Claws That Catch

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Lieutenant Bergstresser, congratulations,” Lieutenant Ross said as Berg walked into Admin. “You’ll be pleased to know that I took the numbers you finally got me for vac time and crunched them.”

“Sorry it took so long, sir,” Eric said, stretching. “I was kind of busy with all the stuff the CO dumped on my lap.”

“Understood,” Ross said. “But don’t you want to know why congratulations are in order?”

“I assume because you finally got the paperwork filled out, sir,” Eric said, sitting down and turning on his computer.

“That as well,” Ross said. “But the reason that congratulations are in order to you, Lieutenant, is that you have a new title.”

“Oh?” Berg asked, wincing.

“It’s called Vac Boss,” Ross said, chuckling. “An analysis of all the numbers on the entire ship, including veteran crew, indicates that you, Lieutenant Bergstresser, have the most time in death pressure. By about an hour, which is pretty good. Or terrible, depending on how you view space.”

“Whenever possible from inside a ship, sir,” Eric replied. “Why do I think this is going somewhere bad… ?”

“Breaking something up in space is a nontrivial exercise, sir,” Eric said, looking over at Weaver.

The Blade had entered three star systems in the area, poking carefully to ensure the Dreen hadn’t gotten there, yet, and looking for a suitable asteroid field. Many systems didn’t have them because of Jovian interactions and the fact that some of the stars were particularly poor in metal formation. They found a good one in the third system and after more hunting found a large asteroid that according to penetrating radar had a high density, a good sign that osmium might be present.

“We had a fun time with a comet last mission,” Weaver admitted. “And he’s right. You can’t just blow it up; the bits continue with the velocity imparted to them by the explosive. Which is high.”

“There has to be an answer,” Prael said, looking at his XO and the most junior officer on the ship. Berg looked about twelve to the captain and he wasn’t sure he trusted him outside the ship, much less in charge of the entire exercise. “We need nodules that are approximately head sized. No more than eight inches on a side.”

“Eight inches,” Berg said, looking at the bulkhead thoughtfully. “Commander Weaver, isn’t that about the cutting distance of one of the melders?”

“About that,” Bill said. “But we’re going to need a lot of ore, Two-Gun…”

“We need to break it down and then break it down again,” Berg said. “We’ll need all the boards. And the dragonflies.”

“The idea, Colonel, is to cut it up,” Berg said, standing on his board and looking at the asteroid. It was shaped vaguely like a peanut, a common look for asteroids he’d noticed, and about a hundred yards long. “We need the smallest chunks you can get without starting any particular chunk on a hard trajectory. Your lasers are going to impart movement energy to this thing. We want it moving as little as possible. And be careful, there are boards flying around.”

Practically the entire company had been rolled out on their golden surfboards and the officers and NCOs were circling the asteroid, considering the mission they’d been given. It wasn’t a standard Marine mission, but as Captain Zanella pointed out it was pretty much on a par for Space Marines.

“We shall see how this works,” Colonel Che-chee said, aiming her dragonfly at the rock. “Firing…”

“They’re just not powerful enough,” the lieutenant reported. “Even with three of them firing at the same point, they’re barely scratching the surface. Based on their rate of cut, my calculations say that it will take more than a month to break it down to the point the melders can start cutting. Then there’s the smelting process.”

“Too much time,” Prael said. “We’re supposed to have been to the target by then and started our survey. We need a faster solution.”

“Well, sir,” Berg said. “I’m thinking that we might have to blow it up and then try to catch the pieces.”

“That would be ugly,” Weaver said, shaking his head. “Those pieces are not going to be going slow. And we’ll have to drill the thing, anyway. Maybe we just find a bunch of smaller rocks. That would be time consuming, but…”

“We need the lasers to be more powerful,” Miriam said, shrugging. “We just make them more powerful.”

“You mean they need to be brighter not more powerful,” Weaver said.

“Pedant,” Miriam replied, sticking out her tongue. “But you’re right, brighter.”

“That just might work.”

“And that means what?” the CO asked.

