Deep Space - Hidden Terror (The Stasis Stories #6)

by Laurence Dahners

  ***

  “Sorry,” Norm Tibbets said, giving April Lee an embarrassed look across the ISS2 module.

  She frowned at him. “Why? Surely, you’re not filled with macho embarrassment just ’cause you’ve been puking up your guts like a wuss for the past couple of days, are you? You’re not thinking I’d be upset just because I’ve had to do your work as well as mine while your gills have gone green? You don’t imagine that I’d wonder why Staze would pay your salary when you’ve been totally useless to them, are you? You’re not of the opinion—” She broke the train of her insults to dodge the bundled pair of socks Norm threw at her.

  Though he found the verbal abuse funny, he protestingly said, “You may be freakishly immune to the horrible side effect of weightlessness, but that will not protect you from my revenge!”

  She fluttered her lashes, “When are you thinking you’re going to be able to exact this revenge? Another month? Two months? Three?”

  “Probably four,” he moaned.

  “Oh, come on,” Lee said cheerfully. “You’ve lost that sallow look. I’ll bet you’ll be pink in a couple of days and out of that sleeping bag in another week.”

  “You’re just lucky I’m not pitching my barf bags at you,” he said menacingly from beneath lowered brows.

  “You wouldn’t dare,” she said, “I’ve got pictures of you at your most miserable.”

  “You, are, a, hateful person,” Norman grumbled.

  She grinned and reached out to pat his shoulder, then pulled back as she realized that the pats would move his body a little perhaps re-stimulating his nausea. She said, “It’s occurred to me that you might be feeling good enough for me to show you how things are going? You shouldn’t have to move your head much.”

  “Sure. It might take my mind off the way I feel.”

  “Slowly point your eyes at this screen,” April said, sticking herself to a Velcro patch on the wall next to his bag and holding out a tablet with a blimp visible on its screen.

  With nothing on the screen to give perspective, it was impossible to know how big it was. “Which blimp is that?”

  “That, my friend, is the Big Bertha.”

  “You started with the biggest one?” Norm asked, dismayed.

  “Um, no. I started with one of the links for the rotating station. Unfortunately, it took us quite a while to get it out of the space-plane and positioned where we wanted it, then a lot of time to blow it up. What I think happened is that some time in there we had a concave-shaped section of the Mylar reflecting a hot focus onto a fold in the balloon. That melted together, then when the balloon blew up and stressed it, that plastic weld ripped a hole.” She shrugged, “So, we need another link balloon.”

  “Hey,” he protested, “those things are expensive!”

  “Yeah,” she agreed sweet-sadly. “If only the guy who’d designed them had worked out a better way to deploy them…”

  “You sure know how to make a sick guy feel worse,” Norm groused.

  “So,” she said brightly. “You wanna know what I think our next step should be?”

  Norm started to nod, then remembered he’d better keep his head still, “Yes, I do.”

  “Well,” she said putting her hand on her chest, “the amazing Ms. Lee blew up Big Bertha, temporarily stazed its interior, then blew it up a little more and permanently stazed the thin outermost layer. What we need now is for someone to fly one of his space-waldos over there, go in through the airlock, and do an inspection to see if we’ve got an intact Stade blimp. Personally, I’m in favor of just letting you lollygag around here until you feel dandy, but the temporary Stade ring that’s holding the end-cap on is due to expire tomorrow, so it’d be sweet if you could check it sometime soon. Ideally, you’d get the end-cap hinges and latches in place and temp-welded so once that temporary Stade vanishes, the waldo could tighten things up and re-weld them without having to worry about aligning everything too.”

  Norm frowned, actually glad to have something to think about besides his queasy stomach. “Is the Mylar off the outside of the blimp yet?”

  “Nope,” she said cheerfully. “That’s something else we need your help with.” She lost her teasing tone. “Seriously, if I brought your waldo controller module in here and stuck it to the wall next to you, you think you could climb in and do this stuff? It occurred to me that you wouldn’t have to move your head once you were in the controller.”

