EXILE

In the last half hour of the shuttle craft’s time on Earth, the series of capacitance units down the runway built up their charges, until the air surrounding them crackled with a pale blue haze, and the smell of ozone pervaded the base. As the minutes ticked off, the shuttle assemblage itself was charged with an intense negative charge, it became nothing less than a phenomenally huge electron. The energy input was immense, and in the last seconds before launch the solidity of the craft began to waver as the matter that formed the craft and all of those inside approached a static form of pure energy, with no solid characteristics. If the time had been but sixty years earlier, the field would have vaporised in a blast of pure energy, a non-chain fusion reaction.

The shuttle was at one end of the capacitance row, with an extra unit behind it. If drawn in plan-view, it would have looked like a join-the-dots picture of an old gun barrel. As the clock ran out, onto zero, the end of the three capacitance units discharged their negative charges simultaneously through large field transformers, creating an intense, localised field of negative energy that surrounded the shuttle assemblage on three sides. The shuttle’s own intense charge was repelled by the field, causing the craft to be blasted forward, out of the field.

As it moved forward down the runway, pairs of capacitors down either side of the runway discharged in a closely synchronised sequence that matched the rapidly accelerating shuttle. No rocketry or engines were used, yet the polar repulse swiftly propelled the huge craft out of the spaceport and out over the lake at a speed that was already supersonic long before the last transformer pair was passed. As the craft was blasted forwards out over the lake, the bottom pilot ignited the ramjet, which instantly flared into life. Thriving on the cold, dense and oxygen-rich air of the lake surface, the powerful ramjet unit thrusted the craft forward with increased power. Still accelerating, the top pilot pulled the slick, elongated aerofoil into a steep climb. As the altitude began to increase, the bottom pilot ignited the afterburners, consuming any oxygen that was pulled through the main chamber too fast to be burned. The increased efficiency maintained the already powerful forward push, giving the whole craft sufficient power to climb smoothly up to the upper reaches of the atmosphere, where the oxygen-starved ramjet began to fail. Although the bottom pilot, from his position underneath the shuttle’s belly, could not see the sky above as he closed down the ramjet and disengaged his unit from the shuttle, the top pilot and her crew on the shuttle were looking at the darkness of space through the pale, blue-tinged haze of the upper atmosphere.

As he began to fall back to Earth, he looked up briefly at the shuttle, in time to see the old-fashioned chemical rockets flare into life in the shuttle’s rear, starting the last five-minute burn that would take the shuttle the rest of the way into space, and into an orbital position where it would then match position and travel path with its target station, and plot the final course that it would take before docking. Seeing the twin stars burn in the close distance, he pointed the ramjet’s nose down, and began the long, supersonic glide back to New Mexico.

On the shuttle, Stein and his fellow travellers had not felt the effect of the charge build-up, as all matter within the shuttle was under a uniform condition, and behaved uniformly. Although they did not realise it, for a brief instant they had all ceased to be solid matter in the normal sense - for the few micro-seconds between total charge and launch, they had become the equivalent of total static energy. For that brief instant, time had been suspended for the shuttle, as all normal electrical energy ceased in favour of the negative charge-up. The world returned, crashing to normality with the launch, the shuttle swiftly discharging as it traversed the three-kilometre runway in those three eye-watering seconds. The acceleration of the craft was as instant as a bullet when fired, the difference being that this bullet had twenty people on board. Yet, very few felt any discomfort, despite no-one wearing any of the antiquated g-suits from generations earlier. Instead, the pressure suit had been replaced by the pressure room. Although none but Michaels and Mel were aware of it, before the charge had built up to distort their local position in space and time, the air pressure within their sealed cabin had gradually been increased, with the air being carefully altered to prevent circulatory embolisms. The electrical stasis field and the pressurised cabin were two of the principal reasons for having paramedics on board, one in each passenger cabin. Although most people of average fitness coped reasonably well with the conditions, owing to their brevity some people had been known to suffer, or to plainly react in unexpected ways. Spontaneous asthma, induced epileptic spasms and haemorrhaged ears, noses and eyes were typical, although occasional psychotic episodes had been experienced by people whose brain electrical activity became disrupted by the charge. As might be expected, these outbursts were more often than not limited to convicts whose brains’ electrical activity had already been disrupted, effectively rewired by cowboy electricians during their unofficial interviews with Doctor Holstein.

