As she moved upward toward the lower-numbered levels — the engineering information center, to her surprise, lay far from Bruno Colombo’s office and close to the axis of Sky City — she left a message for Seth Parsigian. He was to meet her in an hour unless she called and canceled. The limited information in her Argos data base confirmed Seth’s position, but it did not indicate that he knew anything about space activities. Rather the opposite. Like Maddy, he was ground-based. It added to the mystery of his presence. Why would Gordy Rolfe send his Special Projects head to look for a murderer out here?
Maddy did not consider calling Earth for answers. Gordy played his games at multiple levels, and he delighted in withholding information from his staff — even information that would help them. He also kept his projects tightly compartmentalized. Maddy might have guessed that Gordy had other operatives working on Sky City, just as he had them in every major facility and government on Earth. They were engaged in everything from bribery (certain, from Maddy’s personal knowledge) to assassination (rumored, but, knowing Gordy, she was willing to believe it). She would learn of no other Argos Group members on Sky City unless, like Seth Parsigian, they broke Gordy Rolfe’s rules and identified themselves.
She had almost reached level zero. The low-gee environment of Sky City’s axis added physical discomfort to Maddy’s mental uncertainties. Her stomach still did not approve of free fall, and she had no idea what she would say to John Hyslop. The last time they were together she had fallen apart and practically wept on his shoulder. He hadn’t seemed to mind, though if Gordy Rolfe had been there he would have fired her on the spot.
The sign beside the door of the chamber ahead stated in crude block capitals: information control, authorized engineering personnel only. So far as Maddy could tell, no one on Sky City paid any attention to instructions like that. Security, even after all the murders, was nonexistent in this part of the city. Also nonexistent, it seemed, was any interest in decor. Out on the perimeter Bruno Colombo occupied an office where walls, furniture, and carpets were exquisitely balanced in style and tone. Here on the axis the paint and fittings had apparently been selected and installed by a color-blind monkey.
Engineers. What was she doing, letting herself get involved with one?
She floated through the open door and looked inside. Good. John was there. But he was not alone. Half a dozen people sat with him in reclining chairs. They were all staring at a three-dimensional hologram of Sky City. The display, ten feet across, was slowly turning around its central axis. The one-minute rotation period matched the leisurely spin of the structure itself. Maddy had a full view of the whole space city for the first time. The wide, flat pill of the disk seemed solid and substantial, in contrast to the delicate axial spikes that connected the main body of Sky City to the power-generation plant on one side and the shield simulation chamber on the other.
Maddy recognized two of the other people in the room with John: Will Davis, the lanky, skeptical Welshman whom John had introduced her to three days ago, and Lauren Stansfield, the cold-eyed woman with the antique hair comb and the queenly walk, whom Maddy had met and probably deeply shocked when she was drugged to the gills on Asfanil. Maddy’s minimal self-control on that occasion must have made a disastrous first impression.
Confirmation: Lauren Stansfield greeted Maddy with a welcoming scowl. John Hyslop gave her a single puzzled glance and went on talking. “Sky City was designed as a free-orbiting structure. So naturally, nothing more than station-keeping movements to maintain the right geosynch orbit were ever anticipated. We’re facing an unprecedented situation. We can attach mirror-matter boosters at any or all of these places.” He did something to the panel on his lap, and dozens of flashing points of yellow appeared on the hologram. “We already have attitude control engines at each of those sites, so the new installation ought to be easy. But we’re dealing with a structure that masses millions of tons, and it has to travel over a hundred thousand kilometers.” He turned to a slim girl who seemed to be in her early teens. “Amanda, did you check the accelerations?”
Amanda Corrigan. The computer specialist on John Hyslop’s old team. Skinny, angular, no figure. Just a kid. Nothing to do with the Aten asteroid project. Why was she with John now? Why were any of them here? Including John. Had they asked him for help? What he was talking about had nothing to do with his current assignment.
Amanda Corrigan was nodding. She, too, had given Maddy a single glance, then ignored her. “I did a worst case, then a most probable case. I’ve put both of them in the simulation files, so anybody who wants to can take a look. One open question is the travel time. Torrance and Will think it will need at least four weeks to install a low-intensity beam and pulse generator on Cusp Station, and until those are working there’s no point in computing anything. Also, John and Lauren estimate that it will take a couple of weeks to install the thrustors here. So for purposes of analysis I assumed a three-week travel time.”
The others all nodded in agreement. Maddy was bewildered. It was as though she had been transported to a foreign country where she understood not one word of the language. Move Sky City? If so, where and why? But it was a bad time to interrupt with questions. Amanda Corrigan was talking again.
“Worst case calls for Sky City to move two hundred and thirty thousand kilometers. That’s if you start to accelerate when Sky City is on the opposite side of Earth from the shield. I think you’d be insane to try it that way, but I did the calculations anyway. Naturally, you’ll want to finish at rest relative to Cusp Station. So you’ll be accelerating for the first half of the trip, decelerating for the second half. Turning Sky City over out-of-plane to do the changeover would be a nightmare. So you put a double set of mirror-matter thrustors, one set of them on each side. When you do the arithmetic it comes out to an average acceleration of point two seven millimeters per second squared — a few hundred-thousandths of a gee. Peanuts. Acceleration stresses won’t be a problem, even in the worst case.”
John Hyslop was nodding. “That’s what I hoped. I know I didn’t ask you to consider this, but what about rotation? Will we have to stop Sky City turning on its axis when we move?”
“If you do, you will introduce all kinds of other problems.” The speaker was Lauren Stansfield. “Life-support systems are calibrated to the current rotation rate. Air and water circulation pumps assume a certain level of centrifugal forces working either for or against them. I’m not saying that it’s impossible to go through the whole interior and adjust the pump settings, but I am saying it would be a nuisance. If there is any way that we can avoid it, we should.”
Cold, crisp, competent. Lauren Stansfield had sounded that way when Maddy first met her; now it looked like her normal style.
Will Davis added, “Not to mention the screams you’d get from everybody on the perimeter if you halt the rotation.” He grinned at the others. “Wouldn’t do, would it?
Pay all that money for prime half-gee living space, then find you’re sitting in free fall like the poor peasants on the axis.”
The smiles and nods of agreement said Poor like us. To someone with Maddy’s sensitivity to people, that was easy to read. How much money did a Sky City engineer make? She could ask that some other time. Her bet was that she had an income more than this whole group combined, except maybe for Lauren, who was as expensively dressed as before. The harder part was to comprehend the rest of what the others were saying. She was getting the picture very slowly, not because she was unintelligent or because what she was hearing was particularly obscure but because the idea was so alien. This small group was quietly discussing ways of moving the vast and complex Sky City out to the end of the shield and parking it next to Cusp Station. And that, in turn, had huge implications. Why would anyone ever consider such a move, unless the project to save Earth was in dreadful trouble?