The Oort Federation, page 20
eThorpe watched Butler’s face drop. Sitting behind his desk, he seemed to age ten years. eThorpe had known Butler since he assumed the U.S. presidency. Back then, Butler had seemed surprised at his elevation and unsure of himself. Over the years, eThorpe had watched Butler mature as a national politician, then on a global scale, and more recently as Chairman of the Federation, overseeing many worlds. This, however, was Butler’s biggest challenge thus far.
Butler sighed and unlocked a channel to the Oort.
“I urgently need immediate Oort presence in my office,” Butler said.
MARS—VARIOUS LOCATIONS
Mars remained virtually unaffected by the confrontation with the Oort. Nanedi and the other cities took water through portals, but the water portals weren’t affected. They didn’t use waste portals. Instead, they processed their waste and drained it to their agricultural sectors.
City residents focused on agricultural or support activities and a growing manufacturing capability. Portals facilitated movement on Mars, but the Oort lock-out didn’t affect local transportation or the orbital terraforming activities.
Thorpe and Braxton had generated a topological map of Mars that included locations for six channels they intended to burn running northward from the elevated south polar region. The twenty-by-twenty-meter channels would carry melted polar cap ice into thousands of canyons and depressions that would become rivers, lakes, and estuaries when both ice caps were melted, and water was released from the aquifer beneath the north polar basin.
Instead of waiting the full eighty-five Mars standard days for the nanobots to complete all 8,476 mirrors, Thorpe activated the Nanocosm program that controlled the operation as soon as enough mirrors were positioned to form a concentrated beam capable of blasting out the twenty-by-twenty-meter trenches from polar orbit.
1,000 four-kilometer-wide mirrors rotated, tilted, and changed their curvatures so that their beams converged near the ice cap edge at 15° west longitude about 200 km southwest of Sisyphi Planum’s southern edge. Nearly 8,000 gigajoules of concentrated solar energy flashed ice to hissing steam and vaporized the underlying regolith into billowing clouds of rock vapor and nanoparticles that quickly dispersed northward with the adiabatic pressure from the ice cap. Every three seconds, the twenty-meter-wide beam vaporized a one-meter-thick section of regolith down to twenty meters, leaving a twenty-by-twenty-meter trench in its wake as it moved northward.
The trench would carry polar melt 1,700 kilometers northward to Argyre Planitia, a 5.2-kilometer-deep depression that stretched 1,900 kilometers east to west and 600 kilometers south to north, the smaller of two large lakes that would form in Mars’s southern hemisphere. Sixty-two days later, this trench would reach Argyre Planitia.
Ten Mars standard days later, a second beam struck the surface 120º eastward where Australe Lingula pushed northward from the polar plateau. The trench ran north for 1,850 kilometers, emptying into Hellas Planitia—seven kilometers deep, stretching 2,000 kilometers east to west and 1,500 kilometers south to north. Fifty-five days later, this trench would reach Hellas Planitia.
At ten-day intervals, four more beams struck the surface around the south polar icecap, one between the first two trenches at about 0º longitude, and three evenly spaced on the other side of the icecap. These trenches fed into the canyons and valleys spread across Mars’s southern hemisphere.
The typical trench path mapped out by the Nanocosm for the four remaining trenches varied between 8,000 and 12,000 kilometers. The expected time for completing these trenches was about one standard Earth year.
Six months later, Thorpe and Braxton sat in a dark tavern in Nanedi City quaffing local beer and discussing their progress. Thorpe’s trench-burning activities had increased Mars’s atmospheric pressure to 0.3 bar—about the pressure at the summit of Mount Everest on Earth. Carbon dioxide partial pressure was down significantly while oxygen and nitrogen partial pressures were rising. The magnetic field created by Braxton’s orbital superconductor was diverting the solar wind, so the atmosphere Thorpe generated was not swept away.
“The shit you’re making is not exactly breathable,” Braxton said over the rim of his mug.
Thorpe grinned. “How are your Moxie units coming?”
