The view from infinity b.., p.1
The View From Infinity Beach, page 1
The View from Infinity Beach
R.P.L. Johnson
Copyright © 2021 R.P.L. Johnson
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Cover design by Creative Edge Studios
For my Father
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Epilogue
Notes and Acknowledgements
Books By This Author
Chapter 1
Excalibur Station hung in space ahead of them: a huge snowflake of synthetic diamond inscribed within a circle and shot through the centre with a titanium needle.
Kade Morton was not impressed. The New Boston conurbation had looked beautiful too, seen from the window of the sub-orbital that had carried them away, but everything looked good given enough distance, and Kade had lived in those towers for too long to be fooled by their beauty. He wasn't about to be fooled by Excalibur either.
An alarm sounded and Kade ignored it as he had done the earlier warnings. He still had time.
He drifted forward. The observation compartment was empty. The blister of transparent graphene that took up most of the outer wall was a single, flawless carbon crystal, so clear it could have been a hole in the side of the ship, and it was cold: the deep cold Kade had come to associate with airlocks and cheap perimeter cabins near the outer hull. The last time he’d been in that compartment the brilliant green and blue arc of Earth had taken up half the two metre wide blister and the compartment had been packed with passengers keen to get their last view of the planet. In the close-pressed throng of people he hadn’t noticed the cold of space seeping through the crystal. Now—alone in the powered-down darkness of an empty compartment—he felt it reach for him. He shivered, the skin of his arms jumping into gooseflesh. Kade moved closer, the cold closing over him like a cloud. His thin t-shirt, one of the few possessions he had been able to bring with him, offered no resistance to the terrible cold.
He drifted forward until his fingertips pressed against the crystal viewport. It was so cold it felt like burning, like he’d dipped his fingertips in acid.
As the station turned, he picked out details he remembered from his orientation lectures: the Hub, the Spire tipped with the glazed dome of Traffic Control, the primary and secondary habitation rings. Kade reached under his t-shirt and pulled out a thin titanium ring threaded on a scrap of nylon cord: his father's wedding ring, one side still heat-blued from the fires that had killed him.
"Well, Dad," Kade said. "We're here."
The alarm sounded again, along with the voice of the Mercury's computer counting down to the next manoeuvring burn. It took a few seconds for Kade to realise there was another voice talking to him, a human voice.
"I said, what are you doing here? Next burn's in twenty minutes."
Kade turned to see one of the Mercury's crew floating in the doorway that led back into the ship. He was wearing the blue jumpsuit of a flight engineer, and when he saw Kade's face, his expression softened.
"Better get back to your cabin kid," he said. "They can't stop the burn for you. If we miss our window this ship turns into a comet. Next time we swing through the system we'll all be dead of old age."
"I've got time," Kade said. That was true. He still had time: just not much. "I just wanted to see it."
"First time, eh?" The engineer looked him up and down. Kade knew what he looked like. His lanky height had filled out in the last six months but on average it was still a fifty-fifty chance whether he'd be treated as an adult or just like an overgrown kid.
"I remember my first trip to the Belt," the engineer said eventually. "But make it quick, OK? If you're not strapped in before the burn, we'll be off-loading you in a body bag."
"I'll be OK," Kade said.
The engineer regarded him for a long second and Kade was sure he was about to go back on his word. Then he nodded curtly, tumbled like a swimmer in the zero gravity and pushed away down the corridor.
Kade turned back to Excalibur Station. He had spent much of the journey from Earth learning about his new home, but despite that he still felt like a stranger in a new city. Kade knew all about being the new kid. Knew what it was like to be alone, trying to sort potential friend from foe as he shuffled along the chow line in some new cafeteria. At least on Earth he knew the rules: would Excalibur Station be the same? He didn't know and so he watched it, sizing it up like a boxer circling his opponent in the ring.
The central axis of the station was made up of the docks below the main ring, the Hub where the five spokes attached, and the Spire, a tapering shaft hundreds of metres long with the glazed dome of traffic control at its tip.
Around the base of the Spire, solar arrays and ranks of communications lasers and receivers fanned out on spindly gantries that looked no more substantial than frost traced across a cold window.
The five spokes radiated from the Hub. Each passed through the secondary ring to the outer, all-encompassing circle of the main habitation deck. At the very bottom of the station, two laser straight lines—one red, one green—stabbed out into space. That was the mass driver, Kade remembered. Excalibur was a refinery station. It processed ore from the asteroid belt and fired giant bullets of refined metal back toward Earth. The mass driver stayed perfectly still as the main ring rotated above it. The huge electromagnetic cannon remained fixed on its target a quarter of a billion kilometres away.
It's pointing at Earth. It's pointing home.
