by M. D. Cooper
“Don’t be scared, Shelly, it will be fine. People go on these all the time.”
She lost track of time chatting with Karen about the games they would play on the Vimana, and when the announcement came over the lift-car’s audible systems that the portals were closing and they were preparing for ascension, it took her by surprise.
Saanvi peered out the window, waiting to see the ground start to fall away, and when it did, she shuddered and grabbed Karen’s hand on one side, and her father’s on the other.
“Relax, my little monkey,” her father said softly. “It’s perfectly safe, and before you know it, we won’t even be able to see the world anymore.”
Saanvi nodded and watched the mountains in the distance start to slip below the sill of the window. Before long, they could only see the blue sky of their world around and above the lift-car. A minute later a tone sounded, indicating that they could get up and move about.
She glanced tentatively at her father, who nodded, before slipping out of her seat and walking to the window. Taking a deep breath, she peered down and saw the world below, which still appeared larger than she had expected. She looked at the indicator on the window and saw that the lift-car had risen over seven kilometers—though the distance did not have concrete meaning to her.
She could see almost all the nearby mountains east of the space elevator, and to the south, the ocean was visible, too. So far, the world didn’t look that much different than it did when she was on an airplane a year ago, and that wasn’t scary at all.
Looking up, Saanvi let out a gasp. Another lift-car was coming down one of the elevator’s other stands, and, for a moment, it looked as though it would hit theirs, but then it slid by without any trouble. She could see people inside, and small children crowded the windows.
Several of them were waving, and she waved back.
“That was nice,” Karen said from her side.
Saanvi looked up at her father’s ship-friend. “How long until we’re in space?”
“Well,” Karen considered for a moment, “the nominal start to space on Dwarka is ninety kilometers up, and we’ve just passed the ten-kilometer mark. We’ll reach two hundred kilometers per hour soon, so it will be about thirty minutes, give or take a bit. Once we get past the stratosphere—that’s the top of the air on Dwarka—we’ll start going faster. The station is forty thousand kilometers up, so it will be just over four hours before we reach it.”
“Wow,” Saanvi took a deep breath. “Will we even be able to see Dwarka from there?”
“A very astute question,” Karen replied. “Yes, we will be able to see it, but it will look quite small, like how big your house looks from the end of your street.”
Saanvi didn’t quite know how to picture that, but she couldn’t wait to see what it would look like.
Her father got some food from the stands, and they ate at one of the tables before Karen brought out a holo game that involved stacking falling blocks into the right types of piles. The more they played, the faster the game got, and before long, both Saanvi and Karen were frantically stacking holo-blocks in their table, laughing at the dangerously high piles.
Ultimately, the game got the better of them, and the piles all collapsed, spilling blocks across the floor before they vanished and the game reset itself.
She lost track of how many times they played that game, and a few others, before she glanced up and saw lights above the lift-car.
“Karen! Karen!” she cried out. “I see it, I see Kush Station!”
“Yes, Saanvi, that is Kush Station.”
“It’s huuuuuuge,” Saanvi said with a long sigh. “It looks like it’s bigger than our city down on Dwarka.”
“That’s because it is,” Karen replied. “It’s over five hundred kilometers across, and it will be the smallest station we’re going to see on our trip.”
Saanvi’s eyes grew wide and she grabbed Karen’s shirt. “Are you serious, Auntie Karen, they’re all bigger?”
Karen nodded. “Some will even be planetary rings. And if we make a stop at Huro, we’ll see a station that is bigger than Dwarka.”
Saanvi fell back in her seat, her head craned back as she gazed at Kush Station. “Bigger than an entire planet,” she whispered.
LOST IN SPACE
STELLAR DATE: UNKNOWN
LOCATION: Vimana
REGION: Interstellar Space near Hurosha, Transcend Interstellar Alliance
Saanvi watched the ring slowly shrink behind them with a sinking feeling of sadness. The Indus planetary ring had been one of the most amazing things she had ever seen. Her father had told her that it had more living space than her entire world, though that didn’t mean much to her.
What Saanvi loved, however, was playing in the parks on the ring, and looking up to see the world of Indus hanging high overhead.
At first, it had frightened her, and it took some time for her father and Karen to convince her that the world was not going to fall, and that it really wasn’t ‘above them’, but below.
That didn’t make a lot of sense to Saanvi, and she wrote it off as adult silliness. How could she look up at a planet that was below her? The ring was below her. That much was obvious, even to a seven-year-old.
Strange explanations notwithstanding, Saanvi eventually grew accustomed to the planet floating above her head, and came to enjoy the daily noontime eclipses it created.
Karen used the planet and its orbital ring to teach her about a thing called axial tilt, and how that created seasons on planets. The terraformers had given Indus a mild tilt, so the planet almost always caused daily eclipses on at least a part of the ring.
Saanvi found it interesting—mostly because the terraformers did it, and anyone who could make planets had to be the smartest people there were.
