Worlds in Chaos (20 page)

The UN shuttle that had brought the Kronians up from the surface was in the process of detaching from the
Osiris
when the Amspace vessel arrived, climbing from a lower orbit. The captain waited several miles off in a matching orbit while the maneuver was completed.

As well as being larger than the types of craft that Keene was used to, the
Osiris
had a unique variable geometry design that combined linear and rotational accelerations to provide a normal internal gravity simulation whether the vessel was in freefall or under drive. Its basic form was of a wheel attached to one end of an axle. The axle formed the main body of the vessel and was shaped like an old-fashioned potato masher, with a handle projecting from one end of a thicker cylinder. The “handle” consisted of the reactant tanks and propulsion system, while forward of it, the “masher” section contained other heavy equipment, cargo bays, and the docking port. Four booms projecting radially from the masher carried the accommodation modules at their ends and were interconnected by a circular communication tube to complete the wheel. The booms pivoted freely to trail back like the spokes of an umbrella when the craft was under acceleration, the angle automatically finding a value such that, whatever the combined motion, the resultant of the forces generated by rotation and forward thrust was always perpendicular to the decks. Telescopic sections in the connecting ring compensated for changes in the wheel’s circumference when the trailing angle of the booms altered. The engineers among those studying the details on the screen aboard the minishuttle were impressed. “It makes you wonder if those guys out there are still taking applications,” Tim commented to Keene.

Eventually, the UN craft cleared the vicinity and fired a retro burn to begin falling back toward Earth, and the Amspace minishuttle was cleared to approach. Its lock connected with a coupling extended from the
Osiris
’s front-end docking port, and minutes later the occupants were hauling themselves along guide rails into the Kronian ship.

Two Kronians who introduced themselves as Baur and Semad were waiting for them. The first item on the agenda would be an introductory tour of the hub and propulsion section while they were in the central body of the ship, they informed the visitors; after that, they would ascend one of the boom elevators to meet Captain Idorf and the other Kronians in the Command Module, which was the only module being occupied while the
Osiris
was parked in Earth orbit. Refreshments would be available there, in the crew messroom.

In many ways the maze of galleries, shafts, and machinery compartments was reminiscent of Space Dock. But in the unity of expression that he saw in its design—perhaps fitting for a vessel that could cross the Solar System as opposed to a service platform constructed in Earth orbit—Keene sensed a work of inspiration that had found form, rather than a collection of compromises of the kind he had seen too often, hammered out by committees working in semi-isolation to imposed deadlines. It was the difference between a chateau and a shantyville, a patchwork of trailer lots and a landscaped park. If this was an example of what a tiny colony of misfits and dissidents could do, given simply the freedom to become what they were capable of, then what, he asked himself, might the potentials of all the peoples of Earth be capable of achieving?

He and Wally had been curious about two housings on the outside of the wide end of the axle that they had noticed as the shuttle closed in. They were perhaps the size of an average automobile, located diametrically opposite each other at the rear end of the wider hub section, overlooking the projecting spindle forming the tail. They didn’t seem to be communications mountings or external tanks, and seemed unrelated to the propulsion system. The locations seemed unlikely places to put machinery associated with the spoke elevators, and they seemed too small to accommodate independent vehicles of some kind, say for external maintenance.

Keene had more or less forgotten about them and was lagging behind the others to study the layout of an instrumentation bay that they were passing through, when a low voice sounded from a short distance behind him. “
Hey, Lan.
” Keene turned and looked back. Wally had drifted off the route and gone through a steel door to one side that he had apparently tried and found open. Now he had come back to the opening and was beckoning. “What do you make of this?”

Keene aimed himself in a slow bound through the microgravity and peered inside. Most of the chamber was taken up by what looked like some kind of hoist mechanism connecting from an enclosed structure below, visible through a stairwell beneath ducting and floor plates. There was more machinery above, crammed into the base of something extending upward. Keene looked back the way they had come, reconstructing in his mind the route they had taken and estimating distances. Unless he was mistaken, they had to be right under one of the strange housings.

