The Long War

What struck Jansson most in this brief tour wasn’t the space technology, nor the nerdish workers, but the trolls. They were everywhere, labouring in the factories beside clunky assembly-line robots, lugging heavy loads to and fro—such as enigmatic structures of brick, arches and dome segments—and, in one place, mixing and laying down concrete to build what was evidently going to be a broad apron, like a landing pad. This particular party were singing as they worked, and she strained to hear; their song, softly sung, was a round based on what sounded like some old pop song with lyrics about wishing you were a spaceman, the fastest guy alive… No doubt they’d picked it up from the local nerd population.

Frank Wood didn’t even mention the trolls, as if they were invisible to him.

After their walkabout Wood led her to a kind of rough open-air coffee bar, beside the big inverted rocket booster. Jansson sat with relief.

“This is a genuine space launch facility,” he said. “I’m sure you figured out that much. But we’re in a unique position here, next to the Gap, and the way we work is like nothing that’s ever been done before.”

She instinctively liked Frank Wood, but she was quickly growing tired of the fan-boy bragging. “It seems simple enough to me. All I have to do is take one more step and I’ll be in space. Right?”

“True,” he nodded. “In the vacuum. Of course you’d be dead in under a minute if you weren’t in a pressure suit. Then you’d find yourself being flung off into space at hundreds of miles an hour.”

“Really?” She tried to visualize why, failed.

“The Earth’s rotation,” he said. “This Earth. If you’re standing at the equator you’re being rushed around at a thousand miles an hour. The gravity holds you down, here. Step next door, and the gravity’s gone, but you take that momentum over with you. It’s like I whirled you around my head on a rope, and the rope broke, and you just went flying off into space. Of course we can use that velocity vector if we’re clever, but mostly it’s just a nuisance. The only stationary points are at the poles, and it’s not convenient to work there. That’s why we’re at a relatively high latitude, here in England. The further north the better. Or south, of course.”

“Of course,” Jansson said uncertainly.

“Which is opposite to the wisdom of launching from the Datum, where the lower the latitude the better, to get a boost from that rotation… What you have to do is step over in a spaceship.” He pointed to the capsule she’d spotted before, like an Apollo command module on four legs. “That is our shuttle. Adapted from twain technology, a stepping vehicle, but wrapped in a rocket ship re-engineered from the old SpaceX Dragon. All iron and steel components excluded, right? What you do is step over into the Gap—you have to pick the right time of day, when the turning Earth brings you to just the right spot—and the shuttle fires its rockets to take off the spin velocity and bring you to relative rest. Then you dock at the Brick Moon.”

“The what?”

“That’s what we’re calling the permanent station we’re building at the location of the Earth, in the Gap. Brick and concrete are easy to make over here, and easy to step in great sections over there, as long as you use mortar and stuff that can withstand the conditions of the vacuum. Even trolls can churn out great chunks of it.” Which was the very first time he had even mentioned the humanoids. “The station is going to be a kind of honeycomb of sub-spheres in a cluster two hundred feet across. Quick and dirty, but we can do what we like here, whatever we can carry over, you haven’t got to cram everything into the nose-cone of a converted ICBM and subject it to multiple gravities… A brick structure won’t take pressure, but we can install inflatables or ceramic shells within the frame. When it’s done, that is where we’re going to launch our space missions from.” He pointed now at the inverted booster. “I guess you recognize this baby.”

“I wish I could say I did,” she said sadly.

“It’s a re-engineered S-IVB. That is, a Saturn V third stage. You know, the old moon rockets? Old technology but reliable as hell. This is just a test article; we’re reworking it in steppable materials.

“Here’s the beauty of the Gap. From the Datum, you needed a thing the size of the Saturn V itself to get to the moon and back. Right? Because of the need to escape Earth’s gravity. In the Gap, all you’d need to get anywhere, Mars even, is no bigger than this. We’ve already launched one test shot, a mission to Venus with a ship we called the Kingfisher. In future we’re looking at nuclear rockets, which will offer a much better delta-vee. That is—”

“I believe you. I believe you!”