Things Fall Apart: Chapter 24, Part 2

You should go back and read Part 1, if you haven't already!

Aboard Zephyr

They all headed back again to the lift, which let them out on deck four.

Silverman said, "This deck will actually be pretty quick. Aft of us is the next level of engineering of course, and flanking that are replication mass tanks. The cargo lifts both back on more stowage, while the block directly in front of us is sickbay. This is about half-way ready," he said, as he palmed open the hatch. Kasel didn't quite push through...not quite...but he was definitely eager. "Sick bay," Silverman continued, "is actually more than one cabin on this ship—there's one on each of three decks, rather than a single big one—but this is considered the main one, and the stowage on either side prioritizes medical consumables and such, so that if replication is down or mass is scant, you still have a stash. They also have one of the ship's stashes of e-rats. Of course," he made a deferential gesture to Terranova, "you can always choose to reprioritize and rearrange, but that's what the book currently says."

Terranova, however, just nodded. "Sounds like a good book to me, so far."

Kasel was moving around, poking and proding equipment near the biobeds that were already set up. While he was muttering to himself, Singer asked, "What makes this one special?"

Silverman smiled, "Nothing more nor less than the fact that the CMO's and assistant CMO's offices are across the hall forward." He did not point out, to Singer's relief, that neither of those billets were filled at the moment. That was a point she didn't need reinforced. "The rest of that block is the gymnasium for officers, WOs, CPOs and POs; and most of the rest of the deck, are quarters and lounges for warrant officers, chiefs, and petty officers. WOs and Chiefs get cabins slightly smaller than the ones you saw above; POs get the same size cabins but double-occupancy bunks."

Wasserman said, "I'm claiming a top bunk as soon as possible!" prompting chuckles all around.

Most of them moved on to peek at one of those cabins, while Kasel continued to putter around Sick Bay. He seemed mostly satisfied with what he saw.

"Finally furthest forward is the domain of the Time Compressor, which I gather we are not yet permitted to tour...?" This last was a question to either Espinoza or the Commodore, to judge from where he looked next.

The commodore shook her head. "It's probably a little silly, but let's keep that separate for now."

Silverman nodded. Espinoza looked a little disappointed. He wanted to show off the toys.

Wasserman asked, "Where's Fusion Three? I think I remember there were three?"

"There are, or should be. Three will be a similar single-deck emplacement on deck six, if we can get it done in time. Of the three, it's the lowest priority."

Singer looked concerned at that. "That will leave us without true fallback capability." She exchanged a look with Espinoza. His yacht, after all, had been stranded for just such a reason—its single auxiliary fusion reactor was too small to power the time compressor. Espinoza returned her look with a grim expression. The parallel was not lost on him.

Silverman, in turn, looked unhappy at having to confirm that. "Yes, ma'am. You may have to finish Fusion Three by replicating remaining components en route. As I understand it, time is of the essence. We're having to make some choices."

There was no percentage in having any argument about it, here, Singer thought. "Understood, Commander. I guess we are in a bit of a hurry."

They once again took the lift down to deck five. The layout here was similar, but each of the blocks was a bit wider, and once again, the lift doors opened to the other side.

Silverman this time led them directly to the large central block of the deck. "This compartment is divided in two, but the divider can be partly or completely withdrawn. Main dining is one side, and main recreation the other." They stepped into the room and saw that the divider was not currently in place, presumably to make it easier to see the whole space for the tour. The port side had tables and chairs in a layout similar to mess halls on every ship, ever, while the starboard side similarly had a layout similar to the rec deck on Bellerophon. Both spaces were smaller, though, which Singer was briefly concerned about, until she remembered that Bellerophon had been meant for significantly more people than she had gotten used to seeing there, while this ship was built for a crew about the size of the one she already had.

While she was considering this, Silverman moved to a panel on the aft bulkhead near the midway point, and pressed a button. There was a fizz Singer associated with replication, and the partition came into place, leaving them all on the dining room side.

Cadotte spoke up for the first time in a while. "That was...weird. I had already seen it in the specs, but it was still weird. How are we doing that without AIs installed?"

From the drone, Chef actually provided the answer. "It's a fixed pattern. If you wanted the wall to be different at all, aside maybe from a different color, you'd need me—or someone like me—or to reprogram or add a pattern. But to add and then remove a wall with specific dimensions and properties is pretty straightforward."

Singer thought Chef didn't sound entirely happy about being superfluous, even a little bit. The irony of an AI being possibly tweaked by advancing automation was not lost on her.

Nor on Cadotte, Singer could see from their face.

