Things Fall Apart: Chapter 23

The inspection boat Alice's Restaurant Massacree, and Spacedock Anti-spinward 18.

Everyone was back on deck for the approach to Spacedock Anti-spinward 18, which was the official designation at the moment both for the framework and the hull it contained. Singer was a little fuzzy as to whether the naming of the ship, like so much else they were doing, was "provisional" because the actual authorities and procedures were currently out of reach.

Not for the first time, she wondered what sort of retroactive food-fight might ensue if someone at Tau Ceti Core—assuming it survived at all—got persnickety.

That thought largely flew out of her head as their approach vector brought the ship into increasingly better view, the cameras all refining the image to provide as much detail as they could. Whoever wrote the "inspection on approach" program, Singer thought, was clearly in love with starships, and taught the program to be as well.

The basic shape kept the arrowhead silhouette common to most TCTF ships. There was no functional need for such a shape, given how rarely an actual starship entered an atmosphere, but they continued to be designed for the possibility. Gravity and inertial manipulation technologies both meant that any shape would do. Some polities still opted for bluntly functional looking ships. TCTF chose a design language and stuck with it.

The impression of an arrowhead was stronger with Zephyr than it was with Bellerophon. The older ship was, for lack of a better term, top-heavy, with more decks above the broad mid-deck that included Main Rec and Main Dining than below it. Those upper or dorsal decks had also had a sharper profile, covering noticeably less area per deck.

With Zephyr, there was more symmetry, dorsal to ventral. A close look—and they were all looking closely—showed a bit more of a bulge on the dorsal side, but not nearly as pronounced.

They had come in facing the bow from somewhat above the ship, and their first pass had been a slow crawl along the dorsal side. This was also the more complete side, Singer knew from her near-obsessive reading, and had already been almost complete well before the halt was called in her construction.

As they went, Singer made a point of matching up features she could see with aspects she'd seen in the schematic. Here were the escape pod points; here were shield emitters. Here were point-defense lasers. She saw a missile tube access hatch exposed, wondered why it was open.

She was trying hard not to obsess about those defensive systems, and about the lack of real expertise to be had in using them. The mantra was "Nobody goes to war in space. It's too expensive." She was quite determined not to test that maxim in any way.

It was just that other people had ideas of their own, and right this minute, she had no idea what they were and could make no assumptions.

She pointed the open tube out to Espinoza and Alexander flanking her. Alexander had an answer, apparently having tracked the actual construction details while Singer was diving on what the ship was supposed to be. "There was an issue with the launch system. Purely mechanical, but spares are short, so they're either replicating or machining a replacement. It should be replaced in about 200 kilos."

Singer could have looked her next question up, but this was the first real conversation she'd had with anybody since her long talk with Cordé. She'd gotten hyper-focused to a degree she would not have thought possible. That Alexander had let her do so without challenge spoke nicely to zir understanding of zir captain's need to absorb all of this information like it was a new language.

Which, in a way, it was. In fact, contextualizing it as such was probably the only thing that helped Singer absorb it at all.

So instead, she asked, "What do they shoot for testing?" She made a point of smiling as she said it.

By the sound, Alexander was doing the same in response. "A vaguely missile-shaped slug of tungsten-steel alloy, with a small retro-thruster on it to slow it down so it can be retrieved. No warhead, and even the thruster's basically just a boiler for steam. The launch system is magrail, and one of the rails was not sequencing right."

The boat reached the end and swung around vertically, passing the engines before continuing its bend to cruise along the ventral side, presenting its own ventral side toward the ship. Inside the boat, of course, gravity stayed on the floor, so the effect was a bit disorienting.

To Singer's unpracticed eye, the main normal-space thrusters, as they passed them, looked almost the same as Bellerophon's, with the same arrangement of larger and smaller nozzles, a design that remain unchanged, so far as she knew, for two gigaseconds or more. While they were promised a more efficient fusion drive along with their new time compression drive, any engineer who had been trained in all that time would probably understand Zephyr's conventional engines immediately.

They continued turning until they were flying ventral-to-ventral over the bottom of the ship. They flew past the boat bay—Zephyr had only one, although there were docking ports to dorsal that would allow a boat to attach there, at least, and again, Singer made note of details.

