Bypass Gemini

Chapter 4

The most costly part of space travel, in the old days, had been the takeoff. Escaping a planet’s gravity well took a huge amount of energy, and it all had to be done under conventional propulsion. Ways had been found to do an end run around the laws of physics in terms of exceeding light speed without needing the energy of an exploding star to pull it off, but those methods were dangerous to do inside a star system, and more or less impossible in an atmosphere. An early and still popular method to ease the energy cost of this first step in space-faring was the invention of the space elevator. It wasn’t anything special, just a very long tether hooked up to a space station in low orbit, but it let you load-lift and haul material into space without pesky concerns about thrust and escape velocity.

Lex puttered to a stop at one of the four service tethers at Golana Interstellar. They were skinny things compared to the mighty commuter and cargo tethers, but they let the maintenance crew ferry parts and personnel to the station without interrupting scheduled trams. He shouldered his bike and pressed a thumb to the scanner. It gave a satisfying bleep and the security door swished open. Back in his racing days, Lex had done a fair amount of performance tuning on his ships, cars, and sleds. He wasn’t the best mechanic around, but he knew his way around an engine, so Blake registered him as a part timer at his garage for those times when things were getting a little backed up and he needed the extra help. One of the added benefits was free, ‘round the clock access to ‘The Upstairs,’ Golana Interstellar’s orbital section.

“Hey, Denny. Mention the tux and I’ll slap you,” Lex said with a nod to the teenager working the security desk.

“Hi, Mr. Alexander. Reason for tram usage?” he squeaked.

“I need to shuttle some ships around for Blake. I’ll be taking one off planet, so it’s going to be a multi-day thing.”

“Sure thing.”

A few minutes later a tram the size of a shipping container came zipping up from below the loading deck. Maintenance tethers were in pairs, one up and one down. It helped keep the traffic flowing when a schedule wasn’t possible. The gate released a pressurized hiss as it disengaged and he stepped inside. It was a no frills vehicle, little more than a super-sized elevator with a row of seats along one wall, and a matching one upside-down above them. A few more minutes passed while they waited to see if anyone else was going to be burning the midnight oil, then the doors closed and sealed. A control panel on the door worked its way through a sequence of safety checks. Air pressure: Nominal. Tether Integrity: Nominal. Power Integrity: Nominal. Inertial Inhibitor: Active. A pair of heavy duty electric motors whined with effort and the tram began to accelerate upwards.

If he was a first-timer, he would have been awed by the speed of it. The various floors of the maintenance building shot by in a blur of stone and metal, and then the ground was dropping away as though gravity had decided to reverse and he was now falling upward. The acceleration should have been enough to pin him painfully to the floor, but the very same thing that made the limo stunt survivable was at work here as well, doing the job it was actually invented to do. Through the sort of complex quantum physics that a science geek would spend three hours gushing over and the average person would write off as magic, a field generator inside the tram canceled out the excess acceleration, keeping the ride at a rock steady 1g. Without it, the whole ride would either be much slower, much less comfortable, or likely a combination of the two.

About a third of the way through the trip the motors approached their top speed and the acceleration started to drop, the gravity going along with it. Lex grabbed one of the hand rails scattered liberally along the walls and pivoted himself upside-down with a yawn. Artificial gravity was possible, but it was a much larger and more expensive process, so the elevator and most small ships did without. A warning light began to blink on a panel, and the readout listing motor status switched from ‘Powered’ to ‘Regenerative Breaking.’ The gravity came back, though this time on the ceiling, and he took a seat on one of the chairs that seemed so out of place at the beginning of the trip. Barely three minutes after he’d left the surface, the gravity drifted away again and the tram clicked into the docking section of The Upstairs.