Capítulo 7: Chapter 3. It's time to hit the road. sub-chapter 1.
I asked Ariadna to do some important things. The first is to warn the system MSF and people from the city council that we are conducting amateur scientific experiments in such and such a place in private, and if they suddenly record flashes from satellites, or earth tremors in the seismic monitoring service - do not be scared and get up on the nozzles - everything is fine, this is not a new war with the imperials or the invasion of xenos, it's us, the locals, calmly going about our business far from populated areas and not interfering with anyone. But let them be prepared for the fact that from our coordinates we may conduct a series of exits into orbit, and that this is also us, and that we should not be shot down. Of course, I had to speak. The patrol already knew me - I flew into orbit with them on training flights, and there were no problems at all. The signalman on duty transmitted my information above, we exchanged codes of space negotiations and our request was approved. On the contrary, they asked us, since we are going to build spacecraft, to fly to their station. Of course, I promised that as soon as we finish our business, we will immediately fly to visit. However, the MSF officer on duty warned without sentiment that the entire measure of responsibility for our eccentricities is solely on us, and if someone gets hurt from our actions or even more so dies, then we will simply be hit by a rocket from orbit. I assured that we do not intend to harm anyone, our intentions are exclusively peaceful, and that they would be useful to us... then I listed a list of simple substances that we need for flight ... more precisely, I wanted to list, but somewhere in the tenth position I was sent far and for a long time, or rather, to the Distribution Society- if they have free resources in their warehouses that are not assigned to anyone, they will be given out.
It was more difficult with the City Council - they almost interrogated me, they asked to visit the place of work, but I warned that the experiments were dangerous, connected with explosions, and that's why we are taking them far from the town so as not to harm anyone. After hearing about the explosions, respected people from the council politely sent me far away, and warned us not to try to carry out our explosions closer than twenty kilometers to the town. Well, we were way beyond that range. On this, the members of the City Council calmed down and wished us not to be killed by stupidity. Well, thank you… In the Distribution Society, I was also sent far away, and even more politely than in the City Council - earlier than in a month, there will be no free resources, and even more so, in the form of dispersed powders for machine tools - everything is reserved by the societies of Mechanics, Technicians, Builders, etc., for our sudden whim, no one will do anything I took into account that it was necessary to submit an application with justification in advance. In general, according to them, we are clumsy, what we thought before, and so on in the same spirit… We were advised to contact the Society of Prospectors. Alas, there was also a bummer waiting for me there - from all the mining outposts nearby, the accumulated products were shipped to the town, and there it is already reserved, and it's not worth waiting until next month. The prospectors advised us to contact the Society of Order- recycling of garbage is their task, and garbage is a mixture of a variety of raw materials, which in compressed form is quite capable of becoming raw materials for our disintegrators. And while I was negotiating about the possible availability of free, useless, and accidentally lying around resources, it seems that the whole planet has already managed to find out that there are such wonderful us, we have a ship powered by disintegration energy (few people fully understood what it was, but they learned this word quickly), and that we are going to fly somewhere. A bunch of people somehow inexplicably found out my intercom number, they started pestering me with calls and asking to join our crew. I had to put something like this on the answering machine: "yes, we have a ship, and we are flying into space, but the crew has already been recruited. Better help with resources if you can- and then followed a long list of what we need."
In addition to volunteers, I have received several calls from... um... our local media. The network channels "BryanCom" "Will and Reason", "Partisan Broadcast" "The First and Last", the press service of the MSF, and even the ever-memorable "Riddles of the Universe". I refused everyone, citing the danger of our experiments. Let them not risk themselves and their people - if anything, we are not to blame, we warned... And to be honest, I don't like the press. Soon everyone seemed to get behind me. I no longer answered unfamiliar calls. But their number has also decreased tenfold. And it wasn't even that I was tired of constant calls, but that because of them I wouldn't be able to do anything- because of them, there was no time for anything other than talking. By the way, the idea about garbage is interesting. A society of order, then? Well, that's the easiest thing to do.
