by Randy Moffat
There was also a taut safety cable between the ship and the rock and I snap-linked the safety tether of my space suit to it and launched myself along it, performing a sweet little rotation around my body’s center of gravity to plant my feet on the rock at the other end and braking with my hand on the cable. I puffed myself up thinking just how sexy a space traveler I was becoming. Positively Heinleinian—Have Spacesuit Will Travel material. There was an extra large airlock mounted into the rock intended for cargo, with steel rings driven into the stone all around its mouth so I transferred my safety line to one of them and waited patiently. A newer member of TESS whom I did not recognize through his slightly mirrored face plate was floating over slowly from the ship, ram-rodding a pallet loaded with crates recovered from the forward storage container on the bow of the Gaia. He slowed himself and the load adroitly until he was creeping along at a few centimeters at a time. He was waiting for the lock to cycle open too. A red light finally flashed green above the door and I entered ahead of the load, turning to help him maneuver it inside gently to keep if from needlessly banging up the airlock door’s heavy steel rims. I caught a nervous glance through the glass of his helmet over the top of the load. It was an odd one that I had finally come to realize was coming from the fact that he was in the presence of the High Admiral… a legendary figure. My humanity was receding from the pressure of my press releases. What a load of shit.
The door cycled shut and pressure was equalized with the interior. We both broke our helmets open about the same time and hung them onto our backs just after the inner door swung open to admit two more TESS privates and a corporal wearing ‘street’ clothes from the interior. They also sported jackets and heavy gloves to help pull the space cold load inside. The corporal saw the rank someone had super-glued ostentatiously onto the outside of my suit recently and barked a command that snapped them all of them to attention, saluting smartly. Attention can be a bit difficult to assume in lower gravity and one of them had flexed his knees so that he was drifting clear of the floor and floating upward slowly while his cleverer companions had hooked toes under stones of steel in the rock. They looked a bit silly as human planks at different angles including one floating towards the ceiling and I looked a bit grimmer. Rigid military thinking is not always a good thing. In a service as new as TESS I needed innovators who could think outside the box in an instant, not robotic experts in drill and ceremonies. Still, I did not want to look churlish. They were trying to be professional. I took the respect sourly, waved a sketch of a salute back and floated busily past them into the corridor that I knew from diagrams now went straight through the heart of the rock to the other side. I realized that this rock was manned primarily with academy graduates. Each graduating class at our TESS school was adding 35 new players a month onto the TESS game board. Many of them were brand new to space and to TESS in general. Unlike the crew aboard the flag ship where most people knew me well—here it was pretty clear that I was some kind of an august distant personage to them. That guy they saw in the welcome video at the academy and some really bad vids. This TESS thing was growing faster than I could keep up with. I powered myself forward more strongly, still annoyed. TESS had started out as pure fun. Now it was a growing mountain of responsibilities that just took up more and more of my time. I’d begun TESS by risking my neck and launching myself into space on a shoestring and a whim. Now I was responsible for the destiny, livelihoods and danger for hundreds; and headed for thousands. The growth thing was getting more exponential than arithmetic.
I stripped my suit completely off after going through a second lock system inside. It made me smile. Protocols. My protocols. If all you are wearing is scanties, always keep at least three airlocks between you and the void. I was alone here. I hung my kit on a wall with a host of others, fastened it with bungees and sighed heavily to my audience of one. The only audience I dared sigh to these days. Giving myself a mental, physical and emotional shake, I continued down the hallway.
