CHAPTER 1
Kuiper Belt
"Katara, this sector is empty. There's nothing here."
"Spectra don't lie, Sokka."
"That's what you said about the last rock."
Katara floated over to the tiny triangular porthole. In the distance, a peanut-shaped chunk of grey ice and orange, sun-bronzed tar hung motionless in the sky amidst an unblinking starfield. Katara turned towards her brother, running through a checklist in the pilot's seat, and palmed her handheld. An image of a half-built igloo of ice and metal, a gaping hole in its side, appeared on Sokka's display.
"That could be anything. Probably some long-dead prospector's stash, or a failed colony, or a logistics hub for some military expedition." Sokka shrugged. "Anyway, this close to the village? This rock's probably been explored a dozen times over.
"This rock wasn't so close by a decade ago." Katara tossed him a chart.
Sokka fell silent as he examined his screen.
With so much of the economy (well, what little passed for an economy these days) diverted to the war effort, the prospecting industry had ground to a halt this side of the Kuiper Belt. Heck, their little ship had once been a survey vessel, once, before Katara had all but press-ganged him into working for her outfit.
The milliard icy planetoids that filled this sector of the Kuiper Belt waltzed sedately across the chart while decades flew by, effortlessly making their centuries-long laps around the sun. If he was reading Katara's chart correctly, that meant that the rock – which his display had helpfully highlighted - had once been a third of the way past the Neptunian Trojans and five Astronomical Units (AUs), that is, five earth-sun distances, above the ecliptic.
Sokka whistled. Middle of nowhere was right.
Who in their right mind would build a hab in the middle of nowhere?
=O=
"Okay, reactor's powered down, shadow shield's extended. Stay inside the red line on your HUD if you don't want to get singed. And be careful out there."
Sokka's voice always sounded tinny on the suit channel. Katara nodded, and gunned the thrusters on the hardsuit, following the drones down to the giant igloo. She took a moment to inspect the collection of top-of-the-line antennae, telescopes, and other sensors that festooned the bottom of Sokka's survey ship, and shuddered at the pits and scars on the electric thrusters that betrayed the ship's age. They'd need to top up on the self-healing coating soon.
The two-kilometer long contact binary loomed before her, and Katara shivered despite her tough, insulated, hard-shelled spacesuit. Orange-white plains of frozen nitrogen and ammonia, hills and gullys of rock-solid water, and scattered outcroppings of shining metal came into view under the cool light of the sun – a cryogenic wonderland, two-hundred-and-forty-degrees below zero.
She left the irregular shadow of her ship, and smiled as the cold light of the sun – the brightest pinpoint of light in the sky, first among a sea of unblinking equals – played across her face. She had always liked reading by sunlight.
Her ship drifted into view. Katara had never seen a sailboat in her life (or any body of water larger than a decorative pond, for that matter), but she always imagined a sailboat to be what her ship looked like.
At the top of her ship, perched atop a tall mast like a crow's nest, was a tiny nuclear reactor, the size of a small truck, with a molten uranium core that could power a large Earth city – or four electricity-hungry plasma thrusters. Below the reactor hung a huge triangular droplet radiator, its super-stiff guy wires and collection spars jutting from the mast like a huge, translucent sail, designed to dump enough waste heat to boil a small river into an empty, suffocating sky.
Katara shifted her gaze downward. At the base of the mast was an open-framed cruciform keel, roughly the length of a basketball field, balanced precariously atop four huge plasma thrusters (and held together by yet more super-stiff braided nanotube wire). Atop the keel was piled the rest of her ship – spherical propellant tanks, cylindrical habitat modules, irregular clumps of equipment, missile racks, and motorized sensor pallets with unobstructed views of the vault of the heavens.
An inexpensive, easy-to-maintain sailboat, designed for shortish trips around the poorly bootstrapped communities of the Kuiper Belt.
Her Geiger counter ticked appreciably as she slowly drifted towards the ice-encrusted dome, and Katara turned her attention back to her descent. Probably stray radiation from the ship's reactor, reflected off the asteroid. Nothing harmful.
When 'hot', the reactor produced enough deadly neutron radiation to kill a man a hundred kilometers away, were he so stupid to stand around for an hour. Even with the reactor 'cold', the products of nuclear alchemy in the heart of the reactor still emitted enough residual radiation to kill her in minutes, if she were so foolish to scoot outside the shadow cast by the little tungsten radiation shield on the shipward side of the reactor.
