Welcome Aboard Air Marineris
Chapter Twelve: Running Interference

Notwithstanding the roadblocks that my imagination might create, I had some real live construction to do. That’s the professionals way. They solve the problems they can and leave the insoluble ones for later. Troubles always get back to the front burner quickly enough.

By day five, our beams were available in enough quantity to warrant setting up the forming machine to bend arches. There was a premium on space, so we had to work at very close quarters to do both. The arches were bigger than our hut, so we had to take off some walls to allow the finished ends of the arches to poke out. A few days outside in the radiation wouldn’t do them much harm, and we could stay outside the shed after the automation was set up. To manipulate the arches outside, we had the constructors. We could pull our airship around to minimize the shifting needed to load the components on the deck. Running the vacuum pump to float the ship was no problem at all. We could connect it directly to our power and charge the caps in the process. When it was in the correct position, we set it down on a leg unit. The legs were heavy, and it didn’t make much sense to lug them all over creation when we were only setting down occasionally. It raised the capacity considerably. It was a freighter, after all, and it was still Mars. We didn’t have all that many places to set down anyway. Even on the planitias, the flattest places on Mars, there were still enough obstructions to prevent you landing a big airship anywhere you wanted. Two hundred meters was a big ship.

It was at day ten when Starward started to make a nuisance of itself. I was preoccupied, and I didn’t really take account of the innocuous message when it came in. Chantelle pointed it out to me:

“There’s a message to you from some bigwig at Starward under its logo marked “Urgent, from Corporate Headquarters, Starward United Industries to the exclusive attention of Starward Site Manager Monica Chapita.” Is that you Mo? Is that what you are?”

“Don’t you dare play naïve with me, Chantelle Kitenge. It won’t wash even for an instant. You know as well as I do that it’s a putdown. It says wiser heads are in overall charge of this project, not me. I presume this letter is to remind me of that in one line. I can’t wait to hear what insightful suggestions they are going to make to the people who are doing the work. Two hundred million miles away plus no direct experience of the site is going to make for a perspective only available to expert minds.”

“I’ve already researched this guy, Mo. This is the famous Linus Weltmann. He is the Director of the New Leipzig Engineering Institute. His CV is one hundred and eighty pages. All his papers seem to be group efforts, and I’ll bet he was the prestige on every single one. He has been an advisor on everything under the sun, but I don’t see that he has done anything in fifty years. I guess his claim to fame for us is appointment to the group assigned to build a vacuum train under the Atlantic many years back. The webs say it was terminated because they remembered it wouldn’t be safe to send a passenger train across the mid-Atlantic ridge. Sounds like good sense to me. Interesting aside on the ridge. The fem who did the original donkey work to replace the ridge was told that it was ‘woman talk’ when she presented it. Her male colleagues waited a year till she proved it to them, and then they claimed the credit. Have you ever heard of her? Marie Tharp? Probably not. She was one of the ground breakers for tectonic plate theory, but after she had done all the work, they just swanned in and took the credit again. Fems were socialized to accept that then.”

“You people just remember that I am the one working with you. We were the people who made the first airship line possible, and we didn’t need any earthbound foggy bottom to do it.”

“You’re selling him short, Mo. I looked at his image. He’s a handsome figure of a man, and he’s got a fine head of hair. Very artistic. Long and well-combed, falling to his shoulders. Probably has several servants to keep it up. A distinguished man well worth listening to.”

She brightened her screen to show a substantial figure. He had a hawk nose, bushy eyebrows, and ruddy skin. A man in his sixties, it looked. Well fed. He looked like he wasn’t going to need any CRISP R treatments to bulk him up for us. Maybe even a bit too much Linus for Mars. He didn’t look like he could come here any time soon.

“He looks like one of the guys who edged out Cecilia Payne, or Vera Rubin or Rosalind Franklin, and who knows how many others? Starward sent a plurality of fems up into space. Not because they are feminists, but because they are business-people. When you can get more for less, you go for that. Fems use less air, eat less, and poop less than men. They are generally cheaper to keep alive than men but have the same effective functionality. Well, we are here now, and places belong to the people who live there, all other things being equal. We do the work, and we will be held responsible for it.”

