'That's where you sit.' Erelya pointed to the single seat in the middle compartment of the bug, a seat surrounded by blank screens. 'This isn't quite a standard bug. The controls are set like a needle ship's cockpit, the part a pilot uses. It isn't big enough for the entire control section.'
The bug's control seat looked more like one of the needle ship passenger couches than a vacuum bug-control station, except that there was no overhead matching clamshell. A bug wasn't built for the degree of acceleration/deceleration that required a nanite-cushioned restraint seat.
'You get the part that looks real. I sit up front—' She gestured through the open forward interior hatch toward a much smaller and more cramped console and seat behind a real permaglass canopy. 'Someday, if you're good enough, you'll be the one up there.' She slipped toward the seat that looked so oversized. 'First, the harness and headset there. The harness plugs into the inserts on your suit. I'll show you. Oh, and put your helmet in the open locker to the right.'
I eased my way into the seat, stowing the soft helmet, and strapped myself in place. The restraints were designed differently from those I'd had as a passenger, more confining.
Erelya hooked a foot under the rear of the seat and demonstrated how the harness mated with the restraints and how the data leads mated with the receptors on the tops of the forearms of the outside suit. 'Your arms won't leave the seat channels once you begin an insertion, not until you're back out at your destination.'
I slipped on the headset - more like a formfitting partial helmet - and staggered mentally at the mass of sensory data. Chill from receptors in the bow and stern... minimal warmth from the cabin ... twenty percent heat differential between the top and stub gas tanks ... diffuse heat sources in the cabin ...
We were the diffuse heat sources, and I wanted to shake my head. The data kept pouring through me.
I'd almost forgotten Erelya until she touched a stud and the bug hatch closed. 'I need to get strapped in and run through the checklist. All you do is watch. Watch everything.'
How could I? Not only were my eyes registering what I saw inside the bug, but I was getting all sorts of images from the sensors - all four sides of the cargo lock, plus smaller images of the gas-thrust nozzles. That was in addition to all the other data - gas pressures and temperatures, interior atmospheric pressure and temperature, power flows from the fuel cells ...
But the deep, deep vision ... that was the strangest and the most familiar - the bulkheads of the cargo lock, dull gray composite, yet a blue that was not a blue, chilled but not so cold as the nielle beyond the lock door, and the crackling yellow lines that sparkled beneath the inert composite, and webs of white and yellow and orange that wove the starbug together. I swallowed once, and then again.
I licked my lips, difficult because my mouth was dry. 'You ready, Tyndel?'
'Yes, ser.'
'You're not. No candidate ever is. No point in waiting.'
The starbug shivered as the cargo lock cracked and ice crystals puffed around the hull, doubled images picked up in the screens before me and in the direct inputs that fed into the augmented new sensory system the Authority had given me. As I struggled to reconcile the images, the crystals swirled away. Chill bit at me, and I could feel the exterior hull temperature of the starbug drop.
'I'll take us clear of the station.'
Well clear. I suspected.
'Watch the power, and try to feel what I'm doing.' Her voice shifted - or the frequency channel shifted. 'Earth Orbit Two, Starbug One, leaving lock three.'
'Starbug One, cleared. No inbounds this time. Request duration, Captain.'
'Estimate one point five. Local vicinity. Maneuvering practice.'
'Thank you, Starbug One.'
The starbug's ten-meter length of composite and gas canisters slipped through the open lock and into the darkness, dwarfed by the side of Earth Orbit Station Two, a battered composite gray structure blurred against the black of space above the ecliptic. Space itself, experienced through the sensors, was insubstantial yet endless, its depth emphasized by closer and misty colored webs of power that girdled and infused the station and the distant deep white point-disc that was the sun itself. Colors and power washed over and around me.
Solar radiation, photons, energy - whatever the term -pattered like rain striking the left side of the bug, each bundle of quanta somehow registering as heat, or something like it. My eyes twitched, and so did my fingers.
I forced myself back into the mechanical Now where Erelya was just the latest Rykashan to demonstrate how the demons didn't have much use for lengthy introductions to anything, even maneuvering ships in space.
Or for sensing all the unsensed that I'd never experienced before.
I watched, knowing it was the first of many long sessions, wondering - far from the first time - what I had committed my life to.
And why.
64
Each action creates multiple reactions; act seldom and well.
With deft and quick puff-blasts from the gasjets, Erelya brought the starbug to a halt relative to Orbit Two, nearly five kilos behind us, and less than a kilo and a half from the object before us.
The cold nielle of space burned through the sensors, with the distant disk warmth of the sun off my shoulder and the woven cascade of powerlights enshrouding me. Through both sensors and screens, I studied the dull facade of composite film and the black outlines of the lower cargo locks and the upper passenger locks. The simulacrum was stretched on invisible nanite-projected supports - a facsimile of an orbit station apparently dwarfing the starbug. The entire facade massed less than twenty kilograms, and most of that was the central nanite control box from which the facade microthin film was generated.
'You have it, Tyndel.' Erelya's voice was calm, matter-of-fact.
'I have it,' I repeated as I felt the lock on my controls lift, the same way in which Erelya had lifted the control lock for the past five sessions.
'You'll see more than most,' the training pilot said, her voice coming to me on direct feed through the system, 'that it doesn't look like a real station, but this way you can practice without scaring me or damaging yourself and the bug.'
All of those were worthy objectives. I also knew that the facade would let me make more grievous errors and thus subject me to greater wrath from my instructor.
'Remember, effectively, the simulacrum has no mass - you touch it with the jets and you'll just push it away, or rip a hole in it and turn it into gray ribbons. Center your approach on the upper passenger lock.'
'Yes, ser.' My fingers rested in the arm channels, ready to use the manual controls if Erelya decided to call some sort of emergency and require me to navigate solely by the screens before me. The direct links were faster, but I knew I'd be drilled in both types.
How was I supposed to complete the approach? Any direct approach meant side jets, and within twenty meters, any real use of braking jets would shred the simulacrum station.
'To begin with, you'll just sidle up to twenty meters. If your jets affect the simulacrum, then you're using too much braking.'
Easy enough for Erelya to say.
'Eventually you should be able to bring in the starbug against the film so gently that the lock will kiss the outline without rebounding. Then we'll try approaches to a closed station lock ... and eventually we'll start borrowing needle ships after they've finished their runs so that you can get the feel of a real ship. I've talked enough. Bring her in to thirty meters from the lock shell'