181: RETRIEVAL

<<First ………. <Prev ………. [Archive] ………. Next> ………. Last>>

“Retrieval pod to ascent pod. Come in, ascent pod.”

Captain Klees pulls himself out of his half-doze and reaches for the controls. “This is ascent pod, we hear you. Over.”

“This is Gavi Sloap, piloting the retrieval pod. It’s an honour to be speaking with you, Captain Klees. I’ve got a crew of two with me and we’re nearing your location. You should be able to see us on your instruments. Over.”

“Great to meet you, Gavi. We see you approaching. Over.”

“Brace for docking in approximately three minutes. Over.”

Captain Klees acknowledges the heads-up and we all start checking our restraints, as if the mild jostling of a pod docking with ours is going to be anything compared to the rocky ascent. I’ve lost track of the amount of time we’ve been floating in orbit, awaiting retrieval, and I just want all of this to be over. I want to see the ship again. I want to see my friends. I want to go to bed – I’m on a Hylaran sleep schedule, I should have been asleep hours ago.

We have no visuals on the approaching pod, but I know what it’s made of and what it probably looks like. A supply drop pod with some small engines bolted on it, engines stolen from the ship’s rotational systems. Like we were at launch, they’re probably comprised mostly of fuel tanks, although they’d need significantly less fuel than we did. We’re notified of the commencement of docking, and I imagine its four long docking arms reaching out towards us like a blossom-spider reaching for its prey, grabbing our sides – there’s the shake of the arms connecting – and pulling us in, drawing us toward its airlock (although given our reasonably similar mass, it’s pulling both of us toward each other, I suppose).

The ships meet with a vicious jolt that makes my neck muscles scream, and their docking seals, specifically designed to marry to the edges of our docking-equipment-free airlock, start to do so, and at this point my heart begins to stutter, because this is it – if there are any secondary destruction attempts, any sneaky little backup bombs that the Antarcticans sent us and we couldn’t find, this is when they’d activate, right here, when the shuttle airlock seals to an external airlock and the air pressures equalise; the signs that we have, with or without docking arms, docked. If there’s anything else in there that they tricked us into constructing, anything they snuck in as a backup in case the bomb in the docking arms didn’t work, this is when it would activate, destroying both pods and probably killing all of us before we had time to realise that anything had happened.

But it doesn’t. The airlocks seal together, equalise pressure, open. We’re given the all-clear to unbuckle, and slowly, stiffly, wary of out various injuries, the five of us float from one vehicle to the next.

The crew of the retrieval pod are Gavi Sloan, of course, Xanthe, who I know, and someone called Tacha, who I don’t. Xanthe helps us buckle in to new seats while the other two start retrieving equipment from the ascent pod and packing it into the retrieval pod. In the future, I imagine, a lot of this process will be avoided, and the shuttles can just be towed to the Courageous or, preferably, dock with them directly, but for now we don’t want to take any risks with potential sabotage of the shuttle.

Then it’s a simple trip back to the Courageous, and even without any visuals on the ship, it’s immediately obvious that it’s been heavily modified. Gavi talks to Sam over the radio and confirms approach to Pod Launch Ring 1. The way the pod launch rings are designed is for drop pods to be loaded into a drop bay, then the entire ring put under vacuum, then the bay to open to drop the pod. But it seems that at least one drop bay has been modified with its own external ship bay and airlock system, because we dock directly with the ship and can climb up into Pod Launch Ring 1 without any need to move through vacuum.

Lina and Earl are waiting for us, surrounded by a small flock of whom I assume to be more doctors, ready to load us straight onto stretchers and take us to a medbay for assessment, but the only person to immediately submit to this is Dandelion. Plenty of other people are waiting in the ring for us, and as we pull helmets off and rush forward to greet them, the doctors don’t have a chance of coralling us. Captain Klees talks excitedly and quietly to Captain Kae Jin, who looks more drawn than I last saw her, still in a wheelchair and still with an oxygen mask, but still alive. Tal rushes over to bump the palm of kes still-gloved hand against Asteria’s hand, and tap kes knuckles to Sam’s. Tinera wraps her arms around Denish, who handles her very gently, wary of potential injuries, and runs his fingers over the shell of her healed ear with some concern. There are so many old crewmates I want to catch up with, but the first thing I do is take off a glove, retrieve a small item, and find Note Waveskimmer.

