The orbiter, which rode the booster piggyback until staging, was a smaller, blunter version of its big brother; thirty-five metres long, rocket-powered, and capable of lifting four and a half tonnes into orbit, along with ten passengers.
Clean-room technicians dressed in baggy white smocks were riding mobile platforms round the open upper-fuselage doors. The Merlin had been removed from its environment-stasis capsule overnight, now it was being lowered millimetre by millimetre into the orbiter's payload bay.
The probe was surprisingly compact; cylindrical, a metre and a half wide, four long. Its front quarter housed the sensor clusters, their extendable booms retracted for launch; two communication dishes were folded back alongside, like membranous golden wings. The propulsion section was made up of three subdivisions; a large cadmium tank, the isotope power source, shielded by a thick carbon shell, and six ion thrusters at the rear. It was all wrapped in a crinkly silver-white thermal protection blanket.
Greg let his gland start its secretion again, beginning to get a feedback from the technicians' emotional clamour. It was the first time he'd ever encountered the space industry. These people were devoted. It went far beyond job satisfaction. They shared an enormous sense of pride, it was bloody close to being a religious kick.
The Merlin had finally settled on its cradle inside the orbiter's payload bay. As the overhead hoist withdrew, the mobile platforms converged, allowing the huddles of white-suited technicians to begin the interface procedure. The pallet which would deploy the spacecraft in orbit was primed, attachment struts clamped to load points, power and datalink umbilicals plugged in. Monitor consoles were hive-cores of intense activity.
Greg nodded down at the little robot probe and its posse of devotees. "What happens next?"
"We mate the orbiter to the top of the booster. After that the barge will dock with the airstrip. Your launch window opens at half-past eight, lasting six minutes."
The payload bay doors hinged shut, bringing Greg one step closer to Zanthus. And it still didn't seem real.
From Oscot's deck the western horizon was a pastel-pink wash flecked with gold; the east a gash into infinity, not black, but dark, insubstantial, defying resolution, a chasm you could fall down for ever. Greg watched the crescent of darkness expanding as the Atlantic rolled deeper into the penumbra; occlusion slipping over the sky, giving birth to the stars. There was no air movement at all, dusk bringing its own brand of Stasis. The world holding its breath as it slid across the gap between its two states.
Greg was wearing a baggy coverall over his new flightsuit. The coppery-coloured garment fitted him perfectly, a one-piece of some glossy silk-smooth fabric, knees and elbows heavily padded. It had a multitude of pockets, all with Velcro tags; small gear modules adhered to Velcro strips on his chest—atmosphere pressure/composition sensor, medical monitor, Geiger counter, communicator set. He'd even been given a new company cybofax, capable of interfacing with Zanthus's 'ware, which was in the big pocket at the side of his leg. There was also a lightweight helmet, which he felt too self-conscious to put on before getting into the Sanger.
The first real stirrings of excitement rose as he led the security team towards the waiting tilt-fan at the prow, the realisation that he was actually going into space finally gripping. Oscot's deck was a bustle of tautly controlled activity. The ever-present grumble of the thermal generators' coolant water was being complemented by the lighter braying of mobile service units. Five Lockheed YC-55 Prowlers were already on the deck. They were ex-Canadian Air Force stealth troop/cargo transports. Their shape was a cousin of the original B2 bomber, a stumpy, swept bat-wing, with an ellipsoid lifting-body fuselage; the entire surface had a radar-nullifying matt-black coating. There were no roundels, not even serial numbers. True smugglers' craft. Greg watched as the sixth rose silently up out of its daytime sanctuary, an old oil tank converted into a split-level hangar. The big elevator platform halted at deck level with dull metallic clangs which rumbled away into the gloaming. The stealth transporters seemed to draw a thick veil of cloying shadow around themselves, eerily other-worldly.
Sean Francis caught Greg staring. "Neat machines. Yes?"
"I didn't know you still used them," Greg said.
"Sure. Their avionics are a bit outdated now, but they're more than adequate to infiltrate Scottish airspace. That's our main target, their PSP is pretty shaky right now. It'll only take a small push and they'll fall."
Greg watched large pallets of domestic gear systems being loaded through the Prowlers' rear cargo doors. "You build all that stuff here?"