“Sour grapes aside, Mo, let’s see what this dude has to say. Maybe he will be smart enough to agree with us. They did from square one, remember.”

“Is it long? If you can, read it out. We’ve all got to deal with it.”

“Ok. Dear Ms. Chapita, blah, blah, blah. Please accept my sincere congratulations for your appointment as site manager. I have been retained to act as senior coordinating engineer for the project to ensure that our efforts mesh smoothly with head office requirements. I have also been asked to study your estimates and make any suggestions that I deem helpful. Of course, you are on the scene, and we will be depending on your judgment and leadership. Examination of your estimates shows allowances for rock crushing to make the aggregate for your pylon setting concrete. Might I point out that you already have an entire planet that has manufactured all the sand you will ever need free of charge to scoop up? I am suggesting that you could save money and time if you were to use the raw resource available to you. I hope you do not feel I am being presumptuous in suggesting this to someone on scene, but I have frequently found that the perspective of long experience can allow useful alternatives to be posited. I end with the hope that we will work well together. I, for one, am looking forward to the experience of our common effort with great anticipation. Yours truly, Dr. Professor Linus Weltmann, PE.”

“What an endearing common touch he has. Sounds like an attempt to fix me with all the responsibility and reserve the credit to him. I specified crushed rock because the sand is contaminated with perchlorate and other caustic compounds. It’s too much trouble to use. It needs too much remediation because it is corrosive. What benefit in mixing our expensive chemical cement with that stuff? What civil engineer could be ignorant of the need for clean aggregate in concrete? I’m not impressed with this guy. You remember, we considered this at the beginning. We discarded the suggestion. Crushed rock is a more consistent product and only needs screening and blowing. And we have the equipment already. I noted that in the estimates. I did take a charge for it, but that was just accounting. With this first effort, I don’t see much of value coming from this guy. He is supposed to be the best they have to offer. It’s just as well that I wasn’t looking for much help from them on that end. We know what we’re doing. How do you think we should respond, guys?”

Lou was dismissive. He had no time for big hats. That’s why he was here. Good abilities, bad attitude. Just like the rest of us.

“It’s too stupid for a reply. Anybody with any slight knowledge of construction would know that it’s unwise to skimp on materials. It doesn’t turn out well. Labor up here is more money. Maybe it’s different down there. Do-overs here are very expensive. This guy is an expert in being an expert. That’s it. Don’t dignify it. You’ll need to explain it and it sounds humiliatingly stupid no matter how you say it. If you reply he’ll get his back up. You know how we guys are. Maybe if you ignore it, he’ll realize it’s stupid. It wouldn’t save much money even if you followed his dumb advice.”

Chantelle couldn’t take that: “Sorry Lou, that won’t do. You can see by his image, he’s a guy who takes himself seriously. He figures he’s dropping pearls every time he speaks. You don’t reply to him, he’s going to take it as an insult. This kind of guy insults easily. You can wait a bit, as if you are seriously considering him, but you need to give him a reason you’re not using his advice. He’s just smart enough to know he isn’t smart. He’s going to look for ridicule from every direction. Do what you started out to do with them. Convince them it’s not their stupidity, but your peculiar advantage of local experience. No need to point out that any child would have known better.”

“I agree, Chantelle. I’d like to do what Lou suggests, but honey is better. You seem to know what to say, Chantelle. Compliant but firm is the tone. Easy, huh? You write it and let me see it before we send it. Send a copy to Klara, too. She’s the one who warned me about this supervision thing. She has more experience at ass kissing than we do. Welcome to the big leagues, people. Ain’t it fine, though?

