Part 7 (1/2)
We raced round Jupiter's pale orange cloudscape, shedding delta-V as captain Harrison Dominy Raleigh aligned us on a course for Ganymede. Eight hours later when we were coasting up away from the gas giant, I was asked up to the bridge. Up is a relative term on a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p which wasn't accelerating, and the bridge is at the center of the life-support section. There wasn't a lot of instrumentation available to the three duty officers, just some fairly sophisticated consoles with holographic windows and an impressive array of switches. The AI actually ran Kuranda, while people simply monitored its performance and that of the primary systems.
Our captain, Harrison Dominy Raleigh, was floating in front of the main sensor console, his right foot Velcroed to the decking.
”Do we have a problem?” I asked.
”Not with the s.h.i.+p,” he said. ”This is strictly your area.”
”Oh?” I anch.o.r.ed myself next to him, trying to comprehend the display graphics. It wasn't easy, but then I don t function very well in low gravity situations. Fluids of every kind migrate to my head, which in my case brings on the most awful headaches. My stomach is definitely not designed to digest floating globules of food. And you really would think that after seventy-five years of people traveling through s.p.a.ce that someone would manage to design a decent freefall toilet. On the plus side, I'm not too nauseous during the aerial maneuvers that replace locomotion, and I am receptive to the anti-wasting drugs developed to counter calcium loss in human bones. It's a balance which I can readily accept as worthwhile in order to see Jupiter with my own eyes.
The captain pointed to a number of glowing purple spheres in the display, each one tagged by numerical icons. ”The Caesars have orbited over twenty sensor satellites around Ganymede. They provide a full radar coverage out to eighty thousand miles. We're also picking up similar emissions from the other major moons here. No doubt their pa.s.sive scans extend a great deal further.”
”I see. The relevance being?”
”n.o.body arrives at any of the moons they've claimed without them knowing about it. I'd say they're being very serious about their settlement rights.”
”We never made our voyage a secret. They have our arrival time down to the same decimal place as our own AI.”
”Which means the next move is ours. We arrive at Ganymede injection in another twelve hours.”
I looked at those purple points again. We were the first non-Caesar s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p to make the Jupiter trip. The Caesars sent a major mission of eight s.h.i.+ps thirteen years ago; which the whole world watched with admiration right up until commander Ricardo Savill Caesar set his foot on Ganymede and announced to his ma.s.sive television audience that he was claiming not only Ganymede, but Jupiter and all of its satellites for the Caesar family. It was extraordinary, not to say a complete violation of our entire world's rationalist ethos. The legal maneuvering had been going on ever since, as well as negotiations amongst the most senior level of family representatives in an attempt to get the Caesars to repudiate the claim. It was a standing joke for satirical show comedians, who got a laugh every time about excessive greed and routines about one person one moon. But in all that time, the Caesars had never moved from their position that Jupiter and its natural satellites now belonged to them. What they had never explained in those thirteen years is why they wanted it.
And now here we were. My brief wasn't to challenge or antagonize them, but to establish some precedents. ”I want you to open a communication link to their primary settlement,” I told the captain. ”Use standard orbital flight control protocols, and inform them of our intended injection point. Then ask them if there is any problem with that. Treat it as an absolutely normal everyday occurrence ... we're just one more s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p arriving in orbit. If they ask what we're doing here: we're a scientific mission and I would like to discuss a schedule of geophysical investigation with their Mayor. In person.”
Harrison Dominy Raleigh gave me an uncomfortable grimace. ”You're sure you wouldn't like to talk to them now?”
”Definitely not. Achieving a successful Ganymede orbit is not something important enough to warrant attention from a family representative.”
”Right then.” He flipped his headset mike down, and instructed the AI on establis.h.i.+ng a communication link.
It wasn't difficult. The Caesars were obviously treading as carefully as we were. Once the Kuranda was in orbit, the captain requested s.p.a.ceport clearance for our ground to orbit shuttle, which was granted without comment.
The ride down was an uneventful ninety minutes, if you were to discount the view from the small, heavily-s.h.i.+elded ports. Jupiter at a quarter crescent hung in the sky above Ganymede. We sank down to a surface of fawn-colored ice pocked by white impact craters and great sulci, cl.u.s.ters of long grooves slicing through the grubby crust, creating broad river-like groupings of corrugations.
