by Aer-ki Jyr
Traditional wisdom held that spaceships should keep as far away from each other as reasonable, to reduce the chance of collisions, but whether by Star Force tradition or the egos of the pilots that flew the ships for the corporation, Star Force craft had a tendency to group together whenever near, and Paul had to admit that the sight of flying side by side with another spaceship enroute to a space station was just plain cool.
That, and the other ship was many times larger than their Sparrow. It was one of Star Force’s Starships…the opposite of a Dropship, in that the starship would never land on a planet. It was built in space, flew through space, and would probably end up being decommissioned and disassembled in space. As such, it needed no reentry shielding or aerodynamic design, and its blocky nature stood in stark contrast to the Sparrow’s edgeless symmetry.
The two spaceships were visually an odd pair, each designed to accomplish a specific task in lieu of trying to squeeze too much functionality into a single ship. This way, two ships could accomplish the task of one with greater ease, lower cost, and higher efficiency. Thus was the wisdom of the Conduit to Space…it took all the heavy lifting out of the starship designs, leaving them free to ferry about personnel and cargo between the ever growing number of orbital facilities.
As the pair of ships approached the starport Paul could begin to make out the ‘TIE bomber’ design of the station. It was completely enclosed within an armor plated shell with large bay doors that usually remained open, facing down on the planet. It was towards those doors that the Sparrow flew, depressing its approach slightly to slide underneath.
Now seeing it in person, Paul agreed with previous sentiments that the starport design could also be compared to a pair of binoculars, or even the classic chocolate Ho Hos in twin packaging, but Paul preferred the Star Wars reference. Regardless of which metaphor you used, inside the station were two massive rotating cylinders situated side by side, one spinning clockwise and the other counter clockwise under fine-tuned computer control to null out the rotational list.
In front of the two artificial gravity creating cylinders was a ‘crossbar’ connecting them to an array of docking pylons alongside pressurized and unpressurized warehouses that partially obscured the view of the cylinders, which were surrounded by a narrow gap of unpressurized space a few dozen meters wide that transitioned to the inner edge of the armored shell that surrounded the station.
The inside of the thick shell was actually several levels of zero gravity compartments connected to the gravity cylinders on the back side, opposite the docking area. All in all, about half of the internal volume of the starport was zero gravity, with the other half seeing multiple variations of artificial gravity ranging from .05 to 1.0 Earth norm, with all residential areas, restrooms, and food courts in the gravity section.
Still strapped into his seat, Paul felt his body tug on the restraints again as the Sparrow decelerated ahead of its pacing starship and begin maneuvering up and under the oversized ‘TIE bomber.’
“Busy day,” Jason commented to the otherwise silent group as they got their first glimpse of the docking area. There were two dropships, both the midsized Eagle-class, and six starships of various sizes attached to the pylons, with one of the small starships just beginning to disengage and drift out from under the protective shell that surrounded both the station and the docking area.
Paul glanced over at another screen and the large starship now trailing behind them, trying to size it up. It was so long that he doubted it could fit inside the docking area with the bay doors closed. He knew that it was standard procedure to shelter the spacebound dropships during a meteor shower or intense solar flare, but apparently that wasn’t true of all the starships. He wondered how much armor plating they had…
Their dropship nulled out its momentum and pointed its nose in towards the docking pylons before tapping on the thrusters and nudging closer. With practiced ease the pilots squeezed the wing-like Sparrow underneath the shortest of the pylons as they retracted a dorsal hull plate, exposing their docking port underneath the smooth reentry-hardened hull.
Using an automated docking laser system, four thick but flexible mechanical limbs reached out and grasped the frame around the docking port and killed any remaining list from the dropship before an umbilical extended inside the perimeter of the metal struts and made contact. Seal tests were triple checked and the pressure in the umbilical equalized before the system confirmed a good lock to both docking control and the cockpit of the Sparrow.
The copilot appeared a moment later, floating back into the front of the passenger area just to the left of the display screens and toggled the roof hatch, briefly checking the manual pressure gage, which confirmed 1 atmosphere on the other side, before opening their side of the passageway.
Paul and the others began unstrapping themselves and experienced the free floating wonder of zero gravity for the first time as they clumsily began unlatching the storage compartments and retrieving their duffels.
“This is so cool,” Dan said under his breath as he pulled his from what had been the ‘overhead’ bin. Now that they were in freefall, there was no longer any up or down.
Paul smiled unguardedly the entire time it took him to climb along the shallow handholds in the ceiling to where the copilot was waiting at the base of the open hatch. When he got there she gave him a slight boost upward and floated behind Megan through the short, but well lit tunnel up into a large square room with a low ‘ceiling,’ making it easier to find handholds to move about with.
