Invaders (a sequel to Vaz, Tiona and Disc) (13 page)

“Well,” Randy said, his eyes studying Aria, “kinda.” His eyes went back to Carolyn, “But she’s not in the same league… you know…”

Nolan did, he thought, “know.” He thought that still photographs might actually find Aria more attractive than Carolyn. But still photos didn’t see Carolyn smiling, or bubbling over with the joy of life, or focusing the intense spotlight of her attention on people, to make
them
feel… awesome. He had the feeling that a Carolyn with normal looks, not stunning like she actually was, just not ugly, would
still
be the most exciting person in any room. When Nolan allowed himself to muse on what a future with Carolyn might be like—on some of those days when he wondered how long it would be until he saw Tiona again—he thought that surely Carolyn would get bored with him after a while.

If she wasn’t already…

***

Eldon used his power chisel to cut loose an odd-looking chunk of rock from the first S type asteroid they’d taken him to. The small chisel was an incredibly useful tool featuring a chisel point on one end and a hammer point on the other. Linear electromagnets moved a weight back and forth inside of it so that when given power it acted like a small jackhammer, banging itself into the object. This resolved the problem of trying to swing an actual hammer to strike a chisel, an endeavor which tended to spin your entire body around in microgravity. Holding the little jackhammer against the rock while it was working tended to pivot you around as well, but a command to your AI to hold you stationary with the thrust discs on your safety harness functioned quite well to control that tendency. In theory, the safety harness could hold you still while you swung a hammer as well, but the bigger reciprocal motions were more difficult for it to deal with.

The fragment came loose and Eldon caught it before it floated away. He handed it to John who bagged it and slipped it in the door of the specimen container. The AI would immediately associate the number on the bag with a clip of the video of Eldon harvesting it so that it could be identified later. Eldon had initially wanted to put his specimens in glass bottles, but had been told that glass bottles full of vacuum had an alarming tendency to implode if they were bumped a little too hard back in a full atmosphere of pressure. On the other hand, the plastic bags made his specimens look vacuum packed once they were back in a pressurized environment.

Eldon realized on reflection, they
were
vacuum packed.

Suddenly he noticed that hadn’t been John who’d taken that last specimen from him. When he turned to look, he saw that it was Rob Marshall. “What happened to John?”

Rob said, “You filled his container. He took it back to put it in storage.”

“Oh no! Am I harvesting too many samples? There’s just
so
many things that look interesting…”

Rob snorted, “Don’t worry about it. You’ve almost filled all the containers we brought, but we’ve got a bunch of big Kevlar bags we can dump the specimens into the next time we’re accelerating. Then you can fill the containers again at the next asteroid.”

Eldon reflected that the big saucer certainly had the power to transport as many specimens as he wanted—considering that they were planning to bring back a metallic asteroid massing close to 3000 metric tons—it seemed unlikely that he could collect enough samples to make a difference.

In order to keep the samples from banging together hard enough that they might damage the plastic bags they were in, Rob asked to have the saucer start out at a tenth of a gravity acceleration. That way they were able to pour the specimens out of the containers and into the Kevlar bags with a minimal amount of bashing around.

Their next target asteroid was a C type and, thankfully, the closest one to them at 570,000 kilometers. That was a relatively average distance between substantially sized asteroids in contrast to the swarms you
still
saw in the movies. It would take about ninety minutes of one G acceleration and ninety minutes of similar deceleration to get there. This left Eldon itching to un-bag some of his specimens and look at them, though he’d promised himself to wait until he got back to the lab where he could do it in a clean facility to prevent contamination.

Rob Marshall walked in and tossed him a green rock and a tightly inflated baggie with a little bit of dirty slush in it. Eldon grabbed them both, his initial panicked thought being that Rob must have raided his specimen container, “What are these?!”

Rob grinned at him, “I figured that the way you’ve been carefully packing away all your specimens you weren’t going to have anything to actually play with on the trip. Caring deeply about your emotional well-being, I grabbed a couple of specimens of my own while you weren’t looking,” he pointed at the inflated baggie with the slush, “it looks like that one was just a chunk of some kind of ice.” He shrugged, “Presumably at least partly some frozen gas the way the bag blew up. I had to unseal the bag and let some gas out or it would have popped.”

Eldon stared at the bag, “The liquid’s probably mostly water, and the gas mostly CO
2
,”
he mused, “since we were measuring temperatures of minus eighty-five °C. That’s low enough to freeze water and make dry ice, but not low enough to freeze nitrogen or oxygen.” He glanced up at Rob, “It’d sure be interesting to know if there are any other gases in there. Is it okay if I keep this one sealed up?”

Rob rolled his eyes, “Sure, but then what are you going to play with?”

Eldon’s eyes turned to the green rock, “This. Looks like a piece of olivine.”

Looking interested, Rob said, “Cool, is olivine rare?”

“Uh, no…” At Rob’s disappointed look, Eldon said, “It
is
interesting though,” he said,
Just not
very
interesting,
he thought.

***

Harlan had stepped out of the barn to check on the swather which was cutting an alfalfa field under AI control. His eye caught on Reven, riding her fly-board over the field next to the one being harvested. Harlan harvested his alfalfa in a staggered fashion and she was over the nearly mature field that would be harvested in a week or so.

She was about six inches over the tops of the alfalfa in that field which put her about three feet above the ground. He watched in amazement as she carved tight turns, her body at a steep slant. Sometimes she was going around in circles, then other times doing figure eights. There was none of the tentative wobbliness that she’d had that first night she’d picked up the board from Dr. Gettnor. Speaking to his AI, he said, “Connect me to Reven… Reven, why in the world are you flying over the alfalfa?”

