Reality Dysfunction — Emergence

I show it places we visit. And it shows me its interior, what humans get up to.

Really?

Yes, it’s interesting. This Joshua Calvert who chartered us, Tranquillity says he’s a recidivist of the worst kind.

Tranquillity is absolutely right. That’s why I like Joshua so much. He reminds me of me at that age.

No. You were never that bad.

Udat ’s nose turned slightly, gliding delicately between two designated traffic streams congested with He3 tankers and personnel commuters. The bays in this section of the mammoth spaceport disk were larger, it was where the repairs and maintenance work was carried out. Only half of them were occupied.

The big blackhawk came to a halt directly over bay MB 0-330, then slowly rotated around its long axis so that its upper hull was pointing down over the rim. Unlike voidhawks, with their separate lower hull cargo hold and upper hull crew toroid, Udat had all its mechanical sections contained in a horseshoe which embraced its dorsal bulge. The bridge and individual crew cabins were at the front, with the two cargo holds occupying the wings, and an ion-field flyer stored in a small hangar on the port side.

Cherri Barnes walked into the bridge compartment. She was Udat ’s cargo officer, doubling as a systems generalist: forty-five years old, with light coffee skin and a wide face prone to contemplative pouts. She had been with Meyer for three years.

She datavised a series of orders into her console processors, receiving images fed from the electronic sensors mounted on the hull. The three-dimensional picture which built up in her mind showed her Udat hanging poised thirty metres over the repair bay, holding its position steady.

“Over to you,” Meyer said.

“Thanks.” She opened a channel to the bay’s datanet. “MB 0-330, this is Udat . We have your cargo paid for and waiting. Ready for your unload instructions. How do you want to handle it, Joshua? Time is money.”

“Cherri, is that you?” Joshua datavised back.

“No one else on board will lower themselves to talk to you.”

“I wasn’t expecting you for another week, you’ve made good time.”

Meyer datavised an access order into his console. “You hire the best ship, you get the best time.”

“I’ll remember that,” Joshua told him. “Next time I have some money I’ll make sure I go for a decent ship.”

“We can always take our nodes elsewhere, Mr Hotshot Starship Captain who’s never been outside the Ruin Ring.”

“My nodes, genetic throwback who’s too scared to go in the Ruin Ring and earn a living.”

“It’s not the Ruin Ring which worries me, it’s what the Lord of Ruin does to people who skip outsystem before they register their finds in Tranquillity.”

There was an unusually long pause. Meyer and Cherri shared a bemused glance.

“I’ll send Ashly out with the Lady Mac ’s MSV to pick up the nodes,” Joshua said. “And you’re all invited to the party tonight.”

“So this is the famous Lady Macbeth ?” Meyer asked a couple of hours later. He was in bay 0—330’s cramped control centre with Joshua, his left foot anchored by a stikpad, looking out through the glass bubble wall into the bay itself. The fifty-seven-metre ship resting on the cradle in the middle of the floor was naked to space. Its hull plates had been stripped off, exposing the systems and tanks and engines, fantastically complex silver and white entrails. They were all contained inside a hexagonal-lattice stress structure. Jump nodes were positioned over each junction. Red and green striped superconductor cabling wormed inwards from each node, plugged directly into the ship’s fusion generators. Meyer hadn’t thought about it before, but the lenticular nodes were almost identical to the voidhawk profile.

Engineers wearing black SII suits and manoeuvring packs were propelling themselves over the open stress structure, running tests and replacing components. Others rode platforms on the end of multi-segment arms which were fitted out with heavy tools to handle the larger systems. Yellow strobes flashed on all the bay’s mobile equipment, sending sharp-edged amber circles slicing over every surface in crazy gyrating patterns.

Hundreds of data cables were stretched between the ship and the five interface couplings around the base of the cradle. It was almost as though Lady Macbeth was being tethered down by a net of optical fibres. A two-metre-diameter airlock tube had concertinaed out from the bay wall, just below the control centre, giving the maintenance team access to the life-support capsules buried at the core of the ship. Brackets on the bay walls held various systems waiting to be installed. Meyer couldn’t see where they could possibly fit. Lady Macbeth ’s spaceplane clung to one wall like a giant supersonic moth, wings in their forward-sweep position. The additional tanks and power cells Joshua had strapped on for flights to the Ruin Ring were gone; a couple of suited figures and a cyberdrone were trying to remove the thick foam from the fuselage with a solvent spray. Crumbling grey flakes were flying off in all directions.

“What were you expecting?” Joshua asked. “A Saturn V?” He was strapped into a restraint web behind a cyberdrone operations console. The boxy drones ran along the rails which spiralled up the bay walls, giving them access to any part of the docked ship. Three of them were currently clustered round an auxiliary fusion generator, which was being eased into its mountings at the end of long white waldo arms. Engineers floated around it, supervising the cyberdrones which were performing the installation, mating cables, coolant lines, and fuel hoses. Joshua monitored their progress through the omnidirectional AV projectors arrayed around his console.

“More like a battle cruiser,” Meyer said. “I saw the power ratings on those nodes, Joshua. You could jump fifteen lightyears with those brutes fully charged.”

“Something like that,” he said absently.

Meyer grunted, and turned back to the starship. The MSV was returning from another trip to Udat , a pale green oblong box three metres long with small spherical tanks bunched together on the base, and three segmented waldo arms ending in complex manipulators sprouting from the mid- fuselage section. It was carrying a packaged node, coasting down towards one of the engineering shop airlocks.

Cherri Barnes frowned, peering forwards into the bay. “How many reaction drives has she got?” she asked. There seemed an inordinate number of unbilicals jacked into the Lady Macbeth ’s rear quarter. She could see a pair of fusion tubes resting in the wall brackets, fat ten-metre cylinders swathed with magnetic coils, ion-beam injectors, and molecular-binding initiators.

Joshua turned his head fractionally, switching AV projectors. The new pillar shot a barrage of photons along his optical nerves, giving him a different angle on the auxiliary fusion generator. He studied it for a while, then datavised an instruction into one of the cyberdrones. “Four main drives.”

“Four?” Adamist ships usually had one fusion drive, with a couple of induction engines running off the generator as an emergency back-up.

“Yeah. Three fusion tubes, and an antimatter drive.”

“You can’t be serious,” Cherri Barnes exclaimed. “That’s a capital offence!”

“Wrong!”