Rockhoppers Ch. 01

"Yes, sir..." Josh seems poised to add something else, then shakes his head and moves through the hatch.

"Hmf. Kids."

----

"Well done, Faith. You'll want to keep a lighter hand on the fine maneuvering retros, though, I'm amazed we have any CO2 left."

"Yes, Captain, I kept underestimating the thrust. I'll set up a practice sim..."

"Later, later." Nomi interrupts, "Looks like Josh is already loose on the docks. You're officially on leave now too, try to check in every few hours. This station is safe, but drunks are the same everywhere, okay?"

"Yes, Captain." Faith was disappointed Josh had already left, she had been forward to visiting the station with him. Despite the small size of the crew, the Rockhopper was large enough and their duties divergent enough to make socializing on board difficult. Maybe she'd misread his interest.

Nomi could almost read the young woman's thoughts at the mention of Josh. "Kid, Grubs is going to have told Josh to leave you alone in port, and I'm gonna tell you the same. The trip out here was busy as hell, especially with all the prep work, but once we get settled in the deep dark we're all going to get sick of the sight of each other. Go have fun by yourself, sleep with a stranger or something. Just check in, and for god's sake, register your locater.

Faith could feel her face heating up during that little speech, but she just replies "Yes, Captain" and slides through the hatch, headed to her cabin to change clothes.

Nomi sighs and shakes her head after the young woman leaves.

"Kids."

----

"You good in here, Grubs? I'm thinking about harassing your son in person once I'm done with the dockmaster." Nomi's head is poking through the main engineering hatch.

"Heh, is that what it's called these days. Yah, I'm good. Parts are already in stores and turns out the inspector isn't even gonna be here till day after tomorrow, got a backlog. I plan buttoning things down and finding the dingiest bar I can. Tell the boy he's an enduring disappointment."

"Will do. If there's time."

----

Josh is a little frustrated with the older engineer's advisement to give Faith space on the station. Not that he thought she was in any real danger here, but he still felt a little proprietary towards her since helping her back at the belt station. Still, she seems fine now, and they were going to be cooped up together for several months subjective in a few days.

This wasn't his first trip to Galileo station. He remembers his mom doing a stint with the research arm of the naval hospital here, something about broken bones in microgravity. He was about ten earth-standard years old at that point, and he thought his recollection of the size of the station was exaggerated by a child's memory.

If anything, mini-Josh hadn't assigned it enough grandeur. As he leaves the bay and enters the main docking concourse, the ceiling and walls go from the iron green-and-grey of U.N.S. naval paint to the the utter clarity of transparent hullcrystal. The gently curving concourse extends for almost a kilometer in front of him before bending out of sight and he finds himself looking out, mouth agape, at the enormity of the roiling atmosphere of Jupiter.

Heedless of the surrounding crowd, he watches as an enormous, whale-like gas miner slowly floats across his view of the planet. It's bound for the lower docking ring, engineered to handle such massive ships. Constructed here and incapable of intra-system distances, the titanic craft is one of the hundreds mining Jupiter and supplying Galileo (and by extension the rest of the settled solar system) with many of the light gases are far rarer and more difficult to extract on Earth.

He recovers the presence of mind to close his mouth and looks around to see if anyone has noticed his embarrassing lapse, but nobody is paying him any mind. At least a quarter of the people moving through the concourse seem to be Naval vessel crew, probably on leave as they rotate through on duty cycles, and most of those seem equally dazzled by the view, looking up every few seconds at the awesome vista. Unable to stop occasionally glancing out himself, he makes his way over to a station terminal and runs a query. He loads the public schematic into his locater and begins the trek to the station club district.

----

Faith takes much longer to recover from the sight than Josh did, staring entranced at the awesome and terrible glow of the largest object in the solar system, excepting only the Sol itself. She's been on a couple of stations before, but those had been relatively tiny tug mining platforms, no more than a kilometer in diameter and housing one or two thousand residents at best. In addition to the permanent residents, Galileo could accommodate eighty thousand humans comfortably, and its storage tanks displaced thirty times the volume of the livable area of the station.

Jove stares back from his swirling red eye, and as Faith watches the glacial dance of the poison clouds across his face, she sees a flicker of light behind the trailing edge of the sunline, where the planet's atmosphere vanishes into darkness. Looking more closely, the lights appear to be a glittering vee-shape on the surface of the clouds, blue and ethereal. Suddenly, the lights seem to leap, flaring briefly brighter as they carve through the stratosphere. She has no idea as to their provenance.

"What on Earth..." she utters quietly to herself as she moves to one side of the busy concourse, the better to watch the lights uninterrupted.

