106: PIRATES

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It’s movie night.

It’s Tal’s turn, and ke has insisted on doing some preneek tradition called ‘talk like a pirate day’. This involves adopting some specific vocal affectations that ke has provided instructions for. This also involves, for some reason, dressing like a pirate.

“This is not how pirates dress,” Denish grumbles, adjusting his ostentatious home made hat. At a glare from Tal, he reluctantly adds, “Me hearties.”

“Yarr, this eyepatch be pointless,” I add, adjusting the mass over my right eye. “It be screwin’ with me depth perception, though I be uninjured. Am I doing this right?”

“Ye be a natural pirate, Aspen,” Tal assures me.

“The Interlingua was complicated enough without this,” Denish says. “Yarr.”

“The yarr be best goin’ first, comrade,” Sam grins, adjusting the bright red rag that they’re wearing as a belt for some reason.

“Comrade is for somethin’ different,” Tal corrects them. “He be ye Matey.”

“‘Be… ye…’ is that even a sentence?” Denish asks, distressed.

“Fear not, matey,” Tinera says, laying a hand on his arm, “for it merely be fer one night, and then we can stop sounding like idiots.”

“We be soundin’ like normal idiots again tomorrow, at any rate,” says Captain Klees. “Truly, be the eyepatches necessary?”

“They be traditional,” Tal says. “It is said that when the pirates be takin’ a ship and they be goin’ belowdecks into the dark they would uncover their patched eye to see in the low light. Yarr. It be total bullshit, of course. Me believes – ”

“Me believes?!” Denish mutters, starting to panic.

“Me believes, me hearties, that they simply be losing their eyes a lot, to cutlasses and soforth. To parrots, maybe.”

“Parrots?!” the Friend asks. “Uhm, matey?”

“There be a great many parrots at sea,” Tal confirms. “It be said that they would fly onto the ships demanding tribute of crackers, and land on the shoulder of a pirate and he would be captain of the ship.”

“There be worse systems of government,” Lina shrugs. “Yarr.”

“We should be getting’ a chicken from the Greenhouse Ring fer our dear Captain’s shoulder,” Tinera says. “Yarr.”

“Um, no,” Captian Klees says. “We’ll not be doin’ that, me hearties.”

“But Quiche be lovin’ ye so much, Cap’n!”

“Quiche always be tryin’ to eat me eyes.”

“So ye’ll be needin’ the eyepatch!” Tal grins.

“Captain,” Sam interjects, “I be bringing ye news from the… crow’s nest?” they glance at Tal, who nods. “I be pleased to… be announcin’… that we be movin’ at under one fifth of the speed of light now, relative to the stars.”

“Oh, that’s great news!” Captain Klees grins. “So we can… I mean, we be able to reduce the shieldin’, then.”

“Hull robots!” Denish cheers, sharing a high five with Tal.

The hull maintenance robots can’t work with the electrostatic shielding at full strength, and it’s dangerous to reduce the shielding at high velocity. This means that if anything does go wrong with the exterior of the ship at this point, it’s unlikely that we’ll need to physically send anyone out there. Our odds of reaching Hylara without anyone dying on the hull just increased dramatically.

“How far be we from Hylara?” Captain Klees asks. “How… ahoy… is land?” He glances at Tal. Tal considers the piratical correctness of the sentence for a moment, then shrugs.

“She be a little over one light month away. About a year’s travel time, give or take movin’ into orbit. Also, we be slow enough to use the Kleiner array, with the shieldin’ down.”

“We can get proper data on the planet?” Tinera asks, excited. “I mean, we be… able to be gettin’…?”

“Aye,” Sam says, “if the planet is in view. If it be behind the sun, we be havin’ to wait.”

“How long be the process takin’?” Captain Klees asks.

“We be needin’ to shut the main engine down temporarily to do it. About five hours, for the imagin’. Most of that be letting the engine cool.”

“Do it,” Captain Klees says.

“Aye, aye, captain.” Sam salutes, thinks a moment, salutes in the preneocambrian fashion instead, and heads for the front of the ship.

“Someone go with ‘em,” the captain says. (It’s protocol for no one to leave our few living rings without company, in case something goes wrong. There have been too many accidents on this ship to tempt fate.)