I'm calling my mom. Mom, first of all, was very glad to see me (mutually), but she was surprised - we're going to fly, right? Why do we need garbage in a spaceship? Usually they try to get rid of excess garbage in space, send it to recycling stations so as not to clutter up the orbits, and suddenly for some reason we needed a huge pile. I tried to describe the process of obtaining energy for the flight by the ship as briefly and easily as possible, without unnecessary details about disintegration. After asking Ariadna for calculations, I announced the figure - we need at least fifty tons of garbage briquettes prepared for plasming. Mom shook her head sympathetically, and said that they had a couple of boxes a day, except for liquid and solid organic waste. (yes, my mother is extremely polite, and stubbornly avoids not only the word "shit" in speech, but even too close verbal associations with it - only unobtrusively smooth, extremely streamlined ephemisms). In general, according to her, everything is fine with the ecology, so much so that it is possible to build resorts. There is not enough garbage, all goes to recycling, even those "liquid and solid waste" are processed for fertilizers in a public garden. And she suggested a good idea, which I didn't even think of: we have a disintegrator that turns anything into dust particles? Just drag stones, trees, leaves, and other natural junk - it should turn out no worse. If something is not enough, it will be possible to apply to the Society of Order in the Sovietsky - there is much more garbage generated there than we have. It is unlikely that they will be greedy about garbage.
I thanked my mom for the valuable advice, and ended the communication session.
Secondly, I asked Ariadna to get rid of the lake above the northern mine - it is not particularly convenient to pass through it, even with the possibility of quick drying. Ariadne said she had a better idea and offered to take a look at the light projection of the base scheme. In the diagram, the northern shaft, like a periscope, moved up, rose a meter above the water level and threw folding ladders in four directions, the ends of which rested on the shores of the lake. As explained by the cyber pilot, this is part of the system for quickly leaving the ship when parked on the ground, but in this case it will also work as a bridge. I didn't mind.
Soon my father and his friends returned, and I voiced to them the idea of conducting the operation "Junk Mountain". They considered it a reasonable decision, especially since they did not come empty-handed - everyone had a balloon with dispersion and a bag with metal ingots - Vladik had begged this from his comrades in the Mechanics' Society. Ariadne immediately took it all into the loading hatch, and began preparing for disintegration, briquetting, and after that, the disintegration procedure itself. Strangely enough, despite the monstrous energy and shockwave released by the process, we did not feel anything at all. As the cyber pilot explained, this is because each compartment is separated from the other not only by flexible supports, but also by a magnetic cushion with a vacuum layer, so we will not be able to feel tremors or hear a rumble. We only observed slowly growing positions on the scheme of the disintegration system.
Alas, what was accumulated was categorically not enough. Most positions have increased by barely a few percent, a number of values are at zero at all. Rare and precious elements were especially lacking. To obtain oxygen and hydrogen, Ariadna sent a pumping pipe from the lake below us, she pumped the right amount of water into the disintegration chamber, there she filtered out, decomposed into oxygen and hydrogen, and took her places in the storage chambers along the highways. Nitrogen was simply pumped from the air through the air conditioning system and filters. There was no carbon. Silicon also needs to be taken somewhere. Boron is also needed - there are almost no basic components for lithoplast. There is also nowhere to take gold for the space grade of lithoplast. And we need as much as a hundred kilograms of this once precious, and now just an important technical metal. And two hundred kilograms of silver. And Vladik in the Society of Mechanics begged for less than one kilogram. There is no gold in the depths of Bryanskaya completely - it is mined on other planets of the system. Many resources on our planet, due to its young age, simply do not exist - they are all contained in the core and mantle depths, which we will not be able to reach, and will not even want to. Oil, gas, most of the precious metals and intrusive igneous rocks - all this is not found here. In general, Operation "Junk Mountain has begun." Ariadna quickly piled up the tools we requested according to drawings from Vladik's personal archive - vibratory saws, shaped and explosive charges, bags, boxes, electric wheelbarrow. Having received what we needed, we got to the surface - to extract four tons of carbon from wood and six tons of silicon from a suitable stone. There was no lake under us - Ariadna "drank" everything, and we cheerfully began to collect dead wood, saw it into slices and burn it on the shore of the former lake. After that, we watered the coals with water from a nearby stream, put them in bags and dumped them with carts directly into the mine of the space station. Ariadna redirected the bags with the raw materials we extracted by opening additional flaps from the bow to the pre-chambers, and from there to the pre-pressing chambers. With silicon, everything was a little more complicated, but not much. After a short exploration, we found boulders and disintegrations of brown-yellow siliceous rocks, and began to carefully tear them into fragments with explosive charges. In principle, we could have used plasma cutters, but we just needed crushed stone, not even blocks, and it was faster with banal explosives. We put the impaled stone in bags in the same way, took it in wheelbarrows to the station and dumped it into the mine.