The boat bay stood out conspicuously as a completed module, suspended from the framework of the ship that was otherwise open all around it. In particular, the cargo bays on the deck above the boat bay didn't really exist, yet. With the lights shining through, Singer thought she saw at least one more deck above that, meaning the decksoles had not yet been installed between. She saw work boats, small pods with manipulator arms, and in some cases, people in hardened construction suits. Even as she watched, she saw some of the unfinished areas getting closed in with bulkheads.

Singer found herself thinking of the jagged hole in Bellerophon's side that might never be patched, the decks showing through. Once again, she made a note to herself to discuss with the commodore finding some way to rework the older ship. She knew it was unlikely—there were other incomplete ships, or ships in for repair but in far better shape, in the yard. There also was, at the moment, no other complete crew, or even enough bodies to put a crew together, without completely stripping the shipyard.

Still, she couldn't shake the idea. Or maybe she just felt that the ship deserved as good as her crew was getting. Which was irrational, but there it was.

Finally, they reached the bow again. Singer noted the navigational deflector system and two more missile ports, also incomplete. The boat executed a similar maneuver as before, except that, instead of continuing to traverse the dorsal of Zephyr again, the boat arced up. There was a boat-grapple on the underside of the drydock structure, and the inspection boat neatly slid into it, mating up one of its airlocks with a match protruding downward from the dock.

People had been murmuring quietly, sharing observations and comments with each other. Now, as the boat's inspection systems cycled down and the cabin became just a room again, there was actual, excited babble. Singer dropped her shields a bit. Everyone, Cordé included, was downright excited.

Well and good.

They trooped across into the matching lock, which was basically just a lift-car that took them up to the dock's office complex. The same complex, Singer recalled, that the dockworkers at almost all the drydocks had made into their survival shelters for the long megaseconds between the Incident and Bellerophon's arrival. Emerging from the lift, they were greeted by a small contingent—not quite a side party.

A man with the most startlingly red hair Elyah had ever seen—despite herself being a ginger—stepped forward. "Commodore, Commander, welcome to Antispin 18." To Singer, he said, "I'm Lieutenant Commander Silverman, chief yard-dog here," and held out his hand to shake, which Singer took accordingly.

Haraldsdottir added warmly, "Yaakov here has been involved since we laid the keel and the whole thing was so secret even he didn't know what the ship was going to be called, yet."

Silverman took on an innocent pose. "Ship? Is that what we've been building?! All this time I thought this was supposed to be a very fast ice cream stand!"

Singer decided to play along. "I am fond of ice cream, Commander."

Now Silverman's eyes took on a twinkle. "I'll give you a hint that probably won't show up in your diplomatic packet: the current governor general of the David's Star Republic is very fond of vanilla fudge ripple, and prefers hot caramel to hot fudge if you're making a sundae out of it. No nuts."

Singer recalled, then, from other reading she'd been trying to slip in lately, that the governor general's name was also Silverman. She ventured the question, "Aunt?"

"Cousin. I came to the TCTF to get out from under, though. A lot of the family's in politics. I like building things."

Singer considered mentioning that there were going to be plenty of opportunities for building things—including, possibly, entirely new societies—soon, but decided it could wait for another time.

Haraldsdottir was giving Silverman a stern look Singer was pretty sure she didn't actually feel, but it had no effect on the shipwright in the slightest. Instead, he smoothly introduced her to his seconds, Lieutenant Luchny and Ensign Abercrombie. The name of the first one rang another bell and Singer found herself saying, "Lieutenant, do you have a relative who's a PO?"

His eyes lit as he caught the present tense. "Danica's alive?"

"She is!"

"My niece. I hadn't...we've been so busy..."

"I know the feeling. Make sure to give her a call when you get a chance!"

"Ma'am!"

Singer then proceeded to introduce her own officers, after which, Silverman said, "If you'll allow me a moment's pride in my meager facility here, I would like to give you and your officers a quick tour. Then, of course, we can go across to see your new ice cream stand."

Singer was being charmed. She decided she didn't mind, and beamed at him. "That sounds like a good plan to me! Commodore?"

Haraldsdottir was still pretending to be stern. She was pretending very hard, but even without lowering her shields, Singer knew her better than that. It occurred to Singer to ask, later, why she was bothering. Maybe she just felt like somebody ought to be taking this moment more seriously?

"That should do nicely, Commander," she directed at Silverman in a tone that reinforced that idea. Haraldsdottir was studiously pretending the entire exchange had been perfectly professional.

Silverman led them down a corridor, saying, "Now, I apologize in advance. We're no longer living here in the office-and-workshop complex, but some of the traces of our long stay remain...."