"Yes. It's a pretty broad range—crystal players, home terminals, microwaves, fridges, bootleg memox albums—that kind of thing. Our sister ship, Parnell, churns out more of the same, along with a whole host of specialist chemicals for our microgee modules up at Zanthus."
"So Event Horizon only has the two cyber-factory ships left out here now?" Greg asked.
"That's right. There used to be nine of us out here a couple of years back, but the rest have left now. They're docked in the Wash outside Peterborough. Their cyber-systems are being stripped out and reinstalled in factories on land. All part of the Event Horizon legitimisation policy. They were all gear factories, except for Kenton and Costellow, those two used to specialise in producing the actual cyber-systems themselves. Real top-of-the-range stuff; all our own designs, too. The old man kept research teams going ashore in Austria, they provided us with the templates; good enough to match any of the Pacific Rim gear. Bloody clever that."
"Oh?"
"Don't you see? Philip Evans has built up a capability to expand the company at an exponential rate. The cyber-systems are that sophisticated. All he needs is raw material, and financial backing. The factories will multiply like amoebas, yes?"
"You sound like you're happy with Event Horizon."
"Christ, I mean totally. Philip Evans is a genius. Event Horizon has so much potential, you know? A real crest-rider. And I've done my penance out here, ten years' bloody hard graft. When Oscot docks I'm going to be in line for a divisional manager's slot."
The integrated Sanger was sitting at the end of the runway, white vapour steaming gently out of vent points on both orbiter and booster, glowing pink in the fast-fading light. Greg's intuition made itself felt as he walked down the gantry arm towards the orbiter's hatch. It wasn't much, a ghost's beckoning finger, distracting rather than alarming.
For a moment he was worried that it might be the orbiter. That'd happened before, a Mi-24 Hind G in Turkey which was going to take him and his squad on a snatch mission behind the legion lines, he'd balked as he was climbing in. It was a mindscent, the chopper smelt wrong. The Russian pilot had bitched like hell until a maintenance sergeant had noticed the gearbox temperature sensor was out. When they broke the unit open, it turned out the main transmission bearings were running so hot they'd melted the sensor.
But this touch of uncertainty was different, there was no intimation of physical danger. He knew that feeling, clear and strong, experiencing it time and again in Turkey.
He hesitated, getting an enquiring glance from Sean Francis.
"We've only had eight fatalities in twelve years of operations," the Oscot's captain said helpfully.
"It's not the spaceplane," Greg answered. Precisely how much his intuition was gland-derived was debatable, but when he did get a hunch this strong it usually squared out in the end. Even before he'd received the gland, Greg had believed in intuition. Every squaddie did to some degree, right back to Caesar's foot soldiers. And now he had the stubborn rationale of neurohormones to back the belief, giving it near-total credibility.
The rest of the security team were watching him. He gave them a weak grin and began walking again.
The orbiter's circular hatch was a metre wide, with a complicated-looking locking system around the rim. Bright orange rescue instructions were painted on to the fuselage all around it. Greg shrugged out of his coverall and put his helmet on before he was help
ed through by the launch crew.
It was cramped inside, but he was expecting that, low ceiling, slightly curving walls, two biolum strips turned down to a glimmer. Another circular hatch in the centre of the rear bulkhead opened into the docking airlock.
"You the first-timer?" asked the pilot. He was twisted round in his seat, a retinal interface disk stuck over one eye, like a silver monocle. The name patch on his flightsuit said Jeff Graham.
"Yes," Greg said as he sat in the seat directly behind the pilot. Puffy cushioning slithered under his buttocks like thick jelly.
"OK, only one thing to remember. That's your vomit lolly." Jeff Graham pointed to a flexible ribbed tube clipped to the forward bulkhead in front of Greg. Its nozzle was a couple of centimetres wide, a detachable plastic cylinder with REPLACE AFTER USE embossed in black. "You even feel a wet burp coming on, then you suck on that. Got it? The pump comes on automatically."
"Thank you."
The rest of the security team were strapping themselves in; they were the only ones in the cabin. Greg fastened his own straps.
Jeff Graham returned his attention to the horseshoe-shaped flight console. The hatch swung shut, making insect-clicking noises as the seal engaged.
"Is there a countdown?" Greg asked Isabel Curtis who was sitting across the aisle.
