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Nik-note: I dug this out of my files to answer a query on a writing forum... I have not edited it since ~1999, original dates back thrice that... Still fun, IMHO. --- With thirty degrees axial tilt, and 10 Bar plus three hundred degrees of dirty carbon dioxide, 'Nova was indeed a nice place. Oh, sorry! Compared to Venus, of course: 'Nova lacked such Sulphuric clouds. Mind you, terraforming 'Nova was only considered because of Gantur. This second planet in the Epsilon Eridani system was a gas giant, thrice Jupiter's mass. Though it looked like Saturn, these rings were not merely dust and ice crystals. There were 28 true satellites, give or take a few marginals, hundreds of lesser chunks, and thousands, many thousands of fragments. Then came the countless boulders and bricks and gravel and dust, rocks and ice to complete the halo. Gantur was an awesome sight, one that diminished its carousel of consorts by perspective alone. Adjust to Gantur, and all else shrank. There was ample Methane/ Ammonia /water ice in orbit to terraform 'Nova a dozen times. There was even enough for Venus, acid clouds and all, was not Sol 10 light-years away. The early bergs were carved from a mixed-ice outer moonlet using large lasers. Mere slivers of that smelly snow-ball, they were still a cubic mile apiece. They had to be coaxed from orbit by the Project's straining Rock-tugs. Then they could fall towards 'Nova, slowly at first, but inexorably accelerating. 'Nova was not there, of course. Two 'Nova years would pass before the orbits met. Each cubic mile of ice could have made quite a bang. There were points in favour: The planet shaking impacts with their enormous plasma clouds, tectonic upsets and scores of volcanoes would be useful. Their rising, cooling clouds would spawn monstrous low-pressure storms. Those cyclones would persist for months, fountaining heat into space at a fantastic rate. It was the technique used on Venus, where each impact dissipated a thousand times the impact heat, a million times the berg's puny latent heat. Each astrobleme also exposed new surfaces for the acid to attack. The vapourised rock neutralised far more than a berg's meagre megaton of Ammonia. Venus Project had to make the most of its ice, for the Mars Project had first call on Jupiter's minor moons. Luckily, they could take liberties. Venus was a quiet planet. Her astroblemes would calm in a generation, and be levelled in two. 'Nova was trapped by Gantur. Kneaded by planet and solar tides, 'Nova was still too active. It could groan for centuries. The San Andreas factor vetoed that! 'Nova's bergs were seeded with explosives, shattered before impact. Each berg bought a small dip in the heat. The graphs were clear: The Project was winning, but so slowly. Ten years passed. Gantur approached a conjunction with Baltern, the Neptune -sized outer giant. The Terraform crew saw their chance: If they picked their moment, they could fetch the rest of their moonlet. Planet tides would bring Berga closer to escape velocity. The difference was a matter of metres per second, but with hundreds of cubic miles of ice at stake, that tiny gain was crucial. They were that close to the technical limits. The Rock-tugs' hastily boosted Skyhooks' Field held a fractional percent of Berga's mass without gravity. It still had momentum, so the orbit altered. A mild ellipse extended. At greater distance, Gantur's hold fell, and their Skyhooks' gained. So, like a child pumping a swing, they drove Berga's orbit to a wide ellipse, then wider still. It made little difference now, for they were coasting on the very edge of Gantur's gravity well. Then Baltern gave its final nudge, and they were over the pass. They'd hit the precise, pre-calculated parameters for Berga's long, long fall to meet 'Nova. Much mathematics had guided their aim, they'd had practice with bergy-bits, but it took courage to haul off and let 382 cubic miles of moonlet follow Newton's Laws into the dark. Two years passed. Berga was quickening, feeling the tug of the still-distant planet. Two Tugs and a bunk ship sped out to rendezvous six months from impact. For a while, the crews just looked. Berga was BIG. Sure, they'd spent three months coaxing it from orbit. Then, Gantur had loomed over all. Now they were alone, Berga's true proportions could be seen. Tiny scars on its flanks were the sum of their decade's effort. They felt very, very small. At the birth of this system, Gantur had snatched at the wealth, hoarding its trove in the blackness of its distant orbit. Now the crews had stolen a giant's jewel. Could they divide the loot? Before, Ice-Slicing took a pair of lasers. One carved, the other swept the cut clear. Berga was too big. No laser could reach into her miles of ammonia, methane and water-ice clathrate with power to cut. The crews had tried a 'cheese-slice', a stout cable carrying a Drive Field. It squirmed like a berserk boa. They'd tried a plasma beam. Flash steam doused it neater than a fire hose. They'd tried a 'blaster', the biggest ever built (officially). Rock fused with ease, but mixed-ice flashed to steam, then plasma, spreading and swallowing the power. The crews only shifted Berga after they found a solution. Each Tug now carried two pair of lasers. Loosely anchored to the porous, crumbly