The woman stepped forward and extended one of her lower hands, the ones used for finer manipulation. “Jeff Peters?”
He nodded and found the right balance of firmness in shaking her hand. “That’s me. Let me get this inside, and we can lift. Sorry if I’m late.”
“You’re right on time,” she assured him. “I’m Sash. I’ll help with the smaller pieces.”
She used her upper arms to grab a few precarious bags from the top of the pile and headed up the ramp.
He followed slowly, maneuvering the cart to minimize the chances of an avalanche and only lost one bag. That was a victory, no matter how one calculated it.
Speaking of calculating, he’d spent some of his precious time last night calculating how dangerous a single gram of antimatter would be.
The answer was terrifying. 1.8x10^14 Joules of energy might potentially be released. That was the equivalent to forty-three thousand tons of old-style TNT. Roughly the same amount of energy as the nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Earth in what they called World War Two.
Saren’s comments about the use of antimatter had come back to haunt Jeff’s dreams. If one gram of antimatter could do that, how much would be needed to wreck an entire planet? Surely no more than a few kilograms, if spread out appropriately.
Mercenaries were forbidden to fire weapons at a planet from above ten miles in height. That prevented things like orbital bombardment. Supposedly. Jeff knew some races would be willing to risk the repercussions in spite of the draconian penalties, if the price were right.
“Put all your bags into these bins,” Sash told him. “Use the straps to secure them so they don’t come loose if we need to maneuver. I’ll leave the hatch to the control area open so you can join me when you’re done.”
Jeff froze. “You want me to sit up there while you fly?”
She raised an eyebrow. “The Professor accepted you as part of his team. I’m assuming that means you don’t intend to hijack me. You’re not a pirate, are you, Jeff Peters?”
Her matter of fact tone made him smile. “No. Just an engineer. We aren’t that dangerous, I suppose.”
“That depends on the engineer. I’ve met some very dangerous engineers in my time. A few even meant to be. See you in a few minutes.”
She actually winked at him as she headed toward the front of the hauler. He’d never seen any alien with that level of familiarity with human interaction before. She did it so casually, yet it had to mean she knew far more about human society than most of his instructors.
Or, was it possible the Pendal winked, too? He promised himself he’d do the research as soon as he had the free time.
Jeff secured his bags and made his way up to the control area. It was a cramped compartment with several bulky seats in front of control consoles. Sash sat in the one on the right, working on her console.
“You can have the left one,” she said as she glanced over her shoulder at him. “I’ve disabled the controls so there is no danger of you touching anything critical.”
He’d flown in small craft before—mostly atmospheric—but had never had the opportunity to observe the control area in flight. He sat down in the heavy couch and it adjusted slowly to his frame.
“Pull the webbing over you before we lift. If there’s an inflight emergency, you won’t have time to put it on.”
He found the webbing and pulled it across his body, quickly locating the points to secure it.
She nodded approvingly. “Very good. I usually have to do that. You’re clever. The Professor will be pleased.”
“What can you tell me about the Professor?” he asked. “I’ve only heard general rumors.”
Her smile widened. “Allow me to say the rumors don’t do him justice. Anything you heard needs to be taken to the next level. The Professor is an exuberant scientist and much larger than life. In fact, you might say that he is the quintessential scientist of the old school.”
That was a big word for a pilot. He wondered how good her vocabulary was in her native tongue.
Then he felt ashamed for looking down on someone just because they weren’t an engineer or scientist. Wasn’t that just like some of the people he hated the most?
“An old school scientist, eh?” He smiled at Sash. “I can hardly imagine what that means.”
“You’ll find out soon enough,” she replied with a twinkle in her eye. The translation pendant rendered her smug tone so clearly he almost grinned.
And then he almost slapped himself on the forehead. He’d forgotten to return the damned thing. His professor was going to be pissed. Oh well, it was a little late to worry about now. He’d call her once he’d settled in and make arrangements to get it back to her.
Sash pulled a headset designed to go over one ear from a hook near her head, slipped it on, and murmured into it, presumably to get permission to lift off. Once she finished, she manipulated the controls, and the hauler lifted smoothly into the air.
Jeff watched the university stretch out below them with more than a hint of wistfulness. He was going to miss this place. He would miss his friends even more.
The trip to orbit didn’t take long, and he enjoyed the view far more than he would’ve expected. The bright sky slowly faded to black, and the stars emerged. It was just like something out of an old movie.
The world below looked so fragile. The thin coating of atmosphere was all that protected the billions living on its surface.
He couldn’t stop himself from imagining the world rent by massive explosions that shot giant mushroom clouds into the sky. It took an effort of will to push that image away.
Despite all the talk, he knew the likelihood of anyone discovering a method to generate and hold significant quantities of antimatter was extremely unlikely. Plenty of theories sounded good until you tried to put them into practice. The history of engineering was filled with failures. Good ideas that never worked.
