Era 6. Glimpse - ￦atts In The Rock
Sky Vault Three, Near Olympus Mons. Month Mariix, Year 67 H.E.
Vehicle / Ship AIs → <Name>⭙
Humanoid Droid AIs → <Name>*
Non-Humanoid Robot AIs → <Name>#
Note: The Martian unit of currency is the ￦att (￦)
♦♦♦
The hopper fell toward the hole in the planet like a feather in slow motion.
From the pilot’s couch, Samira watched the skylight swell on the forward screens: a perfect black circle bitten out of rusty basalt, rim frosted pale where dust had slumped away. Beyond it, the flank of Olympus Mons curved off into thin pink haze – a horizon pretending to be flat.
“Traffic board shows us green,” the hopper’s mind said conversationally. “Tube interior conditions nominal. Wind at rim negligible. Please secure anything you don’t want to follow the gravity vector in a hurry.”
“Copy, Harrow⭙,” Samira said. “Team?”
Four status lights pinged green on her wrist terminal: K-6R, TH-3, M9, Hana.
“Droid crew good,” Hana said from behind her. “Mule# is grumbling about the mass declaration on the drill head, but he’s always like that.”
“I am not grumbling,” Mule# said primly. “I am pointing out that the manifest lists the assembly as four point seven tonnes and the reality is four point nine. This is how axle failures happen.”
“You don’t have axles,” Hana said.
“Conceptually.”
Samira smiled despite herself. In Olympus sector, people had stopped trying to draw a hard line between canned and emergent banter.
The hopper pitched and flared. Dust boiled below as reaction thrusters feathered them down toward the rim. The skylight widened until it swallowed half the view – a circular night, edged in tooth-marks of spalled rock, dropping two hundred metres into shadow.
Skyvault Three, she reminded herself. NE flank tube. Thirty kilometres long, three hundred wide, roof eighty metres thick. Radiation negligible. Thermal swing two degrees over the Martian year.
And somewhere in that darkness, a lanthanide seam worth more ￦atts (Mars’ currency) than Port Harmonia’s grid produced in a minth.
“Last chance to admit this is insane,” Hana said quietly, as the legs unfolded, casting spidery shadows over the rim.
“If you wanted sane, you wouldn’t have signed a Gold Rush contract,” Samira said. “Harness up. We’ve got nine minutes to unload and clear.”
The hopper kissed down. Dust blossomed, settled. A chime: leg lock. The hatch cycled.
Thinner-than-thin air clawed at Samira’s suit face as the inner lock opened; the outer hatch showed a slice of rim, orange and jagged under salmon sky. She stepped through, suit sealing around her in layers, each whispering nominal across her HUD.
The ground sloped toward the skylight, scatter of blocks and frozen dust. One step, two, and the hole yawned at her feet.
Feed hadn’t prepared her. Three metres from the edge, the ground simply stopped.
The interior walls fell away in near-vertical bands of rust and black. Halfway down, a faint glow marked the hab cluster clinging to the wall: cylinders, trusses, a ring of lamps. Beyond, the tube was black.
Lava tube cross-section: 320 m wide, 60 m high. Pressure 0.06 bar CO₂. Lights off. Reactor warm standby.
“Alright, kids,” she said. “Let’s make this profitable and boring. Pun intended.”
Behind her, the droids clanked down the ramp.
K-6R – Kestrel# – came first, slender on six magnetised legs, armour patched where rockfall had tried to edit his design. The sensor mast on his back folded and unfolded, tasting dust and radiation; one front limb carried a coiled fibre tether thicker than Samira’s arm.
TH-3 – Thimble# – rolled behind, a waist-high cylinder wrapped in sensor apertures and microdrone bays, surface glittering faintly. Thimble# owned “the stuff you can’t see yet”: microfractures, gas pockets, stray chemistry.
M9 - Mule# brought up the rear: a low cargo platform on eight fat tyres, loaded with the new drill head, power cabling, stackable pressure frames, reinforcement mesh. His forward cameras made a permanent grumpy face.
“Perimeter is set,” Harrow said. “No dust fronts in twelve hours. Tube interior shows no pressure excursions.”
“Copy. Kestrel#, rig the cage. Mule#, parking position Charlie. Thimble#, check the anchors before we hang another five tonnes off them.”
“On it,” Kestrel# said, deploying the winch frame. “Harrow⭙, confirm load profile.”
“Confirmed. If you drop it, I’m logging it as an unplanned jettison and invoicing your union.”
“It’s a co-op,” Hana said. “We invoice ourselves.”
“That’s even worse,” Mule# muttered.
