but they know what to do if they can't proceed. They'll ring up all the Bots on the wireless and tell them to go to sleep. And next they will ring up the Russians, tell them to get off their fat bums, and come out here to clear the motorway."
"I get it. We'll have several days to take our pick of some sleeping Bots before the ground is cool enough for GenMat to send a work crew. She looked at the time. "And we've still got fifty-six minutes before we have to split up. Damn, you are good, Lil, I don't care what Dory says about you."
Robyn fed the ground coordinates into her fire control panel and estimated how long her torpedo should take to reach impact for maximum effect. The weapon was smart enough to understand her orders to hit the westernmost of the six large objects, the lead Refinery, which appeared as a moving white square blur on Lilith's video. Homing was passive and visual.
After she fired the torpedo she switched to Torpedo Cam, which was uploaded to her by laser rather than microwave to avoid alerting Mercury with any possible radio back-lobes. And since she shot the torpedo directly at Mercury, there was no visible exhaust flare to announce it was incoming.
The view of the planet grew larger and larger until Lilith's chosen ridge line was visible. After that, the panorama tightened rapidly until it was hard for them to follow what was happening. Suddenly the signal went dead.
Lilith switched to her original telescopic view. They both saw a grey dust cloud settling rapidly in the near-vacuum, a circular debris field, and only five Refineries. But now Lilith and Robyn were close enough to finally see the Bots as little sunlit specks running around the scene like pissed- off ants.
Lilith said, "Great shot, Robyn, that deserves a little yum yum later."
The first major task was completed, and there was still eighteen minutes until the moment of separation.
Here was the reason for the two ships swinging on a tether: GenMat didn't waste power slicing the sky with early warning radar, but they were known to passively search for the bright flares of incoming ships on terminal cruise and bounce the contacts against a list of known traffic. If the Russians discovered Robyn and Lilith's uncleared presence here, they would quickly steer several of those lethal laser beams their way. So the mission employed an unorthodox, acrobatic approach scheme which used absolutely no glowing macro drive, ion drive, or chemical rockets at all.
But it depended on exquisite timing. They were approaching the planet dead- center. No human being had reaction time fast enough to cut the line at the proper moment. In the final minute Robyn armed the system and let the computer make the slice. The landers let go of the tether in the same millisecond and the women found themselves instantly weightless after two months at two-fifths gee.
As the landers rapidly flew apart, temporarily incommunicado, Robyn knew everything was rolling out as she planned. But Robyn still grimaced when she skimmed only three thousand feet above one of Mercury's higher mountaintops. Then she was flying up and out again, captured by Mercury's gravity into a long looping ellipse.
Lilith's lander was flying on a virtual mirror image of Robert's path, altered only by lumps in Mercury's crust which introduced a minuscule variation in their orbit. But this was actually good, it added a safety margin when they met again.
High above the side of Mercury currently facing the sun Robyn caught sight of Lilith's lander again, a bright star which quickly grew and streaked right by, perhaps only a mile away from her at the point of closest ap- proach. She locked on to her with laser communications, and Lil in turn locked onto Robyn. It would be two days up to the top of the ellipse, and two days back down, before they could land and try to grab some Bots.
With any luck, they would beat the human repair team sent out by GenMat to clear the path for the five remaining Sunset Chasers. Those Refineries would become Dawn Racers after the long night of Mercury. It all averaged out in the long run. Sometimes Dawn Racers ran into trouble and went dormant through the long day, and became in turn Sunset Chasers.
At the bottom of their loop on the four day mark, when Robyn and Lilith skimmed just over Mercury's highlands again, they lit off their macro engines to make planetfall. Now there were two big bright flares telling any- one on Mercury who happened to be watching that two interlopers were here. Fortunately the danger was minimized by the low altitude where they initiated the burn, which limited the sight horizon for any surveillance.
This part went well, and presently there were two Astrodyne landers parked in the dark on the gradually cooling night-time surface of Mercury. They lit up the whole area with floods. Lilith and Robyn were already suited up, and they had already recycled most of their cabin air with a pump, so it was only a few minutes after landing before they completed their check- lists, popped the hatch and stepped down the ladder of their respective ships to the ground.
There was little need to get acclimated. They had spend the last two months at the same gravity, by design, and the recent four day interval in free fall did not seriously reverse that conditioning.
