By the time Flight stabilized Atlantis’s course, fired its rocket motors to slow it into a gradually-expanding spiral orbit, and scrambled Albertson’s crew for the rescue attempt, the shuttle was more than fifty thousand kilometers away from the Ark and retreating quickly. Each additional orbit would see the Atlantis spiral another two thousand kilometers and change further away from Gaia until it escaped the planet’s gravity entirely. Its final orbit within the solar system hadn’t been projected yet, but since there wouldn’t be a chance to return to it with more fuel for its empty tanks before it passed beyond the safe operational ranges of the other shuttles in the fleet, Atlantis had been declared lost.
His shuttle scrapped, entire crew dead, and the elevator ribbon nearly severed wasn’t how Jian had pictured his first command playing out. Indeed, it was far, far beyond even his most fervent nightmares.
When Jian spoke again, all of the fight had drained out of his voice. “Can someone please tell me which of my crew’s bodies you weren’t able to recover?”
The cabin fell deathly silent. No one wanted to answer him, or even make eye contact. Finally, Albertson stepped up.
“It was Rakunas,” she said evenly. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah? Sorry are you?”
“Yeah. He was my friend, too. We were in the same primary school class.”
“What happened?”
Albertson turned back around to face her displays. “He came free of the cargo bay at the moment of impact, before the doors had closed all the way. His body then continued out on its own trajectory.”
“And you couldn’t swing back to grab him?” Jian asked.
Albertson shook her head. “We’re running inside our safety margins on fuel as it is.”
“I understand.” And he did, even if he didn’t like it. The rest of the short trip back to the Ark passed in somber quiet. The deceleration burn dug Jian’s restraints into his wrists, even through his skinsuit’s thick sleeves. But the burn passed, and soon enough Albertson gingerly maneuvered her shuttle into its cradle in the aviary.
The gantry clamps and umbilicals ran out to secure the shuttle to the Ark’s hull as everyone inside breathed a sigh of relief, Jian included, even if he was dreading what came next. Sure enough, as soon as the inner hatch indicator turned green to show a positive seal, the door swung inwards as two men in Ark constable uniforms floated in, stun sticks held prominently in their hands.
“Permission to come aboard, Commander Albertson?” the leader of the unit said.
“You’re already aboard, constable,” Albertson answered dryly.
“Yes… well, we have orders to take the prisoner, Jian Feng, into custody.”
“I wasn’t aware Commander Feng had been placed under arrest,” Albertson said as the temperature in the cabin dropped.
“But you have him restrained!” the lead constable protested.
“For his own safety. He just lost his boat and entire crew. He’s understandably a little distraught.” Albertson unbuckled herself from the command chair and expertly floated back to face the interlopers. “So unless I am very mistaken, you are here to escort Commander Feng to his next appointment. Yes?”
The constable swallowed hard. “If you say so, ma’am.”
“This is my boat, and I do say so.” Albertson pushed off and floated back to Jian’s seat, then released the cargo straps pinning his arms and legs.
Grateful for the restored freedom of movement, no matter how short-lived, Jian rubbed some circulation back into his wrists. “Thank you,” he said quietly.
“I’m sorry about all of this, Jian,” she replied just above a whisper. “I don’t know what’s going to happen now, but I don’t believe you were involved in this mess. Others may not be convinced. Don’t let them get to you. Keep your chin up.”
Jian nodded as he released his crash web and drifted out of his seat into the cabin.
“Mr Feng,” the constable said. Albertson loudly cleared her throat. The constable glanced at her, annoyed, but relented. “Excuse me, Commander Feng, if you would accompany us?”
Jian grabbed the backrest of his seat and launched himself towards the open hatch. “Try to keep up, boys. I have places to be.”
He floated down the transfer tube and into one of the engineering section’s main manufacturing bays. What had been a relatively quiet maintenance bay in his youth had evolved from overhauling or remanufacturing equipment as it wore out during the two-century trip from Earth to Gaia. The pace of work was steady, but manageable. Some days, the crew assigned down here just sat around waiting for something to break.