"Inaccurate idiom, here. You observe my wake."

Faith starts, and turns to face the odd pronouncement, finding herself eye-to-sensor with what appears to be a two foot wide mechanical spider clinging to the wall next to her.

Stifling a scream, Faith clasps a hand over her pounding heart. The calmly rational part of her brain informs her that her mouth is gaping like a fish out of water.

"Do you require medical assistance?"

"Uh... I... uh... No, thank you?"

"You are welcome, Faith Adeyemi."

"Uh, who are you and how do you know my name?"

"I am Galileo."

She understands in a rush. She's speaking, through a robotic thrall, to the famous operator of Galileo Station, one of only two permanent artificial intelligence installations in all of human space, the other being located in U.N.S. headquarters back on Luna. It knows her name because she's registered as Rockhopper crew, like it must know the names of every human on the station.

"I'm, um, pleased to meet you, Galileo."

The spider swivels its body with a creepily graceful thrashing of limbs, turning to face the vista of the planet. "You expressed confusion observing my wake. This is a common reaction. Would you like an explanation of the effect?"

"I... uh, yes, please."

The spider turns again to face her. "I trail billions of cables, each approximately one thousand nanometers in diameter. They extend hundreds of miles, deep into the planet's atmosphere. You should be able to make out a faint haze, although the human eye cannot perceive individual strands. The lights you observe are a result of a charge I apply to the cables reacting to particles of the opposite charge in the storms. By manipulating these forces I can apply the appropriate amount of drag to maintain our longitude relative to the sunline. You are a licensed astrogater. Did you pilot your ship's approach?

"Yes."

"You will have observed the large asteroid far above the station, just past geosynchronous orbit."

"Sure, I thought it was the station when we first started getting long range scans."

"In a sense, it is part of the station. Had you attempted a high resolution scan on your final approach, you would likely have resolved the anchors that attach this facility to that asteroid. In this manner it exerts upwards tension as it attempts to escape orbit, and this facility can hang suspended, here, allowing me to maintain one earth gravity without resorting to spin."

"What about when ships come and go? Doesn't your mass change a little? How do you keep the whole thing stable?"

"The corporations that lease docking with me for their mining operations tithe a portion of their bounty to the station. I use these materials to fuel fusion thrusters allowing corrections both here and on the asteroid above, Faith Adeyemi."

"Amazing. Thank you, Galileo."

"Enjoy your time on-station, Faith Adeyemi."

The eye of the mechanical arachnid remains fixed on her as its long, silver limbs swiftly pull it diagonally up the wall a half-dozen meters, until it slips into a maintenance nook and out of sight. 'It hasn't quite nailed down human interaction yet.' Faith thinks to herself with a shiver.

The station smells faintly of ozone and greenery, the familiar scent of environmental doing its job. She can even pick out some spider plants dotting little decorative alcoves along the concourse. The hardy species was one of the original pieces of greenery discovered to thrive in microgravity, and is still popular for its low maintenance and high CO2 conversion rates. They also breed really quickly.

Faith had pulled up the station outline back on the Rockhopper and the sight of the spider plants reminds her of Earth. She flicks on her locater and pages through the public station sections until she finds the entry for the botanical gardens. Thinking of Nomi's advisement, she sends a note back to the ship of her intended destination and registers her locater with the station.

Navigating the crowd while continuing to steal glances at Jupiter, she feels a pang of regret that Joshua isn't visiting the gardens with her.

----

Nomi is finalizing the Rockhopper's contract credentials with the dockmaster when she sees Faith's locater note. Reading it, she shakes her head. "At her age the last place I would have gone on a shiny new station would be the gardens."

"That's cause you got no class." This last from Grubs, braced in the bridge hatch. "I'm outta here till late, Skipper. Locater's registered with the station now if you need to find me."

"Okay. If you come across Josh, get him to do the same, I forgot to ask him to. Faith's already in the system."

"I doubt the kind of bars the kid likes and the kind of bars I like are gonna be the same, but I'll tell him if I see him. He's got a decent head on his shoulders, he'll probably stay out of trouble. Maybe."

Nomi snorts. "He's kin to you, and I've had to bail you out three times! At your age!"

"Misunderstandings, all. Besides, you really wanna be cooped up in this tin can with a saint?"

"God no. I'm a little worried we brought one on board, though. We'll see. Take off, I should be done here in another fifteen minutes."

"All right, Skipper. Have fun with my idiot son."

"He might not have time to see me."

Grubber's only answer to that is a derisive hoot as he heads towards the airlock.