12

Cassini Outpost

Nearly two sols passed before the shuttle was ready to fly to Cassini. Selecting the necessary cargo and loading it on board was complete by mid afternoon Wednesol, but by then the sun had set at Cassini, five time zones to the east of the Outpost. Launch had to wait until after sunrise the next morning. It was just as well, in a way; Will was able to be present when Shinji and Michiko presented their newborn son, Toru, to the community.

Will hadn’t flown on a shuttle for a decade; it was a strange and even a frightening experience for him. The launch and acceleration to a suborbital trajectory took only three minutes. Half an hour of weightlessness was followed by the return of weight as the shuttle fell back into the Martian atmosphere, heat shield down. For twelve minutes the shuttle plummeted downward and across Mars, the hypersonic passage through the atmosphere being used to steer and fly the shuttle farther to the northeast. Then the engines roared back on and after a minute and a half of leaden weight, the shuttle settled on a plume of orange-tinged blue flame onto pad number 3, a dozen kilometers inside of Cassini’s battered and pocked western crater rim.

They stepped out onto rolling, gray-orange, range. The highlands here were ancient; they had seen meteors and asteroids, rain and snow, volcanism, sand-blasting dust storms, and floods since the beginning of time. Two rangers drove up and people got out in pressure suits.

“Welcome, Commander,” said Andries. “We’re delighted you flew up here.”

“I’m delighted, too. We’ve got your stuff; let’s unload now and talk later.”

Andries nodded. Érico—who had piloted the shuttle—opened the side of the cargo bay, which was located below the fuel tanks and just above the landing legs. The crew deployed the cargo ramps and began to unload the new ranger, the two drills, the additional nuke—which had three tonnes of ice blocks packed around it to provide radiation shielding—and boxes of supplies, including dynamite. Meanwhile, Érico connected the shuttle to the spaceport’s power line and moved several ice blocks to the fuel synthesizer unit, which could convert the water, in the presence of atmospheric carbon dioxide, into methane and oxygen. Kevin Dunbar, who was running Cassini’s other nuke, towed the new reactor to a sandbagged pad enclosure near the other one and, using the remote manipulator arms installed on the ranger, connected it to the power grid. By then everything was ready to go. The three rangers set out.

“Will, I’ll need to interview you about this find,” said Tina, sitting up front between him and Andries as they headed down “Pretoria Trail,” as they had dubbed the route from the spaceport to the gold field.

“Okay, but not now. We can do that later.”

“Keep in mind it’s early morning in Europe right now. In about four hours it’ll be time for the producers to plan their evening news programs, and the United States will be six hours behind.”

“Okay.” Will watched the terrain roll by. “Everyone’s extremely excited. I could feel it while we were unloading the shuttle.”

“Immensely,” agreed Andries. “Rather than run the centrifugal separation equipment, we’ve been spreading out and walking the gravel bar in pairs, picking up nuggets as we go, weighing them and entering their GPS coordinates into the computer. We call it ‘gold archaeology.’ The six of us have picked up 900 kilos of nuggets in two sols.”

“Nine hundred kilograms?!”

Andries nodded. “It’s the fastest way. We’ve walked upstream above the gravel bar, too. The hydrothermal complex that the flood tore apart is just one kilometer upstream from the end of the gravel bar. We found nuggets all the way up, and we found them in situ in the bedrock outcrops in the flood channel. So we know where the gold is coming from.”

“How about other metals?”

“Well, the lag deposit is pretty enriched in nickel-iron meteorite fragments; maybe thirty or forty percent by mass. There’s scattered silver; enough for our internal needs, and we can probably export it to the moon and low earth orbit. Copper, too, but that’s downstream twenty kilometers; a fairly large body of malachite-altered dune sandstone sitting under a basalt flow. But that formed through a separate process than the gold and silver bodies, ironically enough. The latter are in or above an intrusion from the base of the crust dating back to the lower Noachian, when Mars had a magnetic field; there’s still a little magnetism in the bedrock from that period.”

“Fantastic. Water?”

Andries shrugged. “It’s everywhere, once you drill down fifty meters. It isn’t quite as available as at Aurorae because the megaregolith has lower porosity than sandstones and arkoses, but there’s plenty for our purposes.”

They drove on in silence, looking at the terrain roll by. In half an hour the road topped a rise; a battered gap in the crater rim. They went down the ejecta blanket and soon stopped at the edge of a valley. Before descending into it, Andries stopped and turned the ranger so they could see out the front. “This is the vallis with the deposit; it’s five kilometers wide and two hundred meters deep, but as you can see, time has nearly erased it as a geologic feature. Those cliffs you see on the other side, there, were formed by a later, smaller flood coursing down the old valley in middle Hesperian times. Do you see the sort of broken canyon upstream?”

