Childers

by Richard F. Weyand

  Her destination was the Quito Elevator, the closest route to space from the Houston Metroplex she had been born in and never left.

  She was dressed now in the midnight-blue shipsuit that was the work uniform of the CSF. No insignia at all adorned it, other than "CHILDERS" over the right breast. She would normally not even have that much until she reported for duty, but she had to wear something, and shipsuits were easier than a wardrobe for a single trip.

  Her research on CSF OCS indicated her massive mane of hair would be shorn off on day one. It was against regs as it was, because in zero-g it would be a five-foot diameter ball of fluff around her head. CSF personnel, both male and female, typically wore their hair short for the sheer convenience of it. Jan was glad to hear it, because two weeks of trying to keep it civilized at the consulate had grown tedious. She had had it shorn herself, to a one inch cut just long enough to lay flat. She had shed all that tedious maintenance with it.

  Her interviews with Kamala Davidson – excuse me, Lieutenant Davidson to her, now – and her own research had allowed them to specify and negotiate her training and her specialty. Officer Candidate School, then surgical installation of implants, Unarmed Combat School, Basic Tactics School, the PhD in Mathematics at a major university, and, after one year of shipboard service in the tactics department of a heavy warship, Advanced Tactics School. It was an aggressive ask for an OCS candidate, but Davidson encouraged her to go for it, and Lieutenant Commander Murdock had enthusiastically approved.

  "I wished we'd had some tactical officers of your intelligence on my last shipboard deployment," he muttered as he signed off the paperwork.

  Both Davidson and Murdock had been surprised about her request for Unarmed Combat School, but Jan had thought it through.

  "First, I need some kind of ongoing physical activity to keep me fit and trim, given the way you people eat. Second, the Enshin style of martial arts taught in the CSF concentrates on turning an enemy's power and momentum against him, and so is particularly suited to someone of, um, short stature. And malnutrition throughout my primary growth years means I am always going to be shorter than most everybody else aboard ship. Third, someone my size will have much less of a problem with being treated like a little girl if Enshin is my hobby, and they know I'm reasonably good at it. It just seems like a good fit for me," Jan had explained.

  The quadcopter arrived and settled onto the consulate roof. It was not in CSF markings, but had the logo of the Quito Elevator. Apparently when you bought a costly ticket into space, they assumed it was their job to pick you up and transport you the much shorter distance to the elevator.

  Jan turned to Murdock and saluted, he returned the salute, then they shook hands.

  "Perhaps we'll serve together some day, Ms. Childers."

  "It would be my honor, Commander. Thanks for everything."

  "Don't mention it. It's going to go back to being pretty boring around here now."

  Jan hefted her duffel bag, loaded with personal toiletries and more of the shipsuits, over her shoulder. The pilot held the door as she boarded the quadcopter, and she dumped the duffel bag in the back seat as she got in. The pilot closed the door and returned to his seat. He had to instruct Jan in how to fasten the seat and shoulder harness, it being her first time in a conveyance in her memory. He then set the autodrive, and the machine lifted off the consulate roof and headed southeast.

  Jan looked curiously out of the windows at the Houston Metroplex. She saw the warren of the old central part of the city, where the consulate was and where she had lived, and then the newer areas surrounding the core. All looked run-down, or, perhaps better, uncared for. People didn't live here, they warehoused here, living in their VR dreams. No one cared what the buildings and their grounds looked like, and it showed.

  Then they were over the Gulf of Mexico, for the 600-mile water leg to the Yucatan Peninsula. The machine rotated its ducted fans for more thrust, and used the fuselage itself for lift as they sped up. It was two hours until they got to Merida, Mexico, to a small service facility on the outskirts of town, for a fuel and rest stop.

  After refueling and a trip to the necessary for both of them, they set off again, headed for San Jose, Costa Rica, 800 miles distant, and another service facility for fuel and lunch. For this leg, the direct route was over land, and Jan watched the jungles pass by below. They passed within view of Belmopan, Belize, and Managua, Nicaragua, on this leg, and they were the same as Houston and Merida. Huge apartment blocks where humanity had warehoused itself.

  After the stop in San Jose, they headed south-southeast, over the water again, this time the Pacific Ocean. They were coming to the end of the 700-mile leg, after spending almost eight total hours in the air, when Jan first saw the elevator.

  "Oh, my gosh."

  Of course, Jan had seen pictures of the Quito Elevator in her studies, but the pictures didn't prepare one for the reality. It looked at a distance like a thin black line that just shot up from the Earth and straight into the sky. As they got closer, the reality set in. That "thin black line" was a hundred or more feet across.

  It wasn't actually in Quito. It was in the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of Ecuador on the equator. Quito was the closest large city, though, and naming it after the city had eased some local approvals necessary to build it in the first place.

  There had been some thought to mounting it to Chimborazo, the tallest peak on Earth as measured from the center of the planet. Several factors had weighed against it, including that it was not exactly on the equator, it was volcanic, it was glaciated, and the glaciers were the water source for the local area. Also, transport of bulk materials to and from an elevator on the peak would be a problem. In the end, the four miles of additional belt for the elevator were not as much of an issue.

