2
Ravi loped along, humming a happy little tune and smiled to himself, still buzzing with feel-good hormones from Sani's little treat this morning. Each long, bounding stride carried him almost five meters before the weak gravity of the asteroid pulled him back to the crumbling surface. This part of the asteroid was a mix of dusty regolith with a leavening of rocky chunks scattered through it, bound together by small amounts of water ice. So at each step the surface gave way under Ravi's boots, absorbing much of the force he was exerting. It was almost like running through dunes at the beach, only the gravity was one fiftieth that of Duniya.
The inside of Ravi's helmet was crowded with holodisplays; there was no room for things as mundane as air supply and suit temperature - the VI on Tarak station was monitoring those things anyway - instead the displays crawled with feeds from several of the drone teams. Sani must have made some adjustments to the work plans for some teams, because Ravi saw that units from K and I were re-deploying to new ground a little bit to polar north of their previous sites. A couple of the I team units had fallen behind the rest of the group and as Ravi watched, their symbols both switched to hash marks, indicating that they were stopped and that the automated routines to free themselves had failed.
Still humming happily, Ravi took the data in, glancing over at his current priority list. The list was topped by checking on a stopped rare earth harvester that was sifting through piles of regolith left by the I and K drones in their previous work sector. The rare earth harvesters were always a high priority because the materials that they gathered were extremely valuable for the electronics industry back home; factories operated by the Aishywiar caste in particular required large quantities of the materials to produce the advanced processors that controlled and integrated the Elephant Battalions - regiments of the massive armored machines were vital tools in the increasingly-frequent confrontations with the Lesser States.
In this case, Ravi would pass almost right by the drones on his way to the harvester. Without hesitation, he added the two I team drones to the top of the priority list; he would check on them on his way to the harvester. Sani would probably have passed by the two stuck drones and gotten back to them later, that was the way she generally worked. But Ravi was always a little quicker to readjust his priorities; as long as he was fast with getting the drones freed, he would still have the rare earth harvester back online faster than Sani anyway.
Shifting his loping strides slightly away from his previous course, Ravi almost covered the distance to the stuck drones in just a few dozen hops. As he topped a small rise, the dusty red and yellow heat shields of the two drones hove into view; four long strides later, Ravi was within a few meters of the nearer of the pair. Ravi dug his heels into the regolith, braking himself almost to a stop, then hopped over to the drone. Most of the displays on his helmet automatically cleared as he reached the machine and a narrow stip of data began to stream near the top of his field of vision, relaying the current status of the machine.
The I team drones scraped up regolith as they moved about the surface of the asteroid, quickly separating water ice and frozen gases into a pair of fiber hoppers that trailed along behind the unit as it moved about and dropping small piles of other solids in a trail for other units to prospect. Periodically a floating depot drone would pass nearby, connecting a flex tube receiver to the hopper and vacuuming the contents out to to be sorted and processed into usable gases and liquids. By default, the drones always continued scooping and processing material, even when they were issued instructions to move to a new work sector. Somehow these two machines had become stuck and unable to free themselves.
A cursory glance at the drone's data feed showed Ravi that the the unit's fuel cells were in good shape and the electric drive motor was fine. He ran his hands over the brightly-colored heat shield, walking around the drone and visually inspecting it's crawler treads; there was no sign of any problem with them. Finally, Ravi got on his hands and knees and peered under the front of the drone to inspect the scoop and scrapers that broke up the regolith and pushed it into the drone for processing, immediately spotting the problem.
Like the majority of the drones on Chilae the I team units were built mostly of hardened fiber components on a light aluminum frame. The scoop had a narrow lip of metal lining to add a little hardness to its leading edge; anything that couldn't be broken or fractured so that it would smoothly flow into the flexible scoop would push the it up and then let it back down after the obstruction was past. But in this case, the scoop had run into something that sliced straight through it's metal edge and continued into the hardened fiber body, until the increasing resistance of the flexible scoop against the offending material finally brought the drone to a halt. Automatic attempts to back off the obstruction had failed because the object was stuck fast in the body of the scoop; finally the drone had gone into standby and called for help.
Ravi's happy humming turned into muttered curses as he shined his helmet light underneath the drone, try to get a better look at whatever it was that had cut into the scoop. The poor angle and swirling dust made it hard to see, but the obstruction appeared to be dull and non-reflective but still vaguely metallic. From his knowledge of Chilae's formation, composition and history, Ravi knew that sharp edges were an extreme rarity on the asteroid. On Likal, the other asteroid being mined above Manigal, the rockier, more metallic composition made sharp points and edges much more common; but Likal had formed in an entirely different era and much deeper in the system, where the heavier materials aggregated. But "rare" didn't mean "none", as the stuck drone proved, so Ravi quickly shifted to thinking about how to free the machine.
Within a few moments he devised a plan to detach and drag away the mostly-empty fiber hopper that was attached to the drone, slightly reducing resistance that the unit's crawler drive would have to overcome to back off of the obstruction. Once the hopper was disconnected and dragged a few meters away, Ravi took position at the front of the drone and issued a verbal command; "Unit I147 engage drive, maximum reverse, ten seconds". The drones' crawler tread immediately engaged in reverse, kicking up dust and debris and creating a heavy vibration that Ravi felt through his gloves as he reached under the heat shield and took a firm grip on an the aluminum frame.
Ravi pushed hard, his booted feet chopping at the ground to gain purchase, trying to generate leverage to get the drone moving. He breathed deeply, grunting and straining with every muscle and kept pushing and churning. When the drones' drive shut off after the prescribed ten seconds, Ravi rested briefly, breath puffing inside his helmet, then commanded the drone to reverse for twenty seconds more. This time he felt the drone slide back off the obstruction a little bit; after a brief rest and another twenty-second push the unit burst free and Ravi lifted his feet to keep from hitting the object as the drone rapidly rolled backwards until the drive shut down.
Chest heaving, Ravi shuffled back and bent to look at what the drone had gotten hung on. It was a dull black triangular protrusion, smooth on both sides and rising to a point. The point was what had sliced into the drones' feed scoop and brought it to a halt. Ravi cautiously ran a gloved finger along one edge of the triangle; it looked pretty sharp. After a moment, he began sweeping regolith away from the object, digging a small bowl out of the asteroid material around it. This exposed more of the object, but it was just the same dull black triangle, widening at what looked like a perfect sixty degrees and disappearing down into the surface of Chilae.
Determined to see more, Ravi kept digging around the object, finally coming to a halt after about ten minutes of steady scraping and pushing away regolith. He had exposed probably half a meter of the black triangle and there was no sign of it stopping or changing in any way. He paused for a moment, debating whether to call Sanira back at the 'hab module, then decided against it. If he knew Sani, she was probably almost done with her workout and headed for her sleep bag. Instead, he queued one of the survey drones to come and take a closer look at the site with low-frequency radar and a seismic sensor. He had seen some really strange things on the asteroid before that turned out to be nothing that unusual once more data was gathered; and he had that second drone to free and a long list of other tasks to complete.
On Tarak Station
Kava Shakuntala leaned back in his chair, watching intently as the latest reports scrolled quickly across the holographic screen floating above the broad expanse of his desk. Much of the information was relatively mundane, including tallies of the resources sent by the projects' mass impellers down-system to orbits close to that of Duniya, the home world, then collected and routed to feed the needs of the Sahakari Collective.
