by Scott Rhine
“Inside?”
“The interior of this vessel is two kilometers across. Zeiss’ doctoral thesis explained how windows let sunlight in to feed the plants. It’s all been guesswork till now. I only found out bits and pieces when I needed to change the shuttle design.”
“Why didn’t anyone see this biosphere from outside?”
“In traditional gravity theory, Einstein demonstrated how a heavy object like a bowling ball would bend a rubber sheet downward, causing smaller objects to roll toward it.”
“I’ve seen the cartoon a few times.”
“Yeah. Alien mathematics showed that entire realms exist under this metaphorical sheet: faster-than-light travel, pocket dimensions, and all manner of law-bending are possible in this realm.”
Yuki’s eyes were still glazed and confused.
Mercy sighed. “In his paper, Z compared this ship to a bathysphere . . . a submarine, with only the hatch sticking up over the waves. His equations—”
Her companion held up a hand. “Let me just enjoy the greenery.” When she could drag her eyes away from the vista, she asked, “Are we near the neck of the balloon or the center?”
“I’m not sure. Since we have life support, maybe this saucer can move. I think gravity is relative to the inside skin of the balloon.”
“Centrifugal force in a spinning cylinder is more likely. Perhaps they put the mountain at the opposite end because it’s part of the spindle we’re rotating around.”
“Yuki, you don’t know me. Because of my talents, I can see Icarus fields and gravity generators like heat shimmers on the highway. There are hundreds of them just below the ground here.”
“We thought our propulsion system was advanced because we had four fields. How fast could this sphere go?”
“I don’t know. Red knows the math better than anyone, but the fields are more than propulsion. I’m pretty sure that the interconnected fields actually form the bubble we’re living in.”
“So if we accidentally break one of them or turn it off?”
“That would be a bad thing.”
“Hmph. Let’s not touch the controls yet. We can explore the other rooms connected to this one. I’m sure the luggage room and closets won’t end life as we know it.”
“Probably not,” Mercy agreed.
****
Each of the small ovals doors led to empty, pillow-shaped rooms with microgravity. Only one of them had storage compartments and access to water. Yuki deduced, “This must be the dining hall.” Each room had a band of short, oval, frosted windows at waist level to let in light. “You were right when you compared this place to a submarine. Are the other five bedrooms?”
“They could be labs, food storage, or whatever else we want to use them for,” Mercy replied. Tapping above changed a window from translucent to clear. The same action below a window turned it opaque.
“That sleeps five couples. Where do the rest of us stay?” Yuki asked.
“Couples. Yeah. Who can keep track of all that?”
“The Zeiss and Herkemer families are obvious. Auckland and the economist Pratibha are engaged, and the life-support folks are exclusive.”
“My God, the food man is hairy,” Mercy exclaimed. “His eyebrows, back, and arm hair make him look like a Muppet. What could she see in him?”
“Hair isn’t always bad. Besides, Johnny makes German-chocolate-flavored soft pretzels. I think Rachael’s addicted.”
“Wow. You’re good with people.”
“I listen. Nadia is the only woman Park talks to, and Crandall is gone.”
“That leaves Sojiro, Toby, and the dumb blond to spread around four single girls.”
“Um . . . Sojiro is gay, so just two guys. You don’t like Lou?”
“He can’t even do square roots in his head.”
“Not every genius is hard science. How many languages do you speak?”
“English and enough German to read technical papers.” Mercy didn’t count Portuguese.
“Lou speaks seven languages, and I hear he’s very clever with his tongue.”
“What good is that?”
“Piloting is his passion, but he makes most of his salary reading foreign newspapers for British Military Intelligence and doing analysis. Sometimes he just talks to people in bars, and they tell him things we need to know.”
“Well, even if he’s James Bond, he’s dating someone earthside.”
Yuki smiled enigmatically. “I know his type. If this takes more than a week, or we’re all going to die in a disaster, he’ll sleep with someone here.”
“Ew. You’re welcome to him. From what I’ve heard, he’s probably carrying a few strains of VD.”
“Not after our alien scrub-down. You and I are kind of outsiders in this club; we should stick together. Tell you what: I’ll stay clear of Toby so you can rope him in.”
“How can you stand to be near Lou after the way he treated you? He’s not what I’d call Mr. Right.”
“Sometimes all you need is Mr. Right Now,” Yuki asserted.
Mercy blushed. “Maybe one of the big doors leads to a second level.”
Yuki shook her head. “There were enough straps for almost thirty people, but the decontamination room had eighty-one pods. I’m guessing that the aliens don’t want all of us to stay in the command center.”
“Maybe. I know that the hardest part of designing spacecraft for me, other than minimizing weight, is packing enough food and water for everyone for the month.”
Yuki glanced out the clear window. “So everyone not on duty goes camping in the woods? Add that to our list of questions for the alien.”
The two approached the larger of the two gold doors. Nothing happened when they touched it with their bare hands. After five minutes of talking and searching for other triggers, Yuki raised her hands in surrender. “No admittance. Is this the forbidden tree in Paradise? Or do you think this Sensei is hiding in there?”
