THE CAMBRIDGE ANNEX: THE TRILOGY

by Peter Damon

  They passed through one more door to enter one of the space-station’s Points of Exit, a facility set up specifically for staff to move quickly between space-stations without having to interact with the public, or use up vital space in the commercial docking bays.

  Wendy-Claire waved towards the PEX’s Co-ordinator while her implant reminded her that this was Kelly Morris, a spaceman who had lost his left leg five years previously while asteroid mining.

  “I need to get to Freedom One,” she told him. “Just me and one other,” she explained.

  He shrugged and glanced at his board. “All I’ve got is toboggans,” he told her, glancing at her guest, clearly gauging him as unable to travel on one, even as a passenger.

  Wendy-Claire would normally have agreed, but Luke was now associated with her, and she wasn’t about to have it said that she’d declined a toboggan run because of a novice. “I’ll take one,” she told him, ignoring his startled look.

  “You’ll be out about 20 minutes,” he warned her.

  She looked at him, waiting until he blushed and looked away before she turned to wait for a vehicle to be taken from the rack and put into the open end of an exit tube. She might be scarcely twenty years old, but she’d been born in outer-space, had done her first space-walk at the age of five. While kids her age had played in sandpits and on swings back on earth, she had played Catch with Frankie Junior in zero-G, had thrown balls at one another while floating 600 kilometres above earth. She knew precisely how long a toboggan run to Freedom One would take.

  Luke had been looking about him in interest, watching as the staff prepared the toboggan. Wendy-Claire grinned as she drew him forward to explain the ride to him. Not that there was much to explain. The vehicle really was little more than a toboggan, as used in winter Olympics games for several decades. Two to three people could sit in the open back and steer it by using an app on their tablets. There was life support that was fed into their lower-back suit-ports through an arm that swivelled out from the side wall, and there was a large enough turbine to get them from one station to another in about 10 minutes, depending upon traffic. Freedom One was not another space station though, and it would take them 20 minutes to get to the old ferry using one of the toboggans. 20 minutes during which they would, to all intents and purposes, be in outer-space. For a novice, anything over two minutes was judged dangerous. Despite all the psychometric testing that had been done, the scientists were still unable to say how individuals would react to being out in space in just a thin spacesuit for the first time. And the spacesuit trend was to manufacture ever-thinner and lighter suits, as Wendy-Claire’s could attest.

  “You’ll be in front,” she told him. She could see him then. If she kept him in view, she would get the feed from his RFID and know his real-time physical state.

  “Do I need to do anything?” he asked, climbing into position.

  “Not a thing,” she told him, passing him a faceplate and helping him put it on before checking his life support to ensure it had engaged fully in the port of his suit. She then watched the heads-up display cycle through the start-up to end with a steady green bar at the foot of the screen before she put her own mask on.

  Her mask was different and didn’t cover the whole head, but fitted to her spacesuit cowl, clamping magnetically to a low ridge that circled her face. Smaller, lighter, it was easier to put on or take off, and gave her greater freedom of head movement.

  She waited for her own head-up display to settle into green, then slid into the vehicle behind Luke, moving until she felt her own life-support engage.

  “We’re green,” Kelly told her, scrutinising the details appearing on the tablet in front of him.

  “Thanks Kelly,” she told him, extracting her tablet from her thigh pouch to bring up the wireless feed from the toboggan and press the start button.

  “Jesus!” Luke cried as the toboggan was shot through the exit tube and out, into outer-space. He had tensed, expecting to ride a roller-coaster, and gasped as he felt nothing, just a normal gravity sitting him firmly in his seat, even as the huge space-station behind him rotated and diminished behind him, the magically coloured sphere that was earth doing a tremendous circle through space as Wendy-Claire rotated the toboggan to align it with the unseen ferry she was heading towards, and increased her speed.

  “Alright?” she asked, conscious of his speeding heart.

  “Am I? This is,,, tremendous!” he answered.

  Wendy-Claire grinned. As a teenager, she had loved riding the toboggans. She and Frankie Junior, only a little over a year younger than she, yet already her equal or better at anything to do with outer-space, had loved stealing the fragile toboggans to scoot about in space.

  “Look,” she told him, tapping his shoulder to point towards a strange looking ovoid craft, a dull black against space, port, starboard and keel lights defining it’s position. “That’s the Newton,” she told him, focusing on her heads up display to read off the time. “Watch it for a minute,” she said.

  He watched, beginning to wonder why, when suddenly, it was no longer there. “It’s gone!” he gasped.

  She nodded. It was one of twenty such vessels that dipped beneath space-time to move to another location. Frankie Junior piloted one of them; the Planck. One day, possibly, she too would pilot one of the exploratory craft. Currently, while half of them visited far systems looking for earth-like planets, the other half were each assigned an unsolved problem to research, like the Planck, which was helping to find the shape of the universe, or the Darwin, which was trying to explain Dark Flow – why a swathe of galaxy clusters were all moving towards one part of the universe, and of course the Bohn, going dangerously close to black holes in an effort to measure them in more detail. These ships were often gone for months, returning with reams of data for analysis by the huge teams of scientists based on earth.

