THE CAMBRIDGE ANNEX: THE TRILOGY

by Peter Damon

  Once upon a time, back in their student days, he had thought his future wife and her best friend very much alike, often ganging up on him. But now, living in close proximity for just over a month, Michael could see how, although Heather’s conclusions might match those of his late wife’s, the manner in which she arrived at them was wildly different.

  The suite they shared was slightly larger than those allocated to the rest of the ship’s personnel. Theirs, in addition to the bedroom, living area and bathroom that was common to all rooms, also had a larger than usual workspace for each of them and a meeting table suitable for six. The only other difference was in its location; immediately next to the ship’s control-room.

  Large TV screens functioned as windows as well as a notice-boards, an information centre, and media and communications platforms, even as games consoles if you wanted them to. At that moment the nearest to their main work area was largely serving as a window, with the crescent of the earth as seen through one of the cameras fixed to the outside of the hull taking up most of the screen. However, one of the large square icons to the side of the screen was blinking a sharp pink, alerting them to the time for the meeting.

  Heather turned the alert off before they stepped out of their suite and into a corridor that held a strong similarity to that of many modern international hotels. The double doors leading into the main meeting room for the control-room personnel was unsecured, while the following door was restricted, and carried a large warning sign to the dangers in trying to gain unauthorised admittance. Someone, and Heather guessed it might well be Matt, had ensured all the signs were in Russian and Mandarin, as well as English.

  The meeting room was large, easily accommodating 20 people, with one side-wall entirely made of glass allowing a view of the half-lit control-room beyond.

  Others were sauntering in, nodding greetings and getting refreshments before sitting down at the table, their tablets invariably in front of them. Even Matt now carried one, if not needed because of his phenomenal memory, then required to keep pace with the volume of communication their team generated.

  “Alright, let’s start with building work,” Michael said, making himself comfortable at the head of the long table.

  “The main work is complete,” Reverend Martin Giles told the room. The work force of South Koreans had taken to him, and in a very organic process he had become their manager and spokesperson, on the one hand outlining what tasks they were to undertake each day, and on the other making Michael aware of any issues they had regarding their living arrangements or work. The Chapel had therefore become one of the first rooms to be completed, and had thereafter become the Project Room for the building work too.

  “Minor work and repairs will continue for a while yet, and we’re trying to have every suite lived in for at least two days before we pass it as complete and ready. That will certainly be finished before the arrival of the college’s students on 1st September,” he agreed.

  “So the noise should die down now?” Gary asked. Gary was the only student on board whose formal studies were not related with the sciences. He was, however, the chair of the Cambridge University Spaceflight Society and, as such, more than qualified to be on board ship.

  The reverend nodded towards the broad shouldered young man seated across from him and smiled. “You’re eager to go onto shifts,” he surmised.

  “We need to,” Gary told him, and looked to the rest of the room. “We’re in space, an extremely hostile environment. We can’t have all but a skeleton crew keeping the same clock, the way we’ve been doing so far,” he stressed.

  “I’ve put together some notes on how I think it can work,” Gary continued. “We can convert whole floors to a converse clock, so it will be 10am on one floor, and 10pm on another. Hall lighting will reflect the time of day. Some areas, like the control-room, libraries, study areas, etc, will remain in use all the time but some, like the kitchens, will also be maintained on a shift pattern,” he explained.

  “Alright. So we go to two clocks. When?” Michael asked.

  “End of the week? Best do it before too many people are on board,” Gary suggested. “Some of us will have to move quarters, but that’s about the worst of it.”

  “Are we going to align it with earth clock?” Michael asked. “GMT and, what would it be? Hong Kong?” he quickly calculated.

  “No point. We’re going to be moving our orbit about too much,” one of the twins told him.

  “There is another piece of major building that needs to be completed quite quickly, although it won’t cause any noise,” the twins told the meeting as they looked up from their tablets.

  “We’ve been playing with the BV21 rubber material used on our spacesuits,” one of them explained. “It uses a novel chemical bonding process to create a synthetic rubber unique to the task required of it; it bonds chemically with other substances.

  “We’ve been discussing this with Peter and Jack Long, their Chief Chemist, and as a result, created a new product. It’s still fundamentally operating as a rubber, but with some of the properties of Kevlar too,” they explained.

  “Doesn’t Kevlar deteriorate under UV Light?” Jake asked, looking down the table towards Peter Bridge, the representative of Long, Bridge and Son, the manufacturers and patent holders of the BV21 material.

  Peter was nodding. “This will need to reside beneath a UV filter,” he pointed out.

  “Does this mean new spacesuits for everyone?” Michael sighed.

  “Well, yes, it will, but what we want to do is paint the outside of the ship with it,” David told him.

  “What; the whole ship?” Michael gasped.

  The twins nodded in harmony. “70,000 square metres, to a depth of 150 millimetres,” David offered as he saw Cheryl reach for her tablet.

  “It will need to be done now, before we start erecting the support struts for all the equipment we’re going to have fixed to the hull,” Allan explained.

  “But why?” Michael asked.

