Man-Kzin Wars IX, Larry Niven [leveled readers TXT] 📗

or corruption at the Port Authority itself. I didn't tell her that: she might be the one I was looking for.

Instead I offered a compliment. "Sounds like you're pretty secure. I've seen banks with looser systems." I meant it too. I didn't mention that I'd seen banks with looser systems because I'd gone in to investigate the frauds that had occurred at them.

"You've got to understand, there are better than two million containers in the system. Every day we move thirty thousand of them through Tiamat. The cargo value in just one of those can get into the tens of millions of crowns. We can't just lose track of one." There was pride in her voice. She was a hands-on technocrat and the tranship system was her baby.

The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the conveyor crane. The rollers on the container rack slid us into the jaws of the waiting cradle. I felt like Captain Nemo being attacked by a giant squid. There was a clang as the locking dogs engaged and then we were on our way, swaying gently in the minuscule gravity field. The crane loaded us onto the roller rails at the end of our row of container racks. The cradle disconnected and the crane swung away. The rollers began spinning and our container moved off.

I watched out the windows like a kid on a train for the first time. There was a double jolt as we were loaded onto a sorter, then a gentle surge as we launched into free fall. I watched in fascination as we soared past the tops of the container racks. We spun slowly and I got a revolving view of the entire, bustling hub. To my surprise we didn't come within a hundred meters of another container. What looked like near misses from below were a trick of perspective. There was all sorts of room.

We reached the top of our parabola and began to descend. There was another surge as tunnel nineteen's container receiver pulled us in. We landed perfectly flat and I realized what the spin had been for—Maintain This End Up at All Times. The whole experience was exciting but vertigo inducing. I got my stomach back under control and looked over at Hunter. He had eschewed the human-sized observation chairs, choosing instead to curl up on top of a large tool bin that afforded him a convenient view and loosely belting himself in with some cargo straps. He looked completely at home, curse him.

I was clearly going to have to get more zero-gravity time if I was going to fit in on Tiamat.

The conveyors hummed and with a gentle swaying we slid into the yawning entrance of tunnel nineteen. The swaying stopped as our container was grabbed by the roller tracks on all four sides of the tunnel. Darkness fell as we left the entrance behind. Merral hit a switch on her control panel and the floodlights came on, lighting the way ahead.

Vertigo jerked at my stomach as my inner ears fought to reconcile themselves with my eyes. The containers move down the tunnels at about fifty kilometers an hour. That's not very much in the scheme of things but with the tunnel walls rushing past just inches away it seems very fast indeed. The tiny pull of Tiamat's rotation is overwhelmed by the acceleration and deceleration forces along the container's axis as it's braked or speeded up to allow for other traffic in the tunnel.

My brain carefully weighed all this information and decided that I was falling headfirst down a bottomless elevator shaft. It was worse than the freefall in the hub. My knuckles were white on the arms of the chair and I found I couldn't make myself let go.

"How long will it take to get there?" I asked, trying to keep my voice calm. It came out sounding tense anyway.

"About forty minutes." It was clearly just routine to Merral.

Hunter yawned, curled up and went to sleep.

A track shunt appeared ahead of us. Luminous letters flashed by, too fast to actually read but I registered them as Y2. A black opening flashed by.

I closed my eyes and took three deep breaths and found I could relax my grip. I was just sitting in a chair in very low gravity. The seatbelt pulled gently as the container responded to the tracks and I could hear the whine of the rollers. I sat on my hands and opened my eyes.

Vertigo hit again, but I forced myself to keep sitting on my hands. Eventually I got used to the view. Another opening, another junction and W1 flashed by. Merral had brought up a tiny hologram on her board. I recognized it as a map of the shipping tunnels. Tiny white dots moved slowly along its tributaries. She pointed to one highlighted in red. "That's us."

I asked her some more questions about the tranship net and its security arrangements. She was happy to oblige me. I got detailed information on how data was stored, how transmissions were crypted and errors caught, how containers were sealed and how physical access was controlled. It really was an impressive system but she kept using the word "fail-safe." An engineer really ought to know better.

After a while the conversation lagged and I fell to watching the hypnotically repeating panorama of tracks, rollers and supports. P3 streaked past. I thought about Holly and Suze. P2, P1, O1, N4, N3. I stopped counting them and thought about Suze.

My reverie ended when the deceleration kicked in and pushed me against my safety belt. A scrabble of claws from behind told me that Hunter's nap had been interrupted and he'd nearly slid out of his improvised restraints. We slowed to a fraction of our former speed. A tunnel junction was coming up.

I looked in amazement at the luminous figures on the tunnel wall. J2—the container bay that didn't exist. The floodlights illuminated a track shunt ahead, leading into a side tunnel identical to all the others