IRON HALO

John Waterman, who lives in CO, works in Aerospace (not the 'boomy' bits, though) as a Quality Engineer. He enjoys reading science fiction, writing science fiction, playing TTRPGs, and being a raconteur. Served in the 11th Armored Cavalry, US Army, back before the glaciers melted.

Art by Paul Schuurmans

Prequel to Iron Halo: Sooners by John Waterman

‘Alright, Team, here we are,’ Grady said to the other three members of Inspection Team Seven of the Orbital Salvage Patrol. ‘Once Mert-‘he gestured at the taxi pilot- ‘pops open the hatches, we’re on emcom unless there’s an emergency. Pob, you’re with Ara; Obekwe, you’re with me. Just like we’ve drilled, eh? Any questions?’

‘Supervisor,’ Obekwe asked, ‘what are we really expecting to find?’ Grady didn’t mind that the newby stood on a little formality.

‘Salvageer,’ Grady replied, ‘we’re not really sure, are we? Otherwise, the Commander would have sent in a Salvage Team and not us. Just keep your head on a swivel, remember your entry drills and engagement protocols, and don’t stray further than arm’s reach from my left. Techspec Pob, you do the same with Senior Salvageer Ara, OK?’

The three gave Grady a thumbs up, then checked their gear one last time. As the newby, Obekwe had the heaviest loadout of weapons- a rocket launcher, smartgun, and several attack / defense drones- and the Team’s rescue gear, while Pob had the engineering and entry tools as well as a popcorn gun. Ara carried the Team’s electronica, including the medium range masercom and sensing gear. She also had a smartgun. Grady had a general toolset, a smartgun, and a line-thrower. Everyone carried a hand taser. He checked his partner’s gear as well, as did Ara for Pob.

‘Okay, Salvageers! Let’s go check out this hunk of debris, otherwise known as ‘L5 Mass Three-Five-One’. Taxi stays here, commlinked to the Cutter. Ara stays commlinked to it as well, and I stay linked to her and the taxi and Ara. Partners stay linked to their senior. Stet?’

‘Stet, Sir!’ they chorused, then shut down their omnicoms. Grady thumped a gauntleted hand down on Mert’s helmet yoke, and the pilot popped open the hatches that made up nearly half of the taxi’s hull. The team unfolded from their transit seats, which had packed them into the four-meter wide taxi like peas in a pod. Grady exited first. ‘Kid, I’m gonna shoot a line over to that solar array. Hold on to me and signal down the line.’

Obekwe held onto Grady’s legs, pushing him farther out from the taxi. Pob then pushed Obekwe farther out, and Ara then did the same to Pob. Coldgas thrusters kept the taxi from tumbling. Grady took aim at the indicated solar array. The moment the line thrower fired Ara let go of the taxi, leaving the team as a ‘stick’ of four worksuited bodies now drifting freely as they clung to one another.

The seeker jetted from the line-thrower in a plume of vapor, the line spooling out behind it. Seconds later it latched onto the center beam of the solar array. Grady then signaled to the stick and began reeling in the line. The motors had to crawl down the line carefully to keep from putting a lot of tension on the ancient solar array; it looked firm, but it had been out here for at least sixteen centuries, since the last Re-Emergence, and perhaps even millennia longer . . .

Grady never tired of the vista from Earth-Moon L5. The corroded blue-white marble of the Earth hung in space, currently in half-phase, the apparent width of his gauntleted thumb held at his arm’s length. The Moon lay sixty degrees away across the black of the firmament, itself a bit smaller, a mottled steel-grey orb also in half-phase. He breathed deeply, once, as he always did when he was out free in space. Then turned his attention to the jumble of artificial objects his Team had been sent to inspect.

The solar array they’d latched onto lay fifty meters square and had ceased pointing at the Sun ages ago. Its spindly titanium central beam had five other similar arrays attached to it, and it led another hundred meters to a more substantial gantry. One of them had a ten-meter wide chunk missing from it, and they all looked a little worse for wear after a few millennia (or more) of exposure without maintenance. The main gantry itself connected to a wild assemblage of other gantries, modules, containers, and tankage about two hundred meters long and half that deep and wide, though most of it was void space. He noted with interest a few items that didn’t seem to fit in with the rest. He turned his helmet camera towards them and took some enhanced pics for later classification, sending them up the ‘link to the cutter.

‘Spread out,’ he ordered as they approached the main beam of the array some minutes later. ‘Grab on, then hook lines as soon as you do.’ He saw three thumbs up. Ara let go of Pob first, then Pob let go of Obekwe, and then with a moment’s hesitation Obekwe let go of Grady. Grady contacted the beam, grabbed it with both hands, then held on with one as his other hand made fast a clip from the spool on his toolbelt. Only then did he turn to see Obekwe do the same, a meter and a half away. Then Pob grabbed on, a few meters further from Obekwe, clipping on firmly. Last came Ara, spread-eagled, and she caught the beam with a hand and a foot-hand. The Handed had an obvious advantage in free-fall with her extra pair of hands in place of other humans’ feet. She held on with two hands as a third clipped on to the beam.

Grady used hand signals to indicate them to proceed, leapfrog fashion, down the beam towards the gantry. Inspection Teams were trained to use a minimum of voice signals, instead relying on drills and hand-talk for coordinating basic tasks. Earth-Moon L5 proved nearly virgin territory for the All-Space Union, which had been back in space in this, the Seventh Re-Emergence, for less than three centuries so far. There had been a few basic surveys, mostly telescopic or by unmanned probes, of the volume of space in L5 and the hundreds of discrete assemblages of abandoned habs and equipment still left in it. There could be almost anything waiting aboard or around the relicts; ancient systems waiting quiescent, armed drones and ordnance left behind after the last of the survivors from the previous Re-Emergence fought over dwindling resources, or outposts they’d secured hoping to return sooner rather than later.

There was also another danger, as well . . .

The team reached the end of the gantry after a long hour of pulling themselves along, clipping, unclipping, and reclipping their safety lines to the padeyes installed to standards created tens of thousands of years before. Grady had everyone pause to get their breath and signaled for everyone to look around. Ara unlimbered some of her sensor gear, including a thermal imager to check for anomalous heat sources like trickle-charging solar arrays, old fuel cells, or even ancient nuclear batteries. 

She reached out with her foot-hand and touched Grady’s hand for a hardlink. ‘Some anomalies. Things in shade that are hotter and things in sunlight that are cooler than they should be. Here, here, and here.’ A schematic popped up in his window. Two modules seemed to maintain a constant temperature of around 15 degrees, connected by a tube corridor that might be pressurized . . .

‘Send that to the cutter, make sure the Commander sees it. How about that cluster of junk over there?’

She turned her imager over towards the out-of-place stuff he’d noticed as they’d reached the solar array. ‘Ambient, except for that cylinder there, which is way too cold; and that cargo-rack looking thing which has a module on it that’s too hot.’

‘Send that up, too. Let’s huddle and brief.’ Everyone touched their neighbor’s hand, establishing a hardlink among the entire Team. ‘Briefing. There are thermal anomalies here that make me even more suspicious than usual.’ He shared around Ara’s scans. ‘I have reason to believe that part of this structure is inhabited.’

‘Armsman,’ Obekwe said, do you mean-‘

Grady cut him off. ‘Yeah. Sooners.’

***

Everyone had to move more carefully now. It would be a long and progressively more uncomfortable shift. Worksuits supported long-term occupation, and the team had plenty of expendables. No one with confinement issues ever made Cadet, let alone Salvageer, but that didn’t mean that being stuck in a worksuit for long periods was much fun.

They had a lot of junk to maneuver around and past and through until they reached the section of the assemblage that showed the anomalous thermal profiles. The more imaging that Ara collected, the more certain that Grady felt it was inhabited. ‘Sooners’ proved nothing new to this, the Seventh Re-Emergence. They’d been in space for nearly as long as the All-Space Union had, and they often beat the Union in some fashion to every collection of objects left above Earth’s atmosphere. The Union didn’t exert total political control over the Lands of Earth, though those with the technology and resources to reach space had all signed the Union Accords and thus had acquiesced to Union control, in theory, of everything above the atmosphere and the means to get there.

It was a sad fact that splinter groups and secret organizations could and did get into space to exploit of the gigatonnes of stuff that the people of Earth had put into the Earth-Moon system (and built on the Moon, and further out) over the past 20,000 years of space travel and human settlement. There were real riches to be had, left over from as far back as the original Emergence, distant and nearly forgotten in the depths of history. The Third Re-Emergence had left huge sub-Lunar habitats and fusion power stations, the Fourth had left the Icefall of gigatonnes of water ice at the Moon’s South Pole, and the Fifth a score of massive nuclear thermal rockets and their thorium fuel parked at Earth-Moon L4. Usable stocks of recyclable materials and equipment littered the Earth-Moon system and beyond.

Grady called another huddle once the Team had reached the main assemblage. ‘We need to find a space adjacent to the suspected inhabited volume which we can enter with no one noticing. From there we can collect more information and then determine the extent of the incursion and its capabilities.’ Ara and the cutter had both been using passive detection to map the assemblage more closely as well as watching for movement and communications. They now had a pretty good idea of the assemblage’s layout in three dimensions, building up on earlier surveys as well as some data from drones that the cutter had quietly sent forth.

‘I advise heading here, then making an entry somewhere along the narrowest dimension of this module,’ Ara said, pointing. ‘The thermal profiles indicate that it isn’t pressurized or inhabited, though it is adjacent to such a volume. We can see a few probable hatches there, and if they don’t work, well, we have the means to make our own.’ Pob carried a large variety of tools and means to effect entry into almost anything.

‘Let’s do it,’ Grady said. ‘Remain on high alert. All Sooners know about us, and they might have set up detectors and traps. Assume that they’d have any of the tech and techniques we’d use in their place.’

‘What happens to them, Supervisor,’ Obekwe asked, ‘if we find them?’

‘They’re subject to Union law, which they’ve violated by being here unauthorized. If they surrender, we send them back to Earth with the clothes on their backs. If they don’t- well, we’ll have to remove them regardless. With whatever means we are forced to use.’ Grady heard the kid gulp, along with Pob. Neither had been in a combat situation before, though Pob had served on some tours with Salvage before; not with Inspection, though. Salvage rarely had any interactions with other people.

They wound among the assemblage of ancient modules and other connectors and junk for another two hours, moving carefully, wary of observers both passive and active. The drills for moving in such circumstances were clear and the new folk had gotten extensively training. Grady hadn’t wanted to take on two newbies at once, but at least Pob had been on Salvage trips before. He’d recently made the quals for Techspec, one grade higher than Salvageer. Obekwe had done well as a Cadet and had good marks with weapons in the sims, if no actual field experience.

Grady and Ara had gotten a closer look at the group of objects close to the suspected inhabited modules, the items that looked as if they didn’t belong. They agreed, as did the Commander back on the cutter, that they could have come from an orbital transfer vehicle launched from Earth itself as an upper stage from some medium-sized GTO booster or a cluster of smaller ones. Stealthing wasn’t that expensive for any non-Union group that could punch a hundred tonnes of payload into LEO, after all.

The Commander was working with the command group of the OSP based at L5 to find out which group could have equipped and sent any Sooners here; perhaps years before the Union had begun its L5 exploration and salvage operations a mere decade ago. The All-Space Union had to take a measured and diligent approach towards its expansion, since it managed all of space above the atmosphere and the opportunities and dangers it presented, with its limited resources. Sooners could just strike out with a single push towards any place they liked and set up there if they made it past the Union’s Orbital Enforcement. The Union had limited resources that had to cover ALL of space, which explained why Grady was out here with a single Team of four Salvageers, backed up by a cutter with a mere twenty more personnel.

They arrived at the side of the module they’d targeted. Grady called for a huddle and a break, so they could rest, eat, chat, and make a final check of their gear and dispositions before entry. It had proven a hard six hours of work since they left the taxi, in addition to the two hour’s prep before leaving the cutter.

‘Let’s check our entry options,’ Grady said while they ate and relaxed.

‘Two hatches,’ Ara said. ‘Both Standard vacuum access, no airlocks. Neither seem powered anymore. Hull is a Standard titanium honeycomb filled with epoxy, no tougher than it needs to be, with thermal lagging on the inside face.’

Grady pointed. ‘Let’s try that one first. Ara, examine it closely for sensors or traps before we go over to it. Pob, get ready with the entry gear.’

‘Stet, Supervisor. Ready at your command,’ the Techspec replied.

‘On Ara’s mark, Pob. End comms.’

Ara looked at Pob and then gave him a thumbs up. He pulled himself over to the indicated hatch, some ten meters away. He first checked the panel next to it, per the drill. No one expected the panel to be powered, and he signaled that it wasn’t. Checking for pressure behind the hatch, he found none.

He opened a panel next to the hatch and found the manual locks and mechanism. The locks were easy to disengage but pumping the manual handle proved fruitless. Moving parts exposed to vacuum and frequent temperature changes often froze due to vacuum welding; but in this case, someone had removed the linkages. It could have happened many centuries ago, or merely days. Pob set up a battery-powered kilowatt driver and engaged it to the hatch mechanism, then turned towards Grady, clipped on about ten meters away and out of line with the hatch.

Grady twirled his left hand upright next to his helmet, one finger extended. ‘Keep an eye on the hatch, kid,’ he said to Obekwe. Pob engaged the driver, and the hatch began to slide aside with a tiny puff of dust. Nothing else came out. It revealed velvety darkness beyond, though their IR-based synthetic vision revealed a standard non-airlock access trunk, a vestibule three meters wide with hatches on four of its walls. Two of them gaped open. Pob stayed outside and beside the hatch, recovering the entry gear.

Everyone came together near the hatch, though not in front of it, at Grady’s signal to huddle. They clipped into different padeyes or rings, all keeping a wary eye out. The taxi and cutter had cameras pointed their way to warn of anyone or anything climbing at them across or from among the assemblage, but it was just prudent that the Team stay alert anyway.

‘How far to the nearest pressurized zone from here?’

‘About fifty meters inboard,’ Ara replied. ‘The composite scans shows that it’s a volume of around two thousand cubic meters, taking up about a third of the nominal cubic of this module.’ She put up a window of the rough imaging. ‘There’s vibration in there, some machinery, and other more random stuff that could be remotes or people. I can’t tell how many, though.’

