Chapter Three
I got towed home, or close enough.
Prof. Azul hooked up his remote to the hitch piece all pods are required to have so he could hardwire Ladybug’s controls to his own through the pod interface. Omaara and Xavier locked onto either side at Ladybug’s tow points.
It was a good thing Ringer craft usually carried loads of extra fuel.
I had to sit at the controls only touching exactly what Prof. Azul told me to touch. Extremely humiliating. But probably the right thing to do.
It left me with lots of time to look out my viewport and use my telescopes to zoom in at things as we passed them. I’d spent my whole life getting told about all the stuff in space near Chawla Station, but I hadn’t actually been able to see very much of it before.
I grew up with all the classic kids’ books for a stationer: One, Two, Three, Chawla and Me and Parts of A Station and such. But my Grandpa Babu loves some really old stuff, so I had his favorite ancient kid’s book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs read to me more times than I could count. That was the updated and abridged version, of course.
Kids who aren’t from Saturn have probably never heard of it, but there’s a cousin of Babu’s who lives on Phoebe who wrote a Saturnian-based sequel to Cloudy. It’s really funny. Most Sadou kids have read it, even though Earth publishers never formally printed Swirly with a Chance of Ravioli.
I can’t tell you about Earth weather, but the moon, Pan?
It really is a snowy white shape that looks like a ravioli made of vanilla cream. Look it up sometime and tell me that Pan isn’t a giant uncooked ravioli that someone inexplicably coated with powdered sugar. And, yes, this particular stuffed pasta is 30 plus kilometers on the long side. The flat part of the ravioli is made of snow from the Rings that collected around Pan’s equator.
I’d never been on the surface, but someday, I was going to spacewalk on it.
The next biggest thing lit up the dark trailing behind Pan. Chawla Station’s faintly snowy exterior reflected the sunlight in a very different way from the pure water ice that constituted most of the local scenery.
Chawla Station, my beloved tuna-can-shaped home, ran a smidge over a kilometer from Dockside to Powerside. That’s counting from the tip of our longest docking arm to the trailing end of the fusion pulse rocket’s induction coils.
Chawla Station was originally the RSC Chawla back when the First Crew drove her all the way to the Rings from Earth’s lunar orbit. The First Crew had it rough, but once she got here, it was a pretty comfortable, good place to live. Plenty of water, the Ring’s blocked Saturn’s radiation belts out, and we had a good amount of everything we needed here except metal. Certainly, it was better than the first few stabs at nonmobile station habitats. And, yeah, later people got much better at building. Sure, folks on the new stations like Daphnis point out this and that feature for how their habitat modules are so much better. But they are only able to be here because Chawla made it all possible.
As everybody knows from One, Two, Three, Chawla and Me, our home has three big parts. There’s Dockside, where I was headed, at the front. The giant cylinder that nobody actually calls The Hab where we all lived is what gives it the tuna-can look. (No, it doesn’t have fish in it. Don’t take Swirly with a Chance of Ravioli too seriously. Well okay that’s not true. There are actually lots of fish in the aquaculture ponds.) Powerside’s my favorite part, and it’s at the back. It has lots of the cool machinery that makes Chawla work.
I always spent time looking at Powerside every time I could. Ladybug was still coming in well “below” the station and was over twenty kilometers from the giant fusion rocket at the back end. I checked my radiation detectors again. Neutron and gamma all green. We still used the main fusion reactor to generate electrical power for pretty much everything we did, so you had to keep your pod inside special radiation shielded zones when you approached Powerside. Going too far aft was a good way to get cooked when Fusion One was running.
We only had one fusion reactor so I didn’t know why we called it ‘Fusion One.’ Normally, Chawla produced only a tiny fraction of the power it was capable of making, but the miniscule thrust it did generate was used to maintain our orbit around Saturn.
I shuddered to think what would’ve happened if I’d been this close and outside the shielded zones when Chawla was at full power. Radiation sickness wasn’t a huge problem for us because the Rings prevented Saturn’s radiation belts from extending down this far.
Dad said that’s part of why our many-great grandparents picked this part of the Rings for where to park Chawla. But every spacer knew you couldn’t completely avoid radiation in space and that radiation sickness wasn’t a fun way to die.
The silvery-grey molybdenum end bell of the fusion rocket was hundreds of meters wide. Five huge magnetic field coils surrounded it. The bell and coils together prevented the exhaust from vaporizing the engine. But if I somehow could have looked straight through it…I’d have seen tiny droplets of fusion fuel injected from the top of the bell igniting many times a second under the intense beams of the dozens of initiators that ringed the mouth.
The bell glowed faintly in the infrared on Ladybug’s enhanced view. Only a fraction of that heat made it to the rest of Chawla. A giant silvery parabolic reflective screen between the engine and the rest of the station saved us from being toasted. The reflector came to a point at the apex of the engine bell. I knew that there were holes both in the screen and the bell there to allow a fuel injector to do its job, but I couldn’t see it from here.
