Allele's vision coalesced before her other senses and motor functions woke to find herself standing someplace off to the side of the main base camp's central pivot. Her body was numbed in a cotton electric fuzz that felt bloated. After a moment her face and head felt as if they were being wiped by a wet sponge that smoothed away the electric fuzz allowing feeling and movement in her face and neck. Looking down at herself she caught the last instant of her legs and feet coming into corporeal focus. Privacy was at a premium at base camp. Everyone would coalesce in plain view. After a few times it would seem as natural as stepping through a bendway. At her feet the surface ice had been ground to a fine granular consistency creating a perfect disc of ice dust about seven feet in radius. The powdery carpet was cut two inches deep into the surface ice.
The central pivot was an open expanse off of which four arterial roads radiated, each straddled by camp structures. There were already several other discs cut into the ice near Allele's. The entire pivot would be honeycombed them by the time the expeditionary contingent was completely transferred. Afterwards, the Base Camp Billet would replace the pivot's surface with the tile-work with which it had already carpeted the rest of the camp.
The camp was established on one of the few flat shelves at the Hadrian Rift's edge that were big enough in area to accommodate it's scope. Though elevated a thousand feet above the rifts floor, the shelf lay only a fraction of the way up the side of the surrounding ridge. Alelle looked north along the north/south arterial, at the end of which was the Phase Craft port where the Rhumbulian's donut shaped hull rose high above the rooftops of the camp buildings that lined the road, blocking any clear view beyond. Despite this the ship and the camp were dwarfed by the looming peaks that trailed off into the distance making up the surrounding range.
The top surface of the ship was flat to allow for aerial landings while away from port. Fore and Aft had twin pointed verticle protrusions that housed Master Bridges. One was a typical navigation control center. Sita had steered the ship from that Bridge. The second Bridge was the core brain center for the ship's extensive research capabilities. From the Research bridge, pinpoint maneuvering controls enabled the Rhumbulian to position itself so as to surround a dig site as large as five hundred feet in diameter within the central opening of the ship's donut shape. The inner walls of the interior opening housed a vast array of scanning and other assessment apparatus to determine pretty much anything they would want to know within the time it took the ship to straddle and encompass a site of interest. Since the ship's massive phase bubble included the entire central opening, it could also be used as a launching facility for smaller craft when not being used for research.
Sita walked up beside Allele. She was also agape looking at the huge ship, "She's a work of art isn't she?"
"I don't know about that, but she'll do," said Allele.
"You haven't been at her controls," Sita replied.
"Well, I'm glad that one of my team knows how to handle her. It may be useful someday," Allele said with pride for Sita.
"Someday I might just steal her," quipped Sita.
"Someday I might help you," Allele shot back with a wide smile.
Sita studied Allele's face noting the smooth sensual line of her lips and how even the smattering of fine wrinkles that circled the folds at the ends of her mouth had a certain distracting grace. She pulled her attention away back toward the port, "Well, I need to make sure my maintenance requests have been done. If you'll excuse me, I'd better get over there."
Allele watched Sita walk quickly up the road to toward the port. The Sun peaked from the northern edge of Jupiter to the west, casting it's warm silken light across the rift. Sita cast long shadows as she stepped in and out of the sunlight that crossed her path between buildings.
Allele turned her attention to the east. The Sun enflamed the tips of the mountain range that formed the rift's edge high above. To the west at Jupiter and the light that played off the fractured ice formations of the ice mining fields that lay at the foot of the mountain range. Allele walked to the western end of the east/west arterial to better see the vastness of the rift. The road terminated near the edge of the shelf. She continued to edge wanting to look down at the broken terrain below. When she got there she discovered she was not alone.
Off to her right on a bolder of blue ice in a small outcrop of frozen rubble sat a young man barely old enough for majority privileges. He stared out across the fractured sea of ice, his attention so lost in the beauty of the scene that he didn't notice Allele walk over and lean on his perch.
"Beautiful isn't it, Jon?" she asked.
"Yes it is amazing," he answered only slightly startled by her presence.
"The largest Neo-scarification on the planet," Allele whispered with awe.
"Countless billions of years of only virgin scarification on the surface of Europa, and then this, the oldest, largest, and most mysterious edifice of humanity" he added.
None of the team anticipated Jon actually being so young. He'd acquired special persona protocols that were not entirely legal. With them he was able to raise personas of higher maturity than socially correct for his actual age. He'd done this in order to enhance his credibility within professional circles. He was a prodigy where anthropological pathology was concerned but he'd been treated dismissively by older colleagues. A new face and change of institution resolved his problem until the opportunity to explore the rift.
Jon decided that he had already amply proven himself to his new colleagues for them to accept him and the rift project was too big to pass up. Sitting there at the rim of an expanse of smooth layered ice that stretched halfway to the horizon, he knew the teasing he suffered from the team well worth the view.
The collapse was a smooth welt on the older rough expanse of the greater rift. When the massive field of ice mines collapsed, water flooded the entire grid quickly freezing over in a perfectly smooth plate of blue ice. Over the centuries that followed the newly formed cracks were determined by the ancient triangular grid of wells below the surface. More water bled and froze across the surface creating a pattern of varying stratified ice steppes that sunlight passes through refracting spectral splits of color depending on the depth and angle of the flows. The denser walls of the sunken wells are illuminated and made visible beneath the surface creating a ghostly honeycomb buried beyond reach, beckoning the curious to pull answers to ancient questions from their depths.
