Chapter 4 - The Anubis

Shanghai Industrial Zone

The smell of noodles cooking was overwhelming in the corrugated iron street stall.  Jin yelled an order at her father over the hubbub of the road.  An endless stream of vehicles and people poured past the place all day every day.  In the evenings, after they closed the stall, Jin and her father retreated to the comparative quiet of the tin shack behind the stall, and did their best to get some much needed rest.  In the mornings, Jin attended lessons at a neighbourhood school before returning to the stall to help with the midday rush.

When she could, she tried to find time to practice the konghou, but the transition from the shanty town to the urban rat race had not been easy.

The jewellery Wu had found in the ruins of sub-Beijing had proved to be mostly costume jewellery, and largely worthless.  However, a couple of the pieces had sold for enough for him to rent the tin shack and the noodle stall, and set up a business.  He had even made enough to pay off the local criminal gang, and the local council health inspectors.

Meanwhile, the talk on the streets was of the revival of the Anubis, although what people generally called was something like ‘cosmic killer.’  The fact that it still existed had come to a great shock to the peoples of the former Eastern Federation, who had endured over three decades of propaganda stating that it had been destroyed, and relations with the states that made up the former Western Alliance were on an equal capability basis.  Governments all across the former Federation were now subject to an intense negative whispering campaign.  All the local strongmen, and/or  the elected representatives in the people’s democracies could say in their defence was that their predecessors had lied to them, and that they knew nothing of the continuing existence of the Anubis.

What they were also saying, and regularly repeating was the humanitarian nature of the Anubis’ revival, and the great mission to the stars that they and all the other peoples of the world would be participating in.  They also made great note of the man selected to lead the mission.  The fact that he was Chinese helped enormously to ease tensions in the former Eastern Federation states.  The propaganda also did its best to gloss over General Cho’s western background.

None of this meant much to Jin.  Her world was encompassed by the demands of the family’s new business, her school work, and the privations of their new home.  Yet occasionally, as she heard people talking about the ‘cosmic killer’, her mind wandered to the great ship in the sky, and its voyage to the stars.  It stirred something in her, a wanderlust that she had never felt before.

L4 - The Anubis

The week on the transit to L4, including three days up to High Point followed by a further four days of tedious travel in free fall aboard a transport did little to assuage Cho's excitement.  As far as the extensively interrogated Defence Force personnel records could tell, nobody alive had been aboard the Anubis. 

Ironically, the stories about the ship had been told and retold with increasing speed and sophistication since the announcement of its existence and new purpose.  A trawl through the newsvid feeds had revealed wild speculation as to the ship's capabilities.  Some of the worst had been from specialist commentators with a military background  who had simply repeated the old scuttlebutt without even the pretence of actually knowing something new or interesting.  There had been anti-war protests resulting from the wilder speculations in some Western cities already, and a worrying letter from the Anubis Mining Corporation’s lawyers demanding an urgent discussion.  That had been put on hold until his return.

The Western Alliance's changes to the ship had always been kept secret.  The huge axial mass driver was no secret, but the rest of the ship was a closed book, until today. 

The report submitted by the mothballing team was disappointingly brief, the non-redacted portions only dealing with the status of survivors of the Eastern attack, the condition of the external airlocks, and a brief notation that the mass driver and its power systems, while damaged, remained partly operational.  A surprising amount of the report had been blacked out, and Cho’s efforts to find an unedited version had been in vain.  The only ray of hope was the name at the bottom of the report. 

Colonel Alfred Clark had led the team, and as already indicated, he was the father of Dr Leah Clark.  The elder Clark had died only three weeks earlier, and despite her recent assurances to the contrary, Cho hoped that Colonel Clark had slipped otherwise highly classified information to his daughter.  It also transpired that Colonel Clark had been quietly advocating in official circles that the ship be restored to its design purpose and used as a colony ship.  The advocacy had been filed and forgotten by previous Earthgov administrations.  Cho didn't think it was a surprise that the idea had been revived when the Centaurus message arrived.  Dr Clark had clearly used her influence inside ESED to have the idea provided to the President at the right time.

The transport closed on the Earth-Moon system L4, the Lagrange point 60° ahead of the Moon's orbit around the Earth.  The faint red shimmer at the point, which Cho knew was somewhat unstable because of the influence of the inner planets, was caused by the Kordylewski cloud, dust left over from the creation of the solar system which collected at points in space where the gravity forces between bodies was balanced.

