Welcome Aboard Air Marineris
Chapter Fifteen:My Little Friend

Seven days later, the Rockship came in with its immigrant contingent, carrying various items of freight. One of those packages contained the two radios they wanted us to set up in our two offices: Klara’s and mine. They were two large, bronze-colored cubes, approximately ten centimeters in diameter. I didn’t have many places to put that box. I had a cubby not too much larger than my assistants. There was a desk, two chairs, and a cabinet. They covered most of my floor.

The boxes were self-contained. There were no peripheral antennas, or other gear to be attached to them, so they didn’t need to be specially placed. There were no plugs or sockets on them. They were sealed and they had no disassembly screws or plugs. That meant they were either autonomously powered, or powered by induction. Instructions on the individual boxes suggested they be put down on a cabinet, so, I did that. My desk was too small for anything more. It would have sat in my lunch spot. I had to eat.

They were apparently keyed to each of us in some way, because when we put them down, a small green status light lit, and it started up. They knew us.

“This communications unit is intended for the use of Monica Chapita. Would you state your name please?”

Since I have never had a conversation with a whiz bang radio, I was not expecting its presumption. You don’t get a gadget speaking before it had been addressed. What a cheeky little machine! Voice activated devices needed a key word before operating. Though they listened all the time, convention required that their powers be invoked.

“You are confirmed as the operator, Engineer Chapita. Professor Doctor Weltmann is being advised of your attendance. A default screen with Professor Doctor Weltmann’s image will display until he is announced. Please wait.”

I was supposed to sit there until the great doctor made himself available. That was endearing. Lucky I had plenty of mundane tasks to do. Always a long list of those. Lots of details, and there were only the three of us. I could instruct my AI assistants to complete tasks, but they weren’t smart enough to set them.

You could get them to replicate procurement lists of completed projects, and even query changes that needed to be made for subsequent ones. But they couldn’t appreciate subtleties of scale and objective in the same way that an experienced human mind could do. Differences like the fact that one project was of limited size and the other was a planet-building exercise. That made for great differences in design and supply that AI was not equipped to assess. That was my job, and that’s what I did then.

I had been working for an hour and was just getting into the specification of changes to be made for the additional constructors we would procure. Since they were unlikely to be used for general purpose construction but would be specialized for implantation and erection of the suspension rails of the airship line, there was no need to equip them for other tasks. And since they would be placing concrete for each pylon, shotcrete pumps and nozzles would be handy items of equipment for them, along with a heated reservoir to store the mix for short periods. There were a few other ideas I had for their equipment. We might be able to speed the installation and improve the high level of efficiency we achieved for the Borealis project we had already completed.

This time, rather than just a disembodied voice as had addressed me when it first recognized me, the radio projected a grainy, monochrome heads-up image. It was a pale reflection even of what you get on a fon, and far short of a displayscreen vid. Some administrative assistant appeared above the radio advising that the Doctor Professor would be available presently. I was not advised what presently meant, so I went back to work.

About fifteen minutes later he appeared on the screen. He sat at a large, pristine, bare desk. The kind you have when other people do the work. The camera was obviously at least two meters away. You could see his entire upper body, against a ghostly image projected behind him. It looked like mountains, but I couldn’t make it out.

A man-mountain sitting before the physical mountain behind him was supposed to suggest he was an outstanding man, I guess. The image was belied by the picayune size of the image the radio ’cast. I almost succumbed to a chuckle, but I held it. I don’t think they conceived how it would play out at the other end.

The specter in the vid spoke. The sound was surprisingly good, considering the source:

“I am Professor Doctor Linus Weltmann, Monica. It is a pleasure to meet you. I know it is hard to believe, but the electronics boys have dreamed up a way to talk to you in real time with no time delay. I’m not at all sure how they do it, but it works. And it’s going to make our coordination more effective. I am so pleased to be able to work directly with our construction team, sharing all the decisions of day-to-day operations.”

The presumption of it took my breath away. In the course of the last four years on Mars, I had forgotten how things were on Earth. Calling me Monica while he maintained the Professor Doctor moniker pushed my buttons, all of them. He should have read my CV. If he had, he would have known. I was a trifle touchy on certain subjects. I could not imagine he was attempting to make a friend of me.