Stay within the shadow shield. Got it.
The gaping maw of the igloo loomed large. Katara shuddered as the drones disappeared into the darkness of a chamber at least a hundred meters tall.
The drones turned on their floodlights.
Katara gasped involuntarily as a huge, white cylinder, a bright, upward-pointing blue arrow on its side, came into view.
"Holy hell, Katara! Would you look at that!"
"Yeah." Katara whispered. "Looks like we hit the jackpot on this one, Sokka."
=O=
It was definitely a Nomad ship. Between the arrowhead motif of the Nomad Initiative, the incredibly advanced fusion drive, the weird name (at least, Katara thought APPA was a name and not some sort of registry code), and how shiny everything was, it couldn't have belonged to anyone else.
Once upon the time, the Nomad Initiative had practically fuelled the economy of the Solar System. Their technologies had opened frontiers. Their contracts had employed billions. Their goal – to cross the gulf between the stars within a millennium, and thence to fill a dead, empty galaxy with human civilization, culture, and joy within ten million years – an inspiration to all.
They were gone now, the economy had gone with them, and peace had gone with the economy.
And the way the nuclear war was eating through what was left of the technological-industrial base… barring a miracle, this ship might well be the last of its caliber ever to be built by human hands.
Sokka shrugged – a gesture that was lost in the bulky joints of the rotund, bug-like hardsuit - as he drifted around the half-built igloo, his trusty nuclear rocket launcher slung over his backpack. "Sure, the arrow's a nice touch, and knowing which way is up doesn't hurt, but I learned a long time ago that a cool paint job doesn't make your ship go any faster."
Katara rolled her eyes. "Says the guy who painted a big eye on our ship so it would see better."
"Well, it worked, didn't it?" Sokka gestured to the towering, dumbbell-shaped spacecraft.
Katara shifted her gaze from the magnetic nozzle and propellant tank of the fusion torch on the bottom, following the bright blue stripe up the narrow spine of the ship – festooned with docking ports for cargo and mission modules – to the big cylinder up top, where the stripe terminated in a blue arrowhead just below the top docking port.
"The big cylinder on top is probably the habitat module. We should start from there."
"You want me to break out the plasma saw?" Sokka asked.
"No. We want this thing intact. We'll need a hacking kit or something to…"
Sokka drifted closer to what looked like the main airlock. "Uhh… Katara? Airlock's unlocked."
Katara's breathing grew shallow. Nobody had built a ship like this in twenty years, and the owner had left the door open.
=O=
Suits on and helmets locked as a precaution, they wandered through pristine decks filled with life-support equipment, past glittering, vacuum-sealed racks of avionics, and into a fully-equipped fabber bay.
"Oh, man, imagine what we could do with these printers." Sokka gesticulated at the smallest of the half-dozen printers that littered the circular bay. "These things are rated for nano-circuitry! Nano-circuitry, Katara. You could print nanotubes and quantum substrates with these things!"
Katara gaped in awe at the huge airlock and assembly arms on the side of the fab bay. "You could practically print a whole new ship from here. Waaay pricier than building it at a shipyard, but, technically, you could do it. With this kind of tech… we might actually stand a fighting chance against the Martians."
"Command deck's up top. Let's see if we can get this thing moving."
"Not a good idea in the igloo. This thing's torch is rated for over a terawatt."
A terawatt – a thousand gigawatts - could have powered a country of three hundred million people, back in the old days on Earth.
"Uhhh… Katara? You'd better come take a look at this."
Katara floated up to the hab centrifuge. Next to a set of sleeping quarters, the owner had laid out a polished stone slab with a few smooth, intricately patterned rocks around it, like the kinds of rocks that came out of an ore grinder… but pretty. Pleasing to the eye.
Sokka was waiting outside what looked like a medical bay.
"Okay, Sokka, what is…"
Katara's eyes went wide. Inside what could only be a hibernation chamber, shrink-wrapped in a fluid-filled polymer bubble like an action figure, lay a young man with a blue arrowhead tattoo on his forehead.
"An actual nomad." Katara hushed. "The Martians must've missed…"
"That's one lucky dude right there." Sokka shrugged. "Do we wake him up and tell him the good news? Or do you want to call higher and wait for instructions?"
