Salvation

While his crew was working on readying the tank, Callum started clearing an area to work in, level with the gap Alana and Colin were preparing. He cut into the girders, creating a cave to bring the portals through unencumbered. It was tough work, sending long lengths of metal tumbling down into the pit below, where they bounced and spun off the thick pipes leading in from the other tanks, clattering away to the very bottom of the pit. Several struck the side of the portal chamber five meters below him.

To hold the six-meter portal, they’d brought three support rails with them—telescoping composite tubes that Callum and Alana set up underneath the tank’s severed pipe. Bonding pads at each end secured them to the remaining steel girders.

The whole procedure took nearly seventy minutes. Callum was sweating profusely when they finished, and Raina confirmed the rails had bonded correctly to the molecules of the lattice girders. Standing on the precarious walkway, he opened the second case, which contained another thirty-centimeter portal, and placed it base down on the mesh.

“Henry, we’re ready. Start threading.”

—

As soon as the tank’s gas evacuation was complete, Henry had cycled out of the ventchamber airlock and headed back to the ED ready-one compartment. Haumea station’s broad passageways were simple metal tubes with nearly a meter of insulation foam sprayed on the outside to help combat the cold imbued by the asteroid’s lonely trans-Neptune orbit. The station didn’t warrant the investment of its own manufacturing module; all its sections and components were shipped out directly from Earth. They were laid out across Haumea’s ice-crusted rock surface in a series of basic geodesic spheres with radial spokes leading out to cylindrical ventchambers of varying size. There were more than eighty ventchambers already, most of them with their outer doors permanently open, allowing plumes of misty vapor to fountain up out of their portals as toxic chemicals or radioactive gases were shunted far away from Earth. The remainder would intermittently produce bursts of canisters, which streaked out across interplanetary space like a blast of giant shotgun pellets. New spheres and ventchambers were still being added as Earth methodically disposed of its historical pollution.

Technicians were already assembling the threader when Henry arrived in ED ready-one. The inside of the dome was the same triple-level layout as a free-fall space station; with Haumea’s minimal gravity it made maneuvering large machinery a lot easier. The central deck was the assembly area for threaders. Henry smiled inside his helmet as he saw the six-meter one being prepared; the big machines always delighted him.

The core of this one was the pair of six-meter portals, currently pressed together so tightly they formed a single disk of molecular circuitry a meter and a half thick. Nine robot arms were carefully integrating an elegant egg-shaped frame of brushed aluminum ovals around them, containing a multitude of mechanical components and actuators, wound with power cables and data fibers.

Henry clicked his space suit boots into the floor grid, holding himself in place while the technicians glided around the growing threader like curious fish investigating a shining reef. He watched the process advance while the voices of the crew back in Gylgen babbled away in his ears.

Once the first part of the threader was complete, a similar, smaller version was attached to its front end, then finally an even smaller edition was attached to the end of that. The three together resembled a bizarre Russian doll mechanism caught in mid-separation.

“Henry, we’re ready for you,” the lead technician said.

Henry picked up the second of the two suitcases he’d brought with him from Brixton. He kicked off the floor and floated easily through the air to the threader. To stop he grabbed one of the ceiling handholds, and maneuvered himself back to vertical relative to the decking. Working in zero gee, constantly having to manipulate your whole body mass with a single arm, built muscle bulk like no gym exercise ever could. All space workers developed upper bodies like pro swimmers. And because portal doors meant everyone went back home to Earth at the end of shift, nobody suffered the kind of calcium loss and muscle wastage early astronauts were plagued with on long-duration flights.

He opened the suitcase and took out the circular thirty-centimeter portal. It locked into place on the front of the threader. “Integration complete,” he reported.

“Reading it,” Fitz said. “Running threader procedure checks. You are go to egress the ventlock.”

The magnetic monorail grip on the bottom of the threader powered up, propelling it along one of several rails on the deck. Henry waited until it went past, then grasped one of the curving aluminum ribs at the back and let it tow him along. The rail led down a passageway to the largest ventchamber on Haumea.