A space shipyard. Design from the FANDOM site.
CHAPTER 2 – SPACE REFIT
13:57 (Greenwich Universal Time)
Thursday, January 8, 2320
Command bridge of the armed merchant ship A.M.S. KOSTROMA
On approach to the Avalon Space Yards
Low Earth orbit
The tall brunette in her early thirties smiled on seeing the face of a mature man appear on one of the small viewing screens attached to the armrests of her command chair.
‘’Hello Gustav! I am back from my second trip to Eris and am ready for the refit we discussed a few months ago and that is to be financed by the Spacers League. I also have a few million credits that are burning my fingertips and that I am eager to spend at your shipyard on a few personal projects I have in mind.’’
‘’Aaah, the kind of customer I like!’’ replied with a smile Gustav Shomberg, the owner of the Avalon Space Yards and one of the most prominent spaceship designers in the Solar System. ‘’So, how are the scientists in the Eris Station doing, apart from wallowing in Eris diamonds?’’
‘’Studying and observing, as you would expect from true scientists. They are also quite busy studying each other, considering the fact that seven babies have been born at the station in the past year and a half, with more on the way. By the way, I also kept busy with Michel Koniev, what with those long space trips, and we now have a three month-old boy named Misha. You will be free to cuddle him once you come aboard.’’
‘’Oh! Congratulations! I am sure that he will make an excellent ship captain one day. About your refit, I received three weeks ago from the Spacers League the weapons systems, ordnance and materiel meant to be fitted to the KOSTROMA. From formidable, your KOSTROMA will soon become a truly mighty opponent in a space battle.’’
‘’Well, I sincerely hope that I will never need to use those weapons, ever: I hate war, even if I proved to be good at it while fighting the Terran Federation four years ago. The personal improvements I have in mind are definitely on the more pacifist side.’’
‘’I am eager to hear about them, Tina. I suppose that your crew will go for a long and well-deserved vacation period on Earth while we will work on your ship.’’
‘’You supposed right, Gustav. I may have forests, giant aquariums and farms aboard the KOSTROMA, but I still don’t have a seaside beach or a mountain range.’’
‘’Can’t have it all, I guess.’’ said Shomberg while shrugging and smiling. Well, I will now leave you in peace, so that you can dock your ship inside my Dry Dock Number One. See you later!’’
The video link was then cut, leaving Tina Forster free to concentrate back on guiding her 1,700 meter-long ultra-heavy cargo ship towards the waiting main dry dock of the Avalon Space Yards. At an empty mass of 2,510,000 metric tons, the KOSTROMA would definitely inflict some major damage to the space yard if not handled properly and with due caution. Thankfully, her cargo holds were presently empty, while her deuterium-tritium fuel tanks were only a quarter full, the result of the long, year-long return trip to Eris, so her ship’s gravity sails, which worked in a fairly similar way to anti-gravity fields, proved more than sufficient to propel the KOSTROMA with agility and precision. Another twenty minutes and the giant cargo ship moored itself inside the largest of the yards’ dry docks. The access doors of the dry dock then closed and compressed air started filling the vast volume of space inside.
‘’Mooring clamps engaged and secured! Communication tunnels extending into position!’’ announced First Pilot Frida Skarsgard, a 31 year-old woman with reddish-brown hair and blue eyes who was also a close friend of Tina.
‘’Shut down all engines! Secure from flying stations!’’ said Tina in turn before looking at her First Navigator, Dana ‘DD’ Durning, who was also her unofficial First Officer. While Dana said that ‘DD’ were simply the first letters of her name, sneaky tongues (male ones mostly) said that it alluded to the size of her chest. Whatever the meaning of ‘DD’ was, the 36 year-old still had most men salivating at her sight.
‘’Dana, you have the bridge. I am going to meet Mister Shomberg.’’
‘’Understood!’’