Three Star Force attendants were present in the boarding/receiving area and got the 2s moving in an organized fashion. One attendant, dressed in the standard dark blue jumpsuit that designated the personnel relations division, led the group through several customs/tracking stations…all of which they bypassed…and into the starport’s zero gravity section where there was a mix of Star Force personnel and tourists milling about as they transferred through a gymnasium sized commons area that looked more like a child’s playground at a restaurant.
There were numerous transparent colored tunnels twisting and crisscrossing the area with floating ‘tables’ intermixed where four people could attach themselves by footholds and straps to work tabletop-mounted computer terminals and entertainment screens, monitoring everything from tv shows to stock market updates.
Paul was so drawn to the amusement park atmosphere on his left that he didn’t glance right until several moments later, when he finally noticed the cinematic ‘viewport’ covering the entire right wall. It was as large as a movie screen and, of course, not a real viewport, but a camera relay from outside the station, letting the patrons watch the docking area, the Earth below, and the ships coming to and from the starport.
The trainees drifted past the screen, barely obscuring even part of the view, as the attendant showed them across the promenade via a slow moving railway that had tiny handholds to grab onto. It carried them in single file to the opposite side where they reentered the working end of another docking pylon.
Again, they bypassed the bureaucracy and moved directly to another airlock…this one leading to one of the smaller starships docked at the starport. When they moved down the umbilical and into a short squarish booth, a line of flashing indicator lights guided them even further into the ship. The attendant led the way and diverted them to the right at a four-way junction where they traveled down a short hall then dropped down a ladder and arrived in a similar passenger cabin to that on the dropship, save for this one was five times as wide and held over 100 seats.
That was, until Paul looked ‘up’ and noticed another bank above him to the right, suddenly realizing that the floor was curved and that the seats went up and around a central pillar that he’d just dropped out of and mistaken as the ceiling.
Not a single seat was occupied.
“All for us?” Jack asked.
“You and a few Star Force personnel that need to transfer over anyway,” the attendant said with a half smile t
hat seemed to be permanently affixed to her face. “Strap yourselves and your bundles into the extra seats until we get underway. The storage areas are in the back, but since this is a dedicated flight you can keep your gear up here with you.”
“My name is Kianna and I’ll be your flight attendant on this trip. If there’s anything you need or have any questions to ask, I’m your go-to person. Please go ahead and get yourselves situated. I believe the captain wishes to get underway in a few minutes.”
Using more ‘ceiling’ handholds, Paul and the others floated over the banks of seats and dropped ‘down’ into them, belting in their duffels in two neat rows behind where they chose to sit clustered together. A few minutes later four more Star Force personnel entered the pit-like chamber that arced up on either side.
Three dark green-uniformed techs, along with a light green-clad woman, whom Paul knew to be a Star Force software expert, settled down into a different section of seats, leaving the trainees to themselves as the attendant disappeared elsewhere into the ship. Not soon after Paul and the others felt the slight tug on their restraints, indicating that they were pulling away from the starport and beginning their trip out to the D-4 training station in middle planetary orbit.
5
All Star Force orbital stations were designated into three categories. “A” stations were open to the public and could be traveled to as simply as buying a plane ticket and booking a hotel room on one of the habitats. There were various versions, from luxury resorts to sports facilities, training classes, zero gravity romance pods, and even low gravity retirement and medical habitats for people too weak or ill to sustain normal Earth gravity.
Whereas all “A” stations were public domain, “B” stations were private ventures. Star Force built the stations then rented them out to corporations or governments, sometimes in berths or entire facilities, but all were operated by Star Force personnel. These included communications stations, factories, warehouses, research labs and astronomic observatories, all the way up to private resorts and homes, for those wishing for permanent residence in orbit and having the funds to pay for it.
The third category of Star Force orbital installations were for private company use, labeled as “C” and showed the greatest range of functions from hydroponic agriculture to heavy industry, shipyards to build the starships, massive mobile construction ‘islands’ to build new stations and expand existing ones, warehouses to store the ever increasing amount of cargo transfers, habitats for the Star Force orbital workforce, and a myriad of other functions.
“D” stations officially didn’t exist yet, and wouldn’t for some time as far as the public knew, but they were internally designated for Star Force’s highly secret military branch, of which the trainees were the beginning. Four stations had been built to date…one a clandestine Research and Development facility, another a fuel production factory, the third a small shipyard for the construction of prototypes coming out of the R/D facility, and the fourth a zero gravity training complex , which was the trainees’ current destination.
Thanks to another set of video screens, Paul and the others got to watch their departure from the starport, soon followed by a sudden jerk sideways as the passenger compartment of the starship began to rotate ever so slowly.
Paul’s recently established inner equilibrium was shattered and his head pounded as the blood started to be pulled towards his feet by the centrifugal force…but that was the norm for Human physiology and his body quickly remembered, settling both his limbs and his stomach, but leaving him with a bit of a headache.
