Chapter 1: The Terror of Childhood

Hi, I'm Archie. When I'm in trouble with mom I'm Archimedes Kephas Orestes. I'm Greek, don't ya know.

I was of the first generation to be born in the ship's creche. I live in a huge ship that mines the outer or Kuiper belt around Sol. We're so far out that it takes a telescope and a good eye to pick out our sun, Sol.

A few generations ago, just after the reactionless drive was discovered, corporations were formed and funded to exploit the asteroids. One team stretched a net of power and control cables around Miranda (the smallest moon of Uranus), attached drivers to it and flew the whole thing to the orbit of Mercury to make it out-gas and burn away all of the organics and volatiles near the surface. This compacted the outer shell of the planetoid quite a bit. The propulsion net was re-strung, then it was flown to L4, Earth's leading Lagrangian point There the surface was cleaned up and the whole thing was hollowed out with solar mirrors and plasma cutters, removing most of the rest of the organics. This also sealed the rock so that the atmosphere wouldn't escape through it. At least, that's what I was taught. Another mesh of cables was buried five kilometers beneath the surface to protect the propulsion system from debris or attacks. Then, after carving out the core and a lot of engineering to build the decks and everything in them, big tanker ships were sent to the Jovian satellites and Jupiter itself to mine the water and gasses. They weren't allowed to take metal, water or air from Earth; only soil, plants, animals and seeds.

That's why we're called the factory ship Miranda and we're owned by the Miranda corporation.

The refined metals and alloys that the ship processes are transported to the huge factory complexes at L5. All the big polluting industries were forced off-planet once the cost of getting up and down the gravity well had dropped by a factor of roughly ten thousand to about a dollar a kilo.

A lot of the ship's construction engineers submitted their resumes to be considered for berths aboard the ship. After all, they'd already proved that they could handle themselves in the environment. My dad, Theo, and my mom, Adriana were hired on as crew members to help monitor the ecology and the atmosphere. I've learned more about the ship's infrastructure than most just from listening to them talk. Our power comes from four rings of eight lithium fusion reactors. Our atmospheric gasses are stored in separate dewars that were cryogenically fractionally distilled. I talked them into giving me a tour of the engineering spaces where it's done. They're huge! They had to spin the tanks to get the fractions to separate out when they were first building the ship, before she was spun up to give us 'gravity'. Well, it isn't really gravity, but if it burns wood and makes smoke, I'm calling it a fire.

It was all quite terrifying, at least to me. We were constantly living on the edge of disaster. Just one misplaced decimal, one forgotten variable and a major subsystem that we depended on for our lives would kill us with no hope of recovery. Everything was so closely linked that a cascade failure was a real possibility.

One part of the ship's design was incorporated to combat just that problem.

The ship is organized in a hundred and eighty tube-shaped decks surrounding the central core, each of which is broken into eight wedges by air tight bulkhead. The volumes are further broken by forty more bulkheads across the central core. That was done to give engineering better atmospheric control and to isolate industries and processes that can't help but create pollution. The air monitoring and remediation systems are separate for each air domain. If it weren't for the concatenated domains that were needed to accommodate the docking core, the huge refineries, the atmospheric gas reservoirs and the gas fractioning equipment we'd have 57,600 individual atmospheric domains aboard ship, excluding the ship's boats and the bridge. That took a lot of automation and a lot of atmospheric engineers to provide over-watch on all the systems. We also had thirty four fusion generators, again excluding those on the ship's boats. We ran one power engineer for four fusors and the power grids were isolated between the generator domains. One separate fusor was reserved for the bridge and computer core while another one powered the docking bay complex. We had lots of entire air domains shut down, in maintenance mode because we lacked enough people on board to populate them.

Some of the larger air domains were organic CO2 sinks and oxygen generators. We grew our own food. Soil chemists regularly took samples to keep the fields fertile. Some entire air domains were planted in flax or grasses and shrubs so people could have 'green' vacations. You wouldn't think that we'd have wetlands on a space ship, but we did. Several of 'em, actually. They were kept isolated by doubled air-locks to keep the bugs from getting loose. Nobody wanted a cricket-infested ship. We had orchards of dwarf trees growing for fruit, nuts and citrus, but they weren't bearing yet.

It took a special kind of person to put up with all those chickens scattered in farms across a few domains. The farms were separated in case of a fast-spreading disease took a flock. The goats had to be carefully watched or they'd get into anything they could. Again, the farms were isolated by doubled air-locks to stop the possible spread of mites and other parasites. Everyone got decontaminated when coming out of them.

We also had huge illuminated water tanks on board that had been inoculated with algae and various selected micro-fauna from rotifers up to shrimp, krill and fish. We harvested a lot of our dietary protein from them.

The boat bay is at the rotational center of the stern. From there a tunnel leads up the core and several special purpose bays are attached to that. Some hold our mining ships, some hold our gas tankers and some are materials bunkers where the mining ships deposit their finds or the finished metals are stored. They've discovered that there are big natural 3-D sheets of asteroids that hold unusual concentrations of heavier elements. They're called drifts. That's where the mining boats concentrate their harvesting.

When I was eight I had to pass several tests to be let out of the creche. They called it achieving citizenship. I had to learn shipboard coordinates, intercom protocols, micro-gee acrobatics, how to put on a pressure suit in ninety seconds, what to do in a lifeboat drill, how to read a sensor panel and how to report a sensor alert. The kids that didn't learn by their ninth birthday were taken off ship. We didn't know where they went. We just hoped that they weren't dumped in the big empty as failures. It was never talked about and we never asked questions. They could always lie.