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  On either side of the transit pad were massive bay doors that served as both airlocks and access ports. Alvarez heard the hiss of atmosphere flooding into the access port to his left. The bay door opened and the transit shuttle, already grounded, rolled forward via gears in the station’s floor.

  “Here’s our soup,” said one of Alvarez’s neighbors. He recognized the man but couldn’t remember his name. The transit was shaped like a giant soup can turned on its side, which was how it earned its nickname. The only defect in the metaphor was in the transit’s flattened landing surface.

  The shuttle doors opened, and Alvarez and the passengers entered. There was a woman and her son already onboard. He recognized their faces too. Alvarez’s son Adam had a play-date with them a few weeks ago. They lived on Tatum, the orbiter before Nakasaw on the relay loop. Alvarez grimaced a smile in their direction. He was too tired for small talk. As the passengers took their seats, the transit exited through the airlock.

  Alvarez looked out his window, trying to spot his apartment as they passed by. The orbiter was a blur, the transit moving too quickly for him to focus on individual windows. But as they moved further away, the larger structure revealed its shape.

  Each orbiter was unique, but they all followed the same L-shape design: an upper rotating tower adjoined to a stationary lower base. The bottom structure formed a wide rim that always faced the nearest star. This rim contained all locales that required continuous light: the transit station, social halls, a pseudo-park, and the primary solar array.

  All space architecture was designed with light in mind. Solar arrays were the primary source of power for most permanent structures. Only vessels that routinely moved out of orbit still used nuclear reactors.

  People wanted light for more than just power. They needed it to help regulate their circadian clocks, to help their minds and bodies know when to wake up and go to bed. Artificial light played a part, but there was always a premium placed on real starlight. It wasn’t until people settled in space that they realized the true extent of their dependence on light.

  Unlike Novos station, Alvarez’s orbiter wasn’t built for maximum solar aspect. It was designed to utilize both light and darkness. People were still terrestrial creatures, after all—best suited for life on a revolving planet.

  The cylindrical upper section of Nakasaw orbiter was a residential tower. It rotated on a twenty-four-hour cycle, a crude but effective way to simulate earth’s turning. Some orbiters were stretched to thirty-hour cycles or longer. Even in space, there weren’t enough hours in the day.

  In the Nakasaw orbiter, each unit received twelve equal hours of light and darkness. It was an eternal equinox. Residents didn’t share floors with neighbors that were horizontally adjacent to them. Instead, neighbors shared the same vertical row. They experienced the same starlight at the same time, the same mornings, and the same nights. The light-experience of adjacent residents was offset by one hour.

  People set their day by which vertical floor they lived in. As if scattered on opposite sides of a planet, people on different floors were effectively in different time zones. Consequently, there were no official workdays, no real night-shift, and perhaps most importantly, no rush-hour traffic. Instead there was a steady flow of people coming and going at every hour. Businesses utilized workers around the clock which added to production. The same machines, laboratories, hangar bays, etc. were used continuously instead of sitting idle while a primary work force slept at night.

  Alvarez’s coffee wasn’t working. He kept nodding off. His mind floated off to different tangents. He thought about his move to the Nakasaw orbiter. It was farther away from Novos than their previous orbiter. But the longer commute allowed for a better quality of life. He didn’t have to be gone for weeks or months on missions. He came home each night to his family. But everything comes at a price. The price Alvarez paid, besides his commute, was moving to a cheap orbiter and working a perfunctory desk job.

  Those orbiters last on the transit relay were the cheapest places to live because of the premium placed on short commutes. Nakasaw was one of the longest commutes to Novos, sometimes running more than twenty minutes. Perhaps more than material wealth, time was the most sought after commodity. But time and certs weren’t the only considerations in choosing an orbiter. Some shared aesthetic values, and some were oriented around religious or philosophical beliefs.

  Alvarez woke with a jolt. He had become good at sleeping upright and, somehow, not spilling his coffee. Out his window he saw the Thompson orbiter, the next residential structure on the relay route. He watched as a transit exited the station. Rather than continue on the relay route, it headed straight toward Novos.

