Johnny Winger and the Great Rift Zone

CHAPTER 6

  Phobos Station, Mars

  August 1, 2110

  2200 hours (Mars Coordinated Time MCT)

  “She may look like a pile of parts now, but in her day, Big Mike was one hell of a cycler ship.”

  Layton Pauley and Captain Cory Hawley stared at the image of Michelangelo as the shuttle maneuvered toward Phobos Station. The wardroom was filled with passengers and a few crew members, all taking in the spectacle of Mars and its approaching moon Phobos, now filling the portholes on all sides. The vast scar of the Valles Marineris filled one porthole near the bar and passengers jostled with each other for better views of the huge chasm.

  The phasing and approach to Phobos Station would take a day, even though the rock pile of a moon swung around the Red Planet in a relatively low orbit of about four thousand miles., circling the planet in slightly more than seven hours with each revolution.

  The last few hours of the approach went off without incident. Twenty hours after departing their cycler ship ride out from Earth, the mottled gray and tan crescent face of Phobos had come nicely into view.

  “Still looks like a rock pile to me,” Hawley noted.

  “Or a potato with cancer,” added Pauley. “That blip of light over the terminator…that’s Big Mike and Phobos Station. We should be there in about two hours.”

  Hawley studied the battered surface of the moon through a navigation scope. “The whole place is covered with craters. Phobos has some serious acne.”

  Pauley had to agree. “She may not look like much but Phobos is an important midway point for Mars. From up here, we can get into and out of Mars orbit pretty easily and you’ve got one hell of a view below. The astros say she’s losing altitude fast and should impact the surface in a few tens of thousands of years.”

  The approach to Phobos Station went off without a hitch. In loose orbit around the moon, the station was an oddball assortment of cylinders and spheres, hung on trusswork-like structure like grapes on a trellis. A few hundred meters away, Michelangelo floated serenely oblivious to the fantastic vista around her.

  Hawley studied the venerable old ship through the nav scope. “She looks like a kebab skewer.”

  Pauley beamed. “True, she ain’t much for the eyes. But she did yeoman duty as a cycler for five years, til Da Vinci and Voltaire and the newer ships came along. Venus, Earth and Mars, around and around. Not the most exciting duty I ever pulled but she was a good ship and we had a good crew. Captain, you remember Marcel Goodwin?”

  “Old Goody?…I do indeed. Worked with him building the station here. I guess he was off flight duty then. Gruff old bird but he had some stories that would curdle your nose hairs.”

  “Yep, that was Goodwin. Best captain I ever worked with. When you’re cycling, time passes pretty slowly. It’s boring duty. But I have to hand it to Old Goody. We seldom had a boring day. Only C/O I ever served under who could make casualty drills into a contest and get you motivated to pull doubles every week and like it.”

  Presently, Michelangelo and Phobos Station hove into view, hovering over the gaping Stickney Crater end of Phobos. The mothballed cycler was designed with a long central mast off of which hung cylinders and spheres, a quad of propellant tanks stuck on the aft end above radiation shielding and her plasma torch engine bay.

  “She’s the only thing around here that could make the trip out past Pluto in less than a year. We don’t have a lot of deep-space ships in the vicinity.” The shuttle gently maneuvered herself toward a docking port at the nose of the cycler’s command and control deck. Soft dock was an almost imperceptible bump, followed by the staccato firing of the capture latches.

  “Hard dock,” came the announcement over the intercom. “Let’s get to work, folks. We’ve got a lot of work to do and not much time.”

  Cory Hawley had developed a lot of respect for Frontier Corps people over the years. When word came out from CINCSPACE that Big Mike was to be saved from the scrapyard and converted for deep space ops, he thought the schedule Paris had sent up was insane and that was being kind. But converting Big Mike was priority number one at Phobos Station and the engineers and techs and roughnecks of Frontier Corps had gone to work with pluck and determination you didn’t often see back Earthside.

  Which was just as well since CINCSPACE had decreed that Michelangelo would launch not later than two months…sixty days…from today, come what may.

  Hawley figured the techs would still be nailing parts on the old warhorse even as she lit off her plasma torch engines and headed out.

  He made his way down the access tunnel and into the airlock, where a perfunctory exam and some paperwork were completed. He grabbed his gear and bags and pitched them in his bunk compartment three levels down, then drifted back up to B Level to find Vikram Singh, the station’s chief engineer, dressing down a few young techs for something they’d done or not done. After haranguing the poor saps for five minutes, Singh kicked them out of his office and blinked hard, realizing it was Cory Hawley hanging at the door.

  “Either I’ve had a few beers too many or that’s the legendary Cory Hawley gracing my doorway…I heard you were on the Voltaire.”

  They shook hands, then embraced roughly, slapping each other on the back.

  “Yeah, Vik…it’s me. And I’m supposed to be driving that old crate you guys are sprucing up. How’s it going?”

  Singh was partially balding with a fringe of gray hair like a halo around the top of his head. He swept his hand toward the view outside the porthole. “That ‘old crate’ you’re referring to will soon be able to run circles around all the other cyclers, once we get through with her. Complete re-do on all decks and everything aft of the propellant quad is brand new…the engine bay’s got higher temperature chambers, high-capacity plates and shielding. Plus a new reactor core, right out of the box. Take a look—“

  Singh pressed a few keys on his desk keyboard and the swarm box on his desk came alive, a faint sparkling fog issuing out of its head like a smoking chimney. In seconds, the swarm formed itself into a scale model likeness of the Michelangelo, floating in space between the two men.

  Hawley marveled at the detail. Right down to the seams on her hab spaces and the stores and supplies pods hung off the main struts, the nanobotic model was a faithful reproduction of the ship floating right outside the windows.

  “Layton Pauley was right…it does look like a kebab skewer. Those pods could be the onions.”

  Singh snorted. “Those pods you call onions are A, B, and C decks. That’s where you’re going to spend the next six months, Captain.”

  “I want to see for myself, Vik.”

  Singh smiled. “First, you meet my assistant…Viktor.” Singh pressed another button and the swarm box issued more glowing fog. This time, a para-human angel entity formed up, hovering over them like something out of a dream. The bot stream swirled and shifted, drifting and coalescing into the likeness of a face and shoulders…a passable sim of a bearded, squint-eyed sage with a double-chin…a suitable resemblance to Buddha himself.

  Hawley was duly impressed. “Hello, Viktor…what exactly do you do around this place anyway?”

  The Viktor angel swirled and brightened as the bots built structure and stabilized the image.