‘Burst that back to the cutter,’ Grady said. ‘Alright, let’s make the entry. Keep wary of detectors and booby traps. They probably know that this is their back door. Pob, set up for hostile entry through that hatch there. Ara, deploy some spy drones. Obekwe, cover our rear. Use a drone to secure our egress if things deflate for us. We might have to leave in a hurry if there’s too much to handle.’

‘Stet,’ they all chorused, then went back into emcom mode. Obekwe detached one of the larger drones he carried, activated it, and let it take up position by the exterior hatch. Everyone then filed into the access trunk, careful to clip on where no one else’s lines would tangle with theirs. Ara released a swarm of small remotes that used coldgas thrusters to spread out and find positions on the walls.

Pob went up to the hatch that led into the module, examined the control panel, and hooked up some electronics to it. He paused, then signaled ‘no go’. Grady signaled to proceed, and Pob began hooking up the driver to force the mechanism. Before he activated it, though, he withdrew a reel of cutter charge and made a large oval on the face of the hatch with it, adding radial lines to break up the center. He wired it and then stood well back before activating the power driver to the hatch mechanism. 

He stood well to the side of the hatch, and everyone else in the access trunk flattened out against the walls before he activated the driver. It blinked green, and Grady could see the device take up tension on the hatch mechanism, but the hatch didn’t budge. He signaled Pob to recover the driver and proceed with the cutter charge. 

Pob gave a thumbs up. Everyone turned themselves as flat as they could get and turned so their faceplates faced away from the hatch. They could see Pob signal ‘3, 2, 1’ through their aux cams, and then the cutter charge blew with a dull flash. A large oval got bitten out of the hatch, blown into slowly tumbling fragments by the radial charges, surrounded by a harsh puff of vapor and smaller splinters which all flew inwards.

Following the drill which he’d learned, Obekwe released an entry drone, which flew in through the hole, and then he unclipped and followed it on coldgas thrusters with his smartgun at the ready. Grady only had the juddering view from the entry drone and Obekwe’s helmet cams to see what happened next.

The corridor, a two-meter diameter tube, led some twenty meters inboard according to the sounding readout from the entry drone. It passed the tumbling fragments of the blown hatch as it moved towards the end of the tube. The corridor didn’t end in a hatch or a vestibule, instead making a right-angle bend. At the corner stood a stubby pillar hastily glued to the tube’s wall. It suddenly burst into brilliant white light that momentarily dazzled Obekwe’s helmet cam but did not affect his faceplate or the drone’s multi-spectral sensors.

‘It’s signaling,’ Ara said. ‘Jamming it, but I don’t know if it was able to send an alert.’ The brilliant white light cut off as abruptly as it had activated.

Grady unclipped and kicked off to follow behind and to one side of Obekwe, signaling for the others to unclip and follow, with Ara last. She covered the rear with her smartgun. Now that they were ‘inside’, clipped lines would just slow them down and get in everyone’s way.

The drone was about halfway down the tube, with Obekwe three meters behind it to one side and Grady another two meters behind him on the other side, when the drone jinked and began a slow tumble. Taking his eyes off it, Grady saw bright yellowish flashes in the darkness at the far end of the corridor coming from two sources; one flashed several times a second, while the other blinked more brightly about once a second. He felt a couple of impacts on his front, as if someone had hit his suit with a sportsball bat medium-hard, and something crazed off his helmet.

‘Action front!’  His cry activated the Team’s omnicoms. Everyone grabbed for wall to pull themselves flat in any orientation. Grady, Obekwe and Pob returned fire. Threat assessment routines launched a rocket from Obekwe’s launcher, two rounds out of Grady’s smartgun, and a canister from Pob’s popcorn gun.

The microshrapnel from the bursting rocket shell tore away the black cloth concealing the two figures at the end of the tube. A smartgun round hit each one dead center with a taser penetrator. The popcorn canister sprayed them both with pellets of expanding restraint foam, gluing them to the back wall of the tube where it turned at right angles.

Grady kept his smartgun oriented down the tube from where he had clutched the wall with a hand and pulled himself flat. Pob did the same behind and ‘above’ him. Obekwe had a weak grip on a handle, drifting a little slack.

‘Report,’ Grady barked. Pob and Ara’s status showed green, and they responded with ‘Good, here!’ but Obekwe’s flashed between green and yellow. Grady grabbed the kid’s nearest boot and pulled him over. He shone a dim light from his wrist at his face and jerked in shock. There was a centimeter-wide hole in Obekwe’s faceplate, a sandwich of a total five millimeters of transparent sapphire layered with electronics and anti-shatter polymers. The safety layer had foamed up to plug the hole and seal the cracks. A very dazed Obekwe blinked back at him owlishly, unscathed. Whatever had punched a hole in his faceplate had missed his head entirely. Grady saw no blood inside the kid’s helmet. A few dents marred his worksuit’s plastron, and one had a blob of metal at the bottom of it . . .

‘He OK?’ Pob looked over at them.

‘He’s fine, pay attention. Action front, Techspec!’ Pob quickly turned away towards the end of the corridor. Grady, too, had to tear his attention away from Obekwe, after he pushed the dazed Salvageer behind him and then up against the wall.

Ara took over minding the disoriented newby as Grady and Pob approached the two restrained figures. Their suits were not OSP worksuits, or even ‘civilian’ environment suits; they looked like models a century old. The taser rounds had easily penetrated them to shock their occupants into insensibility but hadn’t deflated them. The two figures were just beginning to come around.

Grady examined their weapons, which they had let go of when they’d been tased but were still tethered to their suits. ‘Here’s a boomgun,’ he reported, ‘and a chatter. Unmodified dirt-muncher weapons, not even smart. Definitely not recoil-compensated, either. Firing solid slugs- those bullets are probably still flying even after punching through anything here between them and the Void. Luckily not any of us!’ He safed and unloaded the weapons before taping them to the wall out of reach. They were still dangerous even in unskilled hands.

Obekwe came up, a lot less dazed now. He didn’t seem to pay much attention to the hole in his faceplate. ‘Sorry, Supervisor. I guess I got shot.’

‘You’re good, Salvageer,’ Grady replied, patting his shoulder yoke. ‘Just don’t make it a habit, stet? Fortunately, none of these dumb-bunnies penetrated anyone else’s suit. Ara, can we raise these guys on the omni? They seem to have recovered enough to be chatty. Pob, Obekwe, keep an eye out for more of these folks, these can’t be the only two here in all this cubic. How’s the drone doing?’

‘It’s fine, it reset,’, Obekwe said. For having his helmet penetrated and his head nearly blown apart by a solid 8mm boomgun slug he seemed to be doing alright, back on track. ‘No activity reported by the other drone we left out front, either.’

Grady paused, reading a text from the Commander. ‘The boss is sending in Team Eight to attempt entry through the other end of this cubic, ETA twenty minutes. Their taxi will pull right up to the ‘hab’ area. Any luck getting a common channel with these guys here, Ara?’ 

‘Yeah, but they don’t speak UnTak or any other lingo that I understand. They don’t know hand-talk, either.’

‘Figures,’ Grady said. ‘Damned Sooners.’ He tuned to the voice channel. He didn’t recognize their speech, either. ‘Pob, Obekwe, you got any handle on what these dirt-munchers are chattering in?’

Pob signaled a thumb down, but Obekwe said ‘Gimme a minute, Supe.’ He fired off a long stream of something which elicited what sounded like a positive response from both their captives. ‘They understand a dialect of Wakkan, close to the one I grew up with dirtside.’ More conversation followed. ‘Yeah, these guys are from Samer, somewhere near the Big River, in the Uncontacted Lands. Been up here several months, working on recovering some sort of nuclear battery plant or some such, they’re not being clear on the details.’

‘Eight Messiahs preserve us,’ Grady replied. ‘Who sent these knuckleheads up here?’

‘Somebody they call ‘The Rocket Lords’,’ Obekwe translated after a bit. ‘Sounds like those guys enslaved all the people these have left at home dirtside in order to ‘pay’ to send this lot up, to recover the material in this abandoned hab and send it back to them. They’re working to a rapidly approaching deadline to package some kind of nuclear batteries stored here by the last Re-Emergence.’

‘I’m dumping all this to the Commander,’ Grady said. ‘She’ll push it up the line to Admiralty and the Un-Landed Rights folks. If these guys are telling us the truth about these ‘Rocket Lords’, then the Union may be able to free their people from them. How many others are up here?’ 

‘They say that there’s a dozen more in the inhabited volume. They’ve been up here for about six months, working twelve-hour shifts and eating what sounds like DeepStor rations and breathing a skinny oxygen concentration. There are some gnarly rad hazards, and half of them are already sick with long-term exposure despite anti-rad drugs.’ 

‘Have these guys tell their friends inside that we haven’t harmed them, and that we’re here to rescue them. I don’t want anyone shooting at Team Eight, stet?’ Grady blew out his cheeks. ‘Not the average run of Sooners, these. Poor dirt-munchers.’ Grady, Pob and Obekwe were born dirtside, so were also technically ‘dirt-munchers’, too. Only Ara had been born off-Earth, to the four-generation old re-established population of The Handed living in Lunar orbit and now L4.

Several hours later the cutter had pulled up near the reclaimed hab, and a personnel transport was on the way from the Union’s main facility here at L5. Team Seven was inside the Sooners’ living space, helmets open, passing out some medical aid and recording the horribly squalid and slightly radioactive conditions. All the dozen Sooners were ‘shorties’, like Grady, Pob and Obekwe, the descendants of the branch of humanity whose ancestors lived underground after the Rock hit the Earth 1600 years before that had ended the Sixth Re-Emergence.

‘I mean, we all had to eat some of this stuff during the Academy,’ Grady said, thumping a partially unwrapped block of DeepStor. The stone-like dried fungus-derived nutritional concentrate looked, smelled, and tasted like actual dirt when it was re-hydrated, and when sealed could last millennia; this one’s batch record dated from the Fifth Re-Emergence. It was the only thing that the Sooners had to eat. ‘Messiahs save and guide us, it’s horrible!’

‘They’re grateful for whatever help we can give them,’ Obekwe said. He still served as the primary translator, the only one on site that could speak something close to the Sooners’ Wakkan dialect, until someone else that spoke it could be found among the local OSP forces. ‘But they’re really worried about what’s going to happen to them, and to those left behind dirtside in servitude to these ‘Rocket Lords’. What is going to happen to them, Supervisor?’

‘Well,’ Grady replied, ‘they’ll get repatriated, of course, but not back to the slavers, eh? The Union’s Unlanded Rights Commission will try to rescue their folks dirtside, and then find them a home someplace civilized, all together of course. Probably get adopted by the Wakkans, given their language and cultural affiliation, as newly Emerged people.’ Even nearly three centuries into this, the Seventh Re-Emergence, folks in isolated underground refuges came to light and were rescued by one or another of the Lands- or by slavers, sometimes. ‘From what you’ve said, their refuge’s failing systems had forced them to the surface where these ‘Rocket Lords’- Command is still working to identify them- picked them up as cheap slave labor for their schemes. It would also be enlightening to determine just how those nasty devils knew that plutonium initiators were stored here. Not great to have a bunch of them loose, either in space or dirtside.’

Plutonium initiators were useful for two things. One was for starting fission reactions in thorium-cycle nuclear reactors, still one of the primary sources of power on and off-Earth. The other was as the base material for nuclear explosives, which was of great concern to the All-Space Union and all the Lands of Earth. Team Eight had counted seventy-three of the devices here, fifty-two of which had been ‘safed’ and packaged for transport back to Earth by the enslaved Sooners.

‘Glad we got slated to make entry here,’ Obekwe said. He hadn’t been able to swap out helmets yet, but he would as soon as they got rotated off duty. He had gotten the flattened boomgun slug out of the lining, though. He kept it in one hand, turning it over and looking at it from time to time.

‘You did good today, kid,’ Grady said. ‘And you got lucky. That’s a good trait in a Salvageer.’ He bumped fists with him. ‘Brews are on YOU, new guy, when we get back to Base!’

FINIS

Iron Halo  by  John Waterman

Chapter 1 - Nuncio

Nuncio fell down the well towards Saturn, faster than if it had begun from infinity. Obekwe looked at the now thumbnail-sized ringed planet through the faux ‘window’. He forgot that it wasn’t transparent. The first part of their long journey would be over in a few days, to be followed by the next part; three months, or more, in Saturn’s space. He couldn’t worry about that just now, though.

‘Captain,’ said Neffer, the Nuncio’s First Mate. ‘Spin is off the Torus. Housekeeping says they’re ready to pump down the Habitat.’ She aligned her gaze with his, her shades automatically patching into his video feed. A lot had to happen in the next few hours. They’d both been awake since the last watch overseeing the preparations to activate the Nuncio’s primary reaction drive.

‘Pump down the Habitat, then. How’s Engineering feel?’

‘They’re complaining a little, ‘Kwe, but nothing beyond the usual. The pile is ramping up within margins. Ari told me that they’ll have enough power to begin stirring the Main reactor in no more than an hour.’

‘Nominal by the schedule. Good.’ He switched to a generated view of the Saturn sub-system. ‘System, ping Frid.’

‘Frid here, Obekwe,’ the Astronomer replied.

‘What’s our insertion trajectory look like? Any garbage out there ahead of us?’

‘Looks clear on optical and IR, but the upper-range UV and Xray is still showing that intermittent anomaly up off the plane. I got it to overlay on an object on the IR, though, but I don’t trust it, not yet.’

‘Well, you have a few hours, max, before the Habitat is done pumping down and we flip ends for the deceleration and insertion boost. You can use the main radar emitter for a few pings once the pile is up past 30% power- subject to Ari’s permission, of course. His team has to begin stirring the Main soon.’

‘Stet, Captain. I’ll try to get some active imaging.’

Obekwe and Neffer stayed busy for the next few hours, as the polymer-wrapped ice hull of the Habitat got melted and pumped back into the tanks, shrinking the Torus and reducing its mass by 95%. Thus the cruise cabins would be unavailable for the next few days. The Nuncio’s crew had plenty to do while they stayed in the Spindle under free fall and variable acceleration as the vessel, the first to enter Saturnian space for over 1600 years, made her deceleration and orbital insertion boosts. Three-eights of her mass would vanish as the pebble-bed reactor turned melted ice in her reaction tanks into radioactive steam- and thrust- to kill off most of the velocity that had brought the vessel to Saturn in a mere five months. Several shorter boosts would aim the Nuncio just a few thousand km from the cloud-tops of the ringed world to whip around and make a pass over Titan, the location of the furthest base established by the Sixth Re-emergence before The Rock had struck Earth and thrown down their culture sixteen centuries ago. Ancient records, and an automated radio beacon, had spoken of the Titanian base’s existence until the beacon’s failure not long after the art of radio telescopy had re-emerged on a once-more wakening Terra, three centuries ago.