Wally indicated the walls of the structure they could see part of below. “Look at the thickness of those sections there and all over there . . . and those panels under the walkway. We’re in a hub location here—built for permanent virtual zero-g, right?” He looked at Keene oddly. “This isn’t for structural strength, Lan. It’s containment. But what’s it doing here?”

Keene was a nuclear engineer too, and recognized radiation shielding when he saw it. As Wally had said, the layout didn’t add up. They were in the wrong part of the ship for it to have any connection with the propulsion reactors or fuel and waste storage. He looked around, trying to make sense of it. There were signs reading launch coolant, emergency flood valve, and auto eject. A panel at what appeared to be a local control station carried the legends:
Door Sequence, Inner/Outer
,
Destruct Override
,
Acquisition/Director.
Before he had a chance to voice any thought, however, Baur came hurrying back, obviously looking for them.

“That door should be secured. . . . You shouldn’t be in there.” His voice was short. He seemed agitated.

“Oh . . . sorry.” Wally came out, smiling. “I wasn’t sure which way you’d gone.”

Baur closed and fastened the door, entering a code into its electronic lock. “There’s nothing to see in there anyway,” he said, ushering them to follow the rest of the party. “Just auxiliary power plant.”

Not saying anything, Keene and Wally exchanged glances as they moved on. Each read the same in the other’s eye. The
Osiris
was armed. And whatever the weaponry was that it was carrying, it had been devised with a lot more in mind than turkey shoots.

Idorf, not long back from visiting the surface himself, was waiting on the Control Deck with a female officer called Dayda, the remaining member of the skeleton crew, to welcome the visitors. He was characteristically tall, with a lean build bordering on scrawny, a mop of unruly reddish hair, and one of the few beards, short and ragged, that Keene recalled seeing on a Kronian. His face was hollow-cheeked and hawklike, but was saved from an appearance of gauntness by the unwavering eyes and a ruddy, weathered-looking complexion that was perplexing considering the environment he was from. Keene could have pictured him as the captain of a Louisiana shrimp boat, or maybe an old-time frontier-era itinerant preacher. “I’m not yet recovered from being in a place that counts its people in billions,” he told the arrivals as Baur and Semad conducted them through from the spoke elevator. “This kind of number, I think I might be able to handle.”

With Idorf and Dayda, still wearing orange flight suits, were Sariena and the two other Kronians who had just transferred from the UN shuttle. One of them was called Vashen—a planetary scientist with the delegation, whom Keene had spoken to briefly at Gallian’s reception. The other was Thorel, the crew member that Keene had also met on that occasion. Thorel waved an arm to indicate the surroundings. “So you come to see some quality engineering at last, eh, Dr. Keene?” he joked. “Here we can move. Not like those doll-house spaceships you make us squeeze into.” Keene couldn’t argue with that. Designed for people of Kronian proportions, the
Osiris
was spacious compared to Terran-built craft.

There was a round of introductions for those who had not already met, and then Idorf showed the way to the messroom where the food and drink had been laid out. A lot of it looked familiar, presumably shipped up. It seemed that Earth food was a hit with the Kronians. Rather than make speeches and have his guests paraded around like tourists, Idorf left them to mingle and wander off to be shown other parts of the ship as suited their interests. Wally and Tim stayed with the Amspace crew to learn more from Idorf and Dayda about the
Osiris
’s control and communications systems. The other five Amspace people, with Baur, Semad, and Thorel, drifted off in smaller groups, which left Keene and Vicki with Sariena. The two women knew each other from video exchanges while the
Osiris
was in transit, and for a while they swapped small talk while getting better acquainted. Keene thought that Sariena looked surprisingly fresh for having just been through the rigmarole of launch and the flight up. He said so, wondering if it was due to her being out of surface gravity or escaping from the demands of the official schedule. “Just being back in familiar surroundings after so much strangeness,” she told him. “The
Osiris
got to feel like a second home during the voyage out. It probably seems like metal boxes full of pipes to you, but we lived here for almost three months.”