For some reason I thought the landscape more quiet and dignified than that of Earth's moon. I suppose the icescape's palette of dim pastel colors helped create the impression, but there was definitely an ancient solemnity to this small world.
New Milan was a couple of degrees north of the equator, in an area of flat ice pitted with small newish craters. An undisciplined sprawl of emerald and white lights covering nearly five square miles. In thirteen years the Caesars had built themselves quite a substantial community here. All the buildings were freestanding igloos whose base and lower sections were constructed from some pale yellow silicate concrete, while the top third was a transparent dome. As the shuttle descended toward the landing field I began to realize why the lights I could see were predominately green. The smallest igloo was fifty yards in diameter, with the larger ones reaching over two hundred yards; they all had gardens at their center illuminated by powerful lights underneath the gla.s.s.
After we landed, a bus drove me over to the administration center in one of the large igloos. It was the Mayor, Ricardo Savill Caesar himself, who greeted me as I emerged from the airlock. He was a tall man, with the slightly flaccid flesh of all people who had been in a low-gravity environment for any length of time. He wore a simple gray and turquoise one-piece tunic with a mauve jacket, standard science mission staff uniform. But on him it had become a badge of office, bestowing that extra degree of authority. I could so easily imagine him as the direct descendant of some First Era Centurion commander.
”Welcome,” he said warmly. ”And congratulations on your flight. From what we've heard, the Kuranda is an impressive s.h.i.+p.”
”Thank you,” I said. ”I'd be happy to take you round her later.”
”And I'll enjoy accepting that invitation. But first it's my turn. I can't wait to show off what we've done here.”
Thus my tour began; I believe there was no part of that igloo into which I didn't venture at some time during the next two hours. From the life support machinery in the lower levels to precarious walkways strung along the carbon reinforcement strands of the transparent dome. I saw it all. Quite deliberately, of course. Ricardo Savill Caesar was proving they had no secrets, no sinister apparatus under construction. The family had built themselves a self-sustaining colony, capable of expanding to meet the growing population. Nothing more. What I was never shown nor told, was the reason why.
After waiting as long as politeness required before claiming I had seen enough we wound up in Ricardo Savill Caesar's office. It was on the upper story of the habitation section, over forty feet above the central arboretum's lawn, yet the tops of the trees were already level with his window. I could recognize several varieties of pine and willow, but the low gravity had distorted their runaway growth, giving them peculiar swollen trunks and fat leaves.
Once I was sitting comfortably on his couch he offered me some coffee from a delicate china pot.
”I have the beans flown up and grind them myself,” he said. ”They're from the family's estates in the Caribbean. Protein synthesis might have solved our food supply problems, but there are some textures and tastes which elude the formulators.”
I took a sip, and pursed my lips in appreciation. ”That's good. Very good.”
”I'm glad. You're someone I think I'd like to have on my side.”
”Oh?”
He sat back and grinned at me. ”The other families are unhappy to say the least about our settlement claim on this system. And you are the person they send to test the waters. That's quite a responsibility for any representative. I would have loved to sit in on your briefing sessions and hear what was said about us terrible Caesars.”
”Your head would start spinning after the first five hours,” I told him, dryly. ”Mine certainly did.”
”So what is it you'd like your redoubtable s.h.i.+p and crew to do while they're here?”
”It is a genuine scientific mission,” I told him. ”We'd like to study the bacterial life you've located in the moons here. Politics of settlement aside, it is tremendously important, especially after Mars turned out to be so barren.”
”I certainly have no objection to that. Are we going to be shown the data?”
”Of course.” I managed to sound suitably shocked. ”Actually, I was going to propose several joint
expeditions. We did bring three long-duration science station vehicles with us that can be deployed on any of the lunar surfaces.”
Ricardo Savill Caesar tented his forefingers, and rested his chin on the point. ”What kind of duration do
these vehicles have?”
”A couple of weeks without resupply. Basically they're just large caravans we link up to a tractor unit.
They're fully mobile.”
”And you envisage dispatching a mission to each moon?”
”Yes. We're also going to drop a number of probes into Jupiter to investigate its structural composition.”
”Interesting. How far down do you believe they can reach?”