Canticle Blue

45. Base

Music - The Wooded Rises Inland by Tim Story
(From 'Wheat and Rust')

With seemingly limitless patience, Estmere deployed the provisional landing struts of the docking ring and eased it into a polar crater on Innis. To the Terreska engineers the structure had initially seemed impossibly large for the Meid to handle, even in low gravity. Nevertheless, since their simulations had been promising, and the Castel and Maire Meid had once been able to lift the entire Terreska, their confidence was high. Indeed, the landing was a time-consuming process, not so much from a lack of power, but because of the need to first find room near the Crisopa and then to make sure the struts and landing surface would hold. Once down, Estmere continued to use her ship's drives to hold the ring until it leveled itself.  Then Corei's liana lifted the Meid and guided it into a docking port to offload supplies and the first crew members for the new ship.

Tor Stym was the last passenger to disembark. He told Estmere, "I think I'm ready for some rustic living."

To which she bowed and replied, "Yes, and I hope you find no rust."

The new habitat ship would be called the Picarin, a name suggested by Havilan Meid. It was a Per'sa word for "far place." Like the Terreska, its docking ring contained four ports and a central landing bay. The ring had actually been built as if it were an extension of the Terreska and then released when it was structurally sound. Though the facility itself had no means of propulsion at the time, it was large enough to accommodate several construction teams.

Just above the ring was the first section of a cylindrical, docking-support area. Though many of its interior arrangements were nothing more than walled spaces, some of which were temporary, it featured crew and guest quarters, a food preparation area, and an expansive construction facility.

Of necessity, when the Picarin ring departed for Innis, its lights had been turned off, especially those within a transparent circular dome that filled the entire opening above the support area. Now, hidden in the crater, and receiving only marginal sunlight, the crew turned them back on, revealing the makings of a conservatory, filled with starts of plants, small trees, and walkways for a commons. Like an island, and potentially self-sufficient, this complex, in an enhanced form, would become a permanent feature of the ship, moving upward as the Picarin was erected until the spherical portion of the ship would be built around it. For the time being, it would provide respite for the crew.

Lacking raw materials, work on the Crisopa had stopped. But now, its passenger section was lifted by the Silver Run and taken to a docking port. Its utility module was then taken to a third one. In this way, in a relatively short period of time, a lunar base—even a potentially mobile one—was established on Innis.

When the Arna returned and backed into the last docking port, Estmere flew the Maire Meid back to the Terreska. Since the habitat ship would be breaking orbit the next day, leaving the fledgling lunar base to manage on its own, the shuttle had been thoroughly packed with supplies, both for construction and sustenance. It also brought several state-of-art E-matter collectors and two second-generation lianas, piloted by Middi. As the shuttle was docking, the lianas detached themselves and flew to access points prepared for them in the ring complex. Once they had sealed their ships over the openings, the pilots entered the Picarin and joined the crew.

After helping to offload cargo, Shei and Os set out to explore more of the moon's surface in the Arna. They were looking for promising areas to gather raw materials. As they left the base they were joined by a liana carrying a new coring tool which would use a Q-type plasma cutter for excavations. With the liana attached to its stern, the Arna first ascended to a fixed altitude to take images of the region surrounding the base. These were made available on the C-link and added to the Picarin databases to optimize the resolution and topographical information of future maps. After gathering data this way for several hours, the shuttle proceeded slowly southward, ferrying the liana to the polar regions of Innis to look for water ice.

The amount of usable ice they found in deposits there was, for their purposes, limitless; and the coring tool made such quick work of collecting it that the Arna retrieved the other new liana and returned to the area on the same day. Since the Terreska would be departing soon, the first cargo of ice cores was taken there immediately. After dropping off Pa'Keh and taking on more supplies, the Arna crew joined their friends in a prayerful farewell and departed.

On the way back to Innis, Shei called the Bryn Institute to let them know the shuttle would be available as needed. The base, she told them, also had some room for refugees until passage to the Terreska could be arranged.

After that, with new materiel available, work on the Crisopa was uninterrupted. Soon the shell of the sphere section and its piloting bridge were complete, and its passenger section was made habitable.