Titan

16 February 2096: The solar mirrors

When it came to working outside the habitat, Timoshenko wanted both a belt and suspenders. He had a jet-powered maneuvering unit on his backpack but he also had clipped a long tether to the belt of his spacesuit. No sense taking any unnecessary chances, he firmly believed. Being exiled in this rotating beer can was bad enough; floating out to oblivion was not a fate he desired.

Timoshenko was leading a crew of maintenance technicians on an inspection tour of the solar mirrors’ actuator system. Electric motors moved the mirrors automatically as the habitat rotated around Saturn to keep the mirrors pointed correctly toward the Sun. At the time appointed for the habitat’s night hours, the actuators closed the ring of mirrors, folding them down against the cylinder’s hull like the slowly folding petals of a flower.

The entire operation of the mirrors was under automated computer control, backed up by sensor systems that reacted to sunlight and a preset timer built into an ultraprecise atomic clock. Yet the mirrors were constantly jiggling out of place. Not by much. Not enough to cause any real problems. They just jittered enough to make the computer program blare out alert signals. Just enough to drive me crazy, Timoshenko thought.

The entire maintenance team hovered behind the mirrors, of course, in the shade that they cast. Even protected by a shielded spacesuit a person wouldn’t last long in the harsh sunlight that the mirrors focused into the habitat’s windows. Besides, the actuators and their motors and electronics equipment were all behind the mirrors.

They all wore bulky, old-fashioned hard suits. Cardenas had offered Timoshenko a set of nanofiber suits, but one look at the flimsy material and Timoshenko had shaken his head.

“This can really protect you out there?” he’d asked unbelievingly.

“Yes, certainly,” Cardenas had replied. “Just as good as the cermet suits.”

Rubbing the monomolecular fabric between his fingers, Timoshenko had grunted. “Maybe in a few years, after you’ve had some experience with this stuff. For now, I’ll stick with the old-fashioned hard suits. They work.”

Now, watching his hard-suited team working on the solar mirrors, Timoshenko said to himself, The life of the whole habitat depends on these mirrors. Every plant, every farm, every man and woman in there lives only because the mirrors bring sunlight into this glorified tin can. And the damned stupid things refuse to work right.

Timoshenko had decided on a drastic step. Today’s task was to replace each and every individual actuator and motor with an identical replacement. The replacement parts had been tested six ways from Sunday in the maintenance shops. They were flawless, operating to within six nines of their design parameters. The originals were going to be brought inside for similar testing.

We’ll find where the problem is, Timoshenko told himself as he watched his spacesuited team laboring at replacing the dozens of devices. We’ll find it and fix it.

Part of his mind, though, told him he was being foolish. The jinks in the mirrors’ alignments were very minor, more of an annoyance than an actual problem. They were like a small cloud drifting across the Sun, causing a momentary drop in the sunshine’s brightness. They were easily corrected by manually commanding the computerized controls to adjust the mirrors back to their proper positions.

But a small cloud can be the harbinger of a terrible storm, Timoshenko felt. Better to find the fault and fix it now, while it was minor, than to wait until a major catastrophe strikes us.

His crew hated working outside, he knew. He had seen their resentment as they grudgingly wormed themselves into their spacesuits, and now he could hear their sarcastic chatter over their suit-to-suit radios; they were angry almost to the point of rebellion at having to work outside. Too bad, Timoshenko said to himself. It has to be done.

Why? asked a voice in his mind. Because you say so? You think you’re a tsar now? A commissar? The thought shocked him. I’m doing this for the good of the habitat, he retorted silently. For the good of everyone.

That’s what Stalin said when he slaughtered the kulaks, the voice sneered.

Timoshenko hung there in dark emptiness behind the massive panels of the solar mirrors, battling his internal demons, while his crew finished their assigned tasks. Only when each actuator and motor had been replaced, and the replacements tested and proved operational, only when all the original equipment had been carried through the airlocks and all his crew were safely inside the habitat, only then did he pull himself hand over hand along his tether and enter the airlock himself.

I’m no Stalin, he insisted to himself, no tsar. If there’s work to be done I help to do it. If there’s danger to be faced, I face it along with my teammates. Someone has to give the orders, and someone has to bear the responsibilities. That’s necessary. Unavoidable. I didn’t ask for this job. It was forced on me.

He was still arguing with himself as he pulled off the gloves of his spacesuit and began to unseal the helmet.

“Let me help you with that,” said one of the women on his team. She had come in with the first group and was already out of her suit.

“Thanks,” said Timoshenko. As she helped him wriggle out of the spacesuit, he was thinking that now they had to test each piece of equipment they’d brought inside. That will take time and a lot of dogwork, he knew. But at least it can be done inside the safety and comfort of the habitat.

Nadia Wunderly also took a spacewalk outside the habitat. With Gaeta supervising, Pancho, Wanamaker and Tavalera bundled Wunderly into the massive suit. Then they rode in an electric cart through the maze of pipes and machinery below the habitat’s living surface down to the big airlock at the endcap. Wunderly stood inside the suit on the cart’s flatbed, looking like an oversized robot being carried to the guillotine.