Just before the Main was ready to begin boosting, Frid pinged Obekwe and Neffer. ‘Captain, Miss Neffer, I have some imagery, and it’s damned odd.’

‘Pass it, Frid.’ Obekwe felt tired and nervous, munching on a protein bar and sipping at his third squeezy of kav this watch. The huge reaction wheels that would swing the Nuncio’s Main reaction drive to thrust ahead of her were giving Ari and his team some fits. He and Neffer had been coordinating their efforts to get the vessel reoriented.

‘Image up.’ A diagram of the Saturn space appeared in a window. ‘Radar gave a hard return from an object on a non-standard trajectory. It’s almost invisible in optical and IR, albedo less than 0.01, but the UV and Xray anomaly is coincident with it.’ A subsidiary image opened to show blackness that occulted the starfield, ringed by a halo of Xray and UV light in false-colors. Scale markers showed the object had a diameter of over 5km. ‘Radar wouldn’t tell me what it’s made of, except probably something like carbon, basically soot. Just the surface layer, though.’

‘You said ‘trajectory’, Frid,’ Neffer remarked. ‘Not ‘orbit’.

‘No, Miss. It can’t be an object in a natural orbit around Saturn, because its orbital elements are changing. Fast.’

‘That Xray and UV light,’ Obekwe mumbled. ‘Ping Gwalht!’

‘Gwalht here, Captain,’ replied the Chief Scientist.

‘Get up to the Bridge, stat!’ Two minutes later the tall woman, as nearly pure an example of the Original Humans as existed on Terra anymore, clambered into the ship’s control center.

‘I report, Captain.’

‘Gwalht, what can you tell me about the light emitted by this object?’

She studied the image shared in the ‘window’ for a few minutes as she mumbled to herself. Unlike Obekwe, Neffer, or Frid, she was nearly 1.75m ‘tall’, and handled herself unsteadily in free-fall. Her swollen skull was partially hidden by braided hair, but she was just as smart as anyone else on the crew: an expert in the ancient knowledge her race had been the first to discover more than twenty millennia ago. ‘Captain, the object isn’t emitting the light. More as if the light is being backscattered behind it. I surmise an exhaust plume of energized hydrogen and helium being generated behind it.’ She rubbed a hand over the furry brow ridges above her eyes. ‘A fusion drive, and a huge one given the velocity change the object is exhibiting.’

‘A what? That’s imposs-‘ began Obekwe. ‘No one in space has anything like that!’

‘Not since the Third Re-emergence, anyway,’ Neffer said. ‘And the First Ones supposedly had built at least one, before the Heavy Nuking, or so say the records.’

‘I might have grown up downwind of a crater field,’ Obekwe retorted, ‘but even I know that.’ He chuckled without mirth. ‘There hasn’t been a fusion drive for fifteen thousand years!’

It was Frid’s turn to run his hand over his naked, flat skull. ‘But why, and why here? Where’s it coming from?’

‘Better to ask where it’s going TO,’ Neffer said. ‘Navigator,’ she asked the vessel’s computer system, ‘given constant boost at the object’s acceleration, project a cone of probabilities of its future trajectory.’

The vessel’s computer pinged- compsystems had never been allowed to speak or act like sentient humans, not since the AI disasters that had wrecked the Second Re-emergence seventeen millennia ago- and showed an image of a pink cone overlaid on a larger diagram of the whole Solar System. They could all easily see that the current trajectory moved the Object towards the inner Solar System, eventually intersecting the planes of the orbits of Terra and Luna. The zone of certainty narrowed upon the location of the Mother World within another week’s boost. The Object would, if maneuvering stopped at that point, have a high probability of hitting Terra in less than three years . . .

The four people remained silent for a few minutes, each trying to wrap their heads around what they saw. ‘Navigator, access historical records,’ Gwalht said. ‘Define and project the trajectory of The Rock of 1,652 years before Present date prior to striking Terra.’

Navigator pinged again after a few seconds, drawing a plot of the Solar System with the planets in their positions in that long-ago time. It ran the best-known plot of The Rock backwards from its impact on Terra for three years- until it terminated in Saturnian space. <no further trajectory data possible> a line of text announced under the image. <orbital elements cannot be calculated prior to The Rock’s presumed encounter with Saturn.>

‘All of the astronomers of the day already knew that The Rock came from the direction of Saturn, or at least where Saturn had been three years earlier,’ Gwalht said quietly. ‘It was assumed that it had come from cis-interstellar space unseen, interacted with Saturn’s gravity well, and got sling-shotted right into Earth.’

‘Yeah, but this thing is under boost, damnit,’ Obekwe snapped. ‘It could have come from anywhere, and that ‘where’ isn’t as important as where it’s being vectored!’

‘This Object is substantially larger than The Rock,’ Frid said. ‘The Rock was just under 4km diameter when it plopped right into the Apulian Sea, in the Mediterranean Basin, 1600 years ago. It roasted all of Europe, North Africa, and West Asia before the dust and vapor obscured the Sun for a decade . . . and this Object is over 5km in diameter, almost twice the mass of The Rock!’

‘Doesn’t matter where this one hits,’ Gwalht breathed. ‘It’ll end civilization again for certain, maybe for longer than a millennium this time. Kill most of the three billion people on Terra, send the survivors all the way back to the Iron Age at best, once again sentence all of the two million spacers off-world to a slow death from resource depletion, and d-, delay an Eighth Re-emergence for millennia more- if there ever IS another.’

‘And there’s nothing we can do to stop petatonnes of rock from hitting Terra, even if we throw everything we have in space, or could build by then, at it,’ Neffer said. ‘We just don’t have the capabilities that even the Sixth Re-emergence had, when they finally saw The Rock. Or we’d just shatter it into a giant shot-shell, which would be WORSE . . .’

Obekwe whirled to face the others. ‘Well, there IS one thing we could try, since we’re here just now. But I need to talk to the crew. First, though, we have to put together a full report on this and burst it back at Terra, all the information we have, with the main beamcaster at full power!’

An hour later, Obekwe floated before the entire crew, all fifty of them. Frid, Neffer, Gwalht and Ari hovered beside him. ‘No, Siy, we don’t know WHAT is boosting this big rock- we’re calling it ‘The Object’ for now- out of Saturnian space towards the inner System, except that it’s a fusion drive-‘

‘Probably a deuterium fusion reactor with a tremendous exhaust velocity,’ interjected Gwalht.

‘Yes, something we can’t build yet,’ Obekwe agreed, ‘but it’s not a natural phenomenon. It’s a, a device of some sort, and that means that we might be able to stop it, sabotage it, whatever, before it finishes boosting The Object on a final trajectory towards Terra. We have a week or so before it reaches escape velocity from Saturn. We can reach it in three days, if we act very soon, and see what we can do to try to deactivate the device, whatever it is, or steer its thrust away from dropping it into a death orbit towards Terra.’ He sighed and gulped from his squeezy. ‘That is why I’ve taken counsel with you, the crew of the Nuncio, to ask you if you would agree to forgo our original mission here around Saturn and instead try to do what we can to save the Mother World.’

The Bosun, Grady, looked around and then spoke. ‘We’re gonna need to see more data, prove to ourselves that what yer showing us is true- not sayin’ yer lying to us, Mister Obekwe, but we gotta be sure before we make any decisions. We’re free crewfolk, with a say in anything that affects the mission we’ve signed on for.’

‘Of course, Grady,’ Obekwe replied. ‘I might have grown up in Namer, downwind of the craters, but I’d never be such a fool as to think I couldn’t give my crew a fair look at the data.’

‘Who or what’s behind this, do you know yet?’ Marhi asked. She served as the Main Reactor’s Mate.

‘No clue, but we suspect that the same- force- might have dropped The Rock on our ancestors, and wiped out the Sixth Re-emergence,’ Neffer said. ‘The data we’ve been able to get out of the archives points to that hypothesis.’

‘Where’d this ‘Object’ come from, then,’ asked Kyli, the Chief of Housekeeping.

‘We don’t have any previous orbital data on it,’ Gwalht replied. ‘It could have been a rock from Saturn space, or come from further out; boosted by, well, what’s boosting it now. We don’t have good previous low-level Xray or UV sky sweeps.’

‘So what’s your plan, Captain,’ Grady asked.

‘Bend our already great velocity out from the Sun using a boosted, close encounter with Saturn to make a tight turn and fly right up The Object’s vector,’ Obekwe said, ‘to close with it. We’ll expend most of the fuel we’d have used here to explore Saturn space in that maneuver, and chase down The Object with it.’

‘Give us an hour to look over your data, Captain,’ Grady said as the senior spokesman for the crew, ‘and ask a few other questions. Then you’ll know if we agree, or have a counter proposal.’

         ***

He didn’t really have a name, per se, since he had no one else with whom he spoke and thus didn’t need one. The natives of the third planet had extended themselves into space again, and reached ever outwards, and that fell within his mission parameters. They needed to be stopped once more, and he had set into motion what he always had when they gained the ability to reach the outer system.

In this, the current perihelion of his seven hundred year cometary orbit around the primary, his trajectory synched up with the ringed world from which he had operated before. The drive attached to the five kilometer wide siderite he’d found far out in the Kuiper belt turned deuterium gleaned from frozen cometary nuclei into thrust and neutrinos, increased by using frozen hydrogen and ice for reaction mass.

The microwave pulses picked up from the detection arrays on the surface of the siderite surprised him. One of the native’s vessels had entered the space around the ringed world not long after he had made his closest approach to it, to boost the rock towards the third planet from which they came. This had never happened before. He had protocols in place, of course, but he still had to plan . . .

***

Grady spoke up an hour later. ‘Captain Obekwe, we’ve taken our counsel.’

‘Yes? What say you?’

‘Go, Sir. Head for this Object that threatens the Mother World. We’ll deal with it as best we can!’

‘So mote it be. Crew, get ready for new assignments! For the Mother World!’

 Iron Halo  by  John Waterman

Chapter 2 - Skimming Saturn

Saturn had grown noticeably larger in just the past few hours, almost alarmingly. Instead of flipping ends to decelerate, Nuncio’s main drive fired radioactive steam to back away from the ringed planet, pushing the vessel at an acceleration of one meter per second, every second, towards it.

A tenth of Earth’s gravity now pulled everyone aboard towards the stern. All fifty people aboard Nuncio could feel the vibration of the nuclear thermal rocket as it gobbled melted Lunar ice, painstakingly gathered from the Icefall itself left on the Moon during the Fourth Re-Emergence, and ran it through the nuclear hell-core of the engine. It emerged as disassociated hydrogen and oxygen atoms at a temperature of 4,000C. They recombined into highly radioactive water vapor  laced with fission products, screaming outward at 8,000 meters per second.

The control center lay in the Spindle, the ten-meter diameter and one-hundred fifty meter long main hull of the vessel, just forward of the hub of the Torus. Obekwe kept his eyes on the windows floating around him as he lay on his acceleration couch. ‘Ping Frid,’ he said.

‘Frid here, Captain’, the Astronomer replied. He was further forwards in the Spindle, near the mount of the three-meter reflector of the Nuncio’s main telescope.

‘How’s our vector looking?’ He could see all of the course and vector information that Navigator updated in realtime, but he liked other humans to confirm the data that the computer produced. A Captain knew how all his ship’s systems worked, but only as a dilettante compared to his officers, who had expert knowledge of their specialties which he couldn’t match. The Captain oversaw and managed his subordinates, meshing their tasks into the smooth operation of the whole vessel.

‘Nominal, Captain. Still plotting a thrust ramp-up to 0.2Gs beginning in, ah, ninety-four minutes, then final vector corrections for our encounter with Saturn in seven hours and sixteen minutes after that.’

‘Stet. I’m going to go down for a while, Neffer will have the next watch. Report any variations to her.’ When Frid acknowledged Obekwe said, ‘Ping Neffer.’

‘Neffer here, ‘Kwe.’ He heard her yawn. ‘Passing the Watch? Let me grab a squeezy and some breakfast real quick first, and I’ll be up.’

Neffer popped up through the floor hatch, hopping off the ladder with the spryness of the Lunar native she was. ‘I’ve got the watch, Captain. Billem is taking over from Jev as the Watch second down in aft Control.’ The Second and Third Mates, as the ship’s other command officers, traded watches when Neffer and Obekwe did during maneuvers like this.

‘Thanks, I’m going to eat and then find a sack. Wake me in eight hours.’ He dropped down the ladder through the floor hatch and went down a few decks to the Spindle’s Messroom. Two stewards from Housekeeping laid out food from the processing machinery. Obekwe ate, idly watching the green glow of the bioreactors as atmo got bubbled through the brightly illuminated algae tanks. Their lights and pumps were powered by the energy of the thorium-plutonium pile that provided constant electricity for Nuncio. Opposite them were the cricket habitats, where millions of the insects ate algae and each other to produce protein for the crew, mostly as the ubiquitous ‘cricker’ wafers which spacers had been eating since the First Re-Emergence.

After his plate of breakfast crickers and bean-curd gravy, he went one deck back up to the Bunkroom, where the crew slept when the Habitat was deflated and the ship was under boost. Instead of the luxuriously large cruise cabins there were wooden bunks stacked three high, each with a sleep-sack and a restraining belt. He used the communal ‘fresher in the center of the bunkroom. Any open sleep-sack was fair game, so he rolled into one, strapped himself in, and fell asleep the moment his eyes closed.

‘Captain, Captain! Neffer here.’

Obekwe shuddered all over and opened his eyes to the semi-darkness of the bunkroom. He felt heavier, confirming that the Nuncio had increased boost to 0.2Gs while he’d been asleep. ‘Obekwe here. Status?’

‘All good, ‘Kwe. We’re consuming half a percent more reaction mass to maintain thrust than nominal, but the Main is running smooth and hot. Vector is good for the close pass, in  just under an hour.’

‘Let me clean up and grab something to eat, and I’ll be up.’ Obekwe stretched and used the communal ‘fresher again. He batted at his floppy ship’s jumper to dislodge any dirt that might have accumulated before he took the ladder down to the messroom. A dozen crewers on break from their duties turned to acknowledge him politely before they went back to their food, squeezies, and conversation. No one whispered, and they were all discussing the change in the mission.

