Authors: Dominic Green
Captain Adeti of the Tetsushuri Mining Fleet, Kranion Sector, had once prided herself on being able to run further, faster, than Phidippides. She had been born in gravity; she had been weakened by kilodia of living in free fall. She had sacrificed fine muscles and an Amazonian physique for her career. Currently, despite the fact that the man facing her had been burned out like a spent venturi by the heat of plough-pushing, seed-planting, stone-clearing, and ditch-digging, Captain Adeti was uncomfortably conscious of the fluid still puddled by overlong exposure to microgravity in her once powerful ankles. Her ankles, despite being supported by elastic stockings, were painful now that an unaccustomed six-newton gravitational field was pulling on them. A promotion from field grade would buy her a posting back in gravity, perhaps even back on New Earth, New New Earth, or Earth; but to earn a promotion, she had to make quota. The centre of mineral exploitation and exploration, now that Earth had been mined out, was now New Earth, and exploration therefore proceeded accordingly to the constellations that could be seen in that planet’s sky. The constellation Kranion had so far proven to be an unmitigated prospecting disaster. The
PLD38227
held nothing in her specimen tanks but gold and diamonds, the former of which could be extracted cheaply from seawater on Earth, the latter of which could be made out of coal by the tonne using the Popol Process. Here on Planetoid 23 Kranii 3X, however, she believed she had discovered a thing which would make her quota ten times over and put her behind a desk within constant spying distance of her untrustworthy husband in Kibera on Earth, for life.
“Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus—figuratively, you have a mine of, uh, substances greater in value than weapons grade uranium beneath your feet.”
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus nodded politely without anything resembling a mad look of greed seizing his features. He tapped a paperweight, horribly radioactive uraninite ore encased in lead glass, that sat on his writing desk beside the table. “We are aware that there are radioactives on our world. We conducted a survey when we first arrived.” He reached behind himself to the lightswitch and dialled the light downwards. The mineral sample in the lead glass fluoresced evilly.
“Uranium oxide,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “But we cannot mine it out. There’s only a few cubic kilometres of it, and to remove it would be to unbalance our little world’s centre of gravity. Mr. Battista assured us this would happen.”
“Mr. Battista?”
“The Anchorite. Lives in the South End Chasm. Keeps himself to himself,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. The Captain was left wondering whether there was an unspoken implication that the Tetsushuri Mining Company should do likewise.
“It’s, ah, not the radioactives we’re interested in,” said the Captain. She set her devil-handled cup down on an occasional table—the house had furniture for every function—and pulled on her business face. “Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus, have you never wondered how a planetoid only twenty kilometres across can have an atmosphere?”
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus frowned. “Well,” he said, “old Arkarch Duke always claimed it was down to the Providence of the Lord. But on account of how I have an honours degree in Natural Science, I tend more towards the ‘there is a nugget of degenerate matter two thousand million million tonnes in mass ten kilometres beneath my feet’ explanation. There was once a companion star to 23 Kranii, a stellar-sized object Mr. Battista refers to as Easy Pink, and it was knocked out of orbit by a hypothetical object passing through our system, which Mr. Battista is fond of calling the Q Ball. We can infer this from the specks of hypermassive debris hereabouts which occasionally collide with agribiz ships and cut them in half.”
“The oxygen fires are pretty when the ships get cut,” said little Apostle Reborn-in-Jesus, with an acetylene light in his eyes.
“Who is this Arkarch Duke?” said the Captain, nervous that this unremarkable rock was proving to contain far more people than she had anticipated.
“Our leader,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “The man who brought us here to Mount Ararat, Lord rest him.”
“What sort of a name is Arkarch?”
“Not a name,a title. The Arkarch used to claim it was an old Earth title meaning ‘master of the ship’, though I suspect he made it up. He took my family out of a seventy-cubic-metre tenement in the Selvas Favela in Manaus and gave us the stars. Now, alas, he is dead. He died four years after landing.”
“A lot of people,” said Captain Adeti, “seem to have died four years after landing.”
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus shrugged. “It was hard adjusting ourselves to the ways of this place.”
“Are you not concerned that your crops might fail, that a solar flare might drive background radiation even higher than current levels, that there might be a meteor impact or a flash oxygen imbalance caused by a bacterial mutation? Your family could
still
all die.”
