NationStates Jolt Archive

A green-clad spacer darted through the upper corridors of Chiron station, on his way to a waiting spacecraft.
The rest of the crew was already in place when he strapped himself into his seat on the bridge, and took a moment to contemplate the awesome sight of the centaur being manuevered and slowly dissasembled in orbit of the artificial planet.
"Casseiopiea, destination Ixion, to Control, we're ready for launch."
"Copy, Casseiopiea. Cleared to disembark in 13 minutes."
"Standing by."

The spacer flicked a few toggle switches, double checked his straps, and sat back to wait for clearance. There was a soft thud as the airlock sealed off and docking rings disengaged. Refracted sunlight from the chunks of ice flying by overhead cast rainbow bands through the bridge.

"Casseiopiea, you are cleared for takeoff. Do zvidania."
"Do zvidania."

The spacer flicked a few more switches, opened the covers on a few lighted buttons, and depressed a certain squarish one marked "Ventral Thrust". In a moment, the craft was floating lazily away from Chiron's surface, and the spacer depressed the button marked "NTR". A bit of the touchscreen in front of him, specifically a slider bar, changed color from dull grey to bright green. He swiped his finger across the screen, closed the button covers, and lay back in his nicely padded chair as the ship sped away from Chiron, and the interior temperature steadily dropped.

A stream of incandescent plasma lay out behind the craft as its nuclear thermal engines accelerated it away from the mass of ice that was the protoplanet Centaur and into the interplanetary void, temporarily acting as a miniature sun for the frozen world which cast sharply contrasted shadows in the practicaly nonexistant atmosphere.

Three weeks hence, LEDs began lighting up on the control panels of the bridge. The green-clad spacer hadn't moved from his chair, and by this time had a thin film of frost crusting his eyebrows. One by one, lights flipped on throughout the ship and the internal temperature began to rise to a comfortable 293 degrees. Responding to the rise in temperature, the spacer's heart began to beat slightly faster than the two-per-minute it had been keeping up for the last few weeks, and lungs began to draw in recycled air. Soon after the frost had sublimated off of his eyebrows and hair, the spacer lifted his eyelids to look upon the sights through the bridge windows. Filling a full 15 degrees of arc was the iceball Ixion, glowing in the dim sunlight some 43AUs from Sol.

Carefully spinning up its gyros and inertial wheels, the spacecraft oriented itself horizontally with respect to the surface as attitude jets controlled its slow descent and touchdown. Within minutes, a crawler was lowered and began roving away from the ship, scraping ice from the surface as it went. An internal fusion plant provided electricity to remove hydrogen from the cometary matter, which itself provided yet more energy. Other devices pulled out carbon and trace minerals, and began feeding them into nanofabricators. Meanwhile, a second crawler was deployed, and two spacemen in MCP suits bounced about outside, setting up a preliminary tent complex.

Within a few days, the first crawler's nanofabricators turned out almost a complete microfactory, ready to begin synthesis of new spacecraft components. Concurrently, the tents were occupied and boreshafts started beneath them, each one drilled out by a replicator. 'Round the spacecraft itself, icemining machinery rasped and melted away the surface, digging the craft in deeper and deeper, until only the engines stuck out vertical from the surface, and replicators began building tunnel complexes through the ice with the original ship as the hub.