Keene aimed himself in a slow bound through the microgravity and peered inside. Most of the chamber was taken up by what looked like some kind of hoist mechanism connecting from an enclosed structure below, visible through a stairwell beneath ducting and floor plates. There was more machinery above, crammed into the base of something extending upward. Keene looked back the way they had come, reconstructing in his mind the route they had taken and estimating distances. Unless he was mistaken, they had to be right under one of the strange housings.
Wally indicated the walls of the structure they could see part of below. “Look at the thickness of those sections there and all over there . . . and those panels under the walkway. We’re in a hub location here—built for permanent virtual zero-g, right?” He looked at Keene oddly. “This isn’t for structural strength, Lan. It’s containment. But what’s it doing here?”
Keene was a nuclear engineer too, and recognized radiation shielding when he saw it. As Wally had said, the layout didn’t add up. They were in the wrong part of the ship for it to have any connection with the propulsion reactors or fuel and waste storage. He looked around, trying to make sense of it. There were signs reading LAUNCH COOLANT, EMERGENCY FLOOD VALVE, and AUTO EJECT. A panel at what appeared to be a local control station carried the legends: Door Sequence, Inner/Outer, Destruct Override, Acquisition/Director. Before he had a chance to voice any thought, however, Baur came hurrying back, obviously looking for them.
“That door should be secured. . . . You shouldn’t be in there.” His voice was short. He seemed agitated.
“Oh . . . sorry.” Wally came out, smiling. “I wasn’t sure which way you’d gone.”
Baur closed and fastened the door, entering a code into its electronic lock. “There’s nothing to see in there anyway,” he said, ushering them to follow the rest of the party. “Just auxiliary power plant.”
Not saying anything, Keene and Wally exchanged glances as they moved on. Each read the same in the other’s eye. The Osiris was armed. And whatever the weaponry was that it was carrying, it had been devised with a lot more in mind than turkey shoots.
* * ** * *
Idorf, not long back from visiting the surface himself, was waiting on the Control Deck with a female officer called Dayda, the remaining member of the skeleton crew, to welcome the visitors. He was characteristically tall, with a lean build bordering on scrawny, a mop of unruly reddish hair, and one of the few beards, short and ragged, that Keene recalled seeing on a Kronian. His face was hollow-cheeked and hawklike, but was saved from an appearance of gauntness by the unwavering eyes and a ruddy, weathered-looking complexion that was perplexing considering the environment he was from. Keene could have pictured him as the captain of a Louisiana shrimp boat, or maybe an old-time frontier-era itinerant preacher. “I’m not yet recovered from being in a place that counts its people in billions,” he told the arrivals as Baur and Semad conducted them through from the spoke elevator. “This kind of number, I think I might be able to handle.”
With Idorf and Dayda, still wearing orange flight suits, were Sariena and the two other Kronians who had just transferred from the UN shuttle. One of them was called Vashen—a planetary scientist with the delegation, whom Keene had spoken to briefly at Gallian’s reception. The other was Thorel, the crew member that Keene had also met on that occasion. Thorel waved an arm to indicate the surroundings. “So you come to see some quality engineering at last, eh, Dr. Keene?” he joked. “Here we can move. Not like those doll-house spaceships you make us squeeze into.” Keene couldn’t argue with that. Designed for people of Kronian proportions, the Osiris was spacious compared to Terran-built craft.
There was a round of introductions for those who had not already met, and then Idorf showed the way to the messroom where the food and drink had been laid out. A lot of it looked familiar, presumably shipped up. It seemed that Earth food was a hit with the Kronians. Rather than make speeches and have his guests paraded around like tourists, Idorf left them to mingle and wander off to be shown other parts of the ship as suited their interests. Wally and Tim stayed with the Amspace crew to learn more from Idorf and Dayda about the Osiris’s control and communications systems. The other five Amspace people, with Baur, Semad, and Thorel, drifted off in smaller groups, which left Keene and Vicki with Sariena. The two women knew each other from video exchanges while the Osiris was in transit, and for a while they swapped small talk while getting better acquainted. Keene thought that Sariena looked surprisingly fresh for having just been through the rigmarole of launch and the flight up. He said so, wondering if it was due to her being out of surface gravity or escaping from the demands of the official schedule. “Just being back in familiar surroundings after so much strangeness,” she told him. “The Osiris got to feel like a second home during the voyage out. It probably seems like metal boxes full of pipes to you, but we lived here for almost three months.”