  “Must be direct transit,” Alvarez muttered to himself. Direct transits were the express shuttles. They were for VIPs only and went to Novos without making stops along the relay route. You couldn’t buy a ticket, but it was free to ride if you were high enough on Novos Corp’s pecking order. When Alvarez was a mission colonel, he rode direct transit exclusively.

  Stepping down to a desk job was hard for many reasons. The longer commute took some getting used to. On the bright side, Alvarez had learned to snooze en route. It was terrible quality sleep, dozing off in his seat, but he took what he could get.

  Alvarez rested his eyes, drowsy but no longer able to sleep. Between caffeine consumption and an incessant beeping sounding over the shuttle’s PA, Alvarez was awake.

  He knew the sound. Everyone did. It meant they were approaching their final destination, Novos. He shook his head in disbelief. He must have slept through the last three stops.

  He stood up, stretched his legs and back. Looking out the window, he noticed they were hovering outside the docking bay at Novos. He wondered what the holdup was. Other passengers were getting impatient.

  “There must be another shuttle still docked,” the woman standing next to him said. Alvarez checked the time. He should have been in the lab six minutes ago.

  Another passenger said, “All roads lead to Rome, but all transits lead to Novos.” The man chuckled at his own comment. He looked from face to face for someone else to share in his mirth. No one laughed, and no one made eye contact with the irritating man.

  This catch-phrase was one of Novos’s old slogans that had lost its levity years ago. That had become a fulfilled prophesy. Currently, nearly every transport traveling in the sector was heading to or from Novos station, where most business and factory production took place. People worked in orbiters doing service jobs: retail clerks, utilities engineers, maintenance techs, educators, etc. But all of the primary production took place at Novos.

  The one exception was farm orbiters. Growing food didn’t require a great deal of technology or energy. Novos had more than enough starlight to grow plants and to power solar arrays. What Novos didn’t have was plenty of wide-open spaces. Even so, Novos was an intermediary hub for most farm techs, a transfer point between home and fields.

  Alvarez looked out over Novos station. It lacked the rotating towers of a residential orbiter, and it outsized one by an order of magnitude. The dish-shaped station was tilted vertically and had two sides: the dark side was flat and had a central docking bay. The other side was concave and faced the sun.

  Even though transit shuttles were the most common sized crafts to dock, the bay could handle the entire range of Falcon-class ships. Larger Atlas-class vessels had to dock on the exterior hangar bays located on the structure’s outer rim, which was thicker to accommodate the construction demands. Ship activity on the dark side resembled a bee hive’s alighting board, highly congested but synchronized. The dark side was only relatively dark; its Christmas-tree-of-lights were on continual display.

  The side facing the sun appeared tranquil, even serene by comparison. Its surface was a smooth, iridescent monolith of solar arrays that was unobstructed by ships or other shadow-casters. Maximized solar collection was its function and the reason for its slight concave design.

  Initial
structures in early space settlement resembled globes, cubes, or cylindrical shapes. A remnant of the latter design was still apparent in residential orbiters. But as time passed, designers began to realize the utility gained by building structures for maximum solar aspect. Novos and most other primary stations in Outer-Five settlements used a similar dish-shaped design.

  Laboratories and offices tended to require less contiguous space and were usually located near the center of the dish, the thinnest segment on the station. The main docking bay being at the center of Novos meant Alvarez didn’t have far to go.

  There was a murmur from the passengers, too disgruntled to be a cheer. Alvarez saw a craft exit the docking bay. It wasn’t a design he had seen before. Larger than a common Falcon-class ship, it barely squeezed through the bay doors. The insignia on its hull read NC Constance. The bloated ship awkwardly navigated out of the station, fired its main thrusters, and was away.

  Alvarez’s shuttle zoomed in to take its place. Passengers scurried out onto a platform. To everyone’s dismay, the transfer corridor was backed up with other travelers. Something had disrupted the normal, efficient flow of the security corridor at Novos.

