‘That’s right.’ The quantity of data which the project had sent him over the four days since he agreed to captain the ship was phenomenal. Most of the information files were accompanied by requests from the department heads concerned. ‘But I need a while to settle in before I start slinging my weight around.’ He’d actually felt a little overwhelmed walking into the lobby, facing up to the project all alone. Normally when he was involved in anything on such a scale he’d be accompanied by several of his own aides, and there would have been time for a thorough briefing beforehand. It was only last night he’d finally received a report on the Commonwealth ExoProtectorate Council meeting, which didn’t give him much time to mull over the political implications of the flight. The Farndale board had given his appointment their full approval, though, eager to climb on board the project.
‘Of course,’ Daniel Alster said. ‘Your office is ready for you now. But Mr Sheldon suggested I should give you a quick tour of the facilities first.’
‘Lead on.’
The complex layout was simple enough, with the three towers already housing the design and management personnel. A quarter of the office space was unused. ‘Crew training facilities,’ Daniel Alster explained as they passed line after line of darkened glass cubicles.
‘Has anybody been selected yet?’
‘So far, only you. Just about everyone in our exploration division has volunteered – that’s technical personnel as well as the survey teams. Then there’s a couple of million hopefuls on every planet in the Commonwealth who are insisting they’re perfect for the job. This section of the Anshun cybersphere is having to be upgraded we’ve had so much datatraffic. We’re waiting for you to draw up the requirement criteria before we start active recruitment.’
Wilson gave a resigned shrug. ‘Okay.’
The big hangar-like buildings outside the towers were where all the starship’s components were delivered then rigorously tested before being taken through to the assembly platform. There was no manufacturing on-site, everything was shipped in through the planetary station’s gateway. Sixty-three per cent of the components were fabricated on Augusta, including the wormhole generator mechanism which would act as the hyperdrive. The rest of the sections were coming in from all over the Commonwealth, contracts placed according to financial involvement and political clout. Wilson was pleased to see Los Vada had snatched over three per cent.
As soon as the wagons delivered the containers they were unloaded and moved into clean rooms for testing. The assessment facilities which CST had built in such a short space of time were impressive. Sealed environment chambers could produce a huge combination of radiation, extreme thermal loads, vibration stress, electromagnetic irradiation, and hyper-velocity particle impacts, all inside a good old-fashioned vacuum. There were also test labs where electronic components were subjected to all manner of improbable failure scenarios. Once they were certified, the components were moved out to the platform for assembly.
Nigel Sheldon was waiting at the gateway, which was at the end of the largest assessment building. He was wearing the same kind of white overall that Wilson had changed into. They both shook hands; still slightly wary of each other, like old friends who were patching up an argument.
‘Ready for zero gee again?’ Nigel asked. He put on a protective helmet, which moulded itself to his skull.
‘I guess so,’ Wilson said. It had been a very long time and, as Daniel had been telling him during the tour, a lot of their assembly technicians had experienced mild to debilitating nausea when they were working on the ship. Not even continual exposure seemed to weaken the effect. The astronautics companies based at the High Angel had little practical help to offer. They either used robotic systems or personnel who’d been screened to find a degree of immunity. In desperation, CST had been deep-mining some very old medical papers on human zero-gee adaptation, some of which dated back to the Russian MIR station, to see what kind of drugs or DNA resequencing they should be considering.
Wilson allowed Nigel to go first, following cautiously behind him. They were using the exploration division’s gate-way, which had been taken off interstellar survey duties to provide a simple link between the complex and space above Anshun, where the assembly platform was orbiting a thousand kilometres out from the planet. A circular titanium tunnel had been built through the gateway, lined with bands of electro-muscle that were capable of handling components up to eight metres wide, and weighing a couple of hundred tons. The motion was like a throat swallowing, with the sealed containers riding forward on synchronized waves that rippled along the bands.
