THE CAMBRIDGE ANNEX: THE TRILOGY

by Peter Damon

  The Swami lifted a small bell and a servant came running out to receive his instructions before hurrying away again.

  “This is Samuel Jenkins,” Swami Adeela told them as the servant led a tall black man out onto the veranda. “Samuel, meet Heather and Michael, representatives of the Rolle College, more commonly known as the ARC.”

  +++++++++++++

  Vasyl, as he often did at such times, turned off his mind to do what was necessary. In this case it worked, and two hours later Emily glowed from the experience.

  The Russian threw himself into the bathroom long enough to brush his teeth, and stepping out picked up the bottle of champagne before going across to the rumpled bed to wake the middle aged woman, his eyes averted from the pale skin rolling across her midriff.

  “Here,” he grinned, waking her with a smile and a glass of the sparkling liquid.

  “Oh, wow!” she rose and grinned. “This is lovely,” she told him.

  “My pleasure,” he chuckled. “Although I will have to leave soon,” he explained. “I have an appointment with a prospective buyer for one of Paddy’s pieces.”

  “I’m so pleased you’re able to help him,” she told him.

  Vasyl let his smile drop to don a reflective expression. “Paddy is not happy on the ARC, is he?” he asked.

  “The place is stifling him, the poor dear,” Emily admitted.

  “I can see that. Someone like Paddy should be leading, not following,” he agreed.

  “That’s unlikely with someone like Frankie at the top,” Emily laughed without humour.

  Vasyl nodded and went through to the bathroom to begin dressing. “You know,” he called back after a few minutes. He opened the door to the hotel bedroom to find Emily already in her underwear. “We might be able to use him,” he suggested.

  August 27th.

  Sally Locke watched her satellite move into position. She couldn’t help but grin, for here she was, not only building the things, but moving them through space, directing them like pieces on a chess board, or dancers on a stage. She liked the dancer analogy. It was a little greater than the two dimensional movement of a chess piece and had greater freedom and versatility.

  What had been an incredibly precise, lengthy and cautious profession on earth was very much more practical profession on the ARC. And had someone suggested to her just a year ago that she would be creating satellites from shipping containers, she would have laughed at them.

  Yet here she was, and Sally continued to grin as she moved the satellite lower, the board in the control-room of the ARC allowing her to position and monitor it with much greater precision than anything she had come across on earth.

  At 70 kilometres above the International Space Station, the satellite was all but invisible to the crew of the ISS, and yet the equipment installed on the satellite allowed the ARC to see every single detail of the outside of the ISS.

  Sally sat back, very pleased with herself. Her first satellite, and it had taken her less than a week to source the parts, build the unit, and launch it into position.

  +++++++++++++

  Allan and Leanne were guided into the large building beside the Clyde by a hard faced young soldier with a red beret angled across his shorn head, and stopped to survey the large vehicle that was the centre of activity, both of personnel and machinery.

  Brightly lit by arc-lamps around the perimeter wall, the ferry was barely recognisable from the video taken by the vendors and agent. Sandblasting the hull back to the bare metal accounted for some of the strangeness, but the removal of the lifeboats, funnel and masts also contributed. The open deck areas had been covered by new metal sheeting, and all windows and portholes removed. Large doors to the front and back had replaced the ramps, and totally enclosed both fore and aft.

  “Wow, they’ve done a lot!” Leanne cried excitedly.

  Allan felt his tablet vibrate and answered the call with a touch.

  “It’s Thomas. They’re waiting for us inside,” he told Leanne, and they made their way between large pieces of equipment to walk up the gangplank and into the bare interior where a daisy-chain of light-bulbs lit their way into the dim depths. Banging and drilling reverberated through the structure making conversation all but impossible.

  They reached the new control-room and greeted the twins with waves. The boys were standing in the centre of the room, looking down on the large control table. It was functioning, the screen ablaze with warnings as it failed to find connections to the expected systems. The myriad of red warnings jostled for space on the screen making it impossible to read any of them.

  “Oh shit,” Leanne breathed, speaking for all of them.

  “What do we do?” David asked, shouting to make himself heard “Can we turn off some of the logic?”

  Allan considered while Leanne got down onto her back on the bare metal floor to gaze up, underneath the table. The cables had been laid, she saw. Hundreds coming up from under the floor, each carefully tagged and numbered. Nonetheless, it would take her up to two weeks to finish the task of completing the connections.

  “Let me re-write the code into modules that we can turn off or on, as we want. Then we can work on one module at a time,” Allan suggested.

  “How long?” Thomas asked.

  “Two, three days,” he told them. “There’s going to be a lot of modules, and we’ll effectively have a new module, just to control what we turn off or on,” he explained. “You don’t want to take this into space with some of the modules still off, now, do you?” he asked pointedly.

  “Ok,” they agreed. “We’ll talk to Cheryl.”

  “Cheryl?”

  “Yes,” they nodded. “She’s the Project Manager,” they explained.

  Allan went off to find somewhere to work, and Leanne began walking through the ship, learning where everything was.