  It must have been that ship, Alvarez thought. Fortunately, the science lab wasn’t far from the transit station and would only take Alvarez a couple of minutes to get there post transfer.

  He filed in line and joined the slow creep toward the security booth already in progress. The transfer agent in the booth wore the standard light-blue uniform. Her cap read N.T.A., which stood for Novos Transfer Agency. The cap’s short brim, a vestigial characteristic from days on earth, was an iconic expression of Outer-Five fashion. Unless you’re on Terra Firma- unlikely for Outer-Five settlers- there was little use in shading your eyes from above. Most middle-class to affluent settlers could afford auto-tint retinal lenses that adjusted quickly to diminish the intensity of direct rays. This and numerous other realities had slowly changed clothing styles of Outer-Five settlers, widening the gulf between them and the Statists.

  He watched the next shuttle come in. It must have been a direct relay, because the handful of passengers walked through the express check-in, bypassing the soul-crushing waiting game everyone else had to play. The corridor’s sole purpose was to slow people down, corralling them so that surv-tech had time to process faces and biomarkers.

  The agent monitoring her console for alarms or suspicious activity looked bored, her eyes glazed over. She worked as an over-glorified toll-booth operator. Security was a rouse. She was really there to charge passengers for their transit; Novos automatically deducted certs from their accounts. Any unauthorized passengers or visitors were stopped and processed by agents, an uncommon event.

  Certs were stock certificates issued by Novos Corp. They, along with certs from other settlements, functioned as currency. Their value floated against the value of other certs, scarce commodities, and the cost of various goods and services. Although corporate settlements issued the certs, they had no way of controlling their value. It was up to people to determine how many certs they were willing to pay. When corporate settlements issued too many certs, creating an imbalance between their currency and the underlying assets, they were supposed to represent, markets devalued their certs against other more stable currencies. There was no free lunch, and only through the creation of real value did corporate settlements flourish.

  When a settlement made unpopular or risky policy changes, certs often traded at discount to commodities and other corporate certs. Many people traded commodities such as precious metals or more utilitarian commodities like enriched isotopes that fueled reactors. But those were private transactions. The only officially recognized currency were Novos certs.

  Alvarez passed the security booth. He attempted to make eye contact with the agent, but she was in a hypnotic daze, staring at but not really seeing her screens and consoles. The passengers exiting the transfer corridor splintered into a thousand paths toward a thousand destinations. Past this point, movement was quick and unrestricted. Alvarez was in luck. In front of him was a PTU, personal transfer unit.

  PTUs were floating balls of glass with only enough room for one passenger. Novos’s central computer monitored the whereabouts and activities of all persons on the station and placed PTUs in anticipation of transport needs. People outnumbered PTUs, but the mainframe continuously integrated transfer data into the predictive algorithms. On the rare occasion a PTU wasn’t present, people could summon the nearest available unit with a couple strokes on their wrist console.

  PTUs used no motors, jets, or propulsion systems of any kind. Instead they achieved weightlessness and high-velocity travel by disrupting the artificial gravity system. Novos mainframe set their exact course, maneuvering around persons and objects more quickly than a human pilot could.

  The dumbed-down explanation given to Alvarez was that PTUs weren’t propelled at all. Technically, they fell—forward, backwards, up, down, any direction—as they glided on the surface between weightlessness and gravity. Alvarez was just glad they worked.

  Entering the PTU, Alvarez spoke his destination, “Science Lab – division three.” The translucent door closed behind him as he strapped himself in. He closed his eyes in anticipation of the dizzying trip, the blur of external objects, that would ensue. Unnoticed was the coffee floating above his unsealed mug. The unit zoomed forward, and the scalding hot brew splashed backwards against his neck and lab coat collar. Alvarez winced in pain, and then yelled out of frustration. Despite the translucence of the PTU, its speed provided anonymity—small comfort it was.

  The unit darted through the maze of vertical and horizontal tunnels. Arrival times varied depending on how proximate destinations were to the transfer corridor.

