Phytosphere

They’ll keep us locked away like zoo animals on Mars, Mercury, and the moons, and roll into Earth unopposed.”

“Jesus Christ, Mitch,” said Ian, “we’ve had two red lights, and they’ve both been resolved. AviOrbit whipped this mission together in record time. What do you expect? And yes, we got all the Tarsalans.”

“But did we get all their macrogens? I don’t trust those things. I never have. Especially the way they reproduce themselves.”

“Gerry, I think he’s having some mission stress. You’re the medic proxy. Maybe you should give him something.”

Gerry pointed to the screen. “Look. We have target acquisition.”

The screen showed that the three harpoons had exploded deep into the rocky, sun-blasted dirt of Gaspra, and the panel was green-lighting them for rendezvous.

“There,” said Ian. “You see? A green light. Are you happy? Let’s roll this rig in.”

Over the next fifteen minutes, the Prometheus pulled itself along the harpoon cables, traveling at no more than two miles per hour. The rock got bigger and bigger, and Gerry was somewhat comforted to see that it was green lights all the way. Still, the thought nagged. Macrogens. Devices no bigger than his thumb, capable of all kinds of nasty work, including the deployment of millions of nanogens. Had Kafis outplayed him after all? Were the number five starboard thrust conduit and axial number three just the start? Was the Prometheus slowly going to self-destruct as it got deeper into its mission?

The Prometheus touched down without any fanfare and hardly any dust.

The crew spent the next hour fastening her down with fluorescent green anchoring bolts, walking around on the surface with the special crampons on their boots so they wouldn’t drift away.

The FMC Transit Collective drives towered above them in an upside-down pyramid, an architecturally impossible structure anywhere but in the negligible gravity of a planetoid. The sun came up, the sun went down, all within the space of the first three and a half hours, but it was an odd sequence because the crew was on the south pole, and the sun didn’t so much set as hide behind a ridge, slipping out of sight on the left side, then coming out on the right, as if it were playing hide-and-seek with them.

The surface of the asteroid was different from the Moon in that there were only scattered deposits of loosely clinging regolith, like the pockets of snow that hid in the shade when spring came. For the most part it was bare rock, the best possible anchor for their specially designed crampons.

The work was a lot harder than Gerry had thought it was going to be, construction work, really, and he was glad his suit had artificial muscles, and that the gravity was so weak, because he wouldn’t have been able to take the strain otherwise. They jackhammered the Prometheus into the rock, and once all sixty-eight bolts were done, they stopped calling it the Prometheus and started calling it the PCV—the primary command vehicle.

After the PCV was established, they had a rest period of six hours.

At the end of that six hours they got up and launched a small survey probe—what the technicians at AviOrbit had christened Smallmouth 3, in Gerry’s honor, even though technically speaking Smallmouth 2 had been nothing more than a Styrofoam ball embedded with microinstruments.

Smallmouth 3 performed a complete survey of Gaspra, correlating the new topographical information to the known engineering tolerances of the five FMC Transit Collective drives, and feeding all this into a computer program that was meant to design, out of the misshapen rock that was Gaspra, the best possible spacecraft and, more importantly, the best possible planet killer. The program established five installation areas—these would be the five primary thrust bays, and operationally would be connected via laser through the PCV’s thrust conduits.

The crew sledded the drives one at a time to their installation areas, riding the sled two hundred yards above Gaspra’s surface. It was a bit like maneuvering an old-time zeppelin, as it had to be done with great care. The dual dangers were either that the drive would slam into the surface of the asteroid, or, barring that, would drift away into outer space. It had to be maneuvered through what Ian kept calling, with some nervousness, the “critical plane.”

Despite the finickiness involved, they managed, over the coming days, to anchor the drives into the installation areas with glitchless monotony. Gerry’s confidence climbed each time a new drive was installed. This was vindication. This was proof that he could do something like this. This told him that he was more than just Neil Thorndike’s younger brother.

Their third day, they sledded Drive Four to its installation area, what they were dubbing the Norbert Plains, after Mitch’s partner back on Earth. In fact, all the installation areas were plains of one type or another—the computer program had minimized the landform-thrust interference ratio as much as possible.

They maneuvered Drive Four over the selected area, then allowed the sled’s ion pump to give it a shove groundward. The crew capitalized on this downward momentum and soon had their boot crampons biting into the asteroid’s surface. Except for some minor irregularities, the surface was flat and devoid of loose particulate.

The stars swept by overhead as the short day counted out its two hundred and nine minutes. The three of them, like superheroes, held the drive above their heads, a unit that was fully the size of ten transport trucks but weighed next to nothing in Gaspra’s weak pull.

Ian said, “Let’s shift it a few yards to the left. We’ll miss that swell over there.”

So they moved it a few yards to the left, like three guys moving a big couch.

“Settle her down,” said Ian.

Which they did.

The mission continued with seamless predictability until Mitch started working on anchor seventeen.

Then Gerry heard through his helmet radio the two most dreaded words any crew never wanted to hear during a space mission.

“Oh, shit.”

Mitch drifted upward from Drive Four at a speed greater than escape velocity. His crampons had failed, and the force of his pneumatic drill had propelled him into space like one of the old Atlas rockets, his trajectory on an angle so that he didn’t drift straight up but floated quickly over the short horizon like a stray cloud. Ian fired a line to him, but by that time it was too late. Gerry keyed over to Mitch’s visor readouts and saw that the diminutive engineer had red lights not on one, but on both crampons. One he could accept. Two was…well, suspicious. Then both Ian and Gerry cramponed over to the sled. Ian interfaced the sled’s computer with Mitch’s CAPS computer to see if the two could arrive at a workable procedure. By this time, Mitch was well out of view beyond the short horizon.

“Mitch?” said Gerry.

“Jesus Christ…oh, shit! Where are you guys?”

Gerry and Ian looked at each other. It was Ian who delivered the bad news. “Mitch…the sled is giving us a negative on a rescue mission.”

“What? Are you sure?”

“Affirmative.”

“But that’s impossible. The sled should have more than enough thrust to reach me. I can’t be more than three miles away. Why’s it giving you a negative?”

Ian hesitated. “Because I’m afraid that the particular code needed to effect the proper burns and trajectories…it’s gone. Deleted. Not by me.”

The silence that came to the three of them was like the turning of a page. Gerry felt a tightening in his throat, and the tightness quickly spread to his stomach as the claw of an overwhelming apprehension closed its grip. He heard Ian’s voice through his suit radio, a few tense words, “What happened, Mitch?”

but the words seemed to come to Gerry through thick cotton batting.

“Both my crampons red-lighted at the same time,” said Mitch. “Do you know what the likelihood of that is?”

Mitch’s voice sounded hurt. Ian responded, telling the technician, “Even in my day we never got two red lights at the same time….” His words seemed unsure, as if the idea expressed was one Ian never expected to find in his mouth, especially in the current context. “And with the rescue software kaput… I don’t know. What are the chances?”