Chapter 5 - The Unexpected Discovery

Two plodding planning days went by before Cho got more than a brief update from the team on the ship.  Clark and Detroit met with him in his cabin.  The weightlessness meant that they could adopt any position in the cabin they liked, but Cho put his foot down when Clark tried to hang from the ceiling light fitting.  He supposed it was her way of lightening the mood, which was fairly gloomy.  In normal circumstances Cho wouldn't have minded so much, as levity was a valuable commodity in the military.  However, the lack of substantial news had him on edge.

'If you please Doctor, right side up, thank you.'  She turned over, and propelled herself to sit next to Detroit on the cabin's couch/bed, and grabbed the straps which were used to prevent passengers drifting around the cabin while sleeping to hold herself in place.

'We've made some progress, General,' she said in a very tired voice.  'Two fission reactors are up and running, but the fusion reactors are taking longer.  The capacitor banks need to build up a big enough charge to ignite the first fusion reactor.  Because of the way they are daisy chained together, if you can get one going you can start up the next, and so on.  The fusion reactants are available in sufficient quantity to keep them going for decades, but we can't start them up for another week.  We can power the lift/trains though, and we can visit the sections of the ship we couldn't get to before.

'How much rest have you and your team had in the past 48 hours,' Cho asked?

'Not much,' Detroit replied.  'We were going pretty much non-stop for the first day to get the first reactor going.  There were these oscillations in the power outputs which took a while to iron out.'

'You and your team will take a rest.  We can go in the morning.'  By this Cho meant the morning ship's time.  The ship's chronometer was synchronised with UTC - Coordinate Universal Time, which was the standard approach adopted for ships and orbital bases.  It cut down on the opportunity for confusion by having multiple time zones in space.

'Yes Sir,' Detroit replied.  Clark simply yawned uncontrollably.  Then they floated out of Cho's cabin to get some much needed rest.

The following morning, refreshed, but still looking haggard, Clark, Detroit, Cho, and Harrington, along with a coterie of engineers and other hangers on ventured back into the Anubis.

This time the all lights in the corridors were burning brightly, and the pedestrian movers every tenth parallel corridor were also working.  Because the ship wasn't moving, the team needed to manoeuvre into the individual passenger seats.  There were waist restraints as well, clearly designed for periods of weightlessness, although, once the pedestrian movers started moving.  Cho was impressed with the setup.  The mover tracks occupied the middle two metres of the eight metre wide corridors, and regular stops were made every 500 metres along the way.  There was an driver override system, and Clark used it to speed up the transit time.  At the end of the ride, which according to the location system Clark had taken such pains to explain, they alighted roughly two thirds of the way across the ship in a large transit station.  At the station they moved into a lift/train, and started their journey further north.  Half an hour later they stopped, and entered another transit lounge simply marked Cold Sleep 1.  According to the map on the wall, there were another nine such stations along this route.  Climbing out of the car, Clark led them to another maglev tram, where they strapped in for a journey of a kilometre.  There they alighted, and entered the first of the ten massive cold sleep levels on the Anubis.

It was like entering an ultra-modern city made up of identical blocks.  Cold white light emanated from the distant roof, while all around, protruding from the steel grey walls were the cold sleep pods.  Vast 1000 storey sections stretching from floor to ceiling, going on for kilometre after kilometre held the full twenty million cold sleep pods.  Access to the pods was via walkways at each level, with lifts running up the centres of each block.

Cho found the sight awe inspiring, and immensely depressing at the same time.  Despite the massive resources employed to try and save the Earth by the 23nd century, the eco-crisis and the Long War happened anyway.  The staggering resources devoted to the asteroid colony ships might have tipped the balance then, and prevented the agony and losses of the Long War.

'How do these pods work, Doctor,' he asked?

'She walked over to the nearest one, and pulled it open.  Running on extending rails, the whole unit was shaped like an overlarge coffin just over three metres long.

'Were they expecting to take giants to the stars,' Detroit broke in, with a guffaw?  His laugh sounded odd over the radio net, so Cho checked his radio settings, correcting the bass filter in the process.

'There are some very tall people around, and it made sense to standardise the design,' she replied in a straight tone.  'Anyway, as you can see, it uses semi-viscous silicone base that conforms to the sleeper's body shape when it is in use.  After a few minutes of self-adjustment after the sleeper is sedated, a low electric charge is run through the silicone which sets it into the precise shape of the sleeper.  That way bed sores are generally avoided.  The cold sleep drugs are automatically administered by that medical unit', she said, pointing at a robotic arm equipped with a pneumatic hypodermic injector mounted at the head end of the unit..  The same unit had other tubes with coloured liquids coming out of it as well.   'Then the pod is closed up, and the internal air supply is slowly supplemented by the cold sleep gas mixture.  The pod's temperature drops over the same time.  At some time in the future the revival process kicks in, and the sleeper wakes.'