The dirt monkey shook his head. “We have adjusted.”
To be true, this appeared to be the case. Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus was the same colour as the regolith he farmed, like a clay model of a man baked from Ararat sand in a red solar furnace.
“Mr. uh, Reborn-in-Jesus, we believe that the centre of your world could contain a neutronium mote equal to one half-millionth the planetary mass of Old Earth. It might be as big as a beach ball, the largest commercially exploitable neutronium chunk yet discovered. The value of such a find would be incalculable. Neutronium is induplicable on a financially viable scale, and essential in nanomedicine, femtoelectronics, and weapons manufacture. A share of the profits of mote extraction, if you moved your family offworld, would easily pay for a far larger, more fertile plot of land on a developed colony planet—”
“We do not want a developed colony planet,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “God led us here.”
Captain Adeti fidgeted in the unfamiliar wooden chair. “Have you considered another possibility? The collision with, uh, Q Ball might have been enough to compress certain components of Easy Pink below their Schwarzschild radius. The mote inside Mount Ararat might be a collapsar, steadily growing. You and your family might be sitting on a time bomb. Now that we are drilling in the South End Chasm, we will be able to provide an answer to that question.”
“Which I never asked,” said Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus. “How long have you been drilling in the South End Chasm?”
The Captain had no need to consult a watch; the time came up on her retinal HUD on command. “Around five hours now. Did you get your goat?”
“No. I suspect the Devil has taken her. It will be expensive. I’d only recently had her impregnated.”
“Soon, if you take our offer, you’ll have goats from your front door to the horizon. The world will be paved in goats.” The Captain looked up around the room at the cavorting devils carved into the coving. “So, as well as God, your sect’s teaching encompasses a belief in the Devil.”
Mr. Reborn-in-Jesus stared back with a dull sullen eye. “No, it does not. But the Devil exists regardless.”
“STOP! WHAT THE DEVIL ARE YOU DOING!?”
The man had appeared from the rocks above as if they’d given birth to him, his head a mass of hair like a bull baboon’s, waving stick-thin arms that looked to consist solely of bone and nerve fibre, wearing only a light-reflective kaftan. He had nothing on his feet at all—the soles of his feet, Planetometrist Wong imagined, were probably tough as goats’ hooves by now.
“This must be the Anchorite,” whispered Social Correctness Officer Asahara. “Evidently he is no Buddhist.”
“Perhaps those of his religion believe cutting a man’s hair takes away his strength,” giggled Junior Gravitographer Shankar from her position at the telemetry station. One kilometre below them, on the end of thirteen linked windings of superfine line, the sampler drone had located itself on a flat plane of rock visible on the station monitors. It was now on its second section of drilling down towards the C of G, which the Forward detectors clearly identified as a concentrated mass well above the density limit of electron-degenerate matter.
The Anchorite tumbled down the rocks like a corpse down a waterfall, pausing only to yell, scream and wave. Finally, he dropped to the ledge where the Sample Team had set up shop with the rover’s prospecting module, winched down from a hundred metres above on the vehicle’s emergency towing cable. He fell onto all fours, more like an animal than a man.
“Stop,” he said. “You have no idea of the danger of what you’re doing. Please desist.”
“You would be Mr. Giovanni Battista, I take it?” said Planetometrist Wong. “Might we exchange public access data?”
The Anchorite shrank back into a wary crouch. “I have no census data,” he said.
“But
everyone
,” said Planetometrist Wong, “has census data. The chip is implanted in the corpus callosum at birth.”
“Unless,” smirked Correctness Officer Asahara, “the birth is
unregistered
.” This carried with it an implication of deviant non-compliance with central census legislation or, even worse, of birth beyond the Accepted Frontier, where only fanatics and enemies of right and good authority originated. Perhaps unsurprisingly if he was indeed an illegal, the Anchorite did not rise to the accusation.
“We are engaged in an operation the Tetsushuri Company has great experience of,” assured Planetometrist Wong. “For a man with a pick and shovel, it would indeed be dangerous. But we have tried and tested procedures.”