Mercy shrugged. “Could be the luggage claim.”
“Why is it that the alien only talks to Red?”
“The alien talked to both her parents. Mira’s special.”
“You grew up with her. You must know something.”
Mercy bounced to the far side, the final door. A triple-touch caused the rectangular door to fold lensward, letting in bright light and a gentle breeze. Beyond the door was an arc of patio about five meters deep, made of pale-blue tiles. The tiles were proportioned like dominoes a meter long. No, narrower at one end; they resemble daisy petals. Except for a narrow band on each side of the windows around the rim, the outside of the ship was plastered with the tiles as well. The same tiles were also used to fashion a picket fence and a pergola overhead. However, there was a slight gap in the fence near both the left and right edges of the patio.
Both women stepped outside to take a better look.
“This walkway circles the whole ship like a boardwalk,” Mercy announced.
Her Asian companion strode to the edge of the patio. “The mountain has a stream cascading down the side.”
Mercy stood on the same plank to gaze at the scenery. “It’s gorgeous.”
“That looks like a road winding down beside the waterfall.”
As she glanced down, Mercy noticed a round spot on the top of the nearest rail that was a slightly different color. Squeezing from both sides, she pressed it like a button. The rail went dark and came out of the formation like a pulled tooth. “This is amazing. Antigravity planks. I can turn them off.”
One set of giant space windows closed and the next opened, and the resulting temperature shift caused a surge in the wind. In the weak gravity, the breeze pushed Mercy toward the gap, paralyzed in panic.
Yuki grabbed the engineer’s sticky belt with both hands and planted her feet against the rails to either side, anchoring them both. “Turn. It. Back. On.”
Mercy clicked the spot on her plank again, and the device rang with a vibration similar to a tuning fork. This locked the rail in pl
ace half a meter higher than it had been before. “Good idea.” She stepped away from the edge, and the pair retreated to the safety of the control room archway. “That’s twice you’ve saved me with your athletic skills.”
“It was nothing.”
The engineer raised an eyebrow in reply.
“I’ve had some acrobatics experience when I was younger: tumbling, circus trapeze, and rope work. Zero-g seemed to be a natural extension.”
“You’re good.”
“Please don’t tell anyone.”
“Why not?”
“Men line up when they hear about that kind of flexibility. Women automatically hate me. I don’t need to give them any more reasons.”
“Sure. How much more time do we have?”
Blinking again, Yuki said, “About an hour.”
“Should I experiment more with the planks?”
“No. Let’s get a look at the entire ship before we destroy it. Are these really antigravity devices?”
“They behave more like levitating superconductors with quantum-position locking.”
“Levitating? You’re just making this stuff up.”
“No. I’d never BS you. Superconductors can float in one spot or hover around a circular track. They can lift up thousands of times their own weight. Sonrisa could tell you. Our labs are still perfecting them because they require extreme cold and purity of materials.”
They skirted the saucer. At the widest, it was about twenty-five meters.
“How many hectares of surface area does this bubble have?” Yuki asked.
“About 1,256—six times the land area of Monaco, but about a fifth the size of Manhattan. I’m not sure if the surface directly lensward from here is usable. When I was recovering from my fall, all I could see was fog.”
“Back up. Why would you know the land area of those cities?”
“A theoretical project I consulted on, to see if we could boost whole existing cities into orbit with Icarus technology.”
“Did Red come up with that one, too?”
“No, James Blish did. He’s a science-fiction author—you’d know him as one of the writers for the original Star Trek.”
“Never watched it. How did the experiment work?”
“Not structurally feasible, especially the plastic pipes—too brittle and temperature sensitive. Plus, the sustainability equations break down when we have over a few thousand people per bubble.”
“Did you grow up in a lab or something?”
“Whenever I could. Not only did Dad have the best toys, but it was the only way I could spend time with either one of my parents during the summer. Did you grow up in a circus?”
“They took me as an apprentice. I worked very long hours.”
“Sounds difficult.”
“When you’re really poor, you need to be the best at something to survive. My father became a barker; he would gather the crowds and collect their money. I eventually achieved my dream of having my name on the marquee.”
“Why did you quit?”
“I’m small because I didn’t get enough to eat growing up. Mori-san gave me a scholarship to the best schools. Today, my hazard pay is enough to support my entire family.”
When they reached the far side of the ship, the windows to the forbidden room were opaque, and the window setting couldn’t be changed from the outside. Mercy noted, “There are no other entrances to the room we want, but I can tell that the saucer is attached near the neck of the balloon.”
“How did you know where to press on that device?” Yuki asked. “The planks are all the same shade of pale gray to me.”
“I can distinguish a wider range of blues than other people, nothing major.”
Yuki didn’t believe her either. “Give me a boost. I’ll climb onto the pergola roof and see if there are any doors or other clues up above.”
“That’s too dangerous.”
“I’m not afraid of a fall.”
“If there’s no gravity in the middle of the sphere, you could get stuck there. We don’t have a kilometer-long rope or a way to catch you. You’d starve to death. Worse, there might not be air beyond the grav zones.”