“By the end of this week, we’ll have ten thousand units operating, scattered all over the planet. Sally and Brad, with their uploads, I would guess, have done a remarkable upgrade to the units. Get this. The first Moxie unit on Mars in the early twenty-first century converted carbon dioxide into ten grams of oxygen per hour from a seventeen-kilogram cube. Our new portal-powered terraforming Moxie units—T-Moxie units—mass at a hundred kilos, but they produce up to a hundred kilos of O-two per second. Since you are producing about six metric tons of rock vapor per second, at a hundred percent efficiency, we can generate six tons of O-two per second from your stuff and ninety-four tons from atmospheric carbon dioxide.”
Braxton paused and did a couple of calculations with his Link. “If the Moxies are our only oxygen source, it’s gonna take three Earth standard years plus one hundred fifteen Mars standard days to bring the O-two level to twenty-one percent, Earth standard pressure.”
Thorpe chuckled. “I sense a bit of hand-waving here, but I like your numbers. Don’t forget that a lot of the rock vapor we produce is actually iron oxide vapor. That stuff condenses to molecule-size nanoparticles, which means that much of the oxygen will condense out as O-two.”
Braxton grinned and turned to his Link display again. “Factor that in,” he said, “and it’s gonna take three Earth standard years plus one hundred twenty-one Mars standard days.”
“So, three years and four months, give or take,” Thorpe said. “In another six months, we’re gonna tackle the aquifers; the Argyre Planitia and Hellas Planitia first, then Valles Marineris, and finally the north polar basin.”
“Has anybody been able to determine how much water they hold?”
“No, but they are under pressure, and they hold a lot of water. I’m guessing Argyre and Hellas will partially fill their respective basins and that Marineris and the polar aquifers will meet and reach equilibrium with a shoreline that has been projected for about a hundred years,” Thorpe said.
“And while they fill, we’ll be melting the polar caps, right?” Braxton added.
MARS—THE BASINS
Long ago, Argyre held a lot of water, about the same as the Mediterranean Sea on Earth—some 4,000,000 cubic kilometers. Water flowed in from the south and out to the north. As Mars lost its atmosphere and cooled, the Argyre Sea dissipated, and then the surface froze solid, encapsulating about 2.5 million cubic kilometers of water. Over time, the ice cover was buried under a half-kilometer layer of dust that eventually compressed into rock-like regolith. The liquid water beneath the regolith and ice was under great pressure. Drilling through the regolith and ice cover would release that pressure, resulting in a mighty upheaval where the regolith would slide to the bottom, and the ice would break up and float on the water’s surface.
In polar orbit around Mars near the orbiting mirrors, Thorpe instructed the Nanocosm to set the controllers for six sets of 1,000 orbital mirrors to focus on six one-square-meter spots located in a hundred-meter circle around the deepest spot in Argyre Planitia, 5,200 meters below the surrounding plains. In FS Astor, Braxton hovered twenty kilometers to the east and above the impact circle.
“Are you ready?” Thorpe asked Braxton.
“As much as I will ever be.”
Thorpe activated the process. From Braxton’s spot, the six consolidated beams struck the surface like a circular wall of fire. 24,000 gigajoules blasted a circle of six holes fifty-two meters apart in Argyre’s floor. Billowing clouds of vaporized regolith obscured the entire atmosphere surrounding the blast zone as each concentrated beam vaporized 133 meters every second. Five seconds later, six huge steam geysers shot from the holes.
“Rotate your pattern thirty degrees in either direction,” Braxton advised, his voice filled with excitement.
Over the next few minutes, under Braxton’s visual guidance, Thorpe rotated the beam pattern fifteen and then 7.5 degrees. Suddenly, with an ear-splitting report, the hundred-meter circle defined by the blast holes broke into several large chunks that rolled over, dumping their 500-meter regolith load to the bottom. Large cracks quickly radiated out from the hundred-meter hole at the speed of sound until the entire regolith cover in Argyre basin split into thousands of fragments.
“Terminate the beam!” Braxton shouted.
Over the three million square kilometers of Argyre basin, liquid water spurted dozens of meters in the air through cracks as they formed. Large ice floes covered with 500 meters of regolith rolled over, dropping their rock load to the bottom. Smaller floes, unable to sustain the regolith weight on their backs, simply sank to the bottom. Within twenty hours, what for millions of years had been a dry dust bowl was now a huge lake covered with bobbing chunks of hundred-meter-thick ice.