L4 had been picked at the end of the Long War as a convenient hiding place for the Anubis.  The Kordylewski cloud made the Anubis difficult for ground based observers to see, and so provided support for the fiction the Anubis had been destroyed.  The surviving leaders of the Eastern Federation had not been fooled, but the fiction provided a useful opportunity to pursue peace talks.  The alternative was to keep fighting a lost war.  The sub-light attacks from the Anubis had  broken the Federation's ability to prolong the war, and even if the Anubis had actually been destroyed, peace was inevitable.

The result was the Earthgov Treaty, which formed a sort of superior government above all the regional and national governments, similar in structure to the old European Union, but the member states surrendered their rights to self-defence and law enforcement, and placed that power with Earthgov instead.  Of course, it wasn't just the demand for peace among the war weary survivors on both sides.  It was the threat of a revitalised Anubis lurking at L4 which had pushed the Eastern Federation into the final agreement. 

That was thirty five years ago, in the last decade of the 23^rd century, a century where the Dark Ages had returned to Earth with a vengeance.  Continental wide ecological collapses as humanity's demands on Earth's environment had exceeded its ability to provide had led to war for vital resources.  Cho's parents had fought and died for the Eastern Federation.  He had been luckier, left with his mother's mother in New Zealand, where he had grown up in what had remained a land of plenty, islands of green in an otherwise grey world of war.

Cho shook his head at the image.  His homeland's survival had not been just a matter of luck.  Both sides recognised its value intact, and had assiduously avoided attacking it.  Such restraint had been largely missing from the rest of the strategies adopted by the respective governments.  Instead scorched earth policies predominated, with every weapon in the respective arsenals applied to achieve victory.  The Eastern Federation had achieved considerable success in the early decades of the war, capturing most of Eurasia and Africa, with the Western Alliance holding the Americas, Antarctica, and parts of Western Europe and the remainder of Africa.  Australia became a graveyard of armies, as both sides fought to secure its vast natural resources.  During the darkest days, when it was at its lowest ebb, the Western Alliance's government had fled Earth, and operated from orbital and lunar colonies.  The government’s final refuge had been the Anubis, parked in synchronous lunar orbit, the last and greatest colony ship.  In this secret fastness, the ship's great mass driver had been fashioned, and then turned on the West's enemies on Earth.

Harrington gently elbowed him in the ribs, ending his reverie, as the transport closed on the great rock which had suddenly appeared, looming out of the dust cloud.  The transport's pilot had announced that the ship's computer and Doppler radar would be guiding them in to a safe park near the Anubis.  They were still some 150 kilometres from it, but it was readily visible.  Cho knew the Anubis had been carved from a large asteroid, but it wasn't until he got close to it that he began to appreciate just how huge.  A vast oblong boulder of reddish iron some sixty seven kilometres long and about thirty nine kilometres wide at its stern, it dominated the view from the transport's view port.  The colour wasn’t rust though, but rather the effect of the solar wind on the asteroid’s surface.  The ends of the mass driver were not visible from this aspect, but in a few hours the transport would dock, and they could start their exploration of the ship.

'Dr Clark,' Cho said to the tousled blond woman strapped into her seat in front of him, 'just what sort of condition is the ship really in?' 

She 'Have you read the mothballing report,' she asked?

'Yes, but there is a lot blanked out.  I had hoped your father might have filled you on the missing sections.'

'He told me that the ship's interior had been untouched by the attacks, and the internal airlocks had survived, but as to the current state of the place, that's something we will need to look at.  He wouldn't tell me about the changes made during the war.  They were top secret, and I never had a high enough level of security before he died.  The other point is that the ship's systems were originally installed over two centuries ago.  A lot of those systems are going to be hopelessly outmoded.  A big chunk of this inspection will be deciding what we have to replace.'

'So you said last week.  Did your father offer any hints as to what happened to the ship.'

'Nothing useful, I'm afraid,' she replied.  'His team had the job of entering the ship after the Eastern attack, preparing it for transit to L4, and then closing it down until it was needed again.  Whatever he found here went with him to the grave.  Did you know he was the last survivor of the mothballing team.  There was a large number of ship's crew which survived the attack as well, but they were mostly killed upon their return to Earth.  An Eastern ship killer caught them during re-entry.  There were a few who remained on the Moon, but time or bad luck caught up with them as well.'

'What kind of bad luck,' Harrington asked?

'A series of accidents before and after the armistice.  Dad always wondered if the Easterners were deliberately making it impossible for the ship to be operated again.  The deaths were all investigated, but nothing probative came up.  If it was the Easterners, they must have had some very deep cover operatives on the Moon, because anyone assigned to the lunar bases was heavily checked out.  Of course, life on the Moon then was never safe, there is always a chance of dying by accident or the results of enemy action, after all, look what happened to Moonbase One, and other people who died in the incidents.  Maybe they just had bad luck.'