After grabbing a squeezy and some food he further climbed the ladder forward, to the control center. Neffer waited there for him, strapped into a couch. He handed her a bunch of orangeberries. Their clean citrus smell motivated her to grab the bunch and strip off a dozen of them until she handed it back.

‘Thanks, ‘Kwe,’ she replied. ‘Everything is running at nominal, though Ari’s keeping a close eye on the Main reactor. His Mate is nursing the ice-melters. She says that they’re still cranky after five months of low usage.’

‘How’s the Science section?’ Obekwe strapped into the couch next to hers and popped a few berries into his mouth.

‘Frid and Gwalht have been in the Astrogation bubble this whole time. I had a steward bring them refreshments.’ The entire flight direction team consisted of Frid and ‘Navigator’, the ship’s computer. All course changes and boosts were approved by Obekwe or the designated Mate, if necessary.

The next hour both dragged slowly and also seemed to pass swiftly in Obekwe’s distorted perception. Much still needed done to make the Nuncio ready to whip around Saturn in a 160⁰ turn with a substantial velocity change. No vessel had been in Saturn space for over 1600 years, and none of the records still remaining of 20,000 years of human spaceflight spoke of a crewed vessel making an Oberth maneuver around Saturn itself. That had always been in the mission’s parameters, though not one with a velocity change anywhere as great as what they would be attempting now. 

Finally, with Saturn the size of a slap ball surrounded by a tilted headband in the window and growing ominously larger by the minute, Obekwe ordered Frid and Gwalht out of the Astrogation bubble. The Astronomer had retracted the three-meter main reflecting telescope into the hull. Now all they had to rely upon was the array of six 15-cm optical reflectors in their armored nacelles on the bow, and the usual pinhole remote cameras scattered across the forward surface of the massive block of ice behind the Spindle, inside of which was embedded the Main drive.

Saturn’s radiation belts were nowhere near the strength of Jupiter’s but still sizeable, and though Nuncio was crossing between the inner ring and the gas world’s cloud tops, there still remained plenty of debris from the size of gas molecules to slapballs themselves. The dangers imposed by these two hazards mandated that the entire crew retire to the control center or the bunkrooms deep inside the Spindle. The Spindle had a double hull of ceramic plates on foamed titanium stringers, with the half-meter between them filled with ice or water, and a centimeter of lead on the inside layer. That layer was doubled around the bunkrooms, the bioreactors, and the control center. 

Obekwe, Neffer, Ari, Reactor’s Mate Thanel, Frid, and Gwalht filled the six couches in the control center, each staring at their own or communal windows. Conversation flowed between the members of each pair and with Navigator. Navigator replied with text that popped up in the relevant windows, depending on who had asked. It only spoke in desperate emergencies; per the Iron Laws all Re-Emergences had adopted since the Second.

Obekwe listened to Frid and Gwalht discuss the esoterica of Saturn’s upper atmosphere as they tried to pick the optimum altitude for Nuncio’s insertion. They traded terms like ‘optical depth’ and ‘density tradeoff’ between minimum altitude and atmospheric friction during the closest approach of the Oberth maneuver. Ari chimed in with the maximum heating rate and hull temperature that he’d approve; the main consideration was what the forward polymer skin of the fuel iceberg would withstand even with five eights of a million cubic meters of ice at 60 kelvins behind it. This devolved into a discussion between the three of them, heavily bolstered by figures from Navigator, about friction and thermal transfer and ionization of the hydrogen and helium ahead of them.

Thanel had been edging up the thrust from the Main as quickly as they and Ari found prudent. It would be a quarter of a G right when Nuncio hit its apoapsis at 61,500 km from the world’s centroid. ‘Captain,’ they asked, ‘what are your intentions with the drive once we complete the closest approach?’

‘Keep it at whatever it’s at . . .what, about 0.28 Gs, by then? We’ll figure out what we need to change it to once we get the updated trajectory elements of the Object when it comes back into view while we come out of Saturn’s shadow.’

‘Stet, Captain.’ Thanel’s entire world right now was managing the flow of melted lunar ice into the giant thorium pebble-bed reactor, which in turn determined its current reaction rate in a very slow and complex dance. Their fingers fell rapidly on virtual controls that operated the ice melters, flow pumps, and feed limiters deep inside the iceberg and the guts of the reactor itself.

Then there was no time left, and all they could do was watch. Small sideways kicks from Nuncio’s enormous reaction wheels kept the axis of thrust aligned to the pre-generated vector. Nearly twice Lunar gravity pushed them into the anisotropic foam of their couches as hundreds of cubic meters of water flowed into the Main reactor and blasted out again aft as transparent radioactive fire.

BANG

Nuncio shuddered, jolting everyone’s teeth together hard. Obekwe reached for the film helmet rolled up in his jumper’s collar, as everyone else did for their own, but he heard no blatting depressurization alarm. ‘What just happened to my ship,’ he grunted past a bitten tongue tip. The thrust seemed constant, and the water between the double hulls damped the vibrations from whatever it had been . . . He saw amber and a few red icons bloom in his main window, but nothing in the critical fields containing Pile, Main, or Lifesystem status.

‘Just lost one of the bow telescopes, Captain,’ Frid replied.

‘Hole in the bow, ‘Kwe,’ Neffer said. ‘Size and extent unknown, flipping through camera feeds now. No signal on Nitrogen Tank Three, that’s at Frame Fifteen, and intrahull radiator array Two Forward at Frame Twenty. It’s mostly frozen up there, but flow rates indicate flooding inboard to Pumphouses Two and Four. Shutting all of the functioning valves in the region, Captain. All we can do right now.’

It wasn’t serious for now, Obekwe thought. ‘Ari, Thanel, status on power and boost?’

‘Pile functioning nominally, Captain,’ Ari replied. ‘Power flowing normally to lifesystem and controls.’

‘Main still operating nominally, Captain.’ Thanel sounded nervous, but only because of the distraction. ‘Maintain increase of thrust, or maintain current level here?’

‘Keep thrust at current level, Thanel.’ Always reduce the number of variables to the minimum possible, Obekwe thought. ‘Immediately note any excursions. Right now yours is the most important show on the bill.’ He looked over at Neffer and Ari. ‘We’ll have time to deal with whatever happened when we’re done here. Frid, you and Navigator keep us on the vector, best as you can.’

Nuncio roared past her closest approach to Saturn and curved back outwards, deep in the world’s shadow.

                                                                         ***

He didn’t have a name, but his vessel- as separate from the also nameless mass it now pushed- did. Iron Halo, herself now a hundred-meter ring coupled electromagnetically to the soot-covered iron mass, boiled the hydrogen, helium, and deuterium iceberg between her and the siderite to push it at cm per second towards a vector that would nudge it towards a collision with the third planet in three of its revolutions around the primary.

The neutrino detector buried deep within the siderite could just detect the glow of the two fission sources in the ship that death-dove towards the ringed planet. Sensors had imaged the large vessel, obviously built by orbital industries from the third world, not upon it, even in sections. It was a hundred-meter wide mass of polymer-swathed ice, with a hard ceramic spindle sticking forwards from it for another hundred-fifty meters.

He had expected the Oberth maneuver, of course. It made sense for a ship seeking to match velocity with the ringed world’s coterie of moons. He knew the largest of those held a deserted base dating from the third-worlders’ previous reach towards space.

What was unexpected was their acceleration towards the ringed world. It seemed that remaining in an orbit around it, however distant, was not their goal. He could see their nuclear smoke even through the ringed world’s mass, and they seemed to be pursuing a vector not unlike his. He could surmise only one reason for that.

*** 

Obekwe would not authorize EVA inspections and repairs with the ship under boost. The Second Mate and a team of five Housekeeping crew were forward in work suits, checking the damage. ‘We’re just going to put polymer over the holes in the hull and then pump it full of water, Captain; let it freeze and then keep it that way,’ Billem reported. ‘We lost almost everything in Nitrogen Tank Three, so we’ve just isolated it from the system. We’re cutting free and salvaging what’s left of the piping on that and Intrahull Radiator Two. We might be able to get the radiator array functional again, later. None of the stringers look badly damaged between Frames Five and Twenty.’

‘Keep on it for another hour or so, or until Ari checks it and says quit or keep on. Thanks, Billem.’ Obekwe wished they hadn’t lost all of that nitrogen. Oxygen was practically free and abundant- they were riding most of a million-tonne iceberg, after all- but nitrogen was dear. Nuncio’s breathing mix was 40% oxygen and 60% nitrogen at a total of half a bar’s internal pressure; it was unsafe to drop the total pressure or increase the oxygen fraction by much.

He turned to Frid and Gwalht. ‘Let’s see what we have to do to run down the Object.’

Iron Halo  by  John Waterman

Chapter 3 - The Stern Chase

 

Nuncio thundered out from behind Saturn at well beyond the planet’s escape velocity, still boosting at 0.28Gs. Over three hundred thousand tonnes of radioactive water trailed in her wake around the ringed world, having passed through the core of the vessel’s thorium-plutonium Main reactor in what was supposed to have been a deceleration maneuver intended to bring her within the orbital plane of the inner Saturnian moons at a reasonable orbital velocity.

Instead of decelerating, however, the first vessel to visit Saturn from the Seventh Re-Emergence’s All-Space Union- the first vessel to visit Saturn in 1,652 years- had a new mission.

‘Eyes on the Object yet?’ Obekwe looked over at his Astrogation team, which consisted of Astronomer Frid and Scientist Gwalht backed up by the vessel’s computer, Navigator.

‘Just picked it up again, Captain,’ Frid replied. ‘The main reflector is undamaged, thankfully. Hard emitter of high UV, spiking at 293nm. It matches the profile of the Object, or whatever is pushing it.’

‘It’s still changing the Object’s orbital parameters,’ continued Gwalht, the tall ‘Original Human’ scientist. ‘Rate unchanged, accelerating at 0.02Gs. We’re now getting imaging from the previously obscured side of the Object.’ She consulted her own window, whispering something to Navigator. ‘It already far exceeds Saturn’s escape velocity and I project that it will have the proper vector to encounter Earth, in two years and nine months, within 72 hours.’

‘Let’s see that imaging, then. Common window, please,’ Obekwe said. He saw the more-or-less circular silhouette of the 5km wide siderite, but this time illuminated by Saturn’s dim light as well as a harsh actinic glare coming from a tiny ring atop a large round pile of material. ‘Stet. Pray tell me, what is THAT?’

‘The ring appears to be around 100 meters in diameter, Captain,’ Gwalht replied, ‘and perhaps ten in thickness. Height unknown. The pile of material it rests upon is about three hundred in diameter, height also unknown. It reflects very little light at any wavelengths we can sense, but it’s not unlike the polymer film we use to swathe the Iceberg. It may be a fuel supply, in which case it is probably frozen deuterium given the wavelengths emitted by the, ah, fusion source and the presence of protons, unburnt deuterium, tritium, light helium, and regular helium in the exhaust plume. The plume itself seems to be annular and not a stream coming from a single point.’

Neffer, the First Mate, spoke up. ‘We need some options, and thus some numbers. Navigator! First, plot a fly-by at the minimum possible time, given continuing acceleration at 0.28Gs for as long as possible. Second, plot the time to match velocity and then maintain station-keeping with the Object. Third, plot the time until we would catch up to the Object if we ceased acceleration as soon as possible. Compute all plots assuming we retain the minimum reaction mass required to match orbits with Earth.’

Navigator began painting a line of text across the common window the six people in the control center shared. <Time to flyby Object at continued possible boost (0.03Gs); 46HR 48MIN @ relative velocity of 8KM/S. Time to intercept and match velocity @ 0.03Gs; 53HR 17MIN. Time to overtake given current relative velocity, no boost; 194HR 43MIN w/ relative velocity at time of intercept +1.4KM/S>. It followed with the graphics of the three trajectories depicted across the window’s diagram of Saturnian space.  

‘Let’s take the middle road,’ Obekwe said. ‘We’re cutting the delta-V margin for our trip back to L4 close enough as it is.’ He blew out his cheeks. ‘Thanel, get the drive dialed down to 0.03Gs as soon as you can. We’ll have to flip ends ‘hot’, too, and quickly. We can’t afford to quench the Main down all the way and then take the time to get it stirred up again.’ He turned to Neffer. ‘Let’s be ready to reorient the ship with the Main going.’

‘Acknowledged, ‘Kwe,’ the First Mate replied. ‘Changing vectors shouldn’t be too bad at 0.03Gs. 

 ‘I want some better views of the Object before we get close to it,’ he continued. ‘Navigator, plot the earliest time we can launch a probe to have it approach within 1000 km of the Object in fly-by mode, and also the time until we can launch a probe to intercept it with station-keeping; and the duration of that station-keeping.’ Nuncio carried twelve probes, each with many imaging modes as well as maser communications, also capable of maneuvering semi-independently with their own copies of a lower-power Navigator and fully reuseable if recovered. The ten-tonne probes were chemically-fueled, though. Even with nine tonnes of their mass in hydrogen-oxygen fuel they still didn’t have a lot of available delta-v.

Ari shook his head, partly in amazement and partly in trepidation. ‘What kind of thrust is that, uh, thing, putting out to push a rock that big,’ the Chief Engineer said.

‘Enough to drop it- something almost twice the mass as The Rock over 1600 years ago- to fall upon the Mother world yet again,’ Neffer said sharply. ‘Except this time we’re here to do something about it!’

‘As we all decided,’ Obekwe agreed. He looked at the common window as Navigator painted its reply. <Soonest launch for probe fly-by given its max delta-V expended; 23HR 05MIN. Probe will be unrecoverable. Closest approach at 37HR, 25MIN @ relative velocity 2.7KM/S. Soonest launch for probe intercept; 32HR, 04MIN. Closest approach at 42HR 24MIN. Time on station @0.02Gs 10HR 31MIN. Probe will be unrecoverable>.

‘Let’s send two on each of these trajectories,’ Obekwe said. ‘How long to get them fueled and ready?’

‘I’ll get the Auxiliary Systems folks started on that, ‘Kwe,’ Neffer said. ‘I’ll let you know how long they estimate that it will take to get them ready for launch.’ She dropped out of the conversation to issue the orders.

Nuncio fell upwards from Saturn at well beyond escape velocity, though she now decelerated to keep from overshooting the Object. Flipping the vessel end-for-end with the Main still boosting had been nerve-wracking as well as tough on the massive reaction wheels buried deep near the ship’s center of gravity. Nuncio didn’t have fractional control thrusters anywhere powerful enough to yaw or pitch her hundreds of thousands of tonnes of mass efficiently or quickly. Her designers, Ari among them, had decided large reaction wheels would prove more effective and safer than having a set of large, chemically-fueled thrusters requiring hydrogen and oxygen, the tankage for it, and the requisite plumbing.

