Grave to cradle, Arc 3 of "Gone with the Sun"
Chapter 27 Chain Home
N-1
The skeleton of a new Arcturus station lay before them as Kilimanjaro slowly came to a stop, its nose ten metres from the surface of the S-2 moonlet. The N-1 conduit relay would be attached to an altazimuth mount rising from the thin regolith.
"Here's my stop," said Tali. "I'm tuning this new one, over the next few hours, then catching the next frigate back to Earth."
"Whoa. What are we looking at? I thought we'd be on an iron bubble or in space."
Free-space relays existed, but asteroid-mounting allowed for ground vehicles equipped with a small maneuvering eezo core to pass through and stop at the station.
"No, Ash. Haven't got the recipe right yet. This is an ordinary chondritic asteroid. Gravity is weak, but sufficient to keep a maintenance station stable."
Engineers had experimented with forming an iron asteroid bubble, by delving to the core of a nickel-iron asteroid, depositing a liquid argon core, tamping and plugging the hole, then sending it in a close elliptical orbit around the sun. On emergence from the searing blast, instabilities meant only one in five formed a true bubble, and quite non-spherical at that. Better results were hoped for eventually, but for now a roughly spherical solid asteroid would serve to mount conduit-relays.
"We need a maintenance shed for each relay?"
"Not usually. These are new and a bit experimental. The sixth-generation is not just big enough to carry a frigate, Garrus' team also figured out why that stupid thousand-light-year limit was happening."
"So there's longer range."
"Yup. Basically, the wormhole pairs weren't synchronized properly by the QEC."
"So, let's see, we've suddenly got the same sort of range as the Protheans had from Ilos to the Citadel."
"Yup again, nearly a galactic diameter."
"And, Kilimanjaro will make the N-2 on the way to the next stop? About six kilolights away, which I gather is about the last actual planetary system before you go out of the galactic plane and have to use rogue planets to discharge the drive cores. "
"Right again. Which means by the way that although we have plenty of conduit-relay range, Kilimanjaro will still have to stop off every couple of days at some rogue gas giant and dezap the drive core. She could drill into a rocky asteroid in extremis, or trail a five-thousand kilometre long wire net for a few hours, but that's not fun."
"So where's the S-2 conduit-relay we just came through?"
"S-2's mounted on the far side of the asteroid from N-1. Conduit-relays are oriented so as to allow incoming frigates like the Normandy wormhole entry from space, but S-2 would have already been behind you as you came out."
The Normandy had come through S-2 a few hours before, but of course the instant it dropped out of the wormhole, S-2 was only visible in Joker's rear vidcam.
"That mounting looks steerable."
"Yep. Just suppose some unfriendly power gain access to the E-1 conduit in geosynchronous orbit around Earth, or the R-1 conduit in Rio, or the S-1 conduit on Pluto."
"Let me guess. You flip the conduit so they bury themselves."
"Quite right. We don't advertise it. But the maintenance station would change the orientation so that, say, an incoming Oculus or a Collector frigate would impact the asteroid surface at conduit-relay engagement speeds, typically five hundred kilometres an hour but really there's no upper limit."
"Quarians have evil minds."
"It was Kenneth's idea, Ash."
The gaping fab doors slowly revealed Tali's new N-1 conduit-relay, quickly detached by drones and guided to the mounting point where techs waited.
"So long, guys."
"See you, Tali. Probably not soon."
"I know. Keep well." And she entered the airlock. It took half a minute to cycle, then Ash saw Tali skip slowly to the station hatch ten metres away.
"All right, Joker. Let's go get Hannah and her "comm specialist" from the Orizaba."
"So we're taking Hannah to Adelaide, then Hobart, right? And Kelly's her yeoman? Why are we the taxi?"
"She's going to be Hannigan, again again, definitely not appearing in any photo-ops, and you told me she's still a bit queasy about warships, especially this one."
"She'll get over it."
"Maybe. Anyway, our Hannigan will be on some remote Pacific island while Hannah zips around."
"Still, we're the glorified taxi? Come on."
"I suspect Hackett doesn't want to expand the circle of those who might know something. We're taking them to Tasmania first, because some turian wants to check on her. Then someplace east, in the Pacific. There's a whole bunch of people he wants far from media attention. We're taking Brynn Cole to work on generating a grid soliton–"
"– They'll both be popping babies together."
"Shush. Loose lips sink ships. We're taking Gavin Archer there too, doing AI personality research. Also Anne Bryson, continuing work on Leviathan indoctrination."
"And I bet Mom Shepard suddenly develops a consuming interest in all those."
"Shush!"
"Nothing to do with grandchildren, oh no."
"Moreau!"
"Okay, okay, dammit, I just need to vent about being a taxi driver."
"Shut up and soldier, sailor. I'm going to check on that evil genius Donnelly and his minions."
"Minion, singular. Or is Donnelly her minion?"
"Shush."
– Next chapter will be #28, "Separation anxiety…" –
Monday, July 20, 2015 -3/3-
