“Are there no windows?” asked Julia, with obvious disappointment.
“There are direct observation ports around the vehicle launch and retrieval areas and there are windows on the command deck, although they are always covered when the ship is moving at operational speeds,” said Marcel. “However, there are cameras mounted over the entire external surface of the ship and the view is projected continuously onto the inside walls, so you have an uninterrupted view of the universe around you at all times.”
“Nice,” said Chang.
“Pretty basic technology,” said Marcel nonchalantly.
“Oh, and lifts and stairways run through the ship from aft to fore. The gravitational field is longitudinally orientated, so you are in fact in a tower with many floors, with the farmyard at the top and the engines in the basement. You’ll get used to it.”
Arlette stepped back and contemplated. ‘What a simply awesome ship,’ she thought, ‘and what incredible trust has been put in me.’ She felt overwhelmed by it for a brief moment, and scared, but then Marcel was calling her on into the command tower mock-up. Suppressing an impulse to turn to some figure in authority for reassurance, she breathed in, raised her eyebrows and widened her eyes, and stepped forward.
It was not what she had expected. The room inside the tower was a bowl-shaped stadium, with modules for each of the key control functions located at various levels on the periphery. The control platform itself was mounted on a stalk, and mobile so that it could move her effortlessly to any point in the room that she might select and engage directly with any one of her key controllers, one on one. The roof and walls appeared to be windows straight onto the universe outside.
She mounted her control platform, settled into her body couch, surveyed the eager faces around her, and touched ‘start’ on her screen. Instantly she found herself moving in a smooth arc to a position next to the launch engineer, her workspace dovetailing with his and her screen transformed to the launch sequence.
Their eyes met briefly. “Jake Thibault,” he said softly and nodded, and touched his monitor with three fingers.
There was a slight tremor, but no sensation of acceleration.
“Is that it?” she asked.
“That’s it,” he said. “Anti-matter is a fantastic fuel because you can store a phenomenal amount of potential energy in a very small space, but the cost of producing it is so high that you must use it efficiently. For a mission of this scale, optimum efficiency is achieved with a reactor delivering a force of just one tenth of Earth’s gravity. At that rate of acceleration we will reach our rendezvous with the shortcut in thirty-five days, and will be travelling at three thousand kilometres per second. Then we will fire the boosters and orientate the ship to enter the wormhole.”
Jake anticipated the Commander’s next question, and he went on, “We don’t use the boosters at the outset because the fuel we need for them can only be replenished when we have ample water locally for electrolysis. Of course we can use them to get us out of trouble in a hurry if we need to, but higher rates of acceleration save only a few days of transit time, increase both cost and risk and make no sense when we have a manageable mission duration of less than a year.”
Arlette smiled. He was so completely at ease with his task. She had a hundred questions about the technology that she would love to ask, but this was not the moment. She needed to move on and get a grasp of the scope of the operation and the roles and personalities of the key players.
She worked her way through all the positions in the command centre, sometimes returning with a further question, but gradually building her confidence in the capabilities of the ship and its crew. By the end of her first day in the simulator she was elated and felt no compunction about showing it to her personal assistants.
“Oh fuck, boys and girls, is this a gravy boat or what?!” giggled Arlette as they sat down in the monorail car to return to their quarters. Julia and Marcel threw back their heads and laughed with her. Chang smiled but did not laugh. There was something on his mind.
Before returning to her quarters Arlette took a twenty-minute swim, then she showered and changed into casual clothes. She would have a quiet dinner with her personal team, chat about impressions and people, poke a little into their personal lives, hopes and fears and then slip away early for a book or a movie.
That was the plan, anyway.
The four of them met again shortly afterwards, folding into large soft armchairs before a curved panoramic window, the lights on the river twinkling in the dusky distance. Each selected his or her favourite cocktail, sipped, sighed, and sipped again.
Julia spoke up. “Are you comfortable meeting your crew in this piecemeal, informal way?”
“Yes,” came the reply. “I think it is natural among professionals to meet on the job. Perhaps a more important question is ‘Are they comfortable?’”
“Hard to say”, said Chang, “with such a varied bunch, but my feeling is that respect and confidence will be gained by personal interaction, not by formalities. We’ll do that at the end of the week when we’ve knocked a few of the sharp corners off. Then you can attend to the bruised, the miffed and the worried much more effectively.”
“What do you think, Marcel? Today was mostly about the flight technologists getting a first chance to show their colours, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, yes,” said Marcel. “There were plenty of rehearsed set pieces delivered today, naturally. But as Chang pointed out, these people must build their relationships from their professional strengths. We show them respect, we make them comfortable. We have to go through the process.”
“What did you think of Sanam Ghorashian, the lead pilot?” asked Arlette, somewhat archly, keen to get some controversy going.
“Ambitious for glory, competitive to the point of combative, perfectionist – and ravishingly sexy,” was Marcel’s assessment.
“I’d like to see her under pressure,” was Chang’s comment.
“I can tell you from her personal record that she is superb under pressure,” said Arlette. “What did you think, Julia?”