  "It's really something, isn't it?" the pilot asked.

  "I've seen pictures, but it just isn't the same," Jan said. "Of course, you must be used to it by now."

  "Yes, it's easy to get jaded. That's why I like transporting people who have never seen it before. It brings the sense of wonder back."

  The base of the elevator was huge. Its quadcopter landing surfaces were a hundred feet above the ocean waves to protect the equipment from the salt. The belt itself started its journey into the heavens higher yet on the massive structure. Below, there were docking facilities for ships, protected by a half ring of seawall on the ocean side.

  The pilot landed the quadcopter on one of the landing pads, and guided her into the building while his craft was serviced.

  "Departures are right through there. Follow the blue arrows. You're lifting on standby – welcome to the military – but I checked and there's no problem. You're on the next lift."

  "Thank you so much."

  "No problem. See ya."

  And with that he was off to the necessary. After Jan did the same, she headed off in the direction of the blue arrows.

  Jan checked in with the agent in the departure lounge. The pilot was right, she was on the next lift. Her new Commonwealth passport was inspected and stamped, and she was issued a ticket.

  While she waited in the departure lounge, a drop came in. She watched the people file out of the arrival door. Many yawned or stretched, as if they had just woken up.

  After an hour or two, boarding was announced. She queued up with a couple of dozen other passengers at the same door. They handed over their tickets and filed down the hallway to the door of the elevator car at the end.

  Jan could see the car out of the windows as they filed down the hall. The car was perhaps a hundred and twenty feet long. It had three floors for passengers on the side away from the belt, and a cargo bay on the belt side. The cargo bay must have been about twenty feet wide, thirty feet tall, and a hundred and twenty feet long. They were loading some large container into one end of the car as she watched.

  She went on into the car and was shown to her berth. She had lucked out, and had a compartment to herself. It was tiny, seven feet
deep, seven feet tall, and three feet wide. It had one chair that folded into a bed, with cup holders in the arms for drinks, and a lap table that folded out for meals. It also included a VR rig that could be used full-immersion with implants or helmet-and-hands for people like her without implants. The chair faced away from the door to a single window about eighteen inches wide and three feet tall. The window was concave on the inside, so she could put her face into it for a wider field of view. There was an overhead for her duffel on one side wall.

  "This is lovely. Thank you," she told the attendant after he had explained the operation of the chair/bed and pointed out the VR rig and the call button.

  "The schedule for the trip, including scheduled meals, is on info channel 1 on the VR. You can set the VR to alarm you for mealtimes, bedtime, or wake-up time, whatever you want. You can mark your berth for privacy from within the VR and it will display the privacy light outside for us. The necessary is at the end of the hall. If you have any problems, or want anything else, like drinks or snacks, you can call us from within the VR or use the call button there. Any questions?"

  "No, I'm good. Thanks again."

  "No problem. Have a nice lift."

  Jan stowed her duffel in the overhead, then sidled past the chair to get around to the window and look out. Her view was to the north, as the thin belt was arranged in line with the prevailing westerly. North was the lift side and south was the drop side for this cycle. She sank into the chair and tried to relax.

  She had not left the Houston Metroplex since her parents had died. Whether she had traveled with them as a child she did not remember, though she did remember going to the beach with them. Of course, that could have been the beach in the Houston Metroplex. She just couldn't recall. Since then, during the years in the orphanage and then on the streets, she had not ventured out of the downtown district. There were more places to hide, and more places to scrounge food, in the warren of the downtown than in the sterile outskirts.

  Now she was over two thousand miles from Houston, and about to add thirty thousand more miles on her lift into space. She looked in the direction of Houston, over the horizon to the north-northwest. Well, good riddance.

  Her reverie was interrupted by an announcement. It was over a speaker in her berth. She supposed if she had had the VR set on, it would have come over that instead of the speaker.

  "Welcome aboard the Quito Elevator, ladies and gentleman. Our lift to Quito Station will take a bit over two days. Your apparent gravity will increase when we lift and then gradually decrease over the first forty hours or so. As we pass the geosynchronous point, you will experience apparent weightlessness. This can disturb some people, giving them inner ear disorientation or gastrointestinal distress, so if you know you have problems with weightlessness, let us know. We have a drug available that is very good at treating those symptoms without side effects. If this is your first time in space and you are not sure about whether you will have problems with weightlessness, I would recommend you take the drug. It is much easier to find these things out on-ship, where the facilities are much better for helping you once you get sick. So let's save the experimentation for later, shall we?

  "When we are at the geosynchronous point, we will rotate the elevator car on the belt, so the ceiling is toward Earth and the floor is toward Quito Station. This procedure is smooth, but it can be disturbing if you don't know it's coming. We will announce it before performing the procedure. Once we pass the geosynchronous point, apparent gravity will gradually return. Quito Station has 80% of Earth gravity, so it will be a bit easier to move around and your bags will feel lighter on the station.

  "During the period of reduced apparent gravity on the lift, please be very careful moving about the cabin. It's pretty easy to push up out of your chair and bang your head on the ceiling. The necessaries have zero gravity features, and the directions for low-gravity or zero-gravity use are on the back of the door, but it's best to perform those functions before we hit the low-gravity portion of our lift and then wait it out. We'll announce a good time for that as well.