By luck, Robyn spotted one sleeping Bot near enough to her lander that it reflected the floodlights. It was a beautiful little human-shaped thing, nearly four feet tall, with silvery skin. She picked it up tentatively. It didn't wake up, and there was no sun power for it to use in any event. It was made from exotic and light metals like lithium and beryllium, and would have weighed as much as a small child on Earth, but in the lower gravity of Mercury it was even easier to lift. So within a half hour Robyn already had one Bot in the bag. This encouraged her to go looking for more. She only needed one, but perhaps they could use some spare parts.
Lilith, unfortunately, couldn't find a Bot using the lights from her land- er, so she had to comb the ground by foot, using the lights on her suit. This was a surprisingly time-consuming task, like a snorkeler looking for a fin which had fallen off somewhere within a mere five feet of murky water. By the time she stumbled onto her Bot, Robyn had bagged two of her own and was hunting for a third. But as she planned from the beginning, one Bot was sufficient for Lilith.
Although there was quite a safety margin of distance between their two landers, she gave Robyn a heads-up so she could turn her faceplate away from the launch and avoid taking any flying debris. Instead of talking to her by radio, which could be picked up, she walked right up to Robyn and touched her faceplate directly to Robyn's faceplate, just like a kiss, so she could speak and they could hear by the direct conduction of sound with no chance of being overheard by the Russians.
"I got my Bot, Sugar, so I'm leaving now. Watch for blowing rocks."
"Good luck to you," Robyn replied with a wink. "Now what is the first thing you're going to do when you get back and God forbid I don't make it?"
"Read the letter you have stashed inside your Buron. On the nightstand."
"Good girl. Don't worry, I'll be right behind you, but we're not going to get a second chance at this, and I want a few more Bots to create a margin for error."
Lilith shook her head with a grin and patted Robyn's faceplate with a gloved hand. "You're a brave one, I'll give you that." Then she picked her way gingerly over the dark rocky landscape back to her lander, leaving Ro- byn behind to look for more Bots.
There was no way to avoid the bright light of her hot engine exhaust during launch, and the higher she rose, more and more area of Mercury could potentially see her. This was the time of maximum peril. But Astrodyne routinely hauled shipments of refined metals from Mercury to Venus, so Lilith was gambling that GenMat would not attack a ship going away from Mercury with- out a good reason. It was a reasonable risk. GenMat needed Astrodyne to carry their overflow of ore to Venus and thence to Earth.
But in Robyn's case the Russians obtained their good reason for attacking. Robyn saw the bouncing lights of an approaching vehicle and aborted her harvest immediately. Hoofing it back to the lander, she flipped through the launch sequence from muscle memory, without using a checklist, and within a few minutes she was rising rapidly but silently at the head of a brilliant white flare.
The Russian maintenance team noted the launch, and when they arrived on the crime scene fifteen minutes later they stumbled over the bodies of sleeping Bots. They also noted the debris of one Sunset Chaser scattered all around, and the hulks of five more Refineries which had been unable to negotiate the obstruction.
All of this information they relayed back to Tolstoy Basin without commentary. Let The Powers That Be figure out what it all meant. In the meantime their job was just to clear the path so the Dawn Racers could come through here in about three months, revive the Bots, and adopt five new Refineries into their traveling clan. Sometimes the Dawn Racers lost a few refineries to the Sunset Chasers also, so it all evened out in the end.
Lilith squirted an encrypted oral report of events by tight microwave beam so at least the Ginas would be appraised of what happened in the event she and Robyn didn't survive.
When Lilith was three-quarters of the way through her ascent burn without incident, she started to feel euphoric, thinking that she was actually going to survive this stunt. And after an hour Robyn was on her monitor too, finally aloft, but never cracking a smile, because she was just beginning to pass through the Worry Zone.
"I think the Russian maintenance guys saw me launch," she told Lilith.
If so, then Robyn did have something to worry about after all. In fact, they both did, because the Russians didn't believe in coincidences. "Give me a continuous mind-upload," Lilith replied. The Plugs they wore weren't powerful enough to send a fat data stream all the way to Venus, just a trickle.
"You too. That way if just one of us makes it, we won't both be lost."
By now Lilith thought she had all of the GenMat Rules of Engagement figured out. Scheduled arrivals and departures, and unscheduled departures were not attacked. Only unscheduled arrivals were attacked. It was a tidy theory, but it was false.
No less a personality than Kirill Egorov, the chairman of General Materials, complained on a broadcast from Tolstoy Basin on Mercury to Astrodyne about a pair of unidentified flying objects. Lilith Gervasi heard the en- tire message. And presently one of the Ginas replied from Bell Regio on Venus.