Doubtless too, for his remote-control back seat driving, he was probably being paid a minimum of twice the compensation I was paid. I didn’t even consider the implications of that. It would just anger me. The money itself wasn’t important, but I had butted my head against that wall too many times in the past. I didn’t want any more useless headaches. The old boys down there wouldn’t change.

I didn’t get angry, as I once would have done. Having fought and lost those battles, I knew I would just be thought a recalcitrant lesbian bitch. Better to consider my response. I was not alone as I once had been. I would play the lady. It would satisfy me if I were to administer just a little sting, projecting just a touch of immoderate enthusiasm. He would think it his due.

“The Pleasure is all mine, Herr Professor Doctor. How kind of you to offer your help. We have already achieved a modicum of progress, building the Borealis project. We look forward to your input as well. We all hope we will become firm working partners.”

This seemed to ruffle his feathers a bit. Maybe he wasn’t entirely clueless. He cleared his throat a few times and then decided to take the bit in his teeth. He obviously had made his point in calling me without overture. They had just delivered the radio with instructions to unpack it and place it. The impatient urgency in his voice indicated he had another feckless suggestion to make that wouldn’t wait. I kept silent.

“Monica, I have been studying your specifications for this project. The standards you set for the rails seem to be too conservative. As you are aware from your resort to the latest theoretical figures for metal fatigue, the technology now allows us to design metal parts much more sparingly and still maintain healthy safety margins. I have run the numbers on the rails you specified, and I believe that you can make them much lighter than your earlier prototype design at the mine. Considering the number of rails we need to make for the line, a great deal of money could be saved at no cost to safe operation.

“Perhaps you did not put enough stress on the fact that the ships would never be bearing on the rails, but only tensioning them with the residual lift of the ship, which would be automatically varied to conform with the load. You can be assured that the stress would be mitigated in active service. I have sent you the suggested changes in a text. After you have had the opportunity to study it, I would appreciate your comments.

“I know you have work to do, but I would appreciate it if you were to allow me to stand aside and observe for a while. I am very interested to learn some more about the workings of your office so that I might be more helpful. I hope to speak to you every morning at nine. That is the time most convenient to me. Tomorrow I look forward to meeting your subordinates. Would you please ensure they are all available?”

This guy was going to be a major pain. Meeting him at his first thing each morning was going to cut my time at work. We started much earlier than that. The move to intercede between me and my partners was going to confuse everyone and put them on edge. The rail design changes were preposterous. I had already considered all these elements and had experimented with lighter rails and had failures. I had filed a study they did not bother to read. The reference to the fatigue studies I had pulled down while on the train showed that they were watching me. That was creepy and a bit scary. And dumb to do that without asking. There were so many discordant elements in this very brief exchange that I was moved to take that damned radio and throw it out into the canyon to lie beside Alex’ bomb. We had detonated that after we had killed him at the end of his murderous run, and its crater remained just beside our airship line as another reminder of the line between us and them. But, of course, I held my tongue and I said:

“Linus, we use first names here. Since you will be part of our team, I am sure you will want me to dispense with the honorifics and be as frank with you as I am with the others. I would be happy to study your proposals. Since I am to read your offerings, I would ask that you read mine. The rail design study was filed with the working papers for the mine. The suggestions in your proposal are familiar to me because I have already considered the variables you mentioned in my own study. I am extremely interested in replaceing out whether I missed anything there. I do admit to being human and thus as subject to error as is everyone else. Thank you for your contribution, Linus. Now, I will get back to work.”

His ghostly image hung above the radio. It seemed that his headsup was derived from fon hardware and had the same limitations. Whiz bang or not, he couldn’t see or hear any better than you could through a fon. Chantelle was standing watching our conversation in the doorway to my office. She was not in his line of view, and he didn’t seem to be aware of her presence. If he had been, he hadn’t mentioned her. It would have been a perfect opportunity to meet and establish dominance over my partners.

The radios certainly had great promise, but this employment of them was ludicrous. It is such a shame that they didn’t save it and use it for truly constructive purposes. It could have been a boon to people on Mars. Eventually, it would be. Our isolation could be limited. Development of the tech could allow us to take advantage of a broad spectrum of talent available on Earth that had heretofore been denied us. How sad to use it to suppress people rather than enhance their lives.

