175: DEVELOPMENT

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Gatekeeper Rault to Capt. Klees

Hylara has been ordered to continue to refuse supply drops due to possible infections. Be informed that this population may have undetected weaknesses in their immune systems. Provide further information on what health issues your ground crew have and we will send medical supplies via the Vault. Do not have medical supplies dropped from the ship.

This does raise some questions as to how to safely land your population on the planet. We have reviewed the situation and agree that setting up a colony elsewhere would be a good solution. However, being within trade distance of the existing population does not resolve the aforementioned infection risks. We think you should set up on the other side of the planet. As such, we consider it of critical importance to get your crew back onto the Courageous, along with any resupply materials you need for the colony. The existing colony has a Hypati launcher. Our engineers are in the process of designing a system to convert it into a shuttle launcher.

Do not authorise any supply drops from the ship. Inform us of what medical assistance you need. We will contact you with plans and materials shortly.

GK Rault out

We stare at the letter.

“Taproot and stars,” Dandelion says. “I can’t believe that actually worked. It’s so expensive and complicated.”

“It’s the cheapest and simplest way to solve their problem,” I shrug. “What costs them more in the long run, a temporary launch site or losing control over Hylara’s food supply? The real question is whether we can keep the illusion up long enough to get the thing built. They’re going to want to see the Hypati launcher site, and the dandelions are too close to that place for my comfort. We might have to weed the area at some point.”

“How do you think they’ll do it?” Tal asks. “I think it’ll be some kind of virus. Like a cool future zombie virus that they put in the medication they send so that we get back aboard the ship and eat everyone else’s brains and then die.”

Dandelion shakes her head. “Far too tricky. The infection and incubation times would need to be perfect. The plan would rely on us surviving the trip back up. And the Courageous is pretty easy to quarantine someone in. They need to kill the entire crew of the ship or they’re wasting their time. They can’t run the risk of someone surviving, reviving new crew, and dropping supplies for the Hylarans. A virus is a really bad plan for that.”

“It would be so cool, though,” Tal says. “Or another computer thing, but since their last computer thing failed to kill everyone I doubt it. Besides, they could send that over radio.”

“You’re overthinking this,” Tinera chips in. “It’s going to be a bomb. Explosives must be unbelievably powerful by now. They’d just build a huge gun to shoot us out of orbit if they could get away with it, we all know that. They’re going with the launch because it’s the easiest and least suspicious way to get us to cooperate with something actually making contact with the ship, and the easiest thing to put on the ship to destroy it? Bomb. The shuttle will be designed so that it blows up and kills everyone that way.”

“And we’ll have to double and triple check every aspect of the shuttle design to prevent that,” Captain Klees says. “Go through all cargo with a fine toothed comb. We don’t know how small their explosives can be, or what they look like. This is so dangerous.”

“Unlike all the other perfectly safe things we’ve been doing,” I remark. “It’s worth the risk. Whatever we need to alter, we can alter. So long as we can get the materials for shuttles and a launch system…”

“We can send modern manufacturing equipment up to the Courageous, instead of have them try to make it from scratch,” Captain Klees says.

“And send modern surgical systems up for Captain Kae Jin,” Dandelion adds.

“And send people,” Tinera says quietly.

I try not to think about that. It’s yet another decision, a really important one, one that I didn’t think we’d be able to make. But if we can launch things safely enough, and if we can get the ship in good enough condition to leave, then we ground crew will have the same decision to make as the crew in orbit. Whether we want to stay, or go.

And whichever choice we make, it’ll be permanent.

“We can worry about things like that once we’re sure they’re possible,” Captain Klees says. “No sense in counting our launch sites before they’re built.”

And so we get to work.

Antarctica want to get the launcher finished as quickly as possible; the longer the Courageous exists, the higher the chances of the ship and the Hylarans going against orders and dropping seeds. We also want to get it finished as quickly as possible; the longer this takes, the higher the chances that Antarctica will realise that their worst predictions have already happened, and likely stop helping with the launcher. But building something that can safely haul human beings into space on limited supplies and a limited workforce is not a fast process. The existing Hypati launcher, built by Hylarans who are now dead, has to be disassembled, turned to face the direction of the planet’s rotation, and rebuilt. Then it has to be extended to several times its length so that a human-survivable acceleration can get the shuttles as close to escape velocity as possible – the faster the launchers can get us, the less fuel we need. Fuel supply isn’t necessarily a problem – we decide quickly on a hydrogen/oxygen fuel system, since the water, power, and oxygen stripping systems are already in place and abundant, but more fuel is more weight and bigger fuel tanks which is more materials and even more weight, and in terms of thrust per kilogram, it’s a terrible fuel source. Also, more prone to blowing up than most modern rocket propellant systems. So that’s not great.

Antarctica initially want to use a safer, more efficient system, but we push for water. We don’t want them supplying our fuel. We want them supplying the specs, resources, and manufacturing tech for us to build a shuttle that we can fuel ourselves. Because they want to make one shuttle to ‘help’ the ground crew return to the ship (and destroy it). We want a system that we can use to build as many supply shuttles as we want, with or without their help.

