Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross

Author:Charles Stross [Stross, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf, azw3

Cymbals chimed: the floor gave a faint lurch, almost imperceptible, barely sufficient to rattle the china in the dining lounges as the huge liner cut over to onboard gravity. Junior Flight Lieutenant Steffi Grace shook her head. “That’s not very good.”

“It’s within tolerances, but only just,” agreed her boss, Flying Officer Max Fromm. He pointed at the big status board in front of her. “Want to tell me why?”

“Hmm. Kernel balance looks good. We’ve stabilized nicely, and the mass distribution is spot on — no problems there. Um. I don’t see anything on board. But the station…” She paused, then brought up a map of the ambient gravity polarization field. “Oh. We picked up a little torque from the station’s generators when we tripped out. Is that what you’re after?”

“No, but it’ll do.” Fromm nodded. “Remember that. These big new platforms the Septs are building kick back.” He brought back the original systems map. “Now, you’re going to talk me through the first stage of our departure, aren’t you?”

Steffi nodded, and began to take him through the series of steps that the Captain and her bridge crew would be running upstairs as they maneuvered the huge liner clear of the Noctis docking tree. Down here in the live training room things weren’t as tense; just another session in the simulator, shadowing the bridge team. The training room was cramped, crammed with console emulators and with space for only a couple of people to crowd inside. In an emergency it could double as a replacement bridge — but it would have to be a truly desperate emergency to take out the flight deck, five levels down inside the hull.

“Okay, now she’s pumping up the C-head ring. That’s, um, five giga-Teslas? That’s way more than she needs to maintain a steady one-gee field. Is she planning on buffering some really heavy shocks? Attitude control — we’re steady. No thermal roll to speak of, not out here in Septagon B, so she’s put just enough spin on the outer hull to hold us steady as we back out at five meters per second. That’s going to take, uh, two minutes until we’re clear far enough to begin a slow pitch up toward the departure corridor. Am I right?”

“So far so good.” Max leaned back in his chair. “I hate these stations,” he said conversationally. “It’s not as if there’s much other traffic — we’ve got nearly a thousand seconds to clear the approaches — but it’s so damn crowded here it’s like threading a needle with a mooring cable.”

“One wrong nudge—”

“Yeah.” The Romanov was a huge beast. Beehive shaped, it was three hundred meters in diameter at its fattest and nearly five hundred meters long. The enormously massive singularity lurking inside its drive kernel supplied it with power and let it twist space-time into knots, but was absolutely no use for close-range maneuvering; and the hot thrusters it could use for altitude control would strip the skin off a hab if the Captain lit her up within a couple of kilometers.

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