Will nodded.

“That’s the location of the hydrothermal complex that the flood breached, which contains the gold. We’ve named it ‘Joberg,’ the common nickname for Johannesburg. The long feature here—” Andries pointed. “That’s the gravel bar formed from the canyon sediment, where the vallis widened out and the current slowed. Two kilometers of lithified boulder conglomerate with gold nuggets and some scattered native silver. We’re calling it ‘Pretoria.’”

“Fascinating. Let’s go see.”

They drove down the gentle incline to the floor of the flood plain where, an unimaginably long time ago, an unimaginably huge amount of water had raced through, underwater tornadoes cutting through solid rock like a knife through butter. At the northern—downstream—end of the Pretoria conglomerate, a Mobilhab was parked. As they pulled up to it, Will noted the dust all over it; it had gotten surprisingly dirty. Two Mobilhabs had arrived on Columbus 5, and the global dust storm had given the crew extra time to set them up. Like Mars’s buildings, the Mobilhabs were vehicles made of a series of layers: an inner barrier of Mars-made vinyl that the crew walked on and bumped into; a middle layer of airtight, transparent kevlar-reinforced tefzel and nomex imported from Earth; and an protective outer shell of Martian nickel-steel, interrupted by frequent plexiglass windows. Above the vehicle was a hinged solar array capable of making sixty kilowatt-hours of power per sol, enough to keep its life support systems operating. The vehicle was 2.4 meters wide at the floor, 4.75 meters wide at the ceiling and at the floor level of the second floor, 4.75 meters high, and eight meters long; it had two floors, each with two rooms and complete bath facilities, and could house up to eight personnel manageably. It had eight independently powered wheels. It could not be used for road clearing and could not travel as fast as a ranger or a Conestoga, but it supplemented rangers extremely well; an expedition of two rangers and a Mobilhab, with eight crew, could clear roads 14 or 15 hours per sol, sometimes all night if necessary, and could carry out a tremendous amount of exploration while moving forward as well.

“Commander, shall we step out?” asked Andries.

“Oh; sorry, I was thinking. Yes.” Will stood and moved back to the ranger’s rear area, where he put on his life support pack and helmet. The three of them were ready to go in a few minutes. They depressurized the main cabin and opened the rear airlock door, to step straight outside.

Right outside the Mobilhab was a pile of gold nuggets, so they stopped to admire it. Then they headed up the hill, stopping at every spot bedrock poked out from caliche or dunes. Most of the bedrock was boulder conglomerate, consisting of big, black blocks of basalt with smaller, shiny chunks of nickel-iron in betweeen. Will bent close to the ground to look with his built-in magnifier; even on a randomly chosen outcrop he could see a golden fleck or two, usually in the matrix between the cobbles.

“This is amazing.”

“It really is,” agreed Andries. “I feel like I understand the excitement at Sutters Mill, California, in 1848; or in Deadwood, Klondike, Transvaal, or Victoria! The largest nugget ever found on Earth was something like seventy kilos of gold! So far the largest one we’ve found is fifteen.”

“That’s worth how much?” Will did a mental calculation. “About $180,000.”

“It boggles the mind,” said Tina.

They walked up to the top of the ancient gravel bar, then down its steeper far side. At one point, Will spotted a loose fleck. He reached down and picked it up.

“About ten grams, I suppose.”

“Let’s weigh it and enter the data,” reminded Andries. He pulled out a tiny scale and put it down on the rock. The nugget was 11.8 grams. It went into a sample pouch, and Andries typed the coordinates into his computer. “Another datapoint.” he noted. “Some spots are richer than others.”

They turned south and walked along the deposit. Others joined them, holding up nuggets that were as much as a kilogram in weight. Finally, after two hours, with the sun setting, they returned to the Mobilhab and went inside for a hearty supper. They swapped stories about what they had found that sol.

“Commander, is there any possibility we might be able to keep a little of the gold?” asked Kevin Dunbar. “It’s a pretty special souvenir.”

Will considered the request. “We’re here to guarantee a future for Mars, but that doesn’t mean we can’t keep mementos. But let’s keep the mementos small, and for our bookshelves, not our bank accounts.”

“Fair enough,” said Kevin.

Will’s attaché beeped. He had attached it to his spacesuit for the sol’s excursions. He glanced at the screen, intending to see who was calling so that he could ignore the message until later. But he saw that the sender was Mich Dvorkin, Director of Exports, and the message had been forwarded to him via Yevgeny, their local director of exports. He excused himself and went into the mobilhab’s driver’s cabin, where he could view the message privately.

