Dusters EIGHT

Aidyn returned to the empty control room on Chaffee and replayed the audio of the end of One’s last flight, looking for a clue. After listening to the screams again, he cut it off. “You might be right.” He said to no one.

In the morning Aidyn and Dinah converged on the hangar with Two. Aidyn was called away when Geoff rang him about the details of towing the remnants of One back to Earth. It was a pretty basic operation and no one hindered it, no officials got involved. The matter was settled in less than an hour and Aidyn watched One get fired off towards Mars orbit, on its way to Earth.

He didn’t know, but Dinah watched too. “They are still in there.” She said to Gildo, who was with her.

“We need to make sure that was a one time thing Dinah.” He said.

“It will be.” She answered.

They used autonomous Tugs most of the time and in this case, only one was needed. It was pretty much three big assed engines and a computer. One should reach Earth in two months after a fairly dangerous slingshot orbit that scraped the top of the thin Martian atmosphere.

With that much push, they could take the direct route and not the usual slow spiral into a different orbit. They would be met by a fresh Tug near Earth to slow it down and reach orbit around the Moon.


Everyone turned their attention to Welhaven Two. Within a week it was moved outside Chaffee and moored alongside. Dinah triple checked her software adjustments for the shutdown sequences. She hoped that she had covered all of the variables and that it would be a safe ship.

Welhaven sent two additional “scientists” to “assist” with final preparations on Two. Dinah and Aidyn figured they were more spies than help.

Two moved into the test stages and completed three missions, each increasing orbits around Mars and the last run even included two quick swipes around the moon Phobos on the way back.

Dinah’s adjustments were working perfectly and they suffered only one shutdown, which came at the end of the second test. The array in question was removed and inspected to try to determine the root cause of these failures.

After a week, the only probable cause was stress, which lead everyone to think they need a long term solution if this was going to be a viable (profitable) operation. The trips between worlds would be much longer than a few orbits around a small planet.

The matter was to be resolved back on Earth. Welhaven put their best, and some other developers on the problem. They determined a stronger casing around the superconducting coils and a hardened core should significantly lengthen their operating life.

The upgrades couldn’t be made in orbit around Mars, so all operations were stifled and Aidyn went back to Earth to work on the redesign effort, as the front man really. Dinah stayed on Chaffee, and was allowed to run some limited test runs. She sent all test data back to Earth for analysis after every short run.