The engineers had absolute faith in the structural soundness of the station, but just in case…
Keeping the civilians ignorant of the possible need for lifeboats was just another morale, as well as security, problem. Pearson thought the visitors ought to know about them, but somebody in DOD thought the clients should not have unnecessary worries.
Lt. Col. Amelia Pearson was also the security officer aboard Themis. Brad Mitchell was in charge of the station’s environmental and structural integrity, but Pearson was responsible for containment of the less tangible, more slippery commodity of secret intelligence.
She maintained the security clearance files on all enlisted personnel and officers except for General Overton, McKenna, and herself. Those were monitored by General Thorpe at Space Command. Pearson supervised the security clearance investigations for any potential replacement of personnel aboard the station. Replacements were rare, however, since those aboard resisted rotation back to an earth side assignment, and most had extended their one-year postings to Themis one or more times. Outside of war, there weren’t many situations in which the officer/enlisted distinctions virtually disappeared. Station personnel were selected strictly on the basis of competency in a given field.
There was a large backlog of applicants for duty on the space station, from the army, the navy, and the marines, as well as the air force. The 1st Aerospace Wing was air force-operated, but the personnel complement included all services. Maj. Brad Mitchell was a marine. Polly Tang was army. No matter where they came from, though, the military people had never given Pearson much trouble. They understood the importance of the knowledge they accumulated, and when they were earth side, they did not spread it around.
More troublesome to her brand of security were the civilian scientists on two-or three-week stints for companies that had contracted with the Department of Defense. Being scientists, they were naturally curious. Nosy, Pearson termed it. They might well defend to the death their right to protect the secrecy of an industrial process they personally developed in space, but they were less circumspect about revealing military secrets.
Pearson had devised the color scheme used on Themis. All interior surfaces were painted a typical, uniformly military gray. Hatchways to absolutely dangerous areas — primarily the undeveloped spokes and the air locks — were finished in red. Hatchways to spaces accessible only to particularly authorized personnel were orange and were also protected by keypad-operated locks. The nuclear reactor, communication, computer, ordnance and fuel storage areas, and the MakoShark hangars were behind orange hatches.
Areas to which a civilian might be invited, but only under escort, were identified in yellow. The Command Center, the Mako bays, and the Honeybee docking facilities qualified for yellow.
Blue was utilized for the spaces open only to military personnel, such as the military laboratories in Spokes Ten through Fourteen, and green was the predominant color used for those regions accessible to visiting civilians. Some compartments had blue/green hatchways, denoting combined usage. Various corridors in the hub had a green stripe running along the bulkhead. If an unescorted civilian didn’t see green somewhere, he or she knew the territory was forbidden. Not that some of them cared one way or the other. Military people were always reminding errant civilian people of the distinction.
Of the sixteen spokes, seven were open to civilians — three of the residential modules and four of the dedicated laboratory modules, Spokes Two through Eight. The nuclear reactor power plant was located at the end of Spoke Nine. In the hub, civilians could visit the exercise room, the medical clinic, a communications space set aside for corporate contractors, the laundry, and a few other specialized spaces.
At some time during her workday, Pearson made it a point to visit various spaces in the civilian areas. She made her visits randomly, and frequently she sent M. Sgt. Val Arguento in her place. Arguento was an army communications specialist who manned one of the shifts in the Radio Shack, but who also served as the security NCO. He had had extensive experience with the Defense Intelligence Agency and with the National Security Agency.
This morning, Pearson chose Spoke Six. She followed the curving outer corridor, Corridor Two, around to it, passing a number of people emerging from the residential spokes, headed for their assigned tasks. Everyone spoke to her, and she returned the greetings with a smile.
Spoke Six had a green hatchway, and was therefore out-of-bounds to most of the military contingent. The corporate contractors often had secrets they wanted to keep to themselves. And even if they did not, the experiments taking place in the labs were often sensitive, and the scientists didn’t want to be subjected to high traffic.
She tapped the green square and waited while the door unlocked and swung open. This spoke was forty feet long, and along its length, four accesses were provided, leading to small modules attached to the side of the spoke. These were hydroponic farms, where food and other flora were raised in special solutions. Artificial light was normally used, but one of the modules had a sliding shield that allowed direct sunlight to enter. It was all experimental. One of the military spokes had hydroponic farms growing wheat, rice, corn, and soybeans that were actually consumed after Sergeant O’Hara performed his magic.
After her Texas Omelet, Pearson thought she might revert to O’Hara’s bland bean concoctions.
The laboratory on the end of the spoke was huge, eighty feet long by sixty feet in diameter. Its interior bulkheads were partially movable in order to create differently sized spaces, based on the needs of the contractor.
The contractor was responsible for providing the equipment necessary for the particular experiment, and the equipment arrived at the station by HoneyBee.
Spoke Six was currently under contract to Honeywell and to Du Pont and was therefore divided into two separate laboratories. She passed through Honeywell’s space, which wasn’t currently inhabited, and opened the hatch to Du Pont. Honeywell smelled of ozone, which she didn’t like, and she made a mental note to mention it to Brad Mitchell.
Dr. Howard Dixon was upside down to her when she pulled herself through the hatchway She performed a half flip.
He smiled at her. “Ah, Colonel. Welcome.”
“I hope I’m not disturbing anything, Doctor.”
“Not at all. I’m boiling some oxides, if you’d like to watch.”
Absolutely fascinating, she thought. “I’ll pass, thanks. Are you being taken care of? Is there anything we can do for you?”
“Not a thing. I’m perfectly happy.”
In the immense space, he looked like a miniature, hanging onto the workbench fitted to the outer wall. But he did look happy.
The lab was a jungle of specialized instruments, consoles, and work tables to which were attached intricate lacings of tubing, vials, and bottles.
On her circuit of the lab, Pearson was careful to not touch anything. She looked primarily for things that might seem out of place, for paperwork that shouldn’t be there. There wasn’t much paper, of course, since most work notes and reports were kept on computer.
Computer disks leaving the station, or data and voice transfers from the client communications room, were scanned by Sergeant Arguento’s computer for information that should not be included in industrial and scientific reports. The computer sought out key words and phrases in computer documents and sounded the alarm when something was amiss. Usually, when they discovered classified information being transmitted, it was unintentional on the part of the scientist. A trivial piece of scientific curiosity, a measurement of the nuclear plant output, a suspicion that Themis stored ordnance aboard. One nuclear physicist, who also happened to be an antinuke activist, had convinced himself that nuclear-tipped missiles were stored aboard the station. He had made a nuisance of himself searching the station’s compartments for them, and had eventually been deported.