Marten and Omi headed into forbidden territory. Marten knew the way. He’d been here before, and in a certain sense he’d come home. Back in the days when Social Unity ran everything, his parents had been engineers on the Sun Works Factory. Long ago, there had been a labor strike, an attempt at unionization. Political Harmony Corps had brutally suppressed it. His parents and others had then escaped into the vast ring-factory.
Marten opened a hatch and stepped through, Omi followed.
Black and yellow lines painted on the ceiling, wall and floor warned them to stay out. Newly placed red posters with skulls and crossbones made it clear.
“Don’t worry,” Marten said. “I’ve already been here several times.”
They hurried. Sleep-time would soon be over and their maniple would return to training.
“This way,” Marten said. He wheeled a valve, grunted as he swung a heavy hatch and poked his shoulders through. The corridor was smaller here, colder.
“What’s that smell?” asked Omi.
“A leak lets in minute amounts of vacuum. The cold crystallizes the air, and that’s what you smell.”
“Are you sure we’re safe?”
“Here we are,” Marten said.
He led Omi to a small deck, with a bubble-dome where the wall should have been. A hiss came from four meters up the dome’s side.
“Air leaking out,” explained Marten, “but it’s only a pinprick.”
Omi squinted at the bubble-dome’s tiny fracture. “It’s not dangerous, right?”
“Not yet,” Marten said. He pointed outside at Mercury.
The ring-factory rotated around the planet just as Saturn’s rings did around Saturn. The factory’s rotation supplied pseudo-gravity. They presently faced away from the Sun, but the radiation and glare would have killed and blinded them except for the dampening devices and heavy sun-filters.
The dead, pockmarked planet filled over three-quarters of the view. Mercury wasn’t big as planets went. If the Earth were a baseball, Mercury would be a golf ball. It had a magnetic field one percent of Earth’s. A person weighing 100 pounds on Terra would weigh thirty-eight pounds on Mercury. The solar body it most resembled was the Moon. Just like the Lunar Planet, thousands of craters littered Mercury. Dominating the view below was the Caloris Basin, a mare or sea like those on the Moon. Instead of saltwater, however, well-baked dust filled the mares. The Caloris Basin was 1300 kilometers in diameter, on a planet only 4880 kilometers in diameter.
Marten pointed at the Sun Works Factory as it curved away from them—they were inside the fantastic structure. The curving space satellite seemed to go on forever, until it disappeared behind the planet. On the outer side of the factory, unseen from the viewing deck because the outside part faced the Sun, were huge solar panels that soaked up the fierce energy and fed it into waiting furnaces. Catapulted from Mercury came load after load of various ores.
“Look at that,” Omi said.
Far to the left sat the damaged Doom Star Genghis Khan. It was a huge warship kilometers spherical. Blue and red lights winked around it, sometimes dipping into it. They were repair pods. Some were automated robots and some were human-occupied pods.
Omi turned to Marten. “So how is standing here going to help us from getting gelded?”
“Look over there.”
Omi squinted and shook his head.
“There,” Marten said, pointing more emphatically. “See?”
“That pod?”
“Correct.”
A small, one-man pod floated about a hundred meters from the habitat’s inner surface. No lights winked from it. It sat there, seemingly dead, a simple ball with several arms controlled from within. There were welder arms, clamps and work lasers. Anyone sitting inside the pod could punch in a flight code. Particles of hydrogen would spray out the burner.
“What about it?” Omi asked.
“Remember how I told you I grew up here?”
Omi nodded.
“Well,” Marten said, “I bet most of my equipment—my family’s equipment—should still be intact. It was well hidden.”
“So?”
“So my family built an ultra-stealth pod to escape to the Jupiter Confederation.”
“PHC found it, you said, over four and half years ago.”
“I’m pretty sure they found it back then. But that doesn’t matter because I could build another one.”
“Impossible.”
Marten managed a smile. “You’re right. Let’s stay and get gelded.”
Omi paled. “How do you plan on going about this, a…?”
“I need a vacc suit,” Marten said. “So I can go outside and enter the pod.”
“Then?”
“Then it gets hard,” admitted Marten.
“But not impossible, right?”
Marten checked his chronometer. “Time to head back.”
Omi glanced at the hissing spot in the Plexiglas bubble, and then he turned with Marten for the barracks.
3.
On the experimental Social Unity Beamship Bangladesh, Admiral Rica Sioux sank into her acceleration couch. She wore a silver vacc suit, the faceplate dark and the conditioner-unit humming. Around her and suited as well languished the officers of the armored command capsule.
Despite the Bangladesh’s heavy shielding, months in near-Sun orbit had leaked enough radiation so Admiral Sioux had ordered the command crew together with the Security detail into the vacc suits. There had barely been enough suits for higher command and security, a grim oversight from requisitioning. The rest of ship’s company had bitterly complained about the lack of vacc suits for them. After the first cases of radiation sickness, Security had overheard talk of mutiny. Finally, in order to regain a sort of normalcy, the Admiral had ordered drumhead executions of the ringleaders—in this instance, randomly selected personnel.
The experimental spacecraft, the only one of its kind, had already set two hazardous duty records: one for its nearness to the Sun, two for the duration of its stay. Their greatest danger was a wild solar flare. One flare, over 60,000 kilometers long, had already shot out of the Sun’s photosphere and looped over the Bangladesh, only to fall back into the cauldron of nuclear fire. The ship’s heavy magnetic shielding, the same as in Earth’s deep-core mines, kept the x-rays, ultra-violet and visible radiation and high-speed protons and electrons from penetrating the ship and zapping everyone aboard. Not even the vacc suits would have protected them from that. Unfortunately, the rare occurrence of a giant solar flare had signaled the commencement of Admiral Sioux’s troubles. Somehow, the image of their beamship sailing under the flare’s magnetic loop of hot gas had horrified the crew. If a flare should ever hit them—even with the beamship’s magnetic shields at full power— there would be instant annihilation.
They had been in near-Sun orbit since the start of hostilities. Their ship was probably the only one in the Solar System that could have done it. The magnetic shields that protected them this near the nuclear furnace took fantastic amounts of energy to maintain—too much to make the M-shields useful in combat. The gaining of power here was simple but deadly for the personnel aboard. Special solar panels soaked up the incredible wattage poured out of the Sun. Unfortunately, they couldn’t collect when the magnetic shields were up. So they switched off the M-shield and used the heavy particle shields—millions of tons of matter—to keep the worst radiation at bay while the solar collectors collected. Then and none too soon went up the magnetic shields. Most of the radiation leakage, naturally, occurred between these switches.