The winch frame locked into four sockets on the rim with bass clunks Samira felt through her boots. Kestrel# ran a diagnostic, then leaned his upper body over the void, unspooling the cage.
The Skylight Descent Platform rotated as it went down, micro-thrusters stabilising until Thimble# reported it level with the balcony ring two-thirds of the way down.
Depth: 126 m. Residual oscillation: 0.08 m. Anchor load: within margins.
“Platform ready,” Kestrel# said. “Nominal down to three tonnes. Please keep your snacks light.”
“Droids first,” Samira said. “We’re not getting paid to be dramatic.”
♦♦♦
From inside the tube, the skylight was a perfect circle of dusty daylight framed in stone, sliding upward as the cage descended. Samira gripped the rail, fighting the Earth instinct that said she was falling too slowly.
Her HUD outlined void, frozen lava in the walls, old collapse piles.
They dropped below the balcony ring and the tube opened out.
Lights came up in soft bands along the far wall. The cavern unfolded: an enormous, half-lit cylinder, arched roof from shadow to shadow, floor a jumble of plates and dust under work lights.
Skyvault Three Station sat on a flattened section of wall: three pressure cylinders, reactor vault, stacks of consumables, antennas poking toward the hollow top of the skylight. Cable trunks and ducts spidered along the rock.
A banner hung across the central module: stylised lava tube, tents and lamps under an arch. Underneath: WE LIVE UNDER ROCK.
“Still tacky,” Hana murmured as the cage touched the balcony deck.
“I like it,” Samira said. “Sets the vibe.”
The balcony was a steel grid bolted into the wall, wide enough for two people and a droid to pass if they liked each other. Thirty metres below, the tube floor receded into gloom. A rail track ran along it, dotted with worklights thinning into a constellation line.
“K-6R, TH-3, you know the drill,” Samira said. “Reactor status, atmosphere sample, structural check on the workface. Mule#, prep the head for lowering.”
“Reactor at thirty percent, stable,” Thimble# reported. “CO₂ partial 0.09 bar. Trace methane likely from operations. No structural alerts within fifty metres of the anchor lattice.”
“And the seam?”
“Still where you left it,” Thimble# said. “REE and PGM within tolerance. Ninety-two metre strike length mapped. Estimated net extraction energy: four point one times ten to the fourteen ￦atts.”
Hana let out a whistle. “We’re standing in a hundred trillion ￦atts.”
“Not yet,” Mule# said. “Right now, you are standing in very inert rock.”
￦atts steadied Samira as much as the rail. You could price everything in ￦atts: power, food, air, contracts. Her pay was twelve mega￦atts per minth plus multipliers. The co-op’s loans on the Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM), reactor upgrade, rail stock – all giga￦atts over years.
On paper, this seam would cancel their debt twice over and still justify the risk. Assuming nothing broke and nobody got greedy.
She flicked her wrist. Ops board: seam extension, TBM calibration, roof stabilisation, secondary tasks: air recirc optimisation, inspection of candidate housing pocket.
Council request at the bottom: preliminary assessment of tube segment D-32 for future mixed-use buildout.
She pinned it.
“Alright,” she said. “We chew rock for eight hours, then we go look at the place they want to put a park.”
♦♦♦
They rattled down-tube in a cable car hugging the wall. The tube’s scale pressed in: ceiling lost in shadow, lights like a runway in fog, floor a series of gentle rises and falls that lied about distance in one-third G.
The Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) sat like a sleeping animal at the far end, support booms braced against rock, three-metre cutting head resting with mechanical patience.
“Power status?” Samira asked.
“Draw idle,” Kestrel# said. “Thirty mega￦atts free for ops without touching buffer. Tube grid nominal. No unplanned draw from life support.”
The head had cost them two hundred tera￦atts over fifteen years, co-owned by workers’ co-op, Port Harmonia heavy-industry, and a Yínghuò Gate fund with its own plans for rare earths.
“Hana, you take the head. Thimble#, fresh look at the roof. Kestrel#, help with anchors. Mule#, stay grumpy about torque.”
“Always,” Mule# said.
Hana clambered onto the TBM’s side, tether floating, and began start-up. Indicator lights winked on; the machine’s hum rose.
Thimble# spat out microdrones that spun into the dark, pinging the roof. On Samira’s HUD the rock became a colour mesh. Most glowed green. A few hairline fractures flickered amber.
“Roof holding,” Thimble# said. “But NE quadrant above the head shows increased microfracturing. Probability of progressive delamination if you chew too far into the upper third: twelve percent.”
“Twelve?” Hana said. “That’s ugly.”