“Aye,” Denish says, and gratefully takes the excuse to leave.

“Aww, we lost our real pirate,” Tinera pouts.

“Then we must out-pirate him!” Tal grins. “To the rum!”

“We have no rum, matey. Mead only.”

“Tonight, it be rum! And ale! Those are what pirates drink!”

People are shooting me curious looks, I notice. Perhaps wondering what I, the sociologist, think of Tal’s particular perception of historical pirates. I ignore them on the grounds that I don’t particularly care right now. We’re too close to Hylara to care about things like that.

Close enough to fire up the Kleiner array. Close enough to collect proper data on the conditions on the planet. Close enough to see how well they line up with Earth’s rough data that suggested, on the balance of evidence, that Hylara was a good place for a human colony.

I’m terrified that our close-up, improved data is going to show that Earth’s data was wrong.

Soon after, everything suddenly feels a little bit lighter and the floor, which has been a steady slope under my feet for the past four years, is flat. The fore engine has been turned off. Sam and Denish return, and we have Tal’s pirate party, occasionally interrupted by Sam going to check on the progress of the reading.

Then, it’s ready.

“Land ahoy!” Sam announces. “We have imaging of Hylara.”

The pirate crew all cheer and file toward the front of the ship to have a look. We could read the data on a closer terminal (Sam needs to be up front to control the array apparatus, but once the data is in the computer it’s in the computer), but it just feels right to be up the front, where the sensory equipment is.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in the engine ring. It looks pretty similar to how I last saw it, but I have a bit more context for some of the machines, now, after putting time into researching the actual orbit and landing processes. I recognise not just back of the mounting for the huge main engine system, but the physical operational controls for the telescopes, the particle analysis systems, the Kleiner array. All of which can be controlled from the computer terminals if necessary, all of which are mostly in the hands of the computer system anyway, but each of which have their own systems so that the navigator has precise control of its parts in a way that makes the most sense to human hands and the details of the specific system.

This spaceship might be a total shitshow from the core out, but boy did they want to make sure that it was easy for us to look at the planet if we ever actually got there.

There’s an image on the screen above the long-distance telescope controls, a little orb in the dark. Hylara. Too distant to make anything out on the image, at a full light month away, but there, and neither behind nor in front of its sun – our sun. That means we’ll be getting the best Kleiner results possible under these conditions, with minimal interference.

The fore engine is off for the imaging, but the ship is still spinning. Nevertheless, that image remains rock steady in the centre of the screen. I don’t know much about space, but I’m aware of how even the tiniest wobble of a telescope can translate to a massive change in its aim over such enormous distances. We’re in a spinning tube still well outside the solar system we’re looking into, and our view of that planet is perfect. Somebody took a lot of care designing these tools.

While I stare at the planet, our planet, our home, our destination after this long, fraught journey, Sam settles in behind the Kleiner array controls.

“Planetary gravity: 1.16gs,” they announce. “Axial tilt: 11 degrees. No moons.”

This is in line with Earth’s data. Still, Tinera groans. “Everything’s gonna be so heavy.”

“Could be much worse,” Captain Klees points out. “Air pressure?”

“We can only get an estimate with this array, but… looks to be somewhere around 1.1 to 1.2 atmospheres.”

That isn’t in line with Earth’s data. The initial long-distance readings had indicated a pretty thin atmosphere. Thicker atmospheres are a pain in the neck. Setting up a living dome in a thin atmosphere or a vacuum is relatively easy; you pressurise it to 1atm inside, just fill it up like a balloon. Setting one up in a thicker atmosphere means either pressurising the inside to the same or greater pressure than outside, or setting up more reinforced walls from the get-go to protect the lower pressure interior. Which is perfectly doable. But a lot more complicated.

“Be 1.2 atmospheres surviveable?” he asks the doctors.

“Aye, it do be well within human capacity,” the Friend says.

Tinera groans again.

Tal leans closer to the screen. “With that kind of air pressure, surely that must be meanin’…?”

“Yep.” Sam grins. “Earth was right. Magnetic field.”

Denish, Tinera and Tal all begin cheering, and perform a complicated three-way high five. They start a chant. “Magne-tic field! Magne-tic field!”

“Is that important?” I ask.

