Foothold, page 24
part #1 of Foothold Series
After half an hour it was obvious they were reaching an impasse, and eyes were looking to David for a decision.
“It’s not clear which is the best way forward,” David said, having let them talk themselves to a standstill. “If it were, we wouldn’t be having this debate. Everyone is right; we need food, and we need the reactor, and it’s at risk where it is.”
He turned to John and Heidi. “How long do you think retrieving the lander will take? Realistically,” he added seeing that John was about to continue the argument he just left off.
John and Heidi looked at each other. “A month,” Heidi ventured. John waggled his hand to show this was as good a guess as any, but it was hard to tell.
“It’s not a small job,” David stated, with no dissension heard.
“Can the rover cross the bridge?”
Heidi shook her head. “We’ll have to tow the lander with a cable.”
“And we can transport the crawlers in the shuttle?”
John looked thoughtful for a moment, leading David to suspect they hadn’t actually thought about exactly how they were going to get the lander to the ravine.
“If we disassemble them,” he said eventually.
David nodded. “OK, this is what I propose, then. We’ll divide into three teams. Heidi and John will design the bridge and find the materials they need, and then drive the rover to the ravine, making a road where needed. Nathalie and I will move the crawlers to the lander and move the lander to the ravine. This will straight away get the lander away from the center of the flood plain and moving in the right direction. Grace and Veronika will fly transport and surveys with the shuttle, and pitch in where needed. That leaves Nigel and Josh to stay here and get a garden established. OK?”
There were nods of agreement all around. Although seemingly obvious now, the others realized sheepishly that although there were only eight of them, they could in fact do more than one thing at a time.
Looking at John and Heidi again, David posed a question.
“One more thing – could we make more solar panels?”
“We could,” John replied, “but we’d use fabricator stock that we might need later.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Nigel said, understanding David’s concern. “We’ll be working in here,” he indicated the dome, “and there’s plenty of sunlight. If anything goes wrong we’ve got our masks, and we can call the shuttle in.”
“OK,” David said, “I guess we’ve got a plan. Let’s do it!”
The rest of the day was a buzz of activity, as everyone set to with a purpose. Like most plans, it didn’t go exactly as expected; so Grace and Veronika helped David and Nathalie disassemble the crawlers, and pack one of them into the shuttle; and John insisted on coming with them to the lander to check that it was OK.
The valley that the lander had settled in was quite beautiful, David thought. Surrounded by rocky grey hills the broad shingle plain was crisscrossed with the many small streams that formed the braids of the river. It was a pleasantly warm day as they set the shuttle down next to the lander, and the sound of water burbling over the stony riverbed added to a feeling of peace. The only thing missing was life, David thought. Trees, grass and birdsong would have completed the idyllic picture.
The lander sat perched on a slight angle between two shallow streams; one of the landing legs had sunk a little into the sandy soil, David saw.
John was whistling cheerfully as he jumped out of the shuttle and wandered over to the lander, patting it with one hand as he walked around inspecting his new charge.
He made a full circuit and reappeared from the other side a couple of minutes later, holding the crawler socket covers and grinning at the others, his mask not seeming to be a barrier to that or his somewhat raucous whistling.
“Looks good,” he called. “Why don’t you guys start unloading the crawler while I open her up?”
David looked at Grace and Nathalie and raised his eyebrows. “Shall we?” he asked.
As they brought their first load outside and laid it out next to the lander, David could see that John had the hatch open and went inside to see what he was doing.
The inside of lander three was very different to the others. The most noticeable thing was the empty space; lander three did have some general cargo, but the interior was dominated by the reactor, which occupied an area in the center of the lander that would have been two decks on the others.
John was at the far side of the lander, inspecting the exposed structure.
“How does it look?” David asked.
“Good mate,” he answered, not taking his eyes off the lander structure as he walked around, looking at the supporting beams that ran up the sides of the lander. “The reactor’s in good shape.”
“Is there a problem with the lander structure?” David asked, slightly puzzled.
“No, not at all, I’m just thinking about how many of these we can remove.” Seeing David’s puzzled look, he explained further. “They put extra bracing in this lander, for safety,” he said. “The idea is that we would strip them out later and reuse them. As a matter of fact, most of our reusable aluminum alloy is right here in this lander.”
“And we’ll use that for the bridge?”
“Some of it. Don’t forget we are going to fire the thrusters again, so I was thinking of leaving half of them in, just in case.” David nodded, for the first time thinking that the plan might actually have a chance of succeeding.
It took them another half an hour to fetch all of the crawler parts from the shuttle; then John and Grace returned to Haven, John reminding them to recharge their masks using the lander if they needed to.
Arriving back home, Grace was surprised to find Heidi disassembling the probe lander – she’d used the rover to fetch it while they’d been away. The small rover it had landed was parked nearby, waiting for its turn.
“There’s a lot of metal in this lander,” she explained. “We can use the frame directly, and feed the skin into the fabs.”