Mesmerized by the sun's changing light, Allele and Jon watched the strange animated world spread out before them. They might have stayed there the entire day had Lepton not arrived.
"Powerful isn't it?" he said breaking the spell.
Only Allele answered,"Mysterious."
"And it's going to remain that way if you two sit gawking at it forever," Lepton chided.
"True enough," Allele said.
"I've got equipment to prepare," Jon admitted.
"There's a lot of work for all of us if we hope to get out there by tomorrow," Lepton said.
"Tomorrow?" Jon asked, surprised.
"Yes," answered Allele. "Sita is already onboard the Rhumbulian making preparations. I want to get all our primary target sites finished before the month is out and that means we need to start tomorrow or fall behind."
"And I have no idea how long it will take to hammer down into the central core," added Lepton.
"Wait. Primary target sites? I thought we were starting a methodical survey of A-grid," Jon said confused.
"We need to show some results quickly, Jon. If we don't the project could get scrapped. I've therefore decided to gamble on several promising sites before starting the main sweep," Allele explained.
The three walked back to the camp at a brisk pace, discussing the priorities of the day, what needed doing, and in what order.
***
Sita finished putting the observation craft through a series of tests by mid-morning. She'd converted it for use as a launching base. Though extensive, and compromises were needed, she was confident the ship would work. She didn't like using one Bendway hatch to service both Laborpods, it would slow down personnel retrieval and the hatch had a very short range. The twin hatch long range unit with which the craft was normally equipped was too bulky. They would need the space for keeping their equipment. Usually the craft only ferried a few observers to a site and therefore did not need very much cabin space. The hatch she had installed used a small round opening just large enough for a person to slip through. Its short range meant Sita would have to bring the ship directly alongside whatever craft they wanted to board or accept passengers from.
The other major problem was the craft's phase envelope. Not being designed for towing external equipment it's envelope would not be strong enough to blanket the Laborpods during transport. The pods would need to keep their envelopes operational at all times while docked. Luckily they only needed to be docked for long distance travel that was beyond the pods' practical speed capacity. The problem was overlapped envelope engorgement. If phase envelopes overlapped for more than a few moments the overlapping, or engorged, portions of the envelopes would begin to ring in sympathy. The subsequent vibrations would undermine any solid material within the engorged regions. In the case of the phase crafts, their hulls would begin to disintegrate on a microscopic level in rather short order.
Sita managed to rig an interface between the envelope projectors so that the pods enhanced the main craft's envelope when docked rather than remaining independent. The pods needed to be jettisoned or docked at the same time. The pods' mass in relation to the main craft were great enough that docking one alone would weigh down one side of the craft causing it to list. Controlling the joined craft under those conditions was nearly impossible. The repelling nature of their envelope engorgement also meant she needed to dock or jettison both synchronously to keep the main craft stabilized.
Sita was somewhat amazed and proud of having worked the system out herself. In the time she'd been training she became fascinated with phase craft engineering and voraciously studied everything she could find about their design and maintenance. She could easily pass the certification tests for most of the smaller craft and was considerably knowledgable on the workings of the Rhumbulian as well.
Artifact storage space was a high priority. No space could be wasted. Housing three people used a lot of space and to keep it down Sita pulled the additional seats from the main craft. Allele and Jon would have to ride in their laborpods except when they needed access to the main craft. This meant they would spend their entire time on Zeebs. Despite this Sita kept the main craft's MIB system as an extra precaution.
While Sita modified the craft for staging and transport purposes Jon was busy with enhancements on the laborpods for the team's research needs. Though intended for close work, the pods ability for delicate manipulation was sorely lacking. They were designed for heavy geologic work involving the cutting and removal of rock and metallic materials. Jon had the main tonsures removed from the front of the pod. In their place the precision instruments used for archeological work were installed. The original tonsures were relocated to the belly of the pods leaving them available should there be a need for them.
Since they would not have the blanket surveying capabilities of the Rhumbulian to locate points of interest, Jon needed to jury rig a surveying system using the three available craft. He introduced an aberrational generator on all three craft's envelope projectors creating a field that would detect any foreign object and utilize the three craft to triangulate its location. More significantly, He introduced a sub-system found on no other research craft. With it the field could also detect objects that existed in outlying phases anywhere in a frequency range far beyond the Bi-modality of the enveloping systems that only projected a single standard enveloping phase. With his enhanced surveying system they could probably uncover any rogue object buried or hidden in any documented or undocumented phase reality that passed through its field. Likewise he enhanced the entanglement projectors that enable cross phase interaction to accommodate the wider range of phases. Otherwise they might find something in a unique phase but would be powerless to retrieve or otherwise interact with it.
These enhancements gave Allele's team a far greater spectrum to examine than the Rhumbulian had but covered a minute area compared to the larger craft's scope. Jon didn't share his enhancements with the rest of the team. Though he had no recollection of his last encounter with the man he met at the restaurant, he had been instructed not to share them and thought nothing of keeping them secret. If something were uncovered, only the laborpods would see it and Allele would think the discovery within realm of the ordinary. Sita, on the observation craft would be blind to it completely. The importance of these new capabilities were not to come into play for several months.
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