The Council would never allow anything so dangerous to get out. They’d stop Professor Xaltar if it came to something like that. At least Jeff hoped they would. He’d do his part and call in with regular updates for Dean Yusstic if things looked bad.
“You’re very quiet,” Sash said as they pulled out of orbit. “Most people can’t stop chattering once they see space like this.”
He smiled at her. “Don’t mistake my silence for lack of awe. It’s beautiful. I just have a lot of things on my mind. Things I really can’t control.”
She nodded knowingly. “Like becoming Professor Xaltar’s research assistant? The last one felt much the same way. The Professor has been gone from the university long enough that most students have never met him. Their assignment to assist him always comes as a great shock.”
“Did the last one work out?”
“Well enough, though she was a social creature. The isolation disturbed her more than she admitted. She was glad to get back to the university. Still, I believe she enjoyed her time with us in her own way and learned a great deal.”
Jeff turned in his seat and eyed her. “If you don’t mind my asking, what is your part in all this? Does the Professor often need pilots?”
“More than you might think,” she said agreeably. “He conducts experiments at some distance from the station for safety reasons. I also assist him in more prosaic tasks. He’s not as young as he thinks and simply moving bulky equipment around can prove challenging.
“Still, the Professor can be a rather…peculiar man. He has his own eccentricities that make having someone more levelheaded nearby a good thing, even if I can’t help him in his research directly. He also pays very well for me to humor his sense of the dramatic.”
Jeff had no idea what she was talking about, but he imagined he’d find out soon enough. “How far out to the station?”
“It’s parked at what you humans call the L2 Lagrange point, just on the other side of the moon. Well, parked is something of a misnomer. It’s actually in a halo orbit. This point is one of the unstable ones.�
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He cocked his head. “A halo orbit?”
She nodded. “The gravity there balances out, but staying in place is akin to balancing on the tip of a stylus. In practice, it’s easier to simply orbit the station around the Lagrange point. Like a little halo for one of your Human angels, I believe, if you’re looking for the source of the word.”
Jeff had never been particularly religious, but he immediately caught the meaning. “Got it. Why put a station there? The moon is directly between it and the planet. Why not use one of the other points?”
“You’d have to ask the Professor to be sure, but I’ll wager it has to do with the lack of neighbors. After all, who would put something worthwhile in such an isolated location? That keeps his research secure and provides a buffer for any…accidents.”
He raised an eyebrow. “What kind of accidents?”
“I’ll let the Professor brief you on that.”
Her voice was level and uninflected. Jeff wondered if she knew what kind of research the Professor was conducting out here. Still, she was right. He needed to hear everything from the man himself.
The trip around the moon was unexpectedly beautiful. Sash took them far closer to the surface than he’d imagined beforehand. The sight of all the craters and sharp hills were stark and imposing.
All too soon, they pulled away from the surface and skimmed into the darkness of space. Oh, he could see well enough. The sun was at a favorable angle, so they weren’t in the pitch blackness of deep space, but there wasn’t any orbital traffic for the light to reveal.
Then he saw a small dot growing brighter in the distance. “Is that it?”
“It is,” she said. “It’s not much to look at without a frame of reference, but it’ll make quite the impression once we get closer.”
He had no idea what that meant, so he watched the station grow larger in silence. Once it was close enough for him to start seeing details, Jeff knew exactly what she meant.
The place was a floating wreck.
Well, that wasn’t very precise. It was a run down, decaying structure that looked to be mostly abandoned. Partially stripped, too. Large sections of hull plating were missing. It was a floating skeleton.
Most space stations were well lit and had numerous position lights to avoid accidents. This one was brightly lit by the star, but no floodlights provided backup illumination. It would vanish into the shadows once the moon took it around the curve of the planet hidden behind the moon.
It also had no functioning position lights other than the ones at a single docking hatch. The impression of abandonment grew stronger the closer the hauler came. Frankly, he couldn’t imagine how the damned thing kept an atmosphere inside even the intact portions of the hull.
The open pits beyond the missing hull plates were spookily similar to what he’d imagine the eye sockets in a skull looked like. All that was missing in transforming the station into a space-based haunted house were spider webs. He idly wondered if the place were haunted.
The station was rotating, of course. Without centrifugal force, there would be no interior gravity. That implied a certain amount of structural integrity.
“Did they condemn it?” he asked hesitantly.
“By they, I assume you mean the planetary authorities. No, but the station isn’t certified for habitation, and it’s slated for reclamation at some point in the next few years.”
She smiled a little. “That doesn’t mean it’s completely unsafe. The Professor’s laboratory and the habitation section are airtight and safe, if not always comfortable. I made sure of that.”
“And the planetary authorities were fine with that?”
“The Science Guild wrangled a waiver for research purposes. They made me sign a different kind of waiver, too. Didn’t you?”
“Probably,” he said sourly. “I really need to read documents a little more closely in the future and ask questions before I sign them.”
Her smile widened. “A wise precaution here in the Union. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to focus on docking. The Professor hates it when I bang into the hull.”
Jeff hoped she was joking.
