Orphans - Kevin Killiany [6]
He expected Tev to be next, but it was in fact Soloman. The Bynar favored him with a preoccupied nod before settling down and focusing on a padd of his own.
Domenica Corsi and Fabian Stevens arrived together, and Faulwell was startled by a sudden stinging of his eyes at the sight of them separating at the door. It took him a moment to realize it had reminded him of Kieran Duffy and Sonya Gomez holding hands under the table in staff meetings—one of their near-comic efforts to keep their romance under wraps.
He shared the incident and his feelings with Anthony, knowing his partner would understand. When he looked up from his writing, he was surprised to see everyone but Tev had arrived; Pattie was just sliding onto her specially made chair. Across from him, Elizabeth Lense met his startled gape with a smile.
Captain Gold opened the meeting. “All right, people, we’ve had two hours, but now the other team has arrived. What have we got to show for our head start?”
“A multigenerational deep space vessel of classic cylindrical design,” Gomez recited briskly. “Propelled by a very basic ion drive. Nuclear rockets rotated the ship, the angular acceleration providing ersatz internal gravity. Right now neither is working; it’s coasting and spinning on momentum.”
“ ‘Coasting’ at two hundred and twenty-eight thousand kilometers a second,” Stevens said. “With that technology, attaining point seven six lightspeed required centuries of acceleration.”
Faulwell knew that maddening velocity, over three times full impulse but well short of lightspeed, had created a navigational nightmare for the da Vinci. They had spent an hour repeatedly jumping ahead of the colony ship at warp and scanning it as it passed. Then for the last hour and a half they had been corkscrewing insanely around the axis of its course at warp one to stay abreast.
“Also considering the technology,” Pattie chimed in, literally, “at least a century went into its construction as well.” She touched a few controls. A schematic diagram of a circle comprising several interlocking rings appeared on the main screen. As she spoke, several sections of the diagram lit up. “The outer hull comprises several hundred meters of fused nickel-iron, probably an aggregate of asteroid material. This is reinforced by a gridwork of dense alloy similar to duranium but with an odd spectral signature.” A molecular model, with a few gaps, and a matching spectral band appeared below the schematic. “The decks we can scan below the outer hull”—Pattie interrupted herself with a crystalline sound of amusement—“or, from their perspective, above the outer hull, are of similar construction and appear to be filled with myriad large, inert items. One would guess long-term storage. The weight distribution problems in spinning something this size are enormous.” The schematic rotated and elongated, becoming a side view of the huge cylinder. Pattie continued to tap controls as she spoke, an apparently random pattern of bright green dots spread across the image. “The builders dealt with it by installing over one thousand nuclear rockets to govern rotation. They seem to have simply been mounted on the surface of the completed ship. Notice spacing is not uniform; their placement reflects internal mass.”
Pattie paused and on the screen green dots began to go dark. “At least five hundred years ago the system began to fail.” She looked to Gold. “Commander Tev was investigating how and why.”
“He’s working with Conlon on something,” Gold said. “Is his input essential right now?”
“No,” Pattie said. “Just curious.”
She turned back to the panel and tapped a few more commands. What Faulwell took to be stress or force calculations appeared along the top and bottom of the screen. Lines connected the equations to points along the length of the ship that glowed an ominous purple.
“Without the balancing thrust of the rotational rockets, the entire system is unstable. At this scale something as