Taking Joy for a Spin
by Rado Dyne
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Table of Contents, Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 |
Chapter 3: Getting There From Here
When people first mined the aggregated asteroids around the Lagrange points of Jupiter, ice climbers were born. There were amazing materials to be found there, in amazing quantities, which rendered unto humankind the ability to fuel the construction that would eventually lead us out into the stars.
The L5 point of Alberich, a gas dwarf around Proxima Centauri contains similar wealth, mined for years by people like my crew. There were many bergs made out of many materials, but the vast majority were primarily ice. Ice of different elements, gases and liquids on a planet but solid ice in space.
Minerals and compounds that had once been rare on Earth were strewn abundantly within the ice. They became plentiful if only you knew how to access them. Hence we were ice climbers, and our progenitors developed many ways of climbing, of scrambling about on the surface of these bergs, full of their valuables. They learned how to mine in relative safety and, more importantly, how to move. Astronauts learned long ago how to contend with vacuum and nearly zero-G in open space or on scaffoldings built by human hands, but the bergs were a different story.
Moving about on the icy surface of a berg held unique hazards. Weak, strong, pliable, or brittle; ice came in many forms. We eventually learned how to do a pretty good job identifying the different types of surfaces, and dealing with them while avoiding catastrophe. We learned how to move efficiently and safely on terrain never made for human feet or hands.
The use of tethers became common, as well as always working in pairs. The slightly elastic but robust mesh tether between two people provided safety and added maneuverability. Even if you fell away from an object, it gave you a chance to regroup, to reach your partner, and possibly to rebound off one another to get hold of another object. The tether in turn made possible one of the most useful and ingenious methods of moving across the ice.
Tether walking, or Tarzaning, involved one person vaulting away from the surface while tethered, then moving in an arc over their partner, Jane. Jane was the anchor, a person held in place with an ice screw or a punch anchor driven into the ice. Jane made it possible for Tarzan to swing in a circle, traveling quite some distance quickly and, more importantly, without tiring very much.
When Tarzan came down to the surface again, it was important for him to anchor himself, and not simply bounce off. This was accomplished with the punch anchor, or punchy, a spike attached to the boot and leg part of the vacuum suit or, occasionally, the arm.
The structure of the suit takes some of the impact, to avoid broken limbs. The punchy was designed so that after being driven into the ice by the impact of Tarzan, the tip would sprout fletchings which were shaped like a broadhead arrow in reverse, that would grip the ice and anchor Tarzan in place. These went through some design iterations until they evolved into the tools we have today. The tips can be instantly heated to penetrate extremely dense ice, they can be swapped out easily. Ice-climber suits have bracing and shock absorbers built in to soften landings and allow for easy attachment of punchies.
After Tarzan lands and anchors, he and Jane swap roles, with the former Tarzan becoming the anchor and former Jane becoming the swinger through the next arc. Ice climbers have even taken to calling out “Tarzan on!” or “Jane on!” to indicate their current role. An experienced pair can move quite quickly doing this, while conserving strength, and more importantly, oxygen. Observers have stated that two people tether-walking look comically like a giant alien striding across the landscape.
Ice climbers also tend to set protection or “pro” at intervals using ice screws. These are simply hollow screws that can be threaded into the ice by hand or driven with a standard rotary tool and then have a safety line clipped into the head of the screw. This is hugely beneficial if you misjudge the ice you are landing on in your next hop.
Sometimes good ice is underlain with brittle ice, or a gas pocket, and the current Tarzan fails to make a good anchor point. Worse still, he might be blown off the surface with the sudden release of gas from an unseen pocket. There are a number of standard rules we follow when moving this way. Obviously your partner is critical, so you never remove your tether and you always stay together. You always keep enough distance from other pairs of walkers to avoid tangling your tethers. Both Cap and I had done this many times, just never with one another.
So I was doing the fast version of math to get a rough idea of how long it would take us to tether-walk the entire curvature of the overhang, make it over the lip, and traverse the relatively flat surface on the other side to where our supplies were stowed at base camp. There, Cap’s overly cautious supply of oxy bottles would keep us alive long enough to signal the Lariat, and hopefully get the hell off this berg.
I must have slumped so much it was obvious to her even with the suit on. She called out over the radio, “What’s wrong?”
“There’s no way we can make it in time. If we tether-walk the whole way, I put us at almost two hours. The problem is the sheer number of tethered steps. It’s well over a hundred of those half-circle, swinging Tarzan steps. If we cover maximum distance with everyone, and we make every landing perfectly, we are right at the end of our oxygen before we get there.
“If anything goes wrong, if we fail an anchor, if we hit a gas pocket, anything, and we have to recover, we suffocate before we get there. We have a hundred chances to twist a leg wrong. Any injury slows us down. Not to mention the exertion and exhaustion will cause us to burn through oxy at too high of a rate. Even if we—”
“OK, stop right there. I was thinking the tether-walk thing too, and I like it, but what are our other options? All we’ve got to do is get to... let’s call it topside... the side of the overhang where our radios should be able to reach the ship. Can we just fly over the thing on the suit’s cold-gas jets?”
I thought for a moment. Could it be that easy? Then replied, “No. The cold gas in the suits is minimum load-out, just enough for maneuvering in an emergency. We could do minor corrections, even accelerate to a slow drift, but not enough to beat the clock.”
“OK, so no easy flying, plus we have no guarantee the Lariat is in good working order. Whatever happened seems to have only blown out our gravity units, and left our electronics intact, but no way to be sure it didn’t affect other systems on the ship as well.