  “Yeah,” he said with a sigh. “Thinking about something else seems to be helping.”

  “All right then,” Lee said cheerfully, bouncing off toward the exit. “I’ll be right back.”

  Norm stayed still, considering the project. They intended the big blimp to provide an immense space to work in. But, obviously, if they built a segment of the station inside the massive blimp, they needed a way to get that segment out of the blimp and into space. The end cap was supposed to hinge back, allowing access to the interior, so there was a ring of temporary Stade in the wall of the blimp near one end of the huge watermelon shape. When that ring vanished, the end cap would be loose in space. They needed to get the hinges positioned before that temporary Stade vanished or they’d lose alignment and it’d be a big hassle to realign them. Then, once the temp-Stade vanished, separating the watermelon into two pieces, they’d need to apply gasket material between the two pieces and tighten the hinges—they were adjustable—so when they closed and latched the end cap it’d hold air. Then I’ll need to install the dividing wall, he thought. The wall would divide the watermelon into two halves, one end kept pressurized at all times for the workers, and the other end which acting as an airlock they would use to move completed workpieces out into space. They’d move the finished Stades from the working end of the blimp to the airlock end, close the dividing wall, pump down the airlock end, and open the end cap to space. That’s why the Big Bertha blimp was four hundred meters long, so it’d be big enough that each end could hold workpieces nearly two hundred meters long if it needed to.

  Lee came back in with his waldo controller. She Velcroed it to the wall and Norm carefully climbed in. He settled his head against the headrest and waited for his queasiness to settle.

  A few minutes later a waldo disconnected itself from a docking clamp outside ISS2 and moved off toward the massive blimp with a few squirts from its jets.

  ***

  AP Miami, Florida—The National Hurricane Service released its report on this year’s hurricane season. There were nine named storms, four hurricanes, and one major hurricane. This compares to the average season over the past ten years of twelve named storms, with seven becoming hurricanes and 3.5 becoming major hurricanes. The Service was anticipating that this season would have a somewhat decreased severity but Dr. Steven Marsh, the NHS director, says this one was unusually mild. Of course, everyone is wondering whether the diminished seriousness of the season was due to Staze Inc. having moved 128 of its 131 urban-heat-island shields to the south Atlantic in an effort to disrupt storm birthing. The intent was to shade the sea surface in areas where it was hot enough to initiate a hurricane, especially when other so-called “preexisting disturbances” such as showers or rainstorms occurred. They were only going to do it as a test run over the month of September, but when only one named storm formed that month, many of the hurricane states begged them to leave the shields in place for the remainder of the season through November.

  Of course, this has resulted in protests from urban areas in the southern hemisphere that had quite enjoyed having the shields shading them during the past few summers.

  Staze Inc. says it is investing heavily in its urban-heat-island shielding program and hopes to have enough shields constructed by next year that they will be able to provide urban shading and continue trying to inhibit hurricane formation. When asked whether they were going to ask the hurricane-prone states to financially support their efforts, Ryan Taggart, Staze’s spokesperson said, “No. As you know the shields have solar farms on their upper surface and we earn
enough from selling that power to support the shields. Besides, Staze is committed to the idea that hurricane control is its corporate duty. We plan to begin sending shields to the typhoon and cyclone birthing areas the year after next, hoping that someday soon the epic swaths of destruction caused by such storms will be a distant and fading memory.”

  In the research colliders Arturo had worked on while getting his doctorate, the percentage of the particles hurled at one another that actually collided was low. Fewer than 0.0003%.

  So, when their first attempt at using Seba’s “funnels” to narrow the beam achieved a collision rate of 2.36% he was astonished. This already put them well past break-even fusion, especially because their new accelerators were highly efficient. And we can buy ones that are more efficient and achieve higher velocities. I should call Seba and let him know, he thought. To his surprise, he felt a little irritated that it’d worked when he’d been sure it wouldn’t. Nonetheless, he asked his phone to send Seba a text, “First run with collider has achieved better than break-even fusion.”

