‘Prepare for departure.’
The command rattled around the Saturn hub, the jig – the Cronus itself.
Within the hour, with startling suddenness given the scale of the operation, the loading of passengers back aboard the Cronus was to begin.
For John Smith, this was shocking. Disruptive.
He found, in fact, that he didn’t much feel like leaving this fairy-tale tower above the autumnal sea of cloud that was Saturn, with this odd little community of people, working on their odd tasks, steadily and productively, so far from home.
And Smith had had a private agenda here, after all, even leaving aside the Planet Nine issue – he was to test the legality of the extraction of resources from Saturn by a station under Earth government authority.
It was a good project for a Conserver and a trained lawyer. You couldn’t take a breath in this universe without using up some useful matter, some energy. You could always be moderate in that usage, though. And the Conservers, who strove to take nothing at all from the world, who tried to get resource extractions from finite caches banned altogether, represented a higher level of conscience, Smith believed. Indeed, a higher consciousness.
But all that was abandoned now. Mere hours after the detection of the rogue Consortium craft, crew and passengers for the mission to Planet Nine were being summoned to the Cronus for final boarding.
Including John Smith. Saturn was done for him now. He dashed to his tiny room in the hub, grabbed all he could, and headed for his designated departure point.
Smith was to be taken from space-elevator hub to spacecraft hull in a small ferry craft: no more than thirty metres long, it was so small that crew and passengers shared the same cramped cabin as the pilot and co-pilot. He took some comfort in knowing that much of his luggage was already back aboard Cronus.
At the gate he was led aboard and buckled up by a nervous young cadet, who anxiously reassured Smith that these small craft were powered by fission engines. ‘Old and very reliable technology …’ Smith listened carefully, and to the safety precautions aboard, especially about an airtight plastic refuge bubble under his seat.
As it worked out, for him the crossing was smooth, the departure from the hub, the docking with the Cronus, both seamless.
When the hatches were opened Smith found himself being led, or zero-gravity hauled, from ferry to liner through a short, transparent transfer tube – unwisely transparent given the giddy views, he thought after the fact – guided by one crew person and a couple of bots. He feared nausea in this transparent tube, but in the event the astounding view outside, of Saturn, didn’t distract him. He did peer out, though, just on the chance that he might spot the intruder that was causing so much chaos, so much rush.
And he was already starting to think of the five years’ journey ahead of him out to Nine much as he now looked back on the six years from Earth to Saturn – as if he were to be imprisoned in another unusual hotel with a useful library. He’d got through it before; he would get through this next adventure. And then, in the end, could come wonder. Planet Nine, surprise me.
He tried to focus on the here and now.
Once through the transfer tube, his nervous young guide led Smith to his cabin, and went on his way.
Smith moved in. And, once alone, he discovered that the passengers, once safely in their cabins, were instructed to stay there while launch preparations continued.
There were contingency stashes of food and drink, plenty of information inputs. But the sudden isolation, the quiet, was eerie.
He unpacked perfunctorily.
And, suddenly, when he had finally stopped moving, for now, he felt overwhelmingly tired. It was like his boyhood city life, oddly; if you found a place of safety and stillness, you used it. And fatigue, perhaps the result of stress, consumed him.
He slept for a few hours.
Until he was woken by a knock on his cabin door.
The monitors showed him it was little Fabio Caspar, ten years old, son of Emmanuel Caspar. Smith had known it was Fabio. On the hub he had always knocked on the door the same way, when he came to play chess.
Smith opened the door, carefully not looking down, looking left and right along the corridor. ‘Nope, nobody there. I’d better get back to my lawyerin’—’
Which was little Fabio’s cue to float up into the air in front of him, wave his hands, and – a bonus in weightlessness – make a mid-air somersault. ‘Down here, Mr Smith!’
And Smith jumped backward, this time nearly knocking his head on the unfamiliar door frame. ‘Oh, there you are—’
‘Here I am, Mr Smith, here I am! Can I see your new room?’
‘Well, I think it’s a cabin, strictly speaking.’
Fabio came in, sniffed, gazing around at the half-sorted clutter. ‘Not much space, is there?’