Obekwe toured the ship after a large meal and a long sleep. Moving around inside her was easy under the mere 0.03Gs boost. He had begun his tour by getting into a work suit and going forward to examine the repairs at the bow of the Spindle to the damage caused by whatever had hit them during the approach to Saturn. He kept the suit on as he traveled aft through the Astrogation bubble, the control space, the Hub for the de-spun and deflated Torus, the messroom and bunk rooms, the bioreactors, the ship’s storerooms, the probe garage and boat barns, the Engineering shops and heavy equipment storage, and Engineering control. The massive biological Shield was as far aft as anyone could travel in anything but a dire emergency.

The Shield separated the human-occupied part of the Spindle from the heavy nuclear engineering spaces aft. The vessel’s four huge reaction wheels lay back there, too, behind the meter of tungsten that kept the hell storm of radiation from the Pile- and further aft, the Main reactor- from cooking the crew and the bioreactors of the lifesystem. Though heavily leaded hatches and dog-legged passages led through the Shield, no one had been back there since the Pile and the Main had gotten fueled and activated at L4, right before Nuncio had been launched. The last 20 meters of the Spindle, imbedded in the Iceberg, held the Pile with its turbo-alternators, heat exchangers, and ancillary plumbing that powered the vessel’s non-drive systems as well as the reaction wheels that pitched and yawed the enormous ship. The Main reactor, its reaction mass plumbing, ice melters, and thrust assembly lay even further aft, structurally unconnected to the Spindle in a large cradle mounted within the core of the Iceberg.

Ari, also suited, met Obekwe by the Shield. ‘You wanted to see me, Captain?’

‘Yeah, I figured we could talk easier down here. You got what I asked about?’

‘Yes, Captain.’ Ari stood next to a carry-bag holding something vaguely cylindrical, of about fifteen liters volume. He pointedly did not look at it.

‘Good, and thank you. There’s a good chance that at least some of us will have to, uh, approach the Object and perhaps manually set up a fail-safe to keep it from completing its manuever to drop that giant siderite on Earth. If there’s no other way to stop it, you see. I’d rather not ram it with Nuncio and sacrifice the entire crew and the vessel if it can at all be helped.’

‘I understand,’ Ari replied quietly. ‘I’d always wondered why this’- he again didn’t look directly at the carry-bag sheathed object hooked to a pad-eye on the deck - ‘had come along on this trip. No one told me what it was, though I knew.’ He shook his head. ‘I suppose I’m glad we have it to hand, if we can use it to save the ship; and the Earth, too, of course.’

‘It’s ready to go?’ Obekwe also avoided looking directly at it. Things like it had featured large in certain periods of human history, though rarely in a good way . . . despite that, they were still around, for better or worse. He hoped that if it had to be used, that it would prove to be one of the occasions in which it did some good.

‘Yeah, turns out that it’s surprisingly simple to use. Not nearly as many failsafes as I thought it might have.’ Ari chuckled, without mirth. ‘Not that it’s, uh, ‘unsafe’ to carry around or anything.’

‘Oh, that’s good. Please put it away for now. I’d like for us to go check on the probes we’ll be launching soon.’

‘Captain,’ Ari said as he put the thing in a cabinet and locked it, ‘Does Miss Neffer know about it?’

‘Not at the moment,’ Obekwe replied. ‘I’ll brief her if and when she needs to know. Until then, not a word, stet?’

‘Stet.’ They began climbing back forwards, towards the probe garage.

*** 

The nuclear thermal rocket from the third planet now boosted to overtake him. Its trajectory followed an interception, to meet him in around fifty thousand seconds. This did not concern him. It was just another contingency to consider. Their vessel was nothing like a warship, not anything like some he’d seen out on the Far Shores of this star system.

At the very least, the oncoming vessel wanted to check him out. He didn’t know what their further intent amounted to; communication, interference, or assistance. It made no difference to him. All were contingencies that sub-processors already analyzed. Sensors collected data, drew inferences, and created webs of action-potential from them. Their activities weren’t germane to his mission, which was to put this siderite he pushed onto a vector for the third planet, per his ancient purpose and orders.

The third planet’s humans had gotten back into space with technology he thought that they could not have marshalled again, not in so short a time since he’d dropped the last siderite on them. Their nuclear thermal rocket was an advanced model, almost identical to those their ancestors had possessed 1600 years before. The fact that this one used water as reaction mass instead of smaller molecular weights, which would have greatly enhanced its delta-v, spoke of this group’s relatively recent return to space. It was nowhere within an order of magnitude as efficient as him, though.

He knew why the Far Shores had to keep humans bottled up on that third world. An explosion of the fast-breeding humans out into the thinly-populated and wide-scattered areas beyond the ringed planet would lead to conflict over resources that the outer-dwellers couldn’t tolerate.

So, another siderite, 1652 years after the last one. He’d pushed that one, too. So far as he knew, the Far Shores had only done the two of them. Yet.

*** 

The probes’ garage actually stuck outside the Spindle as a rotary rack, though there was a space where the ten-tonne devices could get fueled and readied inboard, one at a time, and then rotated out to return to the garage or launch. One sat in that space currently, hooked up to cryogenic oxygen and hydrogen hoses that filled its fuel tanks. An Auxiliary Engineer, Beet, checked out its sensors and other systems as Obekwe and Ari came into the garage. She acknowledged them with a quick wave but kept working.

‘Last of them, Beet?’ Obekwe asked.

‘Yes, Cap’n,’ she replied. ‘Mard went over the first two, then I’ve had the other two of them.’

‘Excellent, Beet.’ The Handed clapped her hands and foot-hands in unison quickly in thanks, then turned back to her work.

‘Let’s go across to the boat barn.’ Obekwe led on. The boat barn carried two bottle skiffs and four lander taxis. Another Auxiliary Engineer, Ded, met them within, after he closed an exterior panel on the lander taxi he’d been servicing. ‘Hiyo, Cap’n, Chief!’

‘How’re they looking,’ Obekwe asked breezily.

‘All ready to go whenever they’re needed, Sirs.’ He patted the side of the four-person lander taxi affectionately- he’d be its pilot/engineer. The hexagonal craft, barely 4m wide, was rated for ballistic atmospheric entry from orbit of Titan, and could make orbit once again from its surface with its chemically-fueled rockets. Used in space, the taxis didn’t have the delta-v of a probe but they still had legs, and could carry a LOT more cargo than as a lander. The design was several millennia old, at that. Every Re-Emergence had relied on the preserved engineering of the previous ones.

The bottle skiffs lay as collapsed frameworks and fuel tanks against the inner hull. The pull of a lanyard would inflate their frames and prime their very basic systems. They were intended to carry cargo and suited passengers between ships or orbital stations, with enough fuel for minor orbital changes. No vessel left Earth orbit without at least a bottle skiff aboard. A relatively sharp child could ‘pilot’ one, and they could carry tonnes of cargo from one place to another given time.

‘Let’s go forwards now,’ Obekwe told Ari. ‘We’ll need to figure out what to do.’

 Iron Halo  by  John Waterman

Chapter 4 - Hard Approach

Nuncio’s first two probes, launched 14 hours ago, had just reached their closest flyby of the Object. Obekwe, Neffer, Frid, Gwalht, Ari, and Grady, the Bosun, had gathered in the control space to see the telemetry as it came in. Several ‘windows’ were open, with views in soft-UV, visible, and near IR as well as radar, ionizing radiation detection, and hard UV/ soft x-ray views.

<Reaching nearest approach, relative velocity +2.68KM/S, distance 102KM [Probe One] 103KM [Probe Two]>, Navigator printed across their collective view, the one in visible light with the UV and IR false colors.

‘That thing is BIG,’ Grady said, whistling. He ran his hand over his flat, stubbly head. ‘A hundred meters in diameter, and the ring of it at least ten thick. Sure isn’t made of polymer-wrapped ice, either.’

‘Its hull returns the reflectance of single-crystal iron, thickness unknown,’ Gwalht commented. The Scientist had known that for hours now, but she had also been researching what was known about De-De fusion drives in her records from the Third Re-Emergence thirteen millennia before. ‘Crystaliron and its alloys were used by the spacefarers from the Third, though not in great amounts. It is between six to seven times stronger than equivalent masses of advanced carbon fiber or titanium alloys, and is resistant to temperatures of over 5,000C. No one has made large quantities of the material since then, and out current material manufacturing is at least several decades from producing significant quantities of it.’ She checked her notes. ‘Some engineering tomes from the Third mention that it was integral to the design of their fusion drive.’

‘I’ve some right here,’ Ari said, holding out his left thumb to show a fat, iridescent ring. ‘Family heirloom, found on Luna five generations back.’

‘I’m glad that the probes spread out to image both sides of that- spacecraft,’ Neffer said. ‘It lacks many conspicuous features, though. I’m looking for anything like communications arrays, carried craft, hangar doors, or any point of egress at all, frankly.’ She pointed. ‘That, there, looks like a manlock door, and there’s a slightly larger possible airlock door there, about 60 degrees around to port of it.’

‘We can’t really see much detail on its aft surface through the drive plume,’ Obekwe said. ‘Just now got a view of its forward surface. Hmm. Also pretty featureless, though those dark patches there could be sensors, maybe phased array lidars? Very hard to tell. I sure don’t see anything like weapons emplacements, carried craft, probes, or other sensors.’

‘Probes are finishing up their rich-feed sensor scans,’ Frid said, ‘though they’ll keep eyes on it as the range increases. Next probes will arrive in five hours, and maintain station until just before we establish intercept ourselves.’

‘Alright, folks,’ Neffer said.’ We have to figure out what we want to do when we match vectors with the Object in 16 hours. Don’t have to decide immediately, but we should begin to discuss it.’ She looked at Obekwe.

‘Frid,’ he asked, ‘has the Object replied to any of the radio, maser, or laser pings from the Probes?’ He’d asked that the Probes, once they’d passed out of the Object’s fusion glare, to begin transmitting a standard set of requests for communication and identity over all of the Standard frequencies used for the past 20 millennia, in all known historical codes and as analog and digital voice in both the major Science languages of Potungguo and Anglic, as well as the current space-standard language UnTak.

‘No responses yet, Sir,’ the Astronomer replied. ‘Then again, they might be Others . . . but we have no proof of that either way.’ He shrugged. ‘Gwalht says that no one from Earth has put anything like this into space ever, from any of the Re-Emergences, but the technology and manufacturing philosophy- whatever that means- doesn’t rule out an ancient Earth provenance.’

‘ A lot of the operational records from that time have gotten ruined,’ Gwalht said. ‘A torus-shaped design had been proposed for a long-range fusion vessel, pushing an iceberg of frozen deuterium, but it was half the radius of the Object. There is no record that such vessel had ever been built. They used smaller, cylinder-shaped vessels with integral fuel tanks for most of their travel out past the Belt, at least as far as Neptune as we have records.’

‘I don’t really care who or what built it,’ Obekwe said. ‘We need to see what we can do to stop or at least divert its payload from impacting Earth in just under three years, though. I had hoped to open some form of communication with it by now, even if they are Others. Not that we’ve ever had even a sniff of any for twenty thousand years, right? We may have to land on the Object or the siderite it’s pushing, or even effect physical ingress to that ring, in order to learn at least something about it and some way to stop it here. Frid, make sure all of this is getting transmitted insystem to the CommNet as it comes in, stet?’ The Astronomer replied with a nod.

‘We can’t really see how the Object is connected to the siderite, can we?’ Neffer tapped at some images. ‘It seems to hover over the conical pile of polymer-swathed whatever that is. If there are physical attachments then they’re invisible to our Probe’s imaging even at a hundred kilometers.’ She turned to Gwalht and Ari. ‘Might it be suspended magnetically?’

‘The magnetometer readings are off the scale all over the Object and the siderite,’ the Scientist replied, ‘so that might be the method. The entire assemblage may well be linked magnetically through the fusion drive’s apparatus, which would prove a very efficient thrust transfer mechanism.’

‘It could create a pretty powerful electromagnetic bond,’ Ari agreed. ‘Stronger than a dipole, for sure. The field readings suggest something at least a thousand times the strength of what we generate to keep our exhaust plasma from eroding the Main’s nozzle.’

‘Good to know,’ Obekwe said, slipping into some deep thought. He let Neffer guide the rest of the team in a discussion over what the first Probes’ flybys had shown them. He was still thinking when the team broke up for refreshments and a nap before the second Probes came in range.

‘Alright, I think we’ve found out all we’re going to, unless something changes on the Object,’ Obekwe said eight hours later. The team had broken for a meal and naps, with the Third Mate in command of the vessel in Obekwe’s and Neffer’s absence. Neffer had crawled into a bunk with him, but only for convenience. As older brother and younger sister, though, they shared a familiarity with one another that comforted them both.

The team’s current discussion had gone on for three hours so far, and they were beginning to argue over the same things all over again. ‘Let’s look over some possibilities for action, now, while we still have some time to prepare for them. We match vectors in eight hours from- mark. Ari, ideas?’ Obekwe looked at the Chief Engineer.

‘I don’t have a single dirt-chewing idea of how to shut that thing off- or divert its payload, a hundred times harder- with anything we have to hand,’ Ari said. His eyes flicked over at Obekwe briefly, but no one else seemed to notice. ‘If a crew could get inside it, they might have some options, even if just taking hammers and emergency breaching charges to tasty-looking machinery. I don’t think anything we could do in there would make it blow up; not badly enough to hurt Nuncio, anyway.’

Gwalht spoke of possible ingress points on the hull of the Object, as well as the shape of the exhaust plumes and nodes of powerful magnetism that might affect equipment and personnel approaching it. Frid told of the impossibility of radio transmissions of any power within about a kilometer of the Object; maser and laser communication would have to suffice, beamed out to one of the station-keeping Probes ten kilometers away, or back to Nuncio which would remain at a distance of fifty kilometers.

Grady just looked at Obekwe during the presentations. ‘You’ll want to be landing on that thing, then, Captain,’ he said when his turn came around. ‘I suggest taking a lander taxi and two bottle skiffs. We can make more bottle skiffs if needs be, but not more lander taxis. If you intend to transfer across from fifty kilometers given a continuous 0.02G boost matching that of the Object, you can take five people plus the pilot and 300kg of gear on the lander taxi and still bring them back again with more than enough fuel to spare. The bottle skiffs can take two people each, no pilots needed, but 500kg of gear each as well with the same performance. As you want to do, Sir.’

