About two minutes in there was a clang, and I yelled “Fuck!” No one heard me of course, because I was in a vacuum. And in space no one can hear you curse.
Rolling my eyes at my own irrelevant commentary, I asked “What the hell was that? Am I dead?”
“Sorry, Bob,” Gandalf replied. “Slight miscalculation. You glanced off one of the support struts. The drone will need its paint touched up.”
“And its cargo area hosed out,” I muttered to myself.
After several eternities, the cargo door opened and I stepped out onto the same maintenance platform that I'd previously visited through the spy drones.
“I'm here,” I announced. Probably unnecessarily. The drone had already lifted off and was heading back to pick up its next passenger. There wasn't enough room in the rail system to fly both drones, one coming and one going, so this would be a long slow operation. Kind of a combination terror-boredom thing, both at the same time.
We had to use the manual airlock systems, so the air cycling took a long time. Once through the airlock, I found myself in the same long corridor, with the same exhortations for idiots. I set the Manny down and started checking my logs.
After about two hours, everyone was through terror/boredom. I signaled silently and we moved to the end of the corridor.
“Gandalf, any particular instructions?” He would be monitoring our video and audio feeds, so he knew where we were. “No,” he replied. “There are no alarm switches on the emergency staircase, still don't know about the elevators, of course you can always volunteer to test it.”
On the one hand, the stairs would probably be a better idea. On the other hand, they'd flown a spy drone up the stairwell and it was 20 stories to the top. That sounded suspiciously like exercise. But getting caught at this stage would not only be a huge setback, it would be embarrassing as hell. With a heavy sigh I headed for the stairs.
10 minutes later, we reached the top. I cracked open the stairway door and peered out. No guards, drones, or orcs. We slipped through the stairwell door and paused as one to take in the view. The foyer was huge, and the front façade was impressive. The whole building had been designed with the idea in mind that many many Quinlans would be coming and going. It wasn't quite Grand Central station, but it was definitely a full-on transit hub. The ceiling was high, the floor was some kind of faux marble, there was art on the walls, and there were sculptures.
I couldn't see anything out-and-out abstract, but the Quinlans definitely applied spin to their literalist tendencies. The paintings tended toward an Escher or Dali kind of surrealism. The sculptures reminded me more than anything else of West Coast native art - basic shapes, intricately decorated. One thing was sure, this was no phlegmatic stolid culture.
I noticed one additional detail: the station featured a roll-up door at the front, originally meant to allow the maximum space for entry. It appeared management wasn't just depending on electronic alerts to keep the natives out - the door mechanism had been welded into immobility. No one would be opening that door, or even repairing it. It would need to be cut out and replaced.
I pulled up my map, and the heads-up pointed me to a corner of the entrance hall via a path that would keep me out of view of any cameras. Garfield was already on his way there, having had enough of art. The drones and cut a small hole in a wall panel down near floor-level on the inside. It was below grade on the outside though, so some tunneling have been required. The Gamers had bolted on a hatch, presumably so that wildlife wouldn't start making itself at home.
Garfield opened the hatch and looked through, then motioned to me. I peered into the gloom on the other side and realized I was looking at an earthen tunnel. We would basically have to crawl out on hands and… oh wait. Quinlans were quite comfortable on all fours. Well, score one for us. Still, we’d be working our way up a trench on the outside, to get the ground level. I wondered if it would be worthwhile to ask why, but I figured it was more about keeping our comings and goings as invisible as possible. Opening and closing and obviously bolted on door in plain sight would attract all kinds of attention - none of it the good kind. Assuming there was a good kind.
I couldn't help feeling like I was in a World War II flick, playing the French Resistance. But eventually we were outside. This was my first real look at the inside of Heaven’s River. I stopped and gawked like a tourist. I can feel the others do the same as they came through, but I wasn't willing to spare any cycles to acknowledge the fact.
With a radius of 56 miles, Heaven’s River didn't at all resemble the usual depictions of O'Neil cylinders, where the landscape looms like a cliff in two directions. The land in the spin direction was just starting to show a curve at the point where it faded out into the distance. The fact that it curved up instead of dropping like a normal horizon was disconcerting, but you had to really be looking for it to notice.
Clouds formed in several layers, indicating that there was real weather in the habitat. The clouds cast shadows on the land below, or on lower cloud layers. I engaged my telescopic vision - no really - and spotted a rainstorm in the middle distance. The thunderhead formed a horizontal cyclonic pattern oriented along the axis of topopolis. Expected, but still freaky for someone raised on a planet.
Within range of clear sight, rolling hills dominated, interspersed with valleys and plains. I saw occasional stands of trees, but no real forests in the immediate area. I knew
