33: Stalwart

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The next ship on our itinerary was the Stalwart. I’d looked it up before our journey, and it was quite strange. It had normal inertial pull, like the Courageous and the Arborea (phew), so you’d think it would be a nice sensible ring shape, or maybe several rings, but nope. The people who had built the Stalwart had declared a ring shape to be “an unconscionable waste of materials and mass, given the feeble internal volume” and instead decided to build something ridiculous.

The stalwart was two spheres, connected together by tethers. They spun around each other to maintain inertial pull. You could take elevators along the cables between the spheres, but you couldn’t walk around the whole ship; it was more like two ships tied together. There wasn’t even a central spoke for engineering stuff and a treegrave, meaning theirs must be in one of the spheres. Under inertial pull.

Which wasn’t totally ridiculous, I mean the Arborea’s treegrave was also under inertial pull (some weird cultural thing about how it had to be below the roots of their floating forests, for some reason), but at least their ship was a sensible shape and they chose to do that. The stalwart had no zero-pull areas at all, except for some very small chambers tied along their cables for experiments.

The Stalwart wasn’t a very important ship. It was only two colonies old, and it didn’t do anything important for any of the major ships and hadn’t contributed anything super special to any colony (which made sense, given how young it was). The most interesting thing about it was that it had nearly died a colony and a half ago, which wasn’t totally surprising for a new ship – in fact it was kind of impressive that it had solved its own problems (some kind of internal coup or civil war or some meaningless thing like that) without needing an older ship to rescue it. Still, that’s a pretty embarrassing thing to be what your ship is known for, and it wasn’t surprising that they were working really hard on something that they were hoping would be super important for the Dragonseye colony. Some kind of new plant that they were working on with Arborea.

Personally, I hoped that they wouldn’t want to show it off to us; I’d had quite enough of plants.

We docked and walked in through the only docking port in a very small docking bay. The docking bay had all the things you’d expect – temporary storage for cargo, emergency supplies and systems, a couple of space suits… someone watching us.

I mean, obviously the chubby bald man in a pale green jumpsuit strolling over to welcome us to the ship was watching us. And probably the treegrave, and maybe some security people over a camera feed, depending on how much the Stalwart worried about dock security. All of that was a good thing; being unwatched meant being unsafe, because if you got into trouble then there was nobody to help. What I was worried about was the pair of eyes staring at me through an air vent in the wall.

I stared back. They stared harder.

I was being silly, I told myself. The air vent was too small for a person to fit inside, and who would want to hide in an air vent anyway? It was probably just some kind of electronic equipment I didn’t recognise, with lights or shiny dials or something that looked a bit like eyes. There was something wrong with the shape of the eyes, anyway. Maybe it was something that monitored air quality or temperature or something.

The eyes blinked at me, then stared some more.

I opened my mouth to point them out, but there was movement in the vent, and they were gone.

“Welcome,” the man was saying to Tima in a big, booming voice, “to the Stalwart! I understand that you’re interested in our work for the Dragonseye colony.”

“We’re not involved in the colony development,” Tima said, “but we are very interested in the historical basis of the technology you’re using.”

“Ah, fellow fans of botany! You must have had an excellent time aboard the Courageous.”

“Well, it’s not really the plants that we – ”

“And you’ll have an even better time here!” He clapped Tima on the back. “I’m Fari, by the way.”

“Tima. This is Plia and Hali. And this is Taya.”

“Taya!” he said in that tone that people use with kids. “Are you excited for the Dragonseye?”

I shrugged.

“Ha, it seems like it’s forever away, right? Why be excited for something that won’t start for years and years? But, there’s a lot of work to do before we reach orbit.” He dusted his hands together. “Let me show you to your rooms.”

He lead us into a hallway that was really narrow, so narrow that the three historians and I could barely walk side by side. I’d noticed a pattern in places with narrow hallways by now, and checked the walls. There they were, up on the ceiling! Handholds, to move up and down the corridor in zero pull.

That made sense; I supposed that if you separated the two balls of the Stalwart, you’d have two zero gravity ships. I couldn’t see any reason to do that between stars (it would take a lot of fuel to de-orbit them and re-orbit them later), but maybe they planned to separate at the Dragonseye so they could get into the asteroid belt safely? Or maybe they never planned to separate but were designed with zero pull systems for emergencies. If I lived somewhere like this, I’d always be afraid of something happening to the tethers holding the two balls together.

