GARRISON REEVES
The rest of Fireheart Station was on pause—the isotope factories, the power-block stations, the energy-film farms, even the trading hub with its usual commercial traffic. Everything—and that meant everything—was devoted to the final stages of the Big Ring.
Garrison Reeves had joined the main construction crews, glad to have his name listed among so many others, and when he had time off-shift, he volunteered in the greenhouse dome and sent messages to Seth via the green priests. The boy sent excited messages back, talking about school, classmates, and especially the Teacher compies. Seth had even become friends with Arden Iswander. Garrison didn’t particularly like the hard industrialist, but he could not let his grudge extend to his son as well.
He also sent more messages to Orli Covitz, but so far had received no response. Celli told him that the green priest Aelin—whom Garrison knew from the first Iswander extraction yard—had delivered the message to her at Ulio Station.
Garrison was alarmed. “Ulio? But they were just under attack.”
Celli nodded solemnly. “Orli Covitz departed some time before the Shana Rei appeared, but we are certain that Aelin died in the attack. We don’t know where Orli went, only that she was with Tasia Tamblyn and Robb Brindle.”
He reassured himself that at least she was in good company, but he hoped he could find her. He was looking forward to seeing her again in just a few weeks.…
Working on the Big Ring project, or even just the everyday operations inside the nebula, Garrison remembered again what it meant to be a Roamer. Not the repressive “old ways” that Olaf Reeves had preached to his followers, but the real optimistic ingenuity of the clans, their ability to pull fresh ideas out of the most difficult situations.
In its final days, the Big Ring construction site was a hive of activity. Wearing an environment suit, Garrison used a heavy-hauler chariot to maneuver curved girders into place, while his teammates brought in anchor bolts, and others filled the gaps with thin integrity plates. Soon, they would connect the last segment of the torus.
For aesthetic reasons, Kotto Okiah had decided to enclose much of the framework with hull metal, although scientifically speaking, the framework itself should have been sufficient for the purposes of the experiment. Two weeks ago, Garrison had been part of a crew meeting where an exhausted team leader wanted to hear a justification for so much extra work, and Kotto had grown testy. “It’s part of the design. On a project of this scale and this importance, we won’t scrimp on details.” The team leader withdrew his objection, although Garrison realized that the answer was not really an answer.
Every day the gap in the ring grew smaller and smaller, and every worker felt a sense of culmination of their work and an anticipation of the wonders of physics that Kotto would demonstrate.
Now, Garrison maneuvered the chariot-hauler into place, connecting another girder, which strung the top part of the ring gap with the bottom part. Scout pods and metal pallets hung in space, silhouetted against the colorful dazzle of the nebula. From his vantage, the remaining space to be enclosed in the ring structure looked huge, but the torus itself was so enormous that his eyes could barely grasp the curvature from where he drifted.
One more week … two at the most, and then they would all be there to watch the experiment take place.