“Well, we don’t really have the capability to increase the power, which is in watts, of the laser beams themselves,” Weaver explained. “But, we do have the capability of focusing the beams and making them brighter on target meaning more watts per square meter. We need a BMG mirror…”

“XO?” the CO said. “BMG?”

“Uh…” Bill said.

“Big MotherGrapper, sir,” Berg responded, trying not to grin.

“Oh,” the CO said, obviously trying not to grin as well. “Go on.”

“The… mirror will have to be perfectly reflective so it doesn’t absorb enough of the beams to heat up and destroy itself and has to have a tight focus, very tight. We’ll shine all the lasers on the mirror and then focus all the beams down to a centimeter sized spot on the asteroid. That should be enough irradiance on target to cut it.”

“So… it’s like frying ants with a magnifying glass?” the CO asked.

“More or less, sir,” the Ph.D. in optics said, trying not to wince.

“Why didn’t you just say so?” The CO was beginning to have visions of the Death Star firing multiple beams out that combined into one, which consequentially destroyed Alderaan. “We’d need a bunch of silicon for the glass I assume?”

“No, sir. We don’t need any glass at all. In fact, I’d recommend against glass and that we make the mirror out of Zerodur or AlBeMet.”

“Albe…”

“Aluminum-beryllium metal sir. We’ve got plenty of stuff lying around the ship that is made of aluminum and/or beryllium. Toss some of that in the fabber and regen us a blank of AlBeMet that we can hog a mirror out of. Zerodur is a composite, hmm, better stick to AlbeMet.” Weaver ran his fingers through his thinning hair in thought. “We could build a very thin mirror out of AlBeMet without noticing the loss of material at all and the material is much better suited for the purposes here than glass or Zerodur. We’re going to need to fab a mirror that is ten meters or so in diameter though,” Weaver said turning to Miriam. “Can the fabber make that?”

“Well, it can make pieces and then we honeycomb them together and meld them outside,” Miriam said. “We’ll just have to make hardware to mount them together and point it.”

“And cool it,” Weaver added. “That much irradiance and the mirror will get hot hot hot. Wait, melding might cause wavefront errors on the mirror that we don’t understand. Better to just leave it as a honeycomb.”

“I’m beginning to hear the words ‘space tape and baling wire’ in my head, XO,” the CO said.

“This used to be my day job, sir,” Bill replied. “There ain’t gonna be no space tape on my mirror, that you can depend on.”

“How will we point it?” the CO added. “Can we attach something that big to the ship?”

“Uh, sir, that would be harder to do, I think. Besides, the ship vibrates like hell and we don’t want any excess vibrations on the mirror if we can help it. Even AlbeMet has a natural frequency. Think of a fat lady singing and a crystal wine glass.” Weaver thought for a moment and chewed at his lower lip. “We should just take the EVA thrusters off of a couple of suits or a probe and make this thing a free-flyer. We can hand launch it off the Blade and remote control for pointing. This way we ain’t pointing the dragonfly lasers back at ourselves. That would be safer. Okay, you’re right, there may be space-tape involved.”

“And then the beams will be able to cut the rock?” Colonel Che-chee asked.

“We’ll just have to see,” Bill replied. “I need to go off somewhere by myself for a while and do some math. Wish I had a beer to go along with it.”

It took more than a day for Weaver to simulate the mirror design on the ship’s computers. It took another day just to fab and assemble the honeycomb pieces of AlBeMet into a ten-meter diameter primary mirror. The biggest issue was keeping it clean since the slightest bits of dust or fingerprint oil or any impurities on the surface would be a place for heat to gather and then a point where the mirror could be damaged and possibly even destroy itself. The surface also had to be manufactured with a precision of millionths of a meter tolerance. Fortunately, the fabber was good for even stricter design requirements. Bill and Miriam had overseen the entire project. While Bill completed the optical design and engineering of the mirror, Miriam developed a control system out of retrofitted thrusters from the EVA suits. And, since Miriam had difficulty lifting hardware much larger than a bowling ball, she had enlisted the help of her two favorite engineering and machinist lackeys, Red and Sub Dude.