She gave him a brief acknowledging smile. A wiry, attractive thirty-year-old woman with bobbed blonde hair. He could make out the mottled pink flesh of an old scar, beginning below her right ear and disappearing under the collar of her blue flightsuit. "No. You want to hear flight control, it's channel four. Give you some idea."
Greg peered down at his communicator set, fathoming its unfamiliar controls, and switched it to channel four. The voices murmuring in the headset were professionally bland, reassuringly so.
He followed the procedure: gantry-arm retracting, the switch to internal power, umbilicals disconnecting, fuel-pressure building, APU ignition. Half-remembered phrases from current-affairs programmes.
The take-off run was a steady climb of acceleration, turbo-expander ramjets felt rather than heard, an uncomfortable juddering in his sternum. The build through the Mach numbers, night sky devoid of reference points, floor tilted up at an easy angle.
"Go for staging," flight control said.
The orbiter rockets lit with a low roar, vibration blurred Greg's vision. There was a hint of white light around the edges of the windscreen. Acceleration jumped up, pushing him further down into the cushioning. The stars grew brighter, sharper.
The Merlin was deployed a hundred and thirty minutes after take-off, on the second orbit. The Sanger was five-hundred-and-fifty kilometres above Mexico. Greg had spent the whole time staring out of the windscreen, mesmerised by the globe below, the dazzle of daylit oceans, sprinkle of light from Europe's night-time cities, green and brown land that seemed to be in pristine condition, the muddy stain in the sea which marred every coastline. There were none of the physical symptoms he'd been told to look out for, just the strangeness of arms that waved about like seaweed; a whirling sensation, like a fairground ride, if he turned his head too fast.
A small screen on Jeff Graham's console showed the Sanger's payload doors hinging open. The little probe nosed out of its cradle, umbilical lines winding back on to their spools, loose ends flapping about. It seemed to hover above the Sanger as its communication dishes unfolded.
"We stick with it until Cambridge finishes the systems check," Jeff Graham told his passengers. "Never know, we might wind up taking it back."
But the babbling background voices confirmed the Merlin's integrity somewhere over the Mediterranean, and Jeff Graham fired the orbital manoeuvring rockets, raising the Sanger's orbit. The last Greg saw of the Merlin was a dwindling grey outline over pale moon-washed water.
They caught up with Zanthus over Fiji, an orbit ten kilometres lower, closing fast. The terminator was a brilliant blue and white crescent six hundred kilometres below, expanding rapidly as they raced towards the dawn.
Zanthus rose out of the penumbra into direct sunlight. Greg saw a globular cluster of diamonds materialise out of nowhere. Occasional silent lightning flares stabbed out from it as the sun bounced off flat silvered surfaces.
"That's something, isn't it?" Jeff Graham asked.
"No messing," Greg said hoarsely. It was the biggest of the eight space-industry parks in Earth orbit.
The sun lifted above the Pacific, shining straight into the Sanger's cabin. Electrochromic filters cut in, turning down the glare.
Greg watched in silent respect as the Sanger slowly slid underneath Zanthus. Jeff Graham began to fire the Sanger's orbital manoeuvring rockets, raising altitude, their trajectory a slow arc up to the space-industry park which would end in synchronised orbits.
Zanthus began to resolve, individual light-points growing, assuming definite silhouettes. The largest was the dormitory, right at the heart. Ten cans, habitation cylinders fifty metres long, eight wide, locked together at one end of a five-hundred-metre boom; at the other end a vast array of solar panels tracked the sun. The whole arrangement was gravity-gradient stabilised, the cans pointing permanently Earthwards.
Floating around the dormitory were the microgee modules, one hundred and fifty-six materials-processing factories arranged in five concentric spheres. The formation was a loose one, a shoal of strange geometric insects guarding their metallic queen. There was no standardisation to the modules; they ranged from small boxy vapour-deposition mesh-moulds brought up by the Sangers up to the fifty-metre-long, two-hundred-tonne cylinders launched by Energia-5. All of them flaunted a collection of solar panels, thermal-dump radiators, and communication dishes, and some had large collector mirrors, silver flowers faithfully following the sun. Red and green navigation lights twinkled from every surface. Abstruse company logos bloomed across thermal blankets, as if a fastidious graffiti artist had been let loose; Greg hadn't known so many different companies used Zanthus.