I cheered up as I moved. Work had been happening here. I liked to see TESS work. Work meant we were moving forwards. The walls were glassy smooth and reflecting the florescent lights to some extent. The main variance from the native rock being some neat professional looking conduits and pipes laid along one side where the lights were mounted every three feet or so. Looking more closely at the stone in reflected light I could see that here and there the wall surfaces showed occasional dents where the drill rig had gone slightly off alignment as it advanced. The flaws were a sign that the work had been done by someone who was all too human making slight mistakes. I was gratified by that. The human condition was TESS through and through. As I went along I admired the work for what it was. It was an extension of Petrovski’s particular genius again. He had figured out how to build a small McMoran generator that my old Q-Kink team mate Killien had mounted on a neat swivel, gimbals and wheels affair he had whipped up. The little engine would flicker on and off in milliseconds spraying out the ‘Petrovski effect’ in 360 degrees. It made it possible to press out tunnels in short order by simply shoving the molecules of the rock into the spaces between matter behind them as we had learned to do during our very first experiments with the field back in the so-called “Bat Cave” on earth. You simply turned on the generator, it made twenty meters of so of rock go away, you rotated it in place and repeated to smooth out in all directions, then you rolled the unit forward and repeated. The process allowed the “drilling” of a corridor right across the rock of L5 n a couple days by a team of three men. After finishing the corridor that I was currently pulling myself along, two more tunnels had been drilled in short order; for want of better terms one was perpendicular to the first “top to bottom” of the rock and the second one from “front to back” of the rock. Essentially three wide holes straight through the arbitrary X, Y and Z axis of the asteroid. With practice the drill team had then gotten creative and begun to hollow out almost, though not quite square chambers at the core or the rock. These had begun pretty much on a whim and then later dotted throughout the whole rock for various more specific and planned purposes. By now the former asteroid was honey combed with tunnels and chambers. TESS had created history’s biggest space station in two months or so under near zero-g conditions. I liked that. It made me proud to be a part of an innovative outfit with a ‘can-do’ attitude.
Orders that TESS had placed many months before had been rushed up on the ships to support the transformation. The loads for TESS had been carefully wedged between moving cargo loads for the international community and no one outside an elite group inside TESS had the faintest idea L5 even existed. We now had successfully sealed and pressurized the entire habitat portion of the “rock.” Wiring, heating and piping had taken only a couple more months to lay using our usual half assed standards. Then two weeks ago we had finished installing the components and supporting equipment for a small thorium reactor. Fertile Thorium-232 and its fissile U-233 offspring allowed us to let it operate without extremes of pressure. It was a beam design rather than a liquid core. Another compromise. I had been attracted to the liquid fuel designs, but handling coolants and radioactive liquids in low gravity was tricky so we had opted for something closer to a solid core. We would have to swap out some newer fuel in ten or fifteen years because of it. My guys had planned well though. The reactor had been put on line recently and tested. I had been thrilled when it was reported to work beautifully. It should. Fission is now an old technology though the relatively ignored thorium was a huge improvement over the badly dated use of Uranium-235 and Plutonium-239. We didn’t need weapons… we needed power. The thorium reactor was so much safer and more efficient than the aging light water high pressure uranium reactors in the submarine hulls we used right now for ships. If the thorium reactor design worked out in our zero-g environment over the long run, we would use it to replace all the power systems in the fleet over time. We had already found abundant amounts of Thorium off earth on the Earth’s moon, one of the Martian
moons and various asteroids we had surveyed. Essentially it was scattered hither and yon just about everywhere. Fuel supply should be no problem. I was actually now working on a contract with the Vietnamese lunar station-to-be to mine Thorium-232 isotope on the moon to provide to TESS as outer blanket material to absorb neutrons inside the breeder. The South East Asians were delighted to have something tangible to offset the costs of the their impending lunar colony. We were busily bartering additional supply ship runs in exchange for their miner’s output. I just knew that the cagy Vietnamese in their turn they would trade a couple of those extra earned space ship runs to the US for some more advanced shelters and insulation materials to house their people in the colony. An economic triangle. Win-win-win. True space commerce was beginning. New economic levers were evolving in front of our eyes. Whee!
In a purely practical sense the working reactor meant that the L5 station now had plenty of electromagnetic energy to run more and more systems that were rapidly coming on line aboard the Rock. We had power enough now for anything we were likely to need for any foreseeable future. It gave me a warm feeling.