I press the gold ring into their palm. “I hope I have achieved your task to your satisfaction, cousin.”

“To greater satisfaction than anybody could have hoped,” they murmur, reaching for my hair. “But you haven’t finished yet, have you? I hear you’ve decided to steward our ship for the foreseeable future.”

“Somebody has to.”

They tie the ring into my hair. “Traditionally, you should cast this ring yourself, but I suppose that will have to wait.” They eye one of the packed-up machines being lifted out of the retrieval pod. “Perhaps it’ll be a good test case for these remarkable new metal printers you’ve brought.”

Our existing metal printers can already handle a simple gold ring, but I don’t say so. “I won’t be able to wear this in the chronostasis tank.”

“When the time comes, I’ll carry the weight of the ring for you. Welcome home, my sibling.”

I’m able to get in a quick hello with Denish and Sam before Lina gently but firmly guides me away to a medbay and a small fleet of doctors start prodding me and scanning me. The ship’s medical facilities have expanded significantly since I was last on board, and I get a private little area to myself while all of this is going on, with absolutely no visitors allowed. Then, suddenly, it’s quiet, and I’m left alone, waiting for test results to come back. And, finally, I can sleep.

When I wake up, I’m informed that the bones and nerves in my neck are fine but there’s been some pretty severe muscle spraining, and fitted with a neck brace. I’m given some medication for some minor internal damage that I don’t bother to pay much attention to beyond learning that it won’t require surgery, and I’m allowed up and out of the medbay. It’s time to tour the ship.

Well, no, it’s time to take a shower, because sitting in a space suit for a full day leaves you feeling really sweaty and gross. After that, it’s time to tour the ship.

When we were on the ship, we always treated it as a sort of borrowed space. The purpose of various rings was largely adhered to, things weren’t interfered with unless it was necessary to solve some problem. The previous crews had done the same, with the most deliberate impact being a lit of paint and the construction of some new furniture.

That, it seems, is no longer the prevailing mood. The modern residents of the Courageous have taken full control of the layout of the ship as their own space. It’s a space that’s going to have to house a much larger population than it was designed for, and there’s no consideration given to the vision of the original designers in making that happen. Now that all materials are precious, the original idea of simply ditching any rings with problems into space is no longer an option, so there’s no need to keep them so segmented; huge holes have been cut into the walls of the rings to enable movement throughout the ship and prevent choke points at the four little airlocks. The airlocks themselves have had smaller airtight rooms attached to them, ready to act as emergency shelters in a decompression event but otherwise sit largely unused. Every five or six rings a wall sits untouched, the airlocks the only method of moving between them; a safety measure to ensure that part of the ship can still be temporarily sealed off in the event of a hull breach, dividing the ship into four sections. Effort has been made to cut down on vital traffic between the sections by making sure that most things that require regular access are available in each section, but beyond that consideration, very little specialisation per ring is in evidence. Residential areas have been built in most rings, forming a sort of line along one side of the cylindrical ship moving from front to back, of bedrooms stacked on top of each other several levels high to make best use of the space, regularly interrupted by shower and toilet blocks. Some genius has sized them so that there’s just enough room to walk about on the tops, letting them double as scaffolding for engineers needing to work on the air vents or monitoring equipment above, or climb into the Tube. Algal tanks sit throughout the ship, clustered into little food production areas that I assume will become the domains of different agriculture teams that live nearby when the ship is fully populated; huge fish tanks full of edible fish sit next to them, aerated through pipes and valves designed to shut off when they make contact with water to prevent a mess of green goo and dead fish if we happen to lose ‘gravity’. Hydroponics are surprisingly hard to waterproof against gravity mishaps (the plants need to cross the water/air barrier, which means that you can’t really seal the water off), but perhaps in a nod do the concept of variety, some minimal hydroponics are set up here and there as well.

Four new greenhouse rings have been created from storage rings, for a total of six, and there’s talk of creating more. The goods in the storage rings have been stored elsewhere around the ship, mostly in chronostasis rings and network and engineering rings, where the space-wasteful terminals in their cubicles have been taken down. I imagine that there will be a high demand for access to computer terminals when the ship is full, especially if we have more people like Tal and Asteria in chronostasis, but having entire rings for them does seem like a ridiculous waste of space if we want to maximise the ship’s capacity. As well as storage, the engineering and chronostasis rings are used for work and manufacturing and even, to my surprise, socialising and recreation. I don’t think any of us old crew will feel ever feel entirely normal about the chronostasis pods, but the newer residents don’t seem to see anything morbid in them. They’re just sleeping people, after all; people we’re building a home for.