Silverman smiled. "Takes getting used to, for certain. This is one of the few places where we experiment with uncontained replication. We already have other areas on newer ships where we've experimented with basic replication not needing AI intervention. That's actually one way we were able to survive here in the dockyards. Almost every dock crew realized they could switch to basic mode and stretch out the e-rats. That said, most of the replication stations aboard are pretty conventional."

Silverman paused to see if there were other questions, but there weren't.

"Most of the rest of the spaces for people on this deck are crew barracks and services, and they're not really furnished yet. There are two gyms for crew aft. There's a space designated for one of the small secondary sickbays forward and starboard, while the same space to port has the barber shop and dentist's office. The two spaces flanking engineering aft are once again replication tanks—you'll note we have more tanks, more distributed, in this design—while nose section is the primary environment plant. The block immediately forward of this one includes the Bosun's office, at least, as currently designated. We've gone back and forth about whether we should find space for it closer to where the Bosun's cabin'll be upstairs, or here amongst the crew."

Kasel, being the bosun, had an opinion, which is also how Singer realized he'd eventually caught up with the tour. "This deck is good, Commander." Silverman looked at him a moment, realized he was wearing the bosun insignia, and blinked. "Sorry, Chief. I knew you were the surviving medic. I hadn't gleaned you were the bosun, too! This deck it is!"

They poked their heads into one of the spaces designated for crew bunks—no bunks or lockers were in place yet. Singer no longer had any question in her mind why three megaseconds were still required to get this ship ready to fly. There was a lot still to be done.

"Deck six," Silverman said as they walked back toward the lifts," is the last deck we could visit in its entirety, but there's not much to see just now. It'll be more crew quarters, the ship's pool, and spaces for labs and multipurpose workspace. As you would have seen coming in, seven and eight are still mostly just superstructure, although we're building out bulkheads on seven as we speak, and the lift shafts are all pressurized, so we can pass through on the way down to the boat-bay module. Seven, once it's walled up, will have backup environment plants, more multi-purpose workspaces. and the nose compartment will have an arboretum, or at least the beginnings of one."

Cadotte chimed in. "I saw that in the specs, and at first, I was actually confused by it. But I kind of like the idea of actually having a garden on the ship."

It was actually Terranova who answered, "Especially since it's intended to tie in with life support, help freshen the air naturally, that kind of thing. We'd need too much space to replace environmental systems with biological ones, although it's been discussed over the years. But ships that have experimented with green spaces tend to have measurably higher morale, so we're bringing those back."

Cordé asked, "Back?"

"Mmhm," Terranova responded. "Some of the ships that came into the Fleet service when the TCTO was formed had similar ideas. When they were coming up with designs for the truly unified fleet, they went away. We can sit down and talk about why, sometime—I've gone through all the minutes and documentation of the discussions and arguments. When I got brought into this project, I pushed hard for it."

"Well," Cordé said, with some of the first real enthusiasm Singer had heard from her in a long time, "I'm definitely looking forward to having it. Just thinking about having some green space right now is improving my mood."

Silverman smiled and said, "Assuming you get shore leave at David's Star, either at Newer York or New Anaheim, make a point to spend some time in the Core. Both stations still do a lot of genuine agriculture."

Cordé got a kind of dreamy expression on her face. Singer tried not to grin.

They were standing by the cargo lift at this point again. They shuffled in, and as it descended, Silverman said, "The boat bay, as you saw, is almost a separate module. We realized a couple generations back that we'd sort of standardized their size and shape regardless of what ship they were going on, so we just started building them as really big kits. The module includes the control gallery and hangars for three pinnaces and two shuttles, as well as the usual conference rooms. The true deck nine includes those facilities, while the floor of the bay could be considered deck ten, but isn't. Deck eight will be almost entirely storage, and again, as with the multi-purpose workspaces I've mentioned, flexibility is the rule. It could be dry storage; it could be additional reaction mass bunkering or replication mass storage. This is the other place we're experimenting with in-place replication. The whole deck can be reconfigured as needed. Without AI intervention, the system can pretty much just put up and take down bulkheads and doors."

Alexander said, "That explains why that deck is the last one to get enclosed. Once it is enclosed, everything else is down to configuring the system to create the partitioning you want, instead of physically installing bulkheads."

Silverman answered, "Exactly. And before you ask, yes, we did consider simply making that technology ubiquitous throughout the ship and building everything that way. The design bureau, as you might imagine, refused outright. Up until the whole project got put on hold for lack of a crew, it was the only thing they wouldn't budge on at all. They just couldn't imagine a ship where every wall could just be reclaimed and a new wall replicated in a different place."