  Seba’s reply came in less than a minute, “Way to go! Congratulate your team. I’ll be right over.”

  Well, shit! I should’ve known this would happen. He lifted his head and took in his team. Not knowing he’d finished it, they were all still waiting for the analysis to be completed. He cleared his throat and said, “Hey team, congratulations are in order. I’ve texted Kaem Seba and he’s on his way over, but let me be the first to tell you how much I appreciate all your hard work on this. We’re well over break-even!”

  The lusty cheer they put up would’ve drowned out anything else he might’ve said.

  It didn’t take long for Seba to get there. He only had to walk back from Dez Lanis’ ultramodern new Staze headquarters to the separate Stade structure Arturo’s team used for their high-energy work.

  Afterward, Arturo realized the man had provided him an objective lesson in leadership. Seba’d gone around the lab, talking to each person. He’d known all their names, understood their roles on the team, and had delivered personal congratulations to each of them. The people on Arturo’s team were practically gushing afterward. You’d think they were talking to Mr. X himself, Arturo thought. Maybe they think they are, but X surely doesn’t have time to waste looking over Seba’s shoulder when he’d simply glad-handing and motivating. Skill in handling people has to be one of the things X selected Seba for.

  Not that Arturo found himself immune to Seba’s charisma. When Kaem reached him and pumped his hand, Arturo also felt a thrill and got a few goosebumps on his neck. Everyone gathered around when Seba asked to see the data as well as the final design diagrams for their collider.

  Arturo put up their numbers and Seba led a little round of applause. “This is great,” Seba said. “Since the Medness patent only covers the use of laser-induced ponderomotive forces for induction of p-B fusion, we shouldn’t be infringing if we use this design to build generators to power our planet,” he took a little shot at Medness, “without charging so much for it that no one can afford the product.”

  Arturo led his own round of applause. When it died down, Seba grinned and said, “You guys know the penalty for doing well, don’t you?”

  “More work,” someone cheerfully said from the back of the group.

  Arturo wasn’t sure who’d said it, but Seba was. He laughed, “That’s right, Vince! You must’ve worked on good teams before.” Seba turned to look at the screen displaying their final design. “So, you may have done amazingly well, but we’d still like to do better, right? We can generate power with this but we’d like to convert all the protons and boron nuclei into alpha particles in our rocket. The more fusion events we get, the less fuel our spacecraft has to carry. And,” Seba pointed at the design on the screen, “the Mark 1 version’s never as good as the Mark 15, is it? Anyone have ideas on how we could improve the efficiency of this version yet?”

  “Higher particle accelerations so a higher percentage of the collisions we do induce result in fusion events,” someone said.

  “Sure, sure,” Seba said, “though don’t forget that energy used to increase acceleration has to be subtracted from our positive energy balance.”

  Arturo brought up the more efficient yet higher-powered accelerators he’d been looking at and Seba clapped him on the shoulder, saying they were a great idea.

  Someone else said, “We should study our beam alignment. If we’re even a tiny bit off to one side of direct beam collision, we could be losing a lot of efficiency. We may be able to do better with the collider we’ve got.”

  From another voice, “Because the positive charges repel one another, the beam spreads as soon as it leaves the Stade funnel of the waveguide. I think we could draw our glass out even finer to create a tighter beam guide, then have the beam guides end closer to the collision point. That way the beams would hit each other before they get a chance to spread out. Before Stade, you couldn’t do that because materials couldn’t tolerate the heat from the fusion events.”

  Seba said, “That’s a great idea, Mary. Another thing that occurs to me is that, if you angled the beams a little, you could start another funnel on the other side of the collision point. One that’d collect the particles that passed straight through without colliding. That funnel could guide the particles around and inject them back into the acceleration stream. Probably not worth doing in a power generator here on Earth where we’ve got plenty of hydrogen and boron, but in a rocket where every molecule of reaction mass costs you, it could make a big difference.”

