“Far from the cradle”

By William Saunders

We walk along the icy surface. Somewhere far above two long-dead moons hung. The moons hold the resources the web needs. The planet was what we needed. Low gravity is an awful place to live out your years. Muscles and bones wasting away. Progress must be made. The ice was water and CO2. Everything we needed. Ring stations aren’t enough to support a growing population. A CO2 filter clicks over to the vacuum to diffuse its content. The next one turns over. Small flakes of dry ice fall behind me. No wind to carry them away.

The surface breaks into a tunnel. We walk into the crevice. Raw white ice turns to the black of a cold weather airlock. Door 1 cycles open, the walls are a simple tube of Martian weave. No excess equipment detracting from the weave of carbon. Door 1 closes, door 2 opens. We all pull off our helmets. Warmth creeps into my bones. Home, three modules each with its own partitions, each with airlock attachment points for expansion. We stepped into module 1. Every single cold weather settlement starts with one of these. A simple place to lay down cots, a few portable growth beds and cooking kits and at its core a simple generator setup. Maybe a combustion generator, a fission generator, or a decay generator. We had since converted this space into our EVA hub. 

With luck we wouldn’t have to go outside again for some time. We had gone out to fix a drone hub. Without the hub automated repairs of our surface infrastructure growth could not happen. The anchor needed to be built, greenhouse gasses needed to be released. I dodged around shelves and tables as I moved in the gravity that I was not quite used to. I was heavy, though someone from the cradle of humanity would feel the opposite. Soon I was in the quarters, my bunk was against a wall. If one was to pay attention to the noises in the module you could hear the humming of excavator drones preparing the space for the next module.

A small window of rounded P-glass showed the drones. Each unit laid its own tracks on the smooth ice wall. There were 8 of them, each was little more than an extending arm with a cheap diamond chisel that could reach little over halfway of the diameter of the tunnel moving on an omni-orientation track. It was an ancient design, pioneered on Selena when the cities had outpaced the repurposing of lava tubes. To be fair, the tracks had grown a lot stronger for higher gravity environments.