Reven immediately stopped the figure eights she was cutting and slowed. She swung a gentle turn to head her toward the barn, her body rising to the vertical as she stopped turning. She waved. In his ear he heard her response, “I was flying over the field you’d just cut, but I wiped out on a hard turn. I was leaning so hard I was almost flat. Going off the board, the safety harness wasn’t quite quick enough to keep me skidding along in the stubble a little way. Flying over this field is nice because, if I wipe out, the harness has two and a half more feet to catch me before I start bouncing along the ground. Besides, the alfalfa acts like padding.”

As she approached, Harlan saw green smears on her clothing to confirm she’d skidded through the vegetation more than once. He wasn’t surprised to see she was wearing long sleeves and long pants despite it being a fairly warm morning. She even had on some heavy work gloves and a pair of substantial boots to go with the helmet she always wore while boarding. As she approached, he said, “It sounds like you think you’d be safer at a higher altitude?”

“Oh yeah,” she said enthusiastically. “If I fell off at six feet, there’d be no way the harness wouldn’t catch me before I hit. Six inches is fine if I’m not cutting any hard turns, but when I’m really leaning into one I’m too close to the ground.”

Harlan shook his head in amusement, “Okay, you’ve got me with that argument. Go ahead and set it at six feet.”

Her big smile made him feel happy. She said, “Thanks Dad!” She curved gently around to head towards the Gettnors’ place. He heard her say to her AI, “Connect me to Dr. Gettnor if he’ll accept.”

Harlan said, “Why are you bugging Dr. Gettnor?”

Her board kept sailing towards Gettnors’, but her answer came over his AI. “To ask him to reset the altitude for me. Besides, I’d like to ask him to change some other settings so I can carve harder.”

Puzzled, Harlan said, “You can’t reset the altitude yourself?”

“No, Dr. Gettnor heard you saying you didn’t want the HAAT above six inches, so he restricted it to that. I asked him if I could change it, but he said not until you gave me permission.”

Harlan didn’t know whether to be grateful she hadn’t bugged him about changing the HAAT, or worried because she hadn’t, despite falling off the board and skidding a bunch of times.

***

Eldon was sitting in the lounge with some of the extra specimens he’d harvested at the second carbonaceous type asteroid they’d visited. In view of his desire to have some specimens to play with after their visit to the first asteroid he’d realized how much he’d want to have some to look at on the trip back. Therefore, he’d harvested quite a few paired specimens. One of the pair went into a baggie that would maintain the vacuum around it and prevent it from being contaminated while the other went into a separate container so that he’d have something to fool around with on the trip back to his lab.

Tiona came into the room and, seeing what he was doing, said, “Find anything interesting yet?”

“Oh yeah!” Eldon said then launched into a description of some of the minerals he thought were present and some of the things they might learn after he’d been able to analyze and date their formation. He’d been talking for a couple of minutes when he realized that she’d gotten a glazed expression on her face. Realizing that she didn’t think his findings were nearly as interesting as he did, he ran down to conclude, “So, essentially, I think we’ll be able to learn a
lot
from these specimens.”

“Sounds like you think you’d like to make a few more trips?”

“That’d be great! You don’t mind taking me?”

She shrugged, “It only added a few hours to our trip.” She winked, “A small sacrifice to make in the name of science, right?” She tilted her head curiously, “Are you interested in comets?”

“Sure. It’s not as much my field as asteroids, but I’d still like to get some clean data and specimens.” He frowned at her, “Why? You guys wouldn’t be going to visit a comet would you?”

She gave him a hurt look, “What, we can’t just go visit one out of scientific interest?”

Eldon looked at her reproachfully, “Sure,
is
that what you’re doing?”

“Maybe. The folks at NASA have asked us to go look at that new NEO that appeared from behind the sun?” Her questioning tone seemed intended to determine whether he was aware of the object. When he nodded, she continued, “Their latest data would suggest an elliptical orbit that’ll go out beyond Earth’s orbit. Not a threat at present, but perhaps someday. They say there’s no way they wouldn’t have seen an NEO that big if it had been following that orbit previously. Even if it came in on a hyperbolic path and something happened to it to convert it to an elliptical orbit, they find it pretty hard to believe they didn’t see it on its way in.”

“Oh, yeah, I read about that thing. It sounds like a real enigma.” Looking eager, he said, “I’d
love
to go have a look at it. When are you thinking about going?”

She shrugged, “As soon as we get back with this big hunk of metal,” she pointed down through the floor where Rob Marshall was strapping a 2,853 metric ton metallic asteroid to the bottom of the huge saucer. The asteroid was smaller than Eldon had expected, comprising a thick sausage shape a little more than twelve meters in length and seven meters in diameter. That meant a density over six grams per cc suggesting that it was mostly metal and should bring GSI a substantial profit. Tiona said, “We’ll stop long enough for some crew rest and to pick up a few NASA experts, but we should be launching a day or two after we land.”

“Count me in!”

Back in her room, Tiona spent some time looking over the information she had available on the NEO. They really didn’t know much so far. Size estimates ranged from 200 to 2,000 meters. Reflectance varied substantially as if it was oddly shaped or its surface had wildly varying albedos. It was still close enough to the sun that many of the big telescopes wouldn’t image it for fear of frying their systems.

She wondered why NASA couldn’t just wait till it came out where they could observe it more easily with standard systems. Sure, it was interesting. But it was just a big chunk of rock that was
only
mysterious because they didn’t know where it had come from. She couldn’t imagine why there was any big rush to get in to the inner system and look at it. She was curious too, but didn’t know why
GSI
should fund a rush trip to go learn things that NASA would certainly be able to gather data on in plenty of time if they were just patient. It wasn’t like the damned thing was any danger to the Earth on this particular orbit.