We worked hard all day, like the very last hooligans sent by Society to atone for misdeeds. And this despite the fact that we did nothing wrong - everything was purely voluntary. But we were still able to get the necessary amount of silicon, carbon and a few other related elements. We were terribly tired, even taking into account our training and mechanization in the form of wheelbarrows and tools. At the end of the day, we didn't have enough strength for anything. We needed rest. I was pleased with the medical compartment - Paul and Oleg even managed to rub calluses in gloves. A medical replicator repaired their damaged skin in a matter of minutes. Of course, we also use similar technologies in medicine, but for something more serious, like building artificial organs, creating implants, etc., but here, on Photon, this thing heals simple cuts and abrasions.
The same situation is here with food. The food here is prepared from the same raw materials as everything else, in several stages - simple substances are loaded into the first stage of the replicator complex, they form simple compounds, those compounds form more complex ones, they form several varieties of food mass - a conglomerate of substances necessary for human life, specifically - separate groups of protein, fat, carbohydrates, salts, vitamins and minerals necessary for humans, dyes and flavorings. Then the ingredients obtained by this intricate alchemy are sent to the molding, processing and finishing chambers, acquiring the necessary color and taste, texture and shape under the action of additives, the ratio of which depends on the recipe. We could choose a ready-made recipe on the terminal in the kitchen compartment, or, using the built-in development tools, come up with something of our own. Alas, everything was fine only with carbohydrates - for vitamins and even salt, we collected extremely few substances containing iron, magnesium, calcium, sodium, chlorine and other elements useful in moderate doses for the body. So we did not taste any artificial meat or vegetables - we had to be content with bread and sweet sweets, and drink them with sweet soda or just water - there were few substances for something resembling tea, there were no suitable wild plants nearby, we were not fond of alcohols - drinking something containing alcohol is stupidity even more than a bet to go into space without a spacesuit- in one case you will die quickly, in the other - slowly and painfully, although it is much more likely that you will be shot by others- there have been cases. In a society where everyone should always carry a gun, alcohol and other drugs are unacceptable. And we were categorically too lazy to go home after our hard work. However, for the first time - and this will do. Ariadna was awarded stingy, but quite honest words of gratitude, however, she redirected us so that we thanked the software and computing module of the replication system in the kitchen compartment - Ariadna herself, her core, did not participate in cooking food for people in any way at all - her secondary subsystem part was in charge of all household processes, which was responsible only for administration bases.
