But she could not get past arsenic taking the role of phosphorus in terrestrial biochemistry.
With every swallow, she wondered how complete was the process of removing arsenic and inserting phosphorus in its place. Maybe only the merest trace of arsenic stayed behind. A little poison with every morsel….
With renewed vigor, she attacked the rocky ground. These excavations were the first baby step toward farming.
*
“Fire in the hole!” Dana called.
Two meters distant, behind his own hulking granite boulder, Blake covered his ears.
She flipped the toggle on the detonator.
The sharp blam! was a satisfying conclusion to a morning at hard labor. Or would be, if they’d done it right.
The patter of gravel slowed, then stopped. “Let’s have a look,” Dana said.
The synthed charges had blasted six birdbath-sized depressions in the rocky ground. Three pits showed hairline fractures; to play safe, she decided to seal all six.
While the sprayed-on glue cured, they ate an early lunch: more gruel. What little regular food remained was being kept for emergencies. After choking down a few spoonfuls, Dana stretched out on the hard ground. The midday sun was warm on her face. She closed her eyes….
*
Between feather-light nudges from her attitude jets, Dana was in free fall. No gravity? No acceleration? No matter.
Duty weighed her down.
Her hands had not left the flight controls or her eyes the console instruments for…she had no idea. Too long. Surreally long.
Shedding debris and spurting gases, spinning and weaving like a toy top about to fall over, the dying ship had her stymied. Only this gyration would never stop. And faster than she could infer any underlying pattern to the hulk’s erratic wobble, another of its compartments would rupture, spewing atmosphere, or an attitude jet would misfire.
Across the bridge, the mayday call looped endlessly. As though she needed a reminder.
She could end the madness at any time. No one would question her pronouncement that docking was impossible.
No one except her.
On the dying vessel, desperate passengers and crew awaited rescue. In Reliance’s main air lock, suited up, the rescue party stood by awaiting their chance to board.
Everyone waited for her to dock. Without crashing. Without dooming everyone aboard both ships.
Again the wreck lunged. Faster than conscious thought, Dana fired her forward thrusters. Flotsam caromed off her hull even as, by a terrifyingly small margin, the ships slid past one another without colliding.
Slowly spinning, a vacuum-bloated corpse floated past the bridge view port.
A warm, firm hand squeezed Dana’s shoulder. Captain Torrance. Though he must have felt her trembling, he did not say a word.
And so, once more, she edged toward the careening, floundering, bobbing wreck.
There was no denying duty.
*
Dana jerked awake.
“Are you okay?” Blake asked.
She shrugged. What could he do?
Pursed lips said he knew she was holding out. After a while, changing the subject, he said, “The aggravating thing is that Li’s right, in part.”
“Which part?”
“We don’t have enough supplies.” He gestured down the beach, to the plumbing monstrosity on which Carlos and Rikki had spent days fussing. Their construction had tied up a major portion of the colony’s metal reserves. “Beginning with deuterium.”
Because every workaround to their many shortages—when someone came up with a workaround—seemed to take energy. Getting more energy took energy.
In Dark’s seas, as in Earth’s, heavy water could be found as one molecule among about sixty-five hundred. To become energy self-sufficient, they had only to separate out the heavy water. And split the deuterium atoms from the heavy water. And capture the deuterium. And freeze it, near absolute zero, into fuel pellets for the fusion reactor. Simple in concept; not so simple in execution.
Witness Carlos and Rikki shouting. Again.
Peering down the beach, Dana still could not make out what they said. Not a triumphant declaration of success.
Atop the tallest distillation column, a dish antenna pointed uphill. On a mast outside the cave mouth a second dish pointed downhill. Between, invisible to the eye, blazed an intense beam of microwaves: yet another workaround. They lacked the copper to run power cable from the reactor in the cave to the distillery on the shore. They lacked enough, well, anything to build pipes to pump water from the shore up to the cave. Or a big enough pump.
And so, while Carlos tinkered, trying to master the process, their scant deuterium reserves dipped lower and lower. The not-yet-operational distillery was a power hog, made more so by the inherent inefficiency of beamed power.
Grunts wielding pickaxes didn’t use deuterium. Apart from the power to synth their daily gruel….
Blake tried again. “I’m worried about supplies.”
Et tu, Blake? “You want the ship grounded?”
“Hardly,” he said. “A tech civilization takes natural resources. It defies belief that we’ll find everything we’ll need within walking distance. That doesn’t mean I’m not worried.”
“Needing the ship to scout for and recover resources. Too bad I didn’t think to give that as a reason when Li made her pitch. It would have sounded so much better than ‘Because it’s my ship, and I say so.’”
“Yeah. And too bad I lost my samples in the snow on the first scouting trip.”
Because if they had had biological samples earlier, they would have known Dark’s biota relied on arsenic, not its periodic-table cousin, phosphorus.
Who knew phosphorus was the sixth most important element in terrestrial biology?
Copper. Deuterium. Phosphorus. How many other critical resources did they lack? Bringing Dana to wonder how their homemade glue fared. She said, “Back to work, sailor.”
“In a minute,” Blake said. “Answer me this. I don’t believe for a minute Li’s proposal to ground the ship was spontaneous. She claimed to be worried our tech will wear out. Then wouldn’t she also have worried about raw materials for that tech?”
“You’d think.” Dana stood. “Come.” Because the basins, once the glue set, should be waterproof. A theory that could be validated only by filling the basins with water lugged from the shore in buckets,