'How are the body systems sustained over long periods of time,' Cho asked.

'Intravenous feeding,' she replied.  Pointing at the medical unit, she added, 'That delivers sugars, fats, and other nutrients to keep the body ticking over.  That part is one of the limitations of the cold sleep system, and it's not one we have or are ever likely to overcome.  Even with vastly slowed metabolisms, people have to be woken up at set intervals during long duration cold sleep to allow their bodies to recover. Normal aging kicks in during those recovery periods.  For a ten year period of cold sleep, and there will be a number of voyages between systems that long or longer, cold sleep has to be interrupted at least once every couple of years, and each time the sleepers need a few days for their bodies to recover before they go back into the pods again.'

'Won't we need people awake monitoring the sleepers as well, Doctor,' Cho asked?

'Yes, we will,' she replied.  'They will be in cold sleep in shifts too.  The limitations of cold sleep is why we will need to take so many people.  Of the hundreds of thousands people potentially going on this mission, a significant percentage will be medical staff whose job is to keep everyone else going.  That does represent problems over the course of the journey.  The medical staff will age at a relatively faster rate than the rest of the crew.  Over a ten year voyage, they might spend a year of that time awake, whereas a typical sleeper might spend five weeks awake.  That sort of difference catches up surprisingly quickly.  The same thing applies to engineering staff and people allocated to food production.  They will tend to be awake longer during voyages between systems too.'

Her temporal revelation had Cho raising his eyebrows in astonishment.  'That means that we could run low on key personnel in only three centuries of ship time.  How do you propose to prevent that.'

'The traditional approach in science fiction is that they have children to whom they teach their professions.  In turn, each successive generation does the same.'

Cho turned towards Clark, his face a picture of amazement.  'Doctor, you just described slavery,' he said, with a touch of chilly menace.  'Not to mention a driver for potentially extremely risky culture shift.  You and your team will need to find a real solution to this problem, not some idle science fiction nonsense.  How did the original colony ships manage the process?'

'With difficulty, I expect.  They used basically the same system I described, but their journeys were shorter relatively speaking, and they were prepared to accept a higher casualty rate, and by casualties, I am including the rapid aging of key staff members relative to the rest of the crew.  Two centuries ago, they were asking their scientists to solve exactly the same problem, and in all that time we haven’t come up with a solution that doesn’t involve relying on robots and computers making life and death decisions.  And you know how reliable they are.  Nobody wants to die because some programmer hit the wrong button somewhere in a million lines of code.’

‘Try anyway, Doctor,’ Cho ordered, his command voice coming through loudly across the radio net.

Yes, General, we'll see what we can do,' she replied, looking and sounding downcast.  'Our next stop is the agricultural levels.  Apparently they are, or at least were, quite a sight.'

The lift/train and pedestrian maglev ride lasted only a mere five minutes from the cold sleep levels.  This was because a significant portion of the ship was devoted to food production.

The first five hundred or so agricultural levels had been devoted to pastoral farming.  When Cho had heard this his mind had turned to the efforts to establish pastoral farming on the moon.  There, considerable efforts were having to be made to render the system air and water tight.  When the scheme had first been promoted, the promoters had relied on the idea that packed regolith beneath the domes would be adequate as a starter for soil creation, and would be practically impermeable to air and water.  The pilot dome had quickly shown that approach to be a failure, and the company went bust.  Then a year ago Earthgov had injected new funds to revive the project, and the new company was spending a great deal of money laying a multi-chambered plasticrete base for the new agri-dome which allowed for the reuse of water that drained through the soil, and otherwise provided for an airtight system.  Gas emitted by the soil flora and fauna, and the animals themselves, would be collected and recycled too.  The dome's base would be fitted with heat pumps to keep the soil temperature constant, and the dome would be fitted with smart glass that altered its reflectivity and opacity depending on the strength of the sunlight falling on it.  Getting the life cycle in the soil going and stable had proved tricky, and the soil technicians were still working on it.

What he saw before him now dwarfed what he freely admitted was a feeble effort.

