by
We were winning 5-3 in the TankBall tournament final. I had
scored 3 of those 5 goals before I had to refuel. Leslie Daly took my place at
Center and was giving the other team a lesson in micro-G acrobatics. It was
shaping out as the greatest day in my life, champions of the 14-years and under
All-Habitat League. We might even get a chance at the Inter-Habitat Finals next
spring.
Even though we were playing ITA rules, Billy the Fish was in there bashing
everyone in sight. The referee was lenient to say the least. It was time to
show some finesse. I unhooked the O2 hose from my pack, cranked up the volume
on my headband, and flew into the Tank. I called Emily out of the game and took
over Upper Left forward. Billy saw me come in, and immediately thrusted his way
up to me with murder in his eyes. My Imp warned me just in time, I
side-sluffed, and gave Billy a kick as he sailed out of control inches away.
With Billy occupied in trying to break the spin my kick had imparted to him, I
saw Leslie under me doing a two-under to slide past a defender. I saw that she
would take a second getting back her attack attitude, so I grabbed a side-rail
and whistled for the ball. Leslie saw me and deftly tossed me a perfect pass.
As it corkscrewed its way toward me, my Imp whispered trajectory information
into my ear. I pushed off at just the right moment, caught it, retro'ed in
front of the last defender, gassed out to the empty goal and stuffed it. Just
goes to show, I thought, guys are good for bulling around and bumping into
things, but it takes a girl to show some real finesse.
Perhaps I should explain for you earthworms out there. In a deep space
habitat, gravity is relative. Out in the living areas, we have a nice 1/2 G of
gravity. In here, at the axis, gravity did some strange things. Imagine
yourself in a large cylindrical tank, swiftly rotating around you as you float
around in zero G, with a thruster backpack pushing you around. You have 8
teammates and 9 opponents all gassing around inside the tank, chasing after the
ball and each other. You grab a handrail on the side of the tank to get a
little stability, and immediately you feel it drag you along in its rotation.
At the same time, you feel a little weight return as the centrifugal force of
the tank's rotation presses you against the tank sides. Here's the weird part
-- you look "up" and see players drifting in circles around the axis.
The ball takes impossible corkscrew paths as it's passed from player to player.
You push off anti-spinward, puff a little gas to kill your spin, and you're in
the action. The world rights itself and the game becomes straight lines again.
That's TankBall, you and your Imp against the world.
Oh, it occurs to me that not everybody has their own personal Imp, either.
I've had mine since I was three, as have most other kids in the Hab. It's this
headband, see, and it's got eyes and it speaks in your ears. It's really an
Integrated Maintenance Peripheral, an interface to the Hab Net. It sees what
you see, passes that along the Net to the Computing Resource Nexus, and
whispers nagging advice and reminders in your ear about what you should be
doing rather than what you are. Of course, a lot of that is my Mom's and Dad's
programming, since they're out in the Trojans right now on their mining shift
and can't do their nagging in person. Despite the personal touch from my
parents, I really can't stay parted from my Imp for very long. It does prove
useful, especially when you're trying to win the All-Hab championship.
Well, just leave it to my luck. Here I was, with my teammates, about to win
the most important game of our young lives, when the acceleration warning rang
out. Oh ragash it all, not another drill! The Ref called out, "OK people,
let's move it!". There was a concerted groan from both teams, but
everybody started moving out. You don't question Hab discipline, not at the
axis, not when the slightest thrust from the Hab's main engines can smash you
against a bulkhead like a bug. We all headed to the lockers, stowing our packs
and crowding into the elevators. Falling down to the Rim, there was a lot of
good natured debate about what the outcome of the game would have been. Even
Billy came over to me and said, "Hey Jen, nice goal, but next time I'm
going to wipe you out". Leslie came to my defense. "Billy, if you
spent half the time working on moves that you spend talking, you might become a
decent player. As it is, you couldn't wipe the sweat off your butt, much less
keep up with Jen". Thank you, Les, I inwardly said. I was much too tired
and disappointed to get into it with Billy the Fish. He wasn't a bad dude,
outside the Tank, but he got kind of competitive when it came to TankBall.
Les and I shared a cube for acceleration stations, and we got off the
elevator together at Level 8. Level 8 has about 1/4 G gravity, enough to kind
of hop, skip, and jump down the corridor at a good clip. In calmer times, there
would be adults frowning at us for having the temerity to shift and dodge among
the crowds in the corridor. Our Imps would be chiming in as well, warning us to
slow down. But during an alert, everyone was in a hurry to get to their
stations before the acceleration. The Nexus was busy coordinating the alert, so
our Imps were uncharacteristically silent. We turned it into a game, seeing who
could get to the cube the fastest without bashing a passerby. I made it first,
but had clipped two people on the way to Les's one, so we called it a tie.
