Hal's leer grew broader.
Some of them managed to sleep for small periods during the rest of the flight. It wasn't easy. There was always noise, if not in their compartment, then from others, drifting incessantly through the ship like an audio-only poltergeist. People flailed about the cabin, sucking noisily on the water hoses, and microwaving snacks, then bitching about how they tasted of nothing. The toilets were used, which always ended in exclamations of misery, and the small cubicles let out a smell each time the doors were folded back. Who had the worst-smelling farts was an ongoing topic of conversation. Nic Fuccio kept score. Those who couldn't sleep kept their eyes shut from exhaustion, shifting around fitfully in the tiny gravity field. At some stage, almost everyone shouted at Dennis to give them tranks. He refused.
Lawrence nearly cheered out loud when the crap movies finally ended and the Moray's captain showed them an external camera view. The Koribu was five kilometers distant, surrounded by a shoal of smaller support and service ships.
Even now, after twenty years in strategic security and flying to eleven different star systems, Lawrence still got an adrenaline buzz from seeing the huge starships. Like every other starship still flying, the Koribu was designed as a colonist carrier. Not that there were any other designs—even the explorer craft that had once probed interstellar space around the Sol system had the same layout. Only the size varied.
Their shape, and to some degree, form, was constrained by the nature of the compression drive. Although FTL capability was a scientific and technological breakthrough of the highest order, it didn't have the kind of commercial viability Earth's corporations and financiers would have liked. The development team had originally talked about starflights taking the same time as intercontinental aircraft journeys. A more honest analogy would have been with sailing ships. Like a portal, the FTL drive generated a wormhole by compressing the fabric of space-time with a negative energy density effect. As such an energy inverter consumed a colossal amount of power simply to open a wormhole, and the only practical source was a fusion generator, the subsequent wormhole was extremely short in comparison to the distance between stars. That wasn't a technological problem, as the starship flew down the wormhole it was creating, so the drive would simply redefine the endpoint, moving it ever forward. Although a valid solution, it also stretched out the flight time.
Modern starships could make the Centauri run in a week, giving them a speed of just over half a light-year per day.
The Koribu was such a ship. She had been intended as a colonist carrier forty-two years ago when she was being assembled in one of Centralis's freeflying shipyards. Cost structuring by Z-B's accountancy AS had given her an effective range of forty light-years. With that as their mandate, the designers had housed her energy inverter in a drum-shaped superstructure two hundred meters in diameter that made up the entire forward third. Seventy percent of its volume was given over to the eight fusion generators required to provide the massive quantities of power that the drive consumed, an engineering reality that explained why the outer surface was a mosaic of thermal radiators, mirror-bright silver rectangles five meters long, throwing off the phenomenal heat-loading produced by the generators' support systems during flight.
Because of the debilitating effect of freefall on human physiology, especially on twenty-seven thousand untrained colonists over ten weeks, some kind of gravity field had to be provided for them and the crew. It came in the simplest fashion there was: six life support wheels, fat doughnuts thirty meters wide and two hundred in diameter. They were arranged in pairs, counter-rotating around an axial shaft to balance precession. Their hulls, in common with all spacecraft operating outside the protection of Earth's magnetic field, were blank, without ports or markings; just the standard coating of light gray foam rucked from particle impacts and bleached from the light of different stars.
Adapting them for strategic security transport was an easy refit. Z-B turned common rooms and lounges into gyms and sim-tac theaters; some dormitories were taken out of commission and used as Skin suit depots, while the remaining dormitories were unchanged. Between them, they could billet twenty thousand squaddies.
Behind the life support wheels came the cargo section, a broad open cylinder section built up from a honeycomb lattice of girders, which formed deep hexagonal silos. They had once carried modules of industrial machinery and essential supplies that the colonists needed to maintain their settlements. Modifying the silos for asset-realization missions was a simple matter of changing the hold-down clamp designs.
Now, seven orbital transfer ships held station three hundred meters away, encircling the Koribu. One-man engineering shuttles glided backward and forward between them and the starship with halo bursts of green and blue flame, carrying the Third Fleet's lander pods, which they slotted down into waiting silos. At one end of the honeycomb, silos had been merged to form long, deep alcoves. They contained space-planes, the familiar sleek profile of Xianti nose cones just visible rising above the shadows.
Koribu's final stage was its main reaction drive, five direct fusion rockets in the shape of elongated cones over three hundred meters long, ribbed with a filigree of pipes and cables. Big spherical deuterium tanks were plugged into the stress structure at the head of the cones, along with ancillary support equipment and ten small tokamaks that provided power for the main engine ignition sequence.
The Moray docked just ahead of the life support section, nuzzling up to a tunnel that had extended out beyond the star-ship's body. Lawrence had to wait for another twenty minutes listening to the clamor of other platoons banging their way through the orbital-transfer ship's habitation cabins and into the tunnel. Finally, they were given clearance to disembark.
It was a long trek through the starship's freefall corridors to the rotating transfer toroid of their wheel. Inside the top of the wheel spoke was an elevator that was barely high enough to take an adult. They all aligned themselves, tucking the boots into the floor hoops. The G-force built as they descended, much to Lewis's relief. They stopped on the middle of the three decks occupying the wheel itself, where the gravity was an eighth Earth-standard. Enough to settle their stomachs and restore normal circulation patterns. But with it came a disconcerting spinning sensation, as if the decking were about to heave over. They emerged from the elevator, reaching out to steady themselves against the wall.
Every time he came down into one of the wheels, Lawrence swore he wouldn't let the effect trick him again. Every time his body promised him he was about to flip over. He gingerly took his hand away from the wall. "Okay, I know it feels like we're washing about. Ignore it. You're all down and stable. Let's go find our quarters."
He set off down the corridor. After ten paces he had to move to one side to avoid Simon Roderick and his retinue of senior managerial staff. The Third Fleet's board representative was so busy snapping out instructions to a harried aide he never even noticed the platoon. Lawrence kept his own face impassive. He'd followed the investigation Roderick and Adul Quan had launched in the wake of the bar fight in Kuranda. His Prime program had loaded unobtrusively into the base's datapool, passively observing the surge of traffic shunting between AS programs, the information requests to skyscan. Their inquiries had withered away after a couple of days, and the police had never turned up anything. Even so, it was a shock coming face-to-face with a board representative who'd taken such a keen interest in his off-base activities.