Getting up from her command chair, Tina then walked down the steps linking her platform level with the next lower one, where the access rotunda to the elevators was. At this level in the ship, just under the massive, 700 meter-diameter bow shield of the giant cargo ship, only two personnel lift cabins and two medium cargo lifts reached all the way up to the bridge complex and were reserved for the exclusive use of the crew. The other elevators contained inside the central longitudinal spine tube of the KOSTROMA stopped short of it on Deck 23, which was the highest level passengers could normally get to, unless invited up by Tina. Calling up one of the lift cabins and then riding it down to the ship’s Main Promenade Deck, on Level 9, Tina left the cabin there and started walking down one of the four radial hallways linking the deck’s central rotunda with the peripheral ring which constituted the Main Promenade proper. Passing in succession in front of the entrances of the ‘Maharaja’ Indian restaurant, the ship’s commercial daycare center, the ship’s barber shop and hair salon and the children’s playground, she arrived after some sixty meters at the junction of the hallway and of the Main Promenade. Small trees and rows of decorative bushes planted on both sides of the ten meter-wide ring promenade added a soft natural touch to what was in essence a commercial shopping venue used by crewmembers, members of their families, passengers and visitors alike. The shops, boutiques and clubs of the Main Promenade were in fact one of the main reasons why the KOSTROMA was such a popular mixed cargo and passenger ship in the Solar System. For the men and women working hard in often isolated mining operations and smaller human outposts around the Solar System, the passage of the KOSTROMA represented a rare and much appreciated occasion to entertain themselves, shop for things that were not available locally, enjoy exotic food and generally change their minds from work. On such stops at isolated facilities and outposts, another particularity of the KOSTROMA made it even more popular, this time with the managers and logistics officers of those facilities and outposts: the extensive agro-food production facilities on which Tina had worked for years now to develop aboard her cargo ship. With a length overall of 1,740 meters and a total of 128 full decks, many of which were sub-divided into more decks, Tina had plenty of internal space available to devote to hydroponic gardens, animal farms and fish ponds, and this without hurting her cargo-carrying capacity, which presently stood at a whopping maximum of twenty million metric tons, most of it transported in space cargo pods attached to its external flanks. That initiative, apart from helping to fulfill Tina’s dream of transforming her ship into what she called ‘a village in space’, had proved as well to be very lucrative commercially. One reason for that was that the KOSTROMA was now self-sufficient in terms of food production, with Tina not needing anymore to buy foodstuff at often inflated prices from Earth suppliers or from Spacers’ moon farms. Another reason was the fact that some of the crops and foodstuff produced aboard the KOSTROMA were highly-sought of products, like spices, coffee, tea and chocolate, which Tina was then too happy to sell to other Spacers at prices markedly lower than those asked for by Earth’s exporters.
Tina smiled to herself on seeing that the reception counter of the East Outer Access Gallery, which was now some fifteen meters ahead of her, was already processing visitors from the Avalon Space Yards, many of them being obviously spouses or children of the workers of the giant orbital facility. Despite being stationed in Earth orbit, a trip to Earth’s surface was still fairly costly for the average worker, who normally saved his or her money for vacation trips rather than for shopping trips. There was also the fact that the KOSTROMA and Tina enjoyed a special relationship with the Avalon Space Yards, which had effected its first major refit and had also secretly helped arm it in prevision for the war that had opposed in 2315 the now defunct Earth Federation and the Spacers League, a war in which Tina and her cargo ship had played a crucial role. Her smile widened as she watched a group of excited children dragging their parents towards the nearby children’s playground of the Main Promenade, which covered over 500 square meters and had a free height of ten meters, allowing it to house some fairly elaborate play modules. Other children also assaulted the adjacent ‘Enceladus Swirl’ ice cream parlor and candy shop, which served fresh ice cream and chocolate produced aboard the KOSTROMA. The parents of those last children actually put up little resistance, as fresh dairy products were some of the most sought of (and expensive) items off Earth’s surface, due to high transportation costs and the difficulty of keeping those products fresh during the long delivery trips across the Solar System, which could take up to four weeks aboard older cargo ships.
Tina was passing by the reception counter and through the large airlock situated at the junction with the access gallery when her wrist videophone buzzed, making her stop and raise her forearm. Seeing that it was Spirit, the artificial intelligence computer of her ship, calling her, she opened the line and spoke in her videophone.
‘’Yes, Spirit?’’
‘’I am sorry to bother you, Tina, but I just got a message from Shanya, my friend on the VEON SHOURIA: a team of Koorivars just departed Vancouver Island in one of their shuttle craft and is on its way to here. They wish to speak to you in private about a most important and sensitive subject.’’
Two things immediately made Tina freeze for a moment. First, Shanya was the AI computer of the Koorivar ship VEON SHOURIA, which had been saved by the KOSTROMA on Eris. The notion of two super computers calling each other a ‘friend’ was enough to make most people pause. Second, a ‘most important and sensitive subject’, when it related to the Koorivars, could only concern one thing: their anti-matter drive.
‘’Uh, I was on my way to go see Gustav Shomberg, to discuss our refit with him. When is the Koorivar shuttle scheduled to arrive at the Avalon Space Yards?’’
