CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Jupiter survey mission vessel Trojan was virtually a sister ship to the ill-fated Osiris, which had perished during its return voyage to Earth after bringing Keene’s group and other Terran survivors to Kronia. Like the Osiris, it had been constructed with armaments during the time of political tension that had existed between Kronia and Earth, and the armaments had been retained as a resource for the Security Arm in case of need. In fact, the Security Arm were crewing and operating the craft jointly with SOE, making the Jupiter mission a combined planetary survey and SA training venture.

Also like the Osiris, Trojan was built with a unique Kronian variable geometry that combined linear and rotational accelerations to provide a simulation of normal gravity whether the ship was in freefall or under drive. The basic form was that of wheel attached to one end of an axle. The axle was the main body of the vessel and consisted of a relatively thick cylindrical forward end, with a thinner section extending tailward like the handle of an old-fashioned potato masher and containing the fusion reactant tanks and propulsion system. The larger part carried the heavy equipment, cargo bays, and docking port, and also formed the base for six spoke booms (the Osiris had been built with four) extending radially to accommodation modules carried at their ends. The modules were interconnected by a circular communications tube to complete the wheel.

The booms pivoted at their bases to be capable of trailing back like the spokes of a partly opened umbrella when the ship was under drive acceleration. The angle they assumed was always such that the forces produced by the vessel’s forward thrust and by the rotation of the whole structure formed a resultant perpendicular to the decks in the modules at the ends. Telescopic sections in the connecting ring compensated for changes in the ring’s circumference when the trailing angle altered.

Colonel Birt Nyrom, commander of the Trojan‘s SA contingent, stood in the minigravity of the Forward Port Hoist Compartment in the Hub, watching a practice squad completing the drill of bringing long-range attack boosters up from the main armory. The boosters were for attaching to multi-targeting fission-pumped laser warheads, which constituted the vessel’s primary long-range armament. The LORIN shield against incoming meteoroids was an adaptation of the same concept. Since the device was triggered—and in the process, vaporized—by a nuclear bomb, it had to be ejected to a safe distance from the ship before firing, typically fifty miles when used as a defense screen. Larger boosters could be attached for carrying out attacks over longer ranges. During the voyage to Jupiter, it was intended to carry out a series of exercises in deploying and recovering unarmed attack-configured warheads over varying distances from the ship. The boosters were being brought up to the ejection stations in preparation.

The rookie lieutenant who was supervising the squad sounded off the final checklist items confirming that the clamp pins were secured, upper feed hoses drained, set to Open, and stowed, and the Feed Hatch Auto Override was returned to Disenabled. “Boosters ready for Condition Yellow deployment and secured,” he reported to the chief who was overseeing the operation.

“We’re through, Colonel,” the chief advised Nyrom.

“Good. Stand down,” Nyrom acknowledged.

“Good work, and a pretty fast time,” the chief relayed to the lieutenant. “Okay, you can stand the men down.”

“Thank you, sir… Squad, stand down. Okay, that’s it. Good job, guys. Free time until sixteen hundred.”

Nyrom watched the lieutenant turn away as two of the others beckoned him over about something. His name was Delucey, one of the intense and dedicated kind who takes everything seriously—good material to have in something like the SA. Terran-born, he had escaped from Earth in the final days as a kid along with his mother and been brought back by the Osiris with the group that had shuttled up from Mexico. The intenseness that he brought to the job reflected an escape to the Security Arm from the containment, both physically and psychologically, of regular Kronian life, which he unconsciously blamed for robbing him of a future on Earth. At least, that was what the psychiatric advisers had concluded, who suggested that a long-distance mission to Jupiter might help break down the connections. In fact, quite a high proportion of the SA recruits aboard the Trojan were either confused Terrans with repressed hankerings to return to Earth, or young malcontent Kronians who felt the system didn’t recognize them adequately. Nyrom had surprised many with his readiness to accept them.

His wrist compad buzzed as he was casting an eye silently over the scene to satisfy himself that all was as Delucey had reported. He raised the unit toward his face to address it. “Nyrom.”

“Captain Walsh here.” It responded in voice-only. The wording was Walsh’s way of indicating “family” business.

“Captain?”

“We have news from home.”

“We’re just about through here. I’ll come on up.”

“At your convenience, Colonel.” The circuit cleared.

“Carry on, Chief,” Nyrom instructed.

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Nyrom left the hoist compartment and moved inboard via a transverse gallery, at the same time using the compad to call a capsule to the base of the spoke elevator going “up” to the Command Module. Touch-gliding in a series of slow lopes using feet and handrails, he navigated the labyrinth of passages and shafts to a circum-Hub corridor that brought him to the access point. The door was open and the capsule waiting. He entered, and less than a minute later the capsule was ascending from the Hub structure. Above his head through the double-glass wall as he traveled feet-first he had a view of the intricate spoke pivot mechanism at the Hub, and beyond the bulk of the ship, a panorama of stars wheeling slowly. Saturn was still bright in the foreground among them.

The spoke mechanism was ingenious, yes; but as with just about anything involving large moving parts, high stresses, and extremes of environment, it could be temperamental. Lubricants leaked and sublimed away into the space vacuum; pivot arms jammed; the ring when maximally extended could suddenly begin oscillating with complex resonances that rippled around the entire structure. He liked solutions that were solid-state and compact. The Yarbat AG arrays that they were trying out on the Aztec that had just left Saturn sounded like the right way to go about it. If they worked out okay, it would make the Trojan as obsolete and cumbersome by comparison as the Cutty Sark. Lieutenant Delucey’s profile said that his mother was returning to Earth with the Aztec. That had been considered a factor in his favor when considering him for selection. His mother had told the people that she had worked with previously in the Academy on Dione about her worry over his long, withdrawn moods and detachment from things she had tried to interest him in. It was amazing how these things got around.

