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.