Space Stations

However, the running lights and glowing propulsor vents of the orbital traffic servicing River-'Tween-Worlds spiraled up past the skynest, the trade of the People flowing out to buy the wonders and amusements of the distant Upright culture.

With a final quick cleansing lick of his forepaws, Tarrischall fluidly reversed himself in midair, launching down the core passage with a thump of his muscular tail against the dome surface.

Approaching the central interchange, he exchanged whistled salutations with a pair of coworkers. Spiraling past them, he snared the padded surface of the maneuvering ball that hung suspended at the corridor nexus. His six sets of claws caught a purchase in the webbed fabric and he relaunched himself into the guidance chamber access, his day's duties due to commence in a sixteenth portion.

None of the People's space facilities utilized artificial gravity unless it was necessary for some industrial application. A semiaquatic species, the People had come to relish free fall as much as they loved the floating freedom of their world's vast network of lakes, rivers and shallow seas. A product of his planet's water-dominated evolutionary processes, Tarrischall was a sexipedal, carnivorous semi-mammal, bearing closest resemblance to a terrestrial river otter blown up to the scale of a Bengal tiger. Covered from whisker pads to tail with a glossy blood-red fur that trended toward a yellowish cream tone along his belly, his species found clothing irrelevant.

Friend-Marta had often mentioned that her kind found the People to be most attractive.

Honestly flattered, Tarrischall had always replied with a verity of polite sophistries.

Marta's folk were certainly nice enough to know and do trade with, but it had to be admitted that the Uprights were an odd-looking crew.

Tarrischall shot into the Guidance Chamber, a spherical structure with far-viewer panels sheathing its upper and lower surfaces and a row of task pallets spaced around it in a central belt.

The other Voices were already present and at station with shift preparations already underway under the guidance of Narisara-of-the-Ice-Crystal-River. The sleek, black-furred Voice-of-Physics would no doubt have an arch comment or two about the Voice-of-Decision being the last to arrive for duty.

Bouncing off the maneuvering ball in the center of the chamber, Tarrischall dove across to his task pallet. En route he aimed a teasing nip at one of Narisara's rear legs. Without looking up from the glowing half-bubble of her instrument display she replied with a tail swat that could have broken a jaw if it had been aimed to connect.

Still purring contentedly to himself, Tarrischall belly flopped onto his pallet, his rear-and mid-claw sets hooking into the webbing while the stubby digits of his forepaws played across the touch bar arrays surrounding his display bubble, summoning it to life.

“Fair night, pups,” he called cheerfully. “Let's send the Uprights some presents.”

The security hatch into the gate operations center recognized Marta's bio-pattern, sliding open at her approach.

The compartment that contained the center was a large one for a space station. Three tiers of ranked workstations descended from Director's row, facing the ten-by-five-meter main viewer tank inset in the far bulkhead. Her section chiefs were already hard at it, working the shift countdown.

“Evening, Marta,” Assistant Operations Director Estiban Rocardo called up from the central station of the upper tier. “T minus two and ten to dilation and we are showing all green boards.”

Behind him, the primary display held focus on the Worm Gate itself. Considerable familiarity was required before the view ceased to inspire awe.

The gate complex hovered in fixed orbit at the L-2 La-grange point beyond Earth's moon. Several kilometers beyond the rotating rim of the command station, the gate itself lay silhouetted against the mottled gray expanse of Luna's rear face.

The gate structure itself could only be called titanic. Taking advantage of free-fall engineering, its individual components were unconnected, stationkeeping on each other via cybernetically precise thruster control. The twin semi-cylinders of the field generator/accumulator arrays dwarfed the girder structure tube of the perimeter grid, the so-called “worm cage” at their center focus, and the cage itself was one half a kilometer across by one and a half in length.

The toylike myriad of support facilities clustering in free space around the gate, the barge docks, the maintenance and warehousing platforms and the habitat wheels, gave the facility scale. Smaller yet, tug and barge combos and orbital shuttles flitted between the stations like gleaming fish within the structure of a coral reef.

In absolute contrast was the wormhole itself. It was there. It was always there, trapped at the central nexus of the worm cage. Marta knew she was looking right at it, but there was nothing to be seen save for the hole's imprint on her instrumentation.