Wilson gave the lobby a thoughtful look, cementing his impression of unlimited budgets. Farndale had mounted big projects often enough, but that was different; their offices were built in cities, factories in industrial estates. They belonged. It must be the complex’s relative isolation that gave it such a sense of importance and urgency. “You mean Sheldon is managing the starship project himself?” he asked.
“Not the day-to-day details, no. But it is certainly high up on his schedule. He was quite relieved when you agreed to accept the captaincy.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I understand you’ll be taking over a number of administration procedures.”
“That’s right.” The quantity of data that the project had sent him over the four days since he agreed to captain the ship was phenomenal. Most of the information files were accompanied by requests from the department heads concerned. “But I need a while to settle in before I start slinging my weight around.” He’d actually felt a little overwhelmed walking into the lobby, facing up to the project all alone. Normally when he was involved in anything on such a scale he’d be accompanied by several of his own aides, and there would have been time for a thorough briefing beforehand. It was only last night he’d finally received a report on the Commonwealth ExoProtectorate Council meeting, which didn’t give him much time to mull over the political implications of the flight. The Farndale board had given his appointment their full approval, though, eager to climb on board the project.
“Of course,” Daniel Alster said. “Your office is ready for you now. But Mr. Sheldon suggested I should give you a quick tour of the facilities first.”
“Lead on.”
The complex layout was simple enough, with the three towers already housing the design and management personnel. A quarter of the office space was unused. “Crew training facilities,” Daniel Alster explained as they passed line after line of darkened glass cubicles.
“Has anybody been selected yet?”
“So far, only you. Just about everyone in our exploration division has volunteered, that’s technical personnel as well as the survey teams. Then there’s a couple of million hopefuls on every planet in the Commonwealth who are insisting they’re perfect for the job. This section of the Anshun cybersphere is having to be upgraded, we’ve had so much datatraffic. We’re waiting for you to draw up the requirement criteria before we start active recruitment.”
Wilson gave a resigned shrug. “Okay.”
The big hangarlike buildings outside the towers were where all the starship’s components were delivered, then rigorously tested before being taken through to the assembly platform. There was no manufacturing on-site, everything was shipped in through the planetary station’s gateway. Sixty-three percent of the components were fabricated on Augusta, including the wormhole generator mechanism that would act as the hyperdrive. The rest of the sections were coming in from all over the Commonwealth, contracts placed according to financial involvement and political clout. Wilson was pleased to see Los Vada had snatched over three percent.
As soon as the wagons delivered the containers, they were moved into clean rooms for testing. The assessment facilities that CST had built in such a short space of time were impressive. Sealed environment chambers could produce a huge combination of radiation, extreme thermal loads, vibration stress, electromagnetic irradiation, and hypervelocity particle impacts, all inside a good old-fashioned vacuum. There were also test labs where electronic components were subjected to all manner of improbable failure scenarios. Once they were certified, the components were moved out to the platform for assembly.
Nigel Sheldon was waiting at the gateway, which was at the end of the largest assessment building. He was wearing the same kind of white overall that Wilson had changed into. They both shook hands; still slightly wary of each other, like old friends who were patching up an argument.
“Ready for zero gee again?” Nigel asked. He put on a protective helmet, which molded itself to his skull.
“I guess so,” Wilson said. It had been a very long time, and as Daniel had been telling him during the tour, a lot of their assembly technicians had experienced mild to debilitating nausea when they were working on the ship. Not even continued exposure seemed to weaken the effect. The astronautics companies based at the High Angel had little practical help to offer; they either used robotic systems or personnel who’d been screened to find a degree of immunity. In desperation, CST had been deep-mining some very old medical papers on human zero-gee adaptation, some of which dated back to the Russian MIR station, to see what kinds of drugs or DNA resequencing they should be considering.
Wilson allowed Nigel to go first, following cautiously behind him. They were using the exploration division’s gateway, which had been taken off interstellar survey duties to provide a simple link between the complex and space above Anshun, where the assembly platform was orbiting a thousand kilometers out from the planet. A circular titanium tunnel had been built through the gateway, lined with bands of electromuscle that were capable of handling components up to eight meters wide and weighing a couple of hundred tons. The motion was like a throat swallowing, with the sealed containers riding forward on synchronized waves that rippled along the bands.
As Wilson walked forward, it looked as if they were going from the assessment building through a simple circular opening into a giant spherical chamber beyond. The assembly platform was a globe of malmetal that had been expanded out to six hundred meters in diameter. Its internal stress structure resembled hexagonal ribs, with gantry towers extending toward the center from the junctions. They supported a broad gridwork cylinder directly in front of the gateway. It was in there that the starship was taking shape. Right now, it looked like nothing more than an even denser lattice of girders. Hundreds of men and women in simple overalls were scampering along the framework, or anchoring themselves in place beside mobile constructionbots. White composite containers were sliding along the gantries, like pearls of condensation slithering down glass.
