Creation node, p.5
Creation Node, page 5
And, more spectacularly, that solar capture area was embedded in a much wider sail, for it was solar propulsion too that had driven the whole craft out into deep space.
A relatively friendly Earth government had allowed the craft to complete its assembly in a high orbit of Earth, with the ‘loan’ of some resources purchased from the Moon: a few hundred tonnes of aluminium and other products from Moon rock and dust, even some of the Moon’s precious water, to assemble and provision it.
Relatively friendly: Salma learned that the Earth authorities had no great love for the Conservers, but the simple fact that they weren’t Moon miners made them worth cultivating. Hild would say that Earth’s support for the Shadow project was, in fact, a cynical ploy to manipulate possible long-term allies. But the Conservers took those gifts just as cynically, it seemed to Salma, looking back at those times. She wondered if she would have made the same choices, had she been around then.
The six crew members of the Shadow, carefully selected from a wider pool of volunteers, had been smart, educated, well informed and healthy – or they had been at launch. Later they liked to debate the ethical compromises made by Earth and Conservers that had led to the creation of their ship, and as she grew older they had used such debates as a learning exercise for Salma, their only child. In life, she was taught in those sessions, you for ever had to make compromises with your values to achieve greater goals.
Well, however it was funded and resourced, however morally compromised, the Shadow was built.
Then, in the year 2220, a punch from a small nuclear stage had knocked the completed Shadow out of Earth orbit and into the first leg of its long, complicated journey.
The nuke was quickly discarded (and retrieved for use elsewhere). From now on, renewables only. In particular, the ship would sail into deep space on the light from the Sun – but, at first, it would sail towards the Sun, and not away.
After the launch, Salma learned, at first the craft had spiralled inwards, reaching a minimum distance from the Sun of about a third Earth’s orbital radius after the first year’s travel, holding up its solar-energy capture sail like a shield. And then the great propulsive sail was opened – this one with a radius nearly six times that of the energy capture sail, some forty kilometres across. Light exerted a measurable force, even on the palm of a hand held up to Earth’s sunlight. Now this immense sail trapped enough light from the close-in Sun to push the ship at an acceleration of about three per cent of Earth’s gravity.
The final dive into the Sun’s gravity well was conducted as an ‘Oberth manoeuvre’, a tactic evidently used from the earliest days of spaceflight. At closest approach, the craft ‘stole’ some kinetic energy from the Sun in those brief moments when ship and star were coupled through the Sun’s gravity. And after a day of this the ship shot out of the Sun’s deep gravity well at a speed of more than a hundred kilometres per second – more than three times Earth’s own orbital velocity.
All of this was a classic Conserver tactic, Salma had learned. Thanks to Oberth, the Shadow had needed only a little sunlight, a little of the Sun’s enormous fund of radiative and orbital energy.
Salma was never sure she fully understood any of this. Anyhow it had evidently worked.
After that, as the ship sped away from the Sun and inner System with its new, enormous velocity, as Hild and her crew had grown steadily older – as Salma waited to be born – the milestones were reeled off: three months to pass Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun, Saturn’s in six months, Neptune’s in two years – three years to the outer edge of the Kuiper belt. And at last, after a full thirty-five years, to reach the computed position of Planet Nine.
On arrival they had managed to slow into orbit around Nine with an Oberth manoeuvre in reverse, effectively giving Nine a little of the ship’s kinetic energy. (To get away, Salma knew – if they chose to return to the inner Solar System at all – this crew of Conservers could cheat a little, sacrificing some of the mass of the sail to create a small fission rocket.)
And now here they were.
Salma knew that some of the adults were surprised that there had been no further effort from Earth (or Moon) to send a faster, if more wasteful craft to overtake the Shadow and claim the prize. She got the sense that in an inner System full of political turmoil and fast interplanetary industrialisation, such abstractions as distant Planet Nine were irrelevant. Which wasn’t to imply, cynical old Boyd would say, that if Nine turned out to be made of diamonds, or better yet helium-3, the inner civilisations would not come chasing out to seize it.
