Fallen Fragon

by Peter F. Hamilton

  "Sorry, Sarge." It was a fast grunt. Odel was trying not to puke.

  Lawrence moved a little faster, remembering to kill his motion just before he reached the airlock. He slithered easily around the corner and through the hatch, pleased with the way the old reflexes were coming back.

  The Moray was as crude inside as it was outside, stark aluminum bulkheads threaded with dozens of pipes and conduits, hand loops bristling everywhere. The air reeked of urine and chlorine. It must have been strong: Lawrence's sense of smell was fast diminishing beneath clogged sinuses. One of the crew was waiting for him on the other side of the airlock. Lawrence gave him their platoon number, and in return was told what berth they'd been assigned. Each of the big habitation cylinders was color coded. Lawrence led the cursing, clumsy platoon down into the yellow one. Voices echoed about him, coming from open hatchways—other platoons bitching about the conditions and how ill some of their buddies were and why didn't someone do something about bastard freefall. Twice Lawrence banged himself on the walls as they scrambled their way along the central tubular passageway; elbow and knee. By the time he slipped into their compartment he could feel the bruises rising.

  The others crawled in after him, moaning and wincing, looking round sullenly. Their compartment was a simple wedge shape. It had three rows of couch chairs with simple hold-you-down straps, a pair of freefall toilets, a locker full of packaged no-crumble meals, a microwave slot and a water fountain with four long hoses ending in stainless-steel valves. Someone had written: Don't even think about it on the aluminum concertina door of one toilet. What would become the ceiling when the ion drive was running was covered with a sheet screen. It was orientated so that anyone in the chair couches would have a reasonable view. A Z-B strategic security logo glowed faintly in the center purple omega symbol bracketing the earth, crowned by five stars.

  Hal stowed his bag and flew across the compartment, turning a fast somersault on the way. "This is fucking amazing. Hey, what kind of i-media are they going to give us, anyone know?"

  "You don't get i-media in a crate like this," Odel said in exasperation. "This isn't a pleasure cruise, kid. You worked that out yet? You'll be lucky if they've got black-and-white films." He put his glasses on, leaving the display lenses clear, but settling the audio plugs in his ears. Thin vertical scarlet lines appeared on the lenses as he called up a menu. He worked down a playlist of rock tracks from centuries-old classics right up to Beefbat and Tojo Wall, then settled back contentedly as they began to play.

  Lawrence sighed, fastening himself loosely into one of the couch chairs. It could have been worse. Some platoons had boosted out of Cairns ten days ago. At least he only had another four days until the Third Fleet departed from Centralis. Perhaps they could put something in the kid's food.

  * * *

  Simon Roderick went down to the observation gallery half an hour before the portal opening. There were over a hundred people crammed into the small chamber protruding from the surface of Centralis. Somehow they contrived to give him a little patch of free space in front of the thick glass where he could stand by himself. They were silent, though Simon could sense their minds spiking with resentment and disquiet. As always, he ignored their pusillanimous nature with his usual contempt. The physical discomfort of Centralis itself couldn't be dismissed quite so easily, however.

  Centrifugal force didn't make him giddy, although he often caught himself wishing for a full one-gravity field.

  Centralis was too small for that, its rotation producing slightly less than two-thirds of a gee around its outermost level.

  Back in the mid-1970s when Gerard K. O'Neill was putting his High Frontier concept together he produced several designs for space "islands." Starting with the simple Bernal sphere at four hundred meters in diameter, the concepts progressed up to the paradise garden of "Island Three": linked twin cylinders twenty kilometers long. All of them were admittedly achievable with relatively simple engineering procedures. The problem came in gathering together that much material with the requisite construction crews and their assembly equipment in an era when it cost upward of two hundred million U.S. dollars to launch a single space shuttle.

  Scramjet spaceplanes eased the problem of cheaper access to space. But as they helped to build low-orbit stations and their associated industrial modules, so they reduced the need for vast habitats. Even in a rampant consumer society, the quantity of ultraspecialist crystals and chemicals that could be produced only in microgee facilities was limited to a few hundred metric tons a year—a figure easily supervised by small tough crews paid exorbitant salaries to endure the generally unpleasant conditions to be found in Earth-orbit space stations.

  It was only in 2070, when a method of faster-than-light travel was developed, that there was any need for large high-orbit dormitory towns. Starships were neither compact nor cheap: they needed thousands of people to construct the massive superstructure and integrate hundreds of thousands of components into a functional whole. As they were too big to take off or land on a planet, they had to be built in space. O'Neill's old ideas were pulled out of university libraries and studied afresh.

  One critical development since O'Neill's day was synthetic food production. The old island designs were driven by the need to provide vast amounts of farmland to feed the indigenous population. His cylinders had been given multiple-wheel crystal palace geometries and elegant necklaces of agricultural modules so they would be self-sufficient. The new designs discarded all that baggage. All they needed was a couple of refinery modules to process excrement back into protein cells. The starship companies still kept the idea of a central garden park; that kind of open space was acknowledged as a primary psychological requirement for the crews that would have to spend months if not years up in the islands. And that much biota was a reasonably cost-effective fail-safe air regeneration system. But the rest of it, the luxurious landscapes, meandering freshwater lakes, the giant windows with their fans of mechanically swiveled mirrors, Caribbean climates and nuclear family neighborhoods of open-plan Italian villas—that was all condensed and modernized.

