Palimpsest, Thunderfield [red queen ebook TXT] 📗

set off. This time he exited his cabin and turned right and walked on the thick industrial strength carpet to the far end of passage four, at the end turned left towards starboard on corridor one, crossed two more passages on the way until he stopped at a small door with a sign saying crew only.
It was a narrow old style hinged door, painted dull yellow, it was heavy alloy metal and very thick. He opened it inwards, the rubber seals stuck for a second and then it swung free in a smooth easy motion as the massive hinges took the weight. The dark space inside contained a second steel door, also heavy and manually operated, he pushed hard on the vertical handle bar and it slid to one side easily within oiled tracks sunk well below the floor level. Behind that was the third and final door of the two metre deep portal through the inner hull of the ship. It was a mirror of the first door and Max opened it outwards and entered the grey void beyond.
He had stepped onto a meter wide platform which linked to a narrow metal staircase in the middle of a five meters gap between the inner and outer hulls. The interhull stairs were seldom used and the air was noticeably stale compared to the accommodation sections of the ship. Lighting was minimal, and he could not see the full extent of the flights of stairs that rose above him, but below the platform he could discern the slate grey floor. All around the stairs were supported and stabilised by steel struts to the hull walls on either side.
His shoes clanged against the latticed steps as he zigzagged on the flights past two more decks, both allocated as crew accommodation. Occasionally when he rounded a corner between flights he looked along the length of the ship, huge stress struts spanned between the hulls in all directions and at regular intervals as far as the gloom would allow him to see. Even if the interhull stairs had been better illuminated his view would have been limited, at the edge of illumination were large grey blocks of metal, the housings and casings of airlocks, cargo bays and the like.
Eventually he reached the bottom and went through another combination of hinged and railed doors to arrive on Deck Fifteen, the lowest deck.
In front of him was a long narrow passage. He was at the most extreme front end of the habitable zone of the ship, a service passage extended before him which ran its full length of eight hundred metres, ideal for a gyrosoot but Max had to walk.
The deck was scarcely attended by crew and off limits to passengers, even so he normally made his way surreptitiously via corridors and depot areas. He was less inhibited than usual and strode down three quarters of its length, his heels clanged along the passage. He passed the elevator shafts and stairs to the rest of the ship above, passed hydroponics and water tanks, local power generators and into the largest area of the ship, the cargo holds.
He reached a loading bay where most of its volume was filled with a ramp withdrawn into the ship. Hidden behind the ramp was a set of three small offices only occupied during on-load and off-load operations. Max entered the third and least observable office, virtually empty save for a desk and two chairs bolted to the floor. Behind the desk was a door, he knocked.
The door panel grated as it slide into its wall cavity. ‘Come in fella, not seen you a while.’