  “We all know about space junk. Well, the highest incidence of the rubbish is at 800 kilometres, very near our chosen orbital height. We’re at real risk unless we coat ourselves with a nice thick coating of this rubber solution,” Thomas explained.

  “Surely the thickness of our hull protects us,” Michael put in. “What’s a small piece of aluminium alloy going to do to us?” he asked with a grin.

  “They’re travelling at around 28,000 kilometres an hour, Michael, about 24 times faster than a speeding bullet. That’s one hell of a lot of energy per kilo,” Allan warned.

  The twins nodded. “This material can absorb all but the very large items, and those we can watch out for and steer around, just like the International Space Station does,” David explained.

  “Really? Is that what it does? The country that developed a Star-Wars device tells the ISS to move out of the way?” Michael snorted in derision.

  “Let’s not forget that we can always just go out and collect it,” Frankie reminded them all. After all, this was his trade.

  “So when do you plan to do this?” Michael asked.

  “As soon as we can. Our spacemen are looking for further training opportunities, and we’ve got to work out some means of monitoring them and recording their work,” David said. “This is the ideal project on which to formalise a process.”

  “Well, Paul may have something to help on that front.”

  “Yes,” the doctor nodded as all faces turned toward him. “The short of it is that I want to put a chip into everyone’s body,” he explained simply.

  “A chip? Like a computer chip?” Frankie asked, his expression showing his concern.

  “Yes, like a computer chip, although it actually looks more like a capsule than a chip,” Paul pointed out. He began rummaging in his pockets for the example he had brought with him and, as usual, found he had too many pockets.

  “The chip will provide two important pieces of information. First and foremost, it will tell us where everyone
is. As you can probably imagine on a craft such as this, that alone could be a huge benefit. Secondly though, in conjunction with the intelligence in our face masks, the chip can provide us with details of body temperature and heart rate while you’re outside the ARC,” he explained.

  “So you can warn us if someone is overdoing it, or having a heart attack?” Michael asked.

  Paul nodded and, having finally found what he wanted, dropped it onto the table for people to look at. “That’s smaller than the Ibuprofen I take for my headaches,” Frankie noted with surprise.

  “We could put this into all our vehicles too, couldn’t we, Paul?” Heather asked.

  Michael nodded to himself. With all vehicles tracked, they would know precisely where everything and everyone was.

  “Let’s keep the fact that we have electronic tagging of our vehicles among ourselves,” Michael suggested. “I don’t want a thief knowing the first thing they have to do is reach under the wheel arch to pull out our tag,” he explained

  “And, if the chip is transmitting who we are, we could use it for security too, couldn’t we?” Allan Blake asked from the other side of the table.

  “Sure,” Paul answered with a shrug.

  “If Paul can use the Radio Frequency ID type of chip, the RFID type Cambridge University has been doing research on since 2010, then I’m pretty certain we can integrate quite a lot of our systems into the information it will be transmitting,” Allan explained. “That means, doors programmed to your RFID,” he clarified for the likes of Michael.

  “So, I can proceed?” Paul asked.

  The meeting agreed and Michael made another note on his tablet. “Now, about communication,” he told the others.

  Leanne took up the subject. She was the brightest electronics engineer Cambridge University had seen for some while and had worked closely with Allan Blake and the twins to integrate mechanical and electrical systems within the ARC. Michael had asked her to develop their satellite technology.

  “While I appreciate how important it is to create commercial satellites out of all those shipping containers we have above deck, we need to set up our own communication first,” she told the room.

  “What I recommend is an initial GEO satellite situated over the Arctic. The Cambridge University Wireless Society will host the earth-based station that will feed automatically into the earth’s communications network,” she explained. “We’ll set that up as quickly as we can to give us earth communication. Then we’ll need a second GEO satellite over the Antarctic to give us the ability to monitor our commercial satellites, wherever we put them; northern or southern hemispheres,” she explained.

  “You want to put our communication hub into that old pre-fabricated building sitting in the corner of some field just outside Cambridge?” Michael asked with surprise.

  Leanne grinned and shook her head. “The CUWS has received a grant to upgrade their facility. There will be a two story complex on that field with state-of-the-art facilities, including security,” she explained.

  “Anyway, our polar satellite can be used as a model for what will be our staple commercial communications satellite; 200 transponders, three 2 metre diameter dishes, 30 square metres of solar panels. We can verify the model works before going live with paying clients.”

  “But these will be just for us,” Michael asked.

  “Oh yes. They’ll have some extras too, like additional dishes facing outward and a Laser based communication system to support us as we move further and further out,” she told them. “Being on the poles, they’ll also have additional electromagnetic shielding,” she added.

  “200 transponders?” Cheryl asked.

  Leanne nodded. “As you probably know, most GEO satellites have about 32 each. They also have around a 10 to 15 year life-span due to their limited fuel reserves and the need to hold their orbit. So, given our size and fuel source, we can radically reduce the cost of communication to our clients.”

