“But this business of the audit has to be cleared up.” He held her hand. “I know. And I trust you to handle it well.”
She churned with guilt. “Bud, we both have our duty. And we can’t let anything get in the way of that.”
“I understand. But a bit more pleasure before business.” He sat up. “We’ve got twelve hours before we boot up the AI. Let’s go do some sightseeing.”
They washed, dressed, and drank a coffee. Then Bud escorted her to the little ship he called the V-Eye-P.
The project’s one and only one pressurized inspection module was just a platform laden with spherical fuel and oxidizer tanks and a small set of hydrazine rocket motors—actually attitude thrusters cannibalized from a retired spaceplane. On top was a pressurized tent of Kevlar and aluminum, within which two people could stand side by side. That was it, save for a simple set of controls based on a joystick that sprouted from the floor, and a life support system that would keep you alive for six hours at a pinch.
The shield engineers used variants on this design, but just the platform and the engines, without the tent: why bother with a pressure cabin when you had a perfectly good spacesuit? So you would see engineers skimming over the surface of the shield riding their rocket-propelled boxes like scooters. Only this one special little craft was kept aside for VIPs, visitors like Siobhan who didn’t have the time or inclination to get trained up on how to use a pressure suit.
“Not,” Bud said with a faintly malicious grin, “that this Kevlar tent would be much protection if anything went wrong …”
The V-Eye-P was launched from Auroraby an electromagnetic induction rail, like a miniature version of the Sling, the giant mass driver on the Moon. The acceleration was smooth, like a rapid elevator; Siobhan quite enjoyed the feeling of her feet being pressed to the floor.
When they had climbed sufficiently far, Bud tested the little ship’s rockets, “burping” them as he called it. It sounded as if small explosions were going off all around the Kevlar hull. Bud explained that there was no exhaust from the induction rail, and rockets, however small, were never used close to the shield. “We’re building a mirror made of frost laced on spiderweb,” he said. “We try not even to breathe on it.”
The craft swiveled and pitched to and fro. It was like being aboard a rather odd fairground ride.
When he was satisfied, Bud brought the craft to a halt and tipped it forward so Siobhan could see down. “Behold the mother ship,” he said.
The venerable old Aurora2 was still the centerpiece of the shield, still the spider at the center of the web. Despite extensive cannibalization, Siobhan could make out the main features she remembered: the long, elegant spine with the fat habitation module at one end, and the complex clusters of power plants, fuel tanks, and rocket engines at the other. “She’s a game old bird,” Bud said fondly. “I hope she forgives us. She still has a role to play, keeping the shield spun up and oriented correctly. Of course all that will change when the AI comes online and the shield starts to control itself.”
He pulled back on his control stick, and the platform’s thrusters banged. The little ship rose up smoothly, rising away from the shield along an axial line that led straight up from the embedded Aurora.
Siobhan stared out, fascinated, as the shield opened up beneath her. Away from the old Mars ship the shield was a floor so flat and smooth it was like a mathematical abstraction, a semi-infinite plane that cut the universe in half. The surface shimmered, as delicate as a soap bubble, and as she rose higher prismatic rainbows fled across the surface. But the shield was still edge-on to the sun, and the low light streamed through that delicate membrane, so that she could make out the spindly skeleton beneath, struts, spars, and ribs of delicate lunar glass, a fairyland scaffolding that cast long, slim shadows.
“It’s wonderful,” she said. “The most massive engineering project anybody ever undertook, and yet it is nothing but glass and light. Like something from a dream.”
“Which is why,” Bud said a bit mysteriously, “I’ve chosen the name I have for her—the shield’s AI, I mean.”
Her? But he would say no more.
He pulsed the attitude control thrusters again and tipped the platform backward, so its windows swiveled to face the Earth. The home planet was a perfect blue marble hanging in space. The Moon, white-brown, sailed beside its parent, some thirty Earth diameters away. L1 was far beyond the orbit of the Moon; from here, there was no doubt this was a twin world.
“Home,” Bud said simply. “Stuck out here it’s good to be reminded of what we’re working our butts off for.” He leaned close to her, and pointed so she could sight along his arm. “See there? And there? …”
Against the velvety darkness of space she saw sparks drifting, two, three, four of them in a rough line, like fireflies in the night, passing from Earth to shield.
Bud tapped the window. “Magnification please.”
The image in the window before Siobhan exploded in rapid jumps. Now she could see perhaps a dozen ships. Some were just large enough to show detail, hull markings, solar-cell arrays, antenna booms. The convoy looked like toys, models suspended against velvet.
“A caravan from Earth, bringing up the smartskin.” Bud was grinning. “Crawling its way up the gravity hill to L1. Isn’t that a fantastic sight? And it’s been going on, day and night, for years. If you turn a scope on the dark side of Earth, you can see the sparks of all those launches, over and over.”
On the ground, Siobhan had inspected the collection processes. Smartskin blankets, grown out of household windows like Bisesa Dutt’s in London, were gathered at neighborhood collation points, and then shipped to big storage centers at the airports and spaceports, and finally bundled up and sent to one of the great launch centers at Cape Canaveral, Baikonur, Kourou, or Woomera. Just the ground operation was a stupendous enterprise, a mighty international flow across the face of the Earth. And it culminated in these sparks bravely crossing the night.
Bud said, “You know the picture. We’re throwing everything we’ve got into the launches, just like every other aspect of the project. They even dug the space shuttles out of their museums at the Smithsonian and Huntsville, and got those beautiful birds flying again. Worn-out shuttle main engines, too beat-up to be human-rated anymore, are being recycled: you can make a pretty useful throwaway booster out of a shuttle tailplane and a cargo pallet. The Russians have brushed off their old plans for Energia and have got those big old rockets flying again too.
“But even that isn’t enough. So Boeing and McDonnell and the other big contractors are churning out boosters like sausages. Why, some of those new birds aren’t much more sophisticated than a Fourth of July firecracker, and all you can do is point and shoot. But they work, with nearly a hundred percent reliability. And we’re getting the job done …”
To Bud, Siobhan supposed, this mighty space project was a boyhood dream come true—space engineering fast and brutal and efficient and on a massive scale, the way it used to be, before cost and politics and risk aversion got in the way.
“You know,” he said, “I think this will change everything.” He waved a hand at the shield. “Surely there will be no going back to the old timid ways after this; surely we’ve broken the bonds. This has set our new direction. And it’s outward.”
“If we all live through the sunstorm.”
He looked faintly resentful. “If that, yes.” There was a subtext: I might be a space buff but I know my duty.
She felt a pang of regret, and wished she could take the words back. Was a barrier forming between them, even before she got to the meat of her mission here?