  Centralis, which was Z-B's primary Lagrange point facility, adopted a plain cylinder geometry, five hundred meters in diameter and one kilometer long. Its apartment complexes were as cramped as any low-rent city skyscraper, only these were ring-shaped, occupying the lower fifty meters of each circular endwall. The garden between them, like any urban park, was overutilized and overmaintained. Shrubs and trees grew tall and spindly on the thin layer of crashed rock sand that passed for soil, the fusion-powered plasma tube running along the axis never providing the right level of UV. But it had ponds with fountains and expensive koi carp, and picnic tables, and a jogging track, and baseball diamonds, and tennis courts. Although it took months for the Johnny-come-latelies to pick up on the Coriolis-driven double curve flight of balls.

  Radiation shielding, too, was a constant worry beyond Earth's protective atmosphere. The only true defense against gamma rays and high-energy particles was mass, big fat solid barriers of it. Centralis was given a rocky external shield two meters thick, which was encrusted with black radiator fins. There were a few gaps through, for the axial corridors connecting the main cylinder to the nonrotating docking net at each end, shafts for the pipes carrying fluid to and from the fins, and the observation gallery.

  Constellations traced a slow curve outside, although the portal was always in view. It hung fifty kilometers off Centralis's rotation axis like a blue pole star. Simon knew where it was only from the cluster of colony trains keeping station around it, slim silver bars agleam with reflected sunlight, forming their own tight little cluster.

  He used his DM to receive sensor feeds from the trains, closing his eyes to be greeted with the sight of the portal directly ahead. A simple ring five hundred meters in diameter, it looked like a toroid of black hexagonal netting encasing a weak-glowing neon tube. The sight of one never failed to inspire him, reaffirming his faith in Z-B and all its endeavors
. A portal was the most sophisticated, and expensive, technological artifact that the human race was capable of constructing. Only Zantiu-Braun had the facilities, money and determination to build them. Portals were one-shot wormhole gateways. Rather than the continual spatial compression that ordinary starships generated for themselves to fly through, these opened a wormhole down which any vehicle could travel. It took a phenomenal amount of energy, correctly applied against the fabric of space-time, to create the rift. The combined fusion generators of twenty starships wouldn't be able to produce a fraction of the power necessary. So Z-B manufactured an isomer based around hafnium 178 and boosted it up to its K-mixing state; the subsequent decay to its ground state produced the amount of energy required to distort space-time once it was correctly channeled and focused. But the isomer was incorporated into the solidstate wormhole generation mechanism itself, which meant that once the decay was complete the whole edifice was not only useless but highly radioactive as well. You couldn't take it apart and refill it with a fresh isomer. A new one had to be built each time.

  That one-shot limitation meant Z-B had to extract the maximum amount of use from every portal. As a result, they'd designed the colony train, a spacecraft every bit as crude as an orbital-transfer vehicle, but on a much larger scale. They had the same type of engine system, fusion generators powering high-thrust ion rockets, sitting at the base of a kilometer-long girder tower. Simple enough to build, they were assembled in the redundant starship yards floating in attendance around Centralis.

  The fleet of colony trains that Simon could view through his sensor feed were fully laden with descent capsules, as if the tower had been swamped by metallic barnacles. Each of the 840 capsules was an identical cone, six meters wide at the base, coated with a silvery ablative foam that would allow them a single airbrake into a planetary atmosphere. They carried four people and all the basic equipment they'd need to start life on a new planet from scratch.

  To qualify for a berth, the colonists had to be thirty or younger (that is, of childbearing age) and have an appropriate stakeholding in Z-B. It was a qualification that millions of people still strove for, even though the portal worlds were nothing like the original interstellar colonies. There would never be a follow-up, no second portal delivering supplies to expand the colony, no regular starship flights from Centralis. After they arrived the colonists were on their own. If they wanted to get back in contact with Earth and the other developed worlds, they had to build their own FTL vehicles. Best estimates put that level of financial and industrial ability being achieved at least a century after the founding flight, and probably a lot longer.

  As financial analysts never tired of pointing out, Z-B's portal colonies were extremely risky ventures. In an age in which most interstellar flight was now concerned with asset-realization missions, Z-B's attitude seemed almost anachronistic, especially as it was itself heavily involved with asset realization.

  Simon observed the colony trains patiently, waiting as the small digital timer on the rim of his vision counted down the minutes left until activation. When it came, there was little physical evidence. The blue light of the portal ring brightened by two orders of magnitude as the isomer cascade was initiated. The aperture turned blank, obscuring the stars that had been visible in the center. Slowly the blue luminescence contained in the ring began to seep inward, forming a solid sheet of photons. It twisted in an instant, distorting backward and opening into a seemingly infinite tunnel. The intensity of the light withdrew until the wormhole walls were defined only by a faint violet haze that neither camera nor eye could quite bring into perfect focus.