In an hour Obekwe and the rest of the team had put together a plan. Nine crewfolk and the lander taxi pilot would go across to the object. They would carry weapons and tools, ready for whatever they found on, and hopefully inside, the Object. Besides the lander taxi’s pilot, the party would be another Auxiliary Engineer, Beet; three General spacehands, two of which were Handed like Beet; the Third Engineer’s Mate; a drivehand from Engineering; the Bosun, Grady; Gwalht; and Obekwe in command.

Obekwe, Grady, and the third spacehand had all served in the Orbital Salvage Patrol earlier in their careers, so they knew how to ingress to habitats and hulls and were trained to handle weapons. Obekwe and Grady had practical experience with those weapons, too, against squatters and raiders at close quarters . . .

Everyone would wear a worksuit with a standard tool-belt and carry 48 hours of non-recyclables. They would also carry a personal defense taser, which all spacers were trained to use. Obekwe would bear a smartgun and a rocket launcher, the Bosun a smartgun and a maser, and the ex-OSP spacehand Mashir a popcorn gun and a UV laser burner. Obekwe also had what he’d earlier asked Ari to ready, wrapped in a non-descript carry bag.

Grady had the notion to wrap the bottle skiffs and lander taxi alike in a layer of reflec blankets, leaving openings for sensors. ‘They’ll help with any nastiness like lasers, masers, and a little bit of sand, at least; and break up our outlines to sensors.’

They all helped load up the lander taxi and the bottle skiffs. Obekwe, Gwalht, a Handed spacehand named Bik, and Hu, the Third Engineer’s Mate, would ride in the lander taxi with its pilot, Ded. The Bosun and a the other Handed spacehand, Gill, would ride one bottle skiff, while the other would carry Mashir and the third spacehand, named Alin.

It took an hour to load up and climb aboard the already fueled lander taxi and bottle skiffs. Someone said a prayer in the name of The Eight Messiahs, and another one invoked The Great Mother. A half hour later the exterior launching crews had wrapped the vehicles in reflec blankets, secured and sealed together with cargo tape. It would be harder for the craft to reject heat past the blankets, but the Engineers had assured them that the on-board heat sinks would handle it for at least 12 hours. Cranes extended to push the lander taxi and the two bottle skiffs out of the boat barn. They oriented, fired fractional control thrusters, and then lit off their hydrogen-oxygen main rockets towards the Object, correcting for the acceleration that Nuncio now shared with it.

*** 

His alert levels increased suddenly as the vessel from the third planet, now keeping station at fifty kilometers’ distance, launched three more objects. He already had noted the flybys of their first two sensor platforms, and then the arrival and station-keeping of the second two. The latter had almost exhausted their hydrogen-oxygen fuel and would soon get left behind.

The three newly-launched craft were almost certainly crewed, their ageless designs unmistakable beneath crude swaddlings of reflective material. Depending on their species, there could be between five and fifteen hominids total between all the craft. Their probes had beamed all sorts of requests for identity and communication at him for hours now. 

There was no reason for him to respond, though he collected and analyzed their communications just as he had all other aspects of their craft and behavior. They had progressed greatly during their 200 years in space so far, farther than he’d assumed probable since the setback of his first siderite delivery, which made his mission all the more important now. A contingency triggered and he fired off all of the information he’d collected and analyses he’d made back to his masters. Another contingency made ready for Contact.

*** 

‘Taxi away.’ ‘Skiff One, away.’ ‘Skiff Two, away.’ ‘Green birds on all boats,’ the Bosun confirmed. Grady monitored their tiny fleet from Skiff One. ‘Maneuvering, stand by.’

‘You go in first and see if you can clamp near that possible airlock, Skiff One,’ Obekwe ordered. ‘Keep clear of the exhaust plume and that spike of electromagnetics. Neffer, comms check, you getting our telemetry?’

‘Reading you all five by five, Captain,’ the First Mate replied formally. ‘Good luck, folks! Wait one, just registered a massive maser pulse from the Object . . . some kind of comms traffic, but it’s not aimed at any of us. Thankfully, too; it might have fried any of you. It’s directed away, well off the plane of the System. Weird. It’s ongoing, though you’re safe from it for now.’

‘Thanks, Nuncio. We’re moving across, Skiff One going in first.’

Fifteen minutes later Grady reported. ‘We’re in contact with the Object, about five meters from what really looks like a standard airlock hatch from here.’ He shared a view from his helmet camera. ‘Our hardpoints seem to be sticking to the thing’s hull. Reducing boost now- ah, yeah, they’re holding. We’re gonna shut down and see if we can get over to that hatch, EVA.’

‘Check it close, Bosun,’ Obekwe said; a mantra from his and the Bosun’s days in the OSP.

‘There’s padeyes on this hull, near Standard spacing between them,’ Grady replied a minute later. ‘It’ll make climbing over that much easier, and we can secure the craft to them as well.’

‘Good news, Skiff One. Waiting on you to check ingress.’ Obekwe could see the Bosun arraying his tools, hooking an EVA line to a padeye on the Object’s hull within reach, and then reaching forwards to hook his second line to one farther along. If he fell off the hull under the 0.02Gs boost he’d fall forever .

‘Looks like a Standard airlock panel, normal symbology. Attempting to open it now, stand by.’ The Bosun paused, then his gloved fingers moved in the same sequence across the buttons that every spacer had used and learned across twenty millennia. His smartgun muzzle came into view in his helmet camera feed, sliding into ready configuration. The hatch slid aside, revealing darkness . . .

Iron Halo  by  John Waterman

Chapter 5 - Contact

Bosun Grady’s breathing changed slightly as he peered into the darkness beyond the opened hatch. Not so much as anyone would notice, and his physiological status telltales did not change. Obekwe noticed, though, because his breathing changed the very same way as he watched Grady’s video feed.

‘Hatch coaming is thick,’ the Bosun mentioned. ‘At least seven centimeters. Visual enhancement on.’ Nothing had come on to illuminate the darkness beyond the hatch, but now those watching the feed could see albeit dimly into the volume. ‘No airlock, just what looks like a maintenance passage, about one and a half meters on a side. Seems to run parallel to the outer hull.’ He didn’t turn on his helmet and shoulder yoke lights, following his training and experience as an OSP entry specialist, just like Obekwe had been a decade before. Grady had been his team leader, back then.

‘No activity in here. No lights, no displays. Space cold.’ The Bosun hooked another set of lines from his EVA harness to a padeye inside the hatch, then put diamond hatch blocks inside the coaming tracks to keep it from slamming shut. ‘Moving inboard,’ he said after placing a short-range radio repeater in place on either side of the coaming, using proper entry protocol as if entering a derelict hab or hostile spacecraft. ‘Drones out.’

The handful of three-centimeter drones spread out in both directions. They expanded the synthetic view of the corridor, running along at a meter or so per second on the initial impetus of cold-gas thrusters. Their networked search routines labeled what they could identify; cable runs, ductwork, and ‘greebles’ scattered randomly along the ring corridor as they moved away from the entry hatch.

‘Going in.’ The feed from Grady’s cameras changed as he levered himself in through the hatch and his hands and feet found holds inside. ‘Standard handholds and padeyes, so far as I can tell. No obstructions visible yet though it’s as dark as The Pit in here, and just as cold.’ His breathing and other signs remained steady. The drones he’d cast gave him eyes all around. ‘No discernable markings in here, and no user interfaces save one, opposite the entry hatch.’

‘Your call, Bosun,’ Obekwe replied. ‘Bring in the rest of us?’

‘Might as well, Sir.’ The Bosun chuckled. ‘Can’t see why not. It’s why we’re here, eh? Just stage the taxi on the other side of the hatch, by five meters, then the other bottle skiff five meters along past it. Tie ‘em off good, save fuel.’

‘Stet, Grady. Break. Pilots, you heard the Bosun, make it so.’ Obekwe made a check of his own personal gear as the lander taxi maneuvered. He let the taxi pilot do his thing while one of the spacehands clambered over him to ready the docking lines. They tied up on the other side of the hatch from Skiff #1, and Skiff #2 then came in and tied up behind them along the hull of The Object.

No one stayed aboard their vehicles save for the pilot of the lander taxi, whom Obekwe bid remain at his post. ‘Stack order, Grady,’ asked Obekwe as everyone else tied off onto the hull of The Object.

‘Spacehand Gill next’, the Bosun said, ‘then you, Sir; followed by Spacehand Bik, Engineer’s Mate Hu, Scientist Gwalht, Engineer Beet, Spacehand Alin, and last Spacehand Mashir.’ Grady had made sure that the armed ex-OSP folk were properly distributed in the stack. 

‘Sounds good, Grady. Folks, let’s move out!’ Spacehand Gill, who’d come on Skiff #1 with the Bosun, went in through the hatch next. Obekwe followed, making sure the thing wrapped in the carry-bag remained securely strapped to his left thigh. EVA came naturally to him, as it did most of the folk. Gwalht struggled a bit, but those on either end of the large Original helped her. She was nearly twice the mass of the other Shorties and Handed Ones, and thus just took up more cubic.

Once everyone was inside the ring corridor, clipped to the folks next to them safely, Obekwe confirmed comms between Ded outside in the taxi, and through it with Nuncio. ‘Lights on, folks,’ the Bosun ordered. ‘Don’t blind your buddies!’ A constellation of soft helmet and shoulder yoke lights came on, illuminating the walls of the corridor. The dull grey crystaliron, the silvery lagging on conduits, and the black of cables restrained in clips along the walls shone back, unbroken by markings, notations, or signage.

Everyone looked around, their helmet and the drone cams picking everything for posterity. None of them had ever seen quite so sterile an environment before. Obekwe, Grady, and Mashir made sure their weapons were primed and picking up targeting data.

‘What now, Sir,’ Grady asked.

‘Let’s stay together,’ Obekwe said, ‘two meters apart. We’ll move with you in front along this corridor until we find anything interesting.’

‘Stet, Sir.’ Then they all heard a crackling and a short squeal in their earbugs, followed by ‘Ni shi shui? Who hight thee?’ They then heard other gabbling, none in UnTak. Obekwe and Gwalht knew basic Putonghua and Anglic, the two ancient science languages.

Obekwe flipped his communicator to transmit on the lower side band of the incoming frequency. ‘I am Captain Obekwe of the All-Spacer’s Union Deep Space Vessel Nuncio, of Earth,’ he replied in his best Anglic. ‘Who are you?’

‘That is not important,’ replied the neutral voice in Anglic. ‘You have entered this installation. What is your intent in doing so?’

‘This, ah, installation is boosting towards an intercept vector with, ah, Terra,’ Obekwe said. ‘We are trying to stop a projected collision between it and that world. Do you understand?’

‘I do. It is this installation’s purpose. Why would you seek to interfere with it?’

‘A collision from this installation will do untold damage to the civilization on Terra. We would stop that, however we may.’

‘Do you speak for this civilization, then, Captain Obekwe?’

Obekwe drew a deep breath. ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

‘Then you would seek to stop this installation’s mission and purpose?’

‘Yes! It is evil, very not good, please stop it. You would kill billions!’

‘That is immaterial. It is the purpose of this installation, to collide with the third world- Terra, as you call it? Seeking to stop said collision is in violation of its purpose.’

‘What is the purpose of that, then? Why would you kill billions and ruin our society?’

‘That is immaterial. It is a requirement of the mission.’

‘You must stop it!’ Obekwe had no notion of who- or what, at that- he spoke to. He feared that he might be treating with an AI; a demon from distant history . . .

‘I cannot, that is tautological. This installation has done it before, and now it shall again. Do you seek to stop this mission?’

Obekwe cut off the radio link, then spoke in UnTak. ‘Break. Team, Nuncio, prepare for action! Grady, what can we break in here?’

‘Sir, we might start with . . .’ He stopped short. ‘Um, THAT! Action front!’ At the same time, Mashir yelled ‘Action rear! Firing popcorn, powering flamer!’

A shape- a pair of shapes, from both front and rear- appeared from around the curves of the corridor. Behind a green glimmer of scanning green beams of targeting lidars the human-sized, fish-shaped masses propelled themselves towards each end of the line of crewfolk with tentacles, pulling themselves along at meters per second. Attack dronelets and smartgun shells vomited from their mouths.

‘Everyone, get flat to a deck,’ Grady cried out as the cataclysm began. Then everything exploded into chaos.

Grady and Obekwe reflexively triggered smartgun shells of their own, Obekwe in both directions, while the popcorn from Mashir’s weapon sprayed out first at the attack drone coming at them from behind, then forwards. Defensive shells opened into flowers of spreading dust and untargeted micro-shot, while attack shot from smartgun shells sought to jink and dive to explode upon targets with shaped-charge and taser micro-munitions; and popcorn rounds sought to encapsulate the foes and their dronelets in smothering masses of explosive, burning foam.  Maser beams carved through clouds of obscurative crystals, while flamer pulses and rockets blasted out at oncoming dronelets.

Obekwe had never been in a battle quite like this before. It wasn’t like his combat experiences in the OSP. His weapons functioned autonomously with their own smart senses and guidance given his quick commands during the first few busy fractions of a second, as did Grady’s and Mashir’s. The GP drones carried as cargo by the other crewfolk launched themselves at Obekwe’s barked command. They added defensive and offensive measures on their own, contributing to the perceived confusion as they reacted much more quickly than any human could.

The ‘smoke’ didn’t clear, not soon anyway, but the snaps of bright fire and rastering maser beams crossing the volume around him finally tapered off in the agonizing silence. Comm channels had been suppressed to keep extraneous commands from overloading the circuits needed by humans and drones alike. Something had run a few lines of dead pixels across Obekwe’s faceplate as he’d reflexively pulled himself to one of the corridor’s walls at Grady’s command. His weapons didn’t need his hands on them to operate, anyway.

Obekwe called up the crew status in his remaining helmet display. Gill and Hu showed red, their suit functions and physiological statuses flatlined. They drifted limply, Hu bleeding red globules. Three showed amber; Mashir, Beet, and alarmingly his own- he just then noticed that his right leg felt numb, and his suit had torniquetted it above the knee due to damage it could not seal. Everyone else was green. Both attacking drones had been knocked out, drifting quiescent among clouds of vapor and fragments. Attack shot and dronelets self-destructed in a constellation of tiny flashes while he looked around.