Since moving it from the science section outside would have required moving the pieces through the ship, and thus coating them with gunk, Red and Sub Dude cleared out a section of Engineering near the elevator and then planned for it to be evacuated per Captain Weaver’s orders. The evacuation of the room would boil off most finger oils and impurities as well as suck out dust particulates. In other words, they sucked it empty to clean it.

“Captain Weaver, we’ve got the mirror component area cleared and wiped down and I guess we’re ready to evacuate it sir,” Sub Dude Gants alerted Bill, who was arms deep in the fabber pulling out the latest mirror holder and cooling junction.

“Good, that makes what now, Eng? Thirty-eight?” Weaver asked Oldfield standing on the other side of the alien machine at the fabber control console.

“Uh, Thirty-nine. Still twelve pieces to go. And then we can start on the mirror pieces,” the Eng replied.

“Okay then, it is as good a time for a break now as any other.” He turned to the machinist’s mate as he stretched his neck. The mirror holders were damned heavy and lifting them for the last four hours as they rolled out of the fabber was giving him a serious pain in the neck. “Sub Dude, you and Red lock all these down and let me know when you are done. Then we’ll go to zero gravity and suck out the clean room.”

“Yes sir.”

“ALL HANDS ALL HANDS PREPARE FOR ZERO GRAVITY!”

“Well, evacuating the room sucked most of the dust out of it and boiled off most of the oils and other contaminants. We used dry and clean air from bottles to fill the room to a slight overpressure so when we open the doors it will blow any contaminants out not in.” Miriam adjusted the cleanroom suit booties over her spike heels and taped them down as she explained to Captain Prael what they had been up to for the past half of a day. Miriam jerked slightly from a static shock as she touched the metal door-facing of the airseal, grounding herself.

“I see,” the CO grunted.

“But the room isn’t large enough to assemble the mirror and then get it out of the elevator. After all, when it is all said and done the mirror will be over ten meters in diameter and will weigh almost a ton.” Miriam unzipped the makeshift airseal and stepped through, motioning the CO to follow. She then resealed the plastic seam and turned to the door.

“I got it.” The CO was already ahead of her and once he saw the seal close he turned the bulkhead door to the left, opening it. A rush of cool air washed over them as they stepped through the hatch.

“So,” Miriam continued. “We’ll have to make certain the components are clean here and that we know how to put them together. And then comes the fun part. Somebody who can handle things delicately will have to go outside and assemble the mirror in space.”

“And who might that be?” the CO asked.

“That’ll be me, sir.” Weaver looked up from a checklist of components and systems where he was testing the physical mating of three honeycomb pieces. Red and Gants were straining against the weight of the large assembly pieces as Weaver attempted to mate them together while wearing spacesuit gloves. “There’s nobody else on board who’s really qualified for it.”

“Man, I wish we could modify the gravity to about half in here,” Red complained.

“Good idea,” Bill wondered if there was a way to get the little black box to do that as he fiddled with an oversized screwdriver. Letting his focus drift for just a second was enough for him to nearly drop it onto one of the reflective segments. “Maulk!”

“Maybe we should take a short break, sir?” Machinist’s Mate Gants smiled. Even though the room temperature was specifically kept at sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit he was starting to sweat under his cleansuit.

“Good idea. Set’er down.” Weaver backed away from the components slowly and began sliding his EVA gloves off.

“Problems, Bill?” Miriam smiled even though she was wearing a doctor’s mask over her face and nobody could tell.

“I’ve done EVAs in suits and Wyverns but nothing that required this level of intricacy,” Bill said, shaking his head. “This is why astronauts like the ones who built the International Space Station trained in neutral buoyancy tanks for months before a mission like this. Spacesuit gloves are just damned hard to work in, even the Adar-designed ones.”

“Are you saying this is undoable, Captain?” the CO asked, unhappily.

“I don’t know why we don’t just fab some better designed gloves for you Bill?” Miriam said nonchalantly. “We could base them on the Hexosehr suits.”

“Why in hell didn’t I think of that already?” Bill said, tapping his head with the back of his hand. “Duh. I’ll do that now for a break. Miriam, you want to get started with the ACS?”

“Why I’m here,” she said with a smile. “The software is finished and just needs testing. Red, do you mind helping me get those attitude control system thruster boxes up onto the workbench?”

