by M. D. Cooper
“Good, you’ve pulled a lot of long shifts getting this station and its strand built, you deserve a bit of the celebrating.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Samantha replied.
Tanis chuckled. “Good, I know I will.”
The debarkation area was nearly empty—The shuttle had been one of the last for the evening. She walked briskly past the ship berths, still amazed at what had been built in a scant seven years.
It was a feat she would have considered impossible given the state of the Intrepid and the Hyperion just over a decade earlier. But the drive the crew of the Hyperion—now known as the Victorians—showed was inspirational. The results spoke for themselves.
The refugees and the broken-down colony ship. They had made the most unlikely of pairings.
She stepped through the security scanner at the end of the debarkation area and into the corridors beyond. The halls were spare in design, but colorful with different murals and patterns flowing one into the other.
A mother with a young family rushed by, on their way to the celebration. Behind them, moving at a more stately pace, came an older couple. They nodded in greeting to Tanis who fell behind them.
The contrast between the two groups was pronounced. The mother and her children were dressed in a riot of color. Their style reminded Tanis of the crowds on the Main Sweep of the Cho back in Sol. Not so the elder couple. They were dressed in the drab colors and simple clothing their people had worn for centuries.
The generation born on the Hyperion during the long transit between the stars—when the crew had to rotate out of cryopods after a decade under—had created a segment of the Victorian population who never knew the yoke of oppression.
For them, the ship had been like a prison as it crossed the black, not the comfortable home it was to their parents.
When the Hyperion arrived at Victoria, they exploded from it, eager to take any work that would see them down to the surface or out into space.
They absorbed as much of Sol’s culture as they could through the Edeners, as they called the crew and colonists of the Intrepid, adopting clothing, music, and even speech patterns.
Their elders saw it as disrespect for their long-standing traditions, but the new generation saw it as the just result of their parent’s long struggle
Markus did his best to see both sides. He knew that meeting the Edeners was a stroke of luck that changed his people’s destiny forever.
Instead of scratching for resources, barely surviving in the Kapteyn’s system, they would build a modern colony with technology they could never have dreamed of.
But he worried that his people would lose their identity and so he and the Victorian leadership crafted a plan with Tanis and her colony government that would see a slow transition of technology over the course of six to seven decades.
The High Victoria station was an important step on that journey—a clear symbol that the Intrepid was living up to its end of the bargain.
It granted the Victorian colonists on the surface access to space without having to use Intrepid ships. From there, their own short-range shuttlecraft could ferry people to the Hyperion and its steadily progressing sister platform, the Titan.
Tanis boarded a lift with the young family and the elderly couple. It rose slowly from the outer to inner ring; as it did, the tug of centripetally generated gravity lessened. The doors slid open into a sea of moving color, and cacophony of sound.
The mother ushered her children out into the din and Tanis gestured for the couple to proceed her before she stepped out into the corridor.
The celebration for the official commencement of the station was well under way, with music, food and dancing. One thing Tanis had observed about the Victorians is that they never missed the opportunity for a good celebration.
Downworlder colonists mixed with the station and platform crew; a smattering of Edeners were mixed in—though hard to spot amidst the towering Victorians.
She grabbed a drink from a servitor and took a draught as she surveyed the celebration. Ahead she saw Peter and Sarah moving through the crowd, Sarah holding their newborn son. She hadn’t met the newborn yet, and eased her way through the gathering toward the couple.
“Tanis,” Peter called out and extended his hand. “It’s good to see you. Meet our little Thomas.”
Sarah pulled back the blanket and Tanis got a look at the face of the youngest Victorian, for at least another day. The colonists were having children at an alarming rate. Thomas was the fourth child born in the past week.
“May I touch him?” She asked, looking up at Sarah.
“Of course,” Sarah said with a smile.
Tanis was surprised to see Sarah so cordial. Usually the woman was prickly at best with non-Victorians. Apparently motherhood agreed with her.
The child’s skin was soft and smooth under Tanis’s finger. At her touch the baby’s eyes opened and Tanis got a big toothless yawn. She found herself thinking of the future and what holding her own child would be like.
The baby stirred further and his eyes opened for a brief moment.
“I better quit that, don’t want to fully wake him,” she said, removing her hand.
“He just ate, so he’ll fall right back to sleep,” Sarah said as she tucked the blanket back around Tom.
“It looks to be quite the shindig,” Peter said. “I can’t believe they let this many people up the beanstalk.”
Tanis nodded. “I bet somewhere there’s an engineer going over structural specs to make sure the load is distributed well enough.”
“You’re alone,” Sarah observed. “Surely more of your people are present.”
