"How're we looking, Grubs?"
"We're fine on consumable fuel, skipper. New equipment masses more than the empty hold did but we more than make up for it with no full hold on the return trip. We could burn at 5G for a year."
"All right. I'm sending Faith down to you, she's done all the orbital math she can until we're close enough for scanners to pick up something. Take her and Josh and three or four tons of the seed iron. I want you to three to fire up the smelter and do a dry run through of getting a rail section built for when we spot a rock. Are the fins up to that?"
The engineer grunts and a few back of the hand calculations. "It'll barely warm them up. I can push a lot more metal than that before we start getting toasty in here."
"We only have about a hundred tons of seed. I don't want to waste it, but I also don't want the first time we do this to be when we're on approach to a rock. Use your best judgment. I'd like to get through it today and put us all on ice by tomorrow, but we can spare a couple of days now more gracefully than we can later."
"Aye, skipper."
Grubs glances the main engineering display, casting his eye for the thousandth time today over the slowly moving numbers and graphs that represented the physical health of the
Rockhopper
. They are three days out from Jupiter, which now just looks like a tiny half moon on the monitor in the mess. Hell, at these distances the
sun
was starting to just look like a bright star.
Skittering mechanical thuds several dozen yards behind him tell him that Josh is practicing with the spiders. The things move with creepy syncopation, but Grubs gets a weird sort of chief-engineer-spic-and-span pleasure watching them perfectly move a stack of iron ingots in a swarm back and forth across the space Josh is working in.
Looking over, he sees that the boy has the metric ton of ingots stacked in a cube, and the spiders sitting across the bay. Josh taps a command into his locater, and the bots immediately swarm past Grubs and on to the top of the ingots, so coordinated that not a single leg from one so much as brushes any of the others. In a moment they separate, and the stack of iron is gone, as if by magic. As they skitter past the chief engineer once more he sees that each one is carrying four or five of the ten kilogram bars. When they reach their starting point, they clump up again and several seconds later the cube of iron has reappeared and the spiders are returning to their individual bays.
"Prettily done, lad," said the engineer as he approaches his nephew, "Shame iron doesn't come out of the rocks in nice bricks."
Josh grins at his granduncle. "Doesn't matter how it comes, Chief. I get these things now. "
Grubs claps the younger man on the back "That's what I like to hear, lad."
They both look over at the sound of someone opening the bay access. Faith walks through and spots them.
As she heads towards them, Grubs says, "Come on then, lets find out if your confidence is misplaced."
----
Eight hours later, Nomi walks into the engineering bay, which she knows from monitoring readouts for the last hour is a good four or five degrees warmer than the rest of the ship at this point, but the temperature has remained steady since the radiator fins began shedding the differential. Grubs hadn't been wrong about his efficiency estimate.
She finds her three crewman going over a pair of extremely shiny and massive rails. The manufactory is powered down and Josh is on his knees taking watching as he directs one of the spiders to take soundings of the still-too-hot-to-touch metal and talks to the others. Nomi can see waves of heat still rising from the rail.
Grubs looks up at her approach and grins. "Like clockwork, captain. This crew is ready to drink the iron from a rock like milk from a mother's teat."
She winces at the imagery, but she's also pleased. "The
'Hopper
looks fine from my chair too, Grubs. Well done on the charting, Faith."
"Thank you, Captain."
"Josh, Faith, I intend to put the two of you on ice at the beginning of shift tomorrow. Grubs and I will run a couple of high-G tests of the engine, then we'll go down too. I'm going to have the coffins wake us back up in a month if the scanners don't find a problem before then. Get those rails secured so they'll be ready when we need them on the rock."
Grubs speaks up, "Still thinking two gravities for the trip out, Nomi?"
"That's what Faith's math is based on. Our window to start the burn is about five days, so we have a lot of slack if something comes up, but everything is looking good for now. All of you go catch a shower and clean up. I'll cook tonight."
----
Dinner in the mess has an air of celebration. The crew has worked hard to get the
Rockhopper
this far, and everyone is in a good mood. Grubs brings up a bottle of bourbon Stella had given him before they'd left
Galileo
, and everyone has a glass, although Faith makes a face at her first experience with hard liquor.
"You'll come to appreciate it, lass. Till, then, more for me!"
Faith laughs along with everyone else and braves another sip. She looks over her glass at these three people she's known less than two months, her new surrogate family.
'Well'
, she thinks, glancing at Josh and smiling to herself,
'maybe not
family
so much
.
'
Later, after the party breaks up and everyone has headed to their cabin, Faith slips back into her shipsuit and pads barefoot down the corridor to a different cabin. She knocks, and in a moment Josh opens the door.
"Hi." she says.
He looks at her for a moment, then smiles and says, "Hi."
She slips inside and he seals the hatch on the empty corridor.
----
The next morning Grubs looks up from his unaccustomed spot in the astrogators' seat as Nomi squirms through the lower access back onto the bridge. "Got the kids all tucked in?"
As she settles into the command seat and begins strapping herself down, Nomi says, "Yeah, both on ice as of a few minutes ago. Can't say I don't envy them, I shouldn't have had so much of your bourbon last night. Really not looking forward to high G."
"Just means you'll black out before you throw up, lass. We don't need long burns. Four of them a minute each over the next hour will give us our numbers. Doing this at all is almost overkill, given the 'Hoppers ratings, but I won't argue against it. The burns are all laid in."
"Might as well." Punching a couple of keys on her console, she orders cycle to begin. Both of them are immediately swaddled as their chairs and straps distend to cushion them in high G, and moments later the first burn makes both of them rethink their attitude towards both liquor and breakfast.
Sixty painful seconds later, swallowing her gorge and capable of comfortable speech again, Nomi says "Still with me, Chief?"
"Aye, though not particularly happy about it. Boards are green, though. Next burn in thirteen and a half."
