Charles Stross - Lobsters 04 by Halo

Author:Halo [Halo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-12-21T14:16:04+00:00

The Sanger hangs in orbit thirty kilometers up, circling the waist of potato-shaped Amalthea. Drones swarm across the slopes of Mons Lyctos, ten kilometers above the mean surface level: they kick up clouds of reddish sulfate dust as they spread transparent sheets across the surface. This close to Jupiter–a mere hundred and eighty thousand kilometers above the swirling madness of the cloudscape–the gas giant fills half the sky with a perpetually changing clockface: for Amalthea orbits the master in under twelve hours. The Sanger‘s radiation shields are running at full power, shrouding the ship in a corona of rippling plasma: radio is useless, and the human miners run their drones via an intricate network of laser circuits. Other, larger drones are unwinding spools of heavy electrical cable north and south from the landing site: once the circuits are connected, these will form a coil cutting through Jupiter’s magnetic field, generating electrical current (and imperceptibly slowing the moon’s orbital momentum).

Amber sighs and looks, for the sixth time this hour, at the webcam plastered on the side of her cabin. She’s taken down the posters and told the toys to tidy themselves away. In another two thousand seconds, the tiny Iranian spaceship will rise above the limb of Moshtari, and then it will be time to talk to the teacher. She isn’t looking forward to the experience. If he’s a grizzled old blockhead of the most obdurate fundamentalist streak, she’ll be in trouble: disrespect for age has been part and parcel of the western teenage experience for generations, and a cross-cultural thread that she’s sent to clue-up on Islam reminds her that not all cultures share this outlook. But if he turns out to be young, intelligent, and flexible, things could be even worse. When she was eight, Amber audited The Taming of the Shrew: now she has no appetite for a starring role in her own cross-cultural production.

She sighs again. “Pierre?”

“Yeah?” His voice comes from the foot of the emergency locker in her room. He’s curled up down there, limbs twitching languidly as he drives a mining drone around the surface of Object Barney, as the rock has named itself. The drone is a long-legged crane-fly lookalike, bouncing very slowly from toe-tip to toe-tip in the microgravity–the rock is only half a kilometer along its longest axis, coated brown with weird hydrocarbon goop and sulfur compounds sprayed off the surface of Io by the Jovian winds. “I’m coming.”

“You better.” She glances at the screen. “One twenty seconds to next burn.” The payload canister on the screen is, technically speaking, stolen: it’ll be okay as long as she gives it back, Bob said, although she won’t be able to do that until it’s reached Barney and they’ve found enough water ice to refuel it. “Found anything yet?”

“Just the usual. Got a seam of ice near the semimajor pole–it’s dirty, but there’s at least a thousand tons there. And the surface is crunchy with tar. Amber, you know what? The orange shit, it’s solid with fullerenes.

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