Confederation -- 41

Chapter 41

The Earth Space Protection Force was relatively easy to organize. I cheated. I gave the problem over to Rudy and Holmes. It wasn't too long before they had come up with a provisional organization based on our current resources. We'd need more ships, but the Sunnys, now freed of the Pug-bears, for the most part, were starting up their long-neglected industry, and it would simply be a matter of time before they started cranking out FTL ships at a higher rate. We discussed the matter with them via Ansible, and they agreed that it would be desirable to create more ships quickly.

We also had to find suitable things to trade for the different groups and a means of exchange. I didn't want to create yet another fiat currency. Those had never worked out for humans, and I didn't want to have the same problem again, only magnified by involving three species. However, that was something for the future.

The first thing I needed for the Earth Space Protection Force was a base. I didn't want it to be on Earth. That would create too many opportunities for politics. We discussed various moons in the system, but finally settled on Ceres. It could be argued that it is a planet, although a tiny one at about six hundred miles in diameter. There was also some speculation that there might be a considerable amount of water frozen under its surface. If so, we'd have no problem generating enough breathable gasses for our base.

The thing that convinced me was its low gravity. It was low enough that our FTL ships could dock in cradles on the surface. They were unable to enter a large planet's gravity well, but Ceres had a, you might say, very shallow well. It would save a lot of time and effort from transporting back and forth. That was convenient since we'd just about ceased using the Sunnys' transporters.

I had never felt comfortable with those things, and now that I knew more about them, I felt even less at ease with them. The idea that there was a certain amount of noise injected into the signal each time someone went through led me to conclude that I didn't want to subject anyone to possible long-term effects. Besides, Frazzle told me that the Sunnys usually didn't use them. They'd only made so many of the things because the Pug-bears demanded them for the convenience of their empire and the Pugs.

We now restricted ourselves mostly to shuttle transportation, although a transporter trip was not out of the question in an emergency.

That would be a huge advantage if the FTLs could dock on Ceres. We could set up repair facilities. To convince myself, I grabbed a calculator and applied the formula for the surface area of a sphere. The planet was large in terms of surface area, providing millions of square miles of usable surface. I figured that would be more than adequate for our purposes.

I got Frazzle to take us out to Ceres. It took a few hours of medium acceleration and then deceleration. When we arrived, it wasn't as impressive as I'd hoped. The asteroid or planetoid – whatever, looked small until we'd come up quite close. There were some bright spots on the surface that I first thought might be Pug-bear domes.

Frazzle assured me that the Pug-bears hadn't gone to Ceres. The spots must be something else. As we got closer, they turned into what looked like scattered areas of some kind of ice. I was curious and couldn't wait until we'd landed, so we fired a laser at one of the spots. The resultant vapor showed us that it was primarily water ice with traces of methane and some other compounds. That would be good enough. We could use that. I hoped there was a lot more buried in the crust.

I asked Frazzle how the Pug-bears' domes were created, and, once again, he surprised me.

"Oh, dat. That's easy, Dec," he waved his free hand in a circular motion. His other hand was on the ship's control yoke. "We gots plenty of dome machines in the small hold."

"The small hold?" I asked, "Where's that, and why don't I know about it?"

It turned out that the small hold was minimal, and I'd walked past it numerous times, thinking it was some of the ship's machinery. It was a room-sized storage area adjacent to the cafeteria. The door was locked with a heavy-duty mechanism, and perhaps that's why I'd ignored it. It didn't look like something you wanted to open casually.

It turned out that it wasn't entirely safe in there. The so-called dome machines were a little dangerous. You set the thing where you wanted a dome and retreated a suitable distance before activating it remotely. You didn't want to be too close when it began working.

The machine created a spherical field that quickly broke down molecules in the surrounding rock and dragged them into a clear lattice structure that eventually covered the entire sphere. The domes weren't actually domes at all. They were just the top halves of buried spheres. The molecular lattice was both transparent and incredibly strong. The machine layered lattice upon lattice until the dome structure was several centimeters thick. The thickness wasn't needed to contain the relatively small pressure of the internal atmosphere. It was intended to ward off any strikes by debris or rocks.

Frazzle proudly informed me that the domes would withstand most micro-meteorites and, when combined with a variation of the ship's shield, they were nearly indestructible. We loaded up a bunch of them and hauled them over to the surface of the small planet.

The gravity was strong enough that you could walk – sort of. It would do until we could get an artificial gravity generator working. That would allow us to increase the gravity to nearly Earth-normal. I belatedly realized that I'd never questioned the stronger gravity in any of the domes I'd been in before.

Titan was large, but it really wouldn't have earth-like gravity, yet that had been the case when I'd first been there before blowing the place up. I now understood that there had been a gravity generator in operation.

Domes placed close enough to each other would conjoin, leaving neat openings. Careful placement would create a usable habitat and, eventually, I hoped, an entire city. Distant domes could be joined by tunnels or possibly by transporters if you wanted to use the things.

We unloaded the machines, and Frazzle carefully supervised their placement. Then we climbed back into the shuttle and rose off the surface at his request.

