Sliding Void (9 page)

Ahead of the transport capsule, Calder could see the plate-like circumference of the blast shield approaching, a massive one-mile wide dish protecting the rest of the ship from the brute reactions that occurred at the business end of the vessel. The princely part of Calder marvelled that there was enough iron in the world to cast such an artificial bulwark. The fleet ensign from Zeno’s sim merely looked at the dark cratered mass, pitted by age and countless engine boosts, and couldn’t believe that a ship yard had actually granted a flight worthiness certificate to this ageing iron-carbon composite – barely able to take half the thrust of a modern carrier’s engine shielding. Approaching the shield, Calder’s capsule tilted down and rode the monorail into the ship’s interior, passing through the middle of the shield and out along one of five connecting struts – each the size of an oilrig’s legs – that joined the ship’s engines to the rest of the craft. Like the Eiffel Tower turned horizontal, girder after girder shot past Calder, the armoured disc behind him now, along with the command, cargo, crew and passenger quarters. Half way along the connecting struts were a rotating set of vanes, seven of them circling about, lazily, as if someone had taken it into their mind to build a windmill capable of harnessing solar winds for their foundry. And in a manner of speaking, it was a foundry – a mill capable of distorting space-time through an artificial singularity and initiating a translation of the whole vessel into hyperspace. Sensitive enough to field interference they had to be well clear of the solar system’s mass to jump into hyperspace. They were still heading out of Hesperus system, rising straight on a vertical trajectory, the quickest way to break free of the tyranny of the local gravity well. Calder couldn’t see the frosty orb of his home now, it was no longer visible to the naked eye. With nearly a subjective year of sim living under his belt, it seemed an age ago he had been stumbling through the lethal snowfields, his heart thumping in fear as he fled for his life with loyal old Noak by his side. In reality, he had been gone less than a week, the
Gravity Rose
boosting up towards light speed, distant stars crawling past. No wonder Calder was confused. Half the time it felt as though he didn’t know where he was, who he was or when he was.

It only took a second for him to pass through the rotating shadow of the vanes and then he was sliding towards the engines. At the far end of the connecting struts lay the ship’s drive section. A hexagonal power plant dotted with great spherical structures like mushrooms infesting the trunk of a tree. Enough room for a sizeable fusion plant to power the ship’s internal systems when the vessel’s many solar panels were too far away from a sun to operate comfortably, more acres and cathedral-like vaults to house the hyperspace engines and in-system antimatter pion reaction drive.

Slowing on the connector strut, the capsule decelerated for the first in a series of vault-thick doors to swing open along the tube into the engine block. It was as if Calder’s capsule were packed full of valuables and being gently stored in a safety deposit box. In reality, the width of the walls was as much to protect the universe outside from the contents of the drive chamber as to keep the engines safe from asteroid strikes and pirate assaults. There wasn’t much point piloting a starship unless you could enter a solar system at the end of your journey, and the inhabitants of worlds rightly got very nervous about vessels coming in leaking radiation and other exotic particles. Even with missile silos, fighter bays full of hardships, rail cannons, lasers and the associated panoply of combat, the main difference between a warship and a freighter like the
Rose
was largely one of intent. Flying the
Gravity Rose
into a world’s surface at just under the speed of light would result in one hell of an insurance loss for the inhabitants. The ship’s monorail emerged from the long armoured tunnel into a large chamber, the central floor of which was filled with a series of lozenges, each a steel and crystal construction the size of an apartment block, the crystalline portion of their surfaces gently pulsing with blue light. After six simulated months sharing the sensibilities of an ensign in
Hell Fleet
, this hyperspace translation matrix was still black magic to Calder – largely because it might as well have been sorcery to his fleet avatar. For all the analogies heaped upon the understanding of such devices – think of it as knife to slice into the deeper realities of the universe – think of it as a translation device to convert the mathematical language of one reality into another – think of it as a piano’s tuning fork to… no, think of it as a big steaming shit-pile of the wrath of the gods, able to mangle the stuff of creation, mould it into spears and hurl it like one of Vega’s thunderbolts across the creators’ phantasmal realm. Calder’s barbarian explanation made as much sense as any the sims had provided with their talk of advanced Brane theory, affine-parameters and T-duality. His capsule pulled in behind a pod already docked at a halt and the robot driver at the front stomped around, tweeting static in-between its
follow follow
. A door on the left of the capsule rolled into the roof, allowing man and machine to step onto a viewing gantry overlooking the jump matrix. There was a second Sony unit waiting for them, the two robots sharing a burst of communication before forming up behind each other and waddling off. Unlike the robot from the pod, this new boy had its front panel painted white with black characters scrawled across it. The language virus which had burnt the alliance lingua franca, Lingual, into Calder’s skull, provided no comprehension of the writing; but part of his sim learning dimly signalled that these were Sino characters or similar. Lots of Chinese racial worlds inside the Triple Alliance – Calder’s partner in the Hard TAP sim had been one Fu-han Meng. A racist cop voice rose with him, sighing:
With a surname like Paopao, you think the chief of the drive rooms is going to be Färsk Nordic rather than a chink
?