  "We will be serving meals on Quito time, which is the same time zone as New York City, so it shouldn't be too far off for most of you. If you need special arrangements, please let us know. We will also serve drinks at any time. You can order in the VR set, or simply press the call button.

  "In the meantime, we recommend you sit back and enjoy the ride. The VR sets are good for reducing boredom on the long trip, and we encourage their use.

  "Please let us know if there is anything else we can do for you on the trip, and have a good lift, everybody."

  Jan reviewed what she knew of the Quito Elevator in the VR.

  The Quito Station synchronously orbited the Earth at an altitude a bit under 28,000 miles above mean sea level. This was well over the free-satellite synchronous orbit of 22,236 miles. 28,000 miles is what the geosynchronous orbit would be if the Earth were 1.8 times more massive. The required additional pull toward the Earth to keep it synchronous at the higher altitude was thus 0.8g, which was provided by the belt of the elevator. That in turn meant the station had 0.8g apparent gravity, with its "up" direction toward the Earth. It also meant the spun-carbon-nanotube belt had a tension of 0.8 times the weight of the whole station. The belt was a hundred feet wide for reasons of this geometry. The size of the elevator cars was determined by the required size of the belt, not the other way around.

  The maximum speed of the cars on the belt was six hundred miles per hour. Including periods of acceleration and deceleration at either end, the trip was fifty hours. The elevator cars ran by grabbing the sides of the belt. While cargo cars could pass each other or passenger cars anywhere on the belt, it could be a bit bumpy. Upward- and downward-bound passenger cars were therefore scheduled so as to pass each other as they passed through the free-satellite synchronous orbit altitude, where they were effectively weightless. They did this by the simple expedient of letting go of the belt as they passed in free fall, during the rotation that kept the bottom of the car the apparent "down" during the gravity portions of the trip.

  Urp. Jan had known that, but found that reading it groundside and reading it while actually riding in the elevator car were two very different things. She decided to place an order for the weightlessness drug. Even if the zero-gravity of weightlessness didn't make her nauseous, that whole "letting go of the belt" thing just might.

  As it turned out, the rotation was almost a non-event. It was curious, after more than a day and a half watching the stars slowly arcing across her window, to watch them turn completely 180 degrees in a few minutes, but that was about it. Oh, and the cessation of the more-felt-than-heard machinery noise of the drive wheels on the belt when they were disengaged. The silence was deafening. After the rotation, the wheels re-engaged the belt and the near-subliminal machinery noise resumed.

  Facing away from the belt, and given the belt's width compared to the width of the half-rotated cars, Jan did not see the other elevator car pass them on the other side of the belt at a closing velocity of twelve hundred miles an hour, and she was just as glad she didn't.

  The elevator car arrived at the station by settling onto a landing pad on the top of the station, which was the side toward Earth. It had held back against the increasing apparent gravity for the last ten hours, using the energy to recharge, at least partially, its batteries.

  Quito Station

  Jan was met in the Arrival Lounge by an ensign in CSF uniform. In the 0.8g of the station, she had a hard time stopping and almost ran into him.

  "Ms. Childers?"

  "Yes, I'm Childers, Ensign Lopez."

  Jan had used the trip up to continue her studies, working through a lot of the material in OCS, including rank insignia. She had read his name off his uniform. Not knowing the protocol for sure for a recruit, but knowing he had an officer's commission and she did not, and she was in uniform, sort of, she saluted and he returned it.

  "If you would come with me, please."
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  As they walked, he explained the arrangements.

  "You'll immediately move into the CSS Aquitaine. Since you are not ship's crew, you don't have a permanent berth in the ship. A guest cabin was available, and that means you'll have a small cabin to yourself."

  He said this last somewhat wistfully, and she inferred from this that, as an ensign, he did not have a cabin to himself.

  "The Aquitaine is a light cruiser. We're here to rotate diplomatic and military personnel to the Commonwealth's embassy and consulates on Earth. A military courier ship is usually used for that duty, but the CSF likes to use a warship once in a while if one is available. We have the right under the treaty with Earth, and it doesn't pay to not exercise those rights once in a while.

  "Our next stop is Sigurdsen Fleet Base on Jablonka, which is where you're headed.

  "The ship itself is in orbit just outside the station's orbit. It's orbiting in the other direction, so it comes around every thirteen and a half hours or so. She's just too big to dock to the station. Too much tension on the belt.

  "There's several hours before she comes back around and the shuttle can take us over, so the Aquitaine's executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Stewart, has invited you to have lunch with her. That's where I'm taking you now.

  "Any questions?"

  "Just short of a million, Sir, but we're good for the moment, I guess."

  Lopez grinned at her, and she grinned back, and then they were there.

  Lieutenant Commander Bo Stewart waited at a small carrel outside the restaurant, working on a portable VR rig that looked like a pair of dark glasses. Her hands typed on an invisible keyboard on the table in front of her. They approached and stood silently, waiting for her to acknowledge them, knowing the portable VR rig had a proximity sensor.