By the next morning, the batteries of the cosmobase were already charged to the very limit. It was possible to take off. But, some important components were still missing. And, from the surface of the planet, we decided to turn our eyes upward. Vladik offered us a very sensible plan - to get the missing elements in space. Specifically, we could shake off some resources from the Partisan comet satellite. As spectral analysis has shown, its tail shines with spectral lines of almost most of the substances known in the galaxy. Vladik went outside for this purpose and remotely rummaged through his drawings on the home terminal through the intercom, selected the necessary ones from them, put them together on a tablet built into the table (not without Ariadne's help) into a single circuit, and connected his design with a pair of standard modules from the bolides. It turned out to be something like an ancient spacecraft from the time of the exploration of the Solar System. The head compartment consisted of a mini-gravpolar, rebuilt into a gravity dust collector with magnetic discharge into the separation chamber, where the collected dust should be divided into simple substances, some of which we need goes to the accumulation module, and the unnecessary part is thrown overboard. The second compartment is a slightly modified Photon-A bolide, standard for the cosmobase, slightly modified for the new task, which houses the pilot and navigation equipment, plus search equipment for detecting the most productive dust zones. The third compartment is a reinforced engine compartment, which allowed the car to maneuver normally and develop the necessary speed with the cargo of the mining compartment. Ariadna approved the plan, and assured us that the ship's systems would be able to assemble such an apparatus. And she was not mistaken - in a couple of hours everything was ready, and the compartments of the apparatus, assembled in replicator cells, lined up like bullets in a revolver, waiting for the entrance to the southern mine. Vladik volunteered to fly as the initiator of the project. In principle, we could send a robot in an unmanned version, and control it from the surface in avatar mode, but our extreme decided that he urgently and irrevocably needed to personally fly to wipe the comets from dust. We did not dissuade him. Moreover, practice shows that the most reliable systems are those where a robot and a human complement each other.
To begin with, I contacted the MSF duty officers again. The conversation turned out to be funny:
-Over!- I was talking into the intercom, which was transmitting a signal to orbit through the Photon communication node- Reception, the MCF station of the Bryanskaya planet, Vlad Gor is on the line, respond!
An image of the station attendant opened in a separate window:
- Over, I can hear you perfectly! Oh, you experimenters again? How are the experiments, no one has been blown to pieces yet, haha?
- It's all right, - I replied, I missed the not the most successful joke. – We are launching a spacecraft soon, we warn you in advance so that you don't shoot us down, taking us for I don't know what. We give you its characteristics… Ariadna, give them the info array!
The AI radioed up the data with the ship's diagram and its signal data. The attendant took the data to his terminal, examined the circuit, and asked:
- Is that a mining bolide? Where are you sending your nozzles?
- To the Partisan's tail. We collect samples from the comet, we will return them to the planet.
- Wow! Seriously. Well done, this is a high level, and I thought you decided to kick asteroids out of idleness. Then we will send you a couple of combat bolides to accompany you - let them cover you.
- Why? Is there a danger?
- No… This is standard procedure. But if you don't want to, we don't insist. Hmm... I see your spaceship is armed.
-It's nothing, just a ray gun and a block of missiles - you never know, suddenly we'll meet meteors?
- As you wish. I warned you about responsibility - the slightest aggression on your part - and we will spray both you and your ship to the stars. Good day to you!
The connection was interrupted. Well, now we can get started.
