Scattered Suns - Kevin J. Anderson [77]
Kellum said, “You’ll work together, POWs and Soldier compies. There’s plenty of tasks for everybody.”
Chapter 36—CESCA PERONI
Jonah 12 returned to its work routine. Teams doing double duty for several days would more than make up for time lost during the funeral for the former Speaker. Cesca thought they were throwing themselves into the effort in an unconscious attempt to honor Jhy Okiah, or maybe to keep themselves busy with something they could understand while the rest of Roamer society came to grips with the new order.
Tasks around the base were clearly assigned and divided. Though the Roamer excavators and processors were curious about the buried Klikiss robots, it wasn’t their priority. Cryoengineering specialist Jack Ebbe, one of the two men who had uncovered the robot tomb, had since been poking around at the site for several days, while his partner now stayed at the base to put together a small expedition. Ironically, only Cesca and acting administrator Purcell Wan had enough time to consider going to the other side of the planetoid.
Cesca hadn’t wanted to leave Jonah 12 with the old Speaker in such a fragile state, but now she intended to depart and search out other clusters of the outlaw clans as soon as the fast messenger ships came back. While she was waiting, she and Purcell would go inspect the group of buried alien robots.
The still-exuberant vapor miner Danvier Stubbs inspected the grazer, recharged the power cells and air tanks, added packaged food, then got a good night’s sleep before he announced he was ready to make the long journey. “By now Jack’s probably getting antsy,” Danvier said. “He’s been by himself digging around, setting up camp, stringing lights, and gathering data. I told him to come back here for the time being, but he was really excited by the find, and he can be pretty stubborn. You should try sitting in a grazer with him day after day—”
“Then let’s get moving,” Cesca interrupted the loquacious vapor miner. “He’s had time to do a lot of excavating over the past four days, and it’s a long haul to get there.”
She followed him outside the domes while Purcell hurried to catch up. The three of them easily fit inside the turtlelike vehicle, which was built to accommodate five people and extensive equipment and troubleshooting tools. Since it would be a lengthy ride, Danvier sealed the double airlocks and pressurized the compartment so they could remove their helmets.
The grazer set off, crawling across the dark iciness away from the glowing base domes. They bounced over the uneven frozen landscape and dodged swampy pools of liquid hydrogen lakes. Danvier rapped his gloved knuckles on the control panel. “These things aren’t built for speed, but they’re sure reliable.”
As a vapor miner, Danvier specialized in processing frozen gases to sift out usable elements and molecules. During the hours of traveling, he explained everything about his job in far more detail than Cesca wanted to absorb.
The two men had been on a routine ice-combing expedition when they’d found the robots. “We detected an inclusion in a frozen chamber, far enough away that nobody’d spotted it before. Since our sensors are designed to read mostly light elements with occasional spikes of rock or metal, we didn’t know what we were seeing. Jack’s best guess was that a heavy meteoroid had hit the ice, but the readings just didn’t look right to me.” Danvier grinned, as if expecting a pat on the back.
“What screwed up the result was a polymer sheath surrounding the tomb chamber, or whatever it is. The robots are sealed in some sort of bubble, walled off by an artificial membrane. Our sensors picked up the metals of their bodies and the polymers in the protective shell. I said, 'Jack, this is something awfully weird.' And for the first time all shift, he didn’t argue with me.”
His companion had a knack for keeping machinery functional even in supercold environments.