Nu Trilogy 1: The Esss Advance Read online

  The other three spokes extending out from the spine were also single purpose. The naval offices, the naval research and development facilities, and the naval shipping control center were located on the wing opposite the foundry and manufacturing wing. This allowed the Navy to concentrate their base security in one wing of the shipyard. Both of the two remaining opposed wings had been under construction the last time Sted was at the base. Now they were both complete. One wing was the actual shipyard facility where the interstellar ship was under construction. On the opposite wing was the new shuttle docking facility, where the Endeavour was securely attached.

  The four wings were constructed so that they could rotate on a central hub around the spine if artificial gravity was desired, or they could remain stationary and weightless for specific manufacturing or R&D processes, as necessary.

  As Sted floated headfirst through the docking collar into the receiving area of the small ship docking facility, he noticed another significant change at the shipyard. During his last visit, little attention had been paid to the aesthetics of the interior working and living spaces. Now, Sted found himself coming up through the floor of a well-decorated reception area where orientation was pre-selected. There was a thin but functional layer of Velcro-like carpet on the “floor.” The “ceiling” was arrayed with many small LED-type lights surrounding ventilation ducts. The “walls” consisted of pastel-colored, backlit panels with faux windows that had to be framed paper-thin display sheets. Sted didn’t know who had chosen the theme being displayed through the windows, but it was rather odd for his taste. When he swiveled his head around and looked out the windows, he appeared to be in the middle of a field on a dairy farm somewhere back on Earth with cows grazing and an idyllic farm house and barn with grain silos off in the distance.

  “Welcome to Rickover, Captain Richardson,” said an attractive receptionist coming around what appeared to be a desk made of the same paneled material used for the walls. The backlighting on the desk had a brownish yellow tone to simulate of lighter colored wood that Sted couldn’t identify.

  “My name is Jessica Browning. I came down from the AMC offices to get you settled here until the Endeavour departs back to Luna. If you have someone place your personal belongings in the bin next to the reception desk, I will see that they are transferred directly to your room.”

  Jessica extended her hand in greeting, and Sted took it firmly in his grasp and lowered himself to floor level while his eyes met her direct and friendly gaze. “It’s nice to meet you, Jessica. I apologize for any surprise or amazement on my face, but this is certainly not what I was expecting!”

  In Jessica’s other hand were two boot inserts to be slipped into his under-shoe slots. Sted was sure these inserts had been designed for use throughout the civilian-populated portion of the shipyard. The inserts would pair perfectly with the Velcro carpeting in the weightless portion of the facility but would also support his weight in those areas under artificial gravity from the centrifugal force of the spinning cylinders that made up a significant portion of the living facilities.

  “Your reaction is actually quite normal for people who have not been back here for a few years. UTC has invested a great deal in making the environment as friendly and familiar as possible for all of the new arrivals who will be working on the Voyager III.” Jessica handed the boot inserts to Sted. Apparently, she was very experienced in greeting newcomers to the shipyard. She placed a hand on his shoulder to hold him on the floor while he applied the boot inserts.

  “Voyager III? When did the new interstellar ship pick up that name?” Sted asked from his crouched position. This was a new experience, trying to apply the inserts to the bottom of his prosthetic legs. Since his operation and rehab, he had only experienced lunar gravity and the weightless conditions aboard the two small AMC assay ships. He was going to have to adapt to Velcro-walking quickly or look foolish in front of Jessica.

  “People just kept stumbling over calling it ‘the ship’, because there are so many other ships here in the yard, and ‘the interstellar ship’ was just too cumbersome. Someone just started calling it Voyager after the Voyager I and Voyager II probes launched back in the 1970s, and the name stuck. Admiral Bain liked the name and made it official just last week by adding the ‘III’ designation, because he did not want to trample on the history of those first interstellar probes. They’re planning to build at least three of these ships over the next couple of decades, and the next two will probably be Voyager IV and Voyager V.”

  Stumbling was not the word Sted wanted to hear at that moment. He got his feet firmly planted, and Jessica, with extraordinary ease and confidence, assisted him toward the exit.

  “Cam wants to video message with you privately over our secure channel in the AMC offices,” she said over her shoulder. “We’ll go there first before showing you to the AMC guest suite. You’re going to be with us for the next week or so while Endeavour unloads its passengers and gets a thorough engineering inspection after its initial voyage. Lockheed Aerospace has already arranged for you to have a private tour of the Endeavour while they’re completing the post-operation workups. I think Lockheed still thinks they can lure you away from us, and they specifically requested your attendance at the party being held tomorrow on board Endeavour to celebrate the end of its maiden voyage.”

  Jessica led Sted into a corridor just outside of the reception area. The bare metallic walls of the corridor were just as Sted remembered, with handrails for moving quickly along under zero gravity. The floor of the corridor, however, was covered in the same Velcro carpet as in the reception area. Apparently, he had the choice of walking or gliding down the corridor to the spine.