All that changed when the Ark entered orbit around Gaia eighteen years ago. The mission shifted from simple maintenance of the ship’s existing infrastructure, to manufacturing a wide scale, seemingly endless array of components and products for the new colony. Some of them were simple, things like buckets and shovels. Some of them were not, like desalinization pods, quadcopter avionics packages, and this was all on top of their preexisting maintenance duties.
Of course, the Ark’s army of 3D printers and assembly robots did a significant share of the work, but they required constant monitoring, feeding, and maintenance themselves. And for all of their considerable versatility, there were still many components too intricate, or too small batch, for the printers and assemblers to tackle efficiently.
As a consequence, the bay was absolutely screaming with activity. To his left, half a dozen new deep space satellites for the Early Warning network sat in the queue waiting for their solar panels. To his right, spidery assembly drones crawled over the long, spindly arms of the next antimatter funnel to come down the line.
Unlike the Helium-3 harvester they’d just freed on Varr, this machine was space borne. Four of the devices were already hard at work plying the Van Allen Belts of Tau Ceti F for antiprotons. At more than six times Gaia’s mass, and with a core still molten enough to generate a magnetic field stronger than even Earth’s used to be, the next planet out was a perfect harvesting ground for the powerful resource. The funnels used miniaturized fusion generators to project their own powerful magnetic fields as they rode the planet’s naturally-occurring field lines. The charged anti-particles were then pulled into magnetic constriction bottles inside their bodies until they were full, then broke orbit and returned to Gaia with their cargo.
Or they would, as soon as any of them had a full load of two grams of antimatter, which would be several months yet. Then the volatile crop would be transferred and stored in a specially-built containment unit orbiting past even the Pathfinder counterweight on the far end of the space elevator ribbon, just in case anything went wrong. A perfect explosive, the antimatter was much too dangerous to store onboard the Ark. But then, that’s not where it was needed.
While the Ark’s reactors were only too happy guzzling the Helium-3 being mined on Varr, the Alcubierre Drive prototype ship’s power and mass requirements meant it needed something with a little more kick than even fusion could provide.
“Commander, this way,” the constable said.
Jian shook himself back into the moment. All of those thoughts had raced through his mind in a couple of seconds as he tried to find something, anything else to focus on beside the last few hours. Or the next few, for that matter.
One of the techs noticed the three of them floating by the dock and recognized Jian. The news passed through everyone in the compartment at the speed of thought as his arrival was announced through a shared plant link. As one, every pair of eyes silently turned to face him, inspect him. Pity him. Judge him.
It was… unnerving.
“After you, constable,” Jian said, suddenly eager to leave the module. A central shaft ran through all of the Ark’s modules, acting as both a load-bearing member taking on the stresses of acceleration and deceleration back when the Ark still moved, and as a transit tube for travel between modules. The only exception was the old Zero Stadium. It was the largest uninterrupted space on the entire shi
p.
Inside the central shaft, the junior constable motioned for Jian to wait against the wall. The inside of the tube had transfer handle tracks built into the inside surface to speed people up and down the Ark’s ten kilometers of living and working space. The constable called three of the handles back to their location and waited, stun stick held loosely, yet conspicuously, in his crossed arms. The other constable took up position behind Jian as the three small handholds zipped down the track and slid to a stop about two meters apart.
It was a simple enough system. You grabbed the handle, set your destination with your plant, and the electromagnetically driven handle would pull you along, accelerating up to as much as sixty kilometers an hour on the express tracks and taking you from one end of the ship to the other in as little as ten minutes. All you had to do was hang on for the ride.
Jian looped the small safety strap over his wrist and gripped the ring. “So, where we going, fellas?”
“End of the line,” the lead constable said.