ice, they slowly carved huge wedges from the surface. Segments were still a cubic mile apiece, but slim. Unlike those earlier chunks that could reach surface, these miles-long slivers were remarkably fragile. Now, eased clear of their birth-place by the vapour flashed from their flanks, they were ready for seeding. The 'Ski-sticks' advanced. With a toroidal cabin and one hundred fifty metres of four-inch pipe, the nick-name was inevitable. The pipe carried a Drive Field, inside and out. The flanks were warm, but the tip glowed dully, and spun. Place the tip, start the Field, and the pipe sank home while ice spicules geysered from tail and sides. Douse the tip, reverse the Field, an explosive 'egg' slid to the end to be securely tamped by a shower of ice. Then clear, bar a flagellum of fuse, 'Fire-Break' wire, with insulation that would collapse at 80°C. It was well tested: It had a wide margin of safety, but was sensitive to the first shriek of atmosphere. Turn the 'Stick' on gyros, blip the Field, and start over. Each 'Ski-stick' crew could average 6 holes per hour. They spent most of their time waiting, waiting, waiting for the next slice of ice to come loose. Their complaints were real. The Rock-tugs were having trouble. Their Ice-slicers had carved eight wedges in the first week. This was an incredible rate by any previous test, but it was too slow. Nor were the crews improving with practice. If anything, they were slowing. Some-thing new had entered the equation. The crews began to worry. At last, some-one took a deep-core sample, starting from the base of a fresh gouge. The results were startling. The team was aghast. The standard ice-moon model was based on data from Venus Project. For ten years, they'd mined Berga, and cutting rates had matched theory. But Sol was Sol, and Epsilon Eridani was smaller, cooler, and had always been so. Even its t-Tauri stage must have been mild. How else had Gantur's satellites survived? Berga still had a large, soft centre, with a higher proportion of volatiles. These flashed too readily, blanketing the lasers. The crews knew the outer shell was thoroughly degassed, they expected a change with depth, but not so much, so soon. The crews had contingency plans: They'd change the laser frequencies to a band where the gasses barely absorbed. It cost them one hundred hours of continuous work. It gained them five percent. Crew-folk slept, exhausted. The few Engineers puzzled on. Their problem was not the heating of mushy-ice. Their problem was shifting the result. The fog of ammonia, methane and water just would not blow away. The cocktail was too rich. It absorbed, vapourised, ionised and released the lasers' energy as aurora, spreading the beam and slowing the cut. They were back to square one. Yet the 'Ski-sticks' drilled fresh, mushy ice with incredible speed. Was that a solution in disguise? Perhaps. A beam of microwaves could be fed down the plasma cavity of a laser beam. That was the basis for the ubiquitous 'Blaster'. Could the peculiar, space-twisting energies of a Drive Field do the same? It was a novel idea. They tried it, anyway. They borrowed spares from every craft and took hair-crisping risks. The third or fourth lash-up worked. Considering the guesstimates involved, it worked superbly. It worked too well. It dragged itself from a bench, while imploding the partition wall... And scaled two thousand times? If it pulled, its Tug would draw a smothering storm of fragments upon itself. If it pushed, reaction flung the Tug from its work-place. They could not compensate: Ice Slicer lasers shorted Drive Fields. The few Engineers had made a technical breakthrough, they'd opened a window on a new field of engineering, but they'd lost. Besides, four days without sleep was too much. They abandoned the work. The others could sleep: For the Chief Engineer, rest was impossible. Arthur S. McDonald was stuck. His team was the best. His team was also all he had. If 'Nova Orbital Base had advice, he could not ask. Their excavations plus Epsilon Eridani's solar wind had made Berga the greatest comet in human history. Even a Tug would need two days to escape the coma. That trip would be wasted. They had no Trojan relay, and 'Nova was the wrong side of the close-binary sun. Win or lose, this was a private fight. For a true Scot, there could be one solace. The auto-chef's records showed he drank a full pint of whisky, dram by dram, before his co-ordination faltered. The circuits were designed to cope. After the third miscue, it dispensed a random fruit juice. "Gah! Pineapple!" The wave of bitterness revived him somewhat. He took fresh aim. He did not complete the sequence. 