“Everyone's in,” Gandalf reported. “Good luck.”
We would be in constant contact through SCUT, but from this point on there would be no possibility of any physical intervention. We were truly on our own. If one of us ‘died’, they were off the team. At least until they could catch up to the rest of us in the spare. Will could substitute, if one of us couldn't be available to run their Manny at any point. For that reason, he had to monitor the party’s progress so that he was always up to date on current events, but it would only take a few seconds, once a day, to review logs.
I came out of the tunnel and grabbed a convenient anchor cable that the Gamers had laid for us, alongside more of the low-power lights. I moved a few yards along to make room for the others, then looked up and froze in place. Heaven’s River consisted of a stationary outer shell made of regolith, interwoven with structural members and some kind of 3D carbon fiber mesh, and a rotating inner shell made of a combination of metal and ceramics forming some kind of meta-material reinforced with the same carbon mesh. What I hadn't realized, or maybe hadn't paid attention to before, was the fact that the space between the two shells was only about 10 yards. Since the structure was 56 miles in radius, the curve of either shell wasn't discernible from my vantage point. But I could tell which way was which because the inner shell was rotating… at over half a mile per second. From my point of view, I was standing about 10 yards from a surface moving at about 1950 mph. Telling myself this was an illusion didn't help, and it didn't matter how smooth that surface was. If I came into contact with it, it would be like leaning against a giant grinding wheel. Not to mention that I get kicked into a spin that would probably rip my limbs off. And my part in the expedition would be over before it even started.
I unlocked my gaze and said to the others, “be really really careful coming out of the tunnel. Seriously.”
In another minute we were all gathered on the inner surface of the outer shell, collectively holding onto the anchor cable. Each person spent a few solid second staring at the spectacle. I didn't hurry them. It was important for the point to sink in.
“Moving along now.” Matching action to words, I begin moving along the surface, being very careful to keep my grip on the rope and my feet on the ground. I knew for a fact that couldn't actually hear the shell rotating above my head, or feel its vibrations. If there had been any vibration strong enough to be transmitted through the bearings, the whole thing would've already ripped itself apart. Still, my mind inserted a base hum into the silence.
The tunnel, by necessity, couldn't be too close to the Boogen entry bay, or someone would inevitably spot activity, and we’d had to be extremely careful about cleaning up after ourselves during excavation. The Heaven’s River maintenance ecosystem included scavengers that patrolled the space between the shells, looking for detritus, so we had a significant hike from the tunnel to the elevator assembly. Most of the mechanism was sunk into the outer shell.
The inner shell was still only 30 feet away, but a rail system just ahead of us would accelerate a container to mate with the inner shell when going in, or decelerate the container to mate with the outer shell when coming out. Over the months since our first venture using drones, the Gamers had continued to analyze the circuitry that controlled the rail system. Things that could be bypassed had been identified. Things that could be replaced with our components had been reverse engineered.
Unfortunately, at the end of the exercise, we couldn't be confident that activating the elevator wouldn't set off alarms somewhere. So, we were still going to have to ride to the inner shell one at a time in a small mining drone. The Gamers had brought in two of the drones to dig down into the regolith in order to get at the rail system. Now they would be used to fly in the expedition members. As mentioned, if we lost to Manny's we were pooped.
We worked our way down the trench, still holding onto the rope. At the end was a complex set of structural girders, with what had to be magnetic bearings along the working rails. With the amount of study and brainstorming we’d done, the structure was as familiar as the inside of my own Heaven vessel.
“Another vulnerable point, people,” Gandalf said. “You have to go one at a time. While it is extremely unlikely that the elevator system will be activated, if it does we’ll almost certainly lose someone. Even if you don't get run over by a rampaging elevator, just having the elevator’s maglev bearings active will probably trash the drone. So let's keep our flippers crossed.”
“Oh, ha ha,” Bridget replied. “They aren't flippers.”
Of course the biologist would get all uppity about that.
We kept to the same order, so I was first through the mechanism. There wasn't much to it. Climb in, let the hatch close, try to avoid claustrophobia (it made a closet feel spacious), wait for the drone to fly to the elevator terminal, and rinse repeat. The flight was harrowing because I felt like nothing more than a sack of potatoes. If something went south I'd be metal filings before I even realized it. The drone had to fly a carefully calculated semicircular path with a radius of 56 miles with no deviation of more than a couple of feet, while accelerating from 0 to 1950 mph. Piece
