GALACTIC SURVEY (COLONY Book 3)

by Richard F. Weyand

  Huenemann turned to Borovsky, who looked pretty stunned with the idea of trying to schedule something like the design process he saw ahead of them. Huenemann chuckled and turned back to the new operations team.

  “Anyway, that’s the setup. And you guys will like working for ChaoLi. She’s no nonsense. Easy to get along with as long as stuff is getting done. And no internal politics at all. I think she’s allergic.”

  Huenemann shrugged.

  “But right now we need to look at org charts. We’re taking the design types with us, and we’re gonna end up with holes in both groups. We need to work up a needs list for the personnel people.”

  Gannet blinked at Huenemann’s ruthless dispatch, and Huenemann shrugged.

  “Hey, we got shit to do. Ain’t no sense taking forever to get going on it. Any staffing mistakes we make we can fix later.”

  Twenty-year-old Wayne Porter was one of several dozen people working on assembling the RDF deployment vehicles when he got a message that Friday saying he was being reassigned to a new team that was being put together in an office building downtown.

  Porter was working on a degree in industrial design downtown, so it would make it a lot easier for him to attend his evening art classes. This assembly job was just to support his family while he got through school. He knew there wouldn’t be any assembly work being done downtown, though, so he didn’t understand.

  Porter went to his immediate supervisor, Frank Takahashi, but he didn’t know anything about his new assignment.

  “I’m staying here, so I don’t have anything on the new group. Ask Jerry. I think he’s going downtown, too.”

  Jerry – Gerardo Perez – was a couple levels higher in the pecking order at the hyperspace facility, so Porter was a little shy about approaching him, but curiosity won out.

  “Hi, Jerry. Got a minute?”

  “Oh, hi, Wayne. Sure. Whatcha got?”

  “Well, I’m being reassigned downtown, and I don’t understand. Are we going to be doing assembly work downtown?”

  “No, the downtown group is a design group.”

  “A design group?” Porter asked.

  “Yeah. We’re going to be working on the new hyperspace vessel. The big ship all this has been aimed at.”

  “I don’t understand, then. What am I going to be doing?”

  “I’ve got the staff roster. Let me check.”

  Perez got the faraway look of someone consulting his heads-up display.

  “You’re listed downtown all right. But not for assembly work. You’re down for hull design. Staff designer.”

  “Staff designer?”

  “Yeah. Looks like they moved you to the professional staff. That moved you to a different salary structure. Nice increase on that assignment. About double. Congratulations.”

  “Uh, thanks.”

  “No problem, Wayne. See you downtown.”

  Porter wandered out of Perez’s office in a daze.

  But there were stars in his eyes.

  When Porter got home that evening, his wife was just going to start supper.

  “Denise, can your sister take Diana and Stevie tonight?”

  “Sure. I think so. What’s up?”

  “I got a big promotion. They’re starting a new design project, and they’ve put me on that project. Not for assembly, though. As a designer.”

  “That’s wonderful. Your first real job. You know, in your actual field.”

  “Yeah. So we’re going out to celebrate.”

  “Where?”

  “Someplace nice.”

  Porter thought about it.

  “Let’s go to Chen’s.”

  Once seated at their table, they were both looking around.

  “I’ve never been here before,” Denise said.

  “Me, either,” Porter said. “I’ve heard a lot about it, but it’s always been a little too pricey. Not tonight, though.”

  “It’s very nice.”

  They considered the menu and gave their order to the waiter. Once he left, Denise was puzzled.

  “But I don’t understand how you got a design position. You haven’t finished your degree yet. I mean, you’re close now, but how did they even know? Did you put in for it or something?”

  “No. I didn’t do anything. They do know what I’m up to with the degree, though, at least in personnel. The company is paying my tuition, remember? But I think it was something that happened a couple weeks ago.

  ”I was sketching during break. I was drawing space ships. I mean, that’s one of the constant topics of conversation on the project, and I’ve been playing around with designs for what everyone’s always talking about.

  “Mikhail Borovsky came out to the big assembly room. He’s one of the big shots, the project manager for everything. We see him all the time, coming out to review progress.

  “He sees me sketching, and looks over my shoulder as he walks past. He stopped and took a better look. ‘Nice,’ he said, then, ‘Do you mind?’ So I handed him my sketch pad, and he flipped through a bunch of pages. ‘This is good stuff.’

  “I told him they were just sketches. Anything serious I did in the full-up art package on the design machines downtown. He asked me to send him some of my work on those, and then was off, back onto what he was there for.”

  “So you sent him some of your work?” Denise asked.

  “Yeah, I sent him some of the full-up three-D stuff. I never heard anything back. But that must have been the impetus behind this.”

  “Well, however it happened, it’s wonderful. You can spend your time now doing what you love.”

  “It’s a miracle.”

  They were looking around while waiting for their food, when something caught Porter’s eye. He grabbed Denise’s forearm on the table.

  “Denise, do you see that big family table over in the corner?”

  “The one with that late-thirties couple and all their kids? Looks like seven kids. Maybe some in-laws there. Four of those look like two couples. And at least one of those two girls is pregnant.”