Tanis nodded. “They are, I was late and had to catch the last shuttle in. I was out at the beta site going over construction plans there with the onsite team.”
“I still don’t quite understand why we need a beta site,” Peter said. “We have the platforms and now the station for fallback should any terraforming problems arise. Our people are more than capable of living in space.”
“You’ve certainly proven that,” Tanis agreed. “But as your population grows you’ll find yourselves needing the additional breathing room that a second world will provide. At the very least heavy manufacturing can take place there, making the chances of polluting the atmosphere on Victoria smaller.”
“A lot of people think you’re doing it to hide things from us,” Sarah said with narrowed eyes.
“Trust me, we have nothing to hide at the beta site. One of the things I was checking in on is the new team of engineers from the Hyperion who are helping out with some of the base’s construction.”
Peter placed a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “Let’s not get into this tonight. We’re here to celebrate a big milestone for both our peoples,”
Sarah sighed. “Right, sorry Tanis. I’m going to show Tom around—see you later.”
The pair moved off and Tanis let out a long sigh.
Angela let out a silvery laugh in Tanis’s mind.
Tanis sighed. She did at that. Nearly the entire Victorian leadership was on the station, as well as much of the Intrepid’s. In addition, many of the colony leaders were out of stasis—their teams and expertise in high demand as the Intrepid built this unplanned colony.
As she moved through the debarkation foyer toward the corridor that connected to the station�
�s atrium she saw one of the more self-important colony leaders moving toward her.
“Sergey, how are you this evening?” she asked and extended her hand.
Sergey took it and gave just one firm shake before letting go. “Well enough, I suppose, though I don’t really see the need for extravaganzas like this.”
“I think it’s going to be a lovely evening,” Tanis replied. “Especially since its the first celebration of this sort the Victorians are hosting.”
It wasn’t exactly true, she had been present at several cultural celebrations on the Hyperion, but that information wouldn’t make Sergey any easier to converse with.
“I’m already building a shipyard I had never planned to build with a shoestring budget and now I have to come here and hobnob with all these people. For me this is just a distraction.
She had cautioned him about his attitudes more than once, though never so forthrightly.
Verbally she was much more cordial.
“You’ll find that many of the folks here tonight will be of great help in the coming years—or may end up being your customers. I suspect those relationships may be very useful to you.”
As if by magic, Trist appeared at Sergey’s side and gave him a winning smile.
“Come Sergey, I’ll show you around. I know all the right people you’ll want to talk with.”
Sergey’s startled expression was priceless, but Trist slipped her arm into his and guided him away.
Tanis stifled an audible laugh.
It was Trist’s turn to laugh.
Tanis walked through the corridor, stopping to shake hands or speak to groups of people here and there, eventually making it to the station’s atrium.
The domed park was larger than normal for a station of this sort, but the Victorians were adamant about the size. They had never experienced large, open, recreational spaces. When they saw the parks and the cylinders on the Intrepid they made it clear that their stations and platforms would have them as well.
Not that Tanis blamed them. She couldn’t imagine an existence where there were no trees, living and dying without ever feeling grass or dirt beneath your feet.
The station was currently in its night-cycle and the large plas dome overhead filtered out the Kap’s dim red glow, allowing only starlight to shine through. Tanis could clearly make out Sirius, almost directly above them, staring down as though it were angry over their success.
During the day, the dome filtered and amplified the ruddy light of the Kap, shifting it to the yellow end of the spectrum like Sol.
Without that adjustment, the red light of Kapteyn’s Star would require plants leaves to be brown in order to effect photosynthesis—the Victorians had worked hard to ensure they would have green plant-life, at least on the station. On the planet below it was not feasible to globally alter the star’s light and brown vegetation would be the norm.
Tanis was impressed with the atrium’s arrangement. It was quite beautifully done for a people who had never encountered anything like it until ten years ago.
She felt a hand on her shoulder and a voice asked, “how is the Lieutenant Governor this evening?”
Tanis turned with a smile and gave Joe a short embrace. “I’m fantastic. Looking forward to tonight.”
“Stars know you’ve worked hard enough for it. Who would have thought that my shoot-first-don’t-bother-with-questions lady would end up being the one to bridge the gap between two disparate peoples.” He stepped beside her and surveyed the room as he spoke.
“I’m just one person on a team, Andrews and Earnest deserve much of the credit.”
“Like hell we do,” Andrew’s bass rumbled from behind them. “I’ve been doing my damnedest to shuffle every responsibility I can come up with off to you and you’re taking them all with aplomb.”
While he would never admit it, she could tell that Andrews was ready for the journey to be over. She knew he had planned to make this one last run and then retire somewhere quiet, maybe take a colony ride himself. He certainly had not signed up to be the governor of an interim colony that was sharing a system with another people.