The pilot deftly brought the hauler around to the operational docking hatch and tapped her controls to open it up. The massive slab of metal slid ponderously aside, revealing a gapping maw of darkness.
He almost asked if it was safe going into the dark like this before he remembered she’d asked for some peace and quiet to work in. The last thing he wanted to do was distract her at a critical moment.
The overhead lights came on as the hauler slid into the station. “On” being something of an overstatement as the bay was about as well-lit as the exterior of the station. Only a few lights near the far bulkhead flickered to life, but it was seemingly enough for Sash to guide her craft in.
He couldn’t be sure, but he thought there were other vessels squatting in the darkness. There was no way to be certain they were even functional. On this station, he nursed his doubts.
Sash turned the hauler so they could see the exterior hatch, now appearing to sit in the floor due to the gravity caused by the station’s rotation.
“I want to make sure it closes this time,” she confided. “It’s a pain in my donkey when it gets hung up, and I have to suit up to crank it shut manually.”
Jeff felt the corners of his mouth quirk up. The translation pendant had struck again. He was sure she’d made a reference to her anatomy rather than a beast of burden. Not for the first time, he wondered if the professor who designed the prototype had intentionally skewed the results for curse words.
The massive hatch slid closed without issue. Jeff watched as Sash manipulated the controls and the sharp shadows outside began to soften. She’d started the pressurization process.
Once her console beeped, she stripped off her headset, hung it up, and undid her safety webbing. “We’re good. Let’s get you settled into your cabin. Once that’s done, I’ll take you to meet the Professor.”
He discovered the pressurization process hadn’t done a thing for the ambient temperature. As soon as the hauler’s hatch opened, his breath puffed into large clouds of vapor, and he felt the small hairs inside his nose crinkle. It had to be below the freezing point of water in there.
By the time they’d piled his belongings onto the cart and headed into the bay, he was shivering. Sash’s leather jacket suddenly made a lot more sense.
That situation improved only marginally once they entered the station proper. He was suddenly glad he’d packed some sweaters. He’d need them. He made a mental note to add thicker socks to his shopping list for his next trip planet-side.
The corridors in the habitation module were dark and dingy. Housecleaning and lighting seemed to be low on the priority list. Thankfully, their journey to his new accommodations was short.
To his surprise, his room turned out to be a set of rooms. An actual suite, and one in good order. The place was clean and well-lit. The furniture seemed to be made up of odds and ends, but everything was in decent shape.
There were even some pictures on the walls. Mostly scenes from planet-side. Not the world they orbited, he suspected, but many different places. That made him wonder how far and wide hotel art from Earth had made its way in the galaxy, passing from hand to hand, system to system.
“Jensta kept it in good repair while she was here,” Sash said. “That’s your job now. I take care of the air systems and general maintenance, but cleaning this place is all on you. I expect you to be diligent. If I stop by and it smells like cigarettes, I’ll have your hide.”
Jeff narrowed his eyes speculatively. She probably hadn’t said “cigarettes.”
He settled on “butt” as the most likely source word that his translator had mangled. He’d long ago learned that asking for clarification was usually a waste of time. An occasionally hilarious waste of time, but still less productive than he needed to be right now.
“Will do,” he assured her. “I’ll just park the car
t here, and you can introduce me to the Professor, if you have time. After I get a sweater.”
That made her laugh. “About all I have out here is time. I’ll be waiting outside for you.”
It only took a few minutes to find a sweater and slip it over his shirt. It helped immensely with the chill. He slipped the communicator into his pocket, too. That wasn’t the kind of thing he wanted anyone to ask awkward questions about.
Sash didn’t have a key for him, but he imagined larceny wasn’t much of a concern on an abandoned space station with just two potential suspects. That presupposed he had anything worth stealing. Which he didn’t. Name any serious student without a wealthy family that did.
Rather than lead him around the ring—which was probably a good thing considering its condition—she led him toward the central core through one of the spokes. The gravity dropped quickly as they made their way inward until it was gone.
What he found in the central core left him speechless. In fact, it shocked him so badly he let go of the handhold and drifted away from it before he could stop himself.
She deftly snagged him by the belt and hauled him back. “His lab has that effect on everyone. I keep meaning to record people’s reactions, but I’m always too busy laughing. Inside, you understand.”
Under normal circumstances, he’d have had some kind of witty reply, but the scene in front of him left no room for clear thought. And “scene” was exactly the right word, too. It looked like something out of an old movie. A really old movie.
In fact, he was sure the Tesla coils on the right side of what was obviously a mad scientist’s lab were exact replicas of ones he’d seen before. The massive arcs of power shot in every direction with crackles of barely-restrained energy. Energy that ultimately did nothing except provide a dramatic show.
Other props from various ancient monster movies hung from the walls, and a massive glowing ball hung from the ceiling. There was no gravity, so that had to be for show. And what a show it was.
For a Few Credits More: More Stories from the Four Horsemen Universe (The Revelations Cycle Book 7) Page 25