“Easy now, Sub Dude. Let’s walk her around the hull and up to the top of the sail just as we planned,” Weaver said, sweat beading on his forehead. “No worries.”
“Why don’t we just fly her, sir?”
“That’s what the COB asked yesterday when I came up with this procedure.” Weaver took the first steps very slowly, pulling one boot free from the magnetic grip it had on the ship’s hull and then allowing it to kachunk back down.
“So, what did you tell the COB, sir?”
“ ’Cause if the ACS software isn’t just right, or the thrusters misfire, or any number of things happen, we don’t want to take the chance of bumping the mirror into the ship. We get it to the top of the sail, push it away from the ship and let it drift away slowly. If we are at the top of the sail it is less likely to hit anything else. That is sort of standard operating procedure for deep space probes: launch ’em and check them out right after they clear away from the launch vehicle. If we find that there is some software problem we have the whole long trip to the deep space destination to fix it. It’s better than waiting till you get there to figure out that you’ve got a problem.”
“Makes sense, sir.”
Bill focused on making his steps slow and continuous and if he ever felt the slightest tug backwards from Gants walking slower he would pause in place until the pressure went away. Bill liked that level of mental and physical unity and focus. Lately it had all been paperwork and murky personnel problems. This sort of zen state had been hard to find and he’d missed it.
The trek across the hull of the ship and to the top of the sail while carrying an extremely fragile, highly reflective laser relay mirror seemed to take an eternity, but they finally made it.
“Ready for the maiden voyage of the Frumious Bandersnatch,” Bill laughed.
“The Death Star has cleared the planet. I repeat the Death Star has cleared the planet,” Gants added as the giant optic floated into space away from the Vorpal Blade II.
“So you are saying that Miss Moon isn’t perfect?” the CO asked as Captain Weaver entered the conn.
“I never said she was, sir. Not her fault, though. The ACS algorithms were based on a model of the mirror system. A rough model. We didn’t take a lot of time going from CAD to dynamics modeling. So when we turned the thrusters on, the thing got itself in an off-nominal flight condition and that is why it went into the wild spin.” Weaver sat down at the control station and exhaled slowly. “I half expected something like this.”
“And you are certain it is all under control now?”
“Fairly so, sir. The spin actually gave the genetic algorithm Miriam generated what it needed to learn how to control the thrusters and steer the mirror. We should test the thing a time or two before we put anybody or dragonflies out there in front of it with lasers going though.”
“Indeed.”
“The Death Star has cleared the planet,” Berg muttered to himself as the dragonflies took up a ring formation larger in diameter than the rock behind them and pointed in the direction toward the large mirror floating in space fifty meters in front of them.
“What was that, Lieutenant?” the colonel asked.
“Nothing, ma’am,” Berg said. “Whenever you are ready.”
Berg had been up for two days just doing the planning and rehearsal on this operation. Even the first test had moved the asteroid, slightly, so it was going to have to be stabilized. The only way to do that was with Marines “holding” it with rock spikes, which would put the Marines in the area of laser fire.
Berg had been a big reader of SF back before he joined the Marines. And he couldn’t help but think about how blithely the old time SF guys talked about “asteroid mining” as if it was going to be the easiest damned thing in the universe. Grappers.
Safety drills, emergency drills, operational techniques: the operations order on this mining op looked like a battalion night attack and was just about as complicated. And the entire thing had come down on the vac boss. It was a good thing he’d caught up on his homework.
The ship had been moved back because the mirror and dragonfly combination had only been tested with one dragonfly and it was unknown if the mirror could withstand all of them firing together. Weaver and Miriam both agreed that the math looked good, but sometimes experiments didn’t follow the math. For all they knew, the entire assembly was going to go sky high as soon as the dragonflies opened fire. A possibility that had been built into the operations order.
Colonel Che-chee opened fire first, then the other dragonflies in turn, one at a time, with a twenty second pause between each to make certain that the mirror was going to withstand the heat.
“EVA, cooling system is compensating for the heat well,” Weaver looked at some readouts on his console back on the Blade. “Clear to add the next beam Two-Gun,” he transmitted to the lieutenant.
“Conn EVA, add next beam, aye,” Berg said, looking at his controls. The thruster system on the Death Star, as it had come to be known to all, had been designed to allow remote adjustment of beam from the Blade. Since the cut was the most dangerous part of the mission, Berg had taken the responsibility on himself. He knew that at some level he’d chosen to “do the door,” but he also knew that other than Commander Weaver he was the one most qualified. He started drawing the beam across the narrowest point of the rock, the beam slicing deep into the refractory metal of the nickel-iron asteroid.
“EVA, Conn. Cease fire. Target is shifting.”
“Cease fire, aye, Conn,” Berg said. “Colonel, cease fire. Team Four, realign this rock back to initial position.”
Prior planning prevents piss poor performance, Berg thought. So far, so good.
“…Sir, we are just having to realign after about every minute or so of firing. This will take too long if we have to do that,” Berg said.
“Wait one, Two-Gun. We’re working a fix.”
If Captain Weaver was on the problem he’d figure it out, Berg thought. After ten minutes of sitting patiently though, he was beginning to wonder.
“EVA, Conn. Two-Gun, the problem should be fixed as long as you keep a Wyvern at three circumferential points about the target. One at twelve, four and eight o’clock and I’m taking remote control of their thrusters, got it?”
“Wyvern at twelve, four, and eight, aye, sir.” Berg ordered the reorientation of the Wyverns. “Remote control, aye, Colonel, let’s try this again if you please.”
This time the beam tracked flawlessly where Berg pointed it and he did not have to worry about the motion of the rock in space. Somehow the BMG was tracking with the body as it moved from being blasted by the focused laser beams.
It took nearly two days of hard work to cut up the asteroid into “head-sized chunks.” Two days while most of the company cycled in and out of the ship, the machinists manning the fabber had regular breaks and Berg ended up having none at all. Space was an unforgiving bitch and it was up to the vac boss to make sure that everyone remembered that. Berg was constantly moving from the cutting areas, where Marines unfamiliar with the power of the melders nearly ended up breaching their suits, to the airlocks where tired and logy Marines were less-than-careful with their seal protocols. He had to constantly figure trajectories and power for the various Marines moving the rocks, keep rocks from hitting other Marines and, most especially, ensure that nobody got in the way of the cutting laser, which would slice through a Wyvern like a sushi chef through fresh tuna.
But in two days, instead of two weeks or two months, Sub Dude straightened up with a chunk of silvery metal in his suit-gloved hand.