For once I was fully pleased. The creation of L5 had been a huge effort by about thirty of our earliest graduates from the TESS academy and a couple of our old timers from Q-Kink. They had worked hard. I made a mental note to congratulate them all. If they had been soldiers in the 1800’s I would have bought them a barrel of rum and a night of sexual fantasy in a classy brothel that catered to both my men and women of course. As it stood they would get a nice note and a slap on the ass. Times had not necessarily improved the relative values of the rewards you get for sustained sweat equity.
I passed through a tertiary set of emergency air locks near the core of the station. I approved of tertiary backups… especially in TESS. There are three types of levers in science. Each airlock was a protection against one of those levers being applied ruthlessly by the cosmos at the same time. Especially the kind that the universe and her human agents might throw at us unexpectedly to steal our air with little warning. I was thinking of putting a new saying on our letterhead. ‘Bad things happen. Two bad things we can survive. We were betting they would not happen in threes.’ If they ever did. We were screwed. Once again, it met my rigid standards… good enough.
When I got to the approximate center of the rock I found Captain Johnson hanging there near the wall of a big empty looking chamber pointing passionately at a diagram on an oversized computer pad that she, two men and another woman were gathered around. She was speaking in urgent tones. The others all looked contrite and anxious. Some things never change.
The other three people were facing my way and stiffened when they saw me slide in on pussycat feet. This was getting ridiculous. Apparently my face was better known than I thought since I was wearing my ‘ordinary’ space ship uniform of underwear and showed no rank at all this time. Johnson turned in annoyance at the interruption to her tirade, but her face broke out like the sun and beamed when she saw me. Unreservedly she floated like an arrow to me and clasped her arms around my neck. I grasped her back affectionately. This was more like it. Maybe I would replace salutes with hugs in TESS… it certainly set a friendlier tone.
Johnson did not let go, but leaned back and smiled into my eyes.
“You have to meet these folks!” She said.
“I just came hundreds of thousands of miles to see you in the middle of absolutely nothing in nowheresville… and you want me to press the flesh with the plebs?” I said haughtily.
She smacked my arm playfully.
“You never have gotten the thing about you . . . have you?” She tilted her head and looked at me like I was an idiot. “I want to remind you that you are the guy who founded TESS! These academy folks are just crazy for space. To a man and woman they saw that speech you gave from the White House all those years ago. So you are the one who got them out here. They are excited to work for you and right now they are moon struck by the image of the hero who leads this outfit… if only they knew you like I do they would wise up. Frankly in a decade or two if you can keep you head from exploding from conceit you will probably be some kind of a freaking legend with some committee raising money to build a monolithic statue of you where it will block the most traffic.” She lowered her voice to a conspirator’s whisper. “Frankly, whether you like it or not you will be the kind of person that they’ll want to tell their grandkids about.” She put her palms on both my cheeks gently. “All they really want is to squirrel away some kind of story about how they met the Admiral McMoran in their callow youth—before he died!” I grimaced at her, but she ignored it and drove on. “You should get used to allowing it… you dick! Give in or I’ll break your arm! Anything at all will do. ‘Once upon a time he passed me the cream and the sugar in the dining room while looking straight to me and he said… ‘The secret of the depths of space lies between your ears’’ or just about any other useless party rhetoric will suffice. Make something up.”
I am a wise man. I never argue with women.
I shook hands and pumped palms at random—dropping platitudes and compliments left and right. Word got out. A half dozen more showed up apparently by osmosis. I sincerely praised all those who had worked hard on the station and expressed my personal gratitude until my teeth ached from all the sugar and they all looked a bit misty eyed. Five minutes is my limit though. I finally patted a couple shoulders and one back, but jerked my head sideways at Johnson. She caught the signal and we floated off into a nearby empty chamber that looked like it was the size of grand central station. Ironically there is plenty of privacy in a deserted Cathedral.