  +++++++++++++

  Cheryl stood beside a tall worktop whose surface was strewn with diagrams. She constantly cursed the army engineers who demanded that they work from pieces of paper. Three university students sat against the far wall, recruited solely to take the scribbled notes from the engineers and update the electronic image of the ferry.

  Her biggest concerns were the suppliers however, and she was sure the twins had never had this problem with the Koreans.

  “Look,” she told one particular supplier from just across the border in England. “If you don’t deliver on time, tomorrow, as you agreed to do last week, then I will have a dozen men from the First Battalion, Parachute Regiment, come down and get them from you themselves,” she warned. “They were only just telling me of how well the tactic worked on the Kurds,” she drawled.

  The twins smiled to one another. As far as they were aware, none of the suppliers had ever delivered late.

  “Yes?” she asked them, her eyes still blazing as she put the phone down once more.

  “Change of priority,” they told her.

  “Another!” she stormed. “What is it?” and she turned to her own touch screen, 2 metres long and 1.5 wide, to clear her last query and bring up a Gant chart of the project as it currently stood.

  “Gary has to re-write large portions of our controlling software. So we can’t use the main table,” they told her.

  “How long?” she demanded, and they hastily told her.

  Cheryl made the change and watched the items that relied upon it also change.

  “Ok,” she nodded. “We can live with that. We’ll have the floor installed early,” she told them, noticing that the items were already in stock, and the labour available. She changed the date of the task and nodded to herself.

  “Is that it?” she asked, her hand already on the radio as she prepared to tell the appropriate sergeant what she wanted.

  The twins nodded, smiled, and rushed away.

  +++++++++++++

  Jake impressed himself with his ability to change the spy-satellite’s instructions and move it from watching over the International Space Station, to a position
100 kilometres above the border of Turkey and Syria.

  He had been particularly clever in using Matt’s tablet to change the coordinates. Now he had pin-sharp images of the conflict on earth. Fuzzy movement of soldiers were now distinct, sharp enough to recognise anyone looking upwards. The insignia on the vehicles were now clear, right down to their registration numbers. He could even identify the types of rifles being used.

  Jake pored over the images, recording activity on a portable disk for later transfer to his friends on earth.

  September 4th.

  It was a full month before the rest of Cambridge University’s colleges would begin their academic year, but those selected to attend Rolle college were already congregated in Ely’s Church in the heart of Cambridge for a service of remembrance and dedication, the first for Claire and Herbert Rolle, the second for the new college named after them in memory of the sacrifice they had made.

  Sir Richard Phillips, Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University was there, as were all the Pro-Vice-Chancellors. That in itself was a rarity, but Ricky Williams, one of the new students at the college, figured the whole concept of the new college warranted some pageant.

  Ricky, a post graduate student, was going to be studying Mechanical Engineering within the Astrophysics Department. It was the first course of its type in the UK, or Europe for that matter, and specifically geared towards making improvements in spacecraft and space system design. For Ricky, just 24 and an avid fan of anything to do with space and science fiction, it was a dream that had come true.

  At the end of the service, Michael Bennett was confirmed as the Head of Rolle College, which raised a cheer from the three hundred odd people in the church. He rose to walk to the front, and Ricky anticipated a lengthy speech, similar to those he’d heard in the past. Instead, having cleared his throat, and tapped gently on his microphone, Mr Bennett told the students that the buses were outside, and if any of them wanted a window seat, they had better be the first ones out.

  There were three coaches waiting for them, and each had a list of passengers posted. Now there was pandemonium as students rushed from one list to another to search for their name and, finding it, rush forward to claim their place, all the while saying good-byes to accompanying parents and grandparents, often torn between the desire for their parent’s embrace, and a highly prized seat beside a window.

  The scuffling died down as all the window seats were claimed. Ricky had been out of luck, his name being on the last list that he had looked at. He promised his kin he’d write often, urged his younger brother to continue to work hard, and mounted his bus to find a seat near the front, a hand extended to introduce himself to his neighbour, a young woman beaming proudly down at her parents looking up at her from outside the window.

  “Joyce Davers,” she told him, grinning brightly with excitement. “Planetary Science and Astronomy from Oxford, now taking Space Science and Astrophysics, and Applied Mathematics,” she added. “You?”

  “Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering from Strathclyde, now studying Mechanical Engineering, Astrophysics,” Ricky told her as the doors to the bus soundlessly closed.

  The coaches blasted their horns in a cacophony of sound and rose into the air, tyres releasing the odd pieces of gravel they had collected as they began to angle upwards, their slow ascent giving the students and watching cameras the best opportunity to fully appreciate the moment.

  Students cried out in amazement, awe and some nervousness as, without any of the normal sensations associated with flight, they were lifted into the air, people, buildings, streets and town becoming smaller and smaller by the moment.

  As cloud interceded, the coaches accelerated, although the perception from within the coaches was that they had slowed. Slowly, the earth took on the curve that confirmed it was indeed a sphere, and not flat as many had still believed only five hundred years previously.