Nobody said it out loud, but Singer was pretty sure she was not the only one thinking that might be just as well. Chef—who had primary responsibility for both replication and reclamation—might be immune to the virus or bug or whatever that caused the Incident. That didn't mean he would be immune to future attacks, or that other AIs couldn't have hijacked the system. Singer liked the idea of a fully configurable ship, but for now, she was willing to limit its scope.

The cargo lift deposited them directly on the boat bay floor, rather than the gallery deck. Like so much else on this new ship, it did, and did not, look very different from Bellerophon's. In general shape and size, it was recognizable, and the gallery dome depending from the ceiling was a familiar touch. But there was no doubting this was a different space. The use of color was different, and somehow, even without having been told, the whole thing felt pre-fabricated. Not fragile or unreliable, or anything of the sort. Just subtly not an organic part of the rest of the construction.

It was Wasserman who picked up a point Singer had almost forgotten from the specs. "Do I remember correctly, Commander, that this whole module can be jettisoned?"

"Yup. In a pinch, it can be used as one large lifeboat. There are other escape pods, of course. But when detached, it takes with it the garage, so the pinnaces and shuttles are all still available to the separated unit. What's really cool, though, is because of the reconfigurability of deck eight above it, you can recover the module as well. Now, it can't go far on its own. It has no time compressor, barely any thrusters to speak of. But it could maintain orbit, or land softly on at least some planetary bodies. It's not really aerodynamic, but the people inside would walk away from the landing."

Singer filed that away. She very much hoped never to need to do it, but still.

One of the hangars in the ceiling was open, and a pinnace was already present in the cradle. Silverman said, "Left that open specifically to show you. Like the ship itself, your pinnaces will be a bit smaller than Bellerophon's. Most of that volume came out of improvements in material science and component miniaturization. Basically, since all the parts are smaller and lighter, the whole thing is too. The crew space on board is about the same."

He led them back to the lift, then, and finally pressed the control for deck one. Singer had read the specs, backward, forward, and sideways, on the way over, but everything about deck one was redacted except for its general footprint and volume.

Coming out of the lift into a very utilitarian corridor, it was impossible to say what the big deal was, but Silverman, Espinoza, Terranova, and Haraldsdottir—who had not said a single word in quite some time—were all radiating smugness. Without a word, Silverman turned to face a door in the bulkhead just forward of the lift, and palmed it open.

The space in front of them was...space.

No...it was a vast transparency, or maybe a display system, like the one in the inspection boat. The effect was the same, either way.

The room was filled with comfortable furniture, it was carpeted, there were replicator stations at the walls, but the ceiling, curving all the way down to the nose, was space.

Silverman let them drink it in. The service worked to weed out both claustrophobia and agoraphobia, so nobody was panicking, even though they were all a bit startled.

Cadotte chose to end the mystery by asking, "It's not transparent, is it?"

Silverman smiled. "No. It's exactly like the inspection boat. It's even subdividable, if you needed to—different panels could be showing different things. But the default. when the ship is not submerged in time-compression, is to show a one-to-one unfiltered view of space. The design bureau's name for this space is 'Officer's Lounge', but we've quietly relabeled it 'Observation Lounge' since deciding to finish this project with your crew in mind. We were fairly certain that you would not object to sharing this, and really, combined with the other leisure spaces aboard, there's no danger of overcrowding."

Singer had wondered why there was not an explicit officer's lounge in the specs she'd been able to read, and now she knew. She had a brief twinge at the idea that there would not be such a space just for officers, but it felt like...an echo. Not a real feeling, but a memory of something she ought to feel. While never a military service, really, rank had mattered. And it still did, to some degree. Her crew had not completely abandoned its hierarchy.

But it had been truncated by the Incident. They had flown for megaseconds with that compressed hierarchy and the bonding that comes from shared trauma. The fact that some of them had been promoted since did not really change any of that. Singer was not quite prepared to use the word, "family", but neither were they really just a "crew" any more.

And this space, like the arboretum that would eventually grow on deck seven, would be for all of them.

Once more, Singer felt a twinge of guilt. It was almost too much, to get such a prize when there was so much pain in their world. But this was not just a vast floating sofa.

This was an instrument that would be used to zip between places, faster than any other ship currently known could do, and start trying to heal some of that pain. The only way to do that was going to be to identify and catalogue and understand it all, and that, itself, was going to be a whole different kind of trauma.

All the spaces that were focused on crew morale were going to be vital in keeping her crew from going completely insane.

After almost a kilosecond of simply standing and absorbing it all, Haraldsdottir spoke for the first time in a while. "Would two of you be willing to duck back over to the inspection boat and grab the two stasis-boxes in locker three?"

When people turned to look inquiringly at her, she responded with a smile, "I thought we might have a picnic under the stars while we discuss what comes next."