6 - News from the Corps

The moon station was eerily quiet this hour of watch, as a landing request blinked from one of the screens.  Terry Cameron took his feet off the console, yawned and granted the little plinker landing rights.  Since the Font of All Knowledge had shut down the ice mining and called everybody down to the planet surface there wasn’t much traffic, and the next interstellar cargo spine wasn’t due till next month by Chishiki reckoning.  The plinker was the regular single ship that carried information, new hardware and software to make sure that all of the corporate listed planets had the latest netware to maintain interstellar contact.  The ship was settling down nicely into its usual slot and Terry triggered the audio channel.  No sense in chewing bandwidth to see Siva’s face while he was busy, but he could certainly work his mouth.

“Hey, Siva!  You’re late this run.”

“What the hell, Terry?  Where’s the last shift?  There’s nobody working?”

“Nah.  CEO shut everything down.  Something about maintenance but everybody kinda knew it was moa quano.”

There was a whistle.  “I brought a bottle of Kingdom black brandy.”

Terry laughed.  “I’m here by myself this shift.  No sense sharing with lazy illiterates.”

“What like your boss, His Enlightenment?”

“Dark, yeah.”

“See you in a minute.”

**

The ice on the moon was thick enough that the easiest way to mine it was to grow machines, Pounders, that looked like headless elephants.  Terry was educated enough – Technician Second Class – that he had an idea what an Earthan elephant looked like.  He strolled past the mothballed machines, with their gigantic pads designed to smash up great chunks of surface ice with each footfall.  In a sense they were really moonquake machines.  Send a row of them across the iceball and set up a resonant frequency... really the ice couldn’t hold solid against the waves.  You just had to have the centipedes follow after, load the biggest chunks of ice into their hoppers and walk them over to the mass driver where they’d get boosted enough to drop where they were wanted.

The centipedes had their legs folded tight around them, one leg hooked up into the rafters, looking like gigantic bundles of wool hanging from the ceiling over the Pounders, mostly to save space, since the original ice caverns had been carved high.  It was all four shifts of machines, crammed tightly into a space originally designed to house and maintain three shifts at a time.  Two shifts garaged, one shift in maintenance, one shift out busting ice.

Terry waved at his friend at the lander door, triggering the organics in the floor to light his way through the dark and silent garage.  “Damn. That’s spooky.”  Sivasubrahmaniam turned in a slow circle, looking up at the sleeping behemoths with woolly balls of legs hanging above, the hardened ice ceiling dimly glowing green and blue with the reflected light of the floor.

“It’s a problem.”

“Yeah.  Isn’t your ceo required to keep terraforming the place?  Isn’t he in breach of contract to the Corps?”  He pronounced the short form the way everybody did, like ‘corpse’.

“Yeah.  That’s why it’s a temporary shutdown.”

“For maintenance.”

“Yeah.”

Terry closed the door on the garage and they settled down in his cubby.  If anything went wrong with the environmentals, the stupid-ass Brain would let him know.  “How’s Angela?”

Siva grinned. “She’s great!  She just got hired by the Rat himself as admin.”

“That’s great!”

“Yeah, it means we can buy a retirement chunk of planet somewhere outside the Corps.”

Terry’s whistle was silent as he tapped on the table and it extruded a pair of glasses for them.  “That’s expensive.  I’m glad you’ll be able to do that.”  Siva poured a thumb-depth of brandy into both, from his gift bottle and the old friends admired the black/red fire of it for a moment.

“I have a rumour for you... since its hitting the fan downstairs.”  Siva raised an eyebrow.  “Couple a’ things,” Terry continued, seriously.  “My second cousin’s husband is a Tech First class and he told me that the water is poisoning something downside.  Something that the ceo really, really needs.  Sarah figures it’s probably the Funginous seams, or something like lifeweed or rais’er.”

“Quano.  Any one of those would shift life in the Corps something awful.”

“Yeah.  Maybe... just maybe the Rat himself might want to know?”

“Hmmm.  Or the Kingdom.”

Terry shrugged.  “Whatever you do with it, buddy, if you find a bidder for the info...”

“I’ll remember my good friend.” Siva grinned at him and poured another shot.  “How’s the reconciliation between the ceo and his kid going?”

“Like Steinpelzers and mental illness.”

“That good, huh?”

“Yeah.  Any better and the whole damn continent might burst into magnesium combustion.”