Forward of the reflector, there were several large white balls that contained that fuel. The infrared showed them as really dark since the fuel was super cold. That’s why they were forward of the reflector. Keeping the reactor heat away from the tanks helped keep the fuel cold. There used to be many more fuel tanks, way before I was born. You could still see the places where those tanks used to be.
When the Firsters turned RSC Chawla into Chawla Station, they also pulled off some of the spacecraft stuff that wasn’t needed for station duty. Repurposing fuel and metals is the way we live. We still do that a lot, though not necessarily on the same scale as the Firsters. We’ve got all the water and energy we could ever use in the Rings, but metals and carbon and a few other things are harder to come by. Dad always said that fusion energy more than that first space elevator is what made settling the outer Solar System possible. Cheap energy lets us recycle rather than import most things.
How precious some materials were was never clearer than when you looked at the main radiator, the widest part of Chawla. It looked like a giant flat black skirt forward of the snowy white spheres of the fuel tanks. The skirt was looking a little frayed in places. The radiator was separated into many different sections, each of which rejected heat to space from different sources on Chawla. The part closest to the habitat was pretty much entirely intact. That put out heat at the lowest temperature and was used to keep our homes comfortable.
Parts of the radiator further from that low temperature center ring had big chunks missing. Some had been salvaged and turned into other things because it used to cool fuel tanks that were gone. Other places were removed because the main reactor was never going to operate at full power again and wouldn’t ever need as much cooling as it was originally designed with. It all looked neat and tidy and smooth out here from kilometers away, but I’d heard grown-ups talk about the shoddy job that had been done in places. You really had to watch it when you went extravehicular on Powerside or you’d slash your suit open they said. On the bright side, the high quality carbon-carbon in the radiator panels was probably used for pod structure or even broken down in the recyclers and used to feed the plants in the Gardens. I might’ve eaten it in my breakfast that day.
The fusion reactor supplied primary power, but even the Firsters weren’t satisfied with only one source. We had two nuclear reactors for backup. In school books and official diagrams, they are Fission Alpha and Fission Bravo. Everyone calls them “Good Old Alpha” and “Baby Bravo.”
Alpha was down for maintenance. It stresses people out, but it was getting refueled just as fast as is possible, Dad said. And I believed him. Dad ran the Chawla Station Council, and his deputy, Mr. Petrie-Xi, was always calling during dinner to fret about maybe slowing down this or that part of the refueling to save money. Dad wouldn’t allow penny-pinching that came at a cost to safety.
It gave Dorian and Jules panic attacks to hear about safety issues, so Dad would go to the back of the house where they couldn’t overhear if Mr. Petrie-Xi called when they were home. But he didn’t do that when it was just me.
Anyway, the two reactors were on opposite sides of the station on the collar. That got them out away from the fuel and kept some of the other machinery shielded from their radiation. Reactor Bravo was online. My path home purposely put the bulk of the station between me and Baby Bravo, shielding Ladybug from its radiation.
As my viewport zoomed in on Good Old Alpha, I was reminded of why. I could see Alpha’s shielding open, the top of the reactor’s pressure vessel off, and a bundle of new fuel rods from places richer in metals than we were, waiting for installation a safe distance away. A set of powerful remotes moved urgently and deliberately about the various tasks needed to refuel our star performer. Even with the rush, it was going to take a while, and in the meantime the station had only one backup power source available. Most everyone aboard were just a little more keyed up than normal. No sane spacer likes having only one backup, even if Mr. Petrie-Xi would rather have a bigger station shareholder payout for this quarter.
I suppose I could have focused my scopes in the other direction and gotten more sparkly Ring views, but I love big spacecraft. The bigger the better. And Chawla was the biggest spacecraft in the Saturn System. There wasn’t anything about it I didn’t love learning about. I guess it’s because Mom and Dad basically spend their lives keeping her running. I really wish the Ringers had big fusion ships like you could see in the Belt or the Jovian Asteroids.
That’s why I wanted to go to the School in the first place. I just wanted to work on the biggest spacecraft I could as soon as I could.
The reactors were basically the last non-rotating part for a while when you were looking from the rear to the front. Chawla’s Habitat was the least interesting part to me, but when everything else wanted to kill you a boring home was the best kind. Nobody talked about “The Habitat” much day to day. You talked about the specific place you were going to, like your house, or the Gardens, or the Council Building. Everyone knew that meant you were going somewhere in the Hab.
Still I guess it’s weird if you live on planet or a moon or something. The Hab is a giant cylinder about half a kilometer wide and a bit more than that long rotating about twice a minute on its long axis. Me, Xavier, Omaara, my brothers, my grandparents, my parents, and basically everyone I knew well lived inside that spinning cylinder on its inner wall. Powerside at the back and Dockside at the front didn’t rotate relative to the Hab.
