Core

“This isn’t science, you know, it’s a pissing contest.” Garvey gulped down the cold, bitter coffee, dribbling some into his orange beard.

“A contest between whom?” Sarah asked, her RP accent, clear, pale pinkish skin, short dark brown hair, and bright green eyes out of place amid the roughneck miners.

“Cutter and Frontier Fields,” Garvey answered, wiping his beard. His thinning ginger hair topped a permanently flushed face, heavily lined by weather and hard work. “Whichever one wins gets rich.”

“I don’t give a shit,” Marla said. She pulled a hard hat over her cropped curly hair, the bright yellow hat making her mahogany skin and deep brown eyes seem to glow. “We’re gettin’ paid. Are you trying to say you ain’t, Garvey?”

“Nah, man, I wouldn’t be doing this crazy shit if I wasn’t.”

“So it doesn’t matter, does it?” Marla set her empty cup by the coffee maker. “And don’t call me ‘man,’ man.”

“But you’re far more man than Garvey could ever hope to be,” Sarah joked.

“Y’all keep it up and I’ll switch shifts with someone.”

“Really?” Marla asked excitedly.

“Yeah. I was thinking Butler might want to switch.” Garvey laughed.

“Cheeky fucker!” Sarah bowed deeply. “I’m so terribly sorry I disparaged your indisputable, although fragile, manhood.”

“You ladies are killin’ me,” he said. “Let’s get to it.”

“How far did the other shift get?” Sarah asked.

Garvey looked at his data pad. “Second shift got three kilometers, third got almost one.”

“Third shift is digging now?” Marla asked.

“Yeah, I guess changing out the new style cutters is easier, makin’ it so’s they have time to spare now. Big boss don’t like no ‘spare time,’ so they’re gettin’ dusty.” Garvey held the door to the elevator open. “After you, ladies.”

“That’s more like it,” Marla said.

They descended the shaft in the cage, the conveyor across from them continuing its upward journey, pushing the drilled material up to the Martian surface. It meant that they wouldn’t have to start the drill from a stand-still for a change.

The previous shift met them at the cage, Butler handing a sledgehammer to Garvey. “God damn,” Butler said, “they just keep looking better every day don’t they?”

Marla pretended she didn’t hear him, but Sarah turned on the man, easily a head taller than her and built like a bull. “Fuck off, wanker,” she said. “There’s not a woman on Mars would piss on you if your hair was on fire.”

Marla let out a snort of laughter. Butler just stared at Sarah harder, as the cage lifted them out of sight.

As the drill ground away at the solid mantle, the roughnecks managed the coil that served as a wall for the borehole. It required constant movement, pounding the four-centimeter-wide band into the space left by the moving drill head.

With three of them, they could spell each other, two resting while one worked. As with all things related to the Mars Core Project, everything was organized in such a way to maximize the use of every second of every minute.

Sarah worked her away around the borehole, hammering the band into the space created by the drill as it dug down. The band was fed from a coil that fit around the cages and conveyor. Somewhere in the hardware near the surface was the atmosphere generator, while huge fans along the shaft kept the air circulating.

“End of chain!” Sarah’s call brought the other two to their feet, following the inner side of the coil, which was now painted with red stripes that grew closer together as it fed out.

When the solid red end of the coil exited the feed, Garvey and Marla grabbed the bright green start of the new coil and pulled it out to the edge of the borehole. As Sarah pounded the last bit of the previous coil in place, they overlapped it with the bright green portion of the new coil, which she pounded in place on top of it.

Satisfied that the new coil was in place and not in danger of springing free, they sat back down.

“You know,” Garvey said, “I wasn’t sure about being on a team with y’all ladies.” He glanced over at Marla, then looked back at Sarah. “Especially little Miss England.”

“Really? Afraid we’d show you up?” Sarah teased.

“Mostly afraid I’d be pullin’ more than my share. And afraid that I’d have to watch my language around you.”

“Yeah, not so much. ‘Little Miss England’ could make a sailor blush.”