Stretching out into the far distance, the eerily flat landscape was lit by a patchwork of lights.  It almost appeared as if the lights were running in some sort of diurnal cycle, and it currently looked like the sun was setting on a nominal western horizon.  The stark grey ruins of trees littered the sunset landscape, and remnants of dry pale yellow grass turned into dust when his boots impacted the ground.  In the middle distance, a low range of hills, about 50 metres high,  rose towards the sky, err, the ceiling, Cho corrected himself.  Nearby was the dried up bed of a small creek.  Long dead water plants lined the grey dust that used to be its bank.

'Neat, isn't it,' Clark chirped up on the radio net.

'So that isn't a malfunction,' Cho replied.

'No.  The lighting, heating, and even rainfall on each of the pastoral levels replicates a specific climate on earth.  We are currently in the Western European climate, at approximately the latitude of central France.'

'How did they create the landscape?  The lunar cattle herders have been working on their soil for the past three years, and they haven't made anything like this progress.'

'Simple.  The Anubis Mining Company strip mined part of the Midi.  On one of the other levels there are the remains of vineyards, including the soil from the main wine producing areas in France.  The Corporation was founded by a consortium of French mining interests, and I guess their representatives wanted to be able to make their favourite tipples on the journey.

'But all this, there must be millions of tonnes of rocks and dirt on this level alone.'

'Easily,' Clark replied.  'But they didn't shift it all up the old space elevator.  The actual soil is no more than two metres deep, and all but the top half a metre is made up of ground up asteroid rock.  As you know, there is a lot of organic compounds in asteroids, and there is a theory that asteroids provided the compounds required to start life on Earth.  If you break up the rocks, and expose them to water and the right biological processes soil will develop.  Further enhancing  the soil with a cocktail of the right chemicals, introducing the right flora and fauna into it, and then growing grass and other plants in it, and quality soil will develop.  That's what happened on the Anubis.  In fact, it was the extra time and cost required for all the agricultural and pastoral levels that prevented the ship from leaving when it was meant to.'

'And the hills,' he said pointing at the landscape in the distance?

'They support the ceiling in the centre of the asteroid.  Despite the thickness of the iron floors between levels the structure needs propping up.  The iron miners left pillars on each of the levels to provide that support.  They are only really useful when the ship is underway, but in these levels they are hidden by hills.  In some of the others they are in the form of walls between operational spaces.'

'Why have hills at all,' Detroit inquired?

'Weathering produces a useful range of chemicals,' Clark responded.  'Those hills are actually asteroid rock covered with a thin layer of soil.  Factor in the regular rain, and the careful redistribution of the results back onto the soil, and the soil retains its usefulness.  Add in manure, and the flora and fauna required to do something useful with it, and the system is self perpetuating.  Until someone turns off the lights, the water, and the heat.  Then everything dies.  If you take a drive further out, you will find a cattle graveyard, left over from when the Coalition took over the ship early in the war.  I am told it is not a pretty sight.  The AMC had partly stocked the ship, and was running the ship in a low powered orbit to induce just enough south equals down gravity to prevent  the animals floating when the Coalition requisitioned the ship under its war emergency powers.  When we restart the levels we will have to grind up the remains and spread them over the fields.'

'How do you propose to move large animals around here while the ship is still in free fall; give them all magnetic boots?'

'We won't, although we could.  There is provision for netting to keep animals next to the ground when the ship enters freefall.  It is not a solution I favour though.  In practice, delivery will take place when the ship is in powered Earth orbit.  That farm on the Moon you were talking about will be providing some of the source stock, and the rest will be boosted to the ship once it starts its 1/10^th of a gee orbit around the Earth just prior to the mission starting.  That way we won't have to worry about gravitational problems while we finish loading all the people either.'

'I thought the plan was to leave the Anubis at L4, and fit it out here.'

'Well,' Clark responded.  'We could, but it would be a lot cheaper, and easier to put the Anubis into a low powered orbit, and boost stuff to it from High Point and the Moon.  Once we have the key systems on the ship operational we can refuel transports from the ship's fuel stores.  Of course, we have to leave most of the people and the large animals until the last minute, because of the cumulative velocity issue.'

It was clearly impossible to see all the farming levels in the time available, but even seeing some representative ones took up the rest of what proved to be a very long day.  As Clark had pointed out, some was devoted to vineyards, and once working again would be an awe inspiring sight.  The ship designers had clearly aimed to make the surroundings as authentic as possible, including putting in artificial slopes, and replicating the stony soils of their favourite wine producing regions. 

