Building Harlequin's Moon by Building Harlequin's Moon

Author:Building Harlequin's Moon [Moon, Building Harlequin's]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-12-03T22:32:35+00:00

In Sol system they would have called it a KBO, a Kuiper Belt Object. The lump was a flattened and battered spheroid, black except for a shiny blister forming on one side. Invisibly small nanobots were spreading out across that face. Gabriel and Erika sprayed a barrier strip around the object's waist, before they did anything more ambitious.

The barrier would deny the nanobots access to one side of Refuge: the "down" side. From this point Diamond Mine would work only with the "down" side.

They hooked the object easily. It was a skill Gabriel and Ali had practiced over and over, bringing volatiles from dead comet heads, and minerals and more mass from chondrite asteroids, to blanket Selene. Erika too had helped, staying with him through two back-to-back shifts before plunging into a thousand-year sleep.

The body that would become Refuge was much bigger than even the huge Diamond Mine. Gabriel felt like a bacterium driving an ant home with a walnut clutched in its pincers. The rock face of the asteroid-the side that would become Refuge's underside-jutted across the space in front of them, a wall they butted against and held on to, directed and pushed. Regular slight adjustments gave Diamond Mine the queasy feel of a carnival ride.

On the unseen "up" face of the asteroid, nanobots worked tirelessly. Gabriel sent out an occasional probe to look. Erika preferred to ignore it all, as if the rock had developed an unsightly disease. She didn't trust nanotechnology.

A glass pupil was forming on the up side of Refuge, larger every time he looked. Lumps and mounds and cracks and craters were disappearing into its edges. It all happened with excruciating slowness, but it happened. If it got out of hand, they'd drop the rock and start over elsewhere; but that could cost them a quarter century.

The worst problems were being cooped up with only each other for so long. Two years was a long time to be separated from the usual richness of data flow. Gabriel and Erika went from stormy and passionate to deep and soft, from lightly angry to charming, and back again. They'd done this before, and they pushed the cycles faster for fun, playing with the sweetness of being secure enough to argue. Still, it was a long year. Diamond Mine was bigger outside than it was inside.

One morning as they neared Harlequin, they woke together from a rare shared nap: Erika looked Gabriel directly in the face and said, "This has been too easy."

"I know." Gabriel had learned to trust Erika's gut feelings, and he immediately felt her unease.

They spent the whole day looking for problems. Everything was perfect. Gabriel sat up that night while Erika slept. He watched her toss and turn, and knew the day's faultless results hadn't stilled her fears. He made himself stop looking at readouts and just enjoy the star field. He stretched, letting himself fall into the vastness of their surroundings just as he did when he traveled to John Glenn from Selene.

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