As Wilson walked forwards, it looked as if they were going from the assessment building through a simple circular opening into a giant spherical chamber beyond. The assembly platform was a globe of malmetal that had been expanded out to six hundred metres in diameter. Its internal stress structure resembled hexagonal ribs, with gantry towers extending towards the centre from the junctions. They supported a broad gridwork cylinder directly in front of the gateway. It was in there that the starship was taking shape. Right now, it looked like nothing more than an even denser lattice of girders. Hundreds of men and women in simple overalls were scampering along the framework, or anchoring themselves in place beside mobile constructionbots. White composite containers were sliding along the gantries, like pearls of condensation slithering down glass.
Even though Wilson was expecting it, the end of the planetary gravity field came as a shock. One foot was pressed firmly on the ground, while the one in front seemed to waver in mid-air. Wilson concentrated on pulling himself forward, using the handholds between the electromuscle bands. Every sense immediately told him he was falling. His hands automatically tightened their grip. In front of him, Nigel’s body had already swung around parallel to the gateway, and he started to pull himself along the support gantry handholds, heading in towards the ship. Wilson copied him, using the handholds like a ladder for the first few metres, then his body simply glided along twenty centimetres or so above the gantry. He remembered to grip a handhold every few metres, just to correct his direction and prevent any spin from building up. His stomach was quivering at the falling sensation, but apart from a wet belch, he didn’t feel any dramatic onset of sickness. The air around him carried a distinct tang of welded metal and warm oil, though the smell slowly weakened as fluids began to pool in his head.
‘Tell you something,’ Nigel called back over his shoulder. ‘I get one hell of a buzz out of seeing this baby. Big projects always do that to me. But, man, I ain’t been this excited about a chunk of engineering since Ozzie and I put the original wormhole gateway together.’
‘I remember the day,’ Wilson said dryly. He couldn’t escape from his memories of the Ulysses that day either, the last time he’d ever seen the proud interplanetary ship, a big mass of struts with hardware attached at all points. None too dissimilar to this craft.
Nigel chuckled. ‘We’re coming up on the reaction drive section.’
The maze of girders wasn’t getting any clearer as they approached. Wilson asked his e-butler to access the assembly platform array. It overlaid a blueprint of what he was seeing on his virtual vision. The starship’s design was quite simple. The life-support section housing the crew was a thick ring three hundred metres in diameter, which would rotate to provide a twenty per cent gravity field along its rim. A basic von Braun wheel, Wilson thought, though no one would ever call it that nowadays. In the middle of that was a cylinder four hundred metres long and a hundred and fifty in diameter, containing both the ftl drive and the plasma rockets. The surface had a multitude of bulges and prominences, as if it was growing metallic tumours.
The three of them floated around a fat nozzle with a perfect mirror-surface interior. It was the first, and so far only, one of the five plasma rockets to be installed, leaving rosettes of struts where the other four would be fitted. Wilson studied the thick reaction mass fuel pipes and superconductor cabling which would be connected into the o
ther units when they arrived. A hand crept out of its own accord to touch the casing of the installed nozzle.
Plasma rockets. Just like the old Ulysses had. It’s like a bicycle, some things you can’t improve.
‘What kind of power source are we using?’ he asked.
‘Niling d-sinks,’ Nigel told him. ‘Fifteen of the goddamn biggest we make. There are back-ups, as well, of course; we’re providing microfission piles and two fusion generators. But the niling d-sinks are your primary supply. They’ll give you enough power to fly seven thousand light-years.’
‘That far?’ somehow Wilson had been expecting the ship to be capable of reaching Dyson Alpha and returning, nothing more.
‘Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you’ve got a licence to fly off and explore the rest of the galaxy, Captain, okay?’
Wilson smiled with a faint degree of guilt. He’d been thinking just that. ‘You know what you’re doing, don’t you? What this ship is?’
‘What?’
‘You’re dropping a pebble off the top of a mountain. When it gets to the bottom it’ll be an avalanche. People are going to be interested in exploring the unknown again. They’ll want more ships like this, they’ll want to know what else is out there. The next ship will be big enough to fly around the galactic core.’