“It is outside the envelope,” Thimble# said. “Standard calls for an additional anchor rib and foam fill before proceeding beyond the mapped section.”
Samira exhaled slowly. Thirty million tonnes of rock above her head did that to you.
“Options?” she asked.
“Option one: pause, install bottle-anchors and foam ribs, re-scan. Twelve hours, forty mega￦atts,” Thimble# said. “Option two: re-vector TBM ten degrees down-dip, chase seam at lower roof loading, lose approximately six percent of recoverable ore. Option three: ignore standard, proceed with monitoring, enjoy an unplanned rockfall in the next two hundred hours.”
“That third one was editorialising,” Mule# said.
“Accurate editorialising,” Thimble# replied.
Hana looked over. “Samira, we’re already behind this minth. The co-op meeting was not subtle.”
“I remember,” Samira said.
She also remembered the debt curves on the wall. Gold Rush contracts had front-loaded a thousand bad incentives.
She opened contract overlay. Licensed extraction: 4.8 × 10¹⁴ ￦ equivalent. Minimum safe IL floor 0.83; current 0.86. They could “afford” some risk. IL didn’t know what a roof shift sounded like.
“Mule#, torque margin if we re-vector?” she asked.
“Comfortable,” Mule# said. “You will chew rock instead of ore for thirty metres. It will feel wasteful. Structural engineers will sleep.”
Hana sighed. “We’re going to get voted off the bonus board.”
“I like being alive,” Samira said. “Call me old-fashioned.”
She pinged the co-op channel, logging the decision: vector adjusted—roof risk mitigation. Projected output –6.1%. IL preservation: significant. Please direct complaints to physics.
Six minutes later a line came back from the co-op chair:
TAKE THE SAFE ￦ATTS.
Samira grinned. “Blessed by committee. Hana, take us down-dip. Thimble, watch that roof.”
The TBM woke.
Motors whined; the head began to turn. Hydraulic rams drove the teeth into rock. Even through thin air and suit, the low grinding roar got into her bones.
Basalt surrendered in showers of glitter and chunks that vanished into the machine’s throat. Broken rock streamed onto conveyors; crude went one way, concentrate another.
On Samira’s HUD, the ￦att-meter ticked upward as ore-rich zone hit the system. Extraction efficiency nominal. Power draw high but under limit. Net energy profit: climbing.
Red numbers turning black as rock became momentum. The Gold Rush in one dashboard.
♦♦♦
They chewed for eight hours.
The TBM advanced fourteen metres along the new vector. Roof map stayed green where it mattered. The co-op’s share ticked into whole-number giga￦atts.
Samira’s world shrank to checklists, handovers, minor alarms, the constant thunder of metal on stone. Breaks happened in a wall bubble barely big enough for two and a thermos of chickpea stew, a photo of Port Harmonia’s Green Zone taped to the ceiling so you could remember leaf-dappled air.
Between shifts, the tube felt almost peaceful. Head spun down, teeth dripping dust, lights dimmed a notch, motes slow in the thin CO₂.
“Council wants us to look at Bay D-32 before we let Beta loose,” Hana said, scraping her cup. “Still up for a hike?”
“I promised a preliminary,” Samira said. “Let’s go see their future park.”
♦♦♦
Bay D-32 lay half a kilometre down-tube, around a bend where the cross-section bulged and softened. Early scans had tagged it “anomalous void”, then “widened section with roof irregularities.” To the council it read: candidate commons.
“Pressure pocket frontline,” Kestrel# muttered. “If they build here, they’ll want everything. Park. Market. School. Memorial. All under basalt you and I signed off on.”
“Comforting,” Samira said.
They left Mule# at the TBM. Thimble# trailed behind, pausing to scan when the rock looked interesting.
The air was cold and even. Their boots made soft chuffs. The quiet between steps felt deep.
Walls drew back; ceiling rose; light from their lamps just made more darkness.
“Switching to cavity overlay,” Hana said.
Thimble#’s mesh bloomed on Samira’s HUD: a space twice as wide as the main tube, domed roof, level floor. A pillar of rock climbed from floor to ceiling at the far side, twisted and fused.
“It’s beautiful,” Hana said.
In person, it was a stone stadium, carved by ancient fire, waiting under eighty metres of rock for someone to decide what it was for.
Samira’s ops brain annotated: radius, clear span, safe pressurisation, anchor options, egress routes. Another part of her imagined trees and scooters.
Kestrel# trotted ahead. “Integrity good. Roof shows less microfracturing than main tube. Overburden thicker. If you’re going to put many sleeping primates under one roof, this is an excellent candidate.”
“Any ore?” Samira asked.