In the end, though, Salma had always been more interested in where this ship onto which she had been born was going, rather than how it had got there – or where it had come from. Earth’s federal government, the Lunar Consortium and the factional politics of mankind: these were all just words to Salma, without emotional content. Even the cautious creed of the Conservers themselves, into which she had been born, left her unmoved. She knew this was a kind of personal flaw; but at twenty years of age she was growing up to suspect that it was probably a necessary outcome of her peculiarly isolated upbringing.
For better or worse she was more interested in what was out there in the universe than in what was in people’s heads. Just because she didn’t know many people.
So she had deliberately studied what she could of Planet Nine long before the slow, final, agonising crawl to this position, a high orbit about the object.
Which was turning out not to be what they had expected.
‘What a mystery,’ Hild had said, going through the first observations. ‘We were right to come, though. As we said all those years ago, We’ve got to get a ship out there …’
6
‘We’ve got to get a ship out there,’ Doria Bohm said. ‘A ship from here, from the Moon, out to Planet Nine before Earth gets there. We just have to. Or at least to Saturn so we have cards in the game there. All that helium-3. And meanwhile those Conservers found a planet-mass black hole! Why, we could build a whole technological civilisation around that one thing. Just throw stuff in and pow! Catch the white-hot debris …’
Which was a sentiment Matt Kord shared, more or less. But the aspiration wasn’t realistic, even if a capable ship had been available on the Moon, which it wasn’t.
And Kord, who as ‘Resource Coordinator’ was the nearest thing to a head of this semi-independent colony under the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility, had a zillion better things to do than argue about Planet Nine – mostly tangling with Earth’s endless multinational and interplanetary politicking and commercial manoeuvring. And he might have demurred altogether if he’d known this conversation was going to be about more madcap missions to the edge of the Solar System.
But then, Moon-born Doria Bohm, twenty-three years old, was a nascent rebel who had a voice among the young here, and he was a sixty-nine-year-old Earthborn who probably didn’t look like a rebel to anyone, even himself. So Doria had to be indulged.
‘We just have to find a way to get a piece of the action,’ she said now, and reeled off reasons why, in a highly articulate, high-speed peroration.
Kord just waited. He had become good at listening with half of his aged brain while analysing, assessing with the other. Let her get it off her chest, he told himself. Only react to something substantial.
When she ran down, briefly, he butted in, not harshly.
‘What can we do about it? I understand the dream, Doria. I really do. But you have to see the bigger picture.’
With an angry gesture, Doria grabbed a bag of water from a dispenser, held it up, and squirted the water into the air, a transient low-gravity stream that she caught neatly in her mouth without spilling a drop.
Kord suppressed a sigh. Still essentially a creature of Earth, he would never be able to pull stunts like that.
She was looking back at him. ‘What “bigger picture”? I just spent the afternoon arguing with some go-between flunky about why our shipments of nitrogen from Earth are being cut, again …’
‘That is the bigger picture. And nitrogen is the key to the interplanetary politics of the Solar System. For now, anyhow.’ Until helium-3 becomes the issue. He waved a hand. ‘Because you need nitrogen to buffer the air that you breathe, and sustain the plants you grow in your life support cycles … And the Moon has none.
‘Look at it from Earth’s point of view. Historically, you know, at first Earth did allow some limited exports of nitrogen and its compounds from its own atmosphere, to supply the Moon and the other colonies, the free-flying space habitats. But for a long while now there has been a ban on such exports.’
She snorted. ‘Because of “environmental impacts on Earth”.’
‘Yes. That’s valid enough. The rationale was to protect the environment of Earth itself from the effects of multiple space launches, atmosphere scoop-mining, high-speed re-entries and so on. A lot of heat was being dumped into the environment. Earth’s air can literally burn under a fast craft’s heatshield – nitrogen will burn, ironically, leaving you with various toxic compounds. All that is history.