He was an amazing shipmaster, sometimes she thought he might know more about the Intrepid than Earnest and Abby did. But that is where his passion lay—with the ship.
For all intents and purposes, Tanis was in charge of everything outside its airlocks and, when Andrews was in stasis, everything within as well. A far cry from the pariah she had been when she signed on.
“It’s not like I do it all myself,” Tanis said. “I have my own people to shuffle things off to. Markus and Katrina have had some small part in pulling this off as well.”
Joe elbowed her and whispered loudly. “For once just take the compliment.”
Tanis blushed and turned away.
“She never used to do that, right?” Andrews asked Joe.
“No, she did not. I’m not really sure when it started. I think it was some time during our sabbatical in Old Sam.”
Tanis and Joe’s many decades out of stasis had become something of legend on the Intrepid. The crew and colonists alike were in awe of the couple that stayed up through the long dark to watch over the ship.
In reality there was more watching the waves on the lakeshore than watching the ship, but Joe had convinced Tanis not to disillusion anyone.
“So what’s the plan tonight?” Andrews asked.
“The usual, food, speeches, drinking,” Tanis replied. I have a short bit. Mostly it’s Markus who will be running the show.”
“Speak of the devil,” Joe said.
Markus and Katrina were moving through the crowd, smiling and shaking hands with everyone they met.
Tanis was amazed at how much better Markus looked than when she first met him. Ten years ago he looked to be within a decade of death, but now he appeared to be no older than fifty. Katrina had eschewed rejuvenation treatments while Markus took several, they almost looked the same age.
“Ready for your big speech?” Joe asked Markus as the couple approached.
“As I’ll ever be. I had no idea how much rigmarole I was signing up for when I agreed to this job,” Markus replied.
“You make it sound like there was some other option,” Katrina chided him.
Conversation turned to business for several minutes as Tanis and the Victorians discussed several logistic issues with the shipyard, terraforming, and the additions to the space station which would begin the next day.
“Okay, okay!” Joe finally broke in. “You guys need to know when to stop working. Com’on, let’s get a drink to loosen you up before your long, boring speeches.
“You say that now, but next week when the supplies for the dome expansion down on Landfall aren’t ready for you to pick up, you’ll sing a different tune,” Tanis replied.
“I may, but it’ll be a slightly better tune for having had fun tonight.”
Arm in arm, the two couples made their way through the crowd to the impromptu bar on a low grassy hill.
Katrina selected a red wine from one of the Intrepid’s vineyards and swirled it appreciatively before
breathing in the aroma.
“Nothing would have stopped me from leaving Sirius with you, dear,” she said to Markus. “But the thought of never having a good red again was no small thing. If for no other reason, I would have welcomed the Intrepid.”
Markus laughed. “I don’t know how you can drink that… you realize it’s made from berries that grow on trees, right?”
“Yes, dear, I do know what grapes are. I’m not sure how you can speak poorly of wine, especially given that your rot-gut is made from hydroponics waste.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the idea of eating food that grew in worm poop. Sure it tastes good, but it can’t be healthy,” Markus scowled.
“Humanity made it a long time eating plants that grew in dirt, somehow we made it,” Joe added after taking a sip of his beer.
“And we moved past it,” Xenia, one of the Victorian leaders said as she arrived with Dmitry on her arm.
“I wouldn’t say that,” Tanis grinned as she picked a bacon-wrapped pastry from a passing server’s tray. “There’s a flavor you can only get from plants that grew in dirt, let alone from living meat that ate those plants. Vat grown stuff always tastes like you may as well just be eating the vat itself.”
Xenia grimaced. “I can’t believe we’re serving that stuff here.”
Tanis shrugged. “I’ve worked with a lot of different cultures over my years. Some eschew this, others can’t bear that. If I were just visiting it would be one thing, but our cultures are going to spend two or three generations together. We’re going to have to learn to accept and support one another—even in things that we may find foreign.”
Xenia’s expression softened. “I guess that’s true. In a manor of speaking, our peoples are married. We’re going to have to learn how to deal with that.”
“It’s not so bad,” Joe said. “There are some cultures back in Sol that you wouldn’t want to share a system with for the next week, let alone decades. Plus, if Tanis had to go that long without her BLT we’d have a serious problem on our hands.”
Tanis shrugged. “And B is for bacon. Nothing else works in a BLT.”
“Say what you want, dear,” Dmitry said to Xenia. “I’m with the Edeners on this one. The sheer variety of alcohol these folks have is worth any compromise.” He tapped glasses with Joe and they both took another drink.