Julia pulled a face, and Arlette could easily imagine how she was picking her way through a number of uncomplimentary observations. Finally she said, “She is a star and not a team player.”
“OK,” said Arlette, “but I warn you that, despite the prevailing humility being put on show today, we have very few shrinking violets in the cast.”
“I know that you like strong players who can prevail in any kind of catastrophe, Commander, but we are not going into battle on this mission. We have to get along with one another and get our jobs done, often in completely alien and stressful environments, for the best part of a year. Teamwork will be mission critical, the more so as time passes.” Chang was obviously concerned.
After a pause Arlette smiled. “OK, Chang,” she said brightly. “I will place special emphasis on that point when I address the whole crew next week, and please consider it your personal responsibility to monitor and champion team behaviour.”
“I will,” said Chang.
They moved over to the dining table where a traditional Cantonese meal was waiting for them. Chang proceeded to provide a running commentary on the origin and content of the dishes, occasionally with crude and unappetising snippets of information which nobody wanted to hear.
‘Why is it that even the most cosmopolitan of Chinese delight in shocking us with the variety of things they eat?’ thought Arlette.
“Chang,” she said, “you seem to be very knowledgeable about Chinese cuisine. Did you ever work in a kitchen?”
“No,” said Chang, “but I was the family cook because I lost my mother at an early age, and you have to be creative in a household as poor as ours was.”
“Did you resent losing your mother?” asked Arlette.
“Not really,” said Chang, his jaw set and an air of stocky determination about him, “but I resented my vicious, bullying father who used to bring home his drunken workmates
to sneer at me and taunt me because I was passionately interested in art. I ran away from home when I was twelve and got an unofficial job in an electronics factory. I used to watch the production processes out of the corner of my eye and one day I walked into the manager’s office and told him how he could improve productivity. He laughed at me, but he implemented some of my ideas. Then, a couple of months later, he sent me off to school. I’m still in touch with him, but I never saw my father again.”
There was silence.
“And what is your passion now?” asked Arlette.
Chang leaned forward across the table. “To ensure the success of this mission and the safety of its commander,” he said with good-natured intensity. “I think that we are all beginning to realise that we are stepping into history, creating a point of inflection. No human frailty or mechanical imperfection can be allowed to deflect us.”
“Bravo Chang,” said Marcel.
“And you, Marcel, what are your passions? – those which are fit for discussion, I mean.”
Marcel pursed his lips. “Power,” he said. “Awesome power. The first time I saw a rocket take off my whole body trembled with excitement over the release of raw energy. When I went into space I was struck by the enormity of the momentum of the moon and planets. I did my PhD on propulsion systems. I just love the idea that we, feeble little creatures that we are, can be masters of this universe; and”, he added in typical Marcel fashion, “I’d love to ski the wormhole.”
Smiles all round.
“Julia?”
“Oh, for me the great story is nothing until it has been told to the world, has thrilled every child, swelled every heart with pride, and driven every leader to do greater things for humanity. Yes, I’m passionate about it. What we do and what we stand for will be subject to scrutiny for generations. We are the standard bearers of our civilisation. We have to set standards of behaviour and achievement that will always be admired.”
“And what about you, Commander?” Chang asked, his eyes fixed on her.
“Well…” Arlette raised her eyebrows. “I am awed not only by the technology being brought to bear, but also the intellectual capacity. It’s not my nature to feel humble but from where I sit you cannot avoid it. I badly want to go to that star and decorate its planetary system with concrete evidence of human achievement, and I want to make sure that every member of the crew can feel the pride of knowing for the rest of their lives that they were brilliant when they had the opportunity to advance humanity.”
There was a murmur of approval.
5
The Passion of Julia Rogers
Julia Rogers awoke the next morning at 5.30 to an urgent beeping signifying a major diplomatic alert. ‘I’m not ready for this’ was her first conscious thought as she stumbled to the bathroom, hastily arranged her hair and shambled back to sit on the bed.
“OK, tell me.”
The beeping stopped. The huge screen flicked on to reveal the familiar sight of the ISEA international Diplomatic Ops room in Paris. The faces of three situation analysts appeared around a table.
“Morning, Julia.” It was Ahmed Tadayan, a senior political analyst. Next to him sat Anastasia Petrovnik, a much-decorated Russian aero-ace, and Mirwan Kahil, a former Palestinian general.
“We’ve got grief in Armenia,” said Ahmed. “There was a terrorist attack in Yerevan two hours ago which cost more than a hundred lives, while the country is still in the grips of an unprecedented heatwave. The Armenians blame the Azerbaijanis, the Turks claim the Armenians are provoking a conflict, the Iranians have sent in military aid, and the Russians are fuming about violations of international sovereignty. Everybody wants access to Armenian water and hydroelectric power.”
The other two analysts spelled out the potential military scenarios on top of the already bewildering political complexities. It was a tinderbox. Hundreds, even thousands of years of history, crimes, grudges and hatreds were about to be unleashed once more, only to create more crimes, grudges and hatreds, and all this in the context of deteriorating weather patterns that were threatening traditional livelihoods.