Fari seemed like the sort of person who likes answering questions, so I humoured him as we headed down the hall. “Why is your ship just two big balls instead of a ring?”

He laughed. “Because spheres are the most efficient shape when it comes to surface area to volume ratio!” He glanced at me with that expression that adults get when they’re reminding themselves of my age and added, “That is, it’s how you get the most air for the least hull. That’s why so many zero-pull ships are spherical. Every kilogram of hull is an extra kilogram of mass we need to move through space, which means more fuel to move that mass, and more fuel to move that fuel.” He glanced at me again to check if I was understanding, and I made sure I didn’t look impatient at him telling me stuff that every little kid learns when they first start Education. “If we were ring-shaped, we’d be a lot heavier for the same amount of space inside; not, that might be alright for you big fancy ships that are hauling the fleet’s cargo anyway, but for anyone who needs to move around in space, that’s a problem. One sphere would of course be much more efficient, but that introduces a new problem: how to you rotate one sphere to maintain relatively consistent inertial pull through the whole space? Best way to do it is a counterweight, with a tether long enough that the difference in force between the top and bottom levels in the sphere it negligible, and if you’re dragging along a counterweight’s worth of mass anyway, might as well be a second sphere.”

“Has anyone ever thought of adding more spheres?” I asked.

He sniffed. “Oh, yes. The Bracelet – ah, sorry, I mean the Adventurous – tried that. Bunch of ninnies who clearly didn’t understand basic geometric principles. More spheres is less efficient, we told them, but no, they were all carried away with their whole modular thing, more politics in their head than engineering. They built a whole bunch of little spheres that spun around a central point and let me tell you, that was chaos. Huge waste of materials, unnecessary issues travelling from one sphere to another, and if one sphere had an unexpected velocity change it set the whole system into corrective chaos. Just to, what, look cool, I guess? Be different? One sphere is the ideal number if you have something else stable you need to ship as counterweight. Two spheres if you don’t. Adding more just adds problems.” He frowned. “Of course, now with Hexacorallia, we’re drawing a lot on the same principles, but that’s very different. There’s a difference in what makes a good orbital colony and what makes a good interstellar spaceship.”

Hexacorallia was another of the ships on our journey, a baby ship that I didn’t know much about except that it was some experiment for the Dragonseye colony. But I’d never heard of the Adventurous.

“Is the Adventurous doing okay?” I asked.

Fari shrugged. “No idea. We lost it in the last fleet split.”

Oh. Probably not, then.

Fleet splits happened whenever the fleet was starting to get too big and there was more than one viable new star system to head to. When the fleet was getting ready to leave a colony, all the ships would look at the data on the prospective stars, and sometimes they’d disagree on what the best next star was and split into two groups. We never knew what happened to the offshoots, but I didn’t think they’d do very well. The big ships like the Courageous and Arborea tended to stick together, so the other splits would lose all of our wisdom and experience and history, and it probably didn’t help that the ships that decided to break away like that were probably prone to making bad decisions anyway, like the Adventurous seemed to be. Some people liked to talk about how they must be out there spreading humanity through the stars in all directions, but I always thought that they probably died in the vast emptiness of space. It was safest, and most responsible, to assume that the duty of spreading humanity through the stars depended on us. We couldn’t afford to get lazy and hope that someone else was still alive to do it, which is what people talking about the fleet offshoots as if they were definitely alive and thriving always felt like to me.

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m not confident in their survival.”

We turned into another corridor, and I was so shocked at the sight that I stopped listening. It was the same width as the previous corridor, and the doors lining the sides looked the same, except that they were labelled. There were more lights, and some art on the walls, which made it feel more like home (the parts of the Vanguard I’d seen didn’t have much art, and the parts of the Arborea I’d seen didn’t have many walls). It looked pretty normal, except for one shocking thing – here and there on both walls were windows.

Not observation ports. They didn’t show stars. They showed the inside of rooms. Why? Who would put windows in a wall like that? Some algae tanks were see-through so that farmers could see if anything was wrong with the algae, but why rooms? If you wanted to see into a room, you could just go in there. Or if someone in the room wanted to see the hallway, they could come out.

Not every room we passed had a window. About half of them did. I could see into a cafeteria, and some sort of big office, and a room where people ran and ran on machines that kept them in the same place, seemingly on purpose. Fari didn’t seem to think the windows were worth mentioning, but the historians stared just as much as I did.