Chapter 2

The overhead fluorescent tubes of the bridge were dimmed, the blue glow of the few dozen monitors dominated the lighting. Half the workstations were manned, the consoles were black and most had numerous light emitting diodes with steady or flashing red, white, blue and yellow illuminations.
It was five hours since they had been ejected from the wormhole and entered 3D space. Cartwright stood at a forward workstation twelve stressful hours into his shift. He stroked new stubble on his chin, leaned on the high backed imitation leather chair and looked over Brakespear’s shoulder at a navigation console. Four large screens arrayed in a semi circle before them displayed dazzling images whose glow lit the lined, drawn faces of the two officers, their reflections ghostlike in the two middle screens.
‘Talk me through,’ he asked the navigator.
She indicated the far left monitor, ‘the first screen is a map of our new neighbourhood, I have measured distances and vectors from the ship’s detection systems to build it up. Our position is the red V in the centre, I can toggle around to get any sliced view of the sphere of space around us.’ She pushed a joystick and the map swivelled around the V.
‘What is the scale?’
‘A radius around us of four light years.’
‘It’s a busier region than around Sol or NA, any radio waves?’
‘It’s silent,’ Brakespear paused, ‘the next screen is a section of the Milky Way around the local spur of the Orion Spiral Arm,’ Brakespear stretched her arm and pointed with an index finger in a circular motion at a group of stars Cartwright instantly recognised as home. Her finger almost touched the screen, its mirror image backed off into the depth of the stars. ‘Sol’ she said needlessly.
She swivelled her chair to the right, ‘I am scanning images of deeper space around us shown on the third screen, nebulas, clusters anything that might be distinguishable, and having the processor run comparisons through each part of the Milky Way.’ She tapped at the console keys and a series of images popped up into the top right corner of the screen. ‘The green square on the local deep space image is the feature I am trying to identify, in this case an emission nebular, which I’ve labelled 02N.’ She reverted back to the Milky Way image ‘The white square here is the part being checked for a match with 02N.’
Cartwright could see a window inset on the third monitor with a list of thirty codes, with 02N second from top and highlighted. ‘So let me get this straight, we are in an unrecognisable region of space, and first indications are that we are nowhere near anywhere that we can recognise, right?’
‘That’s correct’ said Brakespear.
‘And it is only a matter of time before you can correlate between what we know and what we can see from here, correct?’
‘Well it’s not so straightforward, look’ Cheryl Brakespear tapped at the keyboard and pulled up more images which filled the screen and showed deep space from their current position. Several images had distinct bands of millions of stars, others were areas less populated and a few showed clusters of countless stars.
‘These images clearly indicate spiral arms and a galactic core.’
‘But,’ anticipated Cartwright.
‘For the moment that’s all this place has in common with the Milky Way.’
‘So not only are we nowhere near home, we may not even be in the same spiral arm.’
Brakespear swivelled around in her chair and surprised Cartwright as the back of the seat spun away. She looked directly into his eyes and said ‘we might not even be in the Milky Way.’
Cartwright was momentarily stunned, but she continued ‘There is another but, a better one though, because we could still be relatively near home. It is impossible to say right now if we are in our galaxy or even our spiral arm, but to my knowledge no wormhole has been discovered that spans more than eighty light years.’
She swivelled back to face her workstation, ‘we are not a survey ship and have very limited technology and skills on board and there is just so much stuff: stars, pulsars, nebulas et-cetera, to search through to identify something we know. But’ she emphasized ‘we could find a match that tells us where we are. In fact there could be hundreds of identifiers.’
‘How long do you need?’
‘Each candidate identifier will take a couple of hours to run.’ She brought up the local deep space view on the third screen. ‘The ones I have already selected are labelled and circled in yellow. I have to be methodical and it will take a long time.’
‘Can we speed up the process, run multiple comparisons in parallel?’ Cartwright asked.
‘Sure, it’s heavy on processing power but we can do it if we re-allocate computer resources.’
‘Okay I’ll authorise it. What’s on the last screen?
Brakespear said ‘the last screen is a series of views of the nearest star systems.’
Almost under his breath Cartwright mumbled as he leaned around the chair and closer to the last monitor. ‘So where are we?’
Brakespear tapped at a keyboard and clicked through images of star systems, as they did he said ‘fore, aft, starboard, port, dorsal and ventral’.
‘Planets?’ asked Cartwright.
‘Most of the stars do, I have picked out a few gas giants, and there is an asteroid belt on the port side star, a G type like Sol. There are also signs of ice and rocky planets.’
‘Which is the nearest system?’
‘Binary, forward image, quite close, about three light weeks, I think we are already close to its outer Oort cloud.’ She tabbed back a couple of images.
The binary stars were almost the same size, one was a vivid yellow orange colour, its slightly smaller companion a bright white, there were small discs on the periphery of the image, typical of gas giants.
Cartwright leaned closer, his finger pointed to one of the discs. ‘Interesting for a binary to have planets,’ Brakespear tapped another keyboard and zoomed into one of the discs. The gas giant was a blue green banded miniscule marble with a couple of dark spots that suggested moon shadows. She zoomed out and panned left.
‘And see this,’ she zoomed back in this time onto a small blue brown dot.
‘Rocks too eh, but it is no help to us now. You have done well, keep searching,’ Cartwright patted the woman’s shoulder and left.

* * *

The door grated closed behind Max, ‘Hi Kemp,’ he said.
‘What a racket, you know the drill what’s up with you?’
‘I was a bit too direct, sorry, I am trying to find Ronan in this chaos, have you seen him?’
‘Don’t do it again or you’re barred, and no I haven’t seen Ronan for a few days,’ Kemp’s face lifted into a stained toothy grin above a dark goatee beard, ‘ready to pay?’
‘Yes, here,’ Max swung his bag from his shoulder, loosened the cord in the same movement, reached in with his free had fished until it came out with a thick brown wallet. As he extracted some notes Kemp heaved a couple of yellow plastic coated mattresses across the door behind him. ‘Forty, right?’ said Max
‘Forty five, plus five late payment charge.’
‘Forty five, here, ‘he slapped the cash into Kemp’s open palm.
Kemp strolled ahead briefly checked the cash, and Max followed. They entered a dull yellow tunnel, passed a stack of monitors by the door that displayed multiple views of passages and corridors in Deck Fifteen.
They walked a dozen paces up to more mattresses, Kemp grappled with two of them, shoved them to one side and revealed a hidden amphitheatre. It was an ovoid construction excavated from within a plastic coated cliff face of predominantly yellow and occasional pale blue mattresses. The stacked mattresses formed three lower tiers within the oval and then continued upwards compressed up to a low ceiling. Suspended from above was a pilfered cargo net that held a jumble