“Enough PR. Let’s shift to business. I think we can start moving our ship to the factory. We should be ready with the Quonset stuff in another couple of days. Lou, do you think you could do the whole job? You could tie up the ship to one of the constructors and pull it in. We have a frame set up there already. I think we’re going to need someone else here sooner rather than later. No telling how long Boris will be. We should have two constructors to tow it to the train, but there’s only one of you. I’ll be ok. No wind really. We’ll just load the other one. We’ll need two at Lowell, so, we’ll need another operator. Both of you are essential here. We are already short-staffed, and we just started. See who we’ve got, Chantelle, and get someone up here for Lou to train. Then that person could start the training someone else for when we set it up for the construction here.”

“Why not let me do it virtually, Mo? It will save time. It always takes less time to do it that way rather than in person. I can stay right here and continue with our other jobs while I do it.”

“I know it can, and I know you would do a good job either way, but I like a trainee to have some reality to cling to. Virtual training for virtual reality in the constructor seems a bit too tenuous for me. I want them to be able to begin working right away. Put them into the constructor remote. We’ll have to live with the extra time it costs you. You don’t need to see that cute little girlfriend of yours every day, do you? Maybe you could bring her around instead.”

“Don’t get started on that teasing again, Mo. It isn’t funny. And it doesn’t make any sense. You’re happily married, and we both know it. Besides, she’s totally into me.”

Wow, the presumption of some men is awe-inspiring! She’s got him so snowed; he doesn’t even suspect. I could have gone on to bask in the intellectual superiority of my sex, but I just didn’t have a free day to do that.

“Chantelle. Now that we’re talking about moving the ship, how’s the public end of it going? Any progress on the fanpage? And are we going to give our pioneering ship a name other than MM017?”

“Ask, and you shall receive, Mo. I decided not to call it the Hindenburg. Nobody remembers what it was, but the name still has a bad odor about it even after almost two centuries. The best I can come up with is ‘Marineris One.’ Does that ring your bell?”

“Well, we can use it as a placeholder. We don’t need to decide just yet. That’s the beauty of skins. We can put on the image at the last second. What about giving it a ship name like “A.S. Marineris?”

“That doesn’t give us any room for expansion, Mo. There are going to be twenty of them. I think it’s good that we give people the impression it’s a long-term substantial project, because it is. Do you think we will see its completion? It’s kind of like starting a pyramid in the old days. We are on the ground floor of history, but there’s a lot more coming after us.”

“OK, then. It is the right note to start on. It’ll work, Chantelle.”

“It hurts me to agree with both of you fems, but you’re right. If you want to look big, you need to think big. We need to decide some of this stuff soon. I’m almost ready for the first move, and that won’t take me long. Once we get going, we’re not going to have much extra time. We’re going to want to keep moving, if only to satisfy Chantelle’s punishing shooting schedule. There’s only three of us. Not many for an intercontinental railroad.”

“Two against one. It sounds right. Do it. Now, Chantelle, what about that fanpage, can you show it to me?”

“I’m not really finished setting it up, Mo. I’ve been trying to get the colors and design right. I want to give an institutional impression. Like one of those big company sites. I know there’s just a few of us now, but soon, there will be dozens, I am sure. With us, and the factories, and the extra admin and logistical people to keep track of it all, it’s a fair-sized crew. And we shouldn’t forget a messaging section. We want to establish a reciprocal public presence. Sometimes you can get valuable advice if you can listen for it. You said, fashion a niche. This is how you do it. Where I come from, the important things are often done in the streets.”

There was a big smile on Lou’s expressive face. The eyebrows were elevated, and the smile threatened to reach his ears.

“You are really rocking now, Chantelle. Sitting there quiet, just percolating. I didn’t know you had that deviltry in you. I thought you were a religious girl. Looks to me that you are siting us in an unholy way. All the way in. They’ll never blow us out of here.”

“Surprised, are you? You don’t know, do you, Lou? Didn’t you get some hints along the way? You should meet my girlfriends back home. There, we’ve just hung on for most of our history. How did you think we did that? People like me, that’s how. We know how to improvise. Just stand back and watch, boy.”