Spinning for gravity complicated some things, mostly in controlling stability and getting from spinning to non-spinning parts and back again. But it worked for us. From the outside the Hab was a bit dull. It had much more of a snowy sheen to it than Powerside did. The heat from all the machinery Powerside tended to boil off any water molecules silly enough to try to make their homes there, but those same molecules tended to condense on colder parts of the station. The outer wall of the Hab had meters of water ice frozen onto it as secondary shielding in places.
A common thing first time Ringwalkers brought back were chunks of ice to be melted down and added to the shielding protecting us from the (admittedly pretty benign) natural radiation constantly bombarding our home. The most valuable thing to return with was metal, but that’s a lot harder to find in the Rings.
At this distance you could see the tracks where huge dense counterweights could be moved around to balance out the station’s spin and help keep it from wobbling. Those big blocks were one source of metal we weren’t likely to scavenge any time soon. Some people said we should scrap the counterweight system and start over though.
There’d been several quakes of late. That was another reason to push for Good Old Alpha to get refueled as fast as possible.
When a kilometer-sized spinning spacecraft gets a little out of balance, well, things tend to shake around some. People said the counterweight system was too old. If the Sadous (meaning mostly Mom and Dad with occasional help from Susu and Babu) couldn’t keep them working well then it was time to find a better solution. Or someone else who could find a better solution.
All that talk made me nervous. And the quakes. Those made me nervous too. But they were definitely in the category of Grown-Up Problems. I’m twelve, very nearly thirteen, but really, I’m supposed to be only studying for Maturity Test stuff for the next few years. Then later on, hopefully after a lot more interesting and active study away at School, I’ll be ready to be a real citizen-voter, responsible with my parents for the safety and maintenance of Chawla Station.
As my pod crossed the perimeter into the active drone-control zone surrounding Dockside, I turned my attention to collision avoidance. Prof. Azul had drilled that into us. The only thing that could make my day any worse would be to ram one of the thousands of robotic or semi-robotic spacecraft always active around the station.
Today was a pretty light day. My telemetry only showed a hundred or so drones out. Most of them were tiny remotes being used for various station maintenance or industrial tasks around the cavern of work bays, hangars, and girders that was Dockside. The whole thing looked like something a toddler threw together when left alone too long with an older kid’s construction set, but it actually made a lot of sense once you figured out how it all worked.
Dockside was organized into three irregular rings of modules around a central hub at the front of Chawla. The modules of each ring, with a few exceptions, generally did a different function. The outermost ring was the drone hive.
There were hangars for most of the little robotic spacecraft people in the station programmed or operated remotely to do all sorts of odd jobs out-hull.
We did lots of things with robots. We gathered ice, cleaned ice off from places it shouldn’t be, and did most of our maintenance work. Basic robotics was as important a skill as first aid, computer use, ecology, or cooking. You just needed to know how to program and teleoperate a remote to live on Chawla. It wasn’t hard. Anybody could do the basics. But my grandma, Susu, was so good at it that she could afford her own workshop and hangar.
I could see it as I did my final burn, painted purple and pink in the outer ring right. It was a prime location with power and refueling nodes.
Everyone always wanted her to make drones for them. She had her own printers, agreements with all the material suppliers, and a great deal on drone bandwidth with Station Ops.
The next ring was where we made stuff. The workspaces here were enclosed to keep the vacuum pristine with no stray ice or dust. People made things out there in zero gee and vacuum that we couldn’t make in bulk any other place.
At the very center was a dome containing the command center where Mr. Petrie-Xi and Mom and Dad ran the station. We just called it Control. Surrounding Control were three big cargo airlocks where we could bring stuff into the station in bulk. Mostly ice. That’s also where all the airlocks for people were, so ships that carried people generally pulled into the middle. The RSC Dry Crust was the largest thing docked right now. It was getting ready to take my family and me out to our deuterium fuel refinery station out on Phoebe.
Most of the other kids who survived what my brothers went through were living there now. There’d been issues, and that was the real reason for the trip.
Of course, docking in the Center Dock was for ships that could maneuver precisely and safely under their own power. I’d gotten Ladybug here with big burns of her largest engines…one of which was acting a little weird. I’d long ago shut them down for the protection of the station and only had my smaller attitude control thrusters. Well, my remaining attitude thrusters. I’d lost that whole quad in the collision.
So, because apparently I was still trying to see if I could die from embarrassment, I opened up my comm and said the words no self-respecting spacer ever wanted to have to say, “Chawla Control, Ladybug, negative thruster control. For the protection of the station, I request assisted docking. I say again, for the protection of the station, request assisted docking.”