Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

through virtual space, drunk in charge of a
data-drive. New View floated before her, its image filling her
eyeband’s field. The habitat was a sort of orbital commune
– world socialism, in a very small world – which had
been put together by the left wing of the space movement, back
when such ideas seemed to matter. The graticule showed it was
hundreds of metres across, a circular accretion of habitats,
salvaged fuel-tanks, cannibalised spacecraft. She reached out and
turned it about in her datag-loved hands, mildly amused at the
chill, prickly tactile feedback, and peered at the small print of
addresses on the hull until she found the name she sought.
    Logan; whether forename or surname, real name or party name
she didn’t know; she’d never heard the man called
anything else. There it was, scribed on a hull panel from an old
McDonnell Douglas SSTO heavy-lifter. She tapped it and the view
zoomed in, to show a window with the man’s facepeering out.
It was an engagingly apt interface. Myra zapped a hailing code,
and the face at the window responded.
    ‘Oh, hi? Myra Godwin? Just a moment, please.’ The
fetch wavered and Logan’s real face, subtly different,
seamlessly replaced it, pulling back as the window icon widened
to an interior view of an actually windowless room.
    The compartment was full-spectrum strip-lit, the glowing tubes
like shafts of sunlight among intertwined vines and branches,
cables and tubes. Logan floated in the centre of the room. His
cropped white hair matched his white stubble. He wore a faded
blue singlet and baggy pants. Around his brow was a toolkit
headband on which a loupe and a light were mounted; a standard
eyeband was shoved higher up on his forehead. He was bent around
the open back of a control-panel which he had gripped between his
feet and was working on with a hand laser and a set of
jeweller’s screwdrivers.
    He flipped the loupe up from his eye and grinned at her.
    ‘Well, Myra, long time no see.’ He still had the
London accent, overlaid with a space-settler drawl. His space
fraction had picked up a lot of people she and Georgi had known
in Kazakhstan, tough trade-union militants blooded in the
Nazbarayev years.
    ‘Yeah, I’ve missed you too, Logan. How’s
life on New View?’
    Logan gestured with one hand, automatically making a
compensating movement with the other. ‘OK. We’ve got
pretty much up to complement population-wise, near a thousand
last time I checked. We’re making a good living, though
– got a lot of products and skills the white settlers need.
And the old Mars project is chugging along.’
    ‘You’re still doing that?’
    Logan turned up his thumb. ‘Kitting out the expedition,
bit by bit. No intention of hanging around here forever –
not with the white settlers staking out the Moon, anyhow.
Nobody’s even got much scientific interest in Mars any
more, ‘specially after that contamination thing came
out.’
    Myra nodded glumly. It had indeed come as a bit of a
disappointment that Mars had an entire biosphere of busily
evolving micro-organisms, of recent origin; in the 1970s the
Soviets had proudly deposited a piece of paper autographed by
Leonid Brezhnev on the Red Planet, which was now being very
slowly terraformed by the descendants of bacteria from the
General Secretary’s sweat.
    ‘So we’re gonna go for it,’ Logan went on.
‘Some time in the next couple of years, we’re moving
it out’
    ‘You’re going to move New View?’ Myra
smiled at Logan, and at herself – each question so far had
ended on a high note of astonishment.
    ‘Minus a few hundred tons of stuff we won’t need,
but basically, yes. Fill her up – well, fill up a few
tanks, I mean – with Lunar polar water, buy a fusion engine
from the white settlers and push off on a Hohmann orbit. We got
enough old spacecraft lashed into this junk-heap to build
landers, then habitats on the ground.’
    ‘You’ve got it all worked out, I see,’ said
Myra. ‘Well, good luck to you with that.’ The Mars
colony scheme had been pending, Real Soon Now, on Logan’s
agenda for as long as she’d known him. ‘However,
I’ve got something a bit more urgent to ask you. These
white settlers of whom you speak, they aren’t by any chance
the people I once made a lot of money out of sticking on top of
Protons and Energias and sending out there?’
    ‘That’s the ones,’ Logan said. ‘And
the new lot