That was the other reason for having a paramedic. If, when the passengers had acclimatised themselves to the removal of gravity from their lives, some were to show any altered behaviour, it was typically immediate, and always very violent. The paramedics all carried in their thigh pockets several syringes, at least one of which were primed with a powerful sedative. No staff or crew of the shuttles were ever subject to post-stasis psychosis, as it was called, as the recruitment procedures included a series of stasis transmutations. Only those candidates who later analysis showed to be unaffected by the charge were accepted into the cadet corps. That left non-Space Unit travellers, usually independent scientists, tourists and convicts. If any turned nasty, they were always restrained in their harnesses, and very close to an experienced medic, ever handy with trank drugs. Stein was unaware of the power of the stasis field when, once in orbit and free of the crushing acceleration, he saw Taylor Morecamb begin to thrash around violently in his harness, foaming at the mouth. Just as a primal roar rushed from Taylor’s open throat, Mel whipped open the velcro pocket that secured his hypodermics, grabbing one that had a green plunger, and without hesitation plunged it into Morecamb’s thigh, pumping the plunger as it pierced the man’s skin and muscle. Almost as soon as it started, he slumped unconscious in his sleep, rising slightly against his harness in his free-fall state.

Stein had witnessed it all, but Newman and Hulce were still groggy, only being roused to full consciousness by Morecamb’s bestial yell. Stein quickly looked across, in time to see an obviously concerned Sergeant throwing himself back into his seat to avoid being seen to show any concern. There was no real reason, as Mel was there specifically to make sure that no-one came to any harm. Both Newman and Hulce were obviously worried. Mel saw that, and, despite Michael’s personal rule against communicating unnecessarily with convicts, gave a short explanation.

“Post-stasis psychosis. The mag-lev launch disrupted his brain’s electricity. He’ll be alright - we’ll re-align his neural net on the station. He’ll just reach the moon after the rest of you have.” Spoken, Mel sat back to study the general med and hab reports that were on the display from the rest of the ship, ignoring the baleful glance of the convicts’ escort next to him.

Stein eased back, confident that no real harm could happen to them. Although they no longer had any civil rights, they were valuable commodities, labour for the lunar colonies. For the expense that each convict cost the Global Union to get them into orbit, their lives suddenly became more valuable to the State than they had been before they had each been convicted. Stein grinned slightly, savouring the ironic turn that his life had taken. As he relaxed after the shock awakening into Morecamb’s tormented fit, he noticed the lack of gravity for the first time. His straps still restrained him, holding him tightly against the couch, but he no longer had any sense of up or down. The wall in front of him could as easily have been the floor, or the ceiling. As he oriented himself to the new influences on his body and perceptions, he noticed a distinct lightening sensation, and started breathing deeply as a reflex response, as his subconscious interpreted it as a stress reaction. Hearing Stein begin to heave, swiftly followed by Newman, then Hulce, Mel muttered clearly, “Cabin air pressure reduced to one atmosphere, down from the ten atmospheres used to counter the launch acceleration.” He spoke without so much as looking away from the display panel, nor with any change of expression. Michaels continued to glare, as if he resented someone else talking to his prisoners, his property.

Stein tried to relax, feeling mildly nauseated by the lack of any clear sense of direction. The only other time that he had felt even remotely as disoriented was when he had taken a ferry across Lake Michigan. The weather had deteriorated, and he had developed a bout of good, old-fashioned motion sickness. The hardest part for him then had been trying to match the moving sensations with what he could see. Here, he wasn’t moving, at least not in the same sense, and he definitely could not see where he was heading. Newman vomited.

A gurgling, burping hiccup broke Stein’s own stressed reverie, and he snapped his head to the right in time to see Newman, thankfully not right next to him, display openly how Stein felt. None of them had eaten for many hours, as a standard precaution against this sort of thing happening. Yet it was still a wonder just how much was still in Newman’s stomach. Or had been. Projected explosively into the suddenly too-small cabin space, the half-digested, bilious residue of a CSA meal curdled into a wet, grey-green spray of gobbety mush. The meals had always had the appearance of vomit, only now there could be no mistake. Michaels grumbled curses to himself, something about there being one on every trip. Mel reached forward to a locker under the display unit, and took out some face shields, which he gave to each person. As Stein pulled the rubber straps over his head, he found himself putting most of his attention on the spectacle in front of him, where the admittedly foul-smelling mess was already forming into gelatinous globules, the surface of each rippling in response to slight changes in the cabin air pressure.

Having made sure that no-one would inhale the floating ferment Mel took an orange syringe from his knee pocket, and plunged its contents into Newman’s arm. As he withdrew the needle, he looked across at the others. “Anti-nausea. Restores equilibrium. Anyone else feel that they need it?” Two heads shook. “Good.” Closing the knee-flap, he then reached across to the locker, pulling out a concertina-style tube from the panel, pushing the green “start” button as he did so, starting the hab-system vacuum retrieval. Mel leaned across, and gently moved the tube back and forth, sucking up the putrid mess. Within seconds, there was nothing to remind them of the balls of foul vomitus that had danced disgustingly before their eyes. Mel let go of the tube, which was snapped back into the locker, the same way that a household vacuum cleaner’s power cable is pulled back inside the plastic shell.