Crawling across the sky at one AU every eight minutes, their comm laser would take ninety minutes to cross the solar system; the reply would take another ninety minutes to crawl back.
=O=
Aang groggily opened his eyes. Was there something wrong with the stimulant injectors? Hibernation was usually uncomfortable, but the wake-up cocktail usually took the edge off…
There was a girl in front of him. Even in a bulky blue hardsuit, she was beautiful.
Hadn't the point of his entire enterprise been to be alone for a while? What was she doing here?
Not that he was complaining. If he'd cared about someone so much – and that someone had cared about him so much – that there was an additional person in on his… unorthodox scheme, he was glad that it was her.
As he was wont to do around the fairer sex, Aang said the first thing that popped into his mind.
"Do you want to go squirrel-suit gliding with me?"
The girl's eyes widened as Aang lifted himself out of the resuscitation chamber.
Memories flooded back into Aang's mind as he rose to full consciousness, and he felt a pang of disappointment that no, he hadn't known the girl after all.
Right, his visitors.
"Sorry I didn't roll out the welcome mat. I wasn't expecting visitors until after I finished my hab."
The rest of the room came into focus, and Aang tilted his head as he examined the young man with the big nuclear rocket launcher slung over his back, standing protectively behind the girl.
"Uhh… did someone claim this asteroid while I was asleep? It was unregistered when I got here, honest. My habitat won't need much in the way of resources, and I'm willing to sign anything to say that I'm not going to take over the rock, but I really don't want to have to set up my dome all over again. Also, I was here first, so I think I might have a pretty solid claim."
=O=
His name was Aang. He was some sort of scientist. He liked squirrel-suits, spacewalks, and lab coats with bright orange highlights.
He could change the course of the war.
He had no idea that there was a war.
"So, Katara, how did you like my habitat? Pretty cool, huh? I put the lake in the schematics myself. I wonder how it's all turned out?"
The bald, lab-coated young man rushed over to the nearest porthole, flicked a switch to open the armored cover… and frowned in disappointment. "What the heck happened? Where's my habitat?" He frowned. "Where are Appa's construction drones? Did you… Sokka, right? Sokka, did you blow up my drones?"
Katara was at a loss for words.
"Ugh! Do you guys know how long it took me to get everything set up so I could have a nice, cozy habitat when I woke up? I do not want to go under for another three months just because someone got trigger-happy."
"We didn't touch your habitat. It was like this when we got here." Katara said earnestly.
"Appa is never this slow." Aang went to a display, and the ship hummed to life, as bright white lights replaced blue emergency lighting. "I've been under for at least a few months."
"Aang..." Katara choked on the words. "Things have changed a lot since you went under. We think you went under…"
Aang froze, and his hand dropped from the display.
Katara took a step towards him.
"…twenty years ago." Aang whispered. "I've been under for twenty years." He tapped his head. "Neural interface."
He looked lost for a moment. "I need to make a few calls."
"Aang… there's something else you should know." Katara bit her lip. It had been bad enough for herself and Sokka, as they had watched civilization collapse, year by year, all around them.
Aang was going to take twenty years of bad news in one sitting.
=O=
*One AU = 1 Astronomical Unit, the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun, equivalent to eight light-minutes or 150 million kilometers, about 400 times the distance from Earth to the Moon (which is a bit over 1 light-second) and maybe 120,000 times Earth's diameter.
Mars is one-point-five AUs from the sun.
Jupiter is five AUs from the sun.
Neptune (and Pluto) are thirty AUs from the sun.
Katara and Sokka are approximately forty AUs from the sun. Brrr… chilly.
*Spacecraft are generally set up like skyscrapers, not airplanes. Thrust comes from a rocket engine on the bottom; if there's enough thrust, you can get a clear sense of "up" and "down", down being where the thrust is coming from (i.e. where the floor is pushing you upward because the rocket motor is pushing the floor upward). If your rocket engine does not have much in the way of thrust, you can build your spaceship like a soap bubble for all anyone cares.
*At ~40 AU (beyond Pluto), sunlight has an intensity of under a watt per square meter. That's actually pretty bright – pretty much what your living room would look like if lit by a single twenty-watt LED bulb. It is, of course, nowhere near the intensity of sunlight at 1AU (Earth), 1,300 watts per square meter (much less usually, thanks to clouds, atmosphere, and time of day).