Creations (26 page)

And then, eight minutes after they’d left the tanker plane behind, the engines suddenly went quiet. Instead, gasps and cries filled the cabin as the passengers suddenly felt the same thing at once, one of the most unnatural sensations a human being could ever experience. To Max it was like driving a car off a cliff, starting to fall, but never reaching the bottom. He felt as if his whole insides had just risen up inside him, as prickles of fear and disorientation spread across the tops of his legs and down his back. He turned to face Safi, finding to his alarm that the rest of his body tried to turn the other way instead. He gripped the armrest and faced her properly, waiting for her to say something. She just looked at him and grinned, breathing heavily.

“What a rush,” she said, finally releasing his hand.

Max had no sense of time over the next few hours. He could have been staring out of that window for whole days on end as the world passed by beneath them, or it could just have been
minutes. The plane was spinning slowly as they orbited, spreading the heat of the sun evenly over the airframe, and once every rotation the harsh light would stream in through the windows on Max’s side causing him to look away and shield his eyes. The colour of the sunlight had surprised him at first, and he’d even heard someone in the cabin saying, “My God, it’s blue!” the first time they saw it. It shouldn’t have been such a surprise though; with no atmosphere to scatter the shorter wavelengths and give the sky its distinctive colour, they could see the sun in its true form, a radiant ball of electric-blue light.

The sheer size of the Pacific Ocean was another surprise that he should have been prepared for. Every time they crossed it, the surrounding landmasses would be completely hidden by the curvature of the Earth, leaving nothing but clouds and blue water below them. For almost half of every orbit, occasional chains of islands were the only solid ground in view. Max tried spotting places he recognised, expecting it to be like looking at a map with the names taken off, but in reality it was far more difficult.

At first he couldn’t work out why that small circle of islands looked familiar, with the slightly larger one toward the southern end. Then it hit him, and he almost kicked himself for not recognising it sooner. He was about to point it out to Safi, but then he noticed something else, and it made him gasp in amazement. Inside the circle, the water was a whole shade lighter than outside. He knew straight away what he was looking at: the combined action of millions of robotic boats, churning up the water as they milled around endlessly leaving foamy white wakes behind them. He was amazed just how visible it was; they certainly hadn’t anticipated it. If anyone saw it from up here, all they’d need would be a high-res camera with enough magnification and they’d probably make out the individual boats. For all he knew, maybe someone already had. He kept his eyes on the islands as they vanished behind the plane.

The announcements from the cabin crew kept them informed
as their low Earth orbit took them toward the May station, where they would disembark. The huge modular station, with its research facilities, communication relays and orbital hotel was easily the largest space structure ever constructed, with a near constant flow of visitors like themselves arriving and departing every day. The link-up itself was carried out smoothly and almost noiselessly. The only sound was the faint hiss of the control jets as the autopilot guided them in over the last ten metres, followed by the sound of the docking ring latching into place.

The two cabin crew were the first out of their seats to help the passengers through the cabin and up the tunnel into the station. Max was glad to see he wasn’t the only one having difficulty moving around in this environment. Only Safi seemed to be completely at ease, floating horizontally over the seats, keeping herself steady by pushing lightly against the seat frames below her. They went through the tunnel one at a time, then waited in the large module on the other side. Like all parts of the station it was heavily padded, and painted dark and light on different surfaces to suggest a floor and a ceiling and help people orient themselves. Even the fittings and switches were the same way round, to reinforce the idea of up and down. Most of the passengers were directed straight ahead through the far wall and into the main part of the station, but six of them, including Max and Safi, had to go up through the ceiling into an access tunnel, and eventually to another docking module, where their next ride was waiting.

It was as Max floated through the final tunnel that he suffered his first moment of real disorientation. He’d formed a fairly good mental picture of how the modules and tunnels were laid out, and was quite comfortable with the idea of floating up and down between rooms as well as moving forward. However, when he got his first view of the inside of the lunar transfer vehicle and saw how what he’d convinced himself was a horizontal tunnel
actually came in through the roof of the thing, he lost all sense of which way up he really was. For a few terrifying seconds he could see himself hanging upside down over the seats of the lander, with nothing to support him or stop him falling. All he could do was grab onto a cable duct running alongside and turn to face the wall, waiting for the feeling to pass.

Once he’d reoriented himself he carried on, dropping into the craft and moving away from the hatch so Safi could follow behind him.

“You got a case of the shakes there, didn’t you?” she asked him.

“Just for a moment. I couldn’t tell which way up I was.”

“Inversion illusion, everyone gets it. You okay now?”

“Yeah, a lot better thanks.”

“Good, let’s get strapped in. I think they want to move us pretty soon.”

In terms of external appearance, the lunar landers hadn’t changed much since the day of the old Apollo-era LEMs. Aerodynamics were of no concern, weight however was. Only the cabin had solid walls, like a fifteen foot cylinder lying on its side, with the pilots’ seats looking forward out of one end cap and the passenger windows down the side. The rest of the vehicle was all struts and space frames, holding the spherical fuel tanks running alongside the cylinder’s lower half, and also forming the four landing legs which arced outward and downward to the pads, fifteen feet below. The excessive ground clearance was there for a reason, to enable the unpressurised cargo pod, the same size and shape as the cabin, to be cradled between the legs. The downward facing engines were at the four corners, each one topped by a gantry-like outrigger, holding the small pitch, roll and yaw thrusters at their tips.

The interior was bare and cramped, with canvas seats and a wire mesh floor, and no divide between the passenger area and where the two crew sat. The only closed-off area was the toilet,
tucked into a rear corner of the cabin. Somehow, Max realised, they would have to spend the next three and a half days crammed in here.