The Vimana had spent two weeks docked on a small spur station hanging off the Indus Ring, and Saanvi had spent her evenings with her father and Karen in a suite, which had an amazing view of the stars and Indus’s four moons.
She never wanted to leave, but her father told her that it was inevitable, a big word to mean that she couldn’t stop it from happening.
“Bye, pretty ring,” she said, thinking of how it was small enough in the distance that she could poke the planet out and slide her finger into it.
She lined her finger up with her eye and did just that. “There, now I’ll have you forever,” she smiled, imagining the ring on her finger, and held it up for inspection, wondering what all the tiny people would think.
“I’ll miss it, too,” Karen said from the lounge’s entrance. “We had good times there, didn’t we?”
Saanvi nodded sadly. “We sure did, Auntie Karen.”
Karen sat down with Saanvi and stroked her hair. “It’s really too bad then.”
“What’s too bad?” Saanvi looked up at Karen, wondering what news the adult was about to give her.
“Well, it’s too bad that the ring won’t be nearly as cool as Huro!”
“We’re going to Huro?” she exclaimed, climbing onto Karen’s lap and staring into her eyes from mere centimeters away.
“Yes, crazy, little girl,” Karen said and patted her head—not an easy feat, with how much Saanvi was bouncing about. “But first, you need to catch up on your schoolwork. We took a lot of days off on the Indus ring, and we’ll take more off when we get to Huro.”
Saanvi sighed, the wind going out of her sails. “Yes, Karen.”
* * * * *
Saanvi put down her cup and looked up at her father and Karen.
“So, only two more days until we get to Huro?” she asked.
“Two days until we drop out of the dark layer,” her father said with a nod. “Then it will take a week to get insystem to Hurosha, their planet-construct.”
“Why did they build a whole planet themselves?” Saanvi asked. “Why didn’t the terraformers make a planet for them?”
Pradesh chuckled and Saanvi wondered what was so funny.
“The ter
raformers never went to Huro. Its star is not suitable for terraformed worlds—it is too angry. But, there are many minerals and resources in its outer regions, and so the people of Huro made their own small star and then built a ring around it. They were industrious—that means they were good at their jobs—and soon more people came to Huro. Before long, they had to build another ring, and then another. Now, there are almost five hundred rings wrapped around their little star at different orbital distances and angles,” her father replied.
Saanvi frowned, unable to picture what her father had described, and Karen brought a holo image above the table and showed the progression of rings around the tiny star.
“There are so many you can’t even see the star anymore!” Saanvi exclaimed.
“Yes,” her father nodded. “It’s like a little Dyson sphere.”
“Do you recall Dyson spheres from your studies?” Karen asked.
Saanvi nodded. “It’s a big ball around a star to capture all of its light and energy.”
Pradesh and Karen nodded, proud looks upon their faces as they gazed down at the small girl who was so hungry to know about everything around her.
“But no one has ever built one, right?” she asked. “Not a real one, around a real star.”
“Correct,” Karen nodded. “There are a few stellar rings out there, rings that go around stars, not planets, but they are not solid bands, just loosely connected platforms and segments. It takes too much mass to make something that can withstand the stresses of such an orbit. You remember seeing the expansion joints on the ring at Indus, right?”
Saanvi nodded vigorously. “Yes! Because the side of the ring facing the star is much, much hotter than the other side behind the planet, and it gets a lot bigger…like cookies in the oven!”
Pradesh and Karen laughed and Saanvi’s smile widened.
“Yes, little monkey, just like cookies in the oven. Can you imagine a planetary ring made of cookies?”
“Mmmmm…” Saanvi smiled. “I would eat them all up!”
They all laughed at her reply, and just as they had settled back down, a shudder shook the deck beneath them. An audible alarm began to blare.
“Wha…” Pradesh said as he stood.
Saanvi could see the expression in his eyes that showed he was accessing the ship’s systems on the Link.
“Karen,” he said, his eyes wide with alarm. “Get her in a pod and you too! I’ll dump us out of the DL and meet you there.”
“Prad…” Karen’s eyes were filled with worry.
“Go!”
Saanvi cried out in alarm at the urgency in her father’s voice.
“Daddy!” she rushed to him and wrapped his legs in a fierce embrace.
“Little monkey,” he said with more fear than she had ever heard in his voice. “Just like the drills we did. Go with Karen, it’ll be fun.”
“C’mon,” Karen said as she peeled Saanvi arms from around her father’s legs.
“No!” Saanvi cried out, kicking at Karen, who flipped her around and wrapped her in a warm embrace as she ran through the ship.
“It’ll be OK, little sweetie, I’ve got you, you’re safe,” Karen whispered in her ear. “Your father will be safe, too; he’ll be with us in no time.”
Karen spoke other soothing words, and Saanvi calmed down, locking her arms around Karen and burying her face in her neck. The last thing she recalled was Karen leaning over a stasis pod and lowering her into its embrace, forcing her to lie still.
