“With a fully working fax machine at our disposal, there’s always a choi— Whoa.”
The corridor turned seventy degrees, and opened out into a broad space, maybe ten meters high and at least a hundred meters wide. No, scratch that; a fifty-meter-thick cylinder ran through the room’s center, floor to ceiling, blocking the view of the other side. The chamber was donut-shaped, fully and exactly as wide as the ship. Its floor and ceiling were covered in regular, rolling hills of what looked like foamed metal, lit from both the top and bottom by occasional spotlights: vertical cones of bright yellow light shining up and down, leaving relative dimness in the spaces between.
And there were plants everywhere—a veritable jungle of them, sprouting from pots and from pools of mesh-covered dirt in the regular valleys between the hills. The greenery sprang from both floor and ceiling, and was long enough in a few places to meet in the middle. And there were people lurking among the plants: armed, naked people making only a nominal effort to conceal themselves. The blue did kind of stand out against the green and brown and gray.
“This is the sound baffle,” Robert said. “Where most of us live. Let me, uh, introduce you.” Facing out into the chamber he called out a long string of foreign syllables, and Conrad saw the people out there relaxing, shouldering and even setting aside their weapons.
Conrad, who didn’t realize how tensely he’d been holding himself, also relaxed. Then he grabbed onto a stanchion to stop the slow drift he was accumulating. There was a mild force—gravity, probably—drawing him in toward the middle of the chamber. Maybe down a bit as well, toward the surface he’d identified arbitrarily as “floor.”
“What’s a sound baffle?” the prince asked.
Robert nodded. “Okay, picture the shape of this vessel. A cylinder, right? We’re near the aft end. Engines this way”—he pointed at the ceiling—“and holds that way.” Toward the floor.
“Okay.”
“The bow of the vessel is the snow scoop. Comet fragments go in there, and enter the main hold. It’s nearly full right now: a billion tons of methane and water ice clathrates, plus some coal and chondrite. Doesn’t actually matter what it is, because the hold is really a giant piston that will compress the very atoms into a neutron paste. A few weeks from now, we’ll be ready to squeeze another neuble, and for three days the noise will be awful. This chamber isolates the temporary crew areas from the worst of it. And since the last stage of compression is an antimatter explosion, the chamber also serves as a shock absorber.”
“I see,” Bascal said. “The crew areas being what, a bridge and an engine room?”
“Plus an inventory and two small cabins, yah.”
“That way?” Bascal pointed at the ceiling.
“Right.”
“We’ll see these?”
Robert studied the prince. “We don’t use those areas much. Ander and Nell live there, with their dogs. But if you’re so interested ...”
Brenda muttered something foreign and surly. Conrad added his own glare to the Palace Guard’s. What did this woman expect them to do, disappear? Never exist in the first place?
“Of course we’re interested,” Bascal said.
Robert nodded. “Well, fine. I’ll make sure they know. We need to figure out a place for you all to sleep anyway. I suppose the inventory, or else back there in the corridor where you came in. Obviously, we’re not set up for visitors.”
He pushed off lightly, launching himself on a gentle glide into the jungle of the sound baffle. He called back, “Watch yourselves in here. It’s fun to fly around, but the neutronium hold is right there, behind the forward bulkhead. Five neubles suspended in a magnetic liquid. It’s a pentagon pattern, to distribute the loads evenly. See there and there, where the vegetation is flattened?”
“Yeah,” Bascal said, leaping after him.
“Everyone? Does everyone see those areas?”
They were hard not to see: three-meter disks of flattened grass and vines, each one near the low point between a set of meter-high foamed-metal hills. In point of fact, Robert and “Money” were drifting directly toward one of them, with Bascal trailing behind, looking up between their blue, hairy legs.
“Sure,” Conrad said, and was echoed by Xmary and Karl and Ho. (And wasn’t it great, how quiet and unobtrusive Ho was being? For maybe the first time in his life?)
“Those areas,” Robert explained, “are two gees at the center. Overfly one and you’ll be slammed into the deck before you know what happened. Break your arms if you’re lucky. We’ve never had a fatality, but it’s because we keep it in mind. Always. Five points, in a pentagon around the center. When the next neuble is added, it’ll be six points in a hexagon, and we’ll have to remember all over again.”
His path had begun to curve noticeably, and presently he flapped his arms in a circular motion that brought his legs out below him. And he settled down at the edge of one of the depressions, speeding up at the last moment so that he landed with an audible thump. When he straightened, he was standing at an angle, leaning away from the gravity. Money landed beside him a little farther out, and stood at an even steeper angle.
“That’s how we do it,” Robert said. “Where I’m standing is about a quarter gee, inclined toward the center. The gradient is steep: another step and it’s a full gee, and I’ll be leaning over too far if I’m not careful. Even here, I can hurt myself. Neutronium you don’t take chances with, understand? Five points in a pentagon around the center. Look for the flattened grass.”
“Sure,” Bascal said, alighting almost directly between the two men.
“Good. Good. Everyone try it. This is safety training.” Robert leaped back toward Conrad and the others. Not a leader, right. The human need for hierarchy was supposedly genetic, as inescapable as sex and taxes. And somebody needed to sit at the top—hence the Queendom, right?
While this demonstration unfolded, a substantial audience—at least a dozen people—had filtered out of the weeds and were standing or hanging around gawking at the prince, and at the other campers. The first new people they’d seen in what, three years? Five? Someone barked a question at the soaring Robert, who barked back an answer in the same tone.
Xmary launched herself toward the flat spot, and Conrad, not wanting to be outdone, followed right behind.
“Maybe we should take our clothes off,” he said, in a voice only she could hear. “Just to be polite.”
“Ha ha,” she answered, more loudly.
Behind them, Ho and Karl took the leap.
The maneuver turned out to be almost as easy as it looked; Conrad could distinctly feel the gravity setting in as he approached. He was still in freefall—just curving along an altered trajectory—but it was a different kind of freefall somehow. Stretchy, tingly, slippery. He couldn’t put a word to it, but the feeling was there just the same. The rotation, so his feet were underneath him, was not quite a zero-gee movement. Once his feet got close the gravity seemed to seize and center them of its own accord. His only error was in judging the angle of his body; it wasn’t steep enough, so he came in a bit wrongly when his feet slapped into the baffle wall—the hilly, foamed-metal floor that attracted him like a magnet, grabbing firmly at the last instant. He felt glued.
He wasn’t leaning enough, though. He was perpendicular to the floor, not to the gravity, and for a moment he felt as if he were standing on a steep incline, about to tumble downhill or pull right out of his shoes. But he caught himself, straightening in the proper way, and a few moments later he caught Xmary, who’d landed in front of him and leaned too far out. She flailed briefly, then fell backward into his arms.