Twenty minutes later they left the station and gently manoeuvred away, freeing up the docking port so that other arrivals could use it. The view of the huge structure was spectacular as they pulled back, like a branching three-dimensional network of gleaming white cylinders studded with lights and windows. They even saw another space plane,
The Spirit of Queensland
, noiselessly approaching from beneath them and linking up to the docking port they’d just vacated. Max could vaguely see the faces of people in the station’s habitation modules, pressed up against the glass to watch its arrival and their own departure. He wondered just how many people spent their whole time up here simply staring out of the windows, hardly sleeping or eating for fear of missing something they’d never again get the chance to see. A good few he guessed, and he could understand why.

They spent the next half hour just hanging in space, waiting for the right moment to push away from the grip of the Earth. When the time finally came, the craft tipped over parallel to the ground, then fired its engines to take it from orbital speed up to escape speed. The noise from the engines was nowhere near as fierce as it had been on the way up and Max actually found himself enjoying the feeling of being pressed down into his seat as the acceleration took hold.

“Goodbye, Earth,” Safi said as the world slid past beneath them. “We won’t be so close to you for a while.”

Almost six minutes later the engines stopped and weightlessness returned. The Earth didn’t look to be any further away, but now every second was adding whole miles to the distance. Max suddenly felt a pang of separation, knowing that they were locked into a course which was taking them forever further from their home planet and everything they’d left behind.

“Don’t worry, we’re not gone for good,” Safi said, as if reading his mind. “You hungry? I think they’re going to break out the supplies soon.”

Max hadn’t had time to notice himself getting hungry, but almost five hours had passed since he’d last had any food. “Yeah, I’ll try and eat something,” he said.

He soon settled down to a routine of just sitting and staring out of the windows as the day went on. The craft had set itself slowly spinning, the same way the plane had, dispersing the sun’s heat over its surface in a “barbecue roll” as the pilots had called it. Safi had quickly fallen into conversation with the pilots, swapping stories from her own flying career and her previous trips into space. She also got talking to the other four passengers, all technicians and astronomers heading for the radio observatory on the lunar far side. The cargo pod beneath the craft was theirs, packed with equipment for a long overdue upgrade to the antennas and dishes built into the craters.

“How come you’re landing at Crisium?” Safi asked one of them. “Why not go to the far side directly?”

“Too expensive, we were told. It’s all scheduled transfers nowadays, whether we like it or not. Means we’ve got a three day road journey ahead of us though.”

“You taking the North road?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

The North road wasn’t a road in the normal sense, just a series of radio beacons marking the route between Crisium and the far side observatory, picking its way through the craters and mountains that lay in between. One of the main jobs of the Crisium base was to act as a staging post to the observatory, one of the requirements that had dictated its location. Max didn’t envy the technicians their journey though, or the conditions they’d face when they got there. The far side was the perfect place to shield a radio telescope against interference from Earth, but the distance to the nearest civilisation meant that the living was
basic to say the least.

Safi spent the next few hours sitting with them, then floated herself over and joined Max again. He was still up at the window watching the view, and already the Earth looked smaller and more distant.

“You’re quiet,” she said.

“Just taking everything in.” The things he’d seen and experienced in the last eight hours were starting to overwhelm him and he knew there was more to come.

“It sure is an amazing sight,” Safi said. “You’ve got plenty of time to take it in, you know, we’re not even halfway yet.”

“That’s okay, I’m in no hurry,” he said. He turned away from the window to face her. “So what are you going to do once this is all over and ESOS is behind you?”

“I’ll be back with Obispo probably, where I should have been all along. If they restart their own research I’ll want to be in on it.”

“Why did you leave in the first place?”

“After the accident? I could have stayed, but the programme was effectively dead, and I needed to get away. Luckily I’ve always had my commercial pilot’s licence to fall back on. But getting back into the replication field was what I always wanted. And being back with Obispo again, getting real results out of this technology, these could be pretty exciting times.”

“Exciting isn’t the word I’d use.”

She frowned at him. “You shouldn’t be so worried, Max. I know things didn’t go entirely to plan back there, but new technology never does. It’s a learning process.”

“And some lessons come harder than others.”

“But think of what we can gain by doing this. You must see it.”

He didn’t answer; there wasn’t much more he could say on the subject.

“Oh, and you might like to know,” Safi said. “Victor’s in
danger of getting his fingers burnt by more than just us. We found a bug in the transmitter room, not long after you left.”

“A bug? Who was doing it?”

“No idea, but it was someone on the island. It’s only a short range device, one tiny component inside one of the encryption servers pulled out and replaced with a copy. It looked the same and worked the same, but it had a whole data transmission system built into it. Victor’s been going wild trying to figure out who it is. He even thought it was you at one point.”

“How did you find it?”

“It kept malfunctioning and causing interference on the comms. The repair guy unearthed it.”

Max thought back to the conversations he’d had through that link and the audio and video problems he’d suffered. The realisation that followed made him jolt so hard in his seat he almost floated straight off it.

“I know who it was,” he said. “It was Oliver.”

“Oliver? Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.” The facts were falling into place, following up his gut reaction like one piece of a jigsaw after another. “Someone got hold of the threat letters and sent them to Gillian. Someone had access to them, and the motive to pass them on, and it happened just days after I had that row with Oliver, about Isaac Rourke helping me on the nav system.”

In fact he could even remember Oliver’s words:
Don’t think this ends here, Lowrie. People who cross me end up regretting it
.

“My UCLA boss told me about the last of those threat letters down that link. It was never even mentioned anywhere else, but it was among the ones Gillian got sent. If Oliver heard the whole conversation he’d know just how to get back at me.”

So Gillian’s mysterious informer was Oliver. Tyrell-B, apparently of UCLA, was Oliver. It all made sense.

“But if he thought we were wasting our time with the Prospectors, why bother bugging us in the first place?” Safi said.