7

They arranged a private boat to come get me. I wasn’t in a hurry to take that guy up on his offer of a tour, but I didn’t mind avoiding a trip through Central to catch a ride on the regular supply shuttle. It was something I had decided that I couldn’t avoid. As much as I feared the answers, I had to know who these people were and what they were up to. They seemed to represent a leak in the dam, a threat to my quiet obscurity.

After a short trip through the orbital byway, the old station came into view in the small porthole beside my seat. It followed outdated design principles: a large central cylinder with several spoked wheel modules attached. The middle was marked by a globular bulge. However the most interesting feature was the top section, which was clearly much newer. Several small rooms floated above the central tower connected by a long, thin passage.

The entire station was only a few hundred yards in length. After dropping into orbit behind Galactic Horizon, the shuttle approached the dock at the bottom of the tower. When I came out of the ship there was no artificial gravity waiting for me; I just drifted into a cramped loading hub. Diego was waiting though, floating near the far side of the room with his arms crossed.

“Welcome to our school. I hope you don’t mind microgravity because we’re still working through the red tape to get a GCS. So far only the university president’s suite has been approved since it was built recently.”

Diego looked totally at ease in microgravity, but I hadn’t practiced at all since moving into Polaris. It took me a few moments to get the motions right and push myself over to my host. He was wearing the school’s flight suit again and this time I was wearing mine since it was regulation to travel that way. It’s not like I had anything fancy to wear anyway.

“Let’s go,” I said brusquely. Diego smiled and motioned to the connector behind him. I followed as he casually struck out with his foot to push himself away. We passed through; Diego began to narrate.

“Through there you get into the mechanical and life support primary systems for the station. We don’t really need to take a look at that stuff unless you’re a grease buff; the equipment is all standard. We try not to do anything fancy with it.”

Does that mean you guys have the skills to even start thinking about modding station guts? It was more than you'd expect for ordinary students either in terms of recklessness or genius.

We emerged into the central cylinder. The hollow pillar was largely empty and the radially symmetric sides were padded all the way around with no direction designated as the floor . Since the walls would be out of reach if you got yourself stuck in mid-air, it was the exact type of area the beginner micro guidelines said to clip a line to a wall in. The tower was identical yard to yard except for the clusters of students swimming farther above. It all had the sterile, utilitarian feel of the old satellites.

I saw Diego had a lodestone at the end of a line wrapped around his waist. These anchor lines were a popular maneuvering tool for throwing off to gain enough momentum to reach a nearby wall. The young man had hooked his right foot into a handle on the rim of the connector. As I floated up past him he held out a pair of wraparound glasses.

“Here, this should make the tour a bit more lively.”

I took the glasses and put them on, revealing a whole new side to the station. The bright tower had become a dimly lit cavern with natural stone walls. When I looked at Diego he was draped with a ragged cloak of midnight blue.

“This semester our theme is ‘Kobold Mines.’”

The dark stoneworld made it no easier to orient myself or find anchor points. In places there were even crystalline projections from the walls which were mere digital illusions through which my hands passed without finding purchase. I felt silly struggling through the floating cave. After a few minutes we came to the connector with the first wheel module, represented as intersecting tunnels with ominous sounding signs like “The Grinding Depths” painted on wooden boards nearby.

“This is our applied sciences ring. Mostly workshops, but a few classrooms too. All of our hardware is top of the line, or beyond it.”

“Beyond?”

“We’ve got some talented people coming through here; it’s only natural that their work would trump the corporate stuff. Our aether battery allotment is the highest among any of the satellite academies.”

That’s some impressive pull. The rumors I had heard were beginning to make more sense. It was no wonder people had gotten suspicious when this tiny place was sucking up so much of the aether supply. The energy itself may be infinitely abundant, but our collection capacity hadn’t risen significantly since the orbiting harvest grid first came online. Building new capacity wasn’t something that could be outsourced since the know-how is wrapped up in secret patents.

