The battle at the Moons of Hell

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.

And so it would go on, the pace relentless, the timetable unforgiving, the progress awesome.

A single heavy lander run would drop half a million tiny burster and other seedlings in a precise pattern over an area 2 kilometers wide and 1,000 kilometers long. Within months, the entire area would be a flourishing mat of sedum and other plants busily churning out oxygen from the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide, water, and methane feedstock. According to Wang, Eternity’s land surface was just over 136 million square kilometers, and that meant-Digby’s brow wrinkled as he struggled with the arithmetic-68,000 lander missions if the entire planet was to be carpeted, which of course it wouldn’t be. Even the Feds hadn’t been able to geneer a plant capable of growing on bare rock on the top of a 10,000-meter mountain.

That was how, according to the all-powerful project plan, phase 1 land bioseeding, paralleled by an equally aggressive ocean-seeding program, could be finished in under three years and the irreversible change from a methane/nitrogen/ carbon dioxide atmosphere to an oxygen/nitrogen one would have started.

But it still belied belief, Digby thought. Such was the power of the Feds’ bioengineering that the entire process, which on Old Earth had taken some 270 million years to complete, would take only ten years on Eternity. By then, the planet would have an oxygen-rich atmosphere, admittedly hugely unstable as its oxygen-depleted mantle and oceans soaked up their share of the free oxygen churned out by the trillions of tons of geneered land and ocean biomass but leaving enough to allow the hated breathers to be thrown away and serious migration to begin.

Left to Hammer technology, it would have taken a full century, maybe more, and even then the results could not have been guaranteed, so completely had all the terraforming skills and systems transplanted from Old Earth been lost. In fact, now that he had seen firsthand what was involved, Digby seriously doubted that the Hammer had what it took to manage a project of such mind-bending complexity that even the Feds couldn’t do it without the assistance of literally hundreds of AIs. Just nursing Eternity through the tricky and, by geological standards, nearly instantaneous crossover from a methane-to an oxygen-rich atmosphere without having the whole lot blow up was a problem of such intricacy that Digby seriously doubted that even the mighty Professor Wang truly understood what would be going on.

As Digby settled himself into the jeep, he began to understand the power of Merrick’s vision. For the first time he could begin to see the impact it would have on a people starved of hope.

The only problem with Merrick’s vision, grand though it might be, was the price the Hammer would have to pay sooner or later. Any way he looked at it, it would be way too high. The Feds would see to that.

Oh, well, he thought philosophically as the jeep set off with a lurch and Wang launched into an enthusiastic and detailed account of every part of the massive undertaking that passed in front of Digby, that was a problem for another day.

Four hours later, the jeep was waved through the razor-wire security fence that surrounded the project control center, and they drew up in front of a drab two-story plascrete building.

Eternity’s sun was a searingly bright point almost directly overhead, its harsh light turning the slight irregularities in the walls into a strange mottled mix of light and shade. Aesthetics was not high on the terraforming project’s priority list, and it had been a long time since Digby had seen a building so brutally functional, and he’d seen a lot of Hammer government buildings in his time.

“Home sweet home,” said Wang, his cheerful and exuberant manner in stark contrast to Digby’s as the general climbed, exhausted and sweat-stained, from the jeep. “This is the security block here.” Wang waved a casual hand at a second plascrete building, which was identical in every way to and every bit as ugly as the first.

“Yes, thank you, Professor, you’ve made your point. And just so that we are in no doubt, I am impressed, very impressed, in fact, and you have every right to be proud of the progress you’ve made.

“But”-Digby’s voice hardened-“don’t make the mistake of taking me for granted. It would be the last mistake you ever made. So get the job done and done well and you will be rewarded. But no games. Understood?”

Wang’s face went white with shock. In his excitement and enthusiasm, he had forgotten the brutality that lay at the heart of every Hammer undertaking, big or small, the violence that underwrote the entire structure and fabric of the Hammer Worlds.

“Yes, General. Understood,” he said quietly.