  That wouldn’t work, Arturo thought, would it?

  ***

  As they ate their breakfast, Arya addressed her daughter, “Are you excited about your first day of kindergarten, Zaii?”

  Zaii, always enthusiastic, brightened and exclaimed, “Yes!”

  “What do you think’s going to be the most fun?”

  Zaii’s eyes widened, “Lots of other kids!”

  “Now, soon you’ll be riding the school bus, but today I’m going to take you in our car, okay?”

  Giving her a doubtful look, Zaii said, “I’m scared of the bus. Do I have to ride it?”

  “Um,” Kaem said, “could I take her to school this first day?”

  Arya looked at him in surprise. He made quite an effort to do his share of the parenting. He’d insisted they hire someone to take care of household chores for them, saying it was silly to do that stuff themselves when they had more money than they could ever spend. Instead, he felt they should parent their children. They paid so well that Natalie, the woman who worked for them, was exceedingly happy. She cleaned, did laundry, shopped, ran errands, and occasionally cooked. She’d sometimes picked Zaii up from pre-school and rarely stayed with the child briefly afterward, but generally, either Arya or Kaem were home when Zaii or her little brother Ari were home.

  However, despite Kaem’s efforts to do his share, Arya had expected that taking their daughter to school on her first day would be the mother’s job. She looked at her husband, “Really? Don’t you have meetings scheduled?”

  He shrugged, “Not formally, just my usual impromptu talks with folks. It’ll do them good if I’m not there shepherding them every day.”

  Arya studied him a moment, thinking that the people working for Kaem, brilliant as most of them were, tended to put problems to the side, waiting for Kaem to tell them how to solve their challenges the next time he came around. She wondered, Is he just looking for an excuse to leave them on their own for a while this morning? After a moment, she said, “I can take Zaii. I cleared my schedule.”

  “I… I still remember my first day in kindergarten,” Kaem said, giving his daughter a wistful look, “I’d like to be there to smooth things for Zaii.”

  Arya thought about how difficult Kaem’s schooling had been, his congenital anemia making him too weak to stand up to the other kids. She looked at her rambunctious daughter. I have a feeling Zaii won’t have those problems, she thought. But maybe taking
her to school’s more important for him than it is for her. She shrugged, “Sure.”

  Kaem leaned happily down to his daughter. “Here’s my plan, okay? We’ll wait in the car for the bus to come, then we’ll follow it to school so you can see exactly where it goes. When we get to the school, we’ll get out near where the bus stops and I’ll send the car off to park itself. You and I are going to walk to your class from the place the bus stops so that, in addition to the route the bus follows, you’ll also know how to get from the bus drop-off spot to the classroom.”

  Arya studied him, “I’m not sure it’ll help all that much since you’ll have to go to the school office and get directions to her classroom.”

  Kaem gave her a surprised look, “I’ve reviewed the location and routes on a campus map.”

  Which Arya knew meant he’d committed the route to his phenomenal memory. She shook her head and snorted, “Of course you have. But more important than the route to school is the route home so she’ll know where to get off the bus.”

  Kaem nodded distractedly but spoke to Zaii. “Your mother’s right about that. I’m going to show up when your classes are over and show you how you’ll find the bus when the day comes that you feel like you’re ready to ride it, okay?”

  Zaii nodded enthusiastically.

  “Then we’ll follow the bus home in our car,” Kaem said, “and I’ll help you learn to recognize the places along the way so you’ll know when to get off the bus when you’re ready to ride it, okay?”

  This isn’t just a whim, Arya realized, he’s been planning this for a while. And, he’s given it a lot more thought than I have. She looked at Zaii. “Are you okay doing this with Daddy? Do you want both of us to go with you?”

  Zaii looked at her mother a moment, “Can I go with Daddy today and you tomorrow? I could ride the bus the day after that, okay?”

  “Okay,” Arya said. “I think you’re very brave.”