For fully twenty heart-stopping seconds, Andreesen said nothing, his stare unwavering. Ribot could only look him straight in the eye across the combat information center conference table. Then Andreesen did something that to the best of Ribot’s knowledge had never been observed before. He stood up and leaned over. With the faintest hint of a smile on a face that was, considering the heavy responsibilities borne by its owner, surprisingly young and untroubled, he took Ribot’s hand and shook it vigorously. “No, I don’t. Excellent, Captain, excellent. Not something I say often, as you know. But good luck and may God watch over you all this day.”
Even safely tucked away at his workstation as far away from Andreesen as he could get, Michael imagined he could hear Ribot’s sigh of relief clear across a crowded combat information center.
But Andreesen had Michael’s measure. He turned, and his eyes skewered him. “Helfort! I knew both your father and mother when they were in Space Fleet. Good officers, both of them, and a loss to the Fleet when they retired. My thoughts are with them and of course with your sister. We’ll get them all back safely, I promise.”
Michael could only nod as Andreesen turned back to face Ribot. “Now, Captain, let’s have that drink you promised me and then I’ll leave you in peace.”
For a moment, Michael and everyone else present felt the full force of the Federated Worlds’ commitment to resolve the crisis no matter what. It was an awesome and sobering statement of raw power, and Michael pitied any Hammer stupid enough to get in the way.
Thursday, October 1, 2398, UD
Eternity Base
The transition from the cool air-conditioned comfort of the lander to Eternity’s atmosphere was as sudden as it was brutal.
As Digby stood at the foot of the ladder, the raw heat and humidity of late morning wrapped itself around him and left him gasping as he struggled to make his breather seal to a face instantly slicked with sweat.
“So now you know what’s it’s like down here with us mud crawlers, General.” Unlike Digby’s, Professor Cornelius Wang’s face was barely damp, his voice hardly distorted by the bright yellow breather mask that shrouded his lower face. This was his territory, not the general’s, and his body language betrayed his inner confidence, his sense of command.
“Welcome to Eternity Base, General.”
“Kraa’s blood, Cornelius. Is it always as hot as this?” Digby said, his voice half-strangled, his left hand engaged in a futile attempt to keep the sweat beading on his forehead out of his eyes.
“Yes, I’m afraid it is, General,” Wang said apologetically. “Just be thankful it’s not raining, which it seems to do a lot. But a couple of days will have you acclimatized. The Feds’ drug protocols are very effective at accelerating adaptation to heat and humidity. In a few days, you’ll find it relatively comfortable, believe it or not.”
“By Kraa, I hope so. I don’t think this is something I’d want to put up with for very long. Anyway, enough of that. Let’s get on. I want to see everything.”
“Of course. And we have a lot to show you.” With that, Wang waved Digby toward a jeep parked on an access ramp. Despite the fact that it had been planetside for less than two weeks, the jeep’s mud-streaked and battered sides betrayed the intensity with which Wang had been driving the terraforming project forward.
Beyond the jeep stood the skeletal frames of spaceport infrastructure as they emerged from the yellow-brown earth of Eternity’s surface, an army of orange-coveralled figures and scuttling buildbots swarming over every part. To the left lay the lander maintenance hangars, and to the right the massive supplies warehouse, its vitrified rock floor so smooth that Digby could almost see the sky reflected in it as it waited for the roof to go on.
Directly ahead of Digby, the fusion plant was coming along, its roof of ultra-lightweight plasfiber panels now on, bright red primary power modules installed, and high-voltage power cables beginning to grow outward in every direction from the power distribution modules. Alongside the fusion plant sat the carbon sequestration and oxygen production plant, a mass of cryogenic gas separators and methane and carbon dioxide converters, and behind them was the liquid oxygen storage farm and raw carbon dumps.
Beyond it all stood the focus of this incredible display of Federated Worlds technology, the biomass production plant. Once it was commissioned, from this plant and others to follow would pour a torrent of fast-growing geneered biomass: photosynthetic cyanobacteria, diatoms, coccoliths, and other marine phytoplankton, together with methane-tolerant plants capable not only of surviving on Eternity’s uninviting surface but of reproducing like wildfire.
As explained by Professor Wang, the process was simple, in principle at least.
Some geneered organisms converted water, carbon dioxide, and methane to free oxygen and carbon-based biomass. Others-high-energy crackers they were called, one of the keys to the Federated Worlds’ terraforming technology-split hydrogen directly out of Eternity’s superabundant methane. Eternity’s excess methane was reduced further when, in the presence of oxygen, it was split by ultraviolet light in the upper atmosphere into yet more hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and oxygen.
The hydrogen escaped to space, and the carbon dioxide returned to start the process all over again, leaving a net increase in the amount of atmospheric oxygen and falling methane levels. The process was agonizingly slow to start with but would accelerate dramatically as methane levels fell, the planetary surface oxidized, the levels of dissolved oxygen built up in the sea, and less and less oxygen was lost into the planetary surface and oceans.
Easy, really, when you put it like that, Digby thought as he massaged a forehead that still ached with the mental gymnastics he was having to do to understand it all.
It was the sheer scale of the terraforming process that confounded him. The quantities involved were mind-numbingly huge. Wang’s calculations showed that getting Eternity’s atmosphere to a level at which humans could live comfortably at low altitudes would require close to 780 teratonnes-7.814 metric tons-of free oxygen to enter and, more important, stay in Eternity’s atmosphere. Or as Wang had kindly and more understandably put it, an average of 2.5 million metric tons of oxygen every second for ten years. In the process, Eternity’s oceans, the source of all that oxygen in the first place, would drop by over 3 meters and would go on dropping until Eternity’s atmosphere stabilized centuries in the future.
Digby’s mind had been duly boggled as Wang had reeled off the statistics, but he was not a numbers man, and the very idea of a teratonne was more than he could grasp. To his way of thinking, the best part of the whole extraordinary drama, the only part he could get his mind around, was played by a family of FedWorld geneered plants unofficially called bursters, one of fifty or so geneered species that made up the land-based biomass program.
Bursters were a small, fleshy plant that pushed out long arms of reddish-green leaves studded with small bright purple flowers. Digby liked them in part because they were distant-to the point of being remote, it would have to be said-relatives of his wife, Jana’s, favorite plant, the carpet sedums of Old Earth, Sedum lineare. The garden of their house in McNair was covered in mats of their starlike yellow, orange, and red flowers and gray-green-red leaves. Jana was constantly on the lookout for new varieties to plant.
But FedWorld geneers had taken the humble carpet sedum light-years from its modest origins. Not only would the sedums flourish in Eternity’s appallingly hostile low-oxygen atmosphere, they would produce vast quantities of tiny seed pods that would burst to scatter tiny airborne seeds over a wide radius. Within weeks, those seeds would have germinated and grown into adult plants, each one producing new seed bursts to start the whole process all over again.