‘’It should dock with the station in about 43 minutes.’’
‘’Then, once they are on the KOSTROMA, have them wait for me in my suite on Level 24. I will join them there after speaking with Shomberg.’’
‘’Understood!’’
Her mind now busy speculating about what the Koorivars wanted to tell her, Tina closed the link and resumed her walking. Once out of the 320 meter-long telescopic access gallery, Tina found that Shomberg had sent a driver with an anti-gravity scooter to wait for her at the reception airlock of the station. Thanking the driver, she took place in one of the passenger seats of the scooter and let the man drive her down the long passageways of the installation. Four minutes later, the scooter was letting her step off in front of Shomberg’s private office, situated in the design department of the space yards. Shomberg’s personal secretary, a stunningly beautiful Asian young woman, greeted Tina with a respectful bow.
‘’Welcome to Mister Shomberg’s offices, Fleet Captain Foster. Mister Shomberg is waiting for you in his office. If you will please follow me.’’
A bit amused at being greeted by her rank as a reservist in the small Spacers League’s navy, Tina returned the woman’s bow, then followed her into a large but not extravagant work office where a joyful disorder of piles of documents and dozens of miniature ship models greeted her. Despite being a true technological genius, Gustav Shomberg was a bit old-fashioned in his work habits and manners and liked to use paper documents whenever he could. Shomberg, a tall and beefy man of pure Nordic type with platinum blond hair and pale blue eyes, greeted Tina with a rather unceremonious hug and kisses on both cheeks.
‘’Tina, it is truly nice to see you again.’’
‘’And it is also nice for me to see you, my friend. So, you wanted to discuss with me the refit work on my ship?’’
‘’Of course! The Spacers League is after all ready to spend some 278 million credits on that refit, so we might as well make sure that it is done right. I already received from the League all the materiel and systems for that refit, so we will be ready to start as soon as we agree on how to make it. You did say on your last call that you wanted to spend some of your own millions on personal work to be done on your ship. What did you have in mind exactly?’’
‘’You remember my complaint about not having a seaside beach? Well, I want one! I would like you to use the free overhead space available over the northern and eastern quadrants of the forest ecosystems occupying my ship’s bow section to build a false beach with a false lake of sweet water at least twenty meters wide, on Level 24. I would also like to add some extra agricultural surfaces over the rest of those two quadrants, in order to boost my cereals production. Right now, my wheat production levels are barely enough to fill my minimum needs and I still have to buy wheat grain from time to time.’’
‘’I see! With the trees in your Boreal Forest and Temperate Broadleaf Forest not growing higher than about seventy meters, we have a good twenty meters or more of free height to play with in order to build those new deck surfaces. Supporting those new decks above your forests will not be a problem: I will simply suspend them from your bow shield structure above them.’’
‘’I knew that you would find quickly a way to do this, Gustav.’’ said Tina in an enthusiastic tone. Now, about that artificial beach…’’
By the time that she left Shomberg’s office some fifty minutes later, Tina was satisfied that her ship was in good hands for its refit. Now, it remained for her to see what the Koorivars wanted to tell her. Despite being visibly alien creatures, she knew them to be pacifist, good-natured beings whose talents were mostly geared towards the arts rather than technology. Added to the fact that they were vegetarians and didn’t eat meat or fish, this made the average Koorivar a normally agreeable person. Her mind was still dancing around that question when she arrived back at the reception desk of her ship’s eastern access gallery, again being driven by the scooter driver loaned by Shomberg. Stopping at the reception desk, she asked a question to Natalia Vasilyeva, the tall blonde who worked as the ship’s Chief Hostess.
‘’Natalia, did a group of Koorivars arrive aboard in the last hour?’’
‘’Yes! Four of them, including Administrator Sheraz, arrived some twenty minutes ago by shuttle and were then led to your private suite on Level 24. They are presently waiting for you there, along with Captain Shanandar.’’
‘’Perfect! Thanks, Natalia!’’
‘’My pleasure, Tina.’’
