Grimly determined not to embarrass himself, he inched his way down to floor level. There were toeholds recessed into the floor tiles, and now he looked at them he saw that they were anchored, but obviously designed to be removed frequently. If he pretended that the floor was a wall, then the office door was actually about ten meters above him, and there were plenty of handholds along the way.
He took a deep breath, pulled himself around the clock cabinet, and kicked hard against it where it joined the floor. The results were gratifying; he shot up, toward the office. The wall dropped toward him, and he was able to grab hold of a passing repair drone and angle his course toward the doorway. As he entered it, gravity began to return — he slid along the deck, coming to an undignified halt lying on his back just inside. The office was small, but held a desk, console, and a couple of chairs; a rating was doing something with the console. “You,” he said, “out, please.”
“Aye aye, sir.” The fresh-faced rating hurriedly closed some kind of box that was plugged into the console, then saluted and withdrew into the free-fall zone. Shaken, Vassily sat down in the seat opposite the desk and waited for Engineering Commander Krupkin to arrive. It was already 1100, and what had he achieved today? Nothing, so far as he could tell, except to learn that the Navy’s motto seemed to be
“Hurry up and wait.” The Citizen wouldn’t be pleased.
Meanwhile, on the bridge, the battlecruiser Lord Vanek was counting down for main drive activation.
As the flagship of the expedition, Lord Vanek was at the heart of squadron one, along with three of the earlier Glorious-class battlecruisers, and the two Victory-class battleships Kamchatka and Regina (now sadly antiquated, relics that had seen better days). Squadron Two, consisting of a mixed force of light cruisers, destroyers, and missile carriers, would launch six hours behind Squadron One; finally, the supply train, with seven bulk cargo freighters and the liner Sikorsky’s Dream (refitted as a hospital ship) would depart eight hours later.
Lord Vanek was, in interstellar terms, a simple beast: ninety thousand tonnes of warship and a thousand crew held in tight orbit around an electron-sized black hole as massive as a mountain range. The hole — the drive kernel — spun on its axis so rapidly that its event horizon was permeable; the drive used it to tug the ship about by tickling the singularity in a variety of ways. At nonrelativistic speeds, Lord Vanek maneuvered by dumping mass into the kernel; complex quantum tunneling interactions — jiggery-pokery within the ergosphere — transformed it into raw momentum. At higher speeds, energy pumped into the kernel could be used to generate the a jump field, collapsing the quantum well between the ship and a point some distance away.
The kernel had a few other uses: it was a cheap source of electricity and radioisotopes, and by tweaking the stardrive, it was possible to use it to produce a local curved-space gravity field. As a last resort, it could even be jettisoned and used as a weapon in its own right. But if there was one word that wouldn’t describe it, that word must be “maneuevrable.” Eight-billion-ton point masses do not make right-angle turns.
Commander Krupkin saluted as a rating held the bridge door open for him. “Engineering Commander reporting on the state of machinery, sir!”
“Very good.” Captain Mirsky nodded from his command chair at the rear of the room. “Come in. What do you have for me?”
Krupkin relaxed slightly. “All systems operational and correct, sir,” he announced formally. “We’re ready to move at any time. Our status is clear on—” He rapidly rattled through the series of watches under his control. Finally: “The drive control modifications you ordered, sir — we’ve never run anything like this before. They look alright, and the self-test says everything is fine, but I can’t say any more than that without unsealing the black boxes.”
Mirsky nodded. “They’ll work alright.” Krupkin wished he could feel as confident as the Captain sounded; the black boxes, shipped aboard only a week ago and wired into the main jump drive control loop, did not fill him with confidence. Indeed, if it hadn’t been obvious that the orders to integrate them came from the highest level and applied to every ship in the fleet, he’d have thrown the nearest thing to a tantrum that military protocol permitted. It was his job to keep the drive running, and dammit, he should know everything there was to know about how it worked! There could be anything in those boxes, from advanced (whisper it, illegal) high technology to leprechauns — and he’d be held responsible if it didn’t work.
A bearded man at the other side of the bridge stood. “Humbly request permission to report, sir.”
“You have permission,” said Mirsky.
“I have completed downloading navigation elements from system traffic control. I am just now having them punched into the autopilot. We will be ready to spin up for departure in ten minutes.”
“Very good, Lieutenant. Ah, Comms, my compliments to the Admiral and the Commodore, and we are preparing for departure in ten minutes. Lieutenant Helsingus, proceed in accordance with the traffic control departure plan. You have the helm.”
“Aye, sir, I have the helm. Departure in ten minutes.” Helsingus bent over his speaking tube; ratings around him began turning brass handles and moving levers with calm deliberation, sending impulses along the nerves of steel that bound the ship into an almost living organism. (Although nano-electronics might be indispensable in the engine room, the New Republican Admiralty held the opinion that there was no place for suchlike newfangled rubbish on the bridge of a ship crewed by the heroic fighting men of the empire.)
“Well, Commander.” Mirsky nodded at the engineer. “How does it feel to be moving at last?” Krupkin shrugged. “I’ll be happier when we’re in flat space. There are rumors” For a moment, the Captain’s smile slipped. “Indeed. Which is why we will be going to action stations at departure and staying that way until after our first jump. You can never tell, and the Commodore wants to be sure that no spies or enemy missile buses are lying in wait for us.”
“A wise precaution, sir. Permission to return to my station?”
“Granted. Go with God, Commander.”
Krupkin saluted, and headed back for his engineering control room as fast as his short legs would carry him. It was, he reflected, going to be a busy time, even with as quietly competent a dockyard consultant engineer as Martin to help him keep the magic smoke in the drive control boxes.
The colony of Critics writhed and tunneled in their diamond nest, incubating a devastating review. A young, energetic species, descended from one of the postSingularity flowerings that had exploded in the wake of the Diaspora three thousand years in their past, they held precious little of the human genome in their squamous, cold-blooded bodies. Despite their terrestrial descent, only their brains bound them tightly to the sapiens clade — for not all the exiles from Earth were human.
As hangers-on, the Critics had no direct access to the Festival’s constellation of relay satellites or the huge network of visual and auditory sensors that had been scattered across the surface of the planet.
(Most of the Festival’s senses were borne on the wings of tiny insectoidal robots, with which they had saturated the biosphere, sending a million for every single telephone that had rained down from orbit.) Instead, the Critics had to make do with their own devices; a clumsy network of spy-eyes in low orbit, winged surveillance drones, and precarious bugs planted on the window ledges and chimney pots of significant structures.