The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [105]
Maher showed the away team—Deanna, Captain Picard, Will, and Chief Engineer La Forge—into a makeshift conference room with a large brown table surrounded by eight mismatched chairs. A viewscreen had been mounted carelessly on the bare metal wall at the far end of the room.
“Please sit down,” Maher said. “Doctor Aaron will be here in a moment. Would anyone care for something to drink?”
As he passed around cups of coffee, Maher thanked Picard for transporting over to the outpost. “As you can see, Captain, our supplies are a bit tight at this stage. We don’t have transporters yet, and I think our shuttle is counting the days until retirement. Ah, Doctor Aaron,” he said, as a tall man walked in. “This is the party from the Enterprise.”
The newcomer had thick, untidy black hair and dark brown eyes, and wore a wrinkled lab coat. He sat near the head of the table, nodding at each of the visitors as Maher named them but never quite meeting their eyes. Deanna sensed both shyness and impatience; this man was ready to get down to business.
Picard seemed to come to the same conclusion. “Doctor Aaron,” he said. “We’ve been looking forward to hearing about your work here.”
“It’s really quite extraordinary, Captain,” said Aaron. For the first time, Deanna felt the man’s enthusiasm. “Almost everything we need for this outpost can be found in Heaven’s rings: water for life support and fuel; raw building materials that can be fabricated into shelter. Ennis is one of Heaven’s more stable moons, in terms of orbit and geologic activity, so this is an ideal base from which to study Heaven’s rings. This outpost will be very basic for quite a while, but in a few years I hope we’ll have a first-class research station.”
Maher leaned forward. “Not to mention a larger settlement to accommodate the scientists’ families,” he put in. “We haven’t been in this solar system for very long—the colony on Chandra is only eight years old—but we’re eager to expand our presence.”
“I take it you plan to shepherd ring fragments here to provide raw materials,” Picard said.
“Not fragments, Captain,” Aaron said. “A fragment. A moonlet, in fact. We’re going after Bell-B.”
Aaron tapped the padd he’d brought with him, activating the viewscreen on the wall. A graphic representation of a section of the rings appeared, as viewed from above. On the left side was a curved, orange section of Heaven, with concentric ring segments radiating outward to the right.
“You can see that the rings are labeled A through H, with A the innermost ring. Heaven’s rings are similar to Saturn’s: bright, lots of water ice, and very well defined, especially the inner rings. The outer rings, F, G, and H, are broader and more nebulous; in fact, it’s difficult to see H with the naked eye, because the particles are dark and widely dispersed, but it’s very much there.”
“Where in the rings does—you called it ‘Bell-B,’ is that right?—come from?” Deanna asked.
Aaron tapped the padd again and the screen zoomed in on Ring D, which was thin and sharp. “These two moons are called the Bell Twins, or Bell-A and Bell-B,” he said. “Actually, we tend to just call them Alpha and Beta when we’re feeling lazy. They lie on either side of Ring D, so they’re not quite embedded moonlets, as opposed to Ares, which falls right in the middle of Ring C. But the Bell Twins are interesting because they’re compositionally similar to each other, at least on the surface: rocky with a great deal of water ice. And they’re obvious shepherd moons—you can see the well-defined gaps on either side of the ring, here and here. The Bells don’t usually sit at the same point in their orbits like this, of course. Alpha is closer to Heaven than Beta by almost fourteen thousand kilometers, so its orbital period is more than two hours shorter.”
“But why are you going after such a large moonlet?” asked Geordi. “Wouldn’t it be easier to shepherd smaller fragments in batches rather than move something so large?”
Doctor Aaron smiled. “Yes. But it