Lou just sat there, looking at Chantelle, maybe seeing her clearly for the first time. Looking at our T/A you could easily mistake her for a secretary type who took orders and stopped there. She wasn’t that. If you put her on the spot, all kinds of ideas came out, most of them good. I had seen that too many times to have missed it. Where had Lou been not to have picked up on that long ago? Some engineers are too buttoned, I guess. It was getting too heady. I had to caution them not to go overboard.

“All this is very good. But don’t forget there are still some people who would prefer others to us for this job. To be seen to do it is important, but it is essential to do it. If we don’t do that, they will have all the ammo they need. Now, Chantelle, show me what the fanpage looks like now.”

“I’ve tried to make it look as much like Mars as I can. Our landscape is a lot more relatable for people on Earth than the Moonscape they’ve been shown for the Eye of the Moon, our only competition for world-scale building projects. When it’s augmented, as I do it, you see something like a desert on Earth, so it’s going to be familiar. That’s the landscape for the site. I have divided it into sub-pages for vlogs, picture galleries, interviews with all the exciting people who are doing the job, and a questions and correspondence section which will have as much immediate response as we can manage from three hundred million kilometers away. We have an inherently fascinating story to tell, Mo. It’s as if you could watch the construction of the Trans-Siberian railroad or the Union Pacific, those legendary railroads on Earth, talking to the people who built them and watching them work. I fully expect this to go viral on the webs. The Eye of the Moon did, and we have way more than them. We’ve got real people rather than robots, and that landscape that will show the huge scope of our work.”

She was just getting wound up.

“Our first big push will be our ship being towed by the train. I’ve been thinking of the skins I will apply to the ship. It’s big, and it will be looming over the smaller train. I don’t want it to look threatening. I am going to make it a tomato red, the kind of over-saturated color they used to use in cartoons that kids used to watch in the twentieth century. It can’t be too dark. I don’t want it to remind people of blood red. And the color will be broken up by the script for its name, Marineris One. The script will be curvaceous and cursive in white, leaning to the right to suggest friendliness. That’s courtesy of my girlfriend still in advertising in Lagos, back home. She’s an authority. You’ve got the whole package in me, Mo. I come with add-ons. I’ve been considering going further. I know you’re a fan of twentieth century culture. What if I have Mickey Mouse ride the ship?”

“I don’t know, Chantelle, that may be a bit much. You might cross over from adorable to threatening. He was mean before he was lovable, you know. Don’t do it. And there may be ownership issues. Maybe someone still has property rights over Mr. Mouse. Let me have a brief look at the schema. It looks like you have the right idea. I like the technicolor desert. Pretty enough to need trespass signs. Too bad we don’t have a direct connection to Earth. We could license it for Walker landscape. Make a packet. And the interview section is crying out for a scintillating one-on-one with your peerless leader.”

“You’ve got too much self-respect to let an unscrupulous opportunist underling like me try to curry favor with you, Mo.”

“Don’t pour it on too thick, Chantelle. It might run off and stain something.”

I hadn’t had time to slow down to consider the implications of the white-maned slug they had saddled on me. They couldn’t think that there was any way he could run the project from where he was. Physics prevented that. He would be an hour behind events all the time. So they would not think he could replace me. From the look of him he wasn’t going to be transferred here. Did they think that my natural female reticence would act as a useful control on me? To what end? To piss me off and make me less efficient? I don’t think any rational person would want that after just endorsing me as the best choice for this job.

Only one thing was clear to me. That man Weltmann was going to be a pain, and, although he was far away on Earth, I still had to pay mind to what he said. I have worked with men all my life, and I have learned that they have tolerances that must be observed. If you appear too ‘haughty’ to them, you will attract the kind of pushback that will prevent you from doing your job. You might think that we have gone beyond that. I may be a lesbian and not need men in many ways, but I am still a woman, and the most powerful half of humanity is still male. Chantelle, from a country much like my own, beset with male entitlement, knew as well as I how to deal with that. She had a diplomatic sense better than my own. She was the one to handle Weltmann. She would put a fig leaf on his male vulnerability and make it clear he was at the tail end of this chain of command. It had to be that way. Him forgetting one of the first rules of civil engineering about adequate materials didn’t bode well.