“Gravitational attraction is increasing steadily,” said Junior Gravitographer Shankar. “As expected. Don’t believe what’s down there to have a super-C EV.” The gravitographer spoke in code to keep vital information from the mudballer; frustratingly, he seemed to understand more than a mudballer should.
“I’m well aware of that,” snapped the Anchorite. “It’s a ball of neutronium no larger than a space hopper. Do you think I don’t know what neutronium is?”
From the telemetry station, Gravitographer Shankar’s tone too grew sharp. “I’m getting some very odd readings here. Density is much lower than expected. Neutron-degenerate towards the core, of course, and electron-degenerate in a shell around that, but between the two—”
Gravitographer Shankar tapped SCO Asahara on the shoulder and directed attention from the figures at the base of the screen to the TV picture at the top of it. The picture glared white.
“Vulcanism!”
Wong shook his head. “Impossible on a world this small.”
“Could such a large nugget cause vulcanism in the rocks around it?”
Wong considered the idea for a microsecond. “We have documentary evidence of over a thousand instances of neutronium-cored planetesimals. It’s never been observed. What’s the recorded temperature?”
Asahara glanced at the screen. “Uh…you could walk around in it. Weird coincidence…gravity’s Earth normal at that depth too.”
“Turn down the gain on the photosensors,” said Wong.
The brightness adjusted downwards.
Wong stared into the screen.
“What the hell is THAT—?”
The picture went out; and no attempts at diagnostics and random juggling of settings by Shankar and Asahara could convince it to come back.
*
“Ma’am, the planetoid is hollow below a depth of three kilometres.”
The surface of Mount Ararat hardly rotated. The ring surface of the unnamed planet above, on which Earth or New Earth might be peeled and hung out to dry numerous times like pattern wallpaper, swept towards Captain Adeti so thick and golden out of so close a horizon that it seemed impossible she could not step up and walk on it.
“You realize, Zhong Zhi, that if this planetoid were any larger, this view would be quite unfeasible.”
Wong nodded. “Tidal forces would drag it apart. Only something this small, with this powerful and localized a gravitational field, can orbit within the rings intact.”
Adeti bent down to the child at her right. The child had walked the thirty kilometres from Third Landing to the prospecting ship out of sheer curiosity. The crew had been feeding it Low Fat Ice Cream Simulant.
“What do you call that planet hereabouts?” she said, pointing up at a third of the visible sky.
“Naphil,” said the child. “You’re sitting on my uncle Forswear-Dalliance’s gravestone,” it added.
“Oh,” said the Captain. “Sorry.”
All around her, headstones lay smacked flat like dominoes. So many, in so short a time…
Wong broke in impatiently. “Ma’am, there is also breathable air down there. Shortly before the drone lost contact, it broadcast successful tests for oxygen, CO
2
and nitrogen. The readings for all three gases were even higher than the ones up here on the surface. Uh, ma’am? You’re not wearing your EVA suit, ma’am.”
High above, a set of stars skated overhead in a perfect V-constellation—the components of the prospecting vessel that weren’t required on a planetary surface, the FTL drive, interstellar fuel stages, and deep space navigation fit, temporarily discarded as extra payload.
The Captain looked down from the constellation she commanded and languidly traced a hand across the lettering on the marble, which proclaimed Uncle Forswear-Dalliance to be DEARLY BELOVED. “The locals don’t wear them…so there’s air down there. Stands to reason it would be in greater concentration. The gravity’s higher.”
“Also, ma’am, just before the drone broke off, it drilled through a particularly difficult hundred metre section of vitrified rock. Fused glass, ma’am. And you know as well as I do there’s no vulcanism down there.”
Adeti raised an eyebrow. “You think it’s artificial?”
“Ma’am, there is
light
down there. Visible spectrum. And water. Fresh water. We clearly saw the drone’s tunnel spoil fall into a liquid surface having that refractive index.”
“You think someone’s
living
down there?”
Wong paused. Peddling outlandish theories to one’s commanding officer could shorten career growth. “I think this entire world, ma’am, is artificial.”
This got the bemused psychoanalytical look he’d dreaded. “Pardon?”
“Ma’am, we have here a twenty-kilometre world hit by a neutronium fragment at
just enough velocity
for it to lodge in the C of G and provide surface gravity of one half Earth normal, a breathable atmosphere, and liquid water—”