I got a time cue. Time to head back. Too little time, and yet I was relieved.
“Well encountered,” I said a little too hastily.
Aguella and Oxagast echoed the farewell. But Menno rudely met my gaze and said, “Don’t be afraid of change, Equatorial. It’s coming, whether you like it or not.” Then, to my utter amazement, he clasped his hands together tightly and yelled the single word, “Intrude!” It wasn’t a greeting or a farewell, it was a statement of belief. It was a challenge.
Aguella had said very little during the encounter, but on the way back she would scarcely shut up.
“He’s right,” she said. “Look what they’ve done! Airfoil. Why? They changed the rules, didn’t they? Same thing in the game, they changed the rules.”
“Yeah, well, he didn’t exactly mention whether he won a lot of games,” I pointed out.
“Maybe someday we’ll be able to play against them,” Aguella said.
“Maybe sooner than you think,” I said, remembering the Polars’ strange, constrained looks when I mentioned crystal-to-crystal communication.
Had the Polars solved that problem? That would be a true revolution, far more profound even than replacing the government of the Wise Ones.
Of course their transmission would be pretty pointless until other crystals had receivers. Otherwise they’d be a voice crying in the wind, unheard.
So I thought, and comforted myself with that illusion.
The next day, with the Polar Orbit High long gone from sight, I went aboard the MCQ3 for the first time.
There are sims and then there is reality. And let me say that no sim, no matter how good, matches reality. The problem with a sim is that you know it’s a sim. Reality on the other hand, well, it’s real.
Lackofa, as my sponsor, was my tour guide. Aguella had been chosen by the usual process, so she was sponsorless, and thus had both a disadvantage and an advantage.
The disadvantage was that she had no one to go to for answers. So she stayed hung with me, which was nice. The advantage she had was that she didn’t have to worry about embarrassing her sponsor.
Lackofa’s welcoming words to me were, “Just try not to be a complete idiot, okay? That’s all I ask.”
The MCQ3 was built along fairly standard lines. She was a single-hue cultivated crystal, ovoid rather than spherical. There was dockage for one hundred and four crew — essential and supernumerary. But of course no one provided lift. We could lift if that familiar motion made us feel more comfortable, but lift was irrelevant, unnecessary. A small taste, I suppose, of what an airfoil world would be like.
The MCQ3 existed within a force field that contained an atmosphere and would, we hoped, deflect most space debris. Should the force field ever fail we would lose our atmosphere. The backup system was a maze of pipes buried within the spars and masts that delivered breathable air to each dock.
“You simply pull the tube extension from the collar, thus,” Lackofa demonstrated. “And you place it into your airhole, thus. Then breathe normally until the force field comes back up, or until you freeze to death, whichever comes first.”
“What if we’re not docked?” Aguella asked. “What if we’re in one of the perches?”
“There are emergency accesses there,” Lackofa said. “Good question. You’re thinking ahead.”
That made me open my eyes a bit. Was Lackofa looking for some face-face with Aguella? She wasn’t moning again, was she? No, I would notice that.
I shook the sense memory out of my intakes and ruffled my wings to put it behind me. Didn’t work. Other guys will warn you about being moned; what they don’t talk about is how long the effect lasts.
“What if we’re flying through Zero-space when the force field fails?” I asked.
Lackofa favored me with a withering glare. “We would drop instantly out of Z-space and appear back in normal space, where you would once again breathe through the tube or freeze to death. Oh, and by the way? It’s hard to fly in a vacuum. So if we lose atmosphere you’ll want to be docked.”
I had a flash of myself beating my wings helplessly, futilely in space while the MCQ3 zoomed away toward some distant star.
Well, no one ever said space travel was safe. Generation 9561 claimed to have lost nearly ten percent of Generation 9547, the first Generationals to attempt space travel, and six percent of Generation 9548. Even as recently as 9558 they were losing substantial numbers in space-related accidents.
Then again, individual Generationals die pretty easily. It’s kind of what they do. Corporate life-forms just don’t put up much of a fight over every interchangeable member.
“Follow me, stay close, don’t touch anything,” Lackofa instructed. He flew upward and we fell in place behind him. Up and up through byzantine, unfamiliar spars, past dockages, some that were still being installed and polished.
He led us to a perch like nothing I’d ever seen before — not even in the sim. It was a tipped bowl perhaps fifty feet across, all filled with blinking lights, readouts, and video displays. All of it constructed of metals and carbon filament and flat-crys. It was faintly claustrophobic, all that opaqueness wrapped around you.
“What is this?” I wondered. “It’s not in the sim!”
“No,” Lackofa said. “This is the backup command center. In case of catastrophic damage to the core crystal, these machines can be used to continue flying the vessel.”
“How?”
“This unit is self-contained. You can’t see it but it has its own engines, generates its own force field. In the case of catastrophic damage to the crystal itself, this pod can detach, break free, and keep flying.”
“Without … without most of the crew,” I said, unwilling to believe anything so monstrous. “And it’s not in the sims.”
Lackofa’s eyes were hard. “No, it’s not in
