Orion Shall Rise (52 page)

‘You’ll transfigure the world,’ Plik murmured.

‘Maybe less than you think, son.’ Eygar’s words, which had tumbled and crackled, took on a calmer tone. The fanaticism faded out of his narrow black eyes. ‘Aside from civilizing it. Manufacturing should follow mining out into space. We won’t need to take our raw materials from the hide of mother Earth, nor rub pollution into the wounds. Come back in a hundred years or so, and you may find us living in a pastoral paradise.’

Plik shook his head. ‘Only angels are fit for paradise.’

Eygar scowled. ‘What’re men fit for, then?’ He dismissed his irritation. ‘Work, at least. Okay, come have a look at ours.’

More than a hundred meters deep, below their camouflaged covers, ten shafts in a mountain were the wombs of Orion. Between them, and elsewhere under the range, ran a web of corridors, rooms, vaults, rails, pipes, cables, machines at their business like trolls.

Simply building the physical plant had been a superherculean task. Some natural caves and extinct fumaroles were a nucleus, but mostly the means had been dynamite, a limited amount of power equipment, and human muscle – through day and night, sunshine, rain, fog, snow, frost, thaw for worse than four years. The cost had been gigantic too, and continued so: the cost of concrete, metal, apparatus, labor, fuel for the generators whose electricity powered everything from fluorescents and ventilators to furnaces and groundwater pumps.

(Construction workers were hired in the South, none for longer than a year except those few who knew the truth. They heard that they were building an industrial site to exploit Northern natural resources, for a consortium of entrepreneurs. Local inhabitants heard the same. They didn’t complain too loudly about being excluded. They had work aplenty of their own, and reckoned it bad manners to pry when people didn’t care to talk. … At last Eygar took a small part of the uranium-235 that had been collected and faked a volcanic eruption. The consortium announced that the shock had ruined everything. It could not afford to rebuild. Luckily, the disaster smote in a pause between excavation and furbishing; few personnel were there and casualties were nil. Then the Wolf Lodge, members of which had been leaders of the project, kindly offered to purchase the site for a wildlife refuge and scientific base it had been contemplating.… The Maurai were only marginally aware of all this, and not interested. Their Inspectorate was still new and overextended in the South, Laska was remote and inclement, they had no reason to suspect trickery.)

Not much showed aboveground: cabins, sheds, primitive roads, a laboratory, what an ecological research station would reasonably maintain. None of it was on the mountain of the spacecraft. Nor was much else visible except peaks and the forests below them; Tyonek, on Cook Inlet, lay eighty wild kilometers to the east.

Staff, their families, and their community facilities were housed underground. It was not as claustrophobic a situation as Iern had imagined. Living quarters were small but adequate, more comfortable and healthful than those wherein most of humanity huddled; interior decoration had become a folk art; places existed for meetings, games, sports, hobbies, celebrations; the school and the public library were excellent; if dining was perforce in mess halls, the food and the kitchen help were superior; individuals found
themselves in countless permutations of mutual-interest groups. They could and did go topside almost anytime off duty that they wished, into a land where they could hike, climb, ski, hunt, fish, boat, picnic, frolic, or simply enjoy its magnificence. Sometimes parties of them took cruises by bus or yacht, which might include a fling among the fleshpots of Sitka.

Indeed, the isolation was not and could not be total. A fair number of persons, such as Ronica, had frequent occasion to go elsewhere. Then there were those, integral to the organization, who never had reason to come here – her mother and stepfather, for example. Living in Kenai, they were agents for one of the Wolf Lodge’s commercial enterprises. It was a genuine job, but it was also cover for their service as a liaison, arranging the unobtrusive shipment of needed goods to the establishment across the firth.

On the whole, for nearly all concerned, and counting in the sense of vital achievement, rewards outweighed sacrifices.

Not that they dwelt in perfection. Everybody hated censorship of mail to the outside, and most longed for a glimpse of the South, a change of scene and neighbors, knowing they would not leave this cranny of the world until Orion rose or they died. They quarreled, connived, divorced, fell sick, knew loss and grief and frustration. A few committed crimes, punished by a tribunal of the directorate that governed here. Three who had developed psychoses were humanely but permanently confined.

