2193 - Medium-class Freighter

THE STATION LOOMED AHEAD, slowly spinning to maintain a comfortable Mars-like artificial gravity environment in the habitation modules on its outer rim.  The approach from above mid-deck, almost parallel to the spin axis, gave them a view that reminded Karen of the spinning tops used to illustrate angular momentum in Childhood Education.  The station could accommodate about three hundred people, but it was rarely at more than two-thirds capacity. 

Designed as a primary base station during the mining boom almost twenty years prior, it was strategically parked between Mars and the main asteroid belt in a delicate gravitational balance at the second Lagrange point in the Mars-sun system. Technically, it was in a periodic Lissajous trajectory that orbited the Lagrange point gravitational null, but only navigators were pedantic about it.  The only thing that really mattered was that the station orbited the sun at the same rate as Mars, keeping it near the colony while providing easy access to the main belt.

Lagrange Station Two, or LS2, served as a central repository and refinery for materials mined in other parts of the asteroid belt. When the Space Industry and Mining Corporation cemented its monopoly, they built two smaller sister stations at Lagrange points four and five, both sharing the orbit with Mars.  SIMCo named them Athens and Troy, after the asteroid groups collected there—sixty degrees ahead of and behind Mars in their trek around the sun. Karen was beyond grateful she didn’t have to base from one of those dumps as she admired the pattern of gleaming floodlights illuminating LS2’s primary ring.

Just over two hundred meters across, the primary ring was divided into individual modules measuring three by five meters wide and three meters tall.  Living quarters were typically single units, with a few combined into VIP double suites, all situated on the outer perimeter where the artificial gravity was the highest.  By rotating almost two revs per minute, the station maintained a comfortable Mars-like gravity of three-point-seven meters per second, just less than forty percent of the gravity their bodies were designed to handle on Earth. Since weightlessness made eating, drinking and exercise annoying, the lounge and recreation facilities were also located at the outer edge.

"Impressive, isn’t it?" Karen asked her crew mate, tossing the observation casually over her shoulder toward the viewport where Jakki had settled. 

A deep space navigator wasn’t needed inside the ten-klick bubble, so Jakki was free to enjoy the view as they approached. She had her wrist intertwined with the portal grip strap, bobbing around slightly as Karen maneuvered the ship.  "I expected more antennas.  Isn’t LS2 supposed to house the largest data center off Mars?  I was hoping to have a good connection to the Library once we get on board."

Karen smiled to herself. Young people these days couldn’t stand to be unplugged for a minute. Her eyes were focused on the hologram in front of her, but having spent almost a third of her life at the station she had it practically memorized inside and out.  She kept both hands on the spherical control ball, warm to her touch now, and continued the conversation. "See those towers situated around the outer ring, and the ones along the spokes that get shorter toward the center?  It’s a sparse array.  The entire station is essentially a giant parabolic dish."

"Wow, I see it.  That’s huge!" Karen didn’t need to see her face to know Jakki’s eyes were wide with excitement.  Viewing the approach to LS2 for the first time wasn’t easy to forget. "So, no problem with connection speeds I suppose."

"Don’t worry," Karen added with humored sarcasm, "you’ll be able to access all the funny cat videos you want soon enough." 

"Hey!" Jakki exclaimed, mocking a hurtful tone. "I think they are adorable."  She paused, her focus shifted by a tangent thought. "I wonder if there are any animals still alive in the wild. Back on Earth, I mean."

"I don’t know if the situation there is quite as bad as they say," Karen replied. Her open skepticism of the Histories always seemed to put Jakki on edge, but it was time she started hearing the unfiltered truth. She’d run headlong into it soon enough now that she was out of training, so Karen figured she would at least make it a little easier for her. "Some of what I’ve read seems a little extreme."

"What do you mean?" Jakki responded, with slightly narrowed eyes as though her confidence in Karen was beginning to waver. "The whole surviving population has gone primitive.  Nothing grows anymore, the animals have been wiped out through hunting or starvation, and everyone left lives hand to mouth on what they can scavenge!"

Karen wasn’t surprised by the classic textbook response. It seemed the Education Center propaganda had really taken hold. "Look," Karen began carefully, "I’m not discounting what happened. But the human race survived that way for thousands of years, facing ice ages and lots of natural disasters, plus two previous world-wide wars.  Don’t you think they would have recovered a bit in the last hundred years or so?"  Karen hesitated, trying to gauge Jakk’s reaction before continuing to nudge her beyond the safety and comfort of her youth. "Do you think the mining industry grew up out of nowhere?" Karen knew the party line on that one too, so she planted another small seed of truth. "The lunar colony by itself wouldn’t have had the resources."