“Yevgeny, I just received a message from Consolidated Mining,” exclaimed Dvorkin, a note of excitement in his voice. “Their geological team has just finished analyzing the data sent back from the crew at Cassini. They’re estimating the total gold reserve in the ‘Pretoria Conglomerate’ at six hundred tonnes, which at the current price of $10 million per tonne is worth 6 billion dollars. The Joberg hydrothermal complex may have ten times as much. They say that the local geology suggests an estimated reserve within one hundred kilometers of up to one hundred times as much as Pretoria; in other words, comparable to the Witwatersrand complex in South Africa. Their estimated recovery and transport cost for the first 500 tonnes of the gold in the Cassini region—the easiest part to extract—is $2,000 per kilogram. The next 2,000 tonnes will cost $4,000 per kilo. No one will guess after that. Consolidated is willing to bid twice as much as Muller Mining for the recovery contract; a half billion down right away, a half billion to cover the transportation of four crew and their mining equipment to Mars, and half the profits. Our contribution to the deal is four more personnel and the life support and transportation infrastructure for everyone. They’ll even pay the shipping insurance to cover the cargo coming back to Earth. I’m contacting Muller Mining, A. G., for a counter offer. I expect that we’ll get offers from several other companies as well. Please ask Commander Elliott for any comments about the terms. Bye.”

Will had to laugh when he watched the message fade on his screen. It was a laugh of joy. He couldn’t talk to anyone on the Mobilhab about it, so he called Yevgeny.

“I knew you’d call when you saw whom the videomail was from,” Yevgeny said, his face popping onto the screen.

“This is incredible. Absolutely amazing.”

“I did some calculations. The roughly 6,000 tonnes of gold in Pretoria and Joberg, if mined over twenty years, will bring in three billion per year, half to the Commission; that covers a third of our current expenses. Since governmental allotments will continue, it will allow development of cheaper, faster transportation between the planets. Since Mars has a lot more gold—they say ten times as much in the Cassini region alone—we can predict that more will be found, more mining efforts will be established, and more revenue will come in.”

“I agree! Yevgeny, we’re in the money.”

“I think so. This discovery means Mars can become financially self sufficient.”

“It’s amazing.” Will laughed at the thought.

“It’s unbelievable, it really is. And since the demand for gold on Earth is several thousand tonnes per year, we won’t be in danger of flooding the market any time soon. All this money can be used to import more people and more equipment, giving us more capabilities.”

“We had better talk to Morgan, and plan another meeting of the two cabinets.”

“This certainly changes plans for Columbus 6.”

Will laughed. “Opposition is in less than nine months. Columbus 5 has to leave for Earth in a bit over three; Columbus 6 launches in six, unless they use the solid core nuclear engines, in which case it could launch in eight. There’s a backup interplanetary hab and a backup Mars shuttle held in reserve at Gateway. We may see both of them come this way. There’s a backup ACV, which may fly cargo this way. We may get more personnel; it’d be possible to fly 36 here instead of 30 if the mining companies will pay for them. We’ll need special mining equipment, it’ll have to handle Martian cold, it’ll have to be extremely energy efficient, and it’ll have to be ready to fly here in six months. We’ll need a lot more power. We’ll need at least one biome for Cassini, maybe two for the Outpost. It’s going to be dizzying.”

“How’s it possible to have mining equipment ready?”

Will shrugged. “You know the expression: quality, speed, cost: pick two. We need the equipment fast, which means it’ll be expensive and reasonably good, or cheap and shoddy. Even training the mining personnel will be interesting.”

“They can receive a lot of their training during the flight or here, though.”

“True. There’s another long-term implication to consider. Mars will now have two outposts, because Cassini will have to be permanently inhabited. We won’t be able to call Aurorae ‘the Outpost’ any more.”

“Aurorae’s wealth will be dependent on Cassini, too.”

“That’s right. Maybe Cassini will consist of repair personnel only; maybe the equipment can be run telerobotically from Aurorae. If that’s not practical, though, Cassini may become Mars’s future metropolis, not Aurorae.”

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David Alaoui took time away from the controls of the rover rolling across the hilly, baked wastes of Maxwell Montes to look at Venus through the window. Twice every twenty-four hour elliptical orbit there was a brief half hour period, right after they had swept into sunrise or were approaching sunset, when the planet was a thin crescent, but the sun was not yet shining in the window. At that time Venus was a beautiful thing, not too bright to hurt the eyes, with hints of sunrise or sunset along the limb, and even a sense of the fuzzy, smoggy nature of the cloud deck. He got up and stared for about five minutes.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” exclaimed Juliette to him. They spoke in French, the standard language on Magellan.

“She really is,” he agreed. “Beautiful and deadly. I wish we could walk on her.”

“I wish we could get out of this station!” exclaimed Juliette. “Virtual exploration just isn’t enough. Even a space walk would help right now.”