Nyrom could sympathize with the resentments and frustrations of the kind of people he had tried to muster. He himself had felt the gratification of having his profession and military skills valued back in the days when Earth was feared as a threat, and Kronia prepared to defend itself. But then he had found himself relegated to little more than a trainer of new recruits and administrator in a local police force when the perceived danger passed. For him, that had been a personal disappointment as well as a career setback. In many ways, as a boy growing up on Titan, and for a while on Iapetus, he had felt deprived in never having known life on Earth, which he pictured as vibrant and alive, filled with exciting places and different ways to spend a life. After his father was killed in a construction accident when Nyrom was too young to remember him, he had been raised by an Earth-born uncle, a former military engineer who had migrated to Kronia with his family from somewhere in the Middle East. The uncle had grown to despise war and the suffering it brought to guiltless victims, and come out to Saturn to get away from it and put his skills at the disposal of a better cause. But his nephew had been captivated by his tales of tank duels in the desert, of going out on stealthy infantry patrols at night, of antiaircraft missiles streaking skyward, and he had yearned inwardly for adventure and the exhilaration of competing to exert mastery without pretensions, apology, or disguise. Even with all the space-oriented activity and the exercises on barren moons, the Security Arm had seemed a poor substitute. And then for a while, when the tension with Earth grew, the promise had been flaunted at him… only to be snatched away.

Yes, he could sympathize very easily with those who thought they could be worth more in a system that was different from this.

Nyrom felt the pressure under his feet increasing as the capsule neared the ring and his body took on weight. He emerged into the Command Module walking normally and made his way past the Communications Room and Power Direction Center to the Control Deck. Walsh was by the watch console, talking with the First Officer. He saw Nyrom enter, murmured something to excuse himself, and nodded to indicate the door leading aft to the duty officers’ day room. It was unoccupied. Nyrom closed the door behind them.

Gray-haired, crusty, square-jawed, and stocky, Walsh was a former brigadier general with the U.S. Army who had also been brought back by the Osiris. He had brought a lifetime of military experience that many felt the operations arm of the Space Operations Executive could use more of, and obviously he had not done badly for himself.

There had been some protests back on Titan at the proposal to put a Terran in command of an SOE vessel like the Trojan. One of the main objectors had been the other American, Cavan, which had seemed strange to Nyrom then, and he still didn’t pretend to understand it. Why wouldn’t a Terran, versed in Terran ways, want to see Terran influence expanded in Kronia? But the Triad had ruled against the protests, presumably to placate Valcroix and the Pragmatists in their demands for greater Terran representation in positions of prominence; and then, to appease Cavan and the protesters, they had sent Walsh far from Saturn and out of the way at this politically sensitive time. The more Nyrom saw of political compromise solutions that ended up appeasing nobody and antagonizing everyone, the more he liked the military’s simple and straightforward ways of doing things.

Walsh checked the room’s monitor panel to make sure that it had not been left with a microphone or recorder on, and then turned to face Nyrom across the table in the room’s center, his knuckles resting lightly on the top. “I’ve received a confidential assessment from Acrobat. His reading of the situation is that it’s not going to go through—not by a long way. So we can take it that Blue Moon is a virtual certainty. I’m authorizing you to advance your preparations accordingly.”

Nyrom nodded. “Acrobat” was a reference to Ludwig Grasse. Valcroix’s bill to amend the procedure for making appointments to the Directorates was about to come before the Congress, and the message meant that the inside word was it had little chance of passing. The news wasn’t exactly a surprise. But the record could now be made to show that a constitutional attempt at reform had been rebuffed, and that was the kind of thing that tended to impress Kronians.

The eventuality had been anticipated, and of course there was a fallback plan. The Trojan‘s part in it depended on being able to persuade a significant number of the SA contingent to come over and throw their lot in with the covert Pragmatist group aboard the ship. That had been Nyrom’s reason for seeking out the particular kinds of personnel profile that he had. But that had been about as far as anyone could go toward guaranteeing success, for obviously no actual intimation of intentions could be risked in advance. Hence, Nyrom could use all the time he could get now to begin sounding out the potential support. That was what he understood Walsh was telling him.

Nyrom felt a surge of excitement, the anticipation of action he had always dreamed about. And, if he was honest, relief. Only now did he admit to himself that he had been inwardly worried that the politicians would find some last-minute compromise. New horizons were beckoning, about to open up.

Walsh must have seen it on his face, and smiled thinly with a snort. “Just can’t wait, can you, Birt?” he said.

“I envied you, you know, John. I’d always wanted to be a Terran. Suddenly it feels like going home.”

“What, even for you?”

“Especially for me.”

For, yes, at a time when critical policy decisions were being made that many had strong feelings about, it was understandable why Kronians, thinking the way they did, would send the Trojan with its military capability far out of the way to a place like Jupiter when its presence at Saturn could be problematical. And even more so if a goodly portion of those judged to be potentially supportive of the upstart power bid were arranged to be consigned away with it. Of course, Nyrom had seen what was going on when the selection committees pushed all those square pegs and oddballs at him.

But he had been watching and listening and learning to think like a Terran, not a Kronian. True, with the Trojan and its complement at Jupiter, life at this politically charged moment would be easier for those involved with calming the waters back at Kronia. But if, on the other hand, the Trojan wasn’t going to Jupiter at all, then that could make it a very different matter indeed.