Red waved his number two arm assuredly at her. “Right away.”

“The gloves work even better out here than they did inside,” Bill said as he gently tightened the last mirror component into place.

“How much longer until we are ready to test the ACS?” Captain Prael radioed back.

“As soon as Gants and I disconnect the umbilical from the Blade we’ll hand launch it. ETA, say fifteen more minutes, sir,” Weaver replied. “Miriam, when we get a break I think we should seriously consider redesigning and fabbing some new EVA suits from the Hexosehr design.”

“Roger that, Bill.” She didn’t have the heart to tell him that she had already done it.

“Okay sir, the umbilical is away from my end.” Gants held the long cable in his left hand keeping one hand on the large optic floating above his head; his magnetic boots gave him a solid footing against the Blade’s outer hull. “Red, you can reel it in now.”

“Roger that,” Red responded over the com link.

“Easy now, Sub Dude. Let’s walk her around the hull and up to the top of the sail just as we planned,” Weaver said, sweat beading on his forehead. “No worries.”

“Why don’t we just fly her, sir?”

“That’s what the COB asked yesterday when I came up with this procedure.” Weaver took the first steps very slowly, pulling one boot free from the magnetic grip it had on the ship’s hull and then allowing it to kachunk back down.

“So, what did you tell the COB, sir?”

“ ’Cause if the ACS software isn’t just right, or the thrusters misfire, or any number of things happen, we don’t want to take the chance of bumping the mirror into the ship. We get it to the top of the sail, push it away from the ship and let it drift away slowly. If we are at the top of the sail it is less likely to hit anything else. That is sort of standard operating procedure for deep space probes: launch ’em and check them out right after they clear away from the launch vehicle. If we find that there is some software problem we have the whole long trip to the deep space destination to fix it. It’s better than waiting till you get there to figure out that you’ve got a problem.”

“Makes sense, sir.”

Bill focused on making his steps slow and continuous and if he ever felt the slightest tug backwards from Gants walking slower he would pause in place until the pressure went away. Bill liked that level of mental and physical unity and focus. Lately it had all been paperwork and murky personnel problems. This sort of zen state had been hard to find and he’d missed it.

The trek across the hull of the ship and to the top of the sail while carrying an extremely fragile, highly reflective laser relay mirror seemed to take an eternity, but they finally made it.

“Ready for the maiden voyage of the Frumious Bandersnatch,” Bill laughed.

“The Death Star has cleared the planet. I repeat the Death Star has cleared the planet,” Gants added as the giant optic floated into space away from the Vorpal Blade II.

“So you are saying that Miss Moon isn’t perfect?” the CO asked as Captain Weaver entered the conn.

“I never said she was, sir. Not her fault, though. The ACS algorithms were based on a model of the mirror system. A rough model. We didn’t take a lot of time going from CAD to dynamics modeling. So when we turned the thrusters on, the thing got itself in an off-nominal flight condition and that is why it went into the wild spin.” Weaver sat down at the control station and exhaled slowly. “I half expected something like this.”

“And you are certain it is all under control now?”

“Fairly so, sir. The spin actually gave the genetic algorithm Miriam generated what it needed to learn how to control the thrusters and steer the mirror. We should test the thing a time or two before we put anybody or dragonflies out there in front of it with lasers going though.”

“Indeed.”

“The Death Star has cleared the planet,” Berg muttered to himself as the dragonflies took up a ring formation larger in diameter than the rock behind them and pointed in the direction toward the large mirror floating in space fifty meters in front of them.

“What was that, Lieutenant?” the colonel asked.

“Nothing, ma’am,” Berg said. “Whenever you are ready.”

Berg had been up for two days just doing the planning and rehearsal on this operation. Even the first test had moved the asteroid, slightly, so it was going to have to be stabilized. The only way to do that was with Marines “holding” it with rock spikes, which would put the Marines in the area of laser fire.

Berg had been a big reader of SF back before he joined the Marines. And he couldn’t help but think about how blithely the old time SF guys talked about “asteroid mining” as if it was going to be the easiest damned thing in the universe. Grappers.