We entered the cube and strapped in to our couches. We had been through this
routine a thousand times before. Plug our headbands into the Net, report in,
and wait for instructions. Hurry up and wait. Our responsibilities were to
monitor air-locks 20A through 29B, report on stowage activities in parts of the
bio-labs, and dispatch EVA traffic. The Nexus did most of it for us, we were
just there to oversee things. Everybody in the Hab had some form of
responsibility during alerts. Taking these responsibilities seriously had been
drilled into us from an early age. Our job wasn't the most demanding in the
Hab, not by a long shot. But when everybody's lives depended on everybody doing
their jobs during accel-alert, one didn't slack it. Les and I spent the first
ten minutes of the drill concentrating on our duties, but as things battened
down we started relaxing. Les tossed half a weed cake to me. I gobbled it down
in one bite, delighting in the tarty sweetness of it. I couldn't wait for this
drill to end.
I was just settling in to snooze a little, when the acceleration alarm rang
out again, this time higher pitched and louder, the signal for impending
acceleration. The Governor didn't make unscheduled movements of the Hab
lightly. It's a pretty big deal, making a trillion Kg spacecraft move out of
its chosen path. It takes a lot of thrust from the Hab's main engines. It takes
a lot of fuel, even for a minor course adjustment. I punched up the Nav report
on the Net. Goodness! We were gearing up for a major course adjustment! It
looked like we were going to head out to Jupiter for a sling shot to the
Trojan. What could possibly prompt the Governor to do such a thing?
A Deep Space Habitat is a mammoth object. Take a medium sized asteroid,
carve it inside and out into a cylinder, leave a few struts to give it
structural stability, strap on some fusion rockets for propulsion, keep some
spin for artificial gravity, and throw in about 10,000 souls to grow things on
the inside wall. You have a Deep Space Habitat, or Hab. Most of the time a Hab
spends in orbit. A Hab supports a large constellation of shuttle craft, space
buses, rocket sleds, and personnel carriers. These craft do the real movement,
ferrying people and equipment to the Trojan for mining, to Jovian satellites
for research, or even to Earth for delivery of raw materials. A Hab can move
about, but only very slowly and very expensively. Minor orbital adjustments
were one thing, but to sling out into space a few hundred million kilometers
was another. Throughout my lifetime of 14 years, our Hab had been in orbit
around Jupiter, with the main engines occasionally firing to make orbital
corrections. Now, the Nexus was telling me that we were outbound to true deep
space. Something was going very very wrong!
I thought of my Mom and Dad at the Trojan on their mining shift. They'd been
gone 4 weeks now, with another 4 to go on their shift. I felt a small shiver of
trepidation. So much could go wrong on a mining excursion. I calmed myself by
reasoning things out. If there was an emergency out at the Trojan, why sling
the entire Hab out? Why not send some faster shuttles out, ships which could go
all the way out and back in the time it took the Hab to travel a third of the
distance? Well, then what the hades was going on? Then I thought of the
Inter-Hab games next spring. If we were moving out of Jupiter orbit to the
Trojan, we would certainly not be back in time for the games. This realization
made my stomach flutter. My entire life was being ruined!
My thoughts were interrupted as a low, deep, vibration was felt throughout
the Hab. The vibrations of the main engines were mostly below the frequency of
hearing, more felt than heard. It produced a slight tickling sensation in my
stomach, adding to the knots already there. Newly arriving earthworms said the
sensation was somewhat like what was felt in an earthquake, a sensation I had
never had the misfortune of experiencing. As the minutes passed by, the
vibration deepened. We started feeling a pull into the backs of our
acceleration couches, as the thrust of the Hab engines intensified. I was
definitely feeling like hurling my partially digested weed cake at the Nexus
terminal in front of me. I turned to Les, who was looking somewhat pale
herself. The world seems to be turning sideways, as the 1/4 G pull toward our
feet produced by the Hab's spin was supplemented by the 1/10 G acceleration of
the Hab's engines.
"You know what I think?" Les asked me, and I mumbled my reply. "No what?" Her answer was unintelligible. "What?" I said. She could reply no more. Instead, I watched in horror as a bubble of liquefied weed cake spewed out of her mouth and showered me. I closed my eyes and mouth just in time. "I said, I think I'm going to be sick", she muttered unhappily. That was enough for me. "Mmmmffff" I said, and before she had the chance to ask, my weed cake was on its way. I returned the favor, and the shower. "I said, me too." Then, I passed out.