“This is the nearest cafeteria to your dormitory,” Fari said, seeing us staring into the cafeteria. “So you’ll probably be there a lot. You’re in the guest wing, which is just through here.” He lead us down another corridor, this one plain and windowless again. The doors here were numbered and very close together, so the rooms behind them must be very small. “You have rooms seven through to ten. Five and six are researchers from Arborea, so maybe you’ll know each other!”

“We weren’t on the Arborea for very long,” Tima said. “I don’t think we’d know anyone there who came here before us. We have individual rooms?”

“We’re a very individual sort of ship,” Fari said. “I’ll let you get settled in. The capuchins cleared out and fixed up this area yesterday, s everything should be in working order.” (I’d come across the word ‘capuchin’ when learning about the Stalwart, and it seemed to be a special rank of engineer. About a third of the ship’s population were capuchins and they were responsible for maintaining the ship’s systems and keeping it all running.) “If you need anything, you can contact me through the system. Or anyone else. Or just ask the treegrave. Whatever you like.”

“Uh, thank you,” Tima said, and Fari left us with a little wave. We all looked at each other.

“So,” Hali said. “Anyone got any preferences for a room number?”

I ended up in room seven, and I was right, it was small. Half of it was a thin bed, and the other half was space to walk next to the thin bed. There were drawers under the bed, to store my things, but I had to be on top of the bed to open them. There wasn’t any room otherwise.

The reason there was space to walk next to the bed at all was probably to reach the door in the back of the room, which lead to a very tiny bathroom. It wasn’t designed to work in zero pull and the bed didn’t have any safety straps on it either; that meant that the ship probably wasn’t supposed to be under zero pull and the handholds on the ceilings were for emergency situations. Interesting.

The wall next to the bed was thick and had an air vent near the feet and a panel near the head with a lot of toggles and buttons behind it. They didn’t have labels. I started pushing and flipping them to see what they did.

Most of them didn’t do very much, but I could turn on a soft light over the bed, blow warmer or colder air into the rom through the vent, and… a projector! There was a projector hidden somewhere that projected onto the ceiling right above the bed, so I could watch it lying down.

This was great! Why didn’t beds on the Courageous have this? If I had this at home, I’d never got out of bed!

Then I discovered that the switches weren’t all stuck to the wall. About a third of them were, and the other two thirds were on some kind of block mounted to the wall that came away really easily, once I figured out how. Those buttons and things seemed to control stuff to do with the projector, and the block was small enough to hold in my hands; I could lie on my back and use it.

This was great. I didn’t care how small the room was any more. If I could just figure out the projector, that was all I’d need.

Some of it was easy; I could look up files and videos and stuff just like in a projector room on the Courageous. There was also stuff that I thought might be some kind of computer work at first, but quickly found out were puzzles made for fun. The hardest thing to figure out, because it was so complicated and I had never used it before, was a system for organising things and living on the Stalwart. I found maps of where I was showing me where the nearest cafeteria and gymnasium and doctor’s clinics were, schedules to book a place in group exercises or parties or science presentations, and even a system that would let me send messages to anyone on the ship. (Which shouldn’t be a big deal, I mean I could record a message for anyone on the Courageous and have the treegrave send it, but it was weird that they needed a whole special system for it.) I already had messages from somebody called “Trackerbot” telling me that the treegrave didn’t have my health data or my academic achievement metrics, would I like to book in with a doctor and start the merit certification process?

No, I would not like to do that. I ignored Trackerbot and kept looking around. It was pretty hard to figure out some of the stuff, because while Trackebot’s message was an audio one, most of the stuff in the system was in writing, I’d always thought I was okay at writing, but I couldn’t even guess what most of the words on the projector were. I kept trying, until I heard some faint scratching inside the air vent.

I froze. Had I turned the air on by mistake? No; I couldn’t hear or feel any air. There was something else moving around in there, something heavier than air.

Quietly, I sat up and scootched down the bed a bit to look in.

Eyes. Staring back at me out of the darkness.

I reached out towards the vent.

And the tiny person in there reached back.

It was too dark and they moved too fast for me to know what was happening before two tiny hands were wrapped around the bars of the grate. The grate was set pretty firmly in place, but they managed to rattle it anyway, then pulled themselves forward until I could more clearly see their huge dark eyes and, in the meagre light shining in from the bedroom, their big white teeth.

I screamed.

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