She found Josh in the dome, carefully sowing seeds in a neatly marked out garden; fast-growing salad greens he told her, promising they would have fresh food by the time the reactor was retrieved. Nigel was in the lab they’d set up in lander two, working with the germ cells that had been carefully stored away, waiting for their chance for life. She could see he was glad to be finally able to go to work.
“What have you got there?” she asked curiously.
“Soil bacteria and fungi, mostly. We’re starting from scratch here, so there is nothing to give the soil life. Nothing would rot if we left it out right now – there is no bacteria to break it down, no fungi to feed off it. And over here,” he pointed to an incubator, “Earthworms. Soon we’ll also have some insects started, in a couple of months, and once there are some flowering plants, bees.”
“No nasty bugs, I hope,” Grace said, wrinkling her nose.
“Nothing poisonous,” he answered. “We won’t need nasties like mosquitos, either, but to build a proper ecosystem we’ll need flies and spiders.”
Grace looked a little doubtful at the mention of the last two, but Nigel assured her they were needed. “Ecosystems are complicated,” he said. “Even some of the things we don’t like are needed, especially to break down and recycle dead things. But don’t worry, soon we’ll have chickens, they like to eat bugs.”
Grace’s eyes brightened at the thought of fresh produce. “I could sure go for a good omelet.”
Several days later, they had the crawlers attached to lander three, although not without some difficulty. Because the lander had settled into the soft soil they’d had to dig shallow trenches on both sides to get the mountings to align; but finally they were up and moving. There were two braids of the river to cross on their journey to the ravine; the nearest one was shallow and could be forded without difficulty, the other was deeper and required a significant detour downstream to a place where the steam forked into two shallower braids.
David and Nathalie guided the lander as it ground slowly across the two streams; at one point the water was lapping against the bottom of the lander itself, and the crawlers were all but submerged. Heidi had assured them they could operate without difficulty underwater, and so it proved to be.
Finally, they came to the ravine that was blocking their path, and David privately thought he’d have to revise his earlier optimism. The ravine was only six meters across at the point they had come to, but was very deep, with a rushing stream far below. The rocks at the edges were jagged, and spanning the ravine did not seem like it would be easy.
But they were there, and the lander was on higher ground now, so unless there was a very large flood, it would be safe.
John and Heidi had made good progress approaching the ravine from the other side; they’d had to grade the path in places to form a rough road, and in one place had to carve away a section of hillside, but they would be there the next day. The rover was packed with small sections of bridge, and they’d constructed a trailer containing the longer sections that they pulled behind the rover.
David had called Grace to come and bring them back to Haven, and was surprised when she turned up with John.
“It’s all easy driving now, so I left Heidi in charge,” he explained. “I thought I’d get a head start on the site prep.” At David’s enquiring look, he added, “Don’t worry, she’s got Veronika with her.”
David’s standing rule was that no one should be by themselves, at least not until they were more sure of their environment.
John had brought tools with him, and soon had the others doing his bidding to set up survey equipment, and then help him unload a sonic disintegrator, which he set up near the edge of the ravine.
“Seen one of these before?” he asked.
David and Nathalie shook their heads.
“Watch this,” he said, standing back and activating it with his phone.
The machine promptly set to leveling the rocks within a square area, guided by lasers in the survey markers.
“They call it a disintegrator, but there’s no magic to it,” John shouted over the noise of the machine. “It uses hammers, grinders and focused sound waves to pulverize the rock.”
The machine took only twenty minutes to finish, then shut down with a whine.
David was impressed. “Now what?”.
John held out two shovels. “We don’t have a machine for moving the rock dust,” he said with a grin.
A couple of hours later, the rover bumped its way up the slope across the ravine; Heidi brought it to a halt a few meters from the edge. John waved and called out to her from the other side.
“Wait there, we’ll be right over.”
Turning to David, he said, “That was the easy part, now we need to do the other side.”
Grace flew them over and set down well away from the ravine and the rover. On this side, they were on a plateau that sloped gently down towards the east, towards Haven. At the eastern end, the plateau descended into a valley that was their route home.
“So what’s the plan?” Grace asked curiously.
“We build a bridge then get over it,” John quipped, attracting a few smiles.
“It’s nothing too clever, we’re going to build what’s called a Bailey bridge. It’s simple, strong and dead easy to assemble. What we do is make a little ramp over there,” he pointed to the ravine, “then assemble the bridge in front of it. Then we just push it over. Easy as.”
“Easy as what?” Veronika asked, puzzled.
“Easy as anything you can think of,” John replied, not making it any clearer.
Veronika let it slide. Her English was excellent, even though it wasn’t her native tongue. Some of the vernacular speech though, made no sense at all.
“Right, let’s crack into it!” John exclaimed, further confusing Veronika, who had no idea what that meant either. “You lot, start unloading the trailer!”
John sent Grace and Veronika back to Haven to fetch Nigel and Josh – “We need some more muscle”, while he worked with the others to bolt together prefabricated components that he and Heidi had prepared, whistling cheerfully again.
