"Then you now have a choice. The dragon's nanonic technology will be introduced to Earth at some time. Do you want him to be the one who delivers it, or me?"
She gave a bitter, brittle laugh. "What's the difference?"
"Look at me," he said. When she stared directly at him, he said, "I am the moderate voice. I will not force it on people. I will not allow it to be forced on people. It will be subject to a democratic process, whether stakeholding or classical. But whatever the outcome, change will come; that is always the consequence of new knowledge. How it comes is now up to you. Today you and I are opponents because of circumstance. Do not let that color your judgment of me."
"What, exactly, are you asking for?"
"I want to know where they are both going, where the dragon's homeworld is. I want Prime to break through this communications block so I can divert a spaceplane to Memu Bay airport and take me directly up to a starship. I have to go after them. I have to prevent my clone sibling from being the one who acquires this knowledge."
* * *
Lawrence and Denise spent most of the first week working on repairs and removing junk, aided by a small squadron of Prime-managed robots. Life support wheels one and two were slowly spun up again, providing the Koribu with a balanced precession. One, they ignored completely. Two, they attempted to repressurize. It took them three days just to secure pressure bulkheads. Open doors had been badly damaged by the explosive decompression. Hinges had twisted. Rim seals were ruptured. Debris clogged the rails. Power and data conduits had been shredded by flying fragments. Each of the doors had to be examined for damage and somehow secured in place. The escape hatches that had been blown into space were patched with metal or composite sheets epoxied into place. Eventually, their little habitable domain expanded to cover a quarter of the wheel, with the bridge in the center. One spoke was also pressurized, allowing them up to the hub without needing to suit up. Not that they used the axial corridor much. If anything did malfunction in the compression drive, it would be the robots that performed the repair.
With the pressure restored, they repaired the air filtration and scrubber units, replaced fan motors, cleaned out the heat exchanger and mended pipes. Replenishing the oxygen and nitrogen was no problem. The Koribu's reserve tanks could resupply enough atmosphere to support twenty thousand people for two months. Now they just had to sustain two people for 104 days. Water was equally abundant So much so they never even considered fixing the recycler and purifier mechanism.
Koribu's food stock was made up entirely of sterile meal-packs, food that was produced entirely devoid of bacteria to prevent it from decaying. They had enough to last a thousand years. Denise hated it. "There's no taste," she complained the first day. They were back in the spaceplane, taking a break while the robots finished welding and insulating cryogenic pipes along the spoke.
Lawrence checked her pack. She'd chosen Chateaubriand steak with bearnaise sauce. The hydration valve was preset, so she couldn't have used the wrong amount of water to saturate it before she put it in the microwave slot. "It'll just be freefall pooling," he told her. "Fluid buildup in your head plays hell with your taste receptors. Try squirting some more salt solution into it."
"It's not just the taste, it's the texture, too." She pulled an array of mealpacks out of a box, sending them whirling across the little cabin to bounce off the walls. "Look at these. Each one a different food, and all with exactly the same consistency. It's like lukewarm mashed potato in twenty colors."
"Right. Sorry about that." Only another 103 days of this to go. When the wheel section was finally repressurized, Lawrence stood in the bridge compartment and cautiously unsealed his Skin. He sniffed at the cool air. "Sweet Fate, no problem with freefall pooling here."
Denise took her face mask off and grimaced. "What did that?"
"Let's go find out."
They never did track the stench down to a single source. Coolant fluid that had frozen was now sloshing about, slowly evaporating. The waste recycler was a big culprit, which they solved by closing the valves and having the robots spray the whole mechanism in foam sealant. Food scraps that the crew were eating had partially boiled in the vacuum before freezing; now they were truly rotten. Lawrence also suspected rodents and insects, decomposing away behind the wall and ceiling paneling.
All of it had to be cleared away: the fluids mopped up, biodegradable items taken through an airlock and dumped in nearby compartments that were still in a vacuum. It kept them busy for a while.
Lawrence claimed the captain's small suite of rooms. He took out every article of Marquis Krojen's clothes, all the personal items, erasing his identity. Then he went through the other cabins in search of clothes that fit. A lot had been sucked out into space, but there were enough to last a couple of months before he had to start thinking about washing them. Denise moved into a cabin on the other side of the bridge.
After the first week Lawrence began reviewing the multimedia library. He didn't have much else to do. Prime and the robots were perfectly capable of maintaining the few pieces of environmental equipment necessary to keep their section of the wheel functional. He had reactivated a sustainer cabinet for his Skin. Not that he expected to wear it again. That kept chugging along quietly without his intervention. The compression drive was operating efficiently, as were its tokamaks. There was no navigation required. No daily inspection of the ship. And no view.
At first he started choosing music to play, racking the volume up loud. It was kind of eerie, two people alone in a ship built for over twenty thousand. The music went partway to filling the emptiness for him while he exercised away in the gym to keep his body in trim. Then he and Denise started arguing about the tracks he played. He refused to let it get out of hand. He'd acquired plenty of experience with grudges building amid small groups in confined quarters; she with her rustic upbringing had no idea about the compromises that had to be made. So after that she chose half of them, and he kept quiet about her taste.
Even spending three or four hours a day working out left him with a lot of time to kill. He went back to the library and began accessing the i's. It was something he hadn't really done since leaving Amethi. At first he went for the comedies, new and classic, but there's only so long you can keep laughing at situations that have no real bearing on your own life. After that he immersed himself in action adventures, finally giving up on them when they became idiotic and repetitive. Dramas were generally too harrowing. He guessed that his current circumstances must have heightened his emotional state, leaving him too susceptible to the melodramatic traumas that characters involved him in. Science fiction he refused point-blank. Despite the huge temptation, that really would be premature. He would see Flight: Horizon again. But not here, and not alone. So he butterflied between classic plays and travelogue documentaries and historical event reenactments. Though more often than not he'd delve into the dragon's scattered memories of the Ring Empire and other strands of galactic history, already old when Earth's dinosaurs were young.