Adolescent rebellion was less than might have been expected. The majority of those growing up in this place had only dim memories of anything else, or none. It was taken for granted that as they came of working age they would serve the undertaking, in whatever capacities they were able, until it was finished. A minority cherished no such wish, and resented the fact that they must remain after they reached adulthood. Their parents had contracted to live under what amounted to a dictatorship; they themselves had not, and weren’t Norrmen supposed to be freemen? Could they not be trusted to keep their mouths shut?

The answer was no, they could not; yes, this was a gross violation of their liberty; once the nation was free, they would receive generous compensation, or they could file damage suits for larger sums if they saw fit. Thus far, none had attempted escape, though it would be possible if carefully planned. After all, they were the children of intelligent couples, who had raised them in an atmosphere of
patience, hard work, and exalted hope. How would they feel if, somehow, they betrayed Orion, or simply if they let Orion rise without them?

The entire arrangement was metastable at best. Sooner or later, some random event must tear secrecy asunder, unless the great purpose was attained first. But then, the enterprise itself was marginal, a desperate, wildly daring venture. By that very fact, it caught at the spirit. Orion was a huge thing for which to live. These people had it, and it had them.

The spacecraft were at different stages of construction. In one case, it was demolition. Engineers were taking apart the unmanned test vehicle that had flown this summer, to study piece by piece. They planned to rebuild her, but along modified lines. She had been designed for flotation, to be recovered at sea where no outsiders were watching and returned here in sections. The rest were intended for ground landings.

Just two more preliminary flights were scheduled. Iern had the technical background to know how dismaying that paucity was, but the staff had scant choice. Every shot was a clue to the nature and location of what was under way, and the Maurai hounds were chasing down every other possible trace, too. On that account, the search for fissionables was now suspended, a decision whose rightness the narrow escape of Mikli’s group underscored. Nevertheless, given time, it was sheerly inevitable that the enemy would find this stronghold. Eygar did not propose to grant the time.

The second excursion would be manned, to check out controls and landing gear. Eygar hoped to launch it in a few months, as soon as certain alterations were completed which the first experiment had indicated were desirable. The third flight, also manned, would carry lasers, solar collectors, and solid projectiles for testing; it should be ready in a year or so. Assuming no out-and-out fiasco or disaster, its results would be the basis for equipping the whole fleet. Orion ought to rise in full strength less than two years hence.

‘That’s cutting it almighty thin, I know,’ Eygar said. ‘We’ll launch sequentially, over a period of a week, unless the Maurai are right on our necks by then. That should give a chance to correct some mistakes, as experience shows us what they are. My guess
is
we’ll lose a couple of vehicles, and a couple more will prove useless because of malfunctions. Give me five that work, though –’ he held
a palm upward, fingers crooked like talons –’give me a hand of ships, and we’ll set ourselves free.’

Electric chills went along Iern’s spine as he beheld
Orion Two
.

The corridor through which he had come debouched on a platform ten meters up the ascent tube. Ladders, catwalks, and wheeled scaffolding wove webs through cold, echoing dimness. A pit at the bottom, where fans and scrubbers would receive the really bad toxins from the initial explosion, was like a lake of night. Workers who moved about on the frames, in and out of the hull, were dwarfed; he felt eerily that they did not service the spacecraft, they served her.

Plik crossed himself.

Poised at the center, the ship gleamed with a sinister loveliness. Below her spearhead bow, ports and an airlock were visible. Farther down, she flared gracefully out to a larger diameter which occupied most of her twenty-seven-meter length; therein were equipment and life-support housing, followed by a radiation shield, the cargo space (which would hold weapons in the next war, and again afterward if the peace needed patrolling), another radiation shield, the propulsive machinery, and still another radiation shield – this last to protect metal, plastics, and electronics, not crew. About at her midriff, short wings swept backward. From his angle, Iern spied hatches above and below them, whence three-point landing gear would emerge. He also made out the scaly pattern of heat-buffering tiles, though their ceramic shimmered as burnished a blue-white as the bare metal. At the very stern, three thick plates were successively wider, to a maximum of some fourteen meters. They varied in shape as well as size, and their interconnections were intricate.