They chose to ride underground to avoid the stares and questions of the habitat’s population, questions that would swiftly reach Eberly.

“We don’t want to give him any excuse for stopping us,” Pancho had said, as she’d climbed into the cart’s cab. It was a tight squeeze with four of them in there, but Pancho thought Wunderly was even less comfortable standing on the cart’s flatbed inside that oversize set of iron pajamas.

“You really think we can keep this a secret from Eberly?” Tavalera grouched. Pancho couldn’t tell if the pained look on his face was from worry or just from being jammed so tightly inside the cab.

Without taking his eyes off the pathway he was driving along, Gaeta said, “Hey, man, Nadia hasn’t even told Urbain about this.”

Wanamaker grunted. “A top-secret operation.”

“Better be,” Pancho muttered.

Tavalera’s expression shifted slightly. “If nobody knows what we’re doin’, how’re we gonna get the access codes to the airlock? I mean, the safety department—”

“I got a pal in the safety department,” Gaeta said, grinning. “Bought him a few beers.”

Pancho nodded. “Let’s hope he doesn’t blab to anybody else.”

They reached the endcap and made their way to the airlock there, Wunderly plodding along in the ponderous suit and the other four skittering around her like a quartet of puppies taking a walk with a roving statue.

Gaeta pecked out the access code on the hatch’s control panel. Pancho didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath until she let out a huge sigh of relief when the inner hatch popped open and no alarms went off.

Wunderly licked her lips as she stepped carefully inside the airlock. Gaeta was yammering in her earphones about being careful and attaching both safety tethers and waiting until he gave her the word before she stepped outside. She could barely hear him over the hammering of her pulse. Walking in the suit must be what it’s like to have total arthritis, she thought. Every step was a labor; it took a conscious effort to move one leg and then the other, despite the servomotors that whined and buzzed in response to her muscles’ movements.

She looked down on her little team from inside the suit’s helmet visor. Pancho looked tight with worry. Wanamaker seemed concerned, too. Tavalera was Tavalera, gloomy and apprehensive. Gaeta seemed almost angry, as if he were certain she was going to mess up.

Guess again, Manny, she said silently. I’ll go through this just like we did in the simulator. No flubs, no hitches. I’m going to make you admit that I can work this suit without you shitting bricks every ten seconds.

The inner hatch slowly closed, shutting off her view of the others. Wunderly was alone inside the big metal-walled compartment, her heart thumping. I wonder what the medical readouts are showing? They’d shut down the test automatically if I got anywhere near a redline.

“You facing the outer hatch?” Gaeta’s voice demanded.

“Yes, certainly,” she replied testily, while she turned laboriously in the unwieldy suit to comply with his order.

“Starting airlock cycle,” Gaeta said, his voice going flat as he lapsed into the clipped jargon of a mission controller.

“Airlock cycle, copy,” Wunderly echoed.

Wunderly clipped both her suit tethers to the clasps on either side of the outer hatch. She faintly felt the vibration of the airlock’s pumps through the thick insulation of her boots as she watched the lights on the panel beside the outer hatch slowly flicker from green through amber to red.

The outer hatch swung open and a million pinpoints of stars hung in the blackness, staring unblinkingly at her. Wunderly licked her lips and swallowed hard before she could say, “Ready to go outside.”

No reply. She looked out at the stars, slowly wheeling around her, and suddenly felt slightly breathless, almost dizzy.

“Tethers secure?”

She nodded inside the helmet, then said, “Both tethers secure.”

“Clear for outside,” Gaeta said. She thought he sounded uptight.

Clumping to the lip of the airlock hatch, Wunderly told herself, You’d better not screw up, girl. He’ll never let you use the suit again if you make a single mistake.

“Stepping out,” she said.

There was nothing out there. It was like stepping off a high diving board or jumping out of an airplane. She had never done either, but that’s what went through her mind as she put one booted foot out into sheer vacuum and pushed off the lip of the airlock hatch with her other foot. She drifted outward, turning slightly. The stars were so thickly strewn that she couldn’t make out any of the old familiar constellations.

“You okay?” Gaeta sounded worried.

“I’m fine.”

“Your pulse rate’s over a hundred ten.” Pancho’s voice.

“I’m fine,” Wunderly repeated.

And then Saturn swung into view, swathed about its middle with those gleaming brilliant rings. Wunderly’s breath gushed out of her. My god! she thought. I can almost reach out and touch them!

“Still okay?” Gaeta asked.

Those rings! Out here she could see them clearly, even though they were more than a hundred thousand klicks away. Wunderly stared, awestruck. She could even see the narrow swaths of darker debris that swung through the glittering ice chunks of the rings: sooty dust from crumbled moonlets.

“Still okay?” Gaeta repeated, the strain clear in his voice.

“They’re wonderful!” she gasped. “So beautiful! Look at the way they’re interwoven. They’re gorgeous!”

“Don’t lose your perspective,” Gaeta snapped. “You’re not out there to sightsee.”

“Right,” she replied, shaking her head inside the helmet. “It’s just … they’re so damned fascinating.”

Silence for several heartbeats, then Gaeta said in a considerably lighter tone, “You’re gonna get a lot closer to them, muchacha.”