‘But there was a political background to the ban as well. Or an ideological one. Even by 2100 or so there had been threats to Earth from space – criminal gangs or rogue nations would threaten just to dump massive objects onto the planet, artificial meteorites that could cause a lot of damage if they hit the ground. Later there was one ambitious plan to divert a near-Earth object, a whole small asteroid, onto a collision course. It came to nothing, but people learned.
‘People on Earth, that is.
‘The mood shifted, with space being seen not as a resource, not as some wonderful arena of adventure, but as a source of threat. Or at best a dangerous place to retrieve valuable goods from. Like an unstable gold mine.’
‘Gold is cheap—’
‘Just a metaphor,’ he ploughed on. ‘Short term, space defences were beefed up. Longer term, the mood towards supporting the establishment of new off-world colonies turned hostile. And an easy way to impose control of such colonies, and to contain the growth of existing colonies, was to keep a tight control on nitrogen, among other essentials. Which meant, in particular, putting the squeeze on us.’
‘And now we’re threatening Earth again, are we? Us, a new generation of miners. With our sharper teeth.’
‘Well, maybe,’ he said dubiously, not wishing to provoke her any further. ‘It might look like that, to them. All we can do is react to Earth’s latest moves.’
‘Moves such as blocking us from Ceres, and the gas giants and their moons … Never mind nitrogen. As far as the helium-3 trade is concerned, it’s their turn to try a home run to Saturn … Did I use that idiom correctly?’
He nodded grudgingly. ‘Not quite.’
‘Economically that would shut us out completely. And now there is this complication of Planet Nine too. Whatever the Conservers have found out there, whatever opportunities and risks it poses for our future. Earth means to take it all, that’s clear …’
‘What can we do about it? This is the Moon. We’re a mining colony. We don’t have huge interplanetary liners like the Cronus. We don’t even have a slow deep-space craft like the Conservers’ Shadow. All we have are our rock-hopper surface craft, and a few Moon-Earth freighters … much loved as that battered old fleet may be …’
But with scarcely a breath she launched back into her case.
While Kord distracted himself by thinking about spaceships.
Of which the most modern and impressive on the Moon, to his own ageing eyes, was the Aquila, a graceful hundred metres long, spinning end over end in flight to create artificial gravity, carrying its loads of lunar aluminium, uranium – and, especially, precious helium-3 – to Earth orbit.
But even Aquila had been designed, to his understanding, to reach no further than the asteroid belt – and, given Earth’s embargoes, it would probably never even get that far. Certainly not out to the giant planets and their resource-laden moons and their own heavy, resource-rich atmospheres.
But here was Doria Bohm, who seemed to be making a case for some kind of dash out to Saturn, chasing the Cronus – a mission which itself, by the way, was linked to the Conservers’ discovery of Planet Nine, whatever the hell that was. Making her case by shoving her way into his subterranean office without an appointment. Well, what case? He had yet to grasp it, but no doubt he soon would.
Bohm, Moon-born, young as she was, was forceful, relentless. Whereas Kord had been born long ago on Earth, and so had his stomach, and, increasingly, neither of them relished being reminded of how far they were from the home world’s comforting ground, its enfolding one-gravity field.
By profession Kord was a mineralogist, and had found a perfect fit on the Moon, in some ways, a world of little but minerals. Such was the churn of staff, though, through low-gravity medical issues, confinement and a general sense of demoralisation, that he had eventually found himself the last one left on the Moon of his own generation of lunar scientists and prospectors – and had been given the job of Consortium director, since, it seemed, nobody else would take it.
He had never had aspirations to lead, in this organisation or any other. In a job he never wanted, he liked to feel he’d been conscientious, if not always as competent as he’d have hoped for.