We traveled through one of the spokes out to the Grinding Depths and went door to door poking our heads in. The ring passage was itself ringed by more than a dozen rooms. The shops were smaller than those on Polaris and there were certainly fewer, but I could tell at a glance that illegal aether modification was rampant in their equipment. Unless some military had a hidden lab on a secret satellite, Galactic surely had the most advanced tech labs in space. Even the coffee burning in their pots had the jolting smell of aether shocked beans. Terrible stuff that would keep you awake for three days until you sweated yourself into dehydrated collapse.

And everywhere we went, people waved or shouted at Diego. He returned pleasantries with the other students before we moved on to the next stop. In one workshop, a group of students wearing armored smocks over their flight suits battled a giant mole monster and called to my tour guide for help when we appeared. With a wave of his arm a mist of glowing azure splashed out from his cape and flowed into the shape of a large cat. The shimmering beast charged to the aid of the group and tore great chunks from the mole which dissolved into fragmenting code and disappeared.

After a spin around the wheel we returned to the tower. A group of students carrying bright torches passed us descending into the depths of the station. We hadn’t traveled very much higher when someone else called out to my guide. “Diego, are you on a date? I’ve got just the thing.”

“No, not yet, I’m trying to recruit a transfer.”

“Ah even better. Come lady, try my fare. One meal and you’ll reject whatever nonsense they serve at Polaris."

The one who called out to us was an older gentleman perched inside a floating carriage which had its own little serving counter and strap seats. The smells of a kitchen wafted out from within. Diego made introductions as we swam over to the strange food stall.“This is Joter Lempk, an oddball but somewhat of a legend in the small community of orbital cuisine enthusiasts. Joter, this is Ashley Seidel.”

The old man reacted to my name by staring in awe and then exclaiming, “For you, it’s on the house!” It annoyed me; I had the urge to shout some abuse at him just so that he would never treat me as some heroic figure. I pulled myself into one of the seats and smiled politely. Diego sat beside me and the cook served us ramen in special spherical bowl devices which helped to keep the cluster from floating away.

“Sir Lempk is a pioneer in protein printer design. Everything in here is fake, but he’s gotten the closest to making it real; you can’t even tell the difference anymore.”

He was right. I wouldn’t have guessed that the food was printed if he didn’t tell me. The broth had a richness I had not tasted in a long time. I was taken back to the long gone days of throwing together meals on makeshift stoves in the dark of some sprawl hideout. As a form of self-punishment I had been avoiding cooked food since the end.

The rest of the tour was quite boring. Of course the station had dorms, a regular cafeteria, and classrooms. Not even the giant crystal tree dominating the center of the tower’s bulbous midsection held my interest. The fantasy didn’t matter. As we worked our way through the school, word seemed to spread that something was up. I noticed that Diego was no longer the center of attention when we looked in on this or that room. Students stared at me as we passed by. Diego’s stern gaze kept the onlookers at a distance but the change in atmosphere was obvious.

“Sorry, I didn’t expect this to become a circus,” he said with an apologetic bow of his head.

“I’m used to it,” I replied, but I wasn’t. What I was used to were apprehensive stares and people edging away from me. The media had painted me as a bystander hero whose actions prevented an even worse catastrophe, but even the people who believed that still felt some kind of revulsion and shunned me. I was tainted by the tragedy and no one wanted to come under the shadow of the history that clung to me. The crowd at Galactic were different. Some seemed intimidated, but for other reasons. Many looked eagerly with the glistening eyes used to observe celebrities. I felt slimier and slimier as we went.

Finally we arrived at the top of the tower where another connector was set with closed hatches. Beyond one I knew the station continued with the spire of a new addition. Diego reached out to anchor beside the hatch. He smiled happily. “And above is the president’s suite. William is the real brains behind this operation. He’d like to speak with you if you have the time.”

And now it’s confirmed: here’s the puppet master. Diego was charming, but he was the superficial kind of leader. The other radicals there probably thought they were marching along to his drumbeat, but he in turn was following his patron. The picture was almost complete; all that was left was to figure out what the man in the ivory tower desired.

“I’ll wait here, why don’t you head up?”