In the waning light, my tan was a figment of the past, a figment of Earth spinning below the domed station on the screen. I was a corpse, just like the rest of them, not an outsider. And we were kids no longer.
I tried to stand. Lem pulled me to her, licked my ear. “Baby it’s just getting good.”
“I think I should leave.”
I could hear her smile. “You can’t leave.”
Unrefined
written by
Martin L. Shoemaker
illustrated by
TUNG CHI LEE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Martin L. Shoemaker is a writer with a lucrative programming habit. As a child he told stories to imaginary friends and learned to type on his brother’s manual typewriter even though he couldn’t reach the keys. (He types with the keyboard in his lap still today.) He couldn’t imagine any career but writing fiction … until his algebra teacher said, “This is a program. You should write one of these.”
Fast forward thirty years of programming, writing, and teaching. He was named an MVP by Microsoft for his work with the developer community. He is an avid role-playing gamemaster, but that didn’t satisfy his storytelling urge. He wrote, but he never submitted until his brother-in-law read a chapter and said, “That’s not a chapter. That’s a story. Send it in.” It won second place in the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest and earned him lunch with Buzz Aldrin. Programming never did that!
Martin hasn’t stopped writing (or programming) since. His work has appeared in Analog, Galaxy’s Edge, Digital Science Fiction, and select service garages worldwide. His novella Murder on the Aldrin Express was reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection and in The Year’s Top Short SF Novels 4.
Learn more about Martin at www.MartinLShoemaker.com.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Tung Chi (Jessica) Lee was born in Taipei, Taiwan where at an early age she was exposed to dazzling worlds created by the entertainment industry. She soon found that she could draw her own exciting worlds. Her passion for intriguing places and profound stories in games, movies, and novels strengthened as she grew.
With help from her parents, she majored in visual communication design at National Taiwan University of Art, then studied illustration at the Academy of Art University.
Since her art education began, Lee has discovered and rediscovered how much more exciting life is when viewed with an eye toward art. Today she works as a concept artist and freelance illustrator. She wants to keep contributing to the art world by developing scenes from other universes and possible futures and with each project, her desire grows.
Unrefined
If this had been a vid, there would’ve been a computer voice over the comms: “Thirty minutes to containment collapse.” At least I hoped like hell that I had thirty minutes left. I might need every one of them.
But when you’re facing a cascade failure across your computer network, there are no automated warnings, no countdown. I just had to move as fast as I damn well could, and hope I could get to Wilson and get us out before the fusion reactor blew out the end of Refinery Station.
As Leeanne brought the flitter in toward The Tube—the half-klick tunnel of girders that connected Habitat Module to the Reactor and Refinery Module—I hung from its frame and peered ahead, looking for the airlocks into Habitat’s Control Deck. If Wilson wasn’t there, I wouldn’t know where to look for him. There were nearly three million cubic meters in Habitat. And in R&R … but I stopped that thought. I’d rather not get that close to a failing fusion reactor.
Refinery Station was the first of Wilson Gray’s megastructures, massive artifacts in space that were half constructed, half grown by Von Neumann constructor bots. At one end hung the Habitat Module, still mostly unfinished. At the other end of The Tube was the giant fusion ring.
The reactor provided power for Habitat, but the real reasons Wilson had built the station were the two structures on the far side of the reactor: a giant refinery utilizing the reactor’s raw heat for metallurgy, and the two-and-a-half kilometer mass driver that would launch refined metals from the Jovian system back toward Earth. Wilson had invested his entire fortune into the station, and he had convinced a number of other entrepreneurs to sign up as well. Now all those investments were poised to fail, all due to an unexplained computer crash.
Finally we got close enough that I could make out the airlock hatches between the girders. I was glad one of the best pilots in the Pournelle Settlements was flying. As Leeanne neared the closest approach point, the retros fired, bringing us almost motionless relative to Habitat. She had timed it perfectly—less than five meters, Leanne was good—so I leaped.
For a moment I floated in empty space. Jupiter hung off to my right, half in shadow. The sunward side showed the giant cream-and-brown stripes, as well as an excellent view of the famous Red Spot. Closer to me but still dwarfed by its primary was Ganymede, our closest orbital neighbor. Its dark, reddish-gray surface was dotted with ancient impact craters, evidence that the Jovian system was a treasure trove of valuable rocks. Under other circumstances I would’ve enjoyed the sight, but I couldn’t waste time sightseeing. I paid close attention to the task at hand, and I grabbed for a girder.
Contact! My gloved fingers wrapped easily around the girder, a synthetic carbon crystal rod five centimeters across. I grabbed another and arrested my flight. The girders sparkled in my suit light. Their lattice tied the two modules together even in the face of the minimal tidal force we experienced at this distance from Ganymede. The VN bots had spent over a month assembling this giant structure out of carbon that had cost Willy a small fortune to collect; and now at any moment it could all be shattered by the explosion.
“I’m on, Leanne.”
“Don’t waste words, Sam! Go get Willy. Please!”