“You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?” David asked.
“Mate, this is why I’m here. Heidi too, right hon?”
Heidi nodded, clearly also in her element.
“We’d never get to do stuff like this back on Earth, they used robots for everything. This is pioneer stuff right here.”
David nodded. There was a certain pleasure in working with his hands, making him look forward even more to his future role as a farmer.
The shuttle was soon back with the rest of the team, and John had Grace take him and his new laborers back across the ravine to the reactor, where he soon had them, including Grace, stripping supporting beams from the lander.
“We need these for stringers,” he explained. “The lander doesn’t need them anymore.”
The day’s end saw them with a skeletal frame, which John declared ready to span the gap. David was a little skeptical, but John explained how there was a leading nose to the bridge they would push out over rollers, then they’d finish it off.
“Trust me.”
Leaving Heidi to control the rover, he had Grace fly him, Josh and Nigel across so they could coordinate the landing. Then he signaled Heidi to start, and she started to push the bridge. For a moment it looked as if it wasn’t going to move, then it slowly edged across the gap, tilting up slightly as it rolled up the shallow ramp they’d built.
“Keep it steady,” John barked into his mask microphone. “A little to your left,” he called, and so on, guiding the bridge as it edged forward. Finally it was across, and the nose tilted down to land on receiving rollers as the weight of the span overcame the countering weight of the bridge section on the other side. Heidi pushed it forward a little more until it covered the landing zone, then stopped.
There were cheers and applause as they celebrated their success.
The next day, they finished the task, which went quickly with the parts for the trusses and decking fitting into place, although it was a job for those who weren’t bothered by heights, with the bridge now suspended over a 40-meter drop.
The final task was the construction of a lightweight cart for the lander to sit on, a little like a small railway flatcar, as the crawlers would be too heavy and too slow. The end result was the lander sitting on the cart, ready to be pulled across over a set of guide rails.
The time had come to test their wild idea.
David called for a break before the attempt, and they took the opportunity to eat and discuss the process.
“This bridge, it does not look strong enough,” Nathalie said with more than a hint of concern in her voice.
The bridge structure looked good; it was a model of a small Bailey bridge that any combat engineer would have been proud of. But there was no denying that it had a lightweight look to it.
“I know it looks a bit a thin, but it’s actually not far off,” John said. “Don’t forget the gravity is light and we took quite a bit of metal out of the lander to build the bridge with. But you’re right, it is light, that’s why we need to use the thrusters.”
“Will that really work?” Nathalie asked, still not looking convinced.
“It ought to. The four of us,” he indicated Heidi, Grace and David, “Have all checked the new program. All that will happen is that two thrusters either side will burn on the lowest thrust level for the ten seconds we need to get it across, and that will take nearly a quarter of its weight. What could possibly go wrong?” He radiated confidence.
Nathalie still did not look convinced, and there was feeling of tension in the air – none of them were willing to say what they were thinking, which was that this plan was very risky.
Their break over, they took their places. Heidi backed the rover up to the bridge and John connected a cable to the lander cart. Everyone retreated to a safe distance and John pulled out his phone.
“OK, tension the cable,” he radioed to Heidi.
Heidi slowly edged the rover forward until the towing cable pulled taut.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Ready.”
John looked at David, who nodded, fingers crossed inside his pocket.
John pushed the ‘Execute’ button on his phone screen and was instantly rewarded with a hiss and a low roar as the thrusters ignited. A mixture of rock dust and rocket exhaust kicked up a choking cloud of dust that made it difficult to see.
“Go!” he cried, and Heidi smoothly applied the power. The lander seemed to hesitate for a moment and then started moving at a fast walking pace, rattling the bridge as it passed.
“It’s working!” Nathalie cried, clapping her hands with excitement, her doubts evaporating.
The lander rolled off the part of the bridge anchored to the west side of the ravine and out into the void. As the thrusters cleared the edge the thrust levels must have dropped a little, with suddenly there being no land to push against, and it seemed to rock slightly on the cart and momentarily pause. The rover pulled more tension on the cable briefly then lurched forward, jerking the lander on its cradle.
Suddenly, all of the lander’s thrusters fired at full power. It hesitated for a split second then rocketed upwards from the bridge, trailing fire and smoke as it headed east and disappeared into the sky.
“Holy shit,” Josh exclaimed, “Where the fuck is it going?”
The thrusters cut out, and as they strained their eyes the lander was discernable as a small black dot high in the sky.
“It’s coming back,” John called, “Look!”
The black dot was becoming larger as the lander plummeted back towards them, gravity accelerating it at a frightening rate.
They were staring sudden death in the face as what amounted to a fusion bomb bore down on their position, gravity accelerating it faster and faster. Everyone was rooted to the spot, surprise and fear robbing them of initiative.
Just as it seemed that disaster was literally upon them, the landing thrusters kicked in once more with a mighty roar, and the lander executed a perfect suicide burn, touching down in a hail of shingle and sand just as the thrusters cut off.