Three assembly platforms hung on the outer edge of the cluster, rectangles of cross truss-beams, with geostationary antenna farms taking shape below long spidery robot-arms. Greg saw the Globecast logo on the side of one gossamer dish.
Personnel commuters, manipulator pods, and cargo tugs wove around the modules, slow-gliding three-dimensional streams that curled and twisted round each other, white and orange strobes pulsing, marking out their progress. There were spaceplanes moving in the traffic flows, rendezvousing with the five servicing docks, big triple-keel structures that acted as fuel depots, maintenance stations, and cargo-storage centres. The spaceplanes unloaded their pods of raw materials, receiving the finished products from the microgee modules in exchange. Greg counted nine Sangers attached to one dock, staggered by how much their cargos would be worth. Philip Evans had mentioned how much Zanthus's daily output came to, but the figures hadn't registered at the time, silly money.
Greg watched Zanthus expand around them as Jeff Graham eased the Sanger into one of the traffic lines. An errant image of his gland discharging milky fluids. Neurohormones chased around his brain, and he deliberately focused inwards, on himself, letting his mind wander where it would. It was a different state from the one he used to tease apart the strands of other people's emotions. Introspective. He was isolated from the security team's thoughts, alone and strangely serene.
If that peak of intuition he'd experienced hadn't concerned the Sanger, then, he reasoned, Zanthus itself must be the cause. He reached right down to the bottom of his mind, and found the sense of wrongness again. It was too small, too flimsy to represent any danger, but it remained. Obstinate, and ultimately unyielding.
Frustrated, he let it go. Something wrong, but not life-threatening. The situation irked him. He knew he must be overlooking something, some part of the spoiler that wasn't what it seemed. Yet the operation was so clear-cut.
As if shamed by its failure, his gland dried up.
The Sanger was creeping up to the dormitory, its big cans dominating t
he view through the windscreen. Event Horizon used three of them for its hundred-and-twenty-strong workforce, a third of Zanthus's total population.
Greg saw a Swearingen commuter back away from one of the Event Horizon cans, a windowless cylinder with spherical tanks strapped around both ends. Tiny stabs of white fire flickered from its thruster clusters.
Jeff Graham rolled the Sanger with a drumfire burst from the RCS thrusters. A huge Event Horizon logo slid past the windscreen; the peak of the flying V was missing, patched over with a rough square of hoary thermal foam. The RCS was firing almost continually. A screen on the flight console showed an image of the payload bay, with the airlock tube extended. A matching tube jutted out of the dormitory can, the two barely half a metre apart.
Contact was a small tremble, the whirring of electrohydrostatic actuators clamping the two airlock tubes together.
Jerry Masefield released his belt, and drifted up out of his seat, using the ceiling handholds to crawl down to the rear bulkhead. Greg pressed his belt's release, and cautiously pushed down with his palms. Victor Tyo and Isabel Curtis watched closely. He grinned at them and grasped one of ceiling handholds. His legs developed a momentum all of their own, pulling his torso along until he was lying flat against the ceiling.
Stomach muscles were the key, Greg decided, keep the body straight and rely on his arms to pull him about. He hauled himself towards the rear bulkhead, remembering to take inertia into account as he stopped.
There was a ripple of applause. The rest of the team were swimming out of their seats. Jerry Masefield had opened the airlock hatch and disappeared inside. Greg swung slowly round the rim and followed him into the can.
Greg couldn't quite figure out the section of the dormitory can he'd emerged into, a tunnel with a hexagonal cross-section, three and a half metres wide, bright biolum strips every five metres, hoops protruding everywhere. Logically, it ought to have been a connecting corridor, except it was full of people. They lingered near the walls, aligned with their feet towards him, a foot or hand hooked casually round the hoops, all of them wearing flightsuits and helmets. A large proportion were eating; their food resembled pizza sandwiches, the same pale spongy dough, tacky fillings. No crumbs, Greg realised, and no need for plates and cutlery. Twenty metres away, four exercise bikes were fixed to the walls, riders pedalling away furiously. There was a sign opposite the airlock, an old London Underground station strip: Piccadilly Circus.