  “Yeah. Well, that woman is Chen ChaoLi. She’s the head of the whole hyperspace project. My boss’s boss’s boss’s boss or something.”

  “Wow,” Denise said. “She’s very pretty.”

  “And very powerful. She reports directly to both the Chen and the prime minister. And her husband? That’s Chen JieMin, the genius who came up with hyperspace in the first place.”

  “That’s him? The little guy next to her?”

  “Yeah,” Porter said. “Smartest person on Arcadia. No contest.”

  “What are they doing here?”

  “Maybe they’re celebrating, too. The hyperspace vessel project kicks off on Monday. That’s a big step for the whole project.”

  “And we’re celebrating right along with them,” Denise said. “Kind of, anyway. How nice.”

  What JieMin and ChaoLi were actually celebrating was finding Amber and Earthsea, an accomplishment that Bob Milbank would announce in a speech Monday night. That way he could also announce the start of the design work on the hyperspace vessel – which would begin Monday – as a fait accompli.

  They had told the girls, ChaoPing and LeiTao, now married adults at twenty and seventeen years old. ChaoPing had finished her business degree and started working in the family’s business office. She was about six months along on her first pregnancy now, having delayed children until she and JuMing finished their educations.

  LeiTao was also pregnant, just a few months along. She and DaGang had gotten married about six months back. She now managed one of the stalls in the Uptown Market, the huge galleria that was one of the family’s big moneymakers.

  The boys were just fourteen and ten, a bit young for such confidences. They just knew their parents had had some big success at work. They didn’t care what it was. A family party at the Chen family’s restaurant was a special treat. Not since the weddings had they all come here for dinner, and they were on their best behavior.

&n
bsp; Neither ChaoLi nor JieMin knew Wayne Porter or his circumstances, and they did not recognize him in the crowd at the restaurant this Friday night.

  They were too busy enjoying the celebration of the completion of such a major part of the project, and the beginning of the ultimate piece of the puzzle JieMin had set before Paul Chen-Jasic and Chen JuPing – the prior Chen Zufu and Chen Zumu – twenty-two years before with his first formalism of hyperspace.

  Between that and their growing family, they were suffused with happiness this special night, September twenty-eighth, 2367.

  ChaoLi and JieMin both expected that within three years, the first hyperspace trips to other human planets using the new hyperspace vessel, loaded with cargo and passengers, could begin.

  That year, 2370, would also be the one-hundred-twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the colonies.

  Getting Under Way

  Monday morning found Wayne Porter sitting in a small auditorium at the Chen’s downtown facility for Karl Huenemann’s kickoff talk. There were almost a hundred people there, some of whom Porter recognized. The others must have been located downtown all along.

  At the appointed meeting time, Huenemann got up on the stage in front and addressed the group.

  “Hi, everybody.

  “Some of you know what’s going on, at least a little bit. Some of you have no clue, you just showed up here because you were told to. So I’m going to tell you what’s going on.

  “Over the last two weeks, we found the colonies Amber and Earthsea. We know exactly where they are. There’s going to be a mission out there to confirm that and make sure we can safely be in contact with them. You know, that they’re not military dictatorships or something that could make them less than good people to be involved with.

  “That’s confidential until tonight, by the way, when the prime minister will tell all Arcadia.

  “So that changes some things, which is why you’re here. On that note, I have good news and bad news.

  “Bad news first. The other group – all those guys out at the hyperspace facility – are going to be sending the missions to Amber and Earthsea to check them out. They’re going to be sending out a couple dozen RDF satellites to try and find more colonies, and then checking them out. They got all the playtoys out there, and they’re going to be using ‘em pretty constant over the next couple years.

  “We don’t get any of the playtoys.

  “That’s the bad news.

  “The good news is that, once we check out Amber and Earthsea, we’re gonna go there. We’re gonna have passenger service back and forth. We’re gonna have imports and exports back and forth. We’ll probably be shipping them tea, and God only knows what we’ll be bringing back. We’re gonna start doing that in three years or so.

  “So that’ll be something, right?

  “Except some of you are thinking, How’re we gonna do that? In those little hyperspace ships? Six weeks each way in zero gravity for what? Like four people?

  “Nope. We’re gonna go there in big hyperspace vessels. Huge ships that can carry passengers and cargo, and that spin so they have internal gravity on the way.

  “But we don’t have such ships, you say? That’s right. We don’t. We need to design ‘em. And that’s what we’re going to be doing here. Designing spaceships.

  “Now if that didn’t make your little heart go pitter-patter, you just might be on the wrong project.”

  Everybody laughed. Huenemann was in his element, and he had them all in his pocket. Then he shocked Porter, who did not know Huenemann had seen his renderings.

  “Wayne Porter there’s put some concepts together. In his spare time while he was out in the assembly room boltin’ shit together, believe it or not. Personally, I like this one.”

  Huenemann waved at the display behind him, and one of Porter’s three-dimensional renderings popped up in the display volume, the huge truncated-pipe version of the hyperspace vessel, rotating against the star field. It was three-dimensional and photo-realistic, a professional rendering, and there were oohs and aahs in the crowd when they saw it.