  “Do you mind if we free-float down to the spine?” Sted asked. “I think it will take a bit of practice getting used to zero gravity Velcro-walking on my prosthetic legs.”

  “Whatever you prefer,” Jessica said as she grabbed one of several handrails and pulled her feet free from the carpet. “Let’s pull ourselves down to the spine and take one of the spine transport cabs over to the corporate torus.”

  As they approached the spine, Jessica signaled from her belt comm unit for a cab. Because UTC Aerospace was building the shipyard under a naval contract, the transport systems were designed and developed by UTC’s Otis Elevator division. The spine was 100 meters in diameter. Within it, the equivalent of four elevator shafts were used to shuttle over twenty cabs along the spine and up the spindles to the various facilities. Everyone had a choice of riding in one of the cabs or using the main corridor to “walk” to their destination. Since the entire spine was always at zero gravity, floating and using the handrails was quick and easy. Only during a shift change would the main corridor get crowded.

  Because Jessica and Sted were headed along the spine and then “down” one of the rotating spokes to the corporate offices, it was easier to get on a cab right away and select the AMC office destination from the cab’s control panel. The system moved them horizontally along the spine and then vertically down one of the four spindles leading to the corporate offices. The Otis controls selected the appropriate spine and oriented the “floor” of the cab toward the far end of the spindle. As the cab moved, centrifugal forces from the spinning cylinder took hold, and any floating passengers sank gently to the floor of the cab. By the end of the trip, the apparent gravity was equivalent to the gravity on the moon, or one-sixth of Earth’s gravity.

  When the cab door opened, Sted was feeling very comfortable, because all of his rehab treatments had taken place at the lunar base, so he was used to moving about in the equivalent of lunar gravity. Also, after experiencing the aesthetics in the reception area, seeing the obvious luxury of what appeared to be a floor in any modern office building on Earth or the moon, he was not totally shocked. The Space Navy would not spend money like this for appearances, but all of the corporations contracting with the Navy definitely would. After all, they wanted their existing contracts renewed and the opportunity to bid
on any new ones.

  Jessica moved out of the lobby and down a long hallway toward the entrance to AMC’s offices. After being cooped up so long on the small assay ships under zero gravity, Sted could not help but notice how attractive and appealing it was to watch her move ahead of him down the corridor. He just stood in one spot and drank in the sight.

  When Jessica turned around with a questioning look in her eyes, she saw the big smile on his face and realized she was the cause. She blushed a little under his gaze as she remembered how long he had been out in the belt in that tiny ship. Of course he was attracted. If he had not been, he would hardly be human!

  “Sted? Are you coming?” she asked quietly. “I’m sure Mr. Dunston’s three recorded priority messages waiting for your authentication are very important. It is my understanding that he expects your reply to all three to be on the way back to him sometime in the next hour or two.”

  “Oh, sorry,” he apologized. “I just couldn’t seem to get these artificial legs moving. You completely distracted me. How do you walk in this lower gravity and still make a man stop in his tracks because all he can do is just watch and admire? You don’t have to answer that question. I’m sure that it was completely inappropriate on my part.”

  “Apology accepted,” she said, as the smile in her eyes move down to light up her entire blushing face. “Let’s go inside the office and get you set up in our video conference room. We can talk about your ‘inappropriate remark’ after you have taken care of business.”

  Chapter 37 – Trepidation

  After Jessica left Sted to record his responses to Cam’s messages, she went back to her office, closed and locked her door, and settled into her chair, trying to let her emotions settle in her stomach. She had not been prepared for the impact of Sted’s gaze back in the hallway. In an instant, her stomach had done flip-flops, and her knees had turned to jelly.

  Never in her life had she experienced that kind of shock to her system, and she didn’t know how to respond. She had actually come out to the belt to avoid entanglements, after her devastating breakup back on Luna. She had been working for Lockheed at the time and had thought that her relationship with Eddie from the office was headed in the right direction.

  There were never any really hot sparks flying with Eddie, but she thought she loved him and that he loved her back in the same way. That ended abruptly the day she went home early from work with a fever and the chills, only to find Eddie in their bed with her best friend Darcy. Her fever held no heat in comparison to the anger that flared in that instant.

  How could he treat her like that? Was she so unimportant to him that he could just toss her away for a roll in the sack with her best friend? And what was Darcy doing? Jessica had thought that she and Darcy could share anything, say anything, or do anything, and that nothing could come between them. Darcy’s betrayal was almost worse than Eddie’s!

  She had run from their apartment, run from her job at Lockheed. She had even run away from the moon. The first job opening in the belt that she found was with AMC in their new corporate offices in the HG Rickover Shipyard, and she accepted it without even considering what her future might be like so far from Earth.