The slightest of wrinkles began to form in Jakk’s forehead, but she kept her gaze focused out the viewport. Karen decided she’d done enough for now and turned her attention back to the ship, which she’d been flying almost on instinct the past few minutes. Most pilots relied solely on instrument readings during manual flight.  There was a lot of information to take in at once, and many pilots were slow to process it all. Karen was better than most due to a simple secret—she tightened the seat restraints.  Although it was less comfortable, she could feel the slightest rotation of the ship around her. She realized early in training this gave her an edge over the other rookies.  While they were still trying to make sense of angular rate displays, Karen was flying circles around them.

Karen took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, prepping herself to repeat her successful performance earlier in the sim while trying to ignore the sweat on her palms. Their approach vector brought the ship in along the top deck, almost directly aligned with the station’s spin axis.  LS2 had been formed by pulling molten raw materials from the asteroid belt through a plasma oven extruder, and the glare from sunlight off its smooth surface was almost difficult to bear at this angle.  There were four docking stations on the other side of the main ring, equally spaced around a central pillar between the ring and a large cargo hold at the far end.  The entire section below the ring was de-spun, maintaining a zero-g environment for easy docking and cargo transfer. 

Just a little farther now. Pitch over, yaw left.  Null the roll rates.  Jakk was right—the ship was way overloaded, its movement like a lumbering beast.  If her bribe had worked, docking station three would be vacant. The ship finally cleared the main ring, and Karen started setting up the final attitude maneuver needed to line up with the docks when she noticed the luxury cruiser in her way.

"Dammit!"

Jakki glanced away from the viewport, her right eyebrow raised in prelude to the question that followed. "Captain? Everything all right?" She was obviously still used to the standard language protocols enforced during training.

"Someone parked in my spot."  

"You have a spot?  I thought it was first-come, first-serve."

"Well, there was supposed to be an arrangement."  Karen tugged back on the smooth control sphere, arresting their approach rate so she could think for a minute.  The ship’s autocomm had negotiated their arrival with dock control, and there had been no indication they were full.  "Let me see what’s going on."

Karen opened a communication channel in the short-range frequency band.  "Dock control, this is freighter zero-six-two-one dash nine-seven requesting port status.  Over."

After a brief pause, a male voice crackled to life over the ship’s intercom.  "Miss Conn!  Welcome back.  How was your trip?"

"It’s Captain Conn," she replied, mild frustration putting a slight edge on her tone.  "I didn’t finish top of my class just to keep using family titles."

"Apologies, Captain."  After a brief pause, the voice continued, "Port status...
all docking stations occupied."

Karen’s grip on the control sphere tightened, her lips forming a thin frustrated line at the response. "I expected there to be a vacancy when I arrived," she said in an even tone, choosing her words carefully on the open comm channel.

"I’m sorry for the misunderstanding, Captain," replied the tinny voice. "Naturally, I thought you were on the Mayor’s transport when he arrived yesterday."

"He’s here?" Karen’s voice cracked for a panicked moment. "On LS2?"  Great. Her day just got much more complicated.

"Yes ma’am, er, Captain.  It was a surprise to us as well.  Normally visits of state are arranged ahead of time." The voice continued, apologetically, "If I had known you were traveling separately, I would have sent parking orbit instructions when you first entered the bubble."

Karen let out an audible sigh, her shoulders slumping a fraction as she accepted her fate.  "Fine. Go ahead and send the coordinates."  After a brief pause, she added "I’ll arrange for cargo unloading later, so just send the personnel shuttle." She needed time to figure out what to do with that unregistered cargo.

"Shuttle departing now.  It will be waiting for you at the parking coordinates. Dock control out."

Karen sat motionless for a moment, considering her options.  In spite of the unexpected difficulty, the most stressful part of her day was still ahead.  Her father expected so little of her—why did being seen with him in public get under her skin?  It might be that he only invited her when he needed to make a grand entrance.  It might be that he’d spend the rest of the night talking politics without another glance in her direction.  Or possibly that he always had a young woman on his other arm, where her mother should have been.  Still, as distant as he was, he’d provided for her in most other ways.  One couldn’t have it all, she supposed.  Maybe she’d try something different with her hair to see if he noticed.

Next Chapter: Chapter 5