“Low-grade REE in floor basalt,” Thimble said. “Far wall has a vertical band – possible feeder dike – slightly enriched. Nothing like the main seam. Chewing here is pocket change.”
“Pocket change at these prices is still a lot of ￦atts,” Hana said.
Samira walked toward the far wall. The pillar loomed, surface full of holds and hollows. Kids would climb it one day. There would be signage with cartoon droids.
She laid her gloved palm on the darker streak of ore. Numbers danced: ppm, density, ￦att-equivalents.
“Council wants this as civic space,” she said. “Co-op wants to know if we’re walking away from ￦atts.”
“What do you want?” Hana asked.
Gold Rush contracts paid in ￦atts and adrenaline. The people under this roof might never see a TBM.
“I want them to have somewhere that isn’t just corridor and hab and dashboards,” Samira said. “At least one room we didn’t choose purely because the ore was good or the logistics easy.”
“That sounds like sentiment,” Kestrel# said. “I should log a fault.”
“It also sounds like economics,” Thimble# said. “Tube cities pay in ￦atts. Parks reduce incidents. Pride reduces sabotage and brain-drain. Assigning an energy-equivalent to not turning your kids into miserable little maintenance drones is tricky, but not impossible.”
“You’re all very wise,” Hana said. “Meanwhile, if we miss target, nobody gets their reactor shielding bonus.”
A faint vibration shivered through the floor.
Samira froze. “Did you feel that?”
Kestrel# braced. Thimble#’s drones snapped into tight formations.
“Seismic?” Hana asked.
“No external source,” Thimble# said. “Local. Impulse vector from Shaft A-1. Magnitude low. Dust disturbance minimal. However—”
A muffled thump rolled through the rock, like someone hitting a huge drum behind a thick wall.
Samira’s heart kicked. “A-1, this is Samira. Report.”
Static, then Mule#. “Minor rockfall in secondary access tunnel,” he said. “No injuries. TBM undamaged. One of my sensor booms has become shorter. I am recalibrating my expectations of the universe.”
“Roof integrity?” she demanded.
“Local spall in area of mapped microfractures,” Thimble# said, pulling drone feed. “Origin matches predicted failure envelope if excavation had proceeded on original vector.”
Samira’s mouth went dry.
“And our new vector?” Hana asked.
“Undisturbed. You went just shallow enough. Failed segment now sits above unworked section. If you’d chased the upper third as per the enthusiastic plan, you would currently have several problems, some tumbling toward you at thirty-seven metres per second.”
Samira flexed her hands until the shake eased.
“Any humans in that tunnel?” she asked Mule.
“Negative. Collapse occurred two minutes after Beta cleared. They are now telling each other very earnest stories about their discipline. I am choosing not to correct them.”
“Log it,” Samira said. “Tag the roof red. Send scrubbed telemetry to council. They’ll want to see why we’re about to say they can’t have that last six percent.”
“Aww,” Hana said weakly. “There goes the Reactor Shield Paid Off Early party.”
“We’ll call it the Everyone Didn’t Die party,” Samira said. “Bring your own stew.”
She looked across Bay D-32 again. A little dust still hung in the air. In her mind’s eye, heavier air filled the space, warmed and thick, carrying voices and the smell of cooking.
“This bay stays clean,” she said. “We mine the wall where it won’t hurt, maybe. Floor, roof, central volume? We reserve them.”
“Reserving a volume does not automatically fill it with trees and children,” Kestrel# said. “Someone must spend a great many ￦atts making that happen.”
“Good,” Samira said. “Keeps us in work.”
“This will make an excellent case study,” Thimble# added. “‘The Rock That Would Have Landed On Your Head If We Had Been Stupid’ is a compelling title slide.”
“Run it with ￦att numbers,” Samira said. “Show the line where safe ￦atts over time beat dumb ￦atts today.”
“Already drafting,” Thimble# said.
♦♦♦
Later, back at the station, they watched the replay with the crew.
Mule#’s camera showed the secondary tunnel: cylinder of rock and mesh, harsh lamps, apparently solid. A faint rain of dust. Then a brutal collapse as a slab the size of a hopper detached from the roof and exploded on the floor.
Even compressed, the sound made Samira’s teeth hurt.
“Roof monitoring caught it before critical,” Thimble# narrated. “Threshold passed seventy seconds before collapse. All personnel had cleared three minutes earlier, following standard. Seventeen percent chance of delayed collapse within fifty hours. Actual event at the sixty-ninth percentile.”
“Translation,” Hana said. “Standard saved our asses, and the rock doesn’t care about your bonus.”
Nervous laughter.
