Benny Shalbot directed the docking, then closed the hangar doors and pressurized the hangar with breathable atmosphere. While he waited for technicians to free him from his cocoon, McKenna unbuckled his harness and spoke on the intercom, “Nice ride, Art. You, too, Glenn.”
Glenn Farrell, the backseater, was a Marine major.
“Thanks, Colonel. Do you have any pointers for us?” Ingram asked.
“None. You get gold stars on your OERs.”
The Officer Efficiency Reports, completed by supervising officers, were the primary sources of information for promotion boards.
With the craft’s payload bay doors open, one of the technicians unlocked and opened the hatch to the passenger module, and McKenna pushed himself downward through it. Momentum kept him going until he reached a hangar cell wall — every surface of every compartment aboard the station was a wall. Flexing his knees at contact, he straightened them with a snap and ricocheted off the wall toward the hatchway in the center of the inside bulkhead, sailing under the nose of the Mako.
The old hands aboard the station, practice making perfect, zipped around in the zero-gravity environment with alacrity. Strategically placed handholds and the textured plastic surface of bulkheads were launch, diversion, and landing points. The veterans found comic relief in the flight patterns of newcomers who learned quickly that momentum did not die away and that accuracy in launch meant fewer heads bumped against the wall next to a hatchway.
McKenna stopped himself by grabbing the edge of the hatchway and eased into the corridor. Benny Shalbot was tethered by Velcro straps to the hangar control console below a window that overlooked the inside of the hangar cell. He was double-checking the content of the atmosphere he had pumped into the cell and shutting down the control systems.
Shalbot looked like a weight-lifting leprechaun. Nearly bald, with a bulbous nose and a large head, he was muscled and fit. And beneath all that pate was a brain that not only remembered most of the formulas and schematics involved in radio, radar, computer, and weapons systems electronics, but also understood them.
“How you doing, Benny?”
“This fucking job is driving me crazy, Colonel.”
“Maybe it’s time to go Earth-side for awhile,” McKenna suggested.
“What! And lose my hazardous duty pay?”
Shalbot was among the first to bitch about the Air Force, the station, and his chores, but he would also be the first to stand ankle-deep in the gore and blood running from his wounds, and defend it.
“You okay, Colonel?”
“Fine, Benny.”
“Grapevine says an actuator relay cut out on Blue.”
“That’s what they told me.”
“Goddamn it! I should have caught it.”
Shalbot ran the electronics diagnostics tests on all of the aerospace craft, every time they docked at Themis, updating Brad Mitchell’s centralized computer maintenance files.
“It was probably fine when you tested it, Benny. Hell, you can’t catch all the glitches.”
“I can damn sure try”
“Don’t sweat it, Benny.”
McKenna grabbed a handhold on the console and pushed off toward the “down” end of the corridor. “Down” was toward the outer rim of the hub, and toward the spokes, and “up” was toward the core.
The hub was divided like two onion slices into the hangar/storage half and another half that was a maze of corridors, offices, and more storage spaces. Technicians swam along the corridors, appearing from and disappearing into labs and maintenance areas.
McKenna waved through a window at Mitchell as he went by the maintenance office, then slowed to peek into the exercise room. It was Compartment A-47, but outside of the station commander and the maintenance officer, McKenna didn’t know anyone who called it that.
It was fitted on all walls with specialized equipment for maintaining muscle tone. On the wall opposite the door was a small centrifugal weight machine. All of those aboard who did not regularly return to the Earth’s surface were provided with an exercise regimen by the station’s doctor. And everyone spent ten or fifteen minutes a day spinning in the artificial gravity of the centrifugal weight machine.
As he watched, the centrifugal machine spun down to a stop, and Polly Tang unbuckled herself from the seat.
“Hi, Kevin.”
“Want to come along and watch me change out of my flight suit?”
“No.”
“Want to join me for lunch?”
“Sure. My treat.”
Tang was wearing the blue jumpsuit with built-in boots that everyone aboard Themis wore for its practicality. It did not disguise the trim curves of her petite figure. That view, however, would be as close as he would get. Though the two of them had enjoyed their repartee for a long time, Tang was married to the chief HoneyBee engineer at Wet Country and had two children she adored.
She waited while he slipped into the pilots’ locker room, doffed his environmental suit, and pulled on a fresh jumpsuit. Aboard the space station, no one wore insignia or badges of rank.
He pulled himself through the curtain back into the corridor. “Ready, lover?”
“After you,” she said.
“The view’s better if I follow you.”
“After you,” she said.
McKenna grinned and asked, “Do you have a dining preference?”
“The Skylight Room in Sixteen today, I think.”
“A charming place,” McKenna agreed, and shoved off the hatchway jamb. Tang followed.
The corridor bisected the hub, and when McKenna reached the curved hallway that went clear around the outer diameter of the hub, he caromed off the outer wall, pushing off again. He heard Tang’s feet slap at the bulkhead as she pursued him.
Self-sealing round doors that led into the spokes were spaced irregularly off this pathway. There were seventeen spokes at the moment, though the corridor also had an additional seven doors, sealed and painted red, to accommodate future spokes. There were also airlocks on opposite sides of the hub to allow access to the exterior for repair and maintenance.
The colors were vibrant and important. Amy Pearson had designed the color scheme which designated that red-painted hatches were verboten and orange hatches were keypad locked and restricted except for particular authorized personnel. The entries to nuclear reactor, communications, ordnance, fuel, MakoShark hangar, and computer spaces were orange. Yellow hatches defined those areas where civilians might be invited under escort, such as the Command Center, the Mako bays, and the HoneyBee docks. Blue signified military-only, and green or blue/green denoted spaces accessible to the civilian scientists who regularly inhabited the station.
Colored stripes ran along the corridors to indicate what kind of a space the transient was in. If unescorted civilians didn’t see green somewhere in the vicinity, they were out of bounds. Station military personnel frequently had to remind civilians who transgressed the color scheme.
Protected by a yellow hatchway, Spoke One led to the Command Center module.
Seven of the spokes were open to civilians, Two through Eight, and offered three residential modules and four laboratory modules. Additionally, civilians were welcome in some of the hub compartments: the clinic, laundry, exercise room, and the contractor communications compartment.
Spoke Nine contained the nuclear power plant. Like the spokes containing fuel storage and ordnance, it was secured to the hub with explosive bolts so that it could be jettisoned in an emergency.
Spoke Nine B was the most recently constructed, and its large module was utilized for repairing KH-11, Teal Ruby, and other satellites retrieved from their orbits by Mako workhorses. Major Kenneth Autry was McKenna’s chief pilot on that shuttle service.