The “line” only led one direction from here. The Command Module. They were taking Jian straight to his father. The handle pulled away, tugging gently at Jian’s arm while it accelerated. Very soon, they were whizzing through the spine of the engineering module on the track’s electric whine. The wind blew through Jian’s hair, reminding him of summer vacations spent on Gaia’s surface. The wind was always blowing down there, often even faster than the sixty kph blowing past his face now.
He thought about Shambhala at night, its lights dimmed without power streaming down from the Ark. He thought of the friends he still had down there, like Benexx. Ze was eleven years younger than him and had been little more than a precocious child when they’d first been introduced. Jian resented being forced to play babysitter for the weird little creature at first. But Atlantians matured quickly, and as the years rolled on they became fast friends. He’d not seen Benexx this summer as had become traditional. His studies and training for flight duties had taken precedent over a few weeks of frivolity, but they’d still kept in touch.
He wondered what ze was up to now.
They left the engineering module behind as the tracks carried them into the axle around which the Avalon Module rotated. Two uninterrupted kilometers of white walls and color-coded conduits passed by. There were no windows in the axles of the habitats. The outer surfaces of the shafts were festooned with thousands upon thousands of daylight lamps, casting light down onto the farms and citizens below twelve hours per day. It would be daytime in Avalon now, and night in Shangri-La module.
The constables watched him closely as they made the transition through the old Zero Stadium. They had to stick to the viewing galleries along the inside walls, as the stadium itself was depressurized to make way for the elevator ribbon bisecting the middle of the space like an enormous black sheet.
The interior space was jampacked full of anything that was too large to fit inside the engineering module and its maintenance or construction bays. Three entire lift cars sat parked in their capture gantries, waiting for elevator services to restart, while much smaller ribbon sleds gathered near the southern entrance. Crews of both human techs and repair drones were already assembling to head a few hundred meters down the ribbon to begin patching the gash the Atlantis had left.
“Would’ve save everyone a whole pile of trouble if you could have missed the tether,” the junior constable said from ahead of Jian.
“Oh yeah, kid? It was either that or my shuttle punched a hole in the hull, killed everyone in the viewing galleries, crippled the docks, and probably severed the ribbon completely instead of just taking a repairable chunk out of it. So until you’re flight certified, maybe don’t tell me how to do my goddamned job, OK?”
“Quiet,” the senior constable barked. “Both of you.”
The rest of their transit through the stadium passed by in silence, which was just fine with Jian. He preferred to be left alone with his thoughts during the next few minutes of the trip. They passed through the lock from the old stadium and into the spine of Shangri-La. Or, as most everyone else called it, the Tomb. The place where eighteen years earlier, David Kimura’s terrorists blew up all the supports underneath the habitat’s artificial lake, ripping a massive hole through all six layers of the module’s hull and decompressing the entire space, executing twenty thousand people in their mad play to end humanity. Twenty thousand people, asphyxiated in minutes.
Including Jian’s mother.
He’d been eight when it happened. He’d only survived because he’d been in the Zero Stadium getting ready to watch a match with his older cousins when the bombs had gone off. His mother had been resting in their apartment in Shangri-La, near the very top of the Qin Shi Huang building. She’d never had a chance to get out. When they finally recovered her body months later, she’d made it down less than ten flights of steps before succumbing to the vacuum.
There was a reason Jian spent most of his time either in the engineering module or in the docks. Even the act of passing through this cursed place left a frost on the surface of his soul that took time and effort to thaw out again.
Mercifully, the trip through Shangri-La was short, and in minutes they had reached the Command module, passing first through its multiple tiers of laboratories before reaching the outer doors and security checkpoints for the bridge sphere itself, the nerve center of the entire ship. They were quickly cleared to enter, and found the great ship’s brain experiencing a seizure. Dozens of crewmembers filled the space, darting back and forth from one display or station to another, conferring, questioning, arguing, shouting, and in at least two cases, crying.