The awake population of the Courageous sits at just under seventy people for the moment, but there’s space for so many more. Up in the ship, it’s easy to believe that this place can indeed support two thousand colonists. And, in the future, their children.

Pod Launch Ring 2 is one of the few rings left completely unaltered, set aside solely for its original purpose of dropping people and supplies to the colony below. Pod Launch Rings 1 and 3 do have some changes. There’s the miniature docking bay in PLR1, of course, there the retrieval pod is docked, and a similar docking bay built on a launch bay in PLR3, where a second drop pod is being converted into another tiny spacecraft. But a second bay in PLR3 sits open to reveal another pressurised addition; a tiny room with walls of glass.

“You like it?” Denish asks, coming up behind me.

“Is it safe?”

“It wouldn’t be if we were going to move near lightspeed, but now, yes. You want to see?” He drops down into the room and helps me down the ladder, wary of my braced neck and shoulders.

I’ve been through too many engineering disasters to be immediately swept away by the view. Despite our head engineer’s assurances, I look at the metal floor, the transparent walls, the upper edges securely attached to the hull of the ship around the open bay above. The walls aren’t true glass, of course, but a synthetic built to withstand high pressure and block dangerous radiation; I’ve done enough engineering by now to know that one layer of the stuff is sufficient, but these walls have three, and little monitors attach to them read air pressures between them that decrease going outward, minimising the pressure on any one sheet. It seems that Denish, with good reason, is as safety-conscious as me about building things like this.

Only once I’m satisfied in the room’s ability to hold pressure do I glance at the comfortable-looking benches, where people can sit and relax down here. And the big planters that seem to be part of the floor itself and hold ferns and flowers, a reckless luxury in a place where almost every other plant I’ve seen either produces food or supports the growth of plants that produce food.

And the stars.

A spacesuit helmet doesn’t give you this expansive field of view. A camera doesn’t give you this sense of actual presence. The Hylaran sky doesn’t give much at all most of the time, where clouds block the sky; only rare glimpses of this sight on rare, clear nights.

But there they are, right there, and I can turn all the way around and see that we’re in space. And see Hylara itself, a view I’ve only seen through a camera before now, right there. I was down there, not so long ago. And it’s right there in front of me, on the other side of a window.

I’m crying. Of course I’m crying. Wary of my shoulders, Denish instead pats my elbow.

“We thought,” he says, “it will be good for psychology. Yes?” He brushes a hand over the ferns. “Where we came from.” He gestures to the ship above. “And where we are.” With one expansive sweep of his large hand, he indicates the stars ahead. “And where we go now. We will need to make bigger rooms for this in the future, but this is a start. It is something that we must have.”

I nod, distracted. Now that he’s drawn my attention to the ship, I can see that the outside of it is also undergoing changes. The robots are up and working, of course, with the chronostatic shields down and very likely never going up again. Several of the rotational engines, the ones that keep our ‘gravity’ stable, have been replaced by different engines; I assume ones that use a propellant that’s easier to harvest from space. Far, far down the other end of the ship, I can make out the bones of what I assume will become another room like this one, and I have a sudden fanciful vision of them both expanding year by year, growing towards each other under the careful hands of engineers like ivy snaking up an old tree, until they meet in the middle and create a walkway from one end of the ship to the other. Expanding sideways, maybe, to become a living space of their own; maybe branching off into networks of passages all around the ship, maybe those tunnels expanding and merging and encompassing the whole ship until it’s just a new layer of ship to live on, so that new viewing rooms need to be built beneath. Is that even doable? Is it even desirable? There’s a limit to how much we can build up or down before the gravity difference becomes a problem.

Questions for future generations, I think. If we make this place a secure enough starting point, those future generations will get to ask them.

“It’s beautiful,” I tell Denish. “It’s all beautiful.”

He shoots me one of his classic jovial grins. “It will be.”

<<First ………. <Prev ………. [Archive] ………. Next> ………. Last>>