In addition to the hook-snatch docking trick, tethered complexes like this one offered many other advantages over old-style “Tinkertoy” space stations. Long, metalized tethers could draw power directly from the Earth’s magnetic field, or let you torque against those fields to maneuver without fuel. Also, by yet another quirk of Kepler’s laws, both tips of the bola-like structure experienced faint artificial gravity — about a hundredth of a g — helpful for living quarters and handling liquids.
Teresa appreciated anything that helped make space work. Still, she used remote instruments to examine the braided cables. Superstrong in tension, they were vulnerable to being worn away by microscopic space debris, even meteoroids. Statistical reassurances were less calming than simply checking for herself, so she scanned until she was sure the fibers weren’t on the verge of unraveling.
Overhearing Spivey, clucking like a nervous hen as his cargo cleared the bay, Teresa smiled. I guess maybe we’re not that different in some ways.
The Russians and Chinese had similar facilities in orbit, as did Nihon and the Euros. But the other dozen or so space-capable nations had abandoned their military outposts as costs rose and the skies came increasingly under civil control. Rumor had it Spivey’s folk were trying to cram in as much clandestine work as possible before “secrecy” became as outmoded up here as below.
The crane operator loaded the Colonel’s cargo into an old shuttle tank — now the station freight elevator — and sent it climbing toward the weight-free complex, twenty klicks above.
“Request permission to prepare the airlock for transit, Captain.” Spivey was already halfway down the companion-way to middeck, impatient to join his mysterious machine.
“Mark will help just as soon as the tunnel is pressurized, Colonel.”
One spacesuited astronaut examined the transparent transitway connecting Pleiades’ airlock to Nearpoint. He waved through the rear window, signing “all secure.”
“I’ll see to Spivey,” Mark said, and started to unstrap.
“Fine.” But Teresa found herself watching the spaceman outside. He had remained in the bay after finishing, and she was curious why.
Climbing atop one of the tanks at the aft end, the station crewman secured his line to the uppermost insulated sphere… then went completely motionless, arms half outstretched before him in the limp, relaxed posture known as the “spacer’s crouch.”
Teresa quashed her momentary concern. Of course. I get it.
A little ahead of schedule for once, the fellow was seizing a chance that came all too rarely. He was watching the Earth roll by.
The planet filled half the sky, stretching toward distant, hazy horizons. Directly below paraded a vastly bright panorama that never repeated itself, highlighted topographies that were ever-familiar and yet always startling. At the moment, their orbital track was approaching Spain from the west. Teresa knew because, as always, she had checked their location and heading only moments before. Sure enough, soon the nubby Rock of Gibraltar hove into view.
Great pressure waves strained against the Pillars of Hercules, as they had ever since that day, tens of thousands of years ago, when the Atlantic Ocean had broken through the neck of land connecting Europe and Africa, pouring into the grassy basin that was to become the Mediterranean. Eventually, a new balance had been struck between sea and ocean, but ever since then it had remained an equilibrium of tension.
Where the great waterfall once surged, now diurnal tides interacted in complex patterns of cancelation and reinforcement, focused and reflected by the funnel between Iberia and Morocco. From on high, standing waves seemed to thread the waters for hundreds of kilometers, yet those watery peaks and troughs were actually quite shallow and had been discovered only after cameras took to space.
To Teresa, the patterns proved beautifully, once again, nature’s love affair with mathematics. And not only the sea displayed wave motion. She also liked looking down on towering stratocumulus and wind-shredded cirrus clouds. From space the atmosphere seemed so thin — too slender a film to rely all their lives upon. And yet, from here one also sensed that layer’s great power.
Others knew it too. Teresa’s sharp eyes picked out sparkling glints which were aircraft — jets and the more common, whalelike zeppelins. Forewarned by weather reports on the Net, they were turning to escape a storm brewing west of Lisbon.
Mark Randall called from the middeck tunnel. “The impatient so-and-so’s already got the inner door open! I better take over before he causes a union grievance.”
“You do that,” she answered quietly. Mark could handle the passengers. She agreed with the cargo handler, out in the bay. For a rare instant no duties clamored. Teresa let herself share the epiphanic moment, feeling her breath, her heartbeat, and the turning of the world.
My God, it’s beautiful…
So it was that she was watching directly, not through Pleiades’ myriad instrumentalities, when the color of the sea changed — subtly, swiftly. Pulsations throbbed those very storm clouds as she blinked in amazement.
Then the Earth seemed suddenly to bow out at her. It was a queer sensation. Teresa felt no acceleration. Yet somehow she knew they were moving, rapidly and non-inertially, in defiance of natural law.
It did occur to her this might be some form of spacesickness — or maybe she was having a stroke. But neither consideration slowed the reflex that sent her hand stabbing down upon the emergency alarm. With the same fluid motion, Teresa seized her space helmet. In that time-stretched second, as she spun around to take command of her ship again, Teresa caught one indelible glimpse of the crewman in the cargo bay, who had turned, mouth open in a startled, silent cry of warning.
Back in training, other candidates used to complain about the emergency drills, which seemed designed to wear down, even break the hothouse types who had made it that far. Whenever trainees felt they had procedures down pat, or that they knew the drill for any contingency, some smartaleck in a white coat inevitably thought up ways to make the next practice run even nastier. The chief of simulations hired engineers with sadistic imaginations.
But Teresa never cursed the tiger teams, not even when they threw their worst at her. She used to see the drills as a never-ending exercise in skill. Perhaps that was why she didn’t quail or flinch now, as a storm of noise assailed her.
The master alarm barely preceded the first peal from the shuttle’s backup gyroscope. As she was shutting that down, the characteristic buzzer of the number one hydraulics line started chattering. Station Control wasn’t far behind.
“Gotcha Pleiades, we’re onto it… It looks like… no…”
Voices shouted in the background. Meanwhile, Pleiades’ accelerometers began singing their unique, groaning melody.
Teresa protested — We can’t be accelerating! But her inner sense said differently. Logic would have her shut off the sensors — which were obviously giving false readings. Instead she switched on the shuttle’s main recorder.
Amber lights blazed. She acted quickly to close a critical OMS pressurization line. Then, as if she didn’t already have enough troubles, Teresa’s peripheral vision started blurring! She could still see down a tunnel. But the zone narrowed even as she shouted — “No. Dumpit, no!”
Colors rippled across the cabin, turning the cockpit’s planned intricacy into a schizophrenic’s fingerpainting. Teresa shook her head sharply, hoping to drive out the new affliction. “Control, Pleiades. Am experiencing—”