The Medusa Chronicles by Stephen Baxter Page A

been buckled, ruptured. He kept having to remind himself of the scale of the details—those bent and severed spars were themselves kilometres long, hinting at the tremendous violence of the event. It looked repairable, though, given time and resources. Why had the Machines not set about the task as soon as the damage was quantified?
    Falcon opened the channel back to base.
    â€œMakemake, Srinagar here. All’s well with the ship. And downloading medical data; tell Doctor Dhoni I had sweet dreams. I’m on my final approach for the KBO. I can see signs of the accident, but no obvious Machine activity. You should be picking up my image stream—I’ll keep sending all the way in. Enjoy the show.” Knowing that because of lightspeed delays there would be no possibility of a reply for some hours—given his history Falcon had something of a phobia about signal time delays, but in this situation he was rather glad to be isolated from Kedar and the rest—Falcon settled in for the deceleration phase.
    Meanwhile, however, he began transmitting recognition signals to the KBO ahead of his arrival, using common protocols. But there was no reply. Adam was down there somewhere, according to Kedar. All Machines ­emitted a continuous stream of housekeeping telemetry, and from the data the WG team had analysed on Makemake it was clear that Adam itself had suffered no obvious damage in the incident; his own individual telemetry feed continued to be received, showing no anomalies.
    Time to try the personal touch?
    â€œAdam, this is Howard Falcon. I’m on the approaching ship you must be seeing. I’m alone. If you can read this signal, send something back.”
    Still there was silence.
    By the time Falcon had completed the deceleration burn he was starting to pick up directly the telemetry feeds from many robots, each of them tagged with a unique serial number. Localising the signals was trickier, but they seemed to be clustered around the base of the flinger, either above or a short distance below ground.
    Adam’s signature was among that huddle.
    Falcon switched back to the Makemake channel to report. “Radio silence so far. But Adam’s definitely down there, and I’d give good odds it’s aware of my approach. I guess I’ve no choice but to attempt physical contact.” Falcon knew that his human stewards would have been much happier for him to wait for their assessment of the situation before taking any further action. He wasn’t the type to wait for permission.
    â€œI’m going in.”
    *  *  *  *
    Slowly Srinagar approached the KBO.
    Despite its daunting size, the huge structure was in fact a very simple machine, essentially a massive slingshot exploiting the rotation of the KBO to hurl objects away into space. Slugs of refined, processed matter were loaded into open-topped buckets at the KBO’s surface. For the first hundred kilometres, they were hoisted up the length of the flinger by electric induction motors, until they passed through a point where gravi­tational and centripetal effects were exactly balanced. After that, the flinger’s own rotation did the rest of the work. Near the end of the flinger, magnetic brakes cut in sharply to arrest the bucket, harvesting some kinetic energy in the process while allowing the payload to shoot on its way through the widening maw.
    At that point the payload would be moving at quite a respectable clip: half a kilometre a second. Meanwhile, stationed around the throat of the trumpet, batteries of lasers, drawing on some of that harvested energy, directed their beams at the surface of the payload. The boiled-off volatile gases acted like steering rockets, accelerating the payload further and adjusting its angle of flight.
    This was only the first step in a great chain of commerce. Tugs would eventually grapple the free-flying payloads, gathering them into huge convoys bulk-graded by