The last stop was the industrial levels on the following day.  This was an area where the Western Alliance occupation of the ship had made the greatest difference.  The industrial levels had been largely incomplete when the Anubis project came its untimely halt, and while the levels had been constructed by the Anubis' engineers, they hadn't been fitted out.   That was, until the Western Alliance used it for its home base during the years of exile from Earth. 

What confronted Cho and his companions now was the most incredible hodgepodge of machinery any of them had ever seen.

'Where did all this stuff come from,' Cho demanded, as he walked through factory after factory, and as far as he could tell, through the industrial ages as well?  Looking down one corridor, he swore he saw the shadowy shape of a traction steam engine, but he couldn't be certain.

'All over the place,' Clark replied on the radio net.  Looking back, Cho could see at least a hundred metres away examining what looked like a robotic assembly line for what looked like the ancient East German Trabant, whose history had once filled out an essay on the worst aspects of 20^th century hydrocarbon burning technology.  They made their way over to it.

'This is stuff from some sort of industrial museum,' he remarked as she photographed the assembly line.  His initial impression had been wrong.  The robot assembly line appeared to be set up to make an ancient electric car, one that had been based on the body shape of the Trabant.  He couldn't imagine why anyone would want such a vehicle.

'Pretty much,' she responded.  'The Western Alliance was desperate for equipment to rebuild its forces, and ransacked the industrial estates of Western Europe and the Americas to do it.  Clearly quite a lot of what was pillaged was hauled up here as well as to the Moon.  They weren't too choosy about what they lofted into orbit in the mega transports either.  What couldn't be used could be scrapped and reused.  I think we are in what was the scrap machinery section.  Most of this stuff was either going to be melted down into something else, or retrofitted into other assembly lines.'

'What do you propose to do with it, Doctor?

She turned from her photography, and regarded his space suited figure.

'It's not worth removing from the ship, and it might prove useful in the future.  If any of the cultures we run into have slipped backwards in their technology then this older stuff might be useful to trade with. It's either that or junk it, and reuse the metal ourselves.'

'Maybe.  But it does take up space.  Would we be better off getting rid of it before departure?  We may need the space.'

'General, I don't think you have really grasped just how big this ship is.  There are hundreds of empty levels in this region of the ship.  The real question is not whether we have the space, but what we are going to do with all that we have?'

'Okay Doctor, have your staff complete their inventory of what is here, and then get your wish list together for what you would like to see installed.  Be innovative with your choices.  God knows what we will encounter out there.  The last thing we want to discover is that we can't make a vital spare part, and the nearest factory is a dozen parsecs away.'

'Will do, General,' Clark replied.  She bustled off to brief her subordinates, while Cho took the opportunity to wander round.  It was indeed like an industrial museum.  He returned to the robot assembly line, and used his command code to open the terminal next to it and examined the design schematics for the completed vehicle. What he saw was fascinating. 

Apparently the intention had been to build manned armed manoeuvring units for space combat, and the assembly line was being redesigned for that purpose.  The space equivalent of air combat fighters.  Earthgov was supposed to be working on something similar to deal with potential insurgency in the asteroid colonies, but Cho knew the design work was nowhere as advanced, or as weird looking.  A Trabant on steroids with missile launchers, manoeuvring thrusters, and a rocket engine was the last thing he had ever thought he would see.  The Western Alliance must have been really desperate if it thought it needed anything that strange in its space arsenal.

He concluded his tour, and joined the rest of the inspection unit on the transport.  The captain pointed out that they had reached bingo point for fuel, oxygen, and supplies, and it was time to return to High Point Station.  Cho had had enough of weightlessness in any case.  The next time he wandered the halls of the Anubis, he wanted it to be when it had gravity, and enough that whenever he took a step he wouldn't be liable to achieve escape velocity.  Despite the transport's urgent need to go, it still took a further day to complete the preliminary inspection.  The Anubis was huge, and so it was decided to offload the maximum of supplies as the transport could spare, and leave a small survey team on board.  A resupply would deliver more people and supplies in a couple of weeks.  In the interim, the team would camp in the ship, get some living spaces operational enough to get out of their space suits, and continue the survey. 

Cho had to order Clark to return to Earth though.  She wanted to stay, but she was needed back on Earth for the Presidential briefing.  He wondered as the transport accelerated away from the Anubis what the future held.  Delivering bad news to superiors was not often viewed as meritorious.  His news had been about the worst possible.  He wondered if Earthgov still exiled unpopular officers to weather stations in the Arctic?