“Huh? What’s a snailbot?”
“Little robot scavengers that float around in the tanks and clean up the water. It’s one of the few concessions we had to make to adapt a salt-water aquarium to zero g. We tried live scavengers, but they’re all adapted to cleaning up the detritus from the bottom, or from rocks. In OceanLab, the gunk doesn’t filter out, so we use a machine to keep the water nice and tidy.”
“Maybe OceanLab will get an Earth scavenger to adapt?”
“Could be, but the bots are working well so far. Snailbots to clean up, lungbots to aerate the water. Except for one general-purpose robot with lots of little manipulators, those are the only machines I need to keep everything going smoothly.” She thought of how much time she was investing in this friendly chat and glanced at her watch. “Until now, that is. I’d better get going. Eleven minutes to launch.” She surprised Duke, and herself, by kissing him again before she donned her helmet and stepped into the airlock.
Midway Marina was a lacework of catwalks suspended below Rantoul High Colony’s exterior shell. The Sun had just set when she emerged from the airlock, but it would be back again in one minute as the colony completed half of its lethargic rotation. She was happy to see that Rantoul Departure Control had already switched on the marina lights for her. An armada of space ships, everything from little unpressurized scooters to large family-sized yachts, hung suspended from the network of overhead rails.
She carefully made her way along the open metal grid to her own scooter, towing her backpack behind her in its little cart. Gravity wasn’t noticeably higher down in the marina, just a few hundredths of a g above normal, but her heavy suit reminded her just how out of shape she was. She was exhausted by the time she had her backpack installed in its cradle in her scooter.
Duke was right; she really needed a new scooter. The vehicle she rode on every tour was more hope and promise than engineering elegance. The whole contraption was made up of second-hand parts never intended to serve their current function. Still, she was proud of it; except for a little help from Leroy and Duke, she’d done all the work herself.
With painstaking, deliberate care, she climbed down into her cabin. Production-model space freighters had elegant command centers, but her cabin was nothing more than a collection of flat metal plates welded around her scooter’s central rail. The plates protected her from micrometeorites and provided a heat sink to stabilize the ambient temperature, but her cabin wasn’t even pressurized; she relied on her suit for that. Mirrors, combined with thick leaded windows set in each of the cabin’s plates, gave her a reasonably good view in all directions.
She looked over her minuscule spacecraft with the same care that Rantoul’s safety engineers inspected the colony’s hull and life-support systems, paying particular attention to the radiation counters. The giant space colony had grown from an orbiting base which serviced geosynchronous communications satellites, so it was inside the outer reaches of Earth’s radiation belts. Like all Toulie children, she learned respect for shielding in kindergarten and was most careful to assure her scooter would protect her while she was away from the colony. With the bulk of fuel tanks attached to its plates and a network of thin wires which generated a magnetic field to deflect charged particles, Jeanette’s spacecraft kept the worst of the radiation from reaching her.
Her scooter’s backbone was a rail scavenged from some long-forgotten scientific pallet. At the back end of the rail was a cluster of station-keeping rockets salvaged from a dead communications satellite. Fuel tanks strapped to the center of the rail supplemented those attached to the craft’s shielding plates. Jeanette rode inside her makeshift cabin motorcycle-style, strapped onto her seat with her legs on either side of the rail. The scooter hung from a cargo launch cradle, ready to be boosted into space by the colony’s electromagnetic launcher.
“Rantoul Departure, Flutterbye One,” she called on her suit radio. “Request launch for OceanLab.” The request was simple ceremony; they knew where she was going. She had already called ahead so Departure Control would have her trajectory calculations ready.
“Roger, Jeanette,” Departure Control answered. She recognized the voice, an elderly man who decided to retire in the comfort of South Cap’s low-gravity community. She had never met him, didn’t even know his name, but it was the same voice that sent her off on each tour and welcomed her home when she returned. “Hang on. We’re moving you to the launch station.”
With a little jerk, her scooter started moving. The launch cradle above her crawled along its track until she was extracted from her parking spot in the marina and aligned perfectly with the long axis of the cylindrical colony. Her control panel winked green, indicating the cradle’s satisfaction with its latch into launch position.
“Rantoul Departure, ready for launch,” she called. Her clock showed less than a minute to go. She leaned back against her suit, braced for acceleration.
“Flutterbye One, Rantoul Departure. Cleared for autolaunch at—Uh oh. Flutterbye One, hold.” A brief pause, then, “We’ve got some bad news for you, Jeanette. You’ll have to hold for a while. Colorado Springs says your traj takes you right through the debris cloud that hit OceanLab.”
“But I can’t wait!” she protested. “OceanLab is leaking!”
“We know, Jeanette, but if you launch now, that debris cloud would do to your scooter the same thing it did to OceanLab.”
“I’m armored,” she said. She thought it shouldn’t be necessary to point out the obvious, but people were chosen to work in Rantoul’s transportation system based on their meticulous attention to detail. Safety was always more important to them than getting people to their destination.
“You are, but your engines aren’t. At best, you’d wind up being disabled, and we might not be able to get a rescue vehicle to you in time. Besides, you don’t want to have to pay for a rescue.”
“Hey, the bounty on this unscheduled service would more than cover a rescue flight!” She was getting desperate. With each passing second, OceanLab lost a bit more of its atmosphere.
A different voice, stem and feminine, rang in her headphones. “Flutterbye One, Rantoul Departure Control. Your launch window opens in 132 minutes. We can continue to provide keep-alive power to your spacecraft if you care to hold where you are, or we can move you back to your berth. Say your intentions.”
Jeanette sighed. She knew Maisie Johnson; trying to charm her way past Rantoul’s safety chief was hopeless. “I’ll wait it out here,” she said. “Don’t have time to get out of my suit anyway.”
“OK, Jeanette, we’re still with you,” Maisie answered. “We’ve apprised the Seattle Aquarium of your mission status. They want to chat. Want me to connect you to them?”
“Thanks Maisie. Please do.” She relaxed against her suit and watched the Universe rotate around her.
“Jeanette, Mark Blevin here, at the Seattle Aquarium. Don’t believe we’ve met. I’m the director of life science research down here. We’ve heard about your mission delay, and thought you’d like to hear about OceanLab’s status.”
So the aquarium had the brass on line for this one! Jeanette glanced up at the Earth. The terminator was approaching North America’s eastern seaboard; people in Greenwich would be starting to think about lunch The man got up in the middle of the night just to talk to her! “No, Dr. Blevin, I’m sure we haven’t met. I’ve never been to Earth. But I recognize your name from the OceanLab manuals. Yes, please, tell me about the laboratory.”