  “So I can begin talking to earth-based brokers?” Cheryl asked. Cheryl was the Sales Director for the ARC and had already concluded six agreements for the lifting of privately owned satellites prior to them reaching space. It had been the income from those launches that had enabled the team from Cambridge to buy the container ship in the first place.

  Michael nodded towards the small woman. “Wait until we have the relay set up. The link through the Arctic will provide a little bit more privacy to your dealings,” he explained, making a note on his tablet.

  “But I can base it on 200 responders per satellite?” she asked, making her own notes on her tablet.

  Leanne nodded. “Here,” she said, flicking her finger towards Cheryl on the surface of her tablet.

  Cheryl’s eyes widened as an icon for the document slid onto her tablet. “How you do that!” she cried while Leanne chuckled.

  “Not all of us have been idle over the last few weeks,” Allan grinned. “You can now just ‘flick’ documents to each others’ tablets,” he explained.

  “Anywhere?” Michael asked, trying it with Heather. The icon on his tablet appeared to bounce off of the edge of the screen, while the new icon shot into the middle of her screen, momentarily appearing with a small white box that indicated from whom it had been sent.

  “Not at the moment,” Allan admitted, smiling as he watched those around the table playing with the new functionality. “Meeting rooms, libraries and the study rooms have the functionality at the moment. However, once everyone is transmitting a RFID that can be represented as an app, then you can flick it to whoever you want, as long as their RFID show up on the screen,” he explained. “The main Auditorium only supports flicks to the tutor, or flicks to the audience as a whole. Too many people in too small a space to do better than that I’m afraid,” he finished.

  “Before we all regress into boys once more,” Professor Juliet Rogers called. All eyes turned to the short but busty figure of the Geology professor specialising in Hydroponics.

  “I want to add another sixty tables to the farm,” she explained. “There are suppliers in Cambridge with good experience of my requirements. For each table, there will also be lights and nutrient feeds, plus monitoring tools that will be needed,” she added.

  Michael nodded and added some more notes to his tablet. Juliet made a flicking motion on her tablet and grinned as she saw Michael’s expression as it arrived. The document held her complete shopping list.

  “Alright. I’ll get right on it. Let’s go round the table and see what else we need to discuss. Matt?” he asked, looking directly to his left.

  “Have you been catching any of the news recently?” he asked. “The tabloids are already calling us the High And Mighty, while the technical journals suggest we’re a danger to the fundamental laws of earth and space,” he told the room, putting one particular journal onto the table.

  Michael had, and nodded while noting that various others were nodding too. “The press doesn’t like us at the moment, do they,” he confessed, more a statement than a question. He glanced at the technical journal and dismissed it as too technical for him while noting that the article had been written by a Russian. “We’re going to have to continually think on how we can help earth-based population while not giving up what they really want; the Howard chemical.”

  “We could give a proportion of the responders on our satellites to charities,” Cheryl suggested. “A larger proportion to those satellites covering Third World countries, a smaller proportion to those covering places like the USA,” she said with a straight face. Others smiled and nodded. Michael agreed, both with the suggestion and the sentiment.

  “Thomas, David; anything to add?” Michael asked.

  “Just to ensure you’re all aware; we’ve begun doing extensive testing on our chemical, tests we just couldn’t do down on earth. Mainly, we’re looking to identify its limitations. We want to learn just how fast we can go, and just how big a battery we’re going to need to go there,” they explained.

  “And
were you planning on going somewhere?” Michael asked.

  The twins grinned as they nodded, each in unison with their brother. “We need to discuss where we get our water, but later, not now. And on the subject of how to help earth, we need to discuss recovery of metals, probably from the Asteroid Belt but we could look in on passing asteroids too, and in particular we should look for Rare Earth Elements. They are key to a lot of new technologies and are, as their name suggests, extremely rare,” they explained.

  “You’re not just trying to really piss-off the Chinese, are you?” he asked with a grin, evoking laughs from around the table.

  Michael took more notes. “Wouldn’t the Moon or Mars be better, nearer to us?” he asked.

  “We’re anticipating an outcry from various organisations accusing us of ‘raping’ worlds before we even colonise them,” they explained. “So we don’t think they’re an option.”

  “If you’re reading the scientific journals, you may have read some disquiet about just how our lifting energy works. The consensus is that if it is forcing a change in gravity, then it’s an extremely dangerous energy.”

  “Another battle then,” Michael observed, taking notes. “If you can pass me details of those publications,” he requested.

  “Frankie?” he asked, continuing to go round the table.

  “We’re making some progress on choosing what vehicles we’re going to use,” Frank advised.

  “Let’s get together in a few days to have a look,” Michael suggested.

  Jake cleared his throat and straightened as his turn came around. “We’re soon going to have the best cameras available set-up on the outside of the hull. Even without those, our current cameras have the ability to pick up images as small as four square metres from 500 kilometres away,” he explained. “With the new ones, we’ll be able to make out objects just one metre square”.

  “Where is this taking us?” Michael wondered, thinking he knew.

  “There are areas of earth that are closely monitored by particular groups, Turkey and the Syrian border is one example, but where the images are not available to the public,” Jake continued.