The drill slowed as their shift continued, smaller amounts of rubble leaving on the conveyor. Glints of metal twinkled in the rubble and the drill began heating up more than normal.

“It’s gettin’ too hot!” Garvey yelled over the growing din of the drill. “Shut it down!”

Sarah hit the e-stop on the drill, bringing it to a shuddering halt. The sudden relative silence washed over them, only the sounds of the fans filling the borehole.

“Pull the center cutter and let’s have a goosey,” Sarah said.

Marla crawled down onto the back of the cutter head and released the catches for the center cutter head and hooked it to the overhead winch. Once she was out of the way, Garvey raised the winch to lift the cutter free.

There, beneath the cutter, was a polished metal surface. They had reached the core. He pulled the data pad out of his cargo pocket and took a picture to send it to the surface. “We’re here,” he said on the radio.

The voice on the radio responded. “We’re sending down the core drill. Pull cutters two through seven.”

“Pulling cutters two through seven, will radio when it’s done,” he answered.

All the drilling crews knew the plan upon reaching the core. Remove the center cutters of the drill, and the core drill, looking more like a giant, standard drill, would be lowered in. That drill was water cooled with cutting oil flowing around it at all times.

The goal was to drill a cavity into the core large enough to hold a critical pile of uranium. It was hoped that the critical mass of uranium would heat up the core enough to make it molten once again. With the core molten, more fissile material would be dropped into the borehole and sealed in.

This would, in theory, restart the Martian magnetosphere, improving the conditions for terraforming. At least, that was the theory.

The core drill moved slowly but steadily down into the metallic core, creating a hole a meter wide and fifteen meters deep. They closed out their shift watching the core drill being retracted back up the shaft as the last of the iron-rich shavings, curves of more than a meter long and several centimeters wide, were carried up the conveyor.

Sarah had already cut off the coil at a long slant, pounding it into the last section of un-protected wall. She carried the sledgehammer over her shoulder as they waited for the cage to return to the dorms.

“Well, I do believe that’s our last shift,” Marla said.

Sarah laughed. “Oh, you’re going to miss us?”

Garvey said, “It’s been real, it’s been fun, but it ain’t been real fun.”

“Of course it has, you cheeky git!” Sarah said. “Every minute you spend with me is another minute in heaven, and you know it.”

They rode the cage up to the dorms, where they saw the other shifts waiting, dressed in their bulky surface suits, helmets in hand, with their bags. “Pack up, we’re out of here in thirty minutes,” one of them said.

“Why the rush?” Marla asked.

“They’re bringing in the radioactives as soon as we’re out.”

“I guess they’re going to write off everything in the dorms,” Garvey said. “Here’s your chance to steal the coffee maker, Marla.”

“If I have room in my bag, you can bet I will.”

They rode the cage to the surface in silence, the bulky suits uncomfortable after the year of living in the sealed, pressurized borehole. They put on their helmets and checked each other for gaps or leaks before the cage entered the airlock.

“Do you think it’ll work?” Garvey asked.

“It might,” Sarah said, “though I doubt very much we’ll see it in our lifetime.”

“What are you going to do with your pay and bonus?” Marla asked. “I’m probably going to retire to the Arkansas coast…until I can claim a homestead here.”

“I’m not ready to retire,” Sarah said. “I’ll probably go back to lithium mining, unless I can get on with the Lunar mining crew; digging up rocks to turn into rocket fuel and air.”

Garvey shrugged. “I’ll probably get blind drunk for a while before I make up my mind.”

“Oh, you poor thing,” Sarah said, “you’re driven to drink just to get over us.”

Their banter was cut short when a ground vehicle trundled past, pulling a train of trailers marked with radioactive danger stickers. “Looks like they’re starting already. I’d rather not be here when they figure out they used too much and blow up the planet.”

As the lift ship connected them with the interplanetary ship, on a never-ending loop from Earth to Mars and back, Garvey checked his data pad. “They hit criticality; the core is starting to melt.”

Marla watched the planet they’d called home for the past year shrink behind them as they headed for Earth, imagining what it could look like if she were ever to return.