“This will get worse before it gets better,” concluded Ahmed. “You will need to isolate any crew members from this area with strong nationalist feelings. Good luck.”
‘Forty years of economic, scientific and resources collaboration between the G25 powers and no progress with tribalism,’ thought Julia. ‘Here we go again.’ She projected the mission crew ethnic origin list onto an adjacent screen. ‘Four Iranians, three Turks, an Armenian and twenty-seven Russians. Holy cow.’
Julia lay back on her pillows and pondered the state of the world. A sense of doom descended on her, that her life’s dream could be snatched away by some crazed extremist who had no agenda other than hate.
Ever since she had been a little girl, growing up in northern England, she had wanted to be at the heart of a great multinational venture. She smiled to herself as she remembered sitting on her father’s knee with her nose in a dusty antique book of maps of the political geography of the world in the late twentieth century. Each new page they turned produced a flood of excitement in her, and her father had stoked up her fascination by showing her around each country with live internet pictures.
She had wanted to see every country with her own eyes, to smell the smells, to speak their languages, to solve their problems, to eliminate poverty, to eradicate disease. She would fall asleep imagining herself being instrumental in some great triumph of diplomacy.
Her father was a computer scientist working on weather pattern models and specialised in severe storm dynamics, her mother a research pharmacist, developing DNA-specific medication for individuals with serious diseases. Julia had been nurtured in scientific wonder, full of optimism and confidence that every last barrier to universal human happiness would be conquered. When she was eleven she was taken to a celebration party in Trafalgar Square to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Arab–Israeli peace treaty.
‘People danced, they cried, they hugged each other,’ she recalled. ‘Grand old men with long beards talked about the transformation from war and poverty to peace, mutual respect, cooperation and prosperity. They praised the vision and courage of the political leaders who had signed the treaty, lamenting how their successors had rarely lived up to the same standards.’
Sadly, their concerns were proven justified and the blush of rapid economic prosperity was to fade as religious and political factional disputes erupted again in a pattern that seemed to repeat the history of millennia.
Julia Emily Rogers was born during a huge rainstorm in March 2074. A few months later the whole family, wearied by the persistent floods that afflicted the area, sorrowfully sold their charming Victorian red-brick house at a discount from its purchase price and moved to Manchester.
A vast project to divert the floodwaters of the Thames, which were becoming more prevalent and extreme as climate change progressed, into the Solent on the south coast of England had long been mooted but had failed to gain traction as rival political interests presented conflicting data, countless objections and multiple alternative suggestions, the most recent of which had been the building of a huge dyke around Greater London. The scale of these projects, and the number required to protect vulnerable parts of the country, was unfinanceable given the prospects for the economy. As a consequence there was a general exodus northwards to higher ground and a great economic renaissance in the Midlands and the north. Manchester was well on its way to becoming the new financial and business capital of the UK.
Julia thrived in this young, optimistic society. She was a voluble, intensely bright child, with curly, dark brown hair, arresting grey eyes and interested in everything and everybody around her. Her three brothers all adored her because she would engage in their interests with enthusiasm, asking naive but penetrating questions, and delighting in the extravagant imagery of their answers, based, albeit somewhat loosely, on their perceptions of the wonders of the scient
ific world.
She was popular at school, a tireless natural organiser, defender of the weak, and, in due course, a polished debater. What she lacked in natural inclination towards maths and physics she compensated for with blistering determination and hard work, which, her being naturally athletic, also characterised her attitude on the track and the tennis court. Puberty, teenage rebellion, boyfriends and sex – they came and went. She fell desperately in love with a dreamy, drifting youth at seventeen, and found herself pregnant. Appalled and embarrassed at the enormity of the compromised situation she found herself in, she tearfully confessed her stupidity to her parents, who treated the whole episode as a tiresome learning experience, whose obvious remedy was speedily implemented.
Shaking this off, Julia regained her inspiration and won a scholarship to Paris University, where she studied International Relations with Predictive Futurology. By that time Cognitive Transmission Technology was becoming widely available, allowing an individual to transmit her thoughts via an implanted nanochip device directly to another by microwave radiation, without the need for speech or text, and in the language of the recipient.
CTT required the communicating parties to agree, while in visual and verbal contact, to use the technology between them, and then a call could be initiated just by picturing the recipient. It required focus, clarity of thought and practice to work efficiently and all potential users had to pass stringent tests to get a licence to use it. This was primarily a measure to protect the naive from divulging sensitive information involuntarily. However, CTT was brilliantly successful with like-minded academics exploring complex theoretical issues, and extremely fast and effective between people who knew each other well and needed to work together secretly or in an emergency. The mental directory was a priceless tool for most callers, but almost all preferred to speak normally when confidentiality was not an issue, even though it was their thoughts that got transmitted, not the spoken word. A caller could not access the recipient’s thoughts outside of the topic of the call, or vice versa, but most users would admit to the occasional embarrassment of sending or receiving thoughts that were not intended for transmission.
Omnipotence: Book I: Odyssey Page 3