She looked at Masayo. He stood awkwardly in the stiff suit, his face hidden by a gold sun visor. She asked, “Ready?”
“Let’s get it over.”
Holle threw a switch. The suit winches cut in and they rose up, smooth and silent, their legs dangling, climbing the cables effortlessly, with Holle just ahead of Masayo. “The crossing will take a few minutes.”
“Kind of slow,” he muttered.
“Well, that’s for safety. You in a hurry? I could always override the regulator-”
“Hell, no.”
“Oh, come on, enjoy it. Look around. Get your bearings. There’s the sun, over there.” She pointed. The sun, five times more remote than from Earth, cast an oddly dim light and sharp, strange shadows. It was no longer bright enough to banish the stars that filled the sky all around them, more crowded than seen from any mountaintop on Earth. “Look, you can see the launch stage…”
The Orion launch frame drifted alongside the tethered hulls, its thermal-resistant pyramidal cap still in place, the pusher plate still gleaming. Without the bulk of the hulls the interior looked gutted, and that mighty thermonuclear engine was stilled for good. The hulk was now serving its final purpose as a construction platform as spacewalking astronauts, all of them Candidates trained for the job, put together the warp assembly at the hull tether midpoint. Aside from that Holle could see the freeflying platforms that supported Venus’s planet-hunting telescopes, both of them sailing far from the vibration and bright lights of the hulls. There was no point looking for the antimatter miner; that was fifteen million kilometers away, plying its hazardous trade between Io and Jupiter. All these components were scattered in the blackness, but they twinkled with lights, with humanness, like a little town in the orbit of Jupiter.
Masayo was looking around uneasily, his hands clamped to the restraint at his waist.
“And there,” she said, “is Jupiter.” She pointed the other way from the sun.
Jupiter was a disc, golden-brown, visibly flattened, the only object in the whole universe away from the Ark cluster itself large enough to show as anything other than a point.
“Kind of disappointing,” Masayo said.
It was a common reaction among the crew. “Oh, you think so?”
“It looks no larger than the moon, from Earth.” He held out a thumb, waggling it, occluding the planet from his sight. “King of the worlds! Somebody told me it masses as much as all the other planets combined. Is that right?”
“Yeah. More than three hundred Earths.”
“But it’s just a ball of gas. I can see those big cloud bands, but so what? Even the Great Red Spot is just kind of mud-colored.”
“You should talk to Joe Antionadi.”
Joe had specialized in climatology, among other disciplines, and he spent long hours in the cupola studying Jupiter, a super-laboratory of climate. The Great Red Spot was actually a permanent storm system, centuries old, that prowled endlessly around Jupiter’s cloud bands. There were disturbing parallels between it and some of the huge new hypercanes roaming Earth’s equator.
But they weren’t here for Jupiter itself, but for the products of its magnetosphere.
“You need perspective, Lieutenant. Why are we so far out? Why don’t we orbit close in, skimming a hundred kilometers over the clouds like they used to orbit Earth?”
“Radiation, right?”
“That’s it. Jupiter is a high-radiation environment. A human worker down there would pick up over three thousand rem a day-a lethal dose is around five hundred.” She leaned back, trusting the tether, and waved her suited arms. “And believe me, if you could see the planet’s magnetic field you wouldn’t think Jupiter is so small. It has ten times the strength of Earth’s, it stores twenty thousand times as much energy, and it stretches far out, even beyond our radius here, twice as far. And it traps charged particles from the sun.”
“That’s what makes the radiation environment so lethal.”
“Right. But it’s the interaction between Io and Jupiter’s magnetic field that’s important for us.” Through Venus’s telescopes Holle had seen the mighty aurorae that played over Jupiter’s nightside, and heard the crackle of radio waves emanating from the tortured gases. Io’s flux tube, a system of high-energy plasma, was a natural antimatter factory.
“Hell of a way to go about your business,” Masayo said.
They had reached the tether’s center point now, and Holle slowed them to a stop. Looking around from here she could see the great band of the warp generator, essentially a compact collider ring, wrapped around the tether. Spokes like a bicycle wheel’s attached the ring to a hub at the midpoint of the tether. On the ring she saw a welding spark, and two suited workers moved patiently around a freshly installed panel.
Masayo asked uneasily, “Is there some reason why we stopped?”
“Point to the sun. Just do it.”
“It’s over there.” He pointed again, his finger fat in the heavy glove. “Oh. No, it ain’t.” The sun had shifted visibly around their sky, as had Jupiter, the stars. “We’re turning. ” He grabbed onto the tether.
“Take it easy. That’s Seba down below, where we came from.” She pointed. “That way is down. The other way’s up. OK?”
He forced himself to relax, muttering. “Up, down, up, down.”
“Good. We’ll make an astronaut of you yet. It’s just a slow rotation for now. Takes an hour to complete. Not enough so you’d notice the centripetal force inside the hulls, but it’s enough to keep the tether under tension. Later we’ll spin up faster.”
When the warp assembly was completed vernier rockets would be used to spin the whole assembly, the twin hulls rotating around the tether midpoint like two handholding skaters whirling around on the ice. The rotation, completed once every thirty seconds, would induce an apparent gravity of about forty-four percent of a G in the nose airlocks-and because the centripetal forces increased the further you got from the center, the gravity would rise too, to around sixty-six percent of a G at the base of each hull.
Then a warp bubble would be thrown up around the whole unlikely jury-rigged assembly, snipping it out of the universe and sending it flying across the Galaxy at multiples of the speed of light.
Masayo said tightly, “So are we going on now?”
“In a minute.” This was her chance. She dug a lead out of her pocket; she plugged one jack into her own chest console, the other into Masayo’s.
He looked down. “What’s this?”
“Direct suit-to-suit comms. Overrides the radio signal.”
“Oh. Nobody can hear us, right?”
“That’s the idea.”
“So what do you want to talk about?”
She thought it over. “It just seems a good idea for us to communicate. I mean, we’ve been on this Ark over five hundred days now.”
“Five hundred and forty-eight. Paul Shaughnessy crosses it off on the wall by his couch, like he’s in prison. In fact he was once in prison.”
“There you go, I never knew that.”
“And does it do you good to know that the guy responsible for beating up Thomas Windrup has a brother who’s an ex-con?”
“Look, I’m not probing. You’re very defensive.”
“Do you blame me? You know we’re all up on a variety of charges, us illegals, from insubordination to trespassing on federal property to mutiny. The parents of some of the stranded Candidates are suing us in the civil courts. Just as well we can’t turn this Ark around and go home; I’d be in jail myself.”
She said carefully, “I always heard that you never wanted to be here in the first place. That you just got sort of swept up.”
He hesitated. “Well, it was true. I was the lieutenant, remember. The guys pulled a gun on me and frog-marched me up that damn ramp. I thought I’d have time to talk them round, or disarm them, and get us off the Ark again. And then, once we launched, I figured I should stick with them. At least I had a chance of keeping them in order. Not that I did a good job with Jack, I admit. But you got to see their point of view, Holle. Look, on Earth we were on the front line. We were armed responders. Here, we’re scrubbing gunk off the walls.”