  +++++++++++++

  Michael walked the short distance to the offices of the Cambridge Chronicle, missing the deep pockets his old waxed jacket had provided. Heather had fired it out of the ARC intending that it should burn up as it hit the earth’s atmosphere. He certainly hoped it had. He dared not imagine how he’d feel if one of the gypsy travellers recovered it as a piece of space junk.

  He climbed the broad wooden stairs to enter the grandly named Press Room, wincing as he saw his desk was being used by another, someone not as neat as he, and preferring the screen and keyboard on the other side of the desk.

  Gary, the editor of the Chronicle, came out of his office to shake hands and pummel him on the shoulder.

  “It’s so good to see you!” he told Michael, leading him into his glass partitioned office and offering him a seat. “Have you come to give us an exclusive?” he joked.

  “You’re not that far off,” Michael admitted, declining the offer of a tipple of scotch. “I still read the paper, you know. It sorts of keeps me in touch with Cambridge and normal life,” he admitted with a sad smile.

  “We’d love more little titbits of information from the ARC, small pieces about individual achievements, the sort of things that get into the social networks,” Gary told him, knowing that Michael would understand.

  Michael was nodding. “Truth of the matter is, we’re overworked. Stretched to the limit,” he admitted. “Oliver Cole is working all hours keeping the earth involved in our developments, and it’s all we can do to catch the provocative stories and issue corrections.”

  “But you’re here,” Gary pressed.

  Michael smiled. “We could do with a hand, someone who could grow and develop, but has a good foundation in journalism, and knows what the Cambridge public want to read.”

  “Mm, I might know just the man. He’s come up the hard way, mind; had his share of publicly aired faults.”

  “But he’s still in journalism? With the same rag? That has to say something for his tenacity,” Michael considered.

  Gary smiled. “I’ll talk to him, if you’d like. See if he wants to enter the lion’s den a second time.”

  “I’d appreciate it,” Michael said, and stood. “If he asks about money, we don’t want him,” he added.

  “But if I wanted to give him a ball-park number?”

  “Double whatever he’s on here, and I define his roles and responsibilities,” Michael shared a smile with Gary and shook his hand. “Thanks Gary. It’s really appreciated.”

  +++++++++++++

  For the most part the students were silent, their attention held by the panoramic view from the windows. Most had small cameras, tablets or cell phones and were taking the opportunity to record their ascent into space.

  There was a cheer as it was announced that they were now all astronauts after rising above the 100 kilometre mark, then they fell silent once again as they stared out at the earth below them, cloud patterns moving with infinite slowness while, now and then, waves on the Atlantic reflected glints of sunlight, adding to the magic of the moment.

  The ARC had been positioned to present its side to the oncoming coaches, the title re-painted on its side, only small portions of the large letters obscured by the network of experimental equipment adorning the lattice work of scaffolding along its sides. Below the large ship, beneath the flat field of solar panels the ship used, and keeping orbit with it, were the retrieved items of spent rockets and other junk that were waiting for onward movement back down to earth. The solar panels reflected their images making it hard to count how many were there.

  “The photos of it don’t do it justice,” Joyce murmured as their coach led the way towards the rear of the huge ship.

  “They certainly don’t,” Ricky agreed, watching the doors at the rear open to reveal a massive hanger area, lights guiding them down and in. Was he mad in thinking there were better ways of providing an entry and exit mechanism for such a craft? He took his tablet out to begin making sketches, Joyce glancing down for a few moments, before the actual entry into the ARC won the battle for her attention.

&
nbsp; There was another huge cheer as they touched the surface to roll forward, into one of the smaller garages that stood in front of them, then silence as they waited anxiously to learn what would come next.

  “You will be called individually,” the driver told them, standing and turning to smile comfortingly towards them. “Please remain seated until your name is called, then exit through the open door to where a doctor will be waiting to assign your RFID Chip,” he explained.

  “RFID Chip?” Joyce asked.

  Ricky nodded. “They implant a small capsule under the skin. It interfaces with the systems on board, so doors will open for you, stuff like that,” Ricky told her, finishing his notes on an improved rear door.

  “I remember,” she nodded. It had been mentioned in her Welcome package, along with a hundred other things.

  Ricky heard his name being called and hurriedly put his tablet away. “See you later,” he told her with a smile.

  “Hello Richard Williams,” a young woman in a doctor’s lab coat said, her dark hair still showing blond streaks at the roughly sheared ends as she led him into a small and temporary surgery.

  “Ricky,” he told her automatically, shedding his shirt in anticipation.

  “You’ll feel a little uncomfortable for a short while,” she explained, turning him around and wiping the skin of his back with a damp pad of cotton. She put something cold up against the base of his left shoulder blade and pressed.

  Ricky gasped, and it was done. When he turned back, the doctor was checking her screen to check the device was working. She nodded and smiled. “You’ll find a lift at the end of the corridor. It will take you to the first floor and the auditorium. Your chip will not open any other doors until you’ve entered the auditorium and spent the next hour in there,” she explained.