With each other for company, the robots seemed to have forgotten about their human charge, and Calder groaned and followed after the duo as they marched beside the glass of the viewing gallery, little flashes of cerulean light flashing off their metalwork. Catching up, Calder stepped into a lift with the maintenance units. Then he was sinking through the decks, an archaeologist’s excavation of layered shielding – geological layers of concrete sandwiched between layers of alloy steel, diamond composite, sand, water, air, self-healing fibre-reinforced ceramics, until he reached the Engineering Command Housing core, or ECHO core, in fleet parlance. For most starships, the ECHO core was the most important part of the vessel – all that was separating a functional space vessel from being a couple of million tonnes of metal coffin stranded parsecs from civilisation at worse, or a large satellite trapped in a world’s gravity well at best. The
Gravity Rose
’s was a four storey chamber, a large central atrium surrounded by rises of railinged decks connected by a nest of walkways, gantries and lifts – some designed for human crew, more arranged for the hundreds of mechanicals moving around the space. The robots were rolling between consoles and the banks of instruments, tending them with all the care farmers showed growing their crops in the greenhouses of Hesperus. There was none of the information overload of the bridge here that Calder could see. No storm of flashy icons and hologram schematics, the walls reassuringly solid rather than a skeleton interspersed with the star-spattered void, the bank of consoles comfortingly mechanical. At the centre of the atrium, rising up towards Calder as the lift descended, stood one nod toward modernity – a gigantic table that could have seated a company of marines, but instead was attended by a single man in the ubiquitous green crew overalls. He was pacing its length with the intensity of a field marshal, the hologram landscape across the tabletop not one of military formations, but the hills and valleys of drive cores and reactor piles, portions rising like volcanoes to demand his attention. Circling the table as if they were engaged in a race, a small army of robots rolled, stepped and hovered in holding patterns, waiting for the man to jab a finger at them, his mouth shouting commands that Calder couldn’t hear inside the whining lift. With orders tossed at them in this seemingly derisory manner, the robot that had been singled out would peel away and head off to do his bidding. Calder’s diminutive escort waddled out of the lift first, the open door flooding the lift with sounds of the organised chaos outside. He stepped out after them. It smelled like an oil driller’s cabin – either that or a cop’s garage. Burning grease. Ionisation in the air, robot exertions, machine frictions. The ever-present whiff of great energies being released in distant chambers.

Up until now it had been superfluous giving Zack Paopao the title of drive chief, as he’d had no human crew to boss around. With Calder’s arrival, that was about to change. The twin R4 units halted outside the roller-derby circling the chief’s last stand, observing it with the cool detachment of race referees. Calder walked across to stand just beyond the looping train of robots. Some were little more than crab-sized steel shells with antenna flickering as they jolted along on hidden wheels, other robots taller than the R4s, tractor-tracked cabinets beeping and hooting between themselves, spindly beanpoles with binocular-shaped heads trotting around on whipping nests of metal tentacles.