  “Nice job, Wayne,” Huenemann said, pointed at him, and clapped.

  Everyone else clapped, too, and Porter blushed as most of the people there turned to look at him. He waved once, quickly, and mumbled, ‘Thank you.’ The clapping died down and people turned back to Huenemann.

  “Like I say, I like this one. But there may be a better version. That’s up to us to figure out. Design them, engineer them, and then, my friends, we are damn well going to build them.

  “And Arcadia will space to the stars in them.”

  After the kickoff meeting, Wayne Porter checked his heads-up display to see if he had his office assignment yet. He did, so he consulted the building plan and headed to the indicated room.

  Not only did Porter have a private office, but his office had a gigantic three-dimensional display that took up the whole far end of the room. He didn’t know it, but he had the same setup as JieMin had in his office in the university’s science building.

  Porter pulled up one of his renderings, the one Huenemann had shown during the kickoff meeting. It leapt into life in front of him with such clarity and size it left him gasping.

  This was much better than the student displays he had been using.

  Karl Huenemann had said the people in the hyperspace facility out at the Arcadia City Shuttleport had all the playtoys, but Wayne Porter had the only playtoy he cared about, right here in his office.

  Ideas had been popping into Porter’s head all weekend.

  He sat down and started to draw.

  They also had a kickoff meeting out at the hyperspace facility. John Gannet addressed his new organization the same time Karl Huenemann addressed his.

  “Good morning, everyone.

  “The hyperspace facility – what will be called the Operations Group going forward – reports to me now. You’ll find I may be a little less colorful than Mr. Huenemann, but competent nonetheless.”

  There were some chuckles at that. Karl Huenemann was notorious.

  “Chris Bellamy will be our project manager. I think you’ll find she’s just as meticulous as Mr. Borovsky when it comes to project milestones and costs.”

  That got groans. Borovsky had his own form of notoriety.

  “Now they get to do all the blue-sky stuff downtown, but we have all the playtoys, as Karl would say, and the real blue sky – in terms of actually going up into the sky – is here. When a bird leaves this planet, it’s ours.

  “Our plan is as it was. One order of business is to turn these ships–“ He gestured over his shoulder in the direction of the hyperspace ships on their pads outside. “– and get them on their way to Amber and Earthsea. As you know, and as the prime minister will tell all Arcadia tonight, we now know exactly where they are.

  “What we don’t know is whether the natives are friendly, so we’ll be sending those ships out to find out what they can in a high-speed flyby of the planets. We should have those mission profiles soon.

  “For the RDF satellites and their deployment vehicles, we have a similar mission. Get them ready and send them out to find some other colonies. Those need to be lifted and then assembled in space, but we need cargo shuttles to do that.

  “First order of business then is to get all those non-lift vehicles into orbit and assembled. We have three lift platforms available for that, the large space-capable cargo shuttle and the two hyperspace ships.

  “Only once that’s done do we get the hyperspace ships on the way to Amber and Earthsea. And after that, we get the deployment vehicles on their way.

  “Things will get real quiet here for a while after that, until we start getting results back, so we’re going to start working on figuring out what we need to service whatever kind of hyperspace vessel the downtown desk jockeys come up with.

  “We need to work up a terminal plan for here, plan what kind of passenger and cargo shuttles we need to get everything up there to
where those ships will live, all that stuff. There’ll be plenty to do, and we need to have that ready for when the first hyperspace vessel comes on line.

  “When results do come in, we’re going to have to turn vehicles and get them ready for more of the same.

  “That’s what we’re going to be about. Plenty of work, and we have all the playtoys.

  “Sounds like fun to me.”

  In a live speech on Monday night, Prime Minister Rob Milbank announced the finding of Amber and Earthsea.

  “My fellow Arcadians.

  “You all know that we have been pursuing the dream of space travel for a number of years and have had our minor successes. We have transferred a spacecraft into hyperspace and back, and have even had that spacecraft travel to Beacon and back.

  “More recently, we have had our two intrepid explorers, Justin Moore and Gavin McKay, travel to Beacon and back. We believe these are the first humans anywhere to travel through hyperspace.

  “Tonight I want to announce one more success. Unmanned reconnaissance craft have traveled through hyperspace to far distant locations and used radio detection to find two other human colonies that were planted, like us, a hundred and twenty-two years ago.

  “We now know where Amber and Earthsea are. Soon, we will send hyperspace craft to those colony planets to determine what sort of people they are, if they have the sort of culture and government that would make them good trading partners and friends.

  “I’m sure we have things we can sell or trade to them, things we can teach them, benefits they can accrue from such a friendship. And the same goes for us. What do they have that we don’t? What can they teach us? What benefits can we gain from such a friendship?

  “We will also soon be sending out other reconnaissance craft to look for the other twenty-one human colonies we know exist. We have the capability now, thanks to our years of effort.

  “We are on the verge of an exciting era, an era of human interstellar civilization. I will keep you informed of our progress as we carry on into this bright future.