It took several minutes for the rotating cylinder to speed up to 1 gravity of rotation, but once it did the attendant returned, carefully climbing down the ladder in transition from the zero gravity section of the ship, and informed them that they were free to move about for the duration of the trip. She also noted that if a course correction or acceleration was needed, a warning klaxon would sound, meaning they had 30 seconds to grab hold of something or return to their seats before the engines fired.
As if on cue, a mechanical repetitive buzz-like sound blared three times, prompting the attendant to slip into one of the empty seats…but she didn’t bother to fasten the restraints, so neither did the trainees.
When the engines did fire, it was a lackluster response. Paul had felt more pull riding in his track team’s bus…although this acceleration was constant, lasting for the better part of 20 minutes as the starship accelerated away from Earth, climbing towards middle orbit which, as far as the Star Force definition was concerned, was all orbital tracks between 1 and 50 days in length, meaning geosynch on out past the moon. The training station, however, was over 100,000 kilometers away from the Earth, making it about a fourth of the distance to the moon with an orbital period around 4 days.
Most B-class habitats were parked in geosynchronous orbit, while 70% of the A-class stations were within that boundary or ‘low earth orbit,’ thanks to the tourists desire to see the planet close up. C-class stations were scattered throughout, with a growing number in middle orbit. Given the increasing volume of space traffic, Star Force had adopted…and heavily encouraged others to follow…its policy of leaving the extreme low orbits empty…those being within an altitude of 600 kilometers or so. Star Force’s starports were the closest habitats the company had to the upper atmosphere and were well above that mark.
Not all countries and corporations respected this precedent, and there was a high volume of satellites cluttering the skies, but with Star Force’s ever growing number of communication stations, the practice of putting individual telecommunications satellites into space was falling by the wayside. As it was, Star Force had a small fleet of recovery craft clearing the lower orbits of outdated, broken, or abandoned satellites along with other space debris creating potential navigation hazards.
Star Force’s competitors operated a small fleet of short range ships…some copying the dropship function, others going their own way with capsule/rocket designs and a few upstarts using acceleration tracks on the surface to slingshot a spaceplane up into the atmosphere in lieu of an aerospace cradle. All their designs were primitive compared to those fielded by Star Force, but they were functional none the less, making a small dent in Davis’s monopoly.
Their diminutive orbital stations were, however, all located in extreme low orbit, given that they didn’t have the manpower to build them larger or the thrust capacity to launch them farther out. They also liked thumbing their noses at Star Force’s edict, and used the ‘up close Earth view’ talking points in their tourist advertising.
Their main source of income, however, was from military contracts, given that Star Force had a strict policy on what their services could be used for, which excluded weapons placement, service, or research. While Star Force obviously didn’t have a problem with such things, they weren’t about to help usher in the potential for World War III, nor accelerate the timetable which would run counter to their own militarization efforts. They needed to get armed first…so they kindly declined any military business, which then ran straight to their competitors or the governments’ own space divisions.
98% of the orbital economy flowed through Star Force, however, and any legal attempts to diminish that virtual monopoly had been vehemently fought off, based in no small part to the fact that Star Force was an international corporation, with most of its infrastructure in space where no nation had jurisdiction.
The United Nations had been prompted to declare everything in Earth orbit under their legal control, but after Star Force had quietly informed them and their member nations that they wouldn’t accept that legal noose, the measure had been dropped and the free and open policy of space travel had been publicly reinforced. What hadn’t been publically said was that Star Force promised to cut off all services to any nation voting for the measure, along with the obvious fact that neither the UN, nor any individual nation, had the ability to enforce their laws off planet.
It had been a hopeful bluff
on the UN’s part, which Star Force had quickly called. Getting their early foothold on space travel had, as Davis predicted, given them the leverage they needed to remain independent.
After the acceleration phase, the Star Force starship began an 18 hour coast stage, traveling out to the D-4 station. Paul and the others were free to walk about the ship, which was part gravity, part zero gravity. The rotating section that the passenger seats were in was connected through the central core to another opposite rotating cylinder directly aft, which gave the ship an elongated design.
Behind it, in a zero gravity section, was the engineering area, which contained most of the ship’s machinery, including the engines and fuel reserves, which were ample. Had the captain wished it, the starship could have arrived at the station in less than an hour, but the quicker the transit, the more fuel burned, both in acceleration and deceleration at target.
Star Force designed all its starships with greater cruising ranges than required for their mission assignments, unlike the early days of space travel when the bare minimum was all that was sought for. If the Cougar-class starship that they were traveling in wished to flex its engineering muscle, it could travel all the way to Mars and back over the course of two months with a full fuel load at the optimum planetary alignment.
What Davis understood…and the competition was slowly figuring out…was that the key to space travel was not trying to be the first to do something, but to become the first to do that thing on a regular basis and in an efficient way. In an early Star Force edict, Davis had told his development teams that achievement was not the goal, conquest was. They not only had to beat the challenges set before them, they had to beat them in such a way, and with such repetition, that they literally owned them.