A Forest of Stars - Kevin J. Anderson [117]
“Good thing we Roamers can. You”—Cesca pointed at him—“what’s your name?”
“Nikko Chan Tylar,” he said, raising his chin. “My father is Crim—”
“I know who your father is. Do you have a fast ship? We need to send a message to Osquivel right away.” Her palms were sweaty, and she wiped them on the legs of her jumpsuit.
The young man looked proud. “I can leave in ten minutes, if that’s what you need.”
“Take an hour, just to make sure you have everything. Go find Del Kellum and tell him the news. I’ll round up other Roamer teams and send them as soon as I can.”
Nikko bounded away like a gazelle in the low gravity. Cesca smiled after him, suddenly preoccupied with a thousand more vital plans. Her heart raced with worry; another crisis, and she would have to handle it as Speaker. Though her flotilla of betrothal ships was ready to depart on their stately procession to Theroc, a genuine clan emergency took precedence over marriage plans.
Or am I just looking for excuses?
Nevertheless, Cesca could not put off the wedding forever.
58
KOTTO OKIAH
Over the years, Roamers had faced Hansa prejudice, malfunctioning Ildiran skymines, and deadly hydrogue attacks. But for Kotto Okiah, the simmering hot world of Isperos was his greatest enemy.
The raging too-close sun filled the vault of stars overhead like an enormous furnace. Engineers lived inside a rat’s nest of insulated tunnels. Despite the hard work, though, Kotto found the challenge itself to be so interesting that it more than made up for the discomforts.
Here, bombarded with heavy solar storms, Kotto had pushed his engineering capabilities to their limits, keeping the industrial base alive. There were always innovative alternatives, if he looked at a problem from enough perspectives.
However, lying so close to the edge, the facility was vulnerable to the slightest miscalculation or natural disaster—events even Kotto Okiah couldn’t predict, despite the number of sleepless nights he spent pondering worst-case scenarios. Isperos was a magnet for such things…
The sun-grazer comet entered the system in a death plunge, drawn by the star’s irresistible gravity. The coronal glare had masked the comet’s approach from the facility’s sensors, but as the tumbling ball of ice and gases swung around the limb of the star, it headed toward the small rocky world, seemingly on a collision course.
Kotto’s engineers sounded alarms, rousing him from his quarters, where he had taken a quick nap. Sweating—always sweating in the sauna heat of the underground rooms—he hurried to the control lounge. Already his workers had projected the trajectory schematics.
“We’ve run the calculations three times, Kotto,” said one of his best celestial mechanics, wiping perspiration from his face. “Too close for comfort, but the thing won’t hit us. We’ll probably have to tell everybody outside to duck as the comet passes over.”
“That close?” Kotto said, fascinated instead of fearful. For now.
“Our readings are accurate out to seven significant digits. It’ll be quite a show.”
Within five days, the cottony mass of the comet tumbled overhead, spewing vapors and jetting gases as volatile chemicals evaporated explosively from frozen pockets. Venting gases jostled the comet in a dozen different directions, making precise calculations impossible.
When the evaporating mountain scraped over the night side of Isperos, far from the surface mining operations, Kotto and his workers observed the glorious coma and tail. It was a spectacle unlike anything he had seen before. And only a Roamer would dare be in so risky a place as to witness an event like this. No Big Goose sissy would have dared. He grinned and took numerous archive images, planning to show them to his old mother on Rendezvous…
However, though the comet didn’t hit Isperos, didn’t even graze close enough to pepper the pocked surface with debris, its subtle gravity tickled the molten world and caused its surface to twitch and flinch.
Kotto felt the tremors, the slight movement of the tunnels. It was not a severe enough quake to damage the