and get our popsicle-people up to the space station soon, but knowing that it was going to happen now made the whole thing that bit more real to me.
“Is the station ready yet?” I asked her.
“The ARC is coming along nicely, and we are already manufacturing the pods to go up. The idea is for them to be mostly stocked before they go; it removes the supply issue when they’re up there. It’s the same with the other sites,” she went on, “everyone who isn’t essential gets frozen when they arrive there.”
The question of how they were getting the pods to the station, sorry, the Ark, as everyone calls it here, wasn’t so much above my paygrade but more that it was beyond my skills. I was no rocket scientist, they literally had those here, and the applied mathematics and physics guys were a pretty dry bunch for my liking. This coming from a programmer who spends his days talking to a computer he has designed and looking forward to the daily visits from the girl employed to keep an eye him.
We were stood in line at the cafeteria, sliding our plastic trays along as the line shuffled ahead. If nothing but out of pure interest in having a conversation, I asked the question, “How are they getting up there? Isn’t it expensive to keep sending rockets up? Won’t people notice?”
She half turned to smile at me as she picked up a pre-packaged salad and a bottle of mineral water.
“We got around that a year ago,” she said, “balloons.”
“Balloons?” I asked with a confused look. “How the hell do balloons help?”
“Basically, they’re big-ass weather balloons, and the pods rise on those during the night. When they get as high as the atmosphere allows, a small rocket burst sends them the rest of the way out into zero gravity. Thrusters bring them in to the station and dock them, then they stay there and become part of the structure itself.”
“And getting them back down?” I asked.
“Reverse process,” Cat explained, pouring herself a cup of coffee and silently offering me one. I shook my head; I’d already had about a half-gallon that morning and would probably start twitching if I had any more just yet. She gave a small inclination of her head as if to say whatever and carried on. “The pods detach, thrusters take them back to atmosphere, then ’chutes deploy, and the thrusters guide the pods to the designated landing site. Easy,” she said, as though the process of freezing people and sending them to space and dropping them back down safely was nothing.
A thought pricked my mind as we walked toward an empty table.
“Who flies the things?” I asked. She froze momentarily as she fought to find the right answer. “That’s something someone else wants to discuss with you,” she said.
“You want Annie to fly them?” I asked, seeing no other obvious reason for her hesitation.
“Can it do that?” she asked, making me flinch inside at the it tag.
“Is there a program to fly them?” I asked her.
“Yes.”
“Is there a real-time data link between the station and the pods?”
“Yes.”
“Then yes,” I said, “Annie can fly them when they’re in range for her to take over via data link. I just need the program.”
She beamed a smile at me as she stabbed her fork into her salad a few times to load it with green stuff, which she then folded into her mouth. Chewing for a few seconds, she pointed the fork in my direction and rushed the mouthful to ask me a question.
“But you’ve cracked the cryoprocess, right? It can do that without us now?” she asked, unwittingly offending me again.
“Yeah, she can,” I told her in as gentle a reproof as I could manage.
“Great, because someone is going under this afternoon. You want her to do it?”
~
Tanaka took Milstone into the medical unit, one hand wrapped around his upper arm in a strong grip. They weren’t able to sedate him as they had when they first took him, because that would affect the cryoprocess and could kill him. Killing him now would represent a significant waste of resources, Tanaka thought.
Milstone was flanked on the opposite side by a big guy; fair hair cut short to the wood on the sides and barely longer on top like a recruit, but his age, size, and evident experience in the way that he carried himself made it clear that he was no rookie. The doctor walked with resignation, although he