But now he had to listen to Doria, because Doria was the future, he told himself. Doria, and the generations who had mostly been born on the Moon, unlike their parents, grandparents. Young as she was, she was impressively forceful, he thought. And just as he often felt pulled back to Earth, so she seemed to be pulled outwards …
Quite possibly she was right that the anomaly that was Planet Nine, let alone helium-3 caches in the outer Solar System such as at Saturn, were all part of that outward future too. If only such things could be reached. And legally mined.
But, whatever the validity of her argument, to Kord, Doria was utterly intimidating. Aside from the force of her personality – apart from the striking face, the sharp jaw, the intent blue eyes, the neat stubble of black, shaven hair – she had a whip-thin frame, muscular yet tall, typical of those born on the Moon with its one-sixth of Earth’s gravity. After nearly three centuries of human spaceflight hard lessons had finally been learned in how to cultivate the human body in such conditions. And Doria Bohm had been brought up as expertly as anyone he had ever met on the Moon.
She was the future, he reflected glumly. Probably no human being existed, or had yet existed, better adapted to off-Earth conditions than Doria and her generation. He supposed he envied her, in a dull, cloddish way, even as he attempted to deal with her, and the shadowy factions in lunar society that she represented. While Matt Kord – pale and bloated, born on Earth, at sixty-nine more or less exactly three times Doria’s age – represented the past.
Maybe it would be different if he had been that bit older still, one of the true pioneers of the exploitation of the Moon: one of the first ‘miners’, as they had been called even back then, who were now the subjects of dramas of heroic pioneering days, of battles with an unforgiving nature. That was the quasi-legend that had drawn him out here himself as an idealistic youngster.
He supposed he had been atypical in staying around as things slowly soured, as the global Earth government’s relations with its lunar pioneers became harsher, with excessive control and punitive taxation. An exploitative relationship in all but name. But legally justifiable because, in Earth’s eyes, the Moon’s riches, like all the resources of space, belonged to nobody.
Such resources were to be regarded as a common benefit – evidently a philosophy and legal principle descended from early space law, in turn derived from the centuries-old law of the sea. Which meant in practice that the resources of deep space, including essentials for living such as water, even that most precious of fusion fuels helium-3, even before they were extracted, belonged by right to Earth – or at least to mankind as a whole – and ought to be dedicated to supporting the sedentary culture of Earth and all its billions. You could be paid for the labour of digging it up, but Earth didn’t buy helium-3 and the rest, as it owned it already. Legally.
While all the time the descendants of the first miners bred and swarmed and explored their way across the face of the Moon, and chafed against the political and commercial constraints that resulted in resources needed for growth up here being sent back to prop up a bloated society down there.
More recently all this had come into a sharper focus. Doria was a leading figure in a newly rebellious faction of lunar folk, mostly younger citizens. Younger miners who pushed even against older miners, who had once seen themselves as rebels. Even now he half-listened to her continuing and quite eloquent monologue on the inequities of the modern social set-up.
But in the longer term the real problem, as Kord was in a position to know better than anybody, was the sheer smallness of the Moon, at least in economic terms. Its poverty. No matter how you bought or sold it. The Moon itself had been created in the aftermath of a tremendous primordial collision between Earth and another protoplanet during the formation of the Solar System. An accident like that tended to drive out any volatiles before the remnants even cooled down. So there was hardly any lunar water. What little there was, a residue of later comet impacts, was scattered thin through the regolith and gathered in Shackleton and other permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles.
There were treasures to be had here: uranium to be mined in Copernicus Crater, for example, at a density of a relatively rich hundred parts per billion of the regolith, the Moon’s impact-gardened soil. The greatest treasure of all was helium-3, the optimal fusion fuel. The richest lunar deposits of that were found, alongside Apollo footsteps, in the Sea of Tranquility – but even these offered only four parts per billion of helium-3 in that dust – a tiny fraction even of the already low uranium density. To get a useful cargo load you had to strip-mine the regolith down to three metres and across square kilometres, creating scars you could see from space, or even from Earth with binoculars.