‘It’ll be weightless for most of the journey, I’m told, and that makes places seem roomier, like on the journey out—’
‘I saw your old room. Better than this one! You had your own shower!’
‘Well, that’s true—’
‘And you haven’t got a window! Even though you have a room up against the pressure hull.’
He sighed. ‘Well, that’s true too—’
‘In the old ship all the rooms by the hull had windows, didn’t they? Just little round ones in case they blew out.’
‘They were called “portholes” … Well, Fabio, it’s all different now. I mean, this part of the ship—’ This was the ‘southern hemisphere’ of the ship’s big forward sphere. ‘This used to be all fuel tank. Now they don’t need so much fuel because they use helium-3, and you get a lot more energy out of that … You know all this. Anyway my old room got knocked down. Where it used to be there are big steel struts now. They had to make the whole ship stronger, lengthways anyhow, because of the new engine’s higher thrust—’
‘I’m going to be sleeping in my dad’s room tonight. So I won’t get lonely in a strange place. But I’ve still got my old room on the hub.’
‘I know …’
The Caspars weren’t the only family aboard the Saturn hub, and not the only family to suffer repeated separations. The long journey times from Earth had made this a posting for inevitably long stays, and so accommodations for families had been planned in from the start, as were schools and dedicated medical facilities for children. That was one reason the hub facilities were so roomy, Smith had soon learned; there were plans for still more expansions, still more families. This was a nascent colony, not just an industrial site.
But now Fabio’s father was going to be away for a long time – longer than he imagined Fabio could understand, not yet. Because Emmanuel Caspar, hub commander, having already served several years on a mining operation that was evidently running well, had grabbed the chance to captain the rebuilt Cronus on its mission to Nine, and the adventure and glory that would follow. And that meant that Caspar had to leave behind his family, his little son alone on the hub, for ten years at least.
Now Smith looked down at the lively bundle that was Fabio. Evidently Caspar felt it was worth it, the coming separation. Something ached in Smith’s heart.
A soft chime echoed through the ship’s corridors.
Smith asked gently, ‘Isn’t that the summons? All ashore that’s going ashore —’
‘It just means the Cronus is ready to get out of the jig frame. My Dad told me.’ Fabio executed another perfect mid-air somersault. ‘Can we play chess, Mr Smith?’
‘I’m afraid there isn’t time, Fabio. Not now. You have to let your Dad take you back to the hub and your cabin, don’t you?’
‘Before he goes away.’
‘Yes. But, look. You’ll be talking to your Dad every day, won’t you? By the radio?’
Fabio looked vaguely sulky. ‘Not when the time lag is too long. It will be days and days.’
‘Yes, all right.’ Smith felt oddly desperate. Sorry for the child. He said, ‘But we could still play chess, couldn’t we? You and I. Even when we’re far apart. Over the radio. One move a day. It could be sort of exciting. But we can play faster at the start of the mission, when the lag’s not so bad.’
‘We could play ten games,’ Fabio said now. ‘All at once. A different one every day. Then it would seem like we were playing all the time.’
Smith smiled. Until you grow up a little more and forget all about the old man who played you at chess. ‘Smart idea. All right. Let’s do that.’ That soft chime again, a little louder. ‘But now I think you do have to go, Fabio—’
‘I’m going back again to the hub on the last ferry. My Dad’s piloting it himself, back and forth. He says he wants to say goodbye to everybody. He says I can ride with him.’
‘Well, that will be a treat too. I’ll look for your ferry out of one of the big picture windows.’
‘I’ll wave! I’ll get Dad to wave!’
‘Not if he’s piloting the ferry,’ Smith said with mock horror. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll wave back.’
Fabio hesitated for a second, then he clumsily hugged Smith, released him, and bounded off down the corridor, an extraordinary mixture, Smith thought, of lively kid and microgravity freedom.
Then Fabio called back, ‘Pawn to king four, your move!’
And as it happened, as Smith would learn later, at that exact moment aboard the Lunar Consortium craft Aquila, Jeorg North was also thinking in terms of chess moves.