  A whole grid of script tables displayed by his DNI provided Simon with more information than he wanted about the wormhole's stability and its endpoint coordinate. The target was Algieba, a yellow giant binary system 126 light-years distant. Easily the farthest out that any kind of colony venture had been attempted; it was just approaching the range of the current portal capacity.

  The portal operations AS picked up the beacon signal left behind by the explorer starship, allowing it to confirm the endpoint coordinate was within ten million kilometers of the target planet, an Earth-equivalent world orbiting the smaller of the two stars. It flashed a go signal to the colony trains.

  Ion rockets burned with a painful near-ultraviolet gleam, moving the massive craft out of their holding pattern. The first five to slide into the wormhole were carrying descent capsules full of industrial equipment and civil engineering machinery, a basic infrastructure that would support the entire colony throughout its early years. Twenty trains of descent capsules followed, each one traversing the twenty-five-kilometer internal length of the wormhole in a little over two minutes, emerging into the double glare of the yellow stars.

  Data traffic within the wormhole reached a crescendo as the trains sent back their status and location. Then the isomer cascade was exhausted and the transdimensional fissure collapsed.

  Cold blue light faded from within the portal's external netting, revealing a complex braid of flat gold, ebony and jade filaments. The luster had gone from the materials; they now possessed the tarnished and brittle look of an antique, as if the wormhole had aged them centuries.

  People started to make their way out of the observation gallery. Simon waited until he was alone. He canceled his DNI link with the Centralis datapool to stare at the patch of space where the dead portal floated. It was as if the extinguished circuitry still exerted some kind of weak gravitational pull on his mind. He felt an almost childish burst of jealousy against those who had gone through. They were free of Earth's myriad problems, its contamination and sullying of all human events. Even their passing made it harder for those left behind. Zantiu-Braun had weakened itself still further by giving them their fresh chance. The company could barely afford to fund a portal colony every eighteen months now; not even asset realization was plugging the financial gap anymore. Every time Simon stood in the observation gallery watching colleagues and family depart, his resolution to stay and hold back the barbarian horde decayed a fraction more. He often wondered what his mind's half-life was, at what point he would give in to pessimism and abandon Earth for his own new beginning. It could happen. The sheer inertia of humanity's stupidity would see to that.

  * * *

  The Moray arrived at Centralis thirty hours after leaving low-Earth orbit. Lawrence had resisted the urge to eat as best he could, limiting himself to one meal. That way he only had to use the toilet once; even with the ship's tiny acceleration helping directionwise, it wasn't an experience he wanted to repeat if he could help it. At the same time he forced himself to drink every hour or so: with only a minute G-force when the ion engines were on and several hours' coasting in freefall between burns, it was easy for his body to become dehydrated. Without gravity pulling fluids down to his feet, his deep instincts were confused and unreliable. At least pissing in space was simple—assuming you were male.

  Hal had to be ordered to drink from the water fountain hose on more than one occasion. He wasn't the major problem. Lewis Ward got a bad dose of space sickness, throwing up every time he even tried to drink water. After a couple of hours dodging revolting yellow stomach juices, Lawrence called for the doctor. When she did arrive twenty minutes later, she simply used a hypospray to give him a mild sedative and told the platoon to try to get him to drink in an hour or so.

  "Don't let him eat for the rest of the trip," she warned. "Koribu has a one-eighth gravity field. He can last until then." With that she zipped out of the door with the agility of a shark.

  Hal gave a disgusted snort as she left; she'd been in her fifties, and a decade of service in low gravity had seen her body gently swell out as her legs and arms became more spindly. He'd brightened at the prospect of her house call. Since she'd arrived, he hadn't said a word.

  "Sorry, guys," Lewis whispered. There was a single strap over his legs, allowing him to adopt a semicurled position on the couch chair. His face was gleaming with sweat. When
it came to training and maneuvers, Lewis could move quicker man just about anyone else in the platoon. He had a ratlike agility, allowing him to vanish into some crack or corner that would give him cover whatever the terrain was. His thin body had the kind of stringy standout muscles and tendons Lawrence associated with marathon runners. But he could dash along a ten-meter suspended pole without even having to hold his arms out for balance. Funny how space sickness had hit him worse than any of them.

  "No problem, my man," Odel Cureton said. "Statistically, one and a half of us will suffer some kind of aggravated motion sickness per twenty-five hours of flight. You coming down with it means the rest of us are in the clear." Odel was what passed for the platoon's electronic specialist. At thirty-two he didn't have any degrees or qualifications from colleges or even Z-B, at least none that he produced for the personnel department. But as Odel admitted to four ex-wives, and those in just the last six years, Lawrence could appreciate the man's need for blurring his background. Who knew how many other women could legally lay claim to part of his salary packet? Odel was what Lawrence's old teachers had called bookish; the voice was distinctly upper-class English, too. Normally, Lawrence would have deep misgivings about anyone with those characteristics; they were too much like officer material. But Odel couldn't be faulted for his frontline performance, which was all everyone really cared about. The platoon entrusted a lot of its equipment field maintenance to him, knowing he'd do a good job.