“There has to be a way we can make exploration safer. Come on.”
Mercy considered the challenge. “If I were designing these panels, there’d be a remote control. I could turn the pergola planks sideways and you could walk on them like this deck. You could climb up there if I make some planks into steps. We can string extra straps to make the ascent easier.”
They continued around the ship as Mercy mused about other shapes she’d make with the dominoes. “The possibilities are limitless as long as we stay within a certain distance of the saucer. The five-meter-thick umbilical that links us to the ground looks like the same material as the saucer. Maybe the dominoes will hover around that, too. There are about two thousand panels from what I can see. If I were a betting woman, I’d say 2,187 because it’s the nearest power of three.”
“A control panel like you’re describing might also appear in colors that only you can see.”
“Stands to reason.”
“Let’s poke around and see if we can locate something like that.”
There were no invisible blue markings, and nothing turned on when they tapped around all sides of the big door between the command center and the patio. Instead, Mercy had to arrange the dominoes manually. When set, each held more than 130 kilograms, the weight of both women plus another board.
“You over-engineered the steps a bit,” Yuki complained.
“Your safety is worth a little extra effort.”
“Apart from building a stair you could march a blind elephant up, you’ve only flipped about twenty meters of roof planks. The next decontaminees should be arriving in five minutes.”
“Shoot, we need to be there to help!” Mercy said, rushing down her staircase into the control area.
Yuki leaned over the edge to shout, “I’ll be down in a minute. I want to make a little more progress.”
Auckland arrived a few minutes early, and Mercy was up to her elbows in goop. When she called for her fellow scout over the radio, Yuki’s response was, “Busy. Later.”
Chapter 8 – Defining the Problem
Yuki honestly liked Mercy, but she had work to do. Once Mercy was preoccupied, the technician’s first order of business was to plant a listening dot in each room of the ship, plus the patio—that was all but one of the twelve miniature devices she’d brought with her. What she wouldn’t give for the cameras she had hidden in the rest of her gear.
Tuning her headset to the first bug, she could hear the first person was done coughing up a lung and could croak questions—Auckland. Since the doctor would need to help with the others, and the bug would give her advance warning about people leaving the showers, Yuki decided to make a quick run around outside on top of the pergola level. When that failed to turn up anything, she wrapped sticky strips up to her elbows and knees and strung together a safety line about six meters long to attach to her waist. Then she went climbing in ways that mousy Mercy would never approve, which is why she had to do it before they could stop her.
While leaning over the edge, Yuki had an idea. What if the locked room had an access hatch outside? Such a hatch would be hidden from view by the gray panels. Whenever Mercy had asked for another panel, Yuki had deactivated the panels around the forbidden room and carried them to the engineer by the armload. Nothing appeared above the boardwalk, but she still needed to check below.
Yuki started the covert operation by closing the large, golden entrance. Nothing was audible or visible through this barrier. Free-climbing to the area beneath her target, she removed tiles in a diagonal swath. Locating the off switch was tricky, and when the tile she was clinging to disengaged, she swung completely upside-down, hanging by her ankles and knees. It was in this awkward position that Mercy contacted her.
“Busy. Later,” was all Yuki could squeeze out.
She had to strap
each plank to her back and carry them back to the boardwalk one at a time, worrying that the activation tone might give her away. On her third attempt, she found the seam. Panicked by her success, she covered the crack back up, as well as the other holes. Pressing a plank into a snug slot against the hull muffled the activation sound enough that she grew bolder. Removing and replacing tiles one at a time, she followed the seam around. The hatch took up most of the room’s underside, almost like a landing ramp she’d seen on military craft.
What else were the aliens hiding? She needed to give Mori an edge when the crew returned to Earth. From her bug, she discovered that Commander Zeiss was the next person out of the soup, but he wasn’t talking. Something had happened to him that Auckland was refusing to discuss yet. He muttered something like, “Maybe the mu shielding will help him. People will be arriving at about four-minute intervals over the next hour.”
“It takes about ten minutes to shake off the effects enough to clean on your own,” Mercy noted.
“Once we have five more recovered team members, one per tube, you can go after Yuki. She’s obviously not hurt.”
That gave Yuki another twenty minutes of freedom, maybe more if Zeiss didn’t snap out of it. She climbed to the top of the saucer, near the five-meter-wide umbilical where the tiles stopped. She couldn’t decipher how the ship was coupled, but the tube was piping something to the saucer—air? Water? Certainly the pods were transferred from the lens area through this conduit. If the showers occupied the center, there was still a great deal of dead space on this level unaccounted for.
When she stretched her hand out to touch the umbilical, static crackled and stung her fingers. More miniature lightning cascaded lensward, glowing through the fog. No further probes in that direction.
She needed to crab-walk over to the region of the shower area they couldn’t access, which was coincidentally the same spot as the dining commons. Unfortunately, the desired region was just beyond the reach of her tether. Yuki could descend, move the safety line, and reascend . . . or she could risk it for a few minutes. Time was short, so she peeled off her leash and scrambled over to the target. This was no riskier than running a roofline during a burglary.