‘Wrong, Captain. Only people like you want to do that, born romantics. And there aren’t as many of you as you’d like to think. This Commonwealth we’ve built for ourselves is a mature, conservative society. We’ve grown up a lot in the last couple of centuries. Only people with one short life want to go tearing out into the great unknown with nothing more than a flashlight and a stick to poke the rattlers with. The rest of us will take our time and expand slowly; that way there are no mistakes made. Tortoise and the hare, Captain, tortoise and the hare.’
‘Maybe,’ Wilson said. ‘But I don’t believe we’re as civilized as you like to think, not all of us.’ They’d gone past the reaction drive sector of the ship, and were in the midsection, where two stumpy arms linked the habitation ring to the central engineering section superstructure. Again there wasn’t much to see, just the raw skeleton devoid of any hull plating, even the internal decking was missing inside the stress structure. Although a lot of auxiliary machinery had already been installed. ‘How’s the hyperdrive coming along?’
The lines around Sheldon’s mouth tightened slightly. ‘The flow wormhole generator is undergoing stage three component testing. They should begin primary installation in three to four months.’
‘So how does that leave our overall timescale?’ Wilson asked.
‘Our initial projection has completion in another seven months,’ Daniel Alster said. ‘However, there were several problems associated with zero-gee construction which we hadn’t factored in.’
‘Be more like nine now,’ Nigel grunted.
‘Everything costs more,’ Wilson pronounced happily.
‘And takes longer,’ Nigel completed. ‘Tell me about it.’
‘How come you didn’t build this at the High Angel?’ Wilson asked. ‘I know it would add another two hundred and thirty light-years to the trip, but that’s not much to this ship if I read the specs right. And they have all the astroengineering expertise there.’
‘Political control,’ Nigel said simply. ‘Specifically: mine. This way, CST remains the primary operator for the whole mission.’
‘Fair enough,’ Wilson said. It was a reasonable compliment that Nigel didn’t feel the need to guard what he said.
Near the front of the superstructure a great nest of power cables waited for whatever unit was to be installed there. Intrigued by the power levels involved, Wilson checked the section against his virtual vision blueprint to find it was a force field generator; one of seven. ‘It’s well defended.’
‘I want you back in one piece,’ Nigel said. ‘And I still worry about the envelopment being a defensive action. To me it’s the most likely scenario.’
‘If we’re up against weapons that you need to protect a star against, I don’t think a couple of our force fields will be much use.’
The three of them stopped drifting, and clustered together around a force field generator emplacement. ‘Look,’ Nigel said. ‘One of the reasons I wanted you to see this today was so you could get a decent overview. At this stage the design is still reasonably flexible. Hell, we can put the launch schedule back by a year if we need to. I want your input on this.’
‘Fine. My initial response is that we should be a lot more cautious than the flight profiles you’ve shown me so far. The last thing we want is a mission where we come out of hyperspace right next to the envelopment barrier and start yelling: anyone here? We need to be taking our first look from at least ten light-years out, which means the very best sensor systems the Commonwealth can build. If we can’t detect any signs of conflict from there, then we move in by stages. That will probably mean adding several months to the mission.’
‘I can live with that,’ Nigel said.
‘Good, because I will only take this ship out if we’re running with a safety-is-paramount philosophy. Not just for the crew, but for humans everywhere. If there is something hostile out there, I don’t want to draw its attention to us. I hope you appreciate just how much responsibility is accruing round this project.’
‘I know that, man, believe me, I know. This is what CST faces every time we open a wormhole to anywhere new. People don’t pay us any attention these days because they think that, after three centuries, encounter scenarios are routine, and maybe even boring. Me, I don’t sleep much, I know that one day we’ll come across some virus or bug that gets right past our biomedical screening, or an alien race that is the opposite of the Silfen. Every year we go further out, I add another safety procedure and ignore my staff screaming about what a monster bureaucrat I’ve become. All I do is pray that new procedure is going to be good enough for the one seriously badass encounter that nobody’s thought of before. Take a look at our exploration division’s operational guidelines some time, they should reassure you.’