Living in space had been his parents' dream, not Kade's. His mother had been the one poring over every news report from the Belt. It was his father who had saved his power rations to keep reading his slate after curfew or to spend a few of those dark hours in virtual reality simulations flying ships he would never see in real life. For as long as Kade could remember, his father had never failed to apply for every new batch of contracts advertised by Excalibur. Sadly, his father's zeal had been the only exceptional thing about him. He had been a hard worker and a good technician, just not good enough.
However, when he died in the fire that had engulfed the fabrication forge where he worked, somehow his dream managed to live on. Kade's mother, who had never ventured any further from the ground than their apartment still several levels below the top of the smog belt, had kept filing applications. She was a biological research scientist. She mapped the DNA of fungi that attacked Earth's crops, and developed fungicides, tailored poisons to exploit the weaknesses she found. It was not the sort of work in high demand on a refinery station. Kade still wasn't sure why she had kept sending off those applications. Loyalty to a dead man's dream, perhaps? His father had not left much behind. In the end, his dream was his only legacy. She had been as shocked as Kade when her application was accepted.
And so six months after his father's death, Kade and his mother were on a sub-orbital bound for the New Mexico spaceport.
Kade could see why space was important. Earth needed resources and the asteroid belt was full of rocks rich in gold, platinum and exotic rare Earth minerals. But he couldn't see how space could be any kind of home for human beings. He remembered images from his history lessons, and standing in virtual recreations of old Earth habitats. But even the recreated virtual reality of the bleak tundra around Earth's poles seemed like a paradise compared to the pitiless void of space.
Where would it take them, this flight from Earth, this abandonment of humanity’s cradle in favour of life in a tin can surrounded by cold rocks? Kade knew there were problems on Earth, problems not easily solved, but he couldn’t see how space offered any solution. Humanity needed to fix Earth, not flee from it. The creation of Excalibur Station and the later colonies elsewhere in the belt was less a confident expansion of humanity and more like evaporation: Earth-born lives boiling away into a never-ending vacuum they could not hope to fill.
The automated warning sounded again. Time to go. Kade took one last look at the glittering habitat spinning against the backdrop of stars and saw only another prison. Despite its size, it was starting to look small already.
He pushed away from the window, feeling one last sting of cold against his palm and then he was flying along the corridors toward the small cabin he shared with his mother.
The Mercury's passenger deck to ok up most of the big cylinder that wrapped around the ship's central spine of engines, fuel tanks and cargo modules. For most of the journey the cylinder had spun to create the illusion of gravity, keeping its occupants firmly anchored to the deck by centripetal force. On those rare occasions when the spin deck was locked down for manoeuvring, the ship seemed to double in size.
The Mercury was a big ship, but after months of travel cooped up with a thousand other passengers and crew, even its hundreds of metres of corridors and compartments had come to feel like a prison. In the long voyage to Excalibur, Kade had found only one thing he liked about space travel and zero gravity was it.
Kade flew through the corridors. He came to a junction and tumbled so that he hit the bulkhead feet first and then pushed off again down a gently curving corridor that ran around the circumference of the spin deck. The curvature meant he couldn’t dart straight down its length but had to keep correcting with pushes from hands and feet so that he looked like a horse galloping in great strides metres long. The corridors grew tighter and the light from the pale illuminated triangles set into the bulkheads seemed to grow dimmer.
He reached the cabin and took a second to catch his breath and orientate himself to what had been the floor for most of their journey before opening the hatch and drifting casually in.
“Oh, thank goodness!” his mother said. “Where have you been? They wouldn’t let me look for you. They told me to strap myself in, but I couldn’t. Not with you out there.”
Kade's mother hated zero-G. Even inside the cabin she kept her feet firmly planted on the deck through a white-knuckled grip on the bunk. Even then she looked pale with space sickness. Kade doubted her search would have taken her farther than the end of the corridor.
“It's ok, Mom,” Kade said. “I was just taking a look at the station. I left you a message.”
She ignored him and started unfurling the webbing straps that turned their bunks into temporary acceleration couches.
Most of the small cabin was taken over by the two narrow bunks against each wall. Now, stripped of sheets and hinged at hip level, each looked more like the hospital bed where Kade had said goodbye to his father after the accident. There were lockers built into the white plastic wall panels and a duffel bag in the gold and black corporate colours of Excalibur Engineering held against the wall with a net of elasticized cord. They had all been issued with identical bags during their induction. The rules were clear. There were strict weight limits, mostly for the ride up to orbit, but as that was the start of their journey that was enough. They could take only what would fit in the bag. Kade’s was barely half full. He had a few clothes, a cheap VR helmet with a broken battery pack that would only work when connected directly to a power source, and a slate with a cracked screen.
"Get strapped in," his mother said.