So, water it is. And a really long Hypati launcher it is. The gravity on Hylara is a bit higher than Earth (which means a higher escape velocity), but we’re also spinning faster already with the rotation of the planet. Initially, we calculate optimistically, accelerating the shuttle at a safe level and allowing the launcher to provide one hundred per cent of the acceleration. We learn that we’d need a launcher over one thousand kilometers long. So we abandon that plan pretty quickly. We slowly tweak up the amount of fuel needed and the acceleration rate into uncomfortable levels, then unsafe levels, then ‘the passengers will need to be sedated for the journey and receive medical attention upon arrival on the ship’ levels, until we get something buildable. Us on Hylara keep a particular eye on that one because Antarctica, for obvious reasons, care more about getting this done fast than any permanent organ damage it might do to the passengers. We, unlike them, expect to live through this, and actually do care about that organ damage. Fortunately, Dandelion is there to go over that; she trains on the modern Hylaran medical equipment and takes over as our doctor, so she knows better than anyone what our bodies can handle.

I see Dr Kim out and about occasionally, so I know she’s okay. We mostly avoid each other, although Tal, in a fit of what might be sudden interest or what might be passive aggression, has the ship send down everything we have on the history of ethics in scientific research and gives it to her.

The Hypati launcher ends up being a little over seven kilometers long. Which doesn’t sound very long. But you try building a rail launcher reliable enough to stand up to a space launch, on uneven sand, out of dense materials sent a bit at a time through a single materials port, with extremely limited construction equipment. It’s not a quick or easy task. And Antarctica’s construction timelines are all out because, in addition to them expecting a frankly ridiculous amount of labour from people on Hylara, they think we have 72 more workers than we actually have. The Hylarans invent numerous workplace injuries and generally pretend to be working slower and less hard than we all actually are to cover for the discrepancy. They put the children to work in manufacturing parts for the launcher and general community tasks, freeing up everyone old and strong enough to labour in construction. The children are supposed to do that kind of work anyway, to teach them life skills they’ll need when they joint he community properly, but only for an hour or two every day – I don’t feel great about the four hour days they start pulling. None of us do. Four hours is a full workday. At least, it’s supposed to be – the rest of us are pulling twelve hour days, and to my deep embarrassment, I think I’m coping the worst out of everyone with that.

It’s like being on the Courageous during some of the rougher times all over again, but longer hours out in the weather, which is something the spaceship never had. My crewmates, ex-prisoners, have experience in this, and Tinera, who has experience in heavy labour in harsh environments specifically, takes on the task of coordinating tasks and distributing workloads. Pulling heavy pieces of the launcher into place is one of the few times I see her actually using her replaced hand.

I expect the Hylarans to balk at the heavy workload, but they take to the building a lot better than I do. They lock together as a community fighting for their own future. The best case scenario for their colony is if we can successfully send the Courageous away with most of its population still aboard, and the best chance for that is if we can launch shuttles, and the best chance for launching shuttles is getting this all set up before the Antarcticans realise they’re being conned. So they work.

I like to imagine that they’re enthusiastic about getting to pull one over the Antarcticans, too. Just for its own sake.

Time passes. The dandelions on the hills struggle on, and other terraforming grasses survive, but don’t thrive; there’s only so much you can do with low nitrogen. The farms increase in production and variety, introducing the Hylarans to a broader diet. My body starts to reject and break down the synnerves that Dr Kim killed in my brain shortly after my arrival, and Dandelion gets me drugs for them. Some children grow into adulthood and join the community; Hive and Celti’s very old setmate, Lorna, dies in her sleep one morning, and the body is buried on the neighbouring hill, the grave unmarked but soon clearly indicated by the grasses that grow brighter and greener over it than anywhere else in response to the feast of nutrients available in a corpse. I try not to think about Shia’s bones entangled in the roots of my old home, supporting it for everyone. I try not to think about how short-lived bones are, how long ago it was that she died.

A bit part of moving and extending they launcher is getting the equipment to do so. The Antarcticans send us the parts to build several new construction vehicles, which the Hylarans are happy about. “Even if this fails,” Hive grins, “these trucks will be useful for other stuff.” Their eyes roam over the hills around us, and for a moment it’s like I’m looking at my mother, planning and mapping the future growth of the forest cultivated around us. The Hylarans don’t have untold generations of accumulated experience and wisdom in taming their environment to back them up; they’re going to fuck up. A lot. They’re going to have to save seeds from everything to replace species that will probably go extinct multiple times. They’re going to have to learn both cultivation and genetic engineering, and adapt known information to work in their very un-Earthlike environment. It’s going to be a thousand times harder than getting these shuttles in the sky. But they have an advantage that the shuttle project doesn’t: a complete absence of a time limit. Also, if they fuck it up the first time, people won’t die.

Our current project has no such luxuries.

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