Chief Paopao was either ignoring Calder or oblivious to his existence. He stood five and half feet tall, his round Chinese face sporting a trim goatee beard below and a dark bushy mane of hair above running to silver. It was hard to peg a person’s true age with life extension treatments, but Paopao looked old – maybe late fifties or early sixties. In alliance space, the chief could have been celebrating his half-millennium birthday and Calder would have been none the wiser. Life extensions were prohibitively expensive, the genetic wizardry of resetting human telomere DNA a treatment that could only be initiated so many times – and a closely guarded secret of a network of laboratories; one practised in exchange for disgustingly large amounts of money. But there was something about the chief that spoke of age, of weariness, of tiredness – or was it just the stink of a man who had been defeated by life once too often? Was it the hunched way he leaned over the control table? The harried flicks of his fingers across the control surface, pinpointing nascent problems he had fixed a hundred times before. Or the wiry compactness of his body – as though every inch of fat and waste had been sucked away by a life weighted too long with labours? Brooding between sim episodes, the stench of failure was an odour Calder worried might be clinging to his body. When the chief turned around and finally deigned to acknowledge the newcomer’s presence, the look Calder received was curiously familiar. Where had he seen that before? Ah yes, the glance his father had shot Calder when the military council had arrived bringing news of his older brother Brander’s death on the battlefield and the unexpected tidings that Calder Durk was now heir to the whole kingdom. A mixture of fear and fascination.

‘Ah, well,’ announced the chief. ‘It is my fault, really. I ask for extra help and this is my punishment. One of Rex Matobo’s favours, only the learning of a few sim episodes away from planting an axe through one of my reactor plates for fear it’s possessed by demons.’

Calder was going to point out that one of the sim sessions had been
Hell Fleet
, but on balance, he didn’t think that would reassure the man. ‘Calder Durk at your service, chief. I’ve left my axe at home.’

Paopao made a curious sounding tutting under his breath. ‘I count my blessings.’ As Paopao reached down to tap the control table, Calder noted an animated tattoo wriggling under the chief’s left forearm. With the officer’s shirtsleeves rolled up, Calder watched a crimson phoenix with a missile clutched in its talons growing small as it orbited a moon, before rushing out and smashing through a number four.
That’s the unit insignia of the Fourth Fleet
. So, Zack Paopao had done
Hell Fleet
the hard way – in real-time, rather than via sim. He remembered Zeno’s prohibition about questioning the crew about their lives before the ship, but where was the harm in trying to bond with this hermit of the drive rooms?

‘You were in the fighting fourth?’

Paopao grunted dismissively. ‘If you had been on real jump carrier, not that public relations joke that Zeno carries around, you would know deck apes usually call it fleeing fourth.’

‘Public relations joke?’

‘Fleet has PR hacks attached to show’s design team, as well as technical aides from navy. Icons on a bridge’s warfare boards might be one hundred percent accurate in show, but all else is recruiting poster puffery. It’s called fleeing fourth because no alliance fleet has retreated more or lost greater number of lives in action.’ Paopao jabbed angrily at the control table before his fingers encompassed the three robots he expected to hop to his orders.  ‘Plasma realignment on number five tokomak. Full repair instructions are logged in the local queue on level two. Go.’ He turned back to Calder. ‘Officers call it fleeting fourth, however. For fleeting tenure of careers there. Which is why I am here. Look around, boy—’ his hand encompassed the ECHO core, ‘—on your joke show, there were four hundred and twenty six ratings and officers in carrier’s drive rooms, working three shifts across twenty-four hours. Numbers are right. Details always are – but never spirit. What do I have? A crew of oilers. And now you. Rest of them float around
Gravity Rose
, issuing directives like they are in court of Han Emperor. And where do orders end up? Here, mostly. But you will see. You will see where real work is done on this vessel. You with your sword and your two sims and your fighting fourth.’