Even though Wilson was expecting it, the end of the planetary gravity field came as a shock. One foot was pressed firmly on the ground, while the one in front seemed to waver in midair. Wilson concentrated on pulling himself forward, using the handholds between the electromuscle bands. Every sense immediately told him he was falling. His hands automatically tightened their grip. In front of him, Nigel’s body had already swung around parallel to the gateway. He started to pull himself along the support gantry handholds, heading in toward the ship. Wilson copied him, using the handholds like a ladder for the first few meters, then his body simply glided along twenty centimeters or so above the gantry. He remembered to grip a handhold every few meters, just to correct his direction and prevent any spin from building up. His stomach was quivering at the falling sensation, but apart from a wet belch, he didn’t feel any dramatic onset of sickness. The air around him carried a distinct tang of welded metal and warm oil, though the smell slowly weakened as fluids began to pool in his head.
“Tell you something,” Nigel called back over his shoulder. “I get one hell of a buzz out of seeing this baby. Big projects always do that to me. But, man, I ain’t been this excited about a chunk of engineering since Ozzie and I put the original wormhole gateway together.”
“I remember the day,” Wilson said dryly. He couldn’t escape from his memories of the Ulysses that day either, the last time he’d ever seen the proud interplanetary ship, a big mass of struts with hardware attached at all points. None too dissimilar to this craft.
Nigel chuckled. “We’re coming up on the reaction drive section.”
The maze of girders wasn’t getting any clearer as they approached. Wilson asked his e-butler to access the assembly platform array. It overlaid a blueprint of what he was seeing on his virtual vision. The starship’s design was quite simple. The life-support section housing the crew was a thick ring three hundred meters in diameter, which would rotate to provide a twenty percent gravity field along its rim. A basic VonBraun wheel, Wilson thought, though no one would ever call it that nowadays. In the middle of that was a cylinder four hundred meters long and a hundred fifty in diameter, containing both the FTL drive and the plasma rockets. The surface had a multitude of bulges and prominences, as if it were growing metallic tumors.
The three of them floated around a fat nozzle with a perfect mirror-surface interior. It was the first of the five plasma rockets to be installed, leaving rosettes of struts where the other four would be fitted. Wilson studied the thick reaction mass fuel pipes and superconductor cabling that would be connected into the other units when they arrived. His hand crept out of its own accord to touch the casing of the installed nozzle.
Plasma rockets. Just like the old Ulysses had. It’s like a bicycle, some things you can’t improve.
“What kind of power source are we using?” he asked.
“Niling d-sinks,” Nigel told him. “Fifteen of the goddamn biggest we make. There are backups, as well, of course; we’re providing microfission piles and two fusion generators. But the niling d-sinks are your primary supply. They’ll give you enough power to fly seven thousand light-years.”
“That far?” Somehow Wilson had been expecting the ship to be capable of reaching Dyson Alpha and returning, nothing more.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you’ve got a license to fly off and explore the rest of the galaxy, Captain, okay?”
Wilson smiled with a faint degree of guilt. He’d been thinking just that. “You know what you’re doing, don’t you? What this ship is?”
“What?”
“You’re dropping a pebble off the top of a mountain. When it gets to the bottom it’ll be an avalanche. People are going to be interested in exploring the unknown again. They’ll want more ships like this, they’ll want to know what else is out there. The next ship will be big enough to fly around the galactic core.”
“Wrong, Captain. Only people like you want to do that, born romantics. And there aren’t as many of you as you’d like to think. This Commonwealth we’ve built for ourselves is a mature, conservative society. We’ve grown up a lot in the last couple of centuries. Only people with one short life want to go tearing out into the great unknown with nothing more than a flashlight and a stick to poke the rattlers with. The rest of us will take our time and expand slowly, that way there are no mistakes made. Tortoise and the hare, Captain, tortoise and the hare.”
“Maybe,” Wilson said. “But I don’t believe we’re as civilized as you like to think, not all of us.” They’d gone past the reaction drive sector of the ship, and were in the midsection, where two stumpy arms linked the habitation ring to the central engineering section superstructure. Again there wasn’t much to see, just the raw skeleton devoid of any hull plating, even the internal decking was missing inside the stress structure. Although a lot of auxiliary machinery had already been installed. “How’s the hyperdrive coming along?”
The lines around Sheldon’s mouth tightened slightly. “The flow wormhole generator is undergoing stage three component testing. They should begin primary installation in three to four months.”
“So how does that leave our overall timetable?” Wilson asked.
“Our initial projection has completion in another seven months,” Daniel Alster said. “However, there were several problems associated with zero-gee construction which we hadn’t factored in.”
“Be more like nine months now,” Nigel grunted.
“Everything costs more,” Wilson pronounced happily.
“And takes longer,” Nigel completed. “Tell me about it.”
“How come you didn’t build this at the High Angel?” Wilson asked. “I know it would add another two hundred and thirty light-years to the trip, but that’s not much to this ship if I read the specs right. And they have all the astroengineering expertise there.”
“Political control,” Nigel said simply. “Specifically: mine. This way, CST remains the primary operator for the whole mission.”
“Fair enough,” Wilson said. It was a reasonable compliment that Nigel didn’t feel the need to guard what he said.
Near the front of the superstructure a great nest of power cables waited for whatever unit was to be installed there. Intrigued by the power levels involved,