  Now, here she was, eighteen months later, still a virgin in the belt with no close personal ties to anyone. And now what would she do? Should she slam the door on her still raw emotions or should she open it a crack and take a chance once again? If she did, would the pain return? Could she live through such pain a second time? What would happen when Sted shuttled back to the moon on Endeavour?

  But those eyes were unbelievable. How could she say no to the attraction she felt to this man who had climbed out of such an awful hole created by that random act of the universe? She had studied his history closely to be prepared for welcoming him to the shipyard. The time spent learning about Sted and his career in the Navy and his time with AMC all pointed to a driven, dedicated man, a man who knew what he wanted and drove himself relentlessly to make it happen.

  Was there any dishonesty or duplicity in any of that record? Not really. Everything in his history pointed to a straight shooter, a man trusted and loved by his crew when he was a ship’s captain. But sometimes the records overlooked negative traits.

  Let’s see what happens, she thought, as she rose from her chair, unlocked her office door, and went to face the world once more.

  Interlude 5 – 3.6 Billion Years Ago

  It was time to begin the seeding process. The oceans had an ideal balance of salt and other minerals from both of the icy asteroids that they had sent down into the gravity well of the planet and the constant evaporation, rain, and erosion process driven by the energy of the star that anchored this system. AlvaResh and his team had been tinkering with the planetary environment for millions of orbits around the sun, and it had reached the correct temporary state of equilibrium.

  Single-celled organisms that could reproduce asexually were sprayed in critical areas of the oceans around the planet. Because these organisms could reproduce rapidly under the right conditions, there was no need for the Nu to blanket the entire planet. Through reproduction, the oceans would be filled with them in a short period of time. Their impact on the environment would be significant. The process of photosynthesis from the single-celled algae molecules could store energy from the sun in simple sugars by taking the carbon out of the CO2 in the planet’s atmosphere. Reducing the CO2 was a key ingredient of the Nu’s plan to stabilize the planet’s surface temperature by reducing the amount of heat from the sun trapped by the atmosphere.

  Once the seeding was complete, the Nu made a comprehensive survey of the Oort Cloud, the Kuiper Belt, and the asteroid belt for any potential involuntary collisions with the third planet over the next turn of the galaxy. Several course corrections were made to prevent any such occurrences. The prokaryotic life they had seeded needed time to do its work without major interruption.

  Chapter 38 – Party on the Shuttle Endeavour

  The week at Rickover was just starting for Sted. Jessica had agreed to accompany him to the Lockheed Aerospace post-flight party on his second night after arriving. When they made their appearance on the shuttle, they were greeted warmly by their Lockheed hosts and then introduced to the principal staff members on board. From all of the conversations, it was clear to Sted that they were still trying to recruit him away from AMC.

  The lavish party was being held in the grand ballroom aboard the Endeavour. The operative word was “grand.” The room had to be over 100 meters long and fifty meters wide with a domed ceiling at least twenty meters over their heads. At one end of the room was a stage with a ten-piece dance band. In front of the dance band was a thirty-meter square parquet wood dance floor. Around the dance floor were several dozen tables for guests. Because the shuttle was docked to the shipyard and spinning around at the end of the shuttle docking arm, everyone felt normal in the artificial gravity, allowing them to dance like they were back on the moon.

  “Jessica, I have not danced since I got these new legs, but I would love to try dancing with you anyway. I hope you will excuse me if I flub a few steps,” Sted said as he held out his hand and then guided her onto the dance floor.

  “From everything I’ve seen in the last two days, I don’t think you’ll have too many problems,” Jessica replied. She gave Sted one of her brightest smiles as she followed him out to the center of the dance floor. Then she melted into his arms for a dance she would never forget. Their bodies seemed to fit together like hand and glove, and she didn’t want the dance to end.

  Sted was a little out of breath at the end of the dance, and he knew it wasn’t from the exertion of dancing. It was from the almost chemical reaction his body was having to both the scent and feel of Jessica’s body so close to his.

  After that first dance, the sexual tension between the two was obvious to most of those attending the party. They could not seem to look anywhere else but into each other’s eyes.

  After the party, they went back to t
he AMC suite reserved for Sted, where they spent the rest of the night getting to know each other on a more intimate basis. Sted had been worried the whole evening that Jessica would be put off by his abbreviated natural body with attached prosthetics once they were alone together. As it turned out, he had nothing to fear. Encounters out in the belt tended to be short but torrid. You did not have time to play games that could stretch over months or years. If you felt an attraction, you had to grab on right away to see if it might actually be something that had the promise of a future. If you passed on that first opportunity, you might never see the person again.

  For Sted, this was his first intimate encounter with a woman since the accident, and his body was more than ready to satisfy its need for procreative activity. That body had been sending strong messages since the moment he had popped out of the hatch and seen Jessica in the reception area.