  By the time Alvarez put the lid back on the coffee and cleaned up his mess, he was at the science lab. He passed the reception desk and entered the main laboratory, which in division three was more office than lab. People’s heads—their backs turned—filled cubicles lining the walls.

  Alvarez covered his tracks, looking over his shoulder and trying to avoid detection. But it was no use. Waiting for him at his workstation was his boss, Bob Richards. Alvarez was thirty-five years old, and Richards—as far as Alvarez could tell—was in his late twenties. Both Alvarez’s age and, especially, his distinguished career as a mission colonel seemed to aggravate Richards’ insecurity. He over compensated by riding Alvarez’s tail for anything and everything he could.

  Alvarez tried being assertive. “I don’t know what happened. This morning I…”

  Richards interrupted, “Just because it’s your last day of work doesn’t mean you can come in late. And why don’t you wear a clean lab coat for once? You know you have to catch up on a lot of work, including data reports on the sensory probe.”

  “I’ll get right on it, sir.” Alvarez said. The last word caught in his throat. He didn’t want this job, and he certainly didn’t want to take orders from this middle-management dweeb.

  Why couldn’t he come in late on his last day? Alvarez wondered. He was done with this place, wasn’t he? Even an unexcused absence on his record wouldn’t amount to anything in the big scheme of things.

  Alvarez decided it was because of who he was, or at least who he told himself he was. He finished things, regardless of how hard or easy they were. He didn’t back out of his promises, and he didn’t cut corners on a job, even soul-sucking data processing positions like this one.

  Alvarez sat down to his cubicle, accessed his console, and started opening data files. The first he came to was from a sensory probe stationed in a far, outer edge of Novos territory. Unlike most cases, he enjoyed processing these. They were a link to his former life.

  The data-burst was from a probe named NC-108D. The raw data looked like it was broken or damaged. He tried what few tricks he knew to get it working but to no avail. Reluctantly, he hit the call button for Richards who was looking over people’s shoulders, making comments, and trying to substantia
te his existence. He stomped over to Alvarez as if he was being torn away from something important. In reality, he lived for moments like these—when he could make subordinates feel stupid. Despite the appearance of urgency, he was in no hurry. Alvarez knew Richards would enjoy every minute of this encounter. Richards had a half-eaten breakfast sandwich in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. Arriving at Alvarez’s workstation, he noisily slurped his coffee. He annoyed Alvarez at all levels.

  “What is it this time?” Richards asked.

  “It’s the data from the sensory probe. It seems incomplete.”

  “Did you reformat it via Telos before trying to open it?”

  “That’s the first thing I did.”

  “Did you check if the cohort is still entangled?” Richards said with a mouthful of sandwich.

  “Yes, it’s unaltered. All I can figure is that the data was corrupted on their end.”

  Richards took another bite. “I’m pretty sure that is a manned probe. Let’s see if there was a video feed.”

  Alvarez scanned through the list of files on his screen. “There it is,” he said. “It looks like some of it is still intact.”

  The console screen went black. Richards said, “I don’t get it. That should work.”

  “Listen,” Alvarez said. He turned up the volume.

  “Gospod’ Iisus Khristos Syn Bozhiy, pomiluy menya greshnogo,” said a voice.

  Richards, about to take another bite, put down his sandwich. “Is that the probe technician?” he asked.

  The voice repeated, “Gospod’ Iisus Khristos Syn Bozhiy, pomiluy menya greshnogo.”

  Richards swallowed hard his last bite of half-chewed food and said, “I’m calling Brennen.”

  Chapter 3

  Space-architect David Parker was aboard his newly finished vessel, the Constance. He was joined at the helm by a skeleton crew: a systems operator, navigator, and three sensory technicians. The navigator and operator flew the ship, and the three techs collected and analyzed performance data in real-time. Usually the rest of the ship would be staffed with mechanics and service technicians scattered about in various compartments. Today, it was empty. If they broke down, Novos was close enough to send help.