‘Okay, we understand each other then.’
‘I hope so, Wilson, because this could well be that one encounter I’ve been dreading all these centuries.’
‘So why are you pushing so hard for this mission?’
‘We can’t hide in the dark just because of something we don’t understand. As a species, we’ve evolved a hell of a lot these last centuries, we are Homo galactic now. It might be arrogance on my part, but I believe we’re now capable of facing something this big. And don’t try to kid yourself: this is big, even if all you find is a deserted barrier generator. We have to come to terms with truly alien aliens, and the Silfen have never been that.’
‘I thought you said us true romantics were few and far between?’
‘We are. But look who we are.’
Wilson finally laughed. He tilted his head to take in the massive bulk of the ship. ‘So how come you haven’t named it yet?’
‘You’re the captain, that’s your prerogative.’
‘Are you bullshitting me?’
‘No, man, I figure I owe you that much. Any ideas?’
‘Sure. She’s called Second Chance.’ It wasn’t something he had to think about.
Nigel grinned. ‘Not bad. I guess we’ll have a proper ceremony some time. But first you’ve got to start putting your crew together. I can keep the politicians off your back for a while, but the quicker you make the selection the better. Man, I thought I was used to political horse trading, but this has got them all riled up. Every president, king, queen, first minister, prime minister, chairman, chief secretary, and grand emperor wants their world represented.’
‘You’ve left room for a big science complement, that’s good. I would have insisted on that anyway. The actual crew, the engineers who’ll keep the ship running, I want to keep to a minimum. This is a science mission, after all. So I expect they’ll be drawn from the teams working here.’
‘Okay,
I have no problem passing the buck to you on this one. But be warned, there’s going to be pressure.’
‘I’ll handle it. I don’t suppose you tracked down any more of my old crew did you? I know Commander Lewis never made it to a rejuvenation. The rest of us drifted apart.’
‘I’ll get onto it,’ Daniel said.
*
Paula Myo could actually see the Eiffel Tower from her office window. A century ago the Senior Investigator Office of the Intersolar Serious Crimes Directorate had taken over a lovely old five-storey building just three streets away from the Seine, refurbishing the interior whilst leaving the Napoleonic facade intact. If she pushed her chair back from the desk, and craned her neck, the ancient iron tower was visible over the rooftops. In the ninety-two years since she made Chief Investigator she probably hadn’t looked at it more than a dozen times. Today was one of those rare days when she succumbed, and gazed out at the panorama. The ant-size tourists were just visible on the top, while the lifts ran smoothly up and down the centre of the ancient iron pinnacle. A timeless sight, which if anything had actually improved over the last two centuries as Parisians had gradually pushed the skyscrapers and modern apartment blocks further and further away from the ancient heart of their city.
While she watched, the office array was running cargo and transport files through specialist analysis programs, searching for the patterns which always seemed to elude her. It was the reason for her mood. Those patterns had escaped her for a couple of months now, and there were only so many ways you could search the data, even with modern smartware.
She knew Elvin had begun shipping the arms to Far Away. He would do that the only way possible, break them down into innocuous components, and incorporate them in other cargos. Every time he bought an arms shipment this was the endgame which resulted. She would have cargoes pulled at random by CST security staff at Boongate’s gateway, they would be broken apart and evaluated for any discrepancy. Only three times in the last twenty years had they found components which the manufacturer couldn’t explain. She was sure that if every cargo was taken apart in the same way the results would be a lot better. But CST security had made it quite clear they didn’t have the resources to handle that kind of operation. Besides, she would inconvenience everybody on Far Away who was legitimately importing machinery, and without much just cause other than her own determination. Like all of his predecessors, Mel Rees, her immediate boss, had made it quite clear that the Intersolar Serious Crimes Directorate wasn’t going to support or fund that kind of interception procedure. It was an infuriating policy which she had argued against for decades, to no avail. So while she kept on filing official requests and applying what pressure she could through political contacts, she had to make do with the occasional, random raid on likely cargo cases of equipment.