'Pineapple?' They appeared on his plate as translucent yellow toroids, or segments from same. He knew they started as big, brown, knobbly fruit.... The alcohol trickled home, lowering inhibitions, halting self-criticism, making the impossible acceptable. And, of course, just outside was the biggest pineapple of all time! They started at one end with both Tugs and sank a deep pit. They changed ends, sank another. With one Tug to each hole, stable against the steep back-wall, the problem of reaction was solved. There was even a bonus. The flying bandsaw of fragments scoured the cuts of opaque silicate dust! Months passed. The countdown was done. The charges blew. Thousands of shards plummeted into atmosphere, raising vivid weals like snowballs on mud. Data poured in. The Project was losing sensors along the impact band, but the planet rotated, bringing fresh units into play. They had a continuous-flow experiment on a planetary scale. It was a theoretician's dream, a terraformer's delight. They'd learn more in an hour than Venus Project learned in a year. The ice-fall continued, hour after hour after hour. Berga had been finished weeks ahead of schedule. Tugs spent those spare days spreading slivers along the track. It was a change of plan justified by intuition alone. Yet, what is intuition, but a jest with Entropy? And now 'Nova came full circle. The ice still fell. The surviving sensors took a further hammering, but data still flowed. The Project had a myriad details of pressure and temperature, wind-speed, altitude, atmospheric composition, ionisation, solar incidence, energy distribution.... A further batch of probes was slipped into atmosphere, under the very jaws of the storm. Most fell silent within minutes, but even as they died they told of the havoc in the atmosphere. Many datalinks were scrambled by the raging electric storms, but that was anticipated. Those glimpses of the storms were not lost, merely tangled. The computers could unravel them at leisure, picking patterns to compare with else-where, extrapolating from single berg impacts when probes were scores-to-one, not vice-versa. The computers had no time for such refinements now. It was all they could do to keep score. The planet resembled a mud-pool in ferment. The ice still fell. Now second-time impacts were having a synergic effect. Shock-waves crossed and rebounded, visibly rippling the atmosphere, hurling gouts into space. And the ice still fell. It was thinning now, for even Berga was finite, but the end of the shower was not final. There were a few slivers left. Tugs had held them back, dramatically changing their track. These were not for random use. These were special. These were for the North Pole. Sol's Jupiter, Old Jove himself, had showed the way. Belts and Zones rose and fell, circulating oppositely, growing and discarding lesser spots, sustaining one Big Red. Yet, while the lower latitudes seethed and roiled, the Jovian poles' mosaic of mushrooms quietly hoisted heat to the sky. The stable, unassuming polar updrafts were just as efficient as their boisterous cousins. On 'Nova, they might be crucial. The low latitude impacts spawned monstrous cyclonic storms, but the eyes torn in the clouds were small for the energies involved. By night, heat poured out, but by day Eridani A & B fed it back. Not for aeons had sunshine reached so deep. It sustained the storms, of course, but it trimmed the cooling effect. High latitude storms were the Project's secret weapon. With 'Nova's axis tilted thirty degrees, polar storms could radiate for the three-month winter night. The Project had rejected a plan to dump more on the pole, but the Tug crews did all they could. Three cubic miles of ice fragmented on the fringe of space, crashed down. Their shock-waves raced out. Their plasma cooled. The atmosphere rushed back. Coriolis forces bent the inrush to spiral about each hole. Smaller storms drifted and merged with larger, stabilising them. There were no probes to spare for the pole, but the Rock Tugs again played a role. Holding position with their Drives, they turned their telescopes, radar and infra-red sensors on the latest storms. One fact was clear. 'Nova's greenhouse had sprung a myriad leaks. Without those clouds, 'Nova would stabilise about forty below. Now, heat poured out on a terrifying scale. The Project could not predict the effects of their assault. The Venus-based models had failed within hours. New versions would be forthcoming, of course, but for the while, the theoreticians had lost their lead. They just had to wait and see. The Engineers smiled grimly. So the Math-bashers had been left behind? Too bad! 'Beyond Theory!' was the Engineers' toast, and they were back on-line again! Berga had surpassed their rules of thumb, exceeded all but their wildest bets. They would exploit these new, synergic effects to the full. The most optimistic plans bequeathed 'First Landing' to the grand-children. A century was a long wait, but no cause for dismay. 'Nova crew were still young, low-g living doubled or trebled life expectancy, and Earth was a year away. The childrens' children might pioneer the planet, but their elders would surely follow. The prospect was worth the wait, which was why they'd begun. Now the time-scale had telescoped. The straight line estimate of 'Nova's falling temperature had halved to a generation, a single generation. Optimists pondered dubious data beyond, and planned home-steads. 'Nova's Council weighed the odds for two days, then put it to public vote. Two thirds of Roll was over-reached, with 'No's and 'Nu's a bare handful. The Tug crews hastened to pack. With such a long-term project, they'd only planned to move entire moonlets at conjunction. The time for such delicacy was past. There were slivers of Charles on the way. Before those arrived, the new Ice-Slicers could chop Charles, Deidre and 'Enry into Tuggable chunks! 2654 words 'Nova (c) Nik

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Short Stories - Terraforming 'Nova!