“Was Earth really so much stranger than you expected?” Vicki asked curiously.

“I’m still awed by the sheer numbers of people wherever you go,” Sariena replied. “We all are. Nothing in Kronia prepares you for that. You see the pictures, yes, but there’s a . . . a
mood
created by so many being present all together in the same place, that you
feel
only from being there. . . . And the ocean! Hour after hour of it. I never imagined so much water existed in the universe. The waves at the beach in Hawaii were terrifying.”

“Was the gravity very tiring?” Keene asked her.

“Well, I won’t pretend it isn’t nice to be back up in the ship. But I’ve had an easier time than some of us. I think that having been born on Earth must make a difference.”

“Do you find you’ve remembered much?” Vicki asked.

“Not as much as I thought I had. A lot of what I thought I remembered must have been imagination.” Sariena moved a few paces away and turned, flexing her arms and stretching her head back as if exhilarated by not being weighed down anymore. “I also have feelings that the talks with your governments will go well. The people we’ve met had a lot of questions. The preliminary tour was a good idea, even if a bit exhausting.”

Keene frowned as he listened. No doubt the people asking the questions had been informants placed close to the Kronians in the way Cavan had described. The Kronians didn’t seem to be picking up on the negative rumblings sounding in the media, or else they were being shielded from them. He couldn’t see them dealing adeptly with Earth-style politics. It wasn’t that they were incapable, so much as never having needed to learn how. Their politics back home—or whatever word better described the managing of Kronian social affairs—presumably worked differently.

“How are those orbital calculations going?” Sariena asked.

“What’s the latest from Judith?” Keene asked Vicki.

“There were a few delays, but the last I heard was that we could be seeing some of the results anytime,” she replied.

Sariena looked around. “We don’t have to stay here among things that you see every day. Come on. Let me show you more of the Command Module . . . and something spectacular.”

They left the messroom to reenter the Control Deck and walked along one side, past a row of empty crew stations. Sariena described the functions briefly, giving Keene and Vicki an idea of the
Osiris
’s operating procedures. At the far end was a cross-passage with metal stairwells leading to levels above and below. Beyond, they descended some steps into a recess containing low tables with padded seats set around and against the wall, where the low lighting contrasted abruptly with the brightness they had just left. It seemed to be a kind of viewing gallery, perhaps a rest area, with one wall of glass looking out at the slowly wheeling stars. The window was on the module’s forward side, with no other part of the
Osiris
’s structure in sight.

“I don’t know how much you got to see from the shuttle,” Sariena said. “But this has only become visible in the last few hours. Wait . . .” The sky turned for about a quarter of a minute. Then, the shadows inside the gallery sharpened as the Sun came into view low on the right. The window material darkened to suppress the glare as the light intensified, revealing the sharp edge of the solar disk. One side of it had what appeared to be a bump, from which a finger of whiteness streamed away fully half the width of the window, pointing almost horizontally left. “Athena, just emerging,” Sariena said. “The tail is over thirty million miles long now.”

Keene and Vicki stared, spellbound. After the close pass at perihelion the tail would be at its longest. They were seeing it virtually from the side as it pointed away from the Sun. In the following month its tip would sweep past Earth like a searchlight as Athena swung into its return path, growing even more spectacular as it crossed Earth’s orbit fifteen million miles ahead.

“We saw a shot of it on the screen but it was nothing like this,” Vicki murmured, not taking her eyes of the scene. “And you’re right. That was a few hours back, and it’s grown even in that time.”

“How does this compare to when we were looking at the stars in Washington, Lan?” Sariena asked. She studied the sky as the Sun and Athena disappeared from view at the top of the window and the glass lightened again. “I don’t think we’ll be able to see Saturn this time, though—not from this side of Earth, anyway. You know, it’s strange. I still haven’t gotten used to seeing it looking so small.”

“Tell me something about life there,” Vicki said. “I’ve never quite followed it. You have all those talented people moving out. What is it they’re looking for? Do they find it?”