Kade retrieved his slate and tucked it under the webbing where it would be in easy reach and then settled into his couch, cinching the straps tight across his shoulders as he had been taught. His mother did the same so they were side-by-side, separated by the narrow aisle between the bunks. She reached out and took his hand.
"It's going to be ok," she said as she squeezed his hand so hard he heard her knuckles pop. "This is a great opportunity... for both of us."
She was staring straight ahead, her eyes fixed on some point that seemed to be far beyond the bulkhead of their small cabin. Kade wasn't even sure if she was talking to him.
"I know," Kade said and felt her death grip relax a little.
He turned on his slate and navigated to the ship-wide information channel. It showed a live feed from the Mercury's forward-facing cameras and a countdown to the next burn.
The engines fired with a shudder that ran through the whole ship and weight returned like a great, soft hand that pushed Kade back into his couch until he could hardly breathe.
Chapter 2
John Turnbull sat on a public bench in the Mall and looked up through the glazed roof at the approaching ship.
Sector One, B-Quarter, Blue Deck or in station parlance 1B-Blue, Big Blue or usually just the Mall took up the whole quarter, over a hundred metres of the primary habitation ring. It was long enough to see the curvature of the main ring and Excalibur's reversed horizon as the deck seemed to curve up the slope of an endlessly steepening hill. The bars, shops, and clubs that lined both sides of Excalibur's one and only street followed the curve so that the diners at a cafe at the other end of the quarter looked to be in danger of toppling off their chairs, or having their meals slide off the table.
The roof was a glazed vault of hexagonal pillows of inflated graphene, like soap bubbles caught between a grid of ceramic alloy struts, except that the bubbles were actually impossibly strong films of layered carbon atoms so perfect in their manufacture that each pillow could be said to be one gigantic molecule.
Looking up through the roof, John could see along the Sector One spoke as it reached up toward the Hub as well as the Spire itself stabbing into the blackness of space. The station's four other spokes—each marking the midpoints of Sectors Two through Five—joined at the Hub giving the station the appearance of an old-fashioned wagon wheel with the Spire as the axle.
John watched the Mercury as it manoeuvred for its final approach to the docks below the Hub. From John's perspective, the big transport ship appeared to be spiralling into position, orbiting the Hub every forty seconds, but in reality John knew that the Spire, Hub, and the docks were stationary in space, and it was the habitation ring that was spinning around them.
The Mercury's arrival would signal the start of Crossover when the population of the station swelled by over a thousand people for the two weeks it took to turn the ship around. For many of the station's residents, Crossover was the end of their contract as they prepared to make the voyage back to Earth. For others it meant the return of old friends, but mostly it was just a time to party. There were other celebrations on Excalibur, but the station's mix of nationalities and the fact that its orbit kept it out of sync with any other human calendar meant that Crossover had grown to become the station's main excuse to let its collective hair down.
In the Mall, the preparations were in full swing. Strings of bunting in the black and gold corporate colours of Excalibur Engineering hung from every shopfront. An e-ink tattoo joint halfway along the Mall was offering souvenir specials on Crossover themed art for those leaving the station. More decorations hung from the huge, glazed roof, but John wasn't looking at the decorations. He wasn't there to celebrate, he was there to do business.
He shifted his heavy bag so that it sat a little more comfortably across his shoulder. It was filled with cheap glyphs, souvenirs and vouchers for ‘exclusive’ offers at local bars: shiny trinkets that would cost more to recycle than they were actually worth. They were superficially attractive but ultimately worthless; hopefully John's customers would not realise that until after he was long gone.
He looked up again, past the Spire to the blank sector of space that all the official flight paths avoided. He had another reason to look forward to the arrival of the Mercury. He hoped the ship would bring answers as well as an opportunity to line his pockets.
For several months, he’d been aware of something not quite right on board the station. He made his living around the edges of other people's worlds and prided himself on knowing everything that was going on. The deals he made with the new arrivals were terrible value but they weren't quite scams; the bootleg 3D forge patterns he sold online relied on a generous interpretation of interplanetary copyright law, but they were legal too. Some of his other interests... well, they were downright criminal, there was no way around that, but nobody was perfect.
His way of life required him to stay one step ahead of the authorities and to do that he had to know everything they knew and more. Of all the commodities John traded in, information was the most precious and the only one he coveted for himself.
For several months now the data had been painting a confusing picture. Mining activity was up: everything from the frequency of mechanical breakdowns to the amount of overtime pay being spent in the bars along the Mall to the number of sick days being logged pointed to an extraordinary surge in activity out in the Belt. People were working out there and they were working hard. They were breaking machinery and bones. What confused John was that at the same time as all this activity was going on, the output of refined metals being sent back to Earth was at its lowest point in over three years. Whatever was happening, it wasn't just the usual business of asteroid mining.