“I know what you mean. The greenhouse helps, at least; the plants are always changing. I hope when we go home in the Amazonis, that we’re able to leave the Guineviere. It’ll be hard on us during the cruise home, but the next expedition will have that much more space.”

“They’ll need it. I’d like to see the next expedition deliver a big open module of some sort; call it a gym.”

“That would be good.” David turned back to the rover controls. “I hope this rover lasts another month. The science objectives are getting interesting.”

“How’s the video holding up?”

“It’s blind in one eye and looks like it has a cataract in the other, in spite of computer enhancement. The heat is seeping in; there’s something wrong with the air conditioning in that area of the rover.”

“The same flaw killed the last one. At least we were able to recover the radioactive electric generator.” She tapped on the screen in front of her. “The RTG has really helped the Samandar 3a, since we plugged it in. The extra kilowatt of power is speeding up fuel manufacturing.”

“How much water have we been able to recover from the atmosphere so far?”

“Almost 300 kilos! That dip into the sulfuric acid cloud last week paid off big! We’ve already converted it into over half the liquid oxygen and methane we need for the sample return.”

“We had better send the Phoenix down to recover samples from Maxwell Montes before the rover dies. We may need some time for analysis in the Samandar’s lab before loading the samples into the return capsule.”

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John Hunter’s research kept him quite busy at the Outpost for a week after his vision quest. He was anxious to look for the place of spiritual energy he had seen in his quest, but it was hard to get to the Dacha, especially alone. Finally, Enrique had to go up to do some routine maintenance, so John volunteered to accompany him. Then on the excuse he wanted to check for geological samples, he suited up and walked east-northeast from the Dacha, looking for the sacred place he was sure existed.

The escarpment edge of Little Colorado Canyon was farther away than he thought; three kilometers, a long way to walk by oneself outside. He was nervous about being so far from the Dacha; it was a big violation of the rules, rules that admittedly people bent all the time. As he approached the cliff edge he did so cautiously, his training as an astronaut battling with his cultural training.

He looked down; the Little Colorado was nearly a kilometer deep at this point, the bottom slopes being so steep he couldn’t even see the bottom where the road was, except for a few spots where the canyon bottom twisted. He gazed along the rim, both to the north and the south, and noted a notch in it 500 meters to the north, so he walked toward it.

When he got to the notch he saw that it was the top of a ravine that extended about a hundred meters to the east of the usual cliff edge. Eons ago there had been a water source; a spring that had sapped the cliff and caused it to retreat. Looking into the canyon he spotted the natural bridge that Will Elliott had mentioned; the canyon cut through a lava flow in the strata, and at one point the water of the spring had opened up a natural crack in the rock and worked its way under the lava flow, leaving a piece of it to form a roof over the canyon. He had never seen a phenomenon like that on Mars before.

There were bootprints descending the rim not too far away, also; Elliott and someone else, probably Roger Anderson, had gone down into the ravine. Knowing that there was a route down and back, John decided to follow their trail. It was easy to spot even though it was months or years old; even the worst global dust storm would obscure it very slowly, and the men had been careful on their way down to mark the trail to make their return easy, quick, and safe. As a result, whenever they had tried a path down that had failed, they had clearly scratched it out so that they wouldn’t be confused on their way back up.

The first cliff was the hardest to climb down; after that the men had followed a natural ledge until they reached a breach in the next cliff. It took John fifteen minutes to follow a path that probably had taken forty minutes to establish. He approached the arch with caution; it was an impressive structure, twenty meters above the ravine floor, about fifteen meters long and ten wide. The ground underneath was littered with stones that had broken off it and fallen, sometimes in big heaps. Surprisingly, the last flow of water had broken through most of the debris, establishing a creek bed under the arch.

As he stood just under the edge of the arch, he noticed something else as well; the debris had fallen to form two semicircles, one on each side of the creek bed. Together they formed a rough circle of stones. That really surprised John. “This is a very sacred spot,” he said to himself. He sat on a boulder and prayed thanks to Wakan Tanka for leading him to this place.

He had just finished when his communicator buzzed, startling him. He opened the line. “Hey, John, where are you? I’m finished with the work on the electrical system.”

“Oh, sorry. I’m at the escarpment edge looking into Little Colorado. I just got my samples.” He looked around and picked up two pieces of basalt.

“Acknowledged. You’re a long way from here, then. Shall I suit up and drive over?”

“Ah. . . sure, I’ll walk over to the dirt track leading to the Dacha, and I’ll make my GPS position public so you can home in on me. That’ll save a lot of time.”

“Yeah, and maybe your skin; you’re a long way away.”

“I know. I’ll tell you about it on the way down.”

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