  For a couple of minutes she was busy selecting a course that would avoid the shuttles, moving between stations and earth locations. There were now fifty base-stations on earth and five space-stations that were open to the public. A further two stations were closed stations, one for the ARC, the Rolle College, and the other for the Frankie Hill Space Academy, where Madeleine Hill was dean. Despite the size of the five public stations, it was still the Space Academy that generated most of the orbital traffic. Academy students needed to obtain 600 hours of space-flight before they could even be considered for graduation.

  Once free of the lower orbiting stations, she could relax and enjoy the freedom toboggan flying gave them. Unlike the SUVs where a steel and carbon life-support shell cocooned them while driving through space, the toboggan left them out in space, only their suits between them and nothing.

  She turned the toboggan so they could look behind them as they travelled out, towards the high earth orbit that Freedom One enjoyed, and she allowed Luke his first real look at earth from outer-space. Not a view through a camera feed or a thick carbon-glass window, but a real view. She smiled as she saw his heart-beat suddenly quicken with the revelation, then slow and his breathing deepen. She knew what he was feeling, had felt it all her life, since the first time she had been out in space, throwing herself off the edge of the loading bay with Maddy and Diane to find a new place that she could go for complete solitude and reflection.

  She turned the toboggan as they neared Freedom One, keying a channel open to greet the crew, knowing they were already aware of her and her passenger. The forward door spiralled open and she checked her tablet to ensure she was on course. She and Frankie Junior had often competed to see who could land best without using the docking apps, but they’d long since grown out of those feats of daring, especially after being grounded for a few weeks.

  She brought the toboggan in smoothly, well aware of the number of people watching her, and slid it all the way into one of the smaller garages before bringing it to a halt to dismount. She was still helping Luke climb out of it and shed his mask as the welcoming committee came out to greet their
new guest.

  Wendy-Claire had grown up with these people, had been rocked on their knee before being tutored by them through every one of her exams, so it was funny to see the look of awe on Luke’s face as he was introduced to Allan Blake, Tony Wood, Matt Park, and then Thomas and David Howard.

  She introduced the twins by name, smiling at Luke’s double take as he tried looking for the distinguishing difference in the two brothers. “It’s in the twinkle in his eyes,” she explained while the others laughed. It was an in-house joke among them all. She’d always been able to tell David from his brother and once, when she’d been six years old, her father had asked how she did it. “Because of the twinkle in his eyes,” she had answered. The answer had stuck, and although no one else had seen the same twinkle, she knew it was there.

  “Come,” they told Luke, drawing him from the garage and up the stairs to their favourite laboratory, the Don Graves room, renamed in his honour following his death of a heart attack some ten years before.

  It was a study room more than a testing laboratory, although some equipment remained, too heavy or awkward to be moved, or just too rarely used to warrant the effort. The walls were coated with a white wipe-able substance to become huge whiteboards. For the twins, it was the removal of one more inhibition to their creativity, and the walls were filled with logic equations, their meaning lost to all but the twins, Allan and Tony.

  Luke took a glance, and his eyes lit up. Wendy-Claire had seen that look as he’d gazed on earth, and she could see the same excitement in his readings too, his heart beat increasing as his eyes followed one particular piece of coding.

  The rest stood silent as Luke walked slowly around the walls, his eyes scrutinising the mathematics, a hand sometimes lifting to hold on one particular symbol as his eyes scanned back, validating its existence.

  “This is incredible,” he breathed continuing to move along the wall, following the somewhat haphazard workings that were the culmination of David, Howard, Tony and Allan’s thoughts.

  “Well, anyone who can read our writings,” Allan laughed.

  Luke slowed, beginning to frown. “This, here,” he murmured, taping his finger on a single expression. “It needs,,,” he mumbled, glancing back at previous notations once more.

  Wendy-Claire passed him a different coloured marker and Luke glanced towards the others for permission before bending to apply his own expressions between the already existing lines produced by the others.

  The twins watched for a few moments, then slowly nodded, glancing towards one another as grins slowly spread across their like faces. They moved to the fourth wall to begin using the symbol Luke had just defined, quickly adding three more lines before Luke was finished and could go across to watch them.

  “Yes. That would do it,” he agreed. Allan and Tony were nodding too, beginning to smile.

  “Do what?” Wendy-Claire asked.

  “It’s the answer to the final outstanding Millennium Prize problem,” Thomas told her, a twinkle in his eyes.

  “No, we’re not really interested in the Millennium Prize,” Allan explained, seeing her frown and smiling at her. “But it serves as an induction test. We now know we can work with him and, hopefully, he knows the same of us.”

  “Oh yes,” Luke agreed, still marvelling at the code they had produced. “You have other stuff, like this?” he asked.

  “Oh yes,” the twins said, in total harmony with each other.