Vladik put on a lightweight spacesuit prepared by Ariadna, in which there was absolutely nothing unusual, and went down the passage to the ring compartment with the fireballs, took the seat indicated by Ariadna and began pre-flight preparation according to her instructions. Checking systems for reaction, cleanliness of communication, serviceability of units. More a ritual than a necessity, the AI explained that its maintenance subsystem continuously monitors all devices in all compartments, and if something breaks, it will be the first to know about it. But, she did not object- we had nowhere to hurry too much, and no one would get worse from another check. It was only unclear how Ariadna was going to rescue the ship from the cavern in which the "Photon" is located - not through the core of the planet to launch it? We will have to expand the northern mine in some way - it is less than one meter wide, and our ship of three interlocked blocks is two meters wide only... It fits perfectly in the trunk of the southern shaft, but the southern shaft leads straight down. But, I was worried in vain - the trunk of the northern mine pulled the ladders into itself, went inside, and, with the help of a light launch of the gravpolar, the space base simply turned upside down exactly one hundred and eighty degrees - its absolutely smooth and perfectly spherical outer skin allows it, and thanks to the gravity compensation system we did not feel anything- the top and the bottom hasn't changed for us. Yes, the six-hour day made itself felt - it was already dark outside. Compartments lined up one by one in the mine- mining, control and propulsion, they were connected by a series of reliable fasteners and an improvised prospector spaceship froze waiting for the launch. A small, but quite powerful disintegrating hybrid gravpolar-EPE is installed in the engine compartment of the spacecraft, although only for sublight flights, a weak gravpolar is there only for obtaining energy through disintegration, but, all the same, it could go into space on its own thrust. But, Ariadna decided that it was better to save fuel material, she launched the promotion of the main gravpolar of the space base, this time in synchronization mode. The base itself remained in place, but due to the upward local gravitational shift, gravity in this place noticeably decreased, in addition, Ariadne applied voltage to the superconducting circuits of the southern mine, accurately calculating the momentum, and the spaceship was thrown up from the mine by a bullet, in a matter of seconds, embraced by the brightest, like a thousand lightning radiance, it tore for the limits of the atmosphere, and Vladik sent him along an inclined orbital arc to take the most successful course to the Partisan comet. Yes, the hypersonic shock wave around us probably knocked down trees for a good hundred meters, and stripped the leaves for at least a kilometer around... Actually, such a launch is normally intended for space, but it can also be performed on the planet - the strength of the station and its cars allows it. And the gravity compensation system built into the control compartment of the spacecraft mitigates the frenzied overload from such a rapid acceleration. Imagine, a thousand years ago, the unfortunate pilots of bolides were forced to fly without it, only with primitive systems of passive overload compensation. And if necessary, sharp maneuvers, they experienced all the dangerous effects of overloads on their body. Active onboard inertia compensators were only on large ships, and the designers of the bolides had to be sophisticated with gel protective layers, special suits, medicines and other half measures. And now it has become much easier - spin whatever crazy maneuvers you want- the head will remain in place, the main thing is that nothing falls off from the car itself. Of course, the compensators on the bolides are much weaker than those on interstellar ships, but they are usually quite enough to extinguish not very dashing sublight maneuvers in their zone of action.
We were sitting in chairs in the central hall, watching the spectacle on the light projection, on one third of it the ship's diagram shone, on the other - the diagram of outer space to the Partisan satellite, on the third - the diagram and parameters of Vladik's ship, and above the diagrams - the view from its overview mediascanners.
- Over, Vladik - I'm calling. – How are you feeling?
The extinguished window of the attendant replaced the window with a video from the prospector's cabin with Vladik in a spacesuit.
- Cool!.. Dented as it should be!- he estimated noisily, breathing heavily. – I almost pushed the chair with me! Just imagine - the spacecraft is empty, and on its back skin there is a stencil in the form of my figure? Joke. Everything passed very quickly. At first, I was heavily pressed into the chair, but everything is fine with me... but don't suffer there, bring the data from my scaphe to your projection. Everything is written and shown there.
Ariadna was not slow to do so. On the picture that appeared from the air with a symbolic image of a person, everything seemed to be within the normal range - pressure, breathing, air composition, temperature, brain activity… The indicators were seriously exceeded for a dozen or two seconds, but now he was moving away from the shake-up.
"I'm all right," Vladik repeated. – I'm going behind the globe of the planet, you will be in the shadow for me, the radio is out of the zone, I'm switching to gravcom.
"We're plugging in gravcom," Ariadna confirmed. –Audibility check, call via gravcom.
- Check, I can hear you normally.- Vladik confirmed through the interference of the radio, which did not want to be caught through the other side of the planet, and the spacecraft was not adapted to the communication satellites of the planet. However, even the gravcom did not catch too well because of the proximity of the planet, which with its mass interfered with the gravitational connection.
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