Floating at the exact geometric center of the volume, standing erect despite the microgravity, Captain Chao Feng pointed and waved and barked orders as he strained to keep a lid on the scene and prevent it from descending into chaos.
The crew’s reaction wasn’t surprising, really. The crash was the biggest crisis the Ark had faced since the explosion in Shangri-La eighteen years earlier. Most of them hadn’t been working the bridge back then. Hell, many of them hadn’t even graduated primary school.
Then, Jian’s father turned around from his perch and looked him dead in the eye. Just as in the engineering bay, everyone stopped what they were doing and faced him in unison. Jian knew some of the older faces personally. He’d grown up with them close at hand. They’d been over to his parents’ apartment for dinner. A couple of them had even babysat for him.
His father unbuckled from his command chair and pushed off for the door.
“Constables,” he said, as he gently touched down and grabbed a handhold. “Thank you. I will take over from here. You’re dismissed.”
They saluted crisply, then returned to the lock without a word. Chao never broke eye contact with Jian, even if his expression was unreadable. Finally, Jian flinched and looked away.
“First Officer Supan, I’m going to debrief Commander Feng. Take over.”
“Aye, captain,” Supan acknowledged.
“Follow me, commander,” his father said formally.
Drifting across the outer wall of the bridge sphere, moving hand over hand from one hold to the next, his father guided him towards a lock that led to a set of conference rooms. Jian knew them well. He used to play in them on those rare occasions that his mother couldn’t watch him and no sitters were available. He’d spent quite a few bored hours entertaining himself under the tables, pretending they were forts in need of defending from the scourge of girls infecting the ship.
The door hissed close behind them, and Chao launched himself into Jian and wrapped him up in a tight hug.
“I thought you were gone, boy,” Chao said as his fingers dug into Jian’s shoulders, his breath coming fast and ragged.
The emotional outburst caught Jian off guard. He was expecting to be chewed out. Accused of failure to prevent the catastrophe. Of bringing shame to all that remained of the family line. He wasn’t ready for the emotional outburst from his nor
mally stoic and authoritarian father. It snuck past the defenses Jian had been building up for years. As his father’s relieved tears drifted in the air past his face, Jian’s walls came tumbling down. He wrapped his arms around his father’s shoulders and squeezed harder than he had in years.
“For a minute there, I thought I was too, dad.”
The moment passed and Chao untangled himself from his son’s arms. “Yes, well…” he started, then stopped again to collect his tears with his fingertips before placing them on his tongue. You didn’t just leave saltwater floating around that much sensitive electronic equipment, even single drops of it. Old habits die hard.
Chao squared his uniform. “I have to debrief you. And… I have to administer a BILD scan. It’s not going to be pleasant.”
The sudden shift in emotional momentum almost gave Jian whiplash. “You, what?”
“I’m not any happier about it than you are, son. Believe me, but–”
“A BILD scan?” Jian demanded. “Why not just crack my skull open and go through my brain with a potato peeler?”
“It wasn’t my idea, Jian.”
“Not your idea? You’re the captain. Nothing goes on aboard this ship without your consent.”
Chao took a deep breath. “There’s a fine line between consent and acquiescence. Sometimes, it’s almost impossible to tell them apart. I’m not an autocrat or a dictator, Jian, no matter what you think of me. I have to work with, and sometimes around, a lot of other people. And it’s been made clear to me that the civilian government in Shambhala would feel better if your debriefing included the scan.”
“Well to hell with their feelings. I won’t submit to it.”
“You’ll submit to it, or you’ll be confined to house arrest. Son, I don’t have any choice here. It was all I could do to get them to allow me to be the one to debrief you.”
“You’re doing the scan?” Jian didn’t even try to scrub the betrayal from his tone. “Are you completely mad?”
“You’d rather a stranger do it? Someone without any investment in your wellbeing?”
Children of the Divide Page 13