The questions in her mind redoubled at the mention of Administrator Sheraz, who was the political leader of the some 22,000 Koorivar refugees who had been saved on Eris by the KOSTROMA and who were now living on the northern portion of Vancouver Island, on lands graciously given to them by the President of the Northern Alliance, Claudia d’Arcy. If he had come, then that meant that what was to be discussed probably concerned all the Koorivars. Hoping that some kind of local dispute was not at play here, Tina made her way up to her private suite on Level 24, just under the bridge complex. Her suite, along with the suites allotted to the other senior officers of the ship, had a dominant view of one of the four forest ecosystems Tina had made built inside the bow section of her ship. Each of these ecosystems, housing a distinct type of vegetation and climate and carefully separated from the three other ecosystems, covered a surface of 7.1 hectares and had a free height of up to 95 meters, allowing even the tallest trees on Earth to grow in them. However, even when planting already half-grown trees at the time the new bow section had been built, that had been less than four years ago, so her forests were still growing up and would continue to do so for decades. Still, the view she had from her suite of the Temperate Rain Forest ecosystem, in the western quadrant of the bow section, was nearly enough to make someone forget that they were aboard a ship of space.
When she entered her suite she found five Koorivars, all of them of at least mature age, waiting for her in the main lounge, which had a nice view of the forest below. All five got up at her appearance, with one coming to her for a hug.
‘’Tina, thank you for receiving us!’’
‘’It’s my pleasure, Shanandar. Your request certainly sounded urgent. Is there some kind of problem brewing up on Vancouver Island?’’
‘’Not a problem, Tina.’’ replied Administrator Sheraz, standing a few paces away. ‘’In fact, Vancouver Island is close to a paradise for my people and I will never thank your people enough for the gift they gave us. The reason we came here has to do with a stunning discovery that Doctor Koomak, to my left, made recently. Doctor Koomak?’’
The oldest Koorivar present quickly bowed to Tina before starting to speak.
‘’Pleased to finally meet you, Captain Foster. On Shouria, I was considered one of the top physicists among my people, with my specialty being astrophysics. I recently attended an international conference on physics in Vancouver and something said during that conference struck my mind and started a wild idea. Well, after I presented that idea to Shanya, the central computer of the VEON SHOURIA, it turned out that my idea was not so wild after all. In fact, Shanya ran a computer simulation based on it and found it to be fully viable. To make a long story short, I believe that I found a way for us to travel around the stars and find back the two other evacuation ships which left Shouria before its destruction, some 361 years ago.’’
Tina was silent for a moment, frozen speechless by Koomak’s declaration, before she was able to ask the first of many questions now popping up in her mind.
‘’Travel around the stars? And at what speed?’’
‘’If my calculations are correct: near instantaneous speed. Basically, the idea is to use some of the properties of our anti-matter creation process to deform the fabric of space itself and open a temporary wormhole between two star systems. All the theoretical calculations and simulations have been done by now, but we still have to conduct test runs to make sure that my invention is fully viable and safe to be used. That is where we would need your help and that of your friend, Gustav Shomberg, to build an experimental drone craft and test it before adapting what Captain Shanandar is now calling the ‘Koomak Drive’ to your ship. Once all that is done, we would then solicit your help to go find our compatriots lost among the stars.’’
Tina, stunned by all this, had to sit on a sofa before she could speak again.
‘’But, even if your ‘Koomak Drive’ proves to work as planned, why go after the two sister ships of the VEON SHOURIA? Why not let them arrive at their intended destinations and settle there?’’
‘’For the same reasons which necessitated your KOSTROMA to save the VEON SHOURIA from its icy tomb on Eris, Tina.’’ answered Shanandar, the captain of the VEON SHOURIA. ‘’Remember how the computer controlling our interstellar flight failed due to old age and how all our reserves of seeds meant to provide us with crops had turned bad? Well, we are afraid that the same things will happen to both the SHUNDAR and the SHANIZAR. If and when that happens, the last 44,000 Koorivars in existence will be wiped out and will disappear, leaving only my compatriots now living on Vancouver Island as survivors of my race. When I left Shouria in cryogenic sleep, along with my first contact crew, I fully expected our systems to survive well our long voyage and for our reserves of seeds to keep intact. However, as you know too well, our systems failed us, badly. We don’t want the same things to happen to the SHUNDAR and to the SHANIZAR if we can avoid it. We are ready to pay with the help of our gold reserves for the building of a prototype craft and for its testing, then for modifying your KOSTROMA if Doctor Koomak’s drive proves to be both effective and safe. So, what do you think, Tina?’’
‘’I…I don’t know, really. I see so many implications from this, many of them political, implications of the same kind which were created by the announced existence of your anti-matter drive. Remember the troubles that brought to both me and you. A woman even lost her life because of it, while many more could have been killed as well. On the other hand, you should know that the Spacers League is about to sink over a quarter billion credits into a refit that will add many new weapons, fire control systems and ship armor to my KOSTROMA. As a reservist officer of the Spacers League Navy, I don’t have any more full freedom to use my ship as I wish, unless I am ready to break some rules in the process. Finally, would it be fair to develop an effective interstellar ship drive system, only to hide it from the rest of Humanity? Exploring the stars around us has been a dream for a long time for Humanity. To keep that dream to myself sounds wrong to me.’’