‘Your father was lucky to survive then,’ Cho remarked. 

‘He thinks there were several attempts to kill him.  But the assassins had the bad luck.  There was a multi vehicle pileup on a motorway he just avoided, a plane he was due to travel on he missed at the last minute which was hijacked and then crashed, and an arson in a nightclub which he just managed to escape from.  After that Earthgov Security put a permanent security watch on him and the incidents stopped.’

A warning indicator light went on as the pilot applied retro thrusters which gently vibrated the entire ship.  Forward velocity tamped, the ship glided into a parallel orbit to the Anubis five hundred metres from a large airlock near the centre of the rock.  The passengers had to leave the confines of their chairs to get a better view of the Anubis, and soon there was a cluster of faces around each of the globular viewports.  On the viewable sunlit section of the ship the dull iron surface of the ship was pocked with micro-meteorite holes, along with deep craters and patches of metal wreckage on the surface resulting from the intense heat and radiation of the nuclear attacks.  Now that the transport was closer, it was now obvious why the transport's pilot had chosen to park where he had rather than go in and dock with an intact airlock. 

The co-pilot's voice came over the cabin intercom.  'We are sending out a team to check on the state of the airlock and the level of background radiation,' he announced.  'If we get the all clear we will dock here.  If not we will proceed to another airlock and try again.'

'Where is the ship hangar,' Harrington asked Clark?

'There are two.  Well there were two in the original plans,' Clark replied.  'The mothballing report reported that they were both knocked out during the Easterner attack, so we can't use either of them.  That's why we are looking for a functioning airlock.  I just hope the reserve batteries are still working after all this time.  If they aren't we are going to have to manually open them.  Ah, the team is going now.'

The transport almost imperceptibly shuddered again as an exterior airlock door opened, and two astronauts emerged, and drifted towards the airlock using a manoeuvring system fixed to the back of their EVA spacesuits.  Unlike the moon suits Cho was familiar with these had more in the way of radiation shielding, and lacked separate legs, instead having a legless pod attached to the waist of a standard suit.  Once the airlock was opened, the team entering the ship would be using legged suits to get around.  The two spacesuits jerked as manoeuvring thrusters fired, and a few minutes later they made contact with the airlock structure. 

The distance being so great, everyone in the cabin turned their attention to a view screen showing split feeds from the cameras mounted on the astronauts helmets.  One of the astronauts, having attached to the airlock's panel with a magnetic grapnel, held himself in place by holding onto a convenient handle while he grasped at what appeared to be some kind of key pad.  Try as he might, the lights did not light up on the keypad, and the outer airlock door remained shut.

Damn,' Dr Clark ejaculated, ‘the auxiliary batteries are out of power.’ 

The two astronauts drifted back to the transport, and over the next hour rigged up an electrical cable to the airlock control system, and gently fed a current into its reserve batteries.  Eventually the batteries had a large enough charge, and they entered the airlock, and the door closed.  A few minutes later the outer airlock door opened, and the two astronauts started making their way back to the transport.

Fifteen minutes later they were admitted into the passenger cabin, and debriefed.

'The airlock is working now, but the air inside the section of the ship we entered is oxygen low and tainted,' Sub-Lieutenant Sims of ESED stated.  'It's got a high CO₂ and CH₄ count, and will need to be flushed and replaced.  It's like there was a mini greenhouse effect inside the rock.'

'If we get the plantations going again that would sort out the greenhouse gas problem fairly quickly,' Clark said behind Cho.  He turned in astonishment.

'What plantations,' he demanded?

'The ship has extensive horticultural and pastoral capability.  I imagine most of the soil fauna and flora is dead or in stasis, but with the appropriate replacements and restoring the artificial light and heating systems we could have them back on line in a few months.'

'I thought it was all hydroponic farming,' Cho responded.

'It was, for a lot of its biomass and food outputs, but the size of the asteroid means that it can support real farms using dirt when under one gee thrust.  My father told me that the carousel farms were quite a sight, even during war time conditions.  They had to euthanize the farm animals, as there was no way of getting them off the ship, and they weren't going to survive when the power was switched off, so I expect the decomposition of their carcasses contributed to the tainted air.'

'Just what other titbits of information are you holding onto Doctor,' Cho replied in his command voice.

'That depends on the questions you are asking, doesn't General.  I am not trying to be obstructive; my father mentioned a few things about the ship over the years, and that was one of them.'