“It’s OK, little monkey,” Karen whispered. “It’ll just feel like an instant has passed, and then you’ll be awake again with your father and me.”
Saanvi’s lips quivered with fear, but she trusted Karen. She had never lied to her. Saanvi nodded nervously and lay still as the pod’s cover came down. When it sealed, she took a deep breath and closed her eyes.
AIRTHA
STELLAR DATE: 01.14.8930 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Transcend Diplomatic Corps Interstellar Pinnace
REGION: Near Airtha, Huygens System, Transcend Interstellar Alliance
Airtha was much as Sera remembered it: massive, overwrought, and incredible.
Sera brought the ship out of jump-space deep within the Huygens system, where the capital of the Transcend currently lay. Normally, jumping this deep into a system was a risky maneuver—not just due to the risk of collision, but because the relative speed between stars meant that predicting an exact exit location was nearly impossible.
Even with the safe zones for emergency jumps, a recently terraformed system like Huygens would be rife with dust and small rocks. A clear area was never completely clear.
Her fears were manifested when a warning klaxon sounded on the small bridge and she saw that a small stone had punctured a lower hold before the grav shields came to full strength.
“It’s grav-sealed,” Serge reported from the command chair.
“I’m matching stellar velocity, Huygens sure moves fast,” Sera said with one eye on the local scan, ensuring that nothing else was out there.
“Yeah, it’s why they picked it. They’re forming a black hole to pull it faster, too. They want to pull it right through the next arm, over the next twenty-thousand years. Nice jump, by the way,” Serge replied. “I thought you might have been out of practice, after all those years with low-tech in the Inner Stars.”
“Low-tech teaches you a level of finesse most people here have never developed,” Sera replied as she spun out the antimatter pion drive and eased it up to a full burn. Huygens was moving at just over 0.01c relative to Ascella, and the safe jump zone was uncomfortably close to the current position of a 9Mj planet.
“So I can see,” Serge said with an appreciative whistle as he watched Sera’s hands dance over a holographic console. “I’ve never seen anyone pilot a ship with their hands like that before.”
“I’m doing a combo,” Sera replied. “General commands are all right, over the Link, but I’ve learned that I can use my hands for micro-adjustments better than using thought. There’s just so much of our neural buildout that’s still tuned to these predatory twitch reflexes.”
“That’s certainly not what they taught us in the academy,” Serge replied. “There it was all ‘mind over matter’ and the like.”
Sera held up a hand and threw a grin over her shoulder at Serge. “This is matter, and I’m using my mind to control it.”
Serge barked a laugh. “Well played, Sis.”
With the ship’s vector confirmed and locked in, Sera brought Airtha up on the main holo and leaned back in her seat.
“There it is,” she breathed.
“Home sweet home,” Serge responded to her earlier audible statement. “Always feels good to come back.”
“Speak for yourself,” Sera whispered.
She had to admit that Airtha was impressive—the structure was gorgeous, even if she didn’t like many of the people who lived there.
At the center of the construct lay a small star, a Saturn-sized white dwarf remnant, with less than a fifth of Sol’s mass. The star was not a natural occurrence, having started its life as a much more massive—and smaller—white dwarf, but the FGT engineers gravitationally stripped away most of its mass to make it more manageable. Much of that material—mostly carbon—was used to form the solid ring which encircled the star.
The ring’s circumference was just over a million kilometers. With a width of fifty thousand kilometers, it had a total surface area of fifty billion square kilometers, or ninety-eight times that of Earth’s total surface area.
In both mass, size, and livable star-facing surface area, it was the largest thing humanity had ever created.
Four great pillar
s stretched from the ring toward the star, holding it in place with powerful gravity fields, which, in turn, drew their energy from the star. The pillars also controlled the radiation flowing from the star and directed it out through the poles to fuel a powerful Van Allen-style shield around the construct.
The surface of the ring—both inside and out—was one of the most beautiful ever made. Star-side, the ring had been surfaced with the mass of a dozen planets, creating mountains, plains, oceans, vast deserts, steppes, and even arctic regions.
Dark patches were visible on the terraformed surface of the ring, which had a day-night cycle created by the pillar’s gravity engines bending light away from the surface as needed.
Conversely, the outside of the ring gleamed in the light of the four Huygens stars. Because the matter extracted from the dwarf star was carbon, the ring was, essentially, a diamond. Artisans had spent centuries carving world-sized murals into it, celebrating the history of the Transcend.
Helen responded after a brief pause.
“You’re worried, aren’t you?” Serge said, unaware of Sera’s conversation with Helen, though he may have guessed from her system-long stare.
She turned in her seat and fixed her brother with a hard look. “Wouldn’t you be? Father and I have always…we’ve never had an easy relationship.”
Serge laughed. “That’s the understatement of the year. You were supposed to be the child of his mind, his Athena. Instead, you came out…more like some combination of Aphrodite and Artemis.”