Sheraz slowly nodded his head in response, understanding her hesitations and misgivings.
‘’You are indeed right to ask yourself all these questions, Tina. You are proving again that you have a clear head about those things, which is to your credit. I agree with you that a viable interstellar ship drive is too big a gift to keep to only ourselves. The real question is: can Humanity use it in a peaceful way, without embarking on voyages of conquests, like it happened too often in your Humanity’s history? Can Humans find a livable home among the stars without taking it away by force from any potential alien life forms which would already be living on those worlds?’’
‘’That is a very good and pertinent question indeed, Sheraz. I fervently hope that at least the Spacers League and the Northern Alliance would prove worthy of such an interstellar drive. As for the rest of Earth, I am not so sure.’’
‘’Then, here are two important questions for you, Tina: first, how much confidence do you have in the discretion and honesty of your friend, Gustav Shomberg? Second, how much do you trust Governor Robeson and President d’Arcy?’’
Tina didn’t have to think look before replying to the Koorivar politician.
‘’Gustav Shomberg, apart from being a genius ship designer, is both a most decent man and a person with strong moral convictions. I would trust him with my life. As for Governor Robeson and President d’Arcy, while both of them are politicians who can play a good game like any other politicians, both are decent women who truly care about their citizens and who take the notion of public service seriously. If approached discretely, I am convinced that we could arrive at a fair deal on how to use in the future your new Koomak Drive, that is of course if it proves to work.’’
‘’I am pretty sure that it will work, Captain Foster.’’ replied the old physicist. ‘’The only things left to do is to build a prototype robotic craft and test it properly. I already have the technical drawing of such a ship, which of course also includes an anti-matter drive.’’
‘’Then, we shall pay a visit to Gustav Shomberg as a group tomorrow.’’ declared Tina, now convinced. ‘’In the meantime, you are all invited to have supper here and spend the night aboard. This will also give me a chance to go get my little Misha at the crew’s daycare center, so that I can present him to you, along with my husband Michel.’’
10:10 (Greenwich Universal Time)
Friday, January 9, 2320
Work office of Gustav Shomberg
Avalon Space Yards, Earth orbit
Like Tina, Gustav Shomberg was at first left speechless when Doctor Koomak, who had come along with his four compatriots and Tina, told him about his project to build a prototype interstellar craft. Then, the engineer surprised everybody by suddenly yelling loudly in approbation, a huge grin on his face.
‘’You are asking me if I am interested in building and testing the first interstellar ship in history? Of course I am interested! Building a true starship was my lifelong dream!’’
‘’Uh, I must remind you that there may be a few delicate political considerations about this, Gustav.’’ said gently Tina. That didn’t seem to faze off Shomberg, who gave her a sober look.
‘’Of course there will be political considerations, Tina: every major new invention have brought some such considerations in the past. You are after all talking about opening the road to the stars to Humanity…and to the Koorivars. So, Doctor Koomak, tell me more about your star drive.’’
‘’Well, if described in as simple terms as possible, it basically uses a process quite similar to the one involved in our anti-matter rocket but, instead of transforming matter into anti-matter, we will create a rip in the fabric of Space itself, a rip that will then suck up the ship carrying my device. That ship should then be instantly transported to the opposite side of that rip. The distance and direction traveled would basically depend on the intensity of the field created by my device and by the orientation of the ship at the time of the pulse. Basically, we would only need to point the ship in the right direction, dial in the field intensity and press the ‘jump’ button.’’
Shomberg’s mouth half opened as he measured the implications of Koomak’s words.
‘’But, that means that we wouldn’t even need to extensively modify a ship to give it an interstellar capability. We would only need to add the field generator to its bow.’’
‘’That is correct, Mister Shomberg.’’ said calmly Koomak. As for Tina, those words struck her much harder and her eyes opened wide.
‘’But, that means that my KOSTROMA should be able to be easily modified in order to turn it into a starship, right?’’
‘’If all goes well, yes!’’ replied Koomak. Shomberg then added to the drama with a few words.
‘’Since you based your invention on your anti-matter drive, then I suppose that you could easily draw as well the plans of an engine similar to the anti-matter engine that had propelled the VEON SHOURIA, right? Such engines would nearly be a must for any interstellar ship, in order for it to have a good cruising capability inside star systems.’’
‘’Tha