Wilson was Leeanne’s husband. Nerves of steel were another trait that made Leeanne a top pilot, but hers were strained near their limit. “I’ll get him. You just be ready to pick us up.”
Leeanne and I had been hauling batteries from the magnetosphere generators back to Gray City (the collection of ships and small habitats that housed Wilson’s team as we built Refinery Station). Until the fusion reactor gets up to full output, the generators were the most reliable source of electrical power in Jovian space, converting the radiation in Jupiter’s magnetosphere into electricity and then storing it in batteries. These were one of our most successful products: half the towns in the Pournelle Settlements and a good number of the independent miners bought their power from Gray Interplanetary. But the generator output was too variable, and hauling massive batteries around used too much fuel. With the reactor, Wilson hoped to get a more steady power source for the refinery and the mass driver.
In another organization we could both have pulled rank to get out of such routine work: the boss’s wife and partner and the boss’s Executive Officer drawing a routine transport run? Ridiculous! But not when Wilson Gray was the boss: “Everybody gets their hands dirty” was one of his top rules to keep us in touch with our crew.
And this particular run … Well, it was my fault, really. I had had another fight with Mari Brasco, Chief of Eco Management. It was the same dumb argument that had cropped up since we started dating: her claiming I ran our relationship like I ran a project, me trying to explain myself, and her saying I was proving her point. But this one had been bigger. Maybe she was stressed from all her contract work, I don’t know, but we really blew up. She had told me to choose: boss or boyfriend? Before I could answer, she had stormed out. So Wilson had sent me on the battery run to get me away from the station and give me time to cool off. I suspect he had sent Leeanne because she’s a good listener and he had hoped she could talk me through my troubles.
When we’d heard the news of the computer failure on Refinery Station, though, my dating woes went out the hatch. We’d dumped our cargo
in a stable orbit, and Leeanne had grinned and uttered her favorite words: “Hang on, Sam!” We blew most of our reaction mass getting back to Gray City to render aid if it was needed.
The work crews had evacuated before environmental systems could fail completely. It had fallen to Kim Stone to break the bad news to Leeanne: Wilson had refused to leave, trying to get the system under control and save the station.
At that news, I glanced over at Leeanne. I was sure she was thinking the same thing I was: If only we had been there … And I was the reason we were gone, me and my stupid fight with Mari. If I blamed myself, surely Leeanne would blame me, and I expected an angry glare. But she wasn’t looking at me at all. She stared straight ahead out the view port, her normally dark face turned ashen with worry. Flying normally put a broad grin across her round, friendly face; but the grin was gone, replaced by a grim line that turned downward as Kim continued.
The computer failures had spread, so comms to the station were out. Wilson was still on board, and no one wanted to get trapped in there looking for him. But I wasn’t leaving my best friend, and Leanne wasn’t leaving her husband. Her face had turned steely, and she had flown us to the station at a reckless speed and then had pulled four gees as she brought us to a halt.
The girders were spaced to allow a suited person to climb between them. I did so, pushed toward the airlock, and grabbed the hatch ring to stop myself. The computer display on the hatch was useless: letters and numbers scrolling by too fast to read, occasionally interrupted by a complete screen wipe or random pixilation.
I ignored the screen and opened the lid to the manual controls. I twisted the lever, and the Cycling light lit up.
When the lock was in vacuum, I lifted the lever. The hatch opened and I pulled myself in and closed it behind me before cycling the far hatch. My audio pickups gave me the sound of air whistling in. I popped into the Control Deck annex.
I had been inside Habitat enough during construction, so that I knew my way around pretty well. The annex was right off the main cabin of the Control Deck: a bowl shape, thirty-meters radius by ten deep, filled with a triple ring of monitor stations along the surface of the bowl so a supervisor could survey all stations from the center.
I pushed to the door and opened it. Immediately my senses were overloaded, light flashing through my visor and sound overloading my audio. Every computer at every station flashed data, buzzed alarms, called out gibberish warnings, and strobed bright and dark.
I blinked and looked away. “Wilson!” I shouted over the din, but with no hope that I could hear a response even if he made one.
“He’s not here.” Leeanne watched through my comms. Another person might have sounded frantic, but her control didn’t waver. “The motion sensor’s flaking out from all the signal noise, but there’s no firm signal.”
“We can’t be sure. Let me get a better view.” I pushed off to the supervisor harness, a set of straps in the center of the bowl, and I looked around.
I didn’t want to make Leeanne anxious, but I was sure she was right: Wilson wasn’t there. Unless he was jammed behind a workstation where I couldn’t see, he was nowhere on the Control Deck. That didn’t make sense. Where else would he be?
“Sam!” Leeanne called on the comm. “The power monitor station. The panel’s open!”
Sure enough, an open panel led into the guts of the workstation. I dove over. Wilson had to have opened it to trace a data feed. I could tell because he had left his network analyzer there, still tied into the juncture box. But the readout on the analyzer made me sweat: Fusion Deck.
