Peter Hamilton - Fallen Fragon

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The Moray arrived at Centralis thirty hours after leaving low-Earth orbit. Lawrence had resisted the urge to eat as best he could, limiting himself to one meal. That way he only had to use the toilet once; even with the ship's tiny acceleration helping directionwise, it wasn't an experience he wanted to repeat if he could help it. At the same time he forced himself to drink every hour or so: with only a minute G-force when the ion engines were on and several hours' coasting in freefall between burns, it was easy for his body to become dehydrated. Without gravity pulling fluids down to his feet, his deep instincts were confused and unreliable. At least pissing in space was simple—assuming you were male.

Hal had to be ordered to drink from the water fountain hose on more than one occasion. He wasn't the major problem. Lewis Ward got a bad dose of space sickness, throwing up every time he even tried to drink water. After a couple of hours dodging revolting yellow stomach juices, Lawrence called for the doctor. When she did arrive twenty minutes later, she simply used a hypospray to give him a mild sedative and told the platoon to try to get him to drink in an hour or so.

"Don't let him eat for the rest of the trip," she warned. "Koribu has a one-eighth gravity field. He can last until then." With that she zipped out of the door with the agility of a shark.

Hal gave a disgusted snort as she left; she'd been in her fifties, and a decade of service in low gravity had seen her body gently swell out as her legs and arms became more spindly. He'd brightened at the prospect of her house call. Since she'd arrived, he hadn't said a word.

"Sorry, guys," Lewis whispered. There was a single strap over his legs, allowing him to adopt a semicurled position on the couch chair. His face was gleaming with sweat. When it came to training and maneuvers, Lewis could move quicker man just about anyone else in the platoon. He had a ratlike agility, allowing him to vanish into some crack or corner that would give him cover whatever the terrain was. His thin body had the kind of stringy standout muscles and tendons Lawrence associated with marathon runners. But he could dash along a ten-meter suspended pole without even having to hold his arms out for balance. Funny how space sickness had hit him worse than any of them.

"No problem, my man," Odel Cureton said. "Statistically, one and a half of us will suffer some kind of aggravated motion sickness per twenty-five hours of flight. You coming down with it means the rest of us are in the clear." Odel was what passed for the platoon's electronic specialist. At thirty-two he didn't have any degrees or qualifications from colleges or even Z-B, at least none that he produced for the personnel department. But as Odel admitted to four ex-wives, and those in just the last six years, Lawrence could appreciate the man's need for blurring his background. Who knew how many other women could legally lay claim to part of his salary packet? Odel was what Lawrence's old teachers had called bookish; the voice was distinctly upper-class English, too. Normally, Lawrence would have deep misgivings about anyone with those characteristics; they were too much like officer material. But Odel couldn't be faulted for his frontline performance, which was all everyone really cared about. The platoon entrusted a lot of its equipment field maintenance to him, knowing he'd do a good job.

"Thanks, cretin," Dennis Eason said. He turned back and applied a medicsensor to Lewis's damp forehead, checking the readout that popped up on his field-aid kit.

"Do you even know what you're doing?" Karl Sheahan asked.

Dennis tapped the Red Cross symbol on his tunic shoulder. "You'd better hope so, pal. I'm your best hope for survival."

"You couldn't even give him a fucking aspirin without checking with that whale they call a doctor."

"I'm not authorized to administer anything," Dennis said tightly. "Not when there's a qualified ship's doctor on call. It's a jurisdictional thing."

"Yeah? Is that what you told Ntoko? Huh? Too much blood, it's a jurisdictional thing."

"Fuck you!"

"Enough," Amersy announced quietly. "Karl, watch the fucking movie and stop causing me grief."

Karl grinned as he performed a neat midair spin and landed gently on a chair couch. It turned out the sheet screen didn't have an interactive driver; all it showed were third-person fixed-view dramas. Up on the ceiling the young actress was tooling up to slaughter the vampires that were taking over Brussels. It meant she had to wear a lot of tight black leather.

Hal was in the chair couch next to Karl, staring up at the movie. He hadn't even heard the goading. Karl held on to a strap and leaned over to slap Hal on the arm. "You could give her one, couldn't you, dickbrain. Huh?"

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.