I measure the distance and the angle with my eye, searching for a relatively smooth surface from which to kick off.
Any reasonable trajectory will take me across two-thirds of the void. The breach is three meters wide. A tiny target to reach in one jump.
Something becomes silhouetted within the blue glow. It might be a head. I can’t see clearly. The sting in the air is filming my eyes, and wiping them seems a bad idea. The next time I get a good look, the breach is open, empty.
I’m sure some of the film has coated my clothes, where it’s unhappily trying to clump up and break loose. Much longer in this space and I’ll likely have enough of the active stuff in my lungs to kill me.
The lurch comes. I grab a rung and hang on. All around, wreckage tumbles, rolls, cascades away from the outer reaches of the void. Big pieces break loose and wobble and spin. The whole void becomes a noisy, slamming, chiming circus of mindless debris—all of it tending toward the opposite of our spin. There, it loosely gathers, bounces, and with spin-down finished, drifts across my proposed path with all the leisure of strolling elephants.
I stay low in the shaft but keep an eye on the blue glow within the breach. Debris transits. Some pieces threaten to enter the shaft—but miss. I can’t make out the fixers. If they’ve lasted this long, they’ve likely hooked themselves down and are patiently waiting out the change of momentum.
My jumping-off point, a relatively smooth, broad shaft edge, is just above the last rung. I give some thought to using the rung itself, but it’s too narrow to accommodate both my feet.
Things aren’t going to get any better.
I swing out like an inchworm (another amusing but useless image—some sort of young insect, not a spider) and straddle the edge of the shaft, then grip it with my thighs, straighten my torso, transfer grip to my hands, and arch my back again—plant my feet firmly, bend my knees, look over my shoulder…
A piece the size of a horse just misses me. I don’t give a damn what a
I kick off. It’s a solid kick, the angle looks good. I sail across the void at a decent clip. Still looks good. I draw in both arms and a leg to avoid a twirling chunk of pipe about as wide as my thigh. This starts me wheeling around an axis through my hips. I can’t stop it, but the motion is slow enough not to cause injury, unless I collide with something sharp. I see lots of sharp things. I count the rotations, having nothing better to do, but at the end of five, something large and translucent dims the light from the breach. Could be the film in my eyes. I don’t see it now— don’t want to see it, can’t help but look. Something big and confusing, like an animal made of rods of glass. Not entirely colorless, however. A small, bright red spot clues me that the thing is actually moving in my direction, not just spreading out….
Maybe ten seconds more until I’m at the breach. My hip pirouette is infuriating. I want to stare without interruption, keep track of the cracked and warped walls, the twirling debris, and make sure I’m not being hunted by a glassy haystack blur with a red spot.
Five seconds before the breach. Desperate, I reach out and grab a chunk of flat bulkhead. I stop both my motion toward the breach and my precession. I see… nothing, of course.
A kick at the bulkhead sends me off at the wrong angle. I reach out as far as I can. Two fingers grab hold of a burned, curled edge, and after a few seconds of utterly graceless scrambling, I’ve pulled myself out of the stinking, rubble-filled void, through the breach, and into a quiet, calm blue space that seems to go on forever….
Where I stare into the biggest eye in the entire universe.
CORE
The eye looms over me, a curved, transparent wall about a hundred meters wide. I’m on one side of a space that caps the eye like a gigantic goggle. Behind the eye is liquid water—lots and lots of water, blue green and lovely, filled with an amazing array of bubbles huge and small, moving in sluggish leisure with the residual currents from the last spin-up—very slowly wobbling, jiggling, breaking up, rejoining.
Fizz in a giant’s soda bottle.
The eye has immense depth. It’s the forward end of a huge tank. This leaves me limp with awe, and after I slow my heart and breathing and realize I’m not in immediate danger, the view jogs my memory, filling in basic knowledge from Dreamtime.
Ship needs fuel and reaction mass. The dirty ice moonlet supplies both. Mining machines on the surface send up chunks of ice that get stored in the tanks. That’s where the serpent gouge comes from—machinery digging. The moonlet is mostly water, a small portion of which is deuterium; this can be used in a
For hundreds of years, Ship’s drive has been pumping out broken bits of atoms and streams of high-energy light in a twisting, glowing stream. Ultimately, Ship’s velocity climbs to about twenty percent of the speed of light, .2 c—that is, sixty thousand kilometers per second. It takes something as big as the moon to fill out the requirements of the basic equations that move Ship between the stars. Just on the edge of memory—like something fading after a vivid dream—I see the moonlet being chosen from a dusty, frozen cloud far, far out from the sun. The name of the cloud is incomprehensible,
Ice is transported up the struts to the hulls, then melted, pumped through the sluices—stored in a big tank.
Lots of water.
None for me. I’m exhausted, in pain, thirsty. I squeeze water from my own bottle into my mouth, start to choke, and spit weightless beads. Trying to draw breath and steady myself, I see the red spot from a bleary corner of my eye.
Spin-up resumes with a lurch. My hand loses its grip, and I roll around the perimeter wall of the tank’s cap. Here, at or near the core, the centrifugal force is minimal but still catches me by surprise. I roll, kick, float free for a moment, and look around. The haystack blur must have come through the breach while I was captivated by the slow blue-green roil inside the tank. I can’t find it again. There’s something outboard, to my left—movement opposite the motion of the hull. My head pivots like a bird’s. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s an illusion, and when I can wash out my eye, it will be gone.
Across the cap, near the broad forward end, hatches line the perimeter wall. I try to stand, but my feet pull out from under me, and I bounce again, then drift outboard—down. Here, if I can keep up with the rotating wall, I’ll weigh a fraction of a kilogram. But I’m getting dizzy. I roll until my palms skid on the wall, thankfully smooth but for the jagged edges around the breach. I push off and let the breach roll on by. Finally, I drop and spread flat, relying on friction to gather the necessary force. I’m riding with the wall, spread-eagled and vulnerable to anything with better means of locomotion, better control in the wide spaces.
I have a good view of what’s going on inside the tank. The huge liquid volume reacts to spin-up with an amazing display of fluid dynamics. The bubbles slowly try to coalesce at the center, but currents keep breaking them up, thrusting them outward, until they rebound and gurgle in again. The tank’s contents swish into a massive, godly whirlpool. This would be a beautiful vision to go out on—waiting for the water to surround the long air pocket like a tornado….
Looking inboard, up, I again see the blur—larger now and growing, the red speck revolving on the outside of a fine maze of glassy fibers, gleaming straws flexing and pulling. The thing is a network of glistening rods tied together with tiny blue knots.
Across its surface flash narrow concentric bands of pale color, expanding and contracting, whirling blue and black and green, drawing my gaze inward, then reversing, whirling outward.
Much more fascinating than the tank.
Mesmerizing.