Hellas Planitia, ninety degrees east of Argyre in the southern hemisphere, was a third larger and two kilometers deeper than Argyre. Like Argyre, its floor was regolith-covered ice, but unlike Argyre, over the eons, ice movement under the regolith had produced a rough terrain of mountains and canyons. Thorpe and Braxton decided to blast two smaller circles through the regolith and ice, one in the northwestern quadrant and the other in the southeastern quadrant.
Thorpe instructed the Nanocosm to coordinate the two holes so they would break free together. Braxton placed himself in Aster several kilometers to the southwest. When Thorpe activated the process, the southeastern beams bored through unexpectedly fast as it turned out the regolith was just a few meters thick. In just moments, the southeastern quadrant was a churning cauldron of ice chunks ranging from a few meters square to several kilometers, some with ice mountains jutting from their surfaces. The smaller top-heavy chunks flipped, displaying a gleaming underside.
When the northwestern circle broke free, cracks radiated throughout the remaining Hellas surface. Within twenty-four hours, Hellas became a 4,000,000 square kilometer bobbing ice-filled sea, significantly larger than the Mediterranean Sea on Earth.
Valles Marineris turned out to be a more difficult challenge. Thorpe spaced his six consolidated beams along its 4,000-kilometer length and then moved them together in fifty-meter jumps until the buried ice split open in several sections of the chasm. When the action settled ten hours later, instead of one 4,000-kilometer-long lake, five ice chunk-filled lakes remained, two of them more than a kilometer deep.
The final big challenge was releasing the north polar aquifer. It had formed more recently and over a longer time period than Argyre and Hellas, and it contained many times their combined amounts of water. Thorpe and Braxton laid out a six-hole pattern near the basin center of Utopia Planitia that could be moved quickly to other locations to facilitate breaking up the subsurface ice over the entire basin.
Thorpe instructed the Nanocosm to set up the first pattern. Braxton hovered in Aster twenty kilometers to the south and several above the blast site.
“Ready when you are,” Braxton transmitted.
Five minutes later, six geysers shot into the Martian sky.
“Rotate your ring by thirty degrees and do it again,” Braxton advised.
This time, the regolith-covered ice around the ring collapsed, and cracks began to radiate outward. Braxton gained several tens of kilometers of altitude and then transmitted to Thorpe, “Next pattern in the center of Isidis Planitia.”
“Got it,” Thorpe said and instructed the Nanocosm accordingly.
About an hour later, after three angular shifts, cracks began to radiate through Isidis, with geysers spouting along the crack lines.
“Now Arcadia Planitia,” Braxton said.
Move and setup took a couple of hours before Thorpe said, “Okay, ready to blast Arcadia.”
Then they moved to Amazonis Planitia. Braxton hovered over the far western slopes of Olympus Mons to observe the action.
When the ice cracks started radiating, Braxton said, “The last two are on the opposite side of the pole, a spot between Acidalia and Chryse Planitias, just south of Bonestell Crater.”
“We will have to find another more permanent Mars feature to name after Chesley Bonestell,” Thorpe said. “He was one of my significant inspirations.”
“Yeah, I know,” Braxton said with a chuckle.
Over the next several days, the entire north polar basin changed from dry, dusty desert to iceberg-filled sloshing water. At the pole, the highlands and the ice cap itself protruded from the surrounding icy waters. About ninety degrees east of Hellas at the 30th north parallel, Elysium Mons pushed high out of the surrounding waters, like a gigantic volcanic island in an ice-filled ocean.
The Martian mean surface temperature had climbed to 0° Celsius, and atmospheric pressure had risen to 0.8 bar, which meant that much of the freed water would remain in a liquid state as the ice melted. Atmosphere oxygen level was still too low and carbon dioxide level too high, but that was rapidly changing. By the time the captured water in the ice caps was freed into the southern trenches and the northern ocean, light-weight nose and mouth cups to filter carbon dioxide and supplement oxygen were all that would be needed anywhere on Mars. In three standard Earth years, the domes could come down. Except for the lighter gravity outside cities, life on Mars would become normal.