The excitement over, Mel and the others were able to turn their attention back to the display. Central to the panel was a screen that had a direct video feed from the forward scanners. On it, they were all able to recognise the shiny object that hung in space in front of them. The orbital platform was still a seemingly impossible distance away, thousands of kilometres and three continents away. To the newcomers to space, it was an incredible notion that it would be a matter of minutes, not hours, before they would be alongside the station, owing to the speed at which they were travelling through space. Although slow by cosmic standards, even by the standards of the lunar craft, it was still faster than any of them had ever travelled before in their lives, even when travelling on the sub-orbital lines that took people between continents routinely, following the same routes that the obsolete jet airliners had once used before the oil shock.

From their current position, the platform was just an oddly circular object that reflected bright stars of sunlight at them as it hung in space. Gradually, as they approached, the sparkling object began to take form, as if it was being pulled into focus by God’s camera zoom. Ever so slowly, so much that it seemed to ache, they began to recognise the true form of the platform. Neither the cliche spoked wheel of early science fiction, nor the spindled assemblage of cylinders and lattice-work that had been the form of the first kitset space station of the early two thousands, the platform had all the appearance of a series of dumb-bells strung together along a common axle that ran through the centre of each bar, and the men on board the shuttle could soon match scale from the scattered, illuminated points of viewing windows scattered about the head units at the ends of each revolving shaft.

With all of their attention transfixed by the tiny viewing screen, it was some time before any of them realised that the station appeared to have stopped its wild, spinning motion. Only when they saw, at the periphery of the screen’s view, the outer rim of the Earth circling around the screen’s central image of the platform, did they realise what had happened. So that they could safely dock with the platform’s shuttle interface module, the shuttle pilot had first locked the shuttle’s radar guidance system onto the platform’s navigation beacons, and then used the shuttle’s eccentric micro-thrusters to nudge the shuttle into a corkscrewed approach flight path that was aligned with an imaginary axis, running dead centre through the designated docking bay.

Forgetting about the gyrating globe below them, the men gazed with wonder at the approaching platform. To Mel and Michaels it had lost none of its novelty, and they never tired of the platform approach. Its graceful, lazy motion was almost hypnotic in its hold on the men and women who approached it. Only the flight crew could not afford to lose their concentration, as any lapse could have fatal consequences not only for those on board the shuttle, but for those already on the platform as well. The television screen had been included not to help the paramedic in each lounge, but as a subtle psychological tool to counter the spatial disorientation that often accompanied the loss of gravity from human hab space. Without exception, the men in the aft security cabin had quite forgotten their initial unease at being weightless, unable to even establish which way was up. For in space, there is no up, nor down. Their distraction was total, as they watched the platform loom ever larger, until, still several hundred metres away from the docking port, the platform occupied the entire screen, with the star-strewn backdrop only visible intermittently as the series of radial bars spun past in their own perpetual cycles. It was, Stein thought, like looking through the slowly revolving spokes of a cartwheel after the cart had been violently knocked over. Not that he had ever actually seen a cart, only in old movies. But still, the image persisted.

The sheer scale of the platform was much greater than any of the new men could have imagined. To them, the platforms had always been something that had been talked about and read about, without any real visualisation of the stations themselves. Certainly, they could be seen with the naked eye from Earth, bright white stars that neither flickered nor stood still as they passed overhead in the night sky, and everyone knew what they actually looked like, from news footage. But, nothing could have prepared them for the sight as they approached for the first time. What had appeared to be a metallic blob on the end of a long shaft was, in reality, ten times the size of the shuttle, itself much larger than the earlier shuttles that their grandparents had grown up with.

Nearing the customs unit, the televised view was switched over to the side cameras, as, although the forward cameras were giving an admittedly awesome view of the other revolving sections of the platform, it was not of the unit that the shuttle was now alongside of. The shuttle had stopped moving forwards, slowed by measured bursts form the forward micro-thrusters. The view now fed through to the cabin was of the docking unit. The airlock hatch and its anchor clasps were clearly visible, and were surrounded by reinforced armour plating as protection against collision or explosion. At some distance they were able to make out the figures of platform personnel through the scattered windows, observing and guiding the shuttle’s approach. Soon, the hatch took up the whole view for a brief instant before the screen went black. As the view disappeared, the men felt a distinct jolt. The shuttle had arrived.