Safety drills, emergency drills, operational techniques: the operations order on this mining op looked like a battalion night attack and was just about as complicated. And the entire thing had come down on the vac boss. It was a good thing he’d caught up on his homework.

The ship had been moved back because the mirror and dragonfly combination had only been tested with one dragonfly and it was unknown if the mirror could withstand all of them firing together. Weaver and Miriam both agreed that the math looked good, but sometimes experiments didn’t follow the math. For all they knew, the entire assembly was going to go sky high as soon as the dragonflies opened fire. A possibility that had been built into the operations order.

Colonel Che-chee opened fire first, then the other dragonflies in turn, one at a time, with a twenty second pause between each to make certain that the mirror was going to withstand the heat.

“EVA, cooling system is compensating for the heat well,” Weaver looked at some readouts on his console back on the Blade. “Clear to add the next beam Two-Gun,” he transmitted to the lieutenant.

“Conn EVA, add next beam, aye,” Berg said, looking at his controls. The thruster system on the Death Star, as it had come to be known to all, had been designed to allow remote adjustment of beam from the Blade. Since the cut was the most dangerous part of the mission, Berg had taken the responsibility on himself. He knew that at some level he’d chosen to “do the door,” but he also knew that other than Commander Weaver he was the one most qualified. He started drawing the beam across the narrowest point of the rock, the beam slicing deep into the refractory metal of the nickel-iron asteroid.

“EVA, Conn. Cease fire. Target is shifting.”

“Cease fire, aye, Conn,” Berg said. “Colonel, cease fire. Team Four, realign this rock back to initial position.”

Prior planning prevents piss poor performance, Berg thought. So far, so good.

“…Sir, we are just having to realign after about every minute or so of firing. This will take too long if we have to do that,” Berg said.

“Wait one, Two-Gun. We’re working a fix.”

If Captain Weaver was on the problem he’d figure it out, Berg thought. After ten minutes of sitting patiently though, he was beginning to wonder.

“EVA, Conn. Two-Gun, the problem should be fixed as long as you keep a Wyvern at three circumferential points about the target. One at twelve, four and eight o’clock and I’m taking remote control of their thrusters, got it?”

“Wyvern at twelve, four, and eight, aye, sir.” Berg ordered the reorientation of the Wyverns. “Remote control, aye, Colonel, let’s try this again if you please.”

This time the beam tracked flawlessly where Berg pointed it and he did not have to worry about the motion of the rock in space. Somehow the BMG was tracking with the body as it moved from being blasted by the focused laser beams.

It took nearly two days of hard work to cut up the asteroid into “head-sized chunks.” Two days while most of the company cycled in and out of the ship, the machinists manning the fabber had regular breaks and Berg ended up having none at all. Space was an unforgiving bitch and it was up to the vac boss to make sure that everyone remembered that. Berg was constantly moving from the cutting areas, where Marines unfamiliar with the power of the melders nearly ended up breaching their suits, to the airlocks where tired and logy Marines were less-than-careful with their seal protocols. He had to constantly figure trajectories and power for the various Marines moving the rocks, keep rocks from hitting other Marines and, most especially, ensure that nobody got in the way of the cutting laser, which would slice through a Wyvern like a sushi chef through fresh tuna.

But in two days, instead of two weeks or two months, Sub Dude straightened up with a chunk of silvery metal in his suit-gloved hand.

“That’s it,” the machinist said, turning it back and forth. “That’s five kilos of purest osmium.”

“Right,” Berg said, sighing in relief and looking around. The dragonflies were still at it, cutting carefully into a car-sized chunk stabilized by three very nervous Marines. More Marines were cutting the smaller pieces smaller and smaller. But they had what they’d come for.

“All teams,” Berg said. “Suspend EVA operations. Marine teams, move back to the ship by the numbers. Team Two, recover the mirror and start breaking it down per procedure. Madame Colonel, your people are your own.”

“I think we can make it back to the ship, Lieutenant,” the colonel replied. Even with the Hexosehr translator the humor was evident. “We’ve done it enough at this point.”

“Safety first, Colonel,” Berg said, surfing over to where four Marines from his own platoon were carefully recovering the large mirror. “Good job, Shingleton,” he added as the team leader corrected a hold by one of his people.