“We haven’t converted the Lariat to a grav drive, yet, so hopefully it’s still able to maneuver. We didn’t bring the ship into the depression in the first place because we can’t do it safely. They should not try to rescue us. They may have other problems right now like picking up other members of the crew. We have to work on the assumption that we can eventually get picked up, but we need to maximize our survival time while getting into line of sight of the Lariat. That’s goal number one. How are your Tristan cells?”
“Power levels are fine. We have hours more power than we have oxy.”
“At least we know how we’re gonna go.”
I didn’t like Cap’s sense of gallows humor, so I didn’t laugh.
After an awkward moment she said, “That was me prompting you to buck up and say something like, ‘No way I’m gonna die out here of suffocation, Cap! I put my fantastic brain to the grindstone and I just came up with a Hail Mary that’s gonna solve all our problems. And no worries, I’ve worked it out so you can just ride on my back all the way back home.’”
“Mary’s not gonna help. The way I hear it, she was last in her class, and only made it through by the skin of her teeth!”
“Well at least you got your sense of humor back.”
It was more than that, I had the little ember glow of an idea, way down at the medulla where ideas are not supposed to form. As it started to kindle, I raised my arm and pointed.
“What?” said Cap, following my arm. “You pointing at space?”
“The winch cable.”
I’d have bet her eyebrows were on the rise if I could have seen them. The winch and its attached microfilament cable. We couldn’t operate the winch itself, as that had been Erik’s job. You don’t want more than one operator on that piece of equipment. So, along with floating out there far enough to have line of sight to the ship and act as the radio relay, Erik had the codes to run the winch. When a couple of us came out with a load of ore, they attached it to the winch cable, signaled Erik that people were clear, and he would set the winch to retract.
When the load got close to the rim of the overhang, other crew would unload it and send the empty back with someone guiding it by using their grav harness. The cable was microfilament, thin but incredibly strong and of nearly negligible mass. It could also cut through nearly anything, so you gave it a wide berth as you moved around it. We kept it taut and everyone learned where the path of that cable was.
At the cargo attachment end there was a normal length of high-strength webbing you could grab and work with safely. I hoped Erik was floating with enough oxygen or had already been picked up by the ship, and I even retried the radio to see if I could raise him. No luck.
Cap said, “No Erik eh? So the winch cable. You think you can override Erik’s codes, and just pull us up?”
“Um... too much time. I’m not sure if I can do it at all, and I am sure it will waste enough time that it will put us that much closer to the Grim Reaper.”
Defeating computer codes is never as easy as they make it look in the stories. If it was, everybody would do it all the time. Plus, I’m not that good at computers.
“So no cheating, I guess. Remind me to set up a captain’s override on the damn winch controls later. Yeah, that would be nice.”
The ember had sparked into a full-blown blaze now. “Cap, what if we tether-walk the winch cable?”
“You serious? What? Tarzan the whole way from the center of the depression to topside? How long’s that gonna take?”
“Yeah, we use the winch cable itself as our tether, and swing one giant arc!”
I was already working the calcs on my arm panel, but I took the time to finish. Cap did not speak while I worked.
“Just over an hour and half. We’ll have a little margin for error even.”
“We might need it to make our way to base camp.”
“Plus, after our initial push off, we don’t need to exert ourselves at all. We just ride the cable in a giant arc. We can relax and breathe slow. We maximize our oxy supply.”
“This is what I was looking for with my fantastic brain comment. That’s why I’m the captain. We better get started, I want all the margin we can get.”
So did I. We made a short Tarzan hop to where the cargo end of the winch cable was latched with a quickdraw to a large ice screw. Cap set about discarding the cargo net so we would not get tangled in it.
Carabiners are your friend when you rely on line and screws sunk into ice to keep you from floating off into oblivion. Two carabiners with a short length of webbing between them make a quickdraw, and we all had several of those clipped to our suits. The thick webbing on the end of the winch cable had plenty of attachment points to clip into, so we arranged ourselves comfortably and each clipped in with a quickdraw. Then we compressed our legs, wrapped our hands around the anchor, and released the cable. Cap had gathered the tether that linked us up into a nice coil and clipped it to her suit so we would not snag on anything.
“On three, we both kick off as hard as we can. You count, Cap.”
“One... two...three!”
We both jumped, me pushing with all my might against that ice.
Our angle was good. Within seconds I think the cable grew completely taut, and we were swinging in our arc from the center of the great depression. It was not fast, not by the standards of people who flew about with grav harnesses, but it was motion in the right direction.
We both studied our situation for a while, getting the feel of the motion. I was very glad to know that motion would not stop until we were “topside.” Cap’s hastily coined word for where we wanted to go. There was no up or down when there was no gravity, but it was always good to think of things as having a top and a bottom, or up and down. Often you find yourself defining up as being where you want to go, and down as being where your feet are. So I started to like the idea of topside. It felt like going home, and was the most important thing in the world to both of us for now. Topside, where radios worked and we could talk to our friends, and where oxy bottles were just a little way off.
“Cap? It occurs to me that our radios will start to work as soon as we are clear of the horizon made by the overhang between the Lariat and ourselves.”
“Yup. We should make contact as soon as possible. In the meantime, relax, slow your breathing as much as you can, and enjoy the ride.”
She reached out for my arm and checked my panel. She had more oxygen left than I did, so we divided up the contents of Trish’s bottle between us. Using the bottle ports on our suits and careful not to waste any, we evened out our supplies so that we both had roughly the same breathing time left. Then I clipped Trish’s empty bottle to my leg. If we made it back, I wanted to give it to Maxim. Trish had told me enough to know that they had a thing going. I wasn’t sure how deep of a thing, but it felt right to give him the last bit I had of her.
Copyright © 2022 by Rado Dyne