“How long?” I asked anxiously.
Johnson was nobody’s fool. She knew exactly what I was talking about.
“Three standard days.” She said without hesitation. That lack of delay from her was like something etched in steel plate.
Humans are animals evolved for a twenty four hour circadian rhythm—we had kept it in TESS because the 8-8-8 of the American labor movement’s work, sleep and leisure cycle was the de facto standard of the home planet and made as much sense as any other system in outer space. 24 hours was therefore TESS’ shipboard “standard” day now. We set the clocks and our shifts to Greenwich Mean Time on Mommy Earth—more as an homage to the heartland of British naval navigation than for any very practical or good reason. We were after all exploring a map just as empty as they ones they had filled in.
“The equipment all went in A-OK then?”
She nodded and looked happy.
“As near as I can tell. It came in and we mounted it all lickity-split. Tests out OK. The final problem right now is plotting the rock’s odd shape properly into our computers. This station is just a great big irregular hunk of junk and we need to be right the first time. That is what I was cussing them out about when you got here… at least a half dozen of our laser levels that we set up on the rock’s surface to develop the station’s computer plat book and translate the information into the CAD files were improperly placed. If we had turned on a McMoran drive right now we would have chopped off 16 percent of this tub into a separate baby rock instantaneously. That would have made the crowd gasp.”
I thought about my three levers and that last airlock and I grinned to myself, but my dimples gave me away.
“A normal TESS operation then?”
She giggled.
“We will be ready in 12 hours for the first test. Then we’ll do full on testing suites for the two days after that until I am fully satisfied…” She said firmly. Bossy. Always the engineer.
I nodded.
“Mind if I crash here? I want to stay for your first test at least.” I asked.
She waved her hand in a circle at the empty room we were only half floating in.
“We’ve got three dozen chambers this size… and a hundred plus that are smaller. Take your pick. There is a continental breakfast 0600 thru 0900 hours
in the canteen.”
“Yummy!” I said. “What are we? 60 million kilometers from the nearest continent? Those croissants are stale for sure by now.”
She smiled at me.
“I love you, Bear… but you’re a moron.”
I scrunched up my mouth. Johnson was the only one who dared tell me that straight out, except my girlfriend. If I let them they would have told me my failings quite frequently too. There were days when I thanked my stars for women. There was no way my head would swell up with them around. Godlike figure my ass.
“How well you know me.” I admitted grumpily.
I got through the first test they ran on L5, but didn’t make it even through a full day out of the three I had planned to stay. The output from an alimentary canal struck the rotational air-mover back on Earth.
Lieutenant Woo jumped aboard the SS Tellus on the edge of the Pacific ocean. The space ship was loading today off the Straights of Juan De Fuca. Woo was just making her leap off the same TESS service boat that Bear McMoran crowded aboard at almost the same instant. She caught a glimpse of him briefly in mid-air as she made her own hurtle from hull to hull in the opposite direction. He was in a hurry and did not see her. The boat with him aboard gunned away before she could even turn fully and call out to him. Instead she shrugged, entered the Tellus, found Captain Dixon and began to cajole him into heading straight back to the new L5 station. It took some doing. Dixon did not know her well. She was one of the least obvious members of the original Q-kink team even though it had been she who fired the Petrovski effect for the very first time in human history. It was she who made thirty plus or minus meters of solid limestone disappear in the initial tests by touching a key and it was she who though that action indirectly begun the stampede that had become TESS. Dixon’s limited but innate British chauvinism was skeptical because of her outer appearance of a highly reserved oriental woman. She figured out quickly what she was up against and pulled her Head of Department trump card to get Dixon to change his mildly sexist occidental mind and flight schedule. Not many people knew it, but Lieutenant Woo was technically head of the TESS Communications department. It was a title that rarely got waved about and had presented so few requirements for ship support in the past that it was on no one’s radar.
