A chorus of yeses, ayes, si’s and oui’s fills the air waves as with some guilt I freeze Football Manager 2169, one of whose matches is playing itself out on the main smartwall. I'd only been modifying Angus Athletic’s team formation. I disengage from my seat and scoot myself away from what has been my second home for the last two years of preparation.
No, I couldn't throw all that away, nor the efforts and commitment of everyone around me. Big money has fuelled this project, although equally big money is keeping my escape route open. The most expensive human being in history, slinking off the sinking ship. But, of the colonists, only Mamour knows that, I hope.
I’m not gutted about abandoning my wee game of virtual footie. The ship’s Bridge has its compensations and I am now impatient to get there. My weightless drift through CompZone is not fast enough but I can't do much about it until I reach the opposite entrywall. At a thought from me a section of it fizzes out of existence. It's a neat trick and one that I love to pull while the rest of the crew has to fiddle around with controls on smartsuits.
I realise I’m still carrying my Slinky – not the most manageable toy in zero gravity – and stop to anchor it to what will be the ceiling when acceleration kicks in. Now a quick shove from the newly created opening and ricochet off the wall of Crypt2 – sorry, Personnel Hibernation Unit 2 – sees me ghost my way down TravCentral. It’s slower than gravity-bound walking: I don't want to break my arms stopping at the other end; but it’s faster than clomping round on magsoles, to which we restrict the civvies, for exactly the arm-breaking reasons.
“Nine minutes.”
I could alter my course by a right-angle at the Bridge and head through the Trannie, on to the Admiral’s wee boatie and have done with all this. After all no-one’s indispensible; we all have back-ups, fully trained and ready to fill our shoes at a moment’s notice, even a moment as short as nine minutes. In fact, several days into our acceleration out of the solar system, key reserve personnel will shadow us on board our escort, the battleship Enterprise. In one of my idle spells I queried Brains about that name. He – I still think of our bio-computer as male – he had to patch through to Archive for the answer. It made me laugh: talk of life imitating art.
Shit! Before my diversion into football and day-dream I really had been applying mods, to a nanoassembler, which is presumably now floating around CompZone and will crash to ground when we power away. Ach well, easy come, easy go. They create themselves after all; in fact sometimes too well.
The entrywall to the Bridge arrives and I cushion my impact to place one eye in line with a retscan. I can't think this wall open and have to submit to the extra security. I stare the device into submission and hope it’s not staring in return into my thoughts, which are now meandering back to a feisty wee brunette – no, I’ll be seeing her in a second. The wall dissolves with the sound of a hummingbird in full hover.
You never know what will greet you on the bubble of smartpanes that form the outer surface of the Bridge. It depends on what the crew are viewing. This time they must be taking a last look at home: the panes are transparent and initially darkness is all that registers beyond the burgundy gloom emanating from the Bridge’s instruments and lights. Two brighter clusters dead ahead mark the pilots’ consoles at the apex of the bubble.
Aye, the dark side of the Moon, in the traditional sense of the phrase too as the Earth presently lies behind its satellite and doesn't even cast reflected sunbeams on this hemisphere. One and a half hours it takes for our ship to hurtle round the blackness before we spend the same period looking ‘down’ on a vista of craters, rills, mountains, plains and so-called seas during the sunlit half of our 'day'. Time and time again for the last year but as of this circuit no more.
“Eight minutes.”
My vision begins to adjust and pinpricks of illumination dot the nightscape below: Vespa shipyard, birthplace of Ark2, aka BritOil, aka Brittle to its affectionate crew. The old hands also still use its original codename of February to commemorate our departure month. Or maybe in reaction to the mission’s sponsors?
I crane my neck to what will be ‘up’ and fancy that I detect the smudgy glow of January’s photon rockets. Our flagship is already powering past the 19,000 kilometre mark, so I put the illusion down to my imagination. Flight Pilot Heather Barnard however, like all pilots, will be seeing the glowing white exhaust from the first ark’s anti-matter drives.
I switch to our private channel. “Above you.”
“Only when G kicks in,” she replies. “And even then technically, beside.”
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