Hidden Empire - Kevin J. Anderson [42]
"Get closer," the eager engineer said to Jess Tamblyn, unable to tear his eyes from the spectacle. "We've got to get a lot closer."
Though he was sweating, Jess trusted the other man's intuition. "If that's what we have to do." He sent a brief, silent prayer to the Guiding Star, then did as the other man asked.
Kotto Okiah had no more than a theoretical conception of genuine dangers, but he did understand tolerances and risks better than any other Roamer. Kotto had already designed and established four successful extreme-environment settlements. If the Speaker's youngest son hadn't known what he was doing, tens of thousands of Roamers would already have died.
As the shielded vessel gingerly approached the solar storm, Kotto alternated his attention between the filtered window and the specific-band scanners. With short, spiky brown hair and eyes like bright gray-blue buttons, the engineer looked like a child inundated with remarkable presents. "There! You can see the planet...not as bad as I'd feared."
Jess noted the sparkle of rocky Isperos orbiting close to the turbulent star, embedded in the densest part of the corona. "Not bad? Kotto, it looks like an ember in a blast furnace."
Distracted by his readings, the engineer said, "In some ways that's an advantage."
An advantage. No one had ever accused Kotto Okiah of being a pessimist.
After leaving Ross at the Golgen skymine, Jess had taken his ekti cargo escort to a Hansa distribution complex, then made his way to the asteroid cluster of Rendezvous. He had duties to perform for his family's water-mining operations, clan obligations, business contacts and meetings with other clan leaders...and his brother's gifts to deliver to Cesca Peroni.
But Cesca had not yet returned from her mission with Speaker Okiah. While Jess could easily have arranged for someone else to present Ross's tokens to his fiancée, he did not want to waste a legitimate excuse to spend a few private moments with her, even if the choice went against his better judgment. He knew he shouldn't feel this way, after he had denied himself so much...
Jess had lingered at the Rendezvous complex for several days, waiting for Cesca. But once it began to grow obvious to others that he was stalling, he couldn't let anyone suspect his feelings. He had no choice but to schedule his return to Plumas. When Kotto Okiah had asked for a willing pilot to take him to Isperos on a survey mission, Jess had leaped at the opportunity...not that any other Roamer was the least bit interested in volunteering.
Now, the reconnaissance ship circled the hot planet, fighting the sun's massive gravity before it passed into the blessed cone of shadow behind Isperos. Jess looked down at the baked and glassy surface, seeing fissures caused by heat stresses. Lava seas spilled across the continents, smoothing the scars of impact craters, then hardened into a skin of rock during the cold months of darkness.
"Kotto, you are insane to want to build a Roamer colony here."
The young engineer stared avidly at the blistered world. "Look at the metals, though. You don't find resources like that just anywhere. Lighter-element impurities are all boiled away. Solar-wind bombardment has created plenty of new isotopes for the taking." He tapped his chin with a finger. "If we used fiber insulation, double-walled containment, vacuum honeycombed structural support, we could easily keep colony integrity..." His voice trailed off as he considered the possibilities.
From an early age, the youngest of Jhy Okiah's sons had demonstrated his imaginative and quirky understanding of low-gravity construction. He loved to push the envelope with solutions to difficult survival problems. Kotto had spent more than a decade working in Del Kellum's hidden shipyards within the rings of Osquivel and had twice developed improved ekti reactors for skymines. Despite his successes, and occasional failures, Kotto was not arrogant or stubborn. He was filled with an insatiable curiosity.
As a boy, Kotto had proven quite