Leeanne’s whisper on the comm lacked her usual steely control. “S-Sam. Don’t do it.”
“What?”
“You know where he went, Sam. We’re gonna lose him. We can’t afford to lose you, too.”
But it wasn’t until she said that that I realized: Wilson had followed the signal to the Fusion Deck. He was less than fifty meters from a glowing ring of fusing hydrogen plasma that was just waiting for containment to fail so it could escape.
Fusion reactions are so difficult to sustain that they can’t go critical like a fission reactor. When something goes wrong, the reaction just collapses, destroying the reactor but not posing a threat outside the immediate area. The station was designed so that Habitat Module would be safe in the event of a collapse—but the Fusion Deck and the refinery would surely be destroyed.
So despite Leeanne’s warning, I was going after Wilson. “We’re not losing him.”
“Sam!”
“We are not losing your husband, Leeanne! Don’t waste time arguing. Just get your ass over to the far end and wait for us.”
I went back out through the airlock and into The Tube. There were elevators between the modules, but I crossed the distance faster on my jets.
My rad meters didn’t change appreciably as I settled to a halt at the far airlock. The radiation from the reactor was contained by shielding except where it was used in the refinery, and what escaped the shielding was barely above background radiation from Jupiter itself.
I had selected a lock near the control center. At least I hoped so. I was so used to the computer answering questions like that, but I feared to trust my suit comp. It hadn’t been compromised yet, but if I tied it into station information, it might be. I didn’t need my suit failing me now!
When I got inside, I wished I had trusted the computer. I wasn’t in the control center, I was in a darkened room. Flickering lights through a thick window in the far wall showed part of a giant torus, fifteen meters on the short radius and ninety on the long. The fusion reactor! I had entered in a service room off the main reactor chamber, and that room was hot! I checked my meters: not hot in the radiation sense, or at least not dangerously so, but the temperature was over 30°C. Any warmer and it would start to tax my cooling system. I could hear the cooling fans whirring up already.
I looked around the darkened room. The flickering showed no light switches, just a bank of storage cabinets, a row of work pods, and a wall of monitors—malfunctioning, of course. Once my eyes adjusted to the flicker, I picked out two hatches. One led into the reactor chamber. I pulled open the other, exited the service room, and sealed the hatch behind me. Immediately my cooling fans grew quiet, and my temperature began to drop.
I still sweated, though. It wasn’t from the heat.
At least I knew where I was going now. I floated in a large transit corridor; and in this part of R&R, all corridors led to the control center. The corridor was in darkness, but my suit light showed a hatch about forty-five meters away. That was my destination.
I checked my comp timer. Despite moving as fast as I could, it had been more than ten minutes since our approach to the station, and thirty minutes had been just a best guess. How long did we have? I broke several safety regulations by using my jets to race through the corridor.
When I got to the control center, I entered a room designed almost as a mirror to Control Deck: a giant bowl with three rings of screens. And just as in Control Deck, most of the screens displayed gibberish. The one main difference from Control Deck was my target: the suited man working inside the panel of one of the stations.
“Wilson!” Suit comms couldn’t penetrate station shielding, but they worked fine in the same room.
Without pulling his head out of the panel, Wilson answered, “Sam? Good! Hey, buddy, gimme a hand. Need you to jettison the mass driver, and once that’s done, cut us loose from The Tube.”
“Boss!”
“We’re gonna lose the reactor, Sam. No hope, I can tell. Refinery too. We just have to salvage as much of the station as we can.”
Typical Wilson, worrying about assets and losses while his dream disintegrated around him. He could be passionate when he sold an idea; but when it came to implementation, he was a cold-blooded numbers guy.
And as usual, he made sense. There were mon
ths and fortunes tied up in the station. If any of it could be saved, we had to save it.
I flew over to the superstructure controls. These weren’t part of the main computer network, so maybe they weren’t corrupted. Maybe.
If they were, our ploy was already doomed.
But if this was so important to Wilson … “Boss, what are you after in there?”
Wilson answered tersely, “Evidence.” He went back to work, cursing as he did. When he started swearing, I knew better than to interrupt until he’d solved the problem.
I studied the superstructure controls. They were clean, or at least not flashing gibberish like all of the others. These were part of the construction network, not the station operations network; and when the time had come to hook all the systems together, Wilson and the network guys had debated whether it made sense to tie construction in. I’d never paid attention to the outcome, but it looked as if Wilson had decided to isolate the system.
I’m not a computer guy, but I’m a competent engineer and physicist. I understood the basics of the controls, but it was designed to make it difficult to accidentally cut the station into pieces—like I was trying to do.
I worked through the layers of safeguards and confirmations while also figuring out the process. There were rocket engines on the mass driver and the R&R Module. Explosive bolts would cut the mass driver loose, and the rockets would burn on a preset trajectory. Then I could do the same for R&R.
But first I had to choose the trajectories, feed them to the rockets, double check everything, and confirm everything one more time, all while trying to learn an unfamiliar interface.