“It be the greatest of news!” Tal confirms.

“Magnetic field means a metal core,” Denish explains. “Our planet will have metal on it. This is a very, very big deal.”

I’m struck with the sudden realisation that we could’ve ended up terraforming a planet with no native metal source and sit down heavily on a random box of some kind of machinery. Just trying to think through the danger and effort of such a task leaves me feeling faint.

“I should be able to compensate for the magnetic field to get some atmospheric readings,” Sam says, twiddling with some settings. Then, as an afterthought, “Yarr.”

“Composition? Temperature?” Captain Klees asks.

“Water?” I ask.

“Temperature… I’m picking up highs of around forty celsius and lows of minus three. But temperature’s a very variable thing. It’s in the livable range, but I can’t give you useful detail without a lot more analysis and an observation period of at least a year.”

“Human survivable range, though,” the Friend notes.

“Yes.”

“Forty celsius,” Captain Klees grumbles. “Equatorial?’

“Yeah.”

He doesn’t look happy. I can see why. Like with air pressure, it’s far less trouble to build in low temperatures than high. Insulating and heating a living dome is no trouble; requiting constant cooling is far more complicated. Forty is perfectly doable, but it would be far better to set up in one of the colder areas. Which means setting up off the equator.

The ideal situation would be to put the Courageous into geosynchronous orbit above the colony site, so it’s always in the same place in the sky and can drop supplies as needed. But geosynchronous orbits are only possible near the equator. Building too far off the equator means having the Courageous in an irregular position in the sky and a whole lot of limitations on the scheduling of supply drops which just complicates the whole process.

“Sounds like Captain Kae Jin’s problem,” Tinera shrugs.

“Atmospheric composition…” Sam fiddles with some settings. “Hmm.”

“Problem?”

“There shouldn’t be. But I can’t get any readings on the lower atmosphere levels. Something’s muddying the readings. I’m certain I’m compensating for the magnetic field correctly. Oh! I see; the upper atmosphere has – ”

The blood leaves Sam’s face. They sit still, staring at the screen. I peek over their shoulder, but I can’t make any sense of the readout.

“What be the problem?” Tal asks in kes gravelly pirate voice.

“Well.” Sam clears their throat. “We’re still quite far from the planet. Readings on this array might contain errors that – ”

“What’s the problem?” Captain Klees asks.

“Well. I can’t get a reading on the lower atmosphere because of chemical shielding in the upper atmosphere. Hylara has a robust ozone layer.”

Fuck. An ozone layer.

The rest of the crew do not appear to find this particularly alarming. Most look puzzled; only the Friend, who like me was raised on Arborea and started learning climate science before being able to walk, looks how I’m sure I look right now, its face a mask of shock and dread.

Ozone, O3, is the second most stable configuration of oxygen, and far less stable than the most stable configuration (O2, the kind that we breathe). O3 needs two components to form in any appreciable amount. The first is some kind of high energy input, usually in the form of electricity or UV light. The second is a high concentration of O2. The presence of a robust ozone layer means the presence of a high concentration of O2 in the lower atmosphere.

You can get a thin ozone layer from carbon dioxide. Mars has one; so does Venus. But something thick enough to interfere with a Kleiner reading…

“How much ozone?” the Friend asks. “How thick, how dense?”

“I can’t get precision I trust here…”

“Are we talking in the range of parts per million or parts per billion?” I ask. “Or less?”

“Per million. Low parts per million; less than ten, I think, over a band of… maybe thirty kilometres?”

That’s almost certainly more robust than Earth’s ozone layer. There are other factors involved – intensity of UV rays, presence of other stabilising or destabilising chemicals – but that’s not something you get from a CO2 atmosphere. Not possible. That has to mean O2; has to.

But O2 is, in itself, not a particularly stable chemical. Its high reactivity is what makes it so useful for processes like rusting and firemaking and, well, breathing. You don’t just get free oxygen hanging around in planetary atmospheres in any useful amount. It gets eaten up by the carbon, by the metals, by whatever’s available to react with. The only known planet with a high concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere is Earth. And that’s because Earth contains a highly sophisticated chemical process that produces O2 as a byproduct – photosynthesis.

I take a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “Yarr. This be a very serious matter indeed, me hearties.”

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