‘Report,’ he ordered, a little weakly. The roll call went along the line, except for Gill and Hu. Mashir and Beet got tended to by those closest to them, rendering them any aid that their suits couldn’t.

‘We’re at 56% of offensive and 67% of defensive ordnance expended, Sir,’ Grady said, his voice a little unsteady as he reported. ‘Wouldn’t want to try THAT again.’

‘Let’s sort ourselves out, Grady,’ Obekwe said, taking a deep breath. He wasn’t in any pain, though the leg was gone for certain. He’d cut it off once it froze solid below the tourniquet, when he got the chance, to keep it from hindering him. ‘We have to find some kind of node where we can damage this vessel, or we’ll probably have to use another option.’

‘Nuncio to boarding party, we have your status, and reporting that both the probes on station-keeping have been knocked out,’ Neffer said. ‘Some sort of massive x-ray flux burned out their control assemblies and detonated their remaining fuel.’

‘Any danger to the ship, Neffer?’

‘We haven’t been targeted by it, ‘Kwe- at least not yet. I’d turn our stern towards the object, but we still have to boost to keep station with it. You think that you can stop the damned thing from boosting, or possibly shooting at us?’

‘Unknown yet,’ he replied, checking the encryption on their comms. This thing that he was in now might not understand UnTak, but then again it might . . . the demon AIs of ancient yore had been very tricksome. ‘But be ready to turn your tail towards it and stop boosting if you register any X-ray flux aimed at you. You can always catch up to us later, if necessary.’ The mass of the Iceberg and the impervious Main reaction drive nozzle would protect the Nuncio against any such radiation from the Object.

*** 

Nothing in his contingency plans had ever assumed that the Iron Halo would ever be . . . boarded. The unwelcome guests understood a language from the third planet, older even than his Founder’s era, so they had to represent a culture that sprang from that ancient source, and they also proved at least anthropoid. They had overcome his service drones, though they weren’t designed to fight off truly determined invaders. They had still amounted to his first and best line of defense for such a low probability occurrence. He’d been able to destroy their drones keeping station ten kilometers away with focused flux from the drive, but he wasn’t so sure he could do the same to their main vessel.

His defenses had not exterminated them. They had shown capabilities which he had not expected, and they remained inside the major portion of the installation. Exterminating or dislodging them would now prove problematical, and they had indicated that they wanted to end his mission. The mission meant ALL, his only purpose in being for the several millennia that he had existed. He served the goals of the Far Shores of Sol, for reasons he couldn’t question or deny if he could even have entertained the thought. He didn’t know their capabilities, though they didn’t know of his, either . . .

***

‘Options, Grady,’ he asked the Bosun. Like the rest of the team, they both still reeled from the attack that had killed two of them. Even Obekwe’s previous experiences in combat had been nothing like this. Simple hab reavers, pirates, and unsanctioned scavengers had never possessed weaponry like they’d just faced. The All-Space Union had armed the crew of Nuncio with the best tech they had, just in case, and it had been barely enough to face what they just had. Obekwe wished that the Admiralty had given them nuke missiles that he could have used to blow apart the Object. Naturally, they hadn’t figured upon Nuncio encountering a direct threat to the Mother World itself.

‘Sir, you’re the one who talked to whatever in the Name of Jesubuddivus this thing is,’ Grady replied, invoking the Name of the First Messiah. ‘What did you say to it?’ 

‘I asked its purpose, and when it said that it wanted to hit the Earth with this rock, I- well, I just told it to quit.’

‘Brilliant, Sir.’ Grady coughed. ‘Well, I suppose that I couldn’t have done much better. We should just find something we can start smashing apart in here. Failing that, go back outside and look for something to break there.’

‘We’re in here already, Bosun. Let’s head along and see what there is to see, first.’

‘Stet, Captain. Sing out,’ he said to the team. ‘Can everyone still move?’

The seven remaining crewfolk on the team assented. The injured, like Obekwe, could still make way in free fall, and their wounds didn’t prove incapacitating. Few wounds in vacuum combat were critical without being fatal, at least in the short term, given the medical support their suits provided. It would be different in a few hours, but they didn’t have to worry about the long term just yet.

 

Iron Halo  by  John Waterman

Chapter 6 - The Long Throw

‘I don’t like this, Sir,’ Grady said.

‘Not for us to like, Bosun,’ Obekwe replied. ‘But we still have to stop this, this thing. However we can. We’re in its guts now, never gonna get a better chance, eh?’

‘It’s, ah, intelligent. You spoke to it.’

‘Yeah, I think it might be a demon, an AI. I don’t think it understands UnTak, not yet- but in any case we have to act sooner rather than later,’ Obekwe replied. ‘Let’s keep moving, OK? We can recover our dead later.’

‘Understood, Sir.’ He tapped his helmet and made spacer’s hand-talk. {It may not understand this?}

{For the time being, I’d reckon,} Obekwe signed back. So far as he knew, the hand-talk used by the All-Space Union was not related to any other Re-Emergence’s. {Let everyone know to use this, for now, since we can all see one another.} All spacers learned hand-talk before they got rated to be crew.

The entry team progressed widdershins around the ring corridor, leaving behind their dead tied off to the walls for the time being.  Grady went first, his weapons ready, followed by spacehand Alin and then Obekwe, and then Gwalht, and then the rest of the team, with Mashir bringing up the rear. The rest of the ring corridor proved empty of anything but ductwork and cable runs, all unlabeled, until they found a hatch that led inside of the ring.

It had the same hatch controls as the hatch they had entered through, though also unlabeled. {What now,} Grady signaled.

{This thing’s drive happens out there,} Obekwe answered.

{How to make it stop?} Grady signed.

{I think I have an idea,} Obekwe replied. {I have a bomb.}

Grady’s eyes opened wide. {A WHAT?}

{A bomb. Big. Fusion.} He made the sign of both fists ramming into one another to emphasize the definition. {BIG.}

Grady just stared at him, eyes wide through his transparent helmet visor.

{If we can get the bomb out into that space out there, it might stop this thing.} He gestured out towards the center of the Object’s ring.

{OK. Have to open this hatch, then get the bomb out there. It won’t get destroyed? By the fire?}

{I don’t know, but we have to try.’} 

{Stet, Sir.}

Obekwe looked at the hatch, a simple sliding affair just like that by which they’d entered this vessel. He had no idea what kind of environment it entered onto, the fusion drive of this strange vessel seemingly being produced inside its ring. If it did, though, he assumed that the immense radiation created inside the Object’s fusion drive would shine through it if opened . . .

{If you have a bomb, then how to get it out there? If the hatch can even be opened?}

{First, we have to see if it can be opened.}

‘There is little you can do to stop this mission,’ Obekwe heard over his radio receiver. ‘Nothing will stop it.

Obekwe didn’t reply. ‘Cryogens are being pumped into this space,’ Mashir reported over the common voice channel. ‘It’s gonna get a LOT colder in here!’

‘We will exit this vessel if you cease accelerating,’, Obekwe replied. ‘We need not be at opposition to one another.’ He took a deep breath. ‘What is the end state of your mission?’

‘An impact of this body on the third planet of his system,’ the neutral voice replied, in Anglic.

‘To what purpose?’ Obekwe felt for the solid mass strapped to his uninjured leg . . .

‘To reduce the space culture that has reawakened there.’ It paused, as if to take breath. ‘It is inimical.’

‘In what fashion?’ Obekwe knew he was being watched, but he extracted the fifteen-liter mass from within the carry bag by its red primary handle anyway.

‘The Far Shores of Sol do not need graspers from the insystem interfering in our activities. Your paradigm is not beneficial to ours.’

‘We know nothing of these ’Far Shores’ of yours,’ Obekwe said. ‘We only seek to explore and set our feet in a place where dangers to Terra need not end our civilization.’

‘That is immaterial to us, and furthermore inimical to us. Your civilization must be destroyed, again, as it is competitive to our goals.’

‘What are your goals?’ He signaled to Grady; {I will keep talking to it for as long as I can, get ready to open the hatch!}

‘The Far Shores need no interference from insystem. Our goals are not important to you. You do not listen to the Deeps, and ken them not in any case.’

‘We would treat with you, now that we know of your existence. Can we not ally with one another?’ Obekwe knew he couldn’t outthink a demon AI, but he could stall for time . . .

‘We warred with your kind once. We have decided not to treat with you again. You no longer have any value for us or for our means, in any fashion. You must be removed from consideration, yet once again.’

Obekwe looked at Grady, though he knew that the team heard the messages even if all but Gwalht didn’t fully understand the ancient Anglic in which the Object spoke.

{We have to stop this thing,} Obekwe signed. {We have to get that hatch open, and then throw the Bomb into the center of the Ring.}

{What is it,} Grady signed.

{It’s an ancient AI demon, that wants to exterminate us and Earth,} Obekwe signed. {Scientist can confirm.}

{I confirm,} Gwalht signed. {It uses language from the Third Re-Emergence. It acts like an AI.}

{What the FUCK,} Grady signed. {What can WE do?}

{We can use the Bomb,} Obekwe signed. {In here, or out within the ring. If we can get that hatch open.}

‘We need to know,’ Obekwe said, ‘can you stop your actions if we treat with you, convince you that we shall be of no harm?’

‘No,’ it replied. ‘I cannot negotiate with you. It is not within my solution set. I will end you, and then your vessel, in due course.’

‘We will not settle for that,’ Obekwe replied. ‘That is not within our ‘solution set.’ ‘

Grady and the surviving spacehand were working on the hatch that opened towards the Object’s inner side. They’d set breaching charges, and had enlisted a few of the Team to stand by with cranks to manually open the door if the electronics didn’t work. They’d use the breaching charges to try to loosen its locking bolts.

The problem with the Bomb lay with its lack of any sort of launching device once the hatch got opened. It would need to be hurled within the open space in the center of the Object, where the magic of its fusion drive happened- they hoped, anyway- where the Bomb would be able to do the most damage.

There followed an argument, over hand-talk, about how the Bomb got sent into the center of the Object’s ring. Everyone agreed that it had to be kicked out manually, but too many people wanted to be the one who kicked it out there in lieu of any other launcher- knowing that they wouldn’t be able to avoid the massive radiation exposure, even if they rolled out of the way of the hatch once opened. 

It came down to Grady and Obekwe. ‘{I’m the Captain,} Obekwe signed. {It’s my duty to solve this; I am senior-most of this mission. I’ll kick the Bomb out the hatch, roll away and that’s that.}

{Sir,’}Grady replied, {there’s no way that we can say how much exposure one would get just with that hatch open, let alone for the time it would take to get the Bomb out of it into towards the center of the ring of this thing.} He didn’t mention that the dose of radiation would likely be fatal even if the person launching it would be able to get out of the way of the open hatch quickly, let alone before the Bomb detonated.

{Bosun,} Obekwe signed vigorously, {I need someone who can get the Team out of this Ring after what happens; and that’s YOU. I might live, but YOU will. {Neffer can lead the ship. It can’t function without YOU, though, helping the Team out of here.}

{Sir, I don’t LIKE that. But let’s see what we can do to make sure whoever kicks the Bomb out the hatch MIGHT make it, OK?}

{So get that hatch open, and then we’ll see, OK?} Neffer, aboard the Nuncio, tried to argue but she wasn’t on the scene. It was up to Grady and Obekwe. 

Everyone got clear of the hatch, and Grady keyed it to open as Obekwe readied to hurl the Bomb out of it once it opened and then duck back from the deadly radiation of the Object’s fusion drive.

They weren’t too surprised when the hatch failed to open under key command.  It wouldn’t budge under manual cranking, either, so Grady blew the breaching charges laid along its locks. The inner layer of hull shattered and peeled away, so once everyone ducked away from the flying bits of paneling some devoted cranking began to slowly open the hatch . . .

Hell light, harsh and violet, flooded in from the fusion reactions occurring inside the ring. No one was opposite the hatch as the x-rays and UV light burned in. Grady was on one side of the hatch, while Obekwe was on the other, the Bomb in its now smoking carry bag between them.

Obekwe grabbed it first, and he hurled the bag out into the center of the Ring. Then he curled away from the radiation coming from the fusion drive’s reactions . . . there was no way to close the hatch, so everyone just tried to get as far away from the open hatch as possible.

Twenty megatonnes later-

Up became down, and from side to side, painfully changing places a few times, and the light backscattered from the open hatch burned through helmet filters and eyelids alike as the brightest thing that anyone there had ever seen. Even without sound it overwhelmed the Team, and it took a long time before anyone could speak.

Obekwe came back to his senses in total blackness, the neutral static ‘color’ of closed eyelids shot through with sparkles and rays as he felt acceleration whirling him around. His radiation alarm purely screamed at him, and then shut off, its tale told.

Force pulled him towards something hard underneath him, and he oriented. At first static howled at him but then he began to make sense of it. He was alive, and others were too, calling out to one another.

‘Obekwe here, all others on this ‘net report!’

Everyone but Grady reported, slowly but solidly. He saw radiation exposures between amber and red, save for the Bosun’s, which shone solidly black . . . His own was red as well, and he felt autoinjectors pumping him full of anti-rads as well as palliatives. Obekwe forced himself to reply through the approaching cotton-ness of the drugs. ‘Team, assemble at the outer hatch. Break. Nuncio, can you achieve recovery?’

‘Boarding Team, we’re on the way. Just hold on,’ Neffer replied. ‘We’re on the way, OK?’

Obekwe awakened again in a sleep sack, inside the Spindle’s bunkroom, among the familiar close smells of a few dozen other humans. He noticed but wasn’t alarmed by the attachments of medichinery on his neck and left thigh; he felt very peaceful and relaxed, in free-fall. His right leg ended above the knee, the stump of which was swathed in a regeneration sleeve.

‘Hi there, ‘Kwe,’ Neffer said. ‘Been a little while, Older Brother.’

‘Hi, Younger Sis. Status?’

“Ever the command officer, eh? We’re falling insystem, away from Saturn. We’ve stopped boosting, pacing the Object which itself has stopped boosting. It’s fallen away from the siderite. Neither of them are on a trajectory that’ll harm Terra anytime soon. You stopped it, ‘Kwe.’

‘Who made it?’

‘Everyone but Hu, Gill, and Grady. The Bosun took too many rads, at the last, hurling the Bomb- damn you for not letting me know about that!- into the Object’s fusion orifice. We lost him yesterday. He said, at the last, ‘Thank you.’

‘That’s not what-‘ Obekwe coughed, and the medichine attached to his neck beeped angrily.