It was the most time Berg had spent with his platoon since the voyage started and the necessity of his position had forced him to treat them just like the rest of the company. But the individual members and teams had performed flawlessly, doubtless a result of having the exacting Gunny Juda in charge.

“Thank you, sir,” the corporal replied.

Having no clue what an officer said next, Berg surfed off to check on the teams reentering the ship. Guys did the stupidest things in the airlock, it was amazing.

“So that’s the Old Man,” Dupras said. “ ‘Good job, now get back to work.’ ”

“What do you want?” Shingleton growled. “A medal? You break this thing and I’ll make sure you get a medal: right up your rectum.”

“Two-Gun Berg,” Lyle said, jumping team frequencies. “Don’t cross him or you’ll end up in a world of hurt.”

“I’ve never seen him down on the troop level,” another Marine chimed in. “Not even in the gym. What’s he do all the time?”

“Practices killing people and breaking things,” Sergeant Corwin said. “So like Sergeant Lurch said, don’t cross him. Hell, even Top thinks he walks on water.”

“I heard that march to Richmond was his idea,” one of the Marines said. His tone was, if anything, respectful. You didn’t join Force Recon if you didn’t to an extent love pain and there were few things more painful than an eighty mile forced march.

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Lyle said. “He’s a glutton for punishment.”

“Oh, grapp,” Berg said, collapsing in his bunk. “If I never have to smell the inside of my Wyvern again, it will be too soon.”

“Dude, you just oversaw more hours of space-walk than NASA has done in its entire history,” Lieutenant Morris said. “With zero incidents of any note. Hell, NASA has had more seal accidents in less time than you just had under worse conditions! As a second lieutenant, if that right there doesn’t get you a walk-on-water evaluation, the CO’s just got it in for you.”

“He’s got it in for me, all right,” Eric said. “You’re not going to believe this, but…”

“What did I tell you, sir?” First Sergeant Powell said.

“You were right, Top,” Zanella said. “That kid really can walk on water. Jesus. I was just comparing notes. In fewer man-hours, NASA had four times the level of life-threatening incidents. And they never tried to mine an asteroid with jury-rigged alien technology.”

“And, of course the penalty for a job well done…” First Sergeant Powell said, grinning.

“I told him to have the entire mission report on my desk by the beginning of next watch,” the Marine captain said, grinning. “Now, if he can do that, I’ll give him an OER that makes him look like Jesus Christ come back to life, rapture and all…”

“So,” Captain Prael asked, first thing next shift. “When are the guns going to be back up?”

The ship had left the unnamed F type star as soon as the fabber was secured below and was back on the way to the target area. But with the destination less than a week away, and starting to enter potential Dreen territory, the CO wanted to make sure his guns were going to work.

“Oh, they’re already up, sir,” Weaver said, yawning. “The fabber finished spitting out the last of the critical molycirc about an hour ago. We’re continuing the run to make sure we have spares in the event of another emergency. And of course we’ll need it if we take combat damage; that’s not the only place that requires molycirc.”

“Wait,” the CO said, blinking. “What about the rest of the guns?”

“They were fixed before we even started mining, sir,” Bill said. “And you haven’t lived until you’ve seen Miriam in a coverall and four-inch heels, bent over a hatch running molycirc…”

“Miss Moon…”

“Participated in the reconstruction, sir?” Bill asked. “I think that would be a yes. I had Chief Gestner log her hours and I ended up forcing her to work no more than eighteen hours at a time. I’d say that she probably did about twenty-five percent of the work herself, sir. Chief Gestner and the Eng agree on that estimate, by the way.”

“What, do I have to make an all hands announcement?” Prael asked, throwing his arms up. “Okay, I get it. She’s amazing.”

“And cute,” Bill said, grinning. “Don’t forget cute.”

“Fine, I want to have her love child,” the CO said, shaking his head. “I’ll add that to the announcement.”

“ALL HANDS, ALL HANDS…”

“What the grapp?” Chief Gestner said, his eyes wide.

“Hey, Chief,” Sub Dude said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Welcome to the Space Navy. Things are different here.”