But that wouldn’t solve anything. There was something on the other side of the gate and she knew nothing of its nature. There was an unknown on Olorun.
Syn started to punch in the commands on the control panel to open the hatch. Then, she paused.
She did know something about it. It knew her language. She had understood it. She thought to herself, would a space pirate, some cosmic adventurer, know my language? Maybe there was some universal translator, but really, did they work that fast? No. There had been urgency, inflection. The voice—the girl—knew Syn’s language. It was Syn’s language.
Was it Syn’s voice? Quieter, yes. Strained, yes. Scared, yes. But Syn could hear herself saying those words. She mouthed the words as they descended: Help me. Then again, she breathed them out, nearly silent, inaudible except for her own ears. “Help me.” Blip didn’t stir. He didn’t hear. Or perhaps he didn’t care. But Syn could hear her words, and they sounded so much like the other voice. Maybe they had been Syn’s words. Her voice on the other side of the steel.
Or perhaps Syn had imagined it. Floating before the hatch to the bridge, the fear of the gate ebbed away. She was less certain she had heard what she thought she heard. Perhaps it had been an echo. Maybe they were her own words. Maybe they were in her head. But Blip had heard them. Maybe the other words were clipped? Had she said something that would sound like “Help me?” Was there something she had done that made the cavern echo her own words back to me? Maybe.
The hatch to the bridge popped open with a quiet hiss. As the door slid sideways, the light from the dozens of screens shone through and lit Blip up in a soft blue hue.
“After you,” he chimed.
“Gentleman,” Syn said, spear tight in her fist.
The bridge was a series of arcs, descending as they spread from the main tube. The walls appeared as windows out to the stars. They were not windows. There was no glass there. They were computer displays—perfect resolution, clear as glass, and as precise as reality itself. It was like looking through actual glass onto the fields of the Disc. The screens showed the field of stars that surrounded the Olorun. Before them, in the direction the bridge faced, was the nose of the needle, and beyond that the Bussard ramscoop arrayed in a skeleton framework of arcs and a wired webbing laced between them. The ramscoop wasn’t solid. It was a massive net. A web set out to catch the flies of stray hydrogen and other particles that the ship could convert into energy or other elements to replenish their always dwindling stocks.
Syn walked to the center of the bridge and turned around. Lights blinked, images flowed past, and the metrics of the ship were displayed in graphs, raw digits, and other scrolling information. It was all here at her fingertips—the entire run of Olorun. On one screen, the biological and mineral balance was accounted for: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, potassium, iron, and much more. Each had a target value, and the ship readjusted systems to achieve them. Too much carbon dioxide in the air? The ship would begin the collection of the increasing molecule and divide it into carbon and oxygen. The oxygen could then be mixed with hydrogen and added to the water supply. The free carbon would be combined with free hydrogen to create methane—a fuel that was used in micro-heating throughout the starship. This was one method to keep things in balance. There were hundreds, and Olorun was always planning ahead, working to resolve potential problems before they arose.
On the other side, charts spread out describing the intricate underworld of the Disc where so many dumb bots worked: the body farm, the fields, the hive spaces, the under-solar generators, the filtering ponds. Syn was always astounded by how much else was happening below her feet when she walked the Disc. It was easy to forget that there were layers below layers between her feet and the emptiness of space.
It had been several years after first setting up home in the treehouse before she had ventured into the Underworld. Oh, there was a proper name for it: Strata Level One. Strata Level Two. But to her, it was always the Underworld. Standing in the Disc, the sky reached up and up so high, to the very ground on the other edge. Nothing was pressing down on you from above. In the Underworld, that wasn’t true. The roofs were not low, but they were still there. Twelve feet high was the average height of the rooms. Some were taller. A few, the body farms, in particular, were much lower.
The settling ponds themselves were impossible to navigate—at best there was a foot above the water level in those spots where the water from the entire ship was filtered slowly through the depths of rock and then back to the ship. All of the moisture was moved through that very bottom level.
Along one screen, the engine performance of Olorun was analyzed and displayed. This one had schematics floating above themselves, projecting up off of the screen with a wave of her hand. The screens stayed flat until she chose to interact with them. But with a simple motion, they expanded and filled the space around her—a very real three-dimensional visualization of whatever they were projecting. For the engines, she was able to move and manipulate the different parts and examine the flow of fuel from the scoop back through filtration and processing to the engines themselves. The engines themselves were cold and quiet now. They were in a drift sequence. Floating ahead with inertial mass only.
“Oh,” Blip said from her right.
Syn floated to him and hovered near the center bay of screens. The one in front of him had no diagrams. There were only numbers and an array of tiny dots blinking on and off in such a fast succession that they made no sense to Syn. Blip was gathering some data—he could read that, but she couldn’t. “What is it?”
“Something is wrong.” Blip’s eyes went off and then so did his mouth. He became a white porcelain football floating above the green-lit screen. “A second,” his voice chimed, far more robotic and manufactured than was normal. He was in deep calculation. This wasn’t like being on the Jacob when he was trying to convince the elevator to ignore its programming. This time, he was downloading key information. “A minute more on calculations. I want to run this a couple times to make sure.” His voice had a bit more color. Less monotone now. Maybe he was hopping through the information at a better pace.
So Syn sat and watched the various micro squares turn on and off. She became hypnotized by their flashing and almost fell asleep until she heard his voice, “Okay. I’ve got it.”
“What do you have?”
“It’s bad,” he said.
“Don’t try to soften it. Just tell me.” Syn hated when he evaded answering. Nothing was ever positive when he did it that way. It always made the news feel a bit larger to her, but she usually listened more after he took that approach, just as she was then.
“Okay, so um…”
Computers that stuttered had to be the stupidest thing ever. “Get to it,” she said.
“Something’s wrong with the gravity,” Blip said, and she saw him pull back a small distance. Not more than an inch, but he shifted when he broke the news. Was he scared?
“What’s that mean? How much?”
Blip moved closer but still kept his space. “Not much now. But it will mean a lot soon. A whole lot.”
“Isn’t the gravity controlled by the spin of the Disc?” Syn asked, leaning closer to the screens.
Blip spoke aloud, although Syn knew it was only for her benefit, “Give me a visual of the Disc.”
The computer spoke back, its voice deep and feminine, “The Disc is thirty…”
Syn cut it off, “I know.”
Blip interjected, “Show me the spin of the Disc now compared to the spin of the Disc when Olorun launched.”