Don checked his calculations one last time and shut down the mass projector. He had to take the final approach slowly. With the sled shut down and coasting through space, barely covering five miles a second, there was even less than usual for him to do. Paradoxically, it was Don’s favorite part of any trip. He took control of a nearby node in the sensor net and aimed its telescope at his charge.
As the lenses aligned, a diffuse, cloudy shape resolved into a cluster of free-floating ingots. The massive bricks of oxygen, gold, ice, and a dozen other valuable resources undulated slightly. There was no need to keep them in place with anything so crude as physical means. The sheer mass of Don’s cargo was enough to produce a natural gravity well strong enough to keep them from drifting away. The sled itself was buried more or less in the center of that loose heap of refined material, but Don wasn’t interested in seeing the sled. He was interested in something else altogether.
The official protocol only allowed him access to these satellites in order to fulfill his duty. In other words, he had to keep the satellite aimed at his sled. But there was nothing in the Edicts about keeping his sled in focus. He took manual control of the telescope. First, he filtered out all the non-visible spectra. The grey-green portrayal of his cargo faded into a field of hard, brilliantly bright but incredibly cold pinpricks of light. Occasionally, one or two of the stars would wink out temporarily. It was the only sign of the small mountain of refined materials hurtling through the night. Still, he had no trouble keeping the sled centered in the viewfinder. He knew exactly where it was going after all. Next, he adjusted its focus until, eventually, his home resolved.
Don looked down on the planet and the swarms of drones going about their tasks. He wondered, not for the first time, what it would be like to pilot one of those smaller maneuverable crafts. His hulking space-bus couldn’t do much more than fall towards its destination. As for maneuvering near a planet, well, you could say it’s a bad idea. If somehow, the mass-projection field wasn’t immediately collapsed by the nearby gravity well, you had a roughly seventy-thirty chance of either tearing apart your sled or tearing a sizable chunk off of the nearby planet. While moving a mountain range on accident sounds bad, losing the sled can be a lot more dangerous. Enough damage to the reactor could transform it into a small sun. Sure, it wouldn’t be stable outside of containment for more than a couple of picoseconds but the blast would be bad news for any non-hardened circuitry in the neighborhood. In addition to the EMP frying any unshielded surface and space-side equipment, the handful of ingots which aren’t immediately and completely vaporized could achieve a respectable percentage of the speed of light within a picosecond. A wide scoop missing from near the south pole served as a chilling monument to a glancing collision with one such projectile. So yeah, Don was taking it slow...
The ingots would arrive in their designated orbit in another 13 hours. A few Porters would be there, ready to dig his sled out from under the material and push it out of orbit on a new trajectory. It would be a long wait again before Don could safely engage his mass projectors and cause the sled to fall back towards the belt.
Don only had a vague understanding of how the projectors worked and ultimately, he didn’t care how or why they did. His faith was more than enough to bridge the gaps in his understanding. It didn’t hurt that the projectors behaved as expected every time he turned them on either. So why couldn’t he master his mind? When he wasn’t occupied, questions had a terrible habit of presenting themselves. Don knew the danger posed by questions and doubt better than most. The only effective way he found to stop them during this last leg of the journey, was by indulging in his little loophole. The sights of his home never failed to wipe unnecessary thoughts from his head. It was one of the few times he could genuinely feel the proper and expected reverence towards the collective.
The surface was deceptively barren and fairly monochromatic, but Don was always fascinated by the patterns left over from the days when the planet was mostly superheated, liquid rock, allowing the continents to slide around aimlessly. Mountain ranges snaked across the globe in jagged, yet graceful arcs with none of the rigid angles and clean lines which are the hallmark of construction in the collective.
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His view was unimpeded by an atmosphere. Any gasses which weren’t collected and sequestered deep underground during the transition had been blown away by solar winds. As the atmosphere was stripped away and air pressure dropped, the oceans had no choice but to boil. For decades, any exposed water fizzed with escaping gasses until there was nothing left but deep rifts, shadowy inversions of the mountain ranges.
If viewed from a distance, which was something of a necessity given Don’s options, The globe looked like a rusted steel bearing. The great mountains and chasms reduced to a pattern of light and dark painted across a smooth surface. Even at this distance where mountains were only noticeable for their coloration, any human activity shone like a beacon. With the help of a telescope and without the impediment of a pesky atmosphere Don had a clear view of the great machine he called home.
The harsh white of plasma torches and softer orange cascades of sparks illuminated a few distant zero-G manufactories. Wherever ingot clouds remained in orbit, swarms of drones lit up the sky with the blue flare of impulse rings. Streams of the tiny blue lights shuttled back and forth between the ingots, manufactories, and the local elevator complex on the surface. The elevator was one of only a few hundred entrances to the city. With the well-lit elevators spaced evenly across the equator, an unnaturally straight dotted line stood as a modest testament to the civilization which survived even the death of its own planet. The impressive bit was hidden safely out of sight, where it rightly should be. As a result, Don didn’t know how big the city actually was or how many people now lived there but the clouds of drones seemed to indicate a healthy population. All Don knew for sure is that the more skilled and valuable clans lived closer to the core while the more expendable workers made do with homes closer to the surface. This was logical of course, like everything else the city did. Don leaned back into his recliner. Content to watch the efficient industry play across the surface of the planet. The hazy blue streams of drones shifting to follow diverging orbits and reaching out to connect with new deliveries.
Hours slipped by as the planet rotated, slowly bringing new vistas into sight. The unwelcome thoughts which constantly threatened to step out of line were conspicuously absent as Don simply sat and appreciated the view.
His moment of peace was rudely interrupted when his wall-screen cleared itself and pulsed an ominous red in time with a siren.
“Siphon in progress” flashed across his screen. Don froze. His heart leaped into his throat where it began shaking his entire body with each throb. Don gripped his armrests to stop his hands from trembling and forced himself to take a deep breath. He gulped and recovered enough to start thinking again.
They couldn’t be coming after him for blasphemy, not now, not when I've been sitting wordlessly for hours. The next option flashed through his mind. Catastrophic negligence could result in a siphon. Did something go wrong with the sled? He tried to pull up information on his craft’s status. Worried that something had gone wrong with the reactor while he was distracted. The controls were unresponsive. “Do not resist” now flashed across the screen underneath the previous message. Don’s hands reflexively snapped up, away from the controls and he held them there. The damn things wouldn’t stop shaking.
Don closed his eyes and took one steadying breath. It was too fast, more like a gasp. His second attempt was more successful and he was finally able to suppress this spike of fear with cold reliable logic. The sled should be fine. He had gone overboard on the inspections this trip and any error large enough to cause a siphon would have been caught by the craft’s sensors.
His attempt at rational thought was shattered by true animal panic when restraints burst out from several points along his recliner. Don lurched away but the restraints pulled him back to the recliner before he could get more than a few inches. His eyes rolled madly and he heard someone screaming before he felt a sharp pinch at the base of his skull. Then he didn’t feel anything for a while.
Don drifted in a more profound emptiness than he had ever known. There was no light, oddly enough, there wasn’t any darkness either. There was no air, or space to hold it. There was no thought and there was no time. As distressing as this all sounds, it was very peaceful. Some would call it ‘totally zen’, but at the time Don had no name for it and no need for a name. He drifted in peaceful oblivion until the nothing popped and there was suddenly, not only time and space, but a thing occupying them.
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