Chantelle motioned to me, pointing to her office. She had gleaned the same thing I had from Weltmann’s ignorance of her presence. I walked across the short hall, and we slid her door closed.

“Well, the all-seeing eye is a little dim. And he doesn’t read so well either, Mo. I remember you tried to use lighter rails for Borealis. When we started to run cars over them at reasonably high speeds, the resonance produced tiny cracks at the top of the rails. We couldn’t even see them, but the electrical resistance changed. When we took them down and flexed them, we could. You put that in your report. How could they miss it?

“Because they don’t read boring statistics published by fems in company archives, that’s why. It hasn’t changed from the last century. There are some outstanding fems that get notice because they can’t be ignored. But most ordinary people like me aren’t included. They just don’t pay attention because they don’t think we do anything interesting, being fems. I made the minimum thickness assumption at first, too. It’s a bit counter-intuitive that a floating airship could induce a load factor. What we are doing has never been done on Earth. It’s not obvious that a load could be negative, but that’s the way it is. Especially for airships moving fast. It’s just lucky I experimented with one-fifty on a whim. The stress didn’t appear until you reached a certain speed. Below that, with ore, which is homogeneous, nothing bad happens. At four hundred clicks, with mixed freight and wandering passengers, all hell could break loose. The twenty car trains would shake lightweight stuff to bits. Most dangerous is that you couldn’t see it until it was too late. The cracks settle back in, almost invisible. The electrical resistance changes, that is one of the first signs. But our people could be thousands of kilometers from help. Our line is going to be so long that sensing data may be obscured by other factors. We’ve never done a line this long. Any accident would be a calamity. I’m not cutting corners on that. And it needs to be at speed. We can’t shield them the way we can here under a mountain. I won’t allow them to have more than twelve hours of exposure. It’s too dangerous. That means maximum strength to allow the speed. I won’t compromise. Economy in such things is not a good tradeoff. I can’t send a letter this time, Chantelle. I need to figure out some way to tell that old dear that he is an incompetent fool with a good head of hair and nothing else. In the nicest way, of course.”

“This is his second suggestion, Mo. Not a good track record so far. Why not give him a variation of what you told him the last time? It’s the deference you show, not the principle. I had to present it all the time before I came here. Funny that when you don’t need to prove anything, you don’t want to. I don’t need to get my back up with you. I just come out with it. It’s not the same with Linus.

“Like a lot of men, he’s big on appearances, but light on reality. He won’t remember that you gave him the same answer you gave for his last load. When he realizes the mistake he made, and he may, he won’t want to remember it. Let him get used to the fact that you aren’t at your desk all the time. Better for later when you want to avoid him. We’re going to need to set up some new offices for our new people anyway. Why can’t an alternate office for you be among them?”

“Another good suggestion, Chantelle. Do it. Now, I need to get back and answer him. I don’t want him assuming I’ve even had to think about that stupid fancy. Coming on top of the one about adulteration of our concrete, I even wonder if he’s on our side.”

“Don’t doubt that. He’s been sent by the Devil to tempt you with mammoth savings, Mo. You are not Jesus. Wrong gender, but you did have the same reaction. You immediately rejected him. But don’t forget, it’s their money.”

Wise words. I retraced my steps across the short hall, thinking about how to break it to him gently.

“Linus, I took a quick look at my study in Chantelle’s office. I confirmed it is in the archives of the Borealis project at Starward’s head office. I know you just signed on, and there is no reason you can expect to know everything at once.

“You can’t get the perspective you need from that little window you have, no matter how technically advanced it is. I have had the advantage of building and operating one of these lines and have had to deal with many of the considerations that you may be faced with now. I did think as you now think about rail design. It seems obvious that if flotation is supporting your loads, you don’t need as much strength in the rails. But it’s a misleading assumption. You still have resonance that can easily produce overloads, especially at speed. I ran it up a bit, just for curiosity, really, and it produced micro cracks right away. That scared me. There aren’t any minor accidents out there. Everything that can go wrong outside is a serious problem. It’s very difficult and expensive to repair things here. We’d like to avoid the whole issue if we can.