‘We’ve changed the original design every which way, of course,’ Eygar said. Ardor throbbed beneath his dry phrases. ‘But it was hardly more than a sheaf of calculations and sketches. Old Dyson never got his chance. I wonder what the world’d be like today if he had.…

‘His would’ve been bigger, and assembled in orbit. We need a vehicle that can go from Earth and come back again, and maneuver freely in both air and space, and put down on any reasonable runway or even any reasonably level patch of dirt. She has to be independent of ground control, too, since we can’t set up worldwide stations like the ancients. She’ll carry her own computers, and employ crew at several control boards. Building an integrated
system that one man could fly would’ve added years to the project. What she lacks in elegance, she’ll make up in brute power. If she misses on a pass, she’ll have the reserves to try again.

‘What we had to go on was the old astronautical literature, such of it as survived; ditto the stuff on nuclear engineering, especially explosive devices; our own civilization’s experience with things like aircraft; and the raw belief that it
can
be done.’

He pointed downward. ‘Not much finesse, no. We’ll do better in the next generation of Orions. Here, essentially, on command, the machinery dispatches a bomb down a chute. Valves open in front of it and close behind – sturdy valves! The bomb detonates automatically behind the after plate, unless the pilot sends an override signal. The design derives from ancient tactical warheads. There are several varieties, with yields from fifty tonnes to five kilotonnes; the pilot chooses the mix and sequence. He can have a lesser push still by unleashing a minimum size and sending a ‘muffle’ signal along with it, though that wastes the full available energy. You can’t see them from here – they look like shallow rib segments – but he’s also got solid-fuel chemical rockets to help him maneuver in space, plus gyroscopes inside.

‘That first explosion gets the ship moving!’ he exulted. ‘And then it’s bang again, and bang and bang and bang. Little contamination from the atmospheric bursts; none from bursts in space. The delta vee is limited only by the number and size of bombs she carries. She can prowl above Earth any way the pilot wants, or carry a small ocean freighter’s worth of cargo to the moon or an expedition to Mars – and return.’

‘Hold on,’ Iern said. ‘Space is a high-grade vacuum. How do you couple the energy to the ship, there?’

‘Good for you,’ Eygar laughed. ‘The bottom plate consists mainly of synthetic material that absorbs the energy, shrinks, and rebounds, giving the ship a healthy whack. It’s a compressible lattice of doped fluorosilicone chains and assorted carbon rings, forming a cellular structure. The same stuff supplements the hydraulics in the upper plates, which time-attenuate the impact. You don’t get a jerky ride; it’s fairly smooth. In spite of the Maurai, we’ve learned a bit more basic science than the ancestors knew.’

Because of the Maurai, we know far more biology, and perhaps things about the psyche,
passed through Iern.
Is their attitude
altogether unreasonable?
He cast the thought from him. Ronica’s cause was his.

‘When your ship has completed her mission,’ Plik asked, ‘how does she fail?’

Eygar gave him a hard look before explaining: ‘If she isn’t in Earth orbit already, she assumes it, and fires a retroblast or two to reduce speed. She could theoretically back down through the atmosphere on nuclear, but our control systems aren’t up to that, and besides, it’d make unnecessary contamination. So the descent will be aerodynamic. You see the wings and heat shielding. Those pods under the wings contain turbojets, which have ample fuel. So she won’t come down deadstick. With the lift we’ve got, we can afford the extra mass. In fact, if it weren’t for the need of concealment, she could fly high before releasing the first bomb. But as long as we had to hide the construction work anyway, we did it in these shafts, and installed the pit apparatus to swallow the initial radioactivity –and, of course, to make it harder for the enemy to identify just where the ship is rising from.

‘Oh, she won’t fly like a hawk, no, nor an eagle, I suppose – but a dragon, a dragon.’

2

Wairoa sat hunkered in his cell, contemplating the subtleties of air currents. A shutter slid aside and a guard looked through the window in the otherwise solid door. ‘Hello, there,’ he said.