The Medusa Chronicles by Stephen Baxter Page B

composition and size. Eventually these convoys would be sent on their way to the economies of the inner system, tagged with transponders and with their value, already ticking up and down in accordance with the vagaries of the frost market. All this volatile-ice represented essential supplies for the offworld settlements, water for the arid Moon, complex chemicals for a volatile-starved Mars. It seemed a paradox but it was far cheaper to import such materials all the way in from the outer system than to lift it from Earth’s deep gravity well, in addition to the environmental costs avoided.
    It would take years for any given packet of volatiles to arrive—but what mattered was not the speed of the flow, but rather its dependability.And that was precisely where the present problem lay. This KBO had not been generating its quota of volatiles, not for the best part of a year.
    Now Falcon was closing in. Cautiously he lowered Srinagar , descending parallel to the thin tower of the flinger. As far as he could tell, the damage was all up at the trumpet end, far off into space. Kedar had been able to give him few technical details of the accident, other than to say that it was something to do with a guidance and control fault of the bucket. Guidance and control, Falcon thought ruefully. The guidance and control of a camera platform had cost him dearly once, but there had been a human in the loop on that day in Arizona. There were only Machines here. He wondered how a system as reliable and indeed as simple as the flinger could have malfunctioned so badly, when fallible human reflexes had no part to play.
    Proximity alarms sounded. The surface rose to meet him, dusty, pocked with craters. Falcon deployed the undercarriage, gave the fusor one last pulse to knock his approach speed down to a safe descent rate of five metres a second—and then he was down. Srinagar fired ground-­penetrating anchors the moment it touched ice, the undercarriage compressing and rocking until stability had been achieved.
    Falcon had come down about fifty metres from the base structure of the flinger. It rose in the distance, a tapering cylinder, a vaulting demonstration of the laws of perspective. From Srinagar ’s cabin Falcon watched the base for signs of activity, but there was no movement around any of the service entrances, and there was still no radio contact.
    Nothing for it, then, but to go in himself.
    *  *  *  *
    Falcon readied himself for vacuum—it would be cold and airless out there, but no worse than the surface of Makemake. There were no paths here, though, because there were no people who needed them. He decided not to chance his wheeled undercarriage, preferring to plug into one of his other new ambulatory modules. The six-legged all-terrain chassis would no doubt unnerve “normal” people—it made him spiderlike, he guessed, and therefore tripped all sorts of buried fear responses in the humanbrain—but he could not help that. And besides he need not be concerned about human reactions here.
    He made a preliminary report before leaving the ship. “Makemake, Falcon again. I’m down on the KBO. Still no welcoming party. I’m going outside.”
    Then he lowered Srinagar ’s ramp, opened the lock and picked his way out onto the ice.
    The legs were articulated in such a way as to keep his centre of gravity as low as possible, with the inverted V-shapes of the knee joints almost at his head-height. It had taken months to learn independent control of all six limbs. Now he felt he could climb any slope, stretch across any ­obstacle—could even leap hundreds of metres, if it came to that, in low gravity. Yes, on some level he probably did look monstrous—but out here in the outer solar system it was the human form that was badly adapted to the environment, not his own.
    He approached the flinger’s base structure, a blocky bunker. In this low-gravity environment