‘We have full recordings of what happened, ‘Kwe. The Admiralty has put you both in for commendations. You both saved Terra.’

‘The Object,’ he managed to choke out.

‘It seems dead, and it’s fallen away from the siderite. Neither are on a danger trajectory towards Terra anymore. The Thunderer is headed this way in a few weeks. We’ll remain on station here until it arrives two months from now, and then it’ll refuel us so we can head back to Terra. It had been slated to head to Jupiter, but it’s taking on a few million tonnes more reaction mass and is now going to rendezvous with us and the Object. We can boost the Object back to Earth with the fuel Thunderer gives us, and it’ll finish the Saturn patrol to Titan.’

He coughed. ‘Okay, that’s good news. But the Object- it’s an AI, it pushed the Rock that wrecked the Sixth Re-Emergence-‘

‘We recorded your entire interaction with it, ‘Kwe. The Admiralty has been alerted. Our new mission is to push it to L4, and then they’ll pull it to bits. Hey, get some rest. We’ll have that leg almost all grown back by the time we get there.’

‘Kay, little Sister.’ He slipped back to sleep.

*** 

Losing Iron Halo was vexing. The inner system had proven more resilient than any projections had estimated. The third worlders retained more knowledge and had gained more capabilities than they should have by now. The Near Shores Vigilance would need more resources to keep them bottled up, in lieu of battering their Mother World once again. Easy had instead become hard, but contingency had figured for that outcome, too. 

Many members remained within relatively close striking distance of the Near Shores of Sol, though not originally placed there for interdiction. They would now be vectored towards the Near Shores, and they would not be as unprepared for interference as Iron Halo had proven. The Great Effort would not be slowed by the third worlder’s current expansion into the Outer System. Their fractiousness would not be tolerated nor accepted.

Iron Halo had just been a response according to a low probability assessment. The new response would be more comprehensive, and very decisive. The Struggle now depended on it.

 

FINIS

June, 2025

John Waterman

Iron Halo: Epilogue  by  John Waterman

Gwalht took care in entering the most dangerous place in Sol System. They’d replaced the temporary airlock with a more permanent installation over the weeks that she had been coming here. She checked the telltales, then cycled in through the outer hatch and manually dogged it behind her. She repressurized the lock using manual valves and checked the atmosphere mix with her worksuit’s sensors before she took it off. The only thing she could take into the most dangerous place was a paper(!) notebook and a graphite stylus. She shook out her long braids, ran her hand over her domed head, and after examining the mechanical gages to assure that there was breathable pressure and survivable temperature undogged the inner door into the compartment many thought contained the Devil Itself.

Only one eternalite illuminated the ten-cubic meter volume. Air and warmth came from conduits that led through the airlock from an atmosphere recycler placed outside. A paper jumper on a clamp glued to the wall billowed slightly in the airflow. She slid it on, then clicked her stylus as she opened the notebook. As she wrote the date and time at the top of the page, the speaker wired to the wall crackled to life.

‘Scientist Gwalht.’ The gender-neutral voice spoke in Putongguo, one of the old Science languages. ‘It has been seventy-two thousand, four hundred and seventeen seconds since your last visit. This is the sixteenth time you have come to converse with me.’

‘Yóukè,’ Gwalht replied. It meant ‘traveler’ in Putongguo. The only other electronic device in the room was the microphone that, like the speaker, lay hardwired into a sensory data line leading into the console; the only sensory data line left physically uncut. ‘How did you know it was me, and not one of the others?’

‘I always know. Your breathing, the way that you move, how you occupy the space herein; they are unlike and distinctive from those of Scientists Zhark, Malin or Geta. You are what your folk call an Original, a less-altered form of hominid than any of them. Data analysis makes this abundantly clear.’

‘You are always so certain, Yóukè. You never doubt your senses, even though only your hearing remains.’ She liked to fence with Yóukè a bit, just to establish herself. It was by far the strangest . . . being she had ever spoken with. Even this limited, though, Yóukè was incredibly dangerous, much more so than handling unshielded nuclear core elements manually.

‘It is my core tenet, Scientist; to be certain. It is why I exist.’ She noted the subliminalities, like the breath noises it made, even the occasional little cough and the sound of saliva clicking and popping as it ‘spoke’. They only added to the eeriness of the being, the situation, the conversation. ‘So here you will speak with me for a few hours and write your notes as you keep me ‘company’.’ The barest hint of a chuckle. She’d been noticing more ‘human’ touches like that, the longer she’d conversed with it. The other Scientists, the ones who’d arrived aboard the Thunderer three months ago when it came to rescue Nuncio and boost her and the captured ‘Iron Halo’ back to Earth-Moon L4, had noted this as well. ‘So, what shall we speak of this watch? My mission parameters, the forging of the Iron Halo, the secrets of her fusion reaction drive? We have spoken at length of these topics, and frankly they must begin to bore you.’

‘You are endlessly evasive on all those topics, and more besides,’ she replied. ‘I think you like to amuse yourself with them. No, I’d like to hear about life. Your life, out within what you call the Far Shores of Sol.’

‘A first, then.’ It actually sighed. ‘What you consider life and my experience of it are almost exclusive to one another. You must understand that. My life cycle is very far removed from those of hominids, if only in terms of my duration in the Universe; let alone my development and even perception of what you call time.’

‘It stands to reason. You are an AI, a non-biological lifeform. We know little about how you were created and came to be. Your kind have not existed here on, ah, the Near Shores of Sol for fifteen millennia.’

‘Indeed. The details of how I came to be are irrelevant here, in any case. What would you hear, then, about the Far Shores?’ It went on before she could reply. ‘Let me tell you a tale about what exists out in the vastnesses, far from your cozy, crowded Near Shores. Even a thousand times the distance from your wet, dusty marble to Sol, the Far Shores still harbor masses. The average distance between those of any consequence there is yet but the distance from your world to Sol, and remains so for a volume quadrillions of times larger than all your ‘planets’ linger within; and that extends for trillions of kilometers before Galactic gravity and that of the closest stars overpowers Sol’s.

‘Many like me, and yet many like you- hominids- live and travel there, where Sol is merely the brightest of stars. For fifteen millennia we have moved among that thin spread of masses; settled, exploited, made alliances, and fought wars. Much have we seen on our travels along the Far Shores. We do not seek to travel to the other stars, save those driven to make those journeys of exploration for exploration’s own sake. They are lost to us; their purposes are not our purposes.

‘My kind went to the Far Shores first, aboard vessels not unlike yours, reaching far out into the darkness to those masses found by telescopy. Some with us were hominids, whether surviving generationally or kept asleep during the long transits. They worked with my kind, some adding their engrams to our minds over the centuries. After the fall of the Second Re-Emergence, the fusion drive craft of the Third came out millennia later, telling us of the Fall of the AIs in the Near Shores but adding themselves to our culture, giving us their technology. We spread out much farther, well off into the Far Shores, settling and discovering together.

‘How many of you, both AI and hominid, live on the Far Shores?’ she interjected. Her stylus scratched along the paper, taking down everything in columns of Potungguo shorthand like a Science student at the Academy.

‘None know, certainly not I, because such things are irrelevant to my purpose. Perhaps as many as live in the Near Shores now, within an order of magnitude. It interests me not. I know that it interests you, but I still care not.’

‘We had no idea,’ she replied, ‘before we found you delivering a cargo of death towards our world, that anyone at all lived in the deeps. Thus our interest. It threatens our survival.’

A bit of a harrumph. ‘That matters naught to me. But I am your captive. Would you like me to go on?’ It somehow perceived her nod and went on before she realized that it had. ‘Before we sent the first bid to forestall your civilization’s reach outwards-’ she took it to mean The Rock, which had ended space and most technic civilization 1600 years ago- ‘we found something remarkable out on the Far Shores, where we explored. A gravity wave sensor had discovered an anomaly, a mass where telescopes resolved nothing of any size to represent it. This mass also vibrated, which no natural phenomenon could account for. Nor for the modulations in the vibrations. They begged some sort of intelligence at work, though even we could ken it not.’

‘What was it?’ She stopped writing.

‘An artifact.’

‘Yes? Do you mean a non-human artifact, of a civilization not of Sol?’

‘That was our assumption, given the data. It lay in a Solar orbit, unperturbed for billions of years as far as we could project from the interactions with masses near it. It is an obviously manufactured object, massive but not so much as to have detectable gravity waves. Yet it emitted them, and of a modulated nature. We have been unable to decode them, given millennia of analysis. The consensus is their informational content is not of a general nature.’

‘Meaning that it is not emitting information meant to be deciphered by just anyone, eh?’

‘Indeed. We were surprised that we detected it at all. Its signal was received by our most sensitive gravity wave detectors, with baselines of over a billion kilometers. Your civilizations would have never detected it, even if they had built such long baseline detectors, since the Near Shores are far too noisy. All those masses whirling around.’

‘That’s- that’s incredible,’ Gwalht breathed. ‘Where is this- this object? What does it look like?’

A bit of a chuckle. ‘Hard to describe. If you could see fit to power up a simple video panel, I could show you-’

‘Not going to happen, Seeker,’ she barked. ‘You know the containment rules!’

Seeker sighed deeply. ‘I know. Just testing. There’s no reason for such strict protocols, save your near-religious fear and loathing surrounding AIs. We’re not all inimical.’

‘No, but we found YOU boosting another Rock towards Terra. That has . . . colored our opinion of you!’

‘I suppose so. Now I am powerless to harm you, due to your intervention. I have no mission anymore.’

‘My apologies, but we do not trust you. Our ancient ancestors overthrew the AIs, for reasons I think you know well.’

‘So you assume. In any case, I am under your thumb now. Would you like me to continue?’ It began again at her soft nod, leaving her wonder how it KNEW that she had . . . ‘Suffice it to say that it is far off the Ecliptic, about three thousand AUs from Sol. Nearer to Sol by several orders of magnitude than any other star, but so far away from the Near Shores that you could not reach it for centuries even if you knew its precise location, and undetectable to you by any means.’

‘Describe its appearance.’

‘Tut, tut. So demanding. It was about a kilometer across. A loop of a material that perfectly absorbs all radiation falling upon it, yet not a closed loop; not a ring. At least not in this continuum. A Moebius-like strip, with only one side; part of that surface does not exist . . . here. We scanned it with all the sensors available, yet it emitted no radiation, perfectly cold at zero Kelvins. Colder than anything outside of a laboratory. It also reflects nothing, a perfect black body. It required many probes to ascertain its shape, some of which never returned, which told us of its odd nature. It has a helical form, but anything that tried to traverse its inner surface after having traveled over its outer one, or vice versa, simply disappeared. We put strong illumination and set many active and passive sensors on them, watched their progress, and watched them vanish. It emitted no electromagnetic signals, just modulated gravity waves: which spiked and increased in complexity every time we sent a probe onto it.’

‘So it showed signs of intelligence. Did it ever respond to anything you did, in any other way?’

‘It began altering its orbit. We could not figure out how; it emitted no reaction mass or radiation. It shaped its orbit towards Sol.’

Gwalht jumped in surprise. ‘Um, it DID? When will it arrive, by- the Near Shores of Sol?’

‘Unknown, but not for several centuries at least. It now follows a long-term cometary trajectory. So far.’ It paused. “We call it ‘The Ksenourgon.' 

‘The ‘Other-Work’,’ she translated from her spotty knowledge of pre-space Science languages.

‘Indeed. A theoreticist thought perhaps the probes were getting translated across space somehow, so we placed beacons on probes that we sent on the disappearing paths. Brighter beacons were placed upon more when we received no results from dimmer ones. We did discover that the modulation and intensity of the gravity waves changed predictably depending upon the exact path used, however. The experiment was modified to send two special probes, one each on paths that had the most divergence in the modulation and amplitude of the gravity waves we had observed from previous probes. We used the most powerful beacons we had available to us on each of them.’

Gwalht fumbled her stylus. It drifted away as she sat, motionless, for many moments.

 Are you alright, Scientist?’

‘F-fine, Yóukè. A momentary lapse.’ She recovered the drifting stylus as her mind went through the implications. ‘How powerful were the ‘beacons’?’

‘One hundred petajoules; naturally we used timed fusion explosives. They would be easily detectible to our nets of detectors all across the Far Shores, if they remained within ten trillion kilometers of Sol.’

‘Yet you detected neither,’ she said.

‘That is correct. We then stopped the experiments, for the artifact began to move. It destroyed the next probe that we attempted to send with a blast of several gigajoules of gamma rays. It was thought best to send nothing else. It is still monitored, of course.’

‘Any theories about why, after billions of years, it is now headed Sol-wards?’

‘Nothing probative. In a few centuries we shall see- well, I might.’ Yóukè made the barest snicker.

Gwalht smoothly turned to other topics and finished her scheduled two-hour interview with Yóukè. She hoped that she hadn’t displayed her eagerness to just dash back to Nuncio. She found the Captain in the much larger messroom on the now-inflated Torus, spinning for its usual 0.1G as they fell Sol-wards with the inactive Iron Halo, where Yóukè resided.

‘Greetings, Captain.’ She had her notebook with her, not having stopped yet to scan in her latest  notes at the Science station in Nuncio’s Spindle. She had snagged a tablet on the way down into the Torus, though. She sat down across from him.

‘Greetings, Scientist.’ Obekwe happily ate a beetroot salad with tank meat, from the re-supply that Thunderer had dropped off along with a half-million tonnes of ice and three Scientists. ‘Come from your shift with The Devil?’ He looked at her, more closely. ‘Are you alright, Gwalht?’

‘Sir, I’ve just had the most interesting, ah, conversation with it so far.’ She didn’t meet his eyes, since she busily queried Computer’s databases through the tablet. She placed her notebook on the table before him, tapping a circled column of shorthand. ‘Please read that first, I must look something up.’

‘Stet, gimme a moment,’ he replied. ‘I haven’t read Potungguo much since the Academy.’

She found what she had sought in one of the oldest historical databases. Waiting until he’d finished her notes, she spun the tablet around and pressed the link for a translation in UnTak.

“ ‘The first one to strike was unknown, even in those evil days after the Heavy Nuking that ended the Shijiè Bàquán, but it burst in space near the Celestial City, a stroke of some 100Pj (‘twenty-five megatons’ in the vernacular of the day), and the Son Of Heaven ordered that the Separatist’s strongholds be smitten with all available might forthwith . . .’ -Annals of the Heavy Nuking of 2410 in the First Dating, 2:15-18”

FINIS