'Okay, I understand.  Sims, how soon get we board the Anubis?'

'As soon as you and your party can get into the space suits and over to the air lock.  When we head back we will string a line between us and the airlock, and you will be conveyed along that.'

It took a further half an hour to attach the ship's powered line on the Anubis.  The full rig consisted of lightweight cable attached by a carabineer  to a handle in the pod extending out from the transport's port airlock.  A crew member fired the other end of the cable towards Anubis with a tiny rocket.  On impact, the large plastic pad on the fired end of the cable adhesively stuck itself to the Anubis' hull.  The adhesive coating would hold the line to the hull until a second chemical activated from the transport neutralised the coating.

As each person entered the pod, they attached a tiny motor unit to the cable, and switched on the unit.  When activated, it gripped the cable, and drawing power via induction from the cable, dragged the user along it via a short cable attached to the user's spacesuit.  At the other end it automatically stopped when it impacted the plastic pad.  Then the operator detached the motor unit and gripped the handles dotted around the airlock, and pulled themselves in.  Once inside, they held onto convenient wall flush handles until the last person was inside the airlock, and the outer door shut.  Then the airlock filled with the ship's atmosphere.  Once the airlock internal pressure was equalised with the ship’s the inner door opened, and they were able to enter the airlock's second chamber through a second lock door.  Once all inside the second chamber, the second door was shut, and they were able to open the inner airlock door.  Normal spacecraft used a two door system, but asteroid ships had the extra depth that enabled the use of the much safer three door airlock system.  The ship's hangars used the two door system, but the inner doors were massive affairs capable of preventing the escape of the ship's atmosphere even if the hangars were hit by anything up to a crashing spaceship.

Once through the airlock, the team found themselves in a wide, poorly lit corridor, four metres wide, running perpendicular to their entry.  What was odd was that the doors were in the floor and the ceiling of the corridor.  It took Cho a moment to realise that this made sense when the ship was under thrust, because what he currently regarded as a wall was actually the floor.  The perils of a really low gravity field made themselves suddenly apparent.  He carefully pushed down the wall, onto the floor, and switched on the electromagnetic magnetic boot soles on his space suit.  Suddenly the scene made a lot more sense.  Everyone else followed suit.

'Where are we Doctor,' Cho demanded.  She turned to peer at him through her suit's helmet visor.

'We are in the Engineering Section.  Below us are the primary generators, and the stern end of the mass driver.  Forward of us are the water tanks, the farms, the heavy and light industrial sections, and the cold sleep chambers.  At the other end of the ship are the secondary power generators.  Both of the hangars are further forward on both sides.  There are lift/train systems running along the long length of the ship, but there are also lifts/trains running up the width of the ship.  Each of the decks has pedestrian walkways as well.'

'How far away is the Command Centre,' Cho asked?

Clark looked at the location notation on the wall, and replied, 'It's a notional 15514 floors north of here.  Incidentally, for those unfamiliar with getting around on these ships, the ship should be considered like a giant skyscraper with the bow of the ship as the top or north of the ship, and the stern is the bottom or south end.  Room locations markings are always in floor number, starting from the stern followed by a second number indicating a west oriented corridor and backslash followed by a number which tells us the number of corridors it is from the western end of the ship.  We are currently in 215 Y1/X2378.  If you imagine each floor is like a two dimensional image with X and Y axes, the X axis is the western edge.  Each point on the image can be determined by its distance from the respective edges.  Corridor Y1 we are in at the moment is the closest corridor to the western or X axis.  The next cross corridor is Y2, and so on.  know it sounds confusing but you will get used to it.  As you can see, doors off the corridors have individual numbers based on the distance from the base of the ship and the western end or X axis.  They are cabins designed for individuals working in the command and control functions of this vessel.  Further forward are the compartments for the industrial workers.  Once you get used to the system you will be able to get anywhere you want to go, although because of the way the ship was set up, most business can be conducted over vidphone.'

Cho did a quick estimate.  They were in the notional western side of the stern of the ship.  Each floor in this space apparently had a stud height of four metres.  That meant that, assuming this floor height was common to the ship, and he already knew that it wasn't, there were somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 floors in the overall ship.  The tallest building he had ever been in was a 350 storey building in Dubai.  The sheer size of the ship started making its presence felt.

'How are we supposed to get to the Command Centre?  I hope we don't have to climb ten thousand flights of stairs.'  Before he could say another word, Clark interrupted him with a peal of laughter.

'Of course not General.  The ship’s designers anticipated having to re-enter the ship if the primary generators