“That’s thirty-five hundred degrees,” Aurobindo Ghosh, the engineer, shouted over the furnace roar. The cramped control room barely had enough space for the three people crowded into its confines.
Kalico Aguila nodded as she watched the holographic readouts glowing on the control panel before her. Separate screens displayed visuals of various workings as the smelter finally hit operating temperature.
On another screen, a loader began feeding ore into the bin-shaped hopper. That in turn gravity-fed to a conveyor that dropped the crushed rock into the furnace.
Heated to thirty-five hundred degrees Celsius, the rock melted, running down through ceramic grating to sonic agitators which turned the liquid to mist. Centrifuges then separated the elements based on atomic weight, spinning off the heaviest first until only the lightest remained to be vacuumed away. Electromagnetic fields then further separated the metals, diverting them into separate channels that were subjected to various electrical charges that continued to sort the metals into finer and purer streams.
At the end of the process, compressors filled tanks with gases, while the liquid metals poured into molds. By mixing the flows, various alloys could be tailored to order. The tailings were dumped to cool. Afterward they could either be carted off as waste or further processed for their elements.
All in all, the smelter was a masterpiece of engineering and design—assuming she and her people could keep the complicated piece of equipment running. The technicians trained specifically for its operation had died on Freelander. Kalico’s two engineers were making it up as they went along.
On the monitors she watched as the first streams of white-hot metals emerged from the big machine’s convoluted innards and began running down channels into bar molds.
“By all that’s holy and wonderful,” she whispered under her breath, “that’s the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen.”
“Power’s down a quarter,” Desch Ituri, her second engineer told her. “By God’s ugly ass, Supervisor, this thing eats energy like a shark.”
“How long can we run before we have to start shutdown procedures?”
“Ten minutes?” He shrugged. “Not more. Not this first time. All of the channels and orifices must be clear when we shut down. None of the metal can be allowed to cool and harden in restricted places or it will plug the works. Even then, Supervisor, we’re just hoping we get the shutdown correct.”
Kalico took a deep breath, tension rising to vie with her feeling of success. The problem would be the power source. Her people had recharged the reactor cores to the best of their ability using the shuttle’s reactors. Where could she get the power she needed?
Freelander?
Even if she could remove one of the ship’s reactors, how would she ever get that kind of bulk and mass down to the planet? Besides, the reactor’s structural supports and casing were designed for freefall. They’d collapse under Donovan’s gravity.
Or am I fooling myself?
Odds were that it would be a decade or more before anyone from Solar System came looking. More than that if Turalon didn’t make the return trip in one piece, or in a timely fashion.
Maybe she had time to recharge the cores, even build a facility to manufacture new ones. Donovan was rife with rare-earth elements and radioactive ores. Her smelter had just proved that it was capable of separating metals, including promethium and uranium. Lead for shielding? That was a byproduct of the ores from Number Two. Her reactor would be a primitive thing to begin with. Dangerous. But she had a whole, empty planet to store the radioactive waste on. That, or just shuttle it to orbit and plot a slow spiral into Capella where it would burn up. No one had figured out how to pollute a star. Maybe she could be the first.
Like an overprotective mother she watched the shutdown procedure as Desch carefully let the smelter’s functions run their full terms. The white-hot streams of metals slowed, thinned, and finally trickled their last.
On the collection floor, she saw molds filled with cooling gold, silver, lead, zinc, tungsten, molybdenum, manganese, and other metals. The tanks had taken partial charges of hydrogen, helium, argon, and other gases.
This is the key. This one piece of machinery. If I can just keep it running, I have the future clenched right here. In my fingers.
Desch might have been in another universe, so intently did he watch his displays, fingers flicking this way and that as he worked the interactive holo to shut down the reactor.
“Supervisor?” Spiro’s voice interrupted in Kalico’s ear com.
“Go.”
“I think you need to come to the radio room. Got a hit on one of your high-priority concerns.”
“And what would that be?”
“Supervisor, with all due respect, I think you’d better come up here and listen for yourself.”
Kalico said, “Roger that. I’m on the way.”
She left Desch to his monitors and Ghosh to his readings, stepped out through the control room door, and closed it behind her. The big sialon structure seemed to hum, as if it were oddly happy, alive.
That had to be her imagination.
Kalico made her way out into the flat yard, the soils baked hard by the shuttle’s exhaust. The front-end loader stood beside a pile of ore, the operator already climbing down from the cab. She could just see the corner of the hopper she’d watched being fed.
The reddish earth, so recently wrested from the forest, now had rows of terrestrial crops that stretched out a couple of hundred yards beyond the smelter aircar lot. They wouldn’t plant more until she was sure she could protect her farm from the forest. A fact that rankled, since in a few months her ration packs would be exhausted; she’d be completely dependent upon Port Authority for food.
Where the piping ran from the smelter into the river, steam was rising at the point boiling water discharged from the cooling pipes. Nothing could distract from the fact that she’d made the raw materials for success.
But what could have put that tone in Spiro’s voice? Come up and see for herself?
She nodded to her aircar pilot as she climbed over the side and seated herself. As the vehicle rose, it blasted out the barest cloud of red dust, then circled, gaining altitude as it headed south toward the ridge where her mines could be seen on the skyline.
She glanced down as they followed the line of towers that would power her tram. Her industrial chemist, Fenn Bogarten, insisted that with a source for carbon, he could fabricate cable to carry the buckets. Now that the smelter worked, she could capture the carbon.
“So what the hell is so important, Spiro?”
Out of pure instinct, Kalico glanced up at the late afternoon sky. Had Spiro just heard that another ship had popped in? Now that she had one triumph, she was itching for others. If it was a ship, it had to have come from the past, one of the missing vessels, for Solar System would not send another until they had some word from Turalon. That fact had been understood from the beginning.
Her driver carefully flew wide of a flock of scarlet fliers, the creatures flashing warning colors and diving for the treetops below.
Passing over the fence, the aircar descended and touched down on the main lot in front of the entrance to the great dome. Her driver immediately shut the aircar down, leaped over the side, and offered a hand as she stepped out.
Accessing her com, she asked, “Spiro? Where are you?”
“Radio room, ma’am.”
Kalico pushed through the double doors, passed the mess hall, and took the third right.
In the cramped radio room, an operator sat at the single chair, her head back, face thoughtful. Spiro, dressed in fatigues, arched a questioning eyebrow and handed Kalico a headset.
“Thought you might want to hear for yourself, ma’am. This is a recording.”
Kalico placed the headset to her ear, a slight smile coming to her lips as the voice announced itself.