“So, Linus, I thank you for your suggestion. I am appreciative of your desire to help us. It makes me feel comfortable with our association to know that we share the same approach to this work. As you become more familiar with us, I look forward to further cooperation with you.”

That was as much crow as I was going to eat. Considering he was dead wrong on the rail design and proven to be so, I figured he would have the sense to accept my apology. But he didn’t. Too dumb to realize he could be wrong, or just too proud? I didn’t know which, then.

“Monica, I remind you that I am the supervising engineer Starward appointed to run this project. I have many more years of experience than you, and experience gives perspective that you may not have yet. I want you to test the lighter design on the Borealis line before we finalize the specs on the rails. I also want tests on the concrete with Martian soil to see if we can save money on the concrete mix. Please make the arrangements.”

I had said my piece. I just continued.

“Linus, in order to do tests on the rails, I will need to run the Borealis trains with a full load at four hundred and fifty. We will need to hit four hundred consistently on the Marineris line to limit the trip time to acceptable limits for the passengers. I can test the concrete mix in the lab, but there is no way effectively to simulate service speed trains. We have no data for that. I won’t do it any other way when lives are a stake. You can come up here and do it yourself if you want. We will talk again after I have finished the tests.”

“Monica, there is no need to do the live tests at speed. Make the rails and install them. I can scale the speeds up to whatever you specify in simulations. They work. I have already run scenarios that are successful with my rail designs.”

Sometimes, you just need to insist. If I did what he instructed, I knew the line would fail. They would blame us, of course. Not that I would care by then. The people riding on the train would be my friends and neighbors. I always hate it when push comes to shove. You need to decide between what is right and what is smart. I have never been smart. It is a personality defect in me. I have it from my mother. She would have had a much easier life if she had conceded when she should have. Like her, when it comes to that, my own interests wind up on the short end.

The sure way to stay on the project of a lifetime was to give in. Once you do that, though, it’s so easy to keep running. Maybe the rails would stay lighter than I knew they had to be. I knew I couldn’t do that. My brother Bee would know it too when he heard of it. His stubborn refusal to give in was the reason he was exiled and why I came to know him. It was a lucky day for me, but not for him. The mass of humanity knows when to cut and run, but some of us can’t do that. And the rest of them don’t admire us for it. They know what’s right the same as we do. So, they call us stupid and naïve. They are right. I didn’t like my answer, but I couldn’t change it.

“Linus, I need to do it, and if I remain as manager, I will. If you want to take over, we will all be very happy to go back to Mars Mining. Everybody liked what we were doing there.”

While I was raising that ruckus with Linus, Chantelle, and Lou both stepped across my hall, into my doorway, and into Linus’ field of view. They heard my last words, and they nodded in agreement. They had been involved in the building of the mining line as much as I was.

There it was in front of everyone. I couldn’t take it back. The reality of it, though, was that Linus was in no position to call me on my challenge. He had misspoken and couldn’t accept my implied resignation. Who else would they get? They already had the only pros, and it would have taken months to put new people in place. People who would not know their trade as we did. Linus, sitting on Earth, couldn’t run it from here, no matter what technical enhancements he had.

“All right, Monica. Do it your way, for now. It will come to the same thing. Our simulations were run on the best platforms we have with the latest data. I am confident that real world tests using spec rails will prove that they will work. Same thing for the concrete. Keep me advised.”

Then his screen went to a default image, unmoving and unresponsive. That didn’t shut it off, though. They still listened and observed. He had quit, for the moment, but it was, as the most, a tactical retreat. We didn’t miss that he had left himself a bolt hole in the rail specs. It didn’t really matter though. The rails we could manufacture would meet the specs. They had already.

“OK, we told Linus we would proceed with tests. He seems OK with it. Let’s get it under way, Lou. We have the alloy. Let’s fabricate half a dozen rails and install three on the northern line. We use the same linear motors the Marineris line will use, so we can calculate where you need to install the rails to allow us to reach our test speed at the Junction end, four hundred and fifty kilometers. We can use one of the ore runs for the tests. The ships are the same as the Marineris ones will be. That way no one gets hurt. The worst thing that can happen is a derailment. As for the concrete tests, that will be easy. Just scrape a few hundred kilos of random dust off the ground and we will use it for aggregate. Then test it for tensile and compressive strength. We’ll replace out soon enough if ‘materials one’ in engineering school is based on fact or fiction.”