"Hello, Mr. Egorov," she said. "One of your Refineries exploded when it was passing by, damaging two small Astrodyne freighters loading up on sheets of zinc. They were forced to abort their pickup and return to Venus as soon as possible for repairs."
It was twelve minutes between replies, due to the extreme distance and the sluggish velocity of light. Egorov said, "Explain presence of two freighters. Is not General Materials policy to book pickups near to terminator where refineries operate."
Twelve more minutes, and Jill replied, "That can be explained by the inexperience of the two pilots in question. They must have landed at the wrong site. One crater looks like another. Please accept my apology for the en- tire incident."
To Lilith, the lie seemed perfectly satisfactory. Kirill Egorov didn't have an answer to this in words. But he did reply with action.
Lilith's burn was nearing completion. She was busy securing her precious Bot for the impeding return of free-fall when the screen monitoring Robyn's lander went completely to static and her mind-upload ceased. Without delay, and before verifying what she feared, Lilith deployed her ship's mirrored light-sail, which unfurled like an inverted silver umbrella, complete with a lightweight network of bracing to hold its shape.
When that was done Lilith reviewed the recording of the video from Robyn to see what had happened to her when she wasn't looking. Sure enough, just before the static began, the image of the flight deck glowed red, and Robyn was jumping around in a frenzy trying to strap herself back into her seat. The seams of her landers' skin melted and some of the ship's exterior panels blew out and away into space due to the internal atmospheric pressure, taking Robyn with them before she could get belted in.
Under the searing red light, black scorch marks quickly grew over the deck plates and control panels until they reached the camera, then the image went blank.
Lilith hoped Egorov would be satisfied with just getting Robyn, but no such luck. GenMat steered their launch lasers over her way. Lilith heard a loud bang, accompanied by a sudden return to zero gravity. She realized they must have melted her nozzle and main motor.
Lilith tilted her ship slightly to keep the ongoing assault of coherent light from crawling right up the inner core of the lander stack to the main tanks, which would melt the mid-body plumbing and ignite the propellant mix. By doing this she gave Mercury's lasers nothing but mirror to chew on. On her instruments Lilith noted a small but steady acceleration from that.
Fine, with that acceleration from radiation pressure she could still get to Venus, even though her burn was not yet complete, but it would take some tricky sailing and the cooperation of her enemies.
The Russians were already perturbed that Lilith didn't blow up after a few seconds and disappear from radar like Robyn did, so they poured it on, adding more and more lasers to the attack. And every time they did, Lilith did some figuring and tilted the ship's sail a little bit more to fine-tune the ascent. When she finally had enough velocity to intersect Venus she thought she had won.
But GenMat recalculated her flight path and realized she was still on course to reach Venus. So they began randomly adding a laser from here and there from across Mercury.
Now Lilith's velocity cup was overflowing, and she had to keep tipping this cup first one way, then another, reflecting the light from side to side, but always keeping her projected course touching Venus. It was all well within her limited capabilities as a pilot, but the transit would be about two months and eventually she would need to sleep. Over time GenMat would simply grind her down and they would prevail.
So she needed help fast. Lilith radioed her predicament to Venus and sent along a copy of the video from Robyn's last moments. There wasn't enough bandwidth available on her small vessel, however, to transmit the copy of Robyn's final memories, nor her own current ones.
Within the hour the voice of fifty-nine year old Chayn Millet-Ratte, CEO of Astrodyne, was heard in a general broadcast, relayed from Luna through the transmitter at Bell Regio.
After identifying herself, Chayn said, "Mr. Egorov, I have received images showing the murder of one of my pilots using one or more of GenMat's launch lasers. As a consequence of this, Astrodyne will not offer transportation services to General Materials until further notice. There is nothing personal in this decision, it has to do solely with the difficulty of hiring pilots to fly in a hostile region of space where they might be killed at any moment.
"Right now I feel a temporary shipping embargo is sufficient and I do not foresee a military response or a blockade. But I do have a another pilot who is currently under the same type of unprovoked attack as the first pilot. If the second pilot is still being assailed by your lasers precisely one hour from now, then I will interpret that fact to mean a state of war exists between General Materials and Femina Caelestis. Chayn Ratte, out."
Presently the attack ended, leaving Lilith to drift free on her two month glide path directly at the limb of Venus, which she fine-tuned with solar radiation using her light sail. GenMat even stopped pinging Lilith with their fire control radar and lost the track. They no longer cared about her. As the Russians had done throughout their history, they overstepped a bit, and now it was time to deal with the unintended consequences.