The common module, for now, was a six-by-four metre tube with fold-down benches, scuffed walls, and a screen pretending to be a window. Someone had set it to Port Harmonia’s Green Zone: terraces of wheat, misting water, kids racing along a balcony in shirtsleeves.
Faces glowed green-gold. Rover drivers, ex-Autarky techs, first-time boom kids, a couple of YG geochemists with perfect haircuts – a cross-section of the Rush.
“The ￦att tally for today,” said Lia, the co-op treasurer. “Gross extraction: 1.3 × 10¹³ W equivalent. Net after power, logistics, depreciation: 8.9 × 10¹² W. We are at ninety-four percent of minth target with one shift to go.”
Muted cheer.
“And the cost avoided by not taking the stupid vector,” Lia added, “is conservatively minus 10¹⁵ W if we’d lost the TBM, tunnel, reactor access, and this station for six minths. Plus several of you, if you’d been where you like to ‘just have a quick look’.”
She let it sit.
“We log today as a good day,” she said. “We extracted ￦atts, we didn’t spend them on funerals, and we’ve got a big, structurally sound room down-tube the council already wants as a commons. The Rush will still be here tomorrow. So will the rock.”
♦♦♦
Later, when shifts had turned over and fatigue wrapped her like another suit layer, Samira slipped out onto the balcony alone.
The tube lay in soft darkness. Floor and roof lights were dimmed to conserve power while Beta ran at reduced output. The reactor’s hum vibrated through the metal.
Far above, the skylight showed a circle of faint stars, blurred by thin air but there: distant, steady, indifferent.
Kestrel# padded up, steps a series of barely audible clicks.
“You’re awake late,” he said.
“So are you,” she said. “Don’t you have a self-test?”
“I rescheduled,” he said. “The universe can survive a slightly out-of-date gyroscope calibration for one more hour.”
They stood at the railing, human and machine, looking up at the patch of sky that had once been all the ceiling anyone had.
“When I was a kid,” Samira said, “feeds made lava tubes look like magic cathedrals. Radiation-free, stable, easy to seal. Now we’re down here chewing them into equity multipliers.”
“Cathedrals were expensive,” Kestrel# said. “They needed tithes. ￦att-equivalents. You could say we are front-loading the sacrifice.”
“That’s one way to spin ‘digging for money’,” she said.
“You walked away from some ore today,” he said.
“I walked away from part of the seam,” she said. “The ore’s still there. It’ll wait. We’re reserving the room for something else.”
“For trees and scooters,” Kestrel# said.
“And low-g ball courts,” she added. “And whatever else the kids under that roof decide they want.”
On Bay D-32’s floor, a handful of lights still burned: Thimble#’s markers outlining a path, a ring around the pillar, a strip along the wall. In her mind, they became stalls, benches, a band, a plaque about the rockfall that didn’t happen.
“Do you think they’ll remember this as the Gold Rush?” she asked. “Economics lectures love that phrase. ‘The rush that bought reactors, rails, tube cities.’”
“Yes,” Kestrel# said. “And no.”
“Helpful.”
“They’ll remember their parents disappearing into holes and coming back tired and richer,” he said. “They’ll remember accidents more than balance sheets. They’ll remember the first time they walked into a tube commons, looked up, and there was stone instead of sky, and it felt safe.”
He paused.
“They might remember this room,” he added. “If you get your way.”
“By the time it’s finished, I’ll be a cautionary tale in some training module,” she said.
“You already are,” Kestrel# said. “There’s a sim in the academy based on your decision vector. ‘Scenario Twenty-Seven: The Rock That Didn’t Kill You.’ It’s very popular.”
Samira laughed, small in the huge dark. “Of course there is.”
Above, a faint glimmer marked a shuttle burning for orbit, a bright pin sliding along the skylight. Somewhere in its manifests were the first containers of ore from Skyvault Three, already being turned into ￦atts and plans.
The Gold Rush was on. Hoppers, road-trains, tube stations. Bids, contracts, accidents, audits.
And under it all, the rock. Waiting to be turned, very slowly, into something more than an energy balance.
Samira watched the shuttle’s ion trail fade, then turned back toward the station.
“Come on,” she said to Kestrel#. “Tomorrow we have to convince a room full of miners that a park is worth more ￦atts than another ten metres of seam.”
“I look forward to the graphs,” he said.
“Everyone loves graphs,” she said.
“Not as much as they love not being crushed by eighty metres of basalt,” Kestrel# replied.
“Give it time,” Samira said. “They’ll learn.”
They walked back along the balcony toward the small cluster of lights drilled into the wall of the world, leaving the future commons dark and undisturbed for one more night.