“The Soletta is really doing a job on Martian average temperature,” Thorpe said to Braxton over mugs of beer in their Nanedi City tavern.
“It’ll do even better when we stop monopolizing the polar mirrors,” Braxton said. “I’ve been thinking. What if we use just two beam-sets for the polar channeling and assign the remaining six thousand four hundred seventy-six mirrors to their normal jobs? At the south pole, we can carve grooves in the ice cap leading to the northward trenches. In the north, since there are no trenches, we carve radial grooves to facilitate the melt runoff.
“I ran the numbers for the polar cap melt. Here’s what I suggest. We set the polar mirrors for their normal task and use twenty percent of Soletta power split between both poles. It will take one hundred seventy Mars standard days to melt both ice caps. If we want to be a bit more aggressive, thirty percent of Soletta power will melt both caps in one hundred thirteen Mars standard days.”
“I think I like the more conservative approach,” Thorpe responded. “I think continuing to warm the surface trumps a month-and-a-half saved on filling the basins.”
“Yeah, I agree,” Braxton said, hoisting his mug, “but I wanted to give you a sense of where the options lead.”
The Soletta diverted 10% of its power toward the north polar ice cap of Mars and 10% toward the south polar ice cap. The north polar beam struck the cap a few kilometers south of the pole and extended 500 kilometers to the edge of the ice cover. The south polar beam struck the cap a few kilometers north of the pole and extended 350 kilometers to the ice edge. As Mars turned on its axis, all parts of both poles received a continuous 4.4 petajoules of solar energy. After 170 Mars standard days, virtually no water ice or dry ice remained at either pole. Both southern basins were filled to three-quarter capacity, and the north polar basin had overflowed into the network of channels connecting it to Valles Marineris. Mars had become a water planet.
Chapter Fourteen
MARS-SUN L4—UDACHNY
With Isidor Orlov’s permission and encouragement, Academician Borisovich took the controls during Gagarin’s shakedown cruise. He was particularly interested in the ship’s performance in warp drive. He took the ship vertically out of the ecliptic for an hour on VASIMRs at one-gee, testing various systems during the constant acceleration. Then he shut down the VASIMRs and shifted to warp drive. Inside the starship, the only thing that changed was the loss of gravity when the VASIMRs shut down.
Borisovich pushed ahead for two hours. He varied the drive’s warp factor from 1.0 to 4.5, the maximum available from the LANR he had installed. For two hours, he worked warp factor through the available range several times, ranging from lightspeed to 3,162 times lightspeed and back, averaging warp factor 2.84, or sixty-nine times lightspeed. He dropped out of warp 1,000 AU from Udachny Station at the inner boundary of the Oort Cloud.
During the VASIMR and warp transit, Orlov sat beside the Academician but remained uncharacteristically quiet. When Borisovich lifted his hands from the controls and announced their arrival at the Oort Cloud boundary, Orlov said, “My compliments, Academician, you have absolutely outdone yourself. This is a magnificent spaceship.”
Borisovich smiled and said, “Starship, Sir, starship.”
“Very well,” Orlov acknowledged, “now let’s test our sensing, acquisition, and weapons systems.”
For the next hour, Borisovich demonstrated how to acquire a target using radar and lidar and destroy it, and then floated aside while Orlov detected, tracked, and destroyed three nearby proto-comets. He used the laser on two objects with a range of nearly a million kilometers. He zapped an object at nearly 500 thousand kilometers with his particle beam—near the limit of the beam’s range.
Satisfied, Orlov turned the controls back to Borisovich. “Let’s head back to Udachny,” he said.
Borisovich tested the warp range again on the return trip, averaging warp factor 3.14 for an hour before reinstating the VASIMRs for the final hour leg to Udachny Station.
OORT STATION PRIME—CHAIRMAN JOHN BUTLER’S OFFICE
Federation Chairman John Butler focused his attention on the silvery sphere that took shape in his office just below the domed council meeting hall at OS Prime. eThorpe and eBraxton sat next to his desk as holoimages. The other members of the core group, with their uploads, were scattered around the office.
