Pretty, yes. To be honest most of us dont find the Moon very interesting. They arent true Spacers down there. Not when you can commute to Earth in a day or two. We call it Earths attic...
Max murmured, Closest approach coming up.
Now the whole Moon was shifting across Bisesas field of view. Craters flooded with shadow fled before the fragile windows of the bridge. Bisesa felt Myras hand tighten on her own. There are some sights humans just werent meant to see, she thought helplessly.
Then the Moons terminator fled over them, a broken line of illuminated peaks and crater walls, and they were plunged into a darkness broken only by the pale glow of Earthlight. As the suns harsh light was cut off the lightship lost its thrust, and Bisesa felt the loss of that tiny fraction of gravity.
PART 2 JOURNEYS 17: WARSHIP
John Metternes came bustling up to the flight deck of the Liberator.
Edna asked, Everything nominal?
Bonza, the ships engineer said. He was breathless, the soft Belgian accent under his acquired Australian making his sibilants a rasp. We got the mag bottles loaded and interfaced without blowing our heads off in the process. All the protocols check out, the a-matter pods are being good enough to talk to us...Yes, were nominal, and fit to launch. And about bloody time.
Around forty, he was a burly man who was sweating so hard he had stained his jumpsuit armpits all the way through the protective layers. And there was a slight crust around his mouth. Perhaps he had been throwing up again. Though he had a nominal navy rank as a lieutenant commander, and was to fly with the Liberator as the chief engineer, John had come to space late; he was one of those unfortunates whose gut never adapted to microgravity. Not that that would make any difference when the A-drive cut in, for in flight the Liberator would thrust at a full gravity.
Edna tapped at a softscreen, skimmed the final draft of her operation order, and checked she had clearance from her control on Achilles. The launch window opens in five minutes.
Metternes looked alarmed, his broad stubbly face turning ashen. My word.
You okay with this? The automated count is already underway, but we can still scrub if
Good God, no. Ah, lookyou took me aback, is all, didnt know it was as quick as that. The sooner we get on with it the better. And anyhow something will probably break before we get to zero; it generally does...Libby, schematics please.
The big window in front of them clouded over, replacing the view of Achilles and its backdrop of stars with a side-elevation graphic of the Liberator herself, a real-time image projected from sensors on Achilles and elsewhere. When John tapped sections of it the hull turned transparent. Much of the revealed inner workings glowed a pastel green, but red motes flared in scattered constellations to indicate outstanding engineering issues, launch day or not.
The design was simple, in essence. The Liberator looked like nothing so much as a Fourth of July firework, a rocket no less than a hundred meters in length, with habitable compartments stuck on the front end and an immense nozzle gaping at the back. Most of the hull was stuffed with asteroid-mined water ice, dirty snow that would serve as the reaction mass that would drive the ship forward.
And buried somewhere in the guts of the ship, near that nozzle, was the antimatter drive.
Liberators antimatter came in tiny granules of frozen hydrogenor rather anti-hydrogen, stuff the propulsion engineers called H-bar. For now it was contained inside a tungsten core, isolated from any normal matter by immaterial electromagnetic walls, the containment itself requiring huge energies to sustain.
H-bar was precious stuff. Because of its propensity to blow itself up on encountering normal matter, antimatter didnt sit around waiting to be collected, and so had to be manufactured. It occurred as a by-product of the collision of high-energy particles. But Earths mightiest accelerators, if run continually, would produce only tiny amounts of antimattereven the great alephtron on the Moon was useless as a factory. A natural source had at last been found in the flux tube that connected the moon Io to its parent Jupiter, a tube of electrical current five million amperes strong, generated as that moon ploughed through Jupiters magnetic field.
To mine antimatter, all you had to do was send a spacecraft into the flux tube and use magnetic traps to sift out antimatter particles. But there was a world of