Richard A. Lovett by Neptune's Treasure

Author:Neptune's Treasure
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-02-18T20:43:00+00:00

It took a week to deploy the emitters and detectors to Brittney’s satisfaction, in orbits ranging from barely above the nitrogen cloud-wisps to a couple thousand klicks out. When we were done, she’d built something with the precision of a GPS system for a world nobody else might ever visit. What had I said about curiosity? In Brittney’s case, maybe the word is “overkill.”

“Might as well do it right,” she said.

Luckily, most of the doing was on her part. I just put the ship approximately where she wanted it, tossed a probe out the hatch, then got on the treadring while she tweaked the probe’s thrusters to put it in the precise orbit she wanted. “What exactly do you think you’re going to get from this?” I asked, somewhere around the fifteenth probe. “And just how the hell many of these things do we have?” They were small, massing only a kilo or so each, so it might be quite a few. I’d never really inventoried T.R.’s leftovers. Counting things was more Brittney’s idea of fun.

She answered the second question first. “Six. We could quit now, but the picture would be fuzzy. The more we put out, the better image we’ll get.”

“What’s all this ‘we’ stuff?”

“Oh, that’s for the publications. You’ll be lead author, since you’re the only one the journals know is actually out here. I’m Britt Asboy, from Valles Marineris.”

“Whoa, publications?”

“There should be at least two. One on whatever we find; the other on the method. Nobody before’s ever gotten close to this level of resolution.”

“Shouldn’t we patent it first? Or go looking for more of Naiad’s rare-earth asteroid?” Just because I didn’t need endless money didn’t mean I wanted to walk away from it.

Brittney gave another of those hesitations, and this time I was sure she was running a sim on me. “That wouldn’t work,” she said at last.

“So what the hell does this process of yours do?”

“It maps major subsurface boundaries. Ice/rock layers. Density strata. Really accurately—a whole world, with even better precision than we had on Daphnis. But that isn’t going to tell us what anything’s made of. That would require samples.”

“So, let me get this straight: we’re spending days out here deploying these things to idiotic levels of accuracy, just because we can?”

She had the grace to sound chagrinned. “Basically, yes.”

Since there were only a half-dozen detectors left, I let her finish. Then she told me it would take two weeks to collect the data.

“What?”

“It’s an integrative process. The slower we do it, the more accurate it gets. Though there are diminishing returns. We could have kilometer-level resolution in a few hours, centimeter-level in a decade. This seemed a good compromise.”

Maybe it’s Machiavelli whose name should have been woman, though I guess that’s an exaggeration. Besides, I wasn’t averse to a couple more weeks’ hiking. But it was interesting how she’d managed to sneak it up on me.

For the first few days, we went back to hopping around the surface. But if the melting

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