“Shouldn’t be too hard, Mo. Seems a pointless waste of time, though. We both know what’s going to happen.”

“You don’t need to devote yourself to that alone. You can clean your ears while the machines are doing their thing.”

“It’s going to slow us down a bit. I should be making our operational rails with that equipment rather than defective ones.”

“This is the price of greatness, Lou. Sometimes you need to teach lessons rather than learn them. Anyway, it’s a relatively small job.”

“What if we do have a derailment? It’s going to take a lot of cleaning up.”

“Unlikely, I think. It starts with micro-cracking. The failure doesn’t come until the cracks enlarge. We won’t give them time for that. They won’t separate the first time, I don’t think. We need to apply the speeds and weight or there’s no point to the test. It’s a risk, but not likely to cause harm. And remember to bill the account to head office administrative expense. I do not want to pay for this. It’s bad enough I have to do it.”

I was wrong about Linus’ puny rails. I underestimated the forces that would be multiplied at those elevated speeds. As we were running our ore train towards the Junction, and had reached our target velocity, we passed over the three rails we had fabricated to Linus’ specifications. Rail one cracked, and rail two worse, but as the vibrations built up in the three lighter rails, the third one separated, releasing the trailing retaining cable on the last car so that, agitated by its own vibration, it whipped about in the thin air like a snake without a head. We were very lucky. There was no harm done because there were six retaining cables on each car to equalize the stress, leaving five attached cables on our caboose.

Once the train had cleared the lighter cables, the heavier following rails damped the vibrations that had torn the trailing cable free. The remaining cables secured the car, even though there was still a little extra vibration because of the unmoored cable. It took us a long while to slow the train down without the restraining cable on the final car. We paid the price of quite a bit of scratching on our lift cylinders because we had to use leading cables to restrain the train. Finally, we stopped it.

It made me angry that we had been so close to a catastrophic failure that could have constituted a major roadblock in our plans. And for no purpose. I had told Linus that we had considered the lighter structure and discarded the idea, but it made no difference to his decision. When I am angry, I do intemperate things. Not foolhardy, but certainly impertinent. I stick it to people. We had two good sequences of the rail parting recorded, and I sent them to Linus without comment, labelled ‘test results.’ I could have buried them in a report, but I didn’t feel like it at the time. Chantelle probably couldn’t have restrained herself either, but she was still mad at me.

“You were going to let me be the diplomat, Mo. There is very little more you can do to piss off people in authority than humiliate them. They will forgive incompetence and laziness, and even insubordination, but they will not forgive embarrassment. You did a perfect job on Linus. Oh, I know he’s an idiot, and no kind of engineer, but he is a suit. He only has his position to protect. You almost need to pity him. He must know by now that he’s a front with nothing behind it. And it’s worse that you’re right. He’s going to have it in for you.”

“I know. It was stupid. But he is such a dumbass, Chantelle. I have been dealing with characters like him all my life and I figured when I got here, I was done with them. If his proposals had some hint of sense, I would have been alright with them. He wouldn’t even listen. He thinks that if he says it, it makes sense, and if I say it, it doesn’t. I know that’s not true, but it still makes me angry.”

“There’s nothing to do about it now. We just need to keep running and hope that he can’t catch up. I think we can abandon the testing now, don’t you? Lou tells me that the concrete failed both stress and compression testing. In four days, outside. No mystery, they use the perchlorate in it as an oxidant in chemical rockets. The concrete you make from it is junk. Let’s just forget those stupid ideas and go ahead with what we are doing.

“They are going to regret that they ever strapped those stupid radios on us. Now that they have constant surveillance on us, they have responsibility too. If they had the sense to stay at a distance, they would have been able to bask in the reflected glory and congratulate themselves on how smart they were to appoint us. Now they are close enough to make mistakes, and they will be blamed for them. The money men down there are not going to miss the failed tests, especially when they can replace prior successful ones for the same reasons. They are going to ask. They are relentless.”