Transmat World: Chapter 21, Episode 3
Aboard the See Lurchin’, 2145 A.D.
--
They were over one million miles from Harbinger, nearly four times the distance from the Earth to the moon. Still, they have to look almost straight up or straight down to see stars past the curvature of the enormous structure.
“Good Lord God have mercy,” said Vince.
“There’s no words …” trailed off Maria.
“Santa Madre de Dios,” said Ernesto.
“Wow,” said Enrique.
“We came; we saw; we concurred,” said Julie.
“We need to call this thing something,” said Enrique. “Anybody have any ideas?”
“It looks like some kind of giant nuclear device about to detonate,” said Ferdinand.
“You are a sad, weenie excuse for a hedbot,” said Ookie.
“Looks like a huge gyroscope to me,” said Furboten.
“Such an immense and majestic object demands proper nomenclature,” said Ernesto.
“Two of the first atom bombs were ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man,’ so we will call it ‘Fat Boy Gyro’,” said Julie.
“‘Fatty’ it is,” said Rousseau.
“Let’s go with ‘Fat Boy,’” said Vince, unbidden thoughts of Bert Millsap lurching from his subconscious. How did that SOB get a job with the Board?
Stats from the automated Transmat telemetry system fed to the screen in front of the pilot’s seat, and they generated comments.
“The big ring-like portion of Fat Boy is going one million miles per hour,” said Vince.
“The central sphere with the black belt and windows is a real slacker at 590,000 miles per hour,” said Enrique.
“Wow. Things are moving faster than they look,” Julie said.
“We are still far away,” Ernesto says. “Do you think those light and dark areas on the inside of the ring are habitable?”
“This central ring part is six million miles wide, and the radius is 50 million miles,” said Maria. “Give me a minute … that’s nearly two billion square miles, 10 million times the surface of the Earth.”
“If it’s habitable with nobody home, that could really saturate the real estate market,” said Julie.
“We know somebody is home because of that saucer craft,” said Enrique.
“It could have been an automated drone,” said Maria.
“Well, anywhere a Transmat can go there we are, so it may be a new frontier we’re staring at down there,” said Vince.
“That is assuming we are welcome by the natives. Vince, do you think it’s safe to take a little polar tour?” asked Ernesto. “I believe that will give us much more information than following this giant ribbon in circles.”
“We’ll take it in small jumps and stop whenever we see anything interesting — time limit, three minutes for stops,” said Vince. “Make sure the recorders are going. If something happens to us, maybe someone will find the recording some day and know what took place up until then.”
“Nothing’s going to happen,” said Enrique.
“Yeah, walk in the park,” said Rousseau. “Those flashes of light are tourists taking pictures.”
“Let’s go around the top and circle the whole thing, then talk about getting closer,” said Vince.
Enrique pushed big buttons on the spring-loaded pilot’s console. Oversized buttons handled pudgy exoskeleton fingertips. Each control console mounted on a spring-loaded bracket to keep that large, hard, powerful finger from going right through the panel in a moment of over excitement. See Lurchin’ moved in fifteen million mile leaps around the huge space ship. On the sixth jump, everybody said “Stop!” ten degrees from the top center. It was a good view of how the spokes intersected the base of the polar cylinder with large-radius corners forming the edges of a huge plain upon which the polar cylinder sat; six million miles in diameter and two and a half million tall; three million if you included the half-million-mile thick spoke-connector plain upon which it rested.
The hot view, literally, was between the spokes. Through a hole in the top of the golden Membrane, they could see the source of energy at the heart of this large space ship. Intensely backlit, a filtered image showed the containment grid that kept the star in place relative to the Membrane and the outer construction of spokes, Rim, and cylinders. The crew of the See Lurchin’ could only conjecture about what they were seeing.
“Why do you think there’s a hole here? Look, the sphere is paper thin. Well, I guess it could be miles thick and it would still look paper thin from here,” said Enrique.
“It has no apparent edge dimension; we will call it the Onion Skin,” said Ernesto. “The hole must be to control heat. If the star is enclosed, and it varies in intensity, there has to be a way to regulate the heat. I’ll bet there is another hole like this at the other pole. They convert extra heat energy into microwaves and beam it to receivers on the bottom of the cylinders. There it is converted to energy or re-beamed into space as waste energy at the tops of the cylinders.”
Three minutes were up and the ship jumped. It was now five degrees past the edge of the polar cylinder. See Lurchin’ had relative velocity to the huge structure based on original velocity differences between it and Earth’s solar system. It was drifting back toward the central axis and the cylinder. They could make out geometric patterns, perhaps the gravity generators, on the top.
See Lurchin’ began to spin. Everyone was strapped in but soon all the hedbots and anything else loose was stuck to the inner wall of the hull. Centrifugal force was trying to straighten Enrique’s arms. It took suit power to bring them back in and work the controls to counter the spin. His practice dancing with the thrusters paid off. He hit the right combination of thrust and angle on several of them to take out all but a fraction of the spin. They had gravity. Everybody was hanging out of crew seats at a forty-five degree angle pointing up, forward, and to the left. Enrique rotated the ship until g-forces were pulling them a normal straight down.
“Everybody okay!?” yelled Vince too loudly with the voice augmentation button accidentally flipped on.
“You mean other than our hearing not as good as it used to be,” said Enrique among a chorus of “yeahs.”
“I got a little excited. I’ll turn down my suit mike.”
“The next version of these suits should have an external face holo-projector so we can see how big everybody’s eyes get when we’re whirlpooled,” said Julie.
“What the hell was that?”
“That was their prop wash,” said Ernesto, “I should have thought of this, although I don’t know how we could have been warned.”
“We got caught up in what appears to be the edge of one of their artificial gravity generator beams latched onto a star somewhere over yonder,” said Vince, waving an arm. “That’s what started us spinning. During Enrique’s superb corrective action, we drifted into the beam. Look at the screen.”
Everybody stared at the image of the gargantuan Christmas ornament, which looked just the same.
“The text read-outs in front of Enrique,” pointed out Vince to a chorus of “oh’s.”
“We’re accelerating away from it,” said Maria.
“And we’re moving faster and faster,” said Rousseau as he settles back on Enrique’s shoulder.
The other three hedbots were now moving away from the wall they were slung to, leaving temporary image outlines of a flying serpent, kitten, and lizard on the hull screen. They were some of the few things not strapped down, stowed, Velcroed, or magnetically secured. All had let go of their perches at the same instant — the safest thing they could do. If the See Lurchin’ had kept spinning faster, they would have done serious damage to themselves or the ship when they were forced to let go.
“Do a back-track jump of about a million miles,” said Vince
“On it boss,” said Enrique, and the See Lurchin’ winked out of and into existence a million miles away. Then he observed, “We are not accelerating anymore,” stating the obvious since they were once more weightless.
“From now on the drone will precede us. It will constantly transmit any deviation from normal gravity,” said Vince.
“I’ll get Mr. D,” said Julie, punching the webbing release on her recliner and heading for the drone. “‘D’ for delightful,” said Julie to questioning looks.
“‘D’ for demonic,” said Furboten.
“I’ll help you,” said Ernesto.
A cushy plastic coating on the steel grating softened the sound of their magnetic boots to muted thumps as they moved to retrieve the drone. Enrique slaveed the drone to the controls of the See Lurchin’ and programmed a three minute lag between its jump and the See Lurchin’s. In thirty seconds they were back on track for a circumpolar navigation of Fat Boy.
“Since Fat Boy is slowing down we must be at the forward pole. It is using gravity beams to shove against stars in front of it to slow down,” said Ernesto.
“What do you bet we find another setup like this at the other pole but in attraction mode?”
“I’m not going to take that bet, but I’m hoping there is. I have an idea on how to build enough velocity to match Fat Boy’s belt — all for free,” said Vince. The Transmat X-drive of the See Lurchin’ activated, leaving a ball of nothingness soon filled by the vacuum of space.
