CHAPTER 34.
“MOVE, you stinking piece of—” A.J. expressed his feelings with a kick to Athena’s side.
“It’s frozen to the rails again,” Jackie said with a sigh.
“There’s got to be a leak somewhere,” Mia Svendsen said tiredly, trying to push hair back from a forehead that was sealed away inside her suit. She muttered something in Norwegian that didn’t sound at all polite. “But all the systems claim they’re working.”
“Dammit—” A.J. restrained himself with great difficulty.
The hardest part is knowing that we don’t have that far to go. That we could have been there by now if Athena didn’t decide that it had to do a stop and go every few meters!
There was little communication from Maddie and Larry now. They were conserving their energy and food as much as possible, and it was running low.
Two and a half days getting Athena set up. Two more days getting us down here, setting up a motorized winch that allows us to do shifts downstairs and then go back up. Now four and a half days drilling through this crap a meter at a time!
It didn’t help that they had to make Athena do what amounted to a wiggle up and down constantly, in order to allow enough space for them to follow, slide through the rails, and so on.
“I do not understand,” Horst’s voice came up above in Munin, where he was resting. “The hydrophobic coating should exclude the ice. Why is it not working?”
“That stuff was studied at milspec tolerances, not cryogenic,” A.J. answered absently, staring with both fury and longing at Athena, willing the massive melt-probe to start moving again. “Lots of stuff that works at a mere minus forty goes screwy at minus one hundred fifty. Plus it wears off with that much mass on it.”
“A.J.,” Mia said, “can you check the integrity of all seals again?”
“Okay,” he said, “but I doubt I’ll find anything.”
The Faerie Dust worked passably here…most of the time. If he didn’t demand too much of it, or could channel a lot of power to it with a transmitter. He’d brought down a portable transmitter and tuned it to one of the frequencies they could receive acceptably, so the dust on Athena should be working reasonably well.
Based on the signals, the Dust was doing its job. But the data coming back insisted that there was nothing at all wrong with Athena—other than that she was stuck and having to wait until enough heat could be built up to melt the ice. Then they’d have to deploy Athena’s lower side anchors as jacks, slide out the rails, dry them, coat them again, and slide them back.
We don’t have time for this. “Nothing, Mia. Everything’s intact, not even a pinhole in any of the connectors, the pipes, the flexible hose, even the forward nose seal. All intact.”
He was about to shut off that view when some anomalous data came in. What the…
There was Faerie Dust on the rail. Dust he had not put there, as there wasn’t any particular reason to instrument the metal. As the Faerie Dust was capable of its own (slow) movement, it tended to stay where it was put even in the face of significant vibration. So where the hell…
A.J. connected to his main control and data collection system back on Nebula Storm, through Munin’s link, and had the individual dustmotes send back their UID—Unique IDentifier—codes. Now, track their history. Where’d I put those motes originally? Is there any commonality?
Slowly, an image built up in his VRD—the tiny dots, a fogbank of lightmotes, crawling backwards in time…
To all converge on the upper edge of the forward nose seal.
He stared for a moment, then felt a tiny thread of understanding starting to work its way through. Data history for that period…
Sure enough, they had all showed a quick spike of humidity and pressure when they were suddenly thrown from their position to end up on the rail. Checking, he found quite a few more motes scattered all over the place, trying rather unsuccessfully to make their way back to their assigned locations in the mobile network.
“Mia…I take it back. There’s a tiny, tiny, intermittent leak in the upper portion of the nose seal.”
“I thought you said it was intact.”
I did. And it still is. “Yeah, and it is intact. So I don’t quite know what’s happening to—”
“Gravity,” Brett said suddenly.
Mia froze. “Uff-da,” she said with exhausted realization. “Athena is meant to be working vertically. The pressure evenly distributed—”
Now it made sense. “—but we’ve put her kinda on her side, so the pressure’s less at the top. And so every little bit, when it goes over something that’s not quite perfectly smooth, a tiny bit of water vaporizes past it.”
“Yes.” Mia frowned. “That leak is very small compared to the amount of water, yes?”
“Tiny. So small that we weren’t noticing the loss in what was going upstairs.” Refilling Munin was proceeding along with this operation; they weren’t about to waste the water right now. “Hell, its small enough that we weren’t noticing the mist. Playing back the video and enhancing, I can just make it out in a couple frames, but you’d have to be staring at it just the right way.”
Mia stared at the nose of Athena for a moment, then went through a series of gestures and muttered commands that reminded A.J. of himself. “The nose seal material is a smart seal—it can be adjusted. But it has no fine control and direction.” She looked up suddenly. “A.J., do you think—”
He felt a broad smile starting, as an immense weight seemed to lift from him. “Oh, I very much think, yes! I can embed enough Faerie Dust in there to tell you exactly what to do. Hell, if you need it I can have enough of it embed itself into the material so that it will act as a conductor for the signals.”
“That might work. Brett, we need a model right now, tell us, optimum distribution to assure sufficient control of the seal, prevent more leakage?”
“Have it for you in ten minutes,” Brett said promptly.
“Without the leak,” A.J. said, “Mia, it won’t freeze anymore, right?”
“I would be very surprised if it did,” she said. “If we can keep any significant amount of ice from being available to adhere to the rails, we should be able to progress much more quickly.”
“I sure hope so.”
He wasn’t religious—never had been. But knowing that Helen was so near, yet so utterly out of reach, in so much danger…he was tempted to pray, but he had no idea what to. Just…let us save her, somehow.
“Here’s your model,” Brett said suddenly, and he realized he’d been standing there for some minutes, doing nothing.
“Got it!” he answered. Okay…whoo, that’s going to take a fair amount of the Dust I have left. But who cares, if it works?
“All right, Mia—try it!”
Athena lunged forward, eating its way through ice as fast as they could drive her.
And this time, it didn’t stop.