ChaoLi nodded.
“The other thing that’s public knowledge is that the prime minister left in a much better mood than he arrived. Chen JuMing told me he was pretty serious when he arrived, but he was whistling to himself when he departed.”
JieMin heard all this and wondered if it was in reference to his own meeting with Chen Zufu and Chen Zumu. That had been just yesterday. The meeting with the prime minister could have been in response to that.
But did the prime minister being so happy afterwards mean that Chen Zufu and Chen Zumu had convinced him of a plan of action that suited him, or had it been the other way around?
The next morning, Wednesday, JieMin got a request to drop by Chen Zufu’s tea room before heading off to work. JuMing was working the reception desk, and led him through the locked apartment door to Chen Zumu’s tea room.
Chen Zumu was sitting on a pillow alone in the room. There was no other place to sit.
“Good morning, JieMin.”
“Good morning, Chen Zumu.”
“I do not want to delay you this morning, but I do have a small extra assignment for you.”
“Of course, Chen Zumu.”
“JieMin, I want you and your associates to prepare an inventory of all the things a private entity would need in order to carry forward the hyperspace drive research independently of the government. That would include equipment, prototypes, machining files, drawings, intellectual property, and key personnel. You may do this assignment within your own circle of associates, but I want you to keep it close. Make it something of a hypothetical exercise, if you would.”
“Of course, Chen Zumu.”
“Thank you, JieMin. That is all.”
On the bus to work that morning, JieMin allowed himself to hope that Chen Zufu and Chen Zumu had convinced the prime minister of his plan, and the hyperdrive research would continue out from under the thumb of Dr. Karl Huenemann.
Preparations
The factory designs with which the metafactory had been loaded by Colony Headquarters before the colony left Earth included plans for building factories for all the needs of modern life.
There were factory designs for factories to build appliances, vehicles, electronics, manufacturing machinery, construction supplies like concrete, drywall and plumbing fixtures, shoes and clothing, food-processing machinery, satellites, and even space-capable shuttles.
There were also factory designs for factories to smelt metals, make glass, refine oil, synthesize rubber and plastics, weave cloth, and produce chemicals and paints.
There were even plans for the metafactory itself, and the colony had three of those operating currently. None of those were the original metafactory, which had long since worn out and been recycled. They were now on their fourth generation of metafactories.
After the colony was established, a group of technical people had been assembled and trained to program the metafactories, and had designed factories for new products and modified products.
Other than for placing satellites, though, there was little need for space-capable shuttles. The atmospheric shuttles were used to transport high-value or time-critical items between the growing number of cities on Arcadia.
The colony even had one very big atmospheric shuttle that had been used to transport small metafactories from Arcadia City to several other cities. Those small metafactories only had one program – to build a large metafactory.
Once those metafactories became operational turning out factories, there was more than one manufacturing center on the planet, and out-migration from Arcadia City increased. With a population that had doubled in seventeen years – to eighteen million – the population needed to spread out.
But space-capable shuttles weren’t of much interest other than for placing satellites. Arcadia had no moon, so there was no intermediate stop to entice people off the planet into space.
Further, the Arcadia system had no asteroid belt, no resource-rich destination for which intra-system space travel would be needed.
The only enticement to space for the people of Arcadia was the possibility of interstellar travel through hyperspace.
The shuttleport for Arcadia City was southwest of the city, south of the western suburbs and west of the manufacturing center that had sprung up inland from the fusion power plant. It wasn’t a huge affair, because the shuttles were vertical-takeoff-and-landing, so there was no need for long runways.
Most of the shuttles operating out of Arcadia City Spaceport were atmospheric shuttles transferring four or eight containers of cargo at a time from Arcadia City to the other major cities that were growing up inland or up and down the coast.
There was also one big atmospheric shuttle for transporting the starter metafactories.
One shuttle on the shuttlepads today, though, was different.
Among other things, it was a lot bigger.
Gavin MacKay and Justin Moore were working their way down the pre-flight checklist.
“Fuel?”
“Fuel shows ninety-nine percent.”
“Oxygen?”
“Oxygen shows ninety-eight percent.”
“Pressure?”
“Pressure check shows cabin is sealed.”
It was a long checklist, with some things on it they were not used to. Of course, they had both taken the canned training course that had been included in the library of all the colonies. The space-capable shuttle was a standard design, and training and simulations were both available.
For that matter, they had flown smaller space-capable shuttles before, the ones used to place satellites into orbit. But they were much smaller.
This, though, was different. With the same capacity as the large atmospheric cargo shuttle, but with all the extra things one needed to leave the atmosphere and return safely, it was huge.
It would be the biggest thing either one of them had ever flown.
“Arcadia Control to Shuttle Z-1. Other traffic is being held. You have clearance for takeoff and bearing zero-niner to space.”
“Shuttle Z-1 to Arcadia Control. Roger clearance for takeoff and bearing zero-niner to space.”
Moore nodded to MacKay, and the co-pilot began spooling up the massive