"We be safer dis way," he said. "The machines' fields don't differentiate between atoms. If you too close, they will take your atoms as well as the rocks. That's why the small hold is always locked. Not good to accidentally set one of these things off in the ship."

I replied, "I can see why –"

I paused, awestruck, as the fields began working on the surface. The things created a veritable rainbow of colors as they manipulated and moved the atoms into the dome structure. It was a fantastic light show.

I reflected that while human technology was close to that of the Sunnys in some ways, in other ways, they were far beyond us. I glanced at Liz and Hattie to tell them how amazed I was, but it wasn't necessary. They were as astounded as I was. Hattie's mouth was open with a half-smile. It was apparent that she found the colors entrancing. They were probably the most beautiful thing she'd seen in her life.

Once the domes were set, we had to install an airlock. The lock was another piece of genius Sunny engineering. It came in a small package that unfolded into a door-sized structure. At Frazzle's direction, we carefully placed it against the dome, and it somehow adhered to the lattice structure. When he activated the electronics, it cut the lattice bonds, leaving a piece of the dome that could be adapted as an inner door.

We installed the lock, entered, and took a quick tour through the connected domes. There was probably enough space in the ten domes we'd set up to house over a thousand people. It looked like Ceres was going to be the new headquarters of the ESPF.

I wondered how hard it would be to figure out a work schedule oriented around its nine-hour and four-minute "day." Initially, it seemed like we might work every third such day with one day off and one for sleeping. I guessed that people would probably adjust their circadian periods to fit the rotation period.

Frazzle installed some additional equipment inside to generate an atmosphere. There was enough ice in the crust to use for that purpose, and the atmosphere machine immediately began emitting a metered mixture of gasses. The atmosphere-generating equipment was a variation of the dome-making machines, adapted to drag molecules out of the crust and release them. A certain amount of heat was released at the same time, so the temperature issue was partially solved in that way.

The atmosphere machine was something that Frazzle had to adjust. It pulled material from the crust a distance away from the domes and could be set for any mixture of gas desired. He set it for an atmosphere that was a sort of compromise that all three of our species could easily breathe. The temperature would eventually have to be regulated with an environmental control unit, but we could leave it for the time being. It would remain warm enough that the atmosphere wouldn't condense or freeze.

We returned to the ship to wait for the domes to fill with air. Meanwhile, I called Rudy and requested that he bring the rest of the squadron to Ceres. Frazzle was anxious to have more Sunny help than our small contingent provided. Between the four ships, there was a sizable amount of equipment that we'd need to make the domes habitable. This was all stored in various lockers and holds that we humans hadn't known about.

Frazzle sort of apologized about that, "Dec, de use you puts the ships to so far not been setting up colonies. Each ship Sunnys build have some colony equipment, and Sunnys never think to tell you about it. Now we need all equipment we can get. The other ships have parts for fabricating a dock structure and houses inside domes. Also important is Rudy's ship has an environmental control unit. That will keep temperature set right."

I just shook my head in amazement. The Sunnys were certainly thorough in terms of preparation.

"Frazzle, did the Pug-bears know about this equipment on the ships?" I asked.

"No, dey just leave all work to us Sunnys. We had to make everything work right or be killed, so we were careful to include plenty of equipment," he replied matter-of-factly.

I was disgusted, "The Pug-bears are just stupid, despite their grafted on intelligence!"

He looked at me with a funny expression, and I revised my statement.

"Well, I mean, they may have a certain amount of intelligence, but they didn't care about Sunnys."

"Dat's right. They thought that they could always get more of us, and they could do until you freed us. We grateful for that," he nodded in understanding.

It was near the end of my day shift, so I met Liz and the kids in the cafeteria. We ate and then took the children to the main hold for some zero-gravity playtime. Halfway through, Hattie and Kasm showed up, coming through the hatch together. She had her hand resting casually on his back as they came through. It looked a little unusual to me, and I glanced at Liz. She gave me a cocked eyebrow that meant not to comment, so I didn't.

The two proceeded to join the zero-g fun, playing tag with Michael and Rowan. We let the game go on for thirty minutes before deciding it was time to make sure the kids got some sleep. Leaving Hattie and Kasm still flying around, we returned to our quarters.

Once there, we concentrated on getting the children to sleep, but after they'd nodded off, I asked Liz, "What was that all about, anyway?"

She knew what I meant.

"I don't know if you've noticed. You've been busy with the domes and stuff, but Hattie and Kasm have seemed to hit it off in some way."

I was puzzled, "What does that mean?"

Liz sighed, "Hattie has never been able to open up to me. I think that her horrible experiences have made her afraid to have a human relationship. Maybe she thinks that humans are too easy to kill. She's been gradually spending more and more time with Kasm. He seems to enjoy having her around, so I haven't said anything."

I considered, "Maybe I'll have a conversation with him. See what he thinks is going on. I'm sure he means well."

It was a little disconcerting. I didn't know how intense their relationship was or what direction it was taking. I knew from experience that Kasm was a good friend and one who was more mentally similar to humans than were the Sunnys. I just wanted to make sure that neither of them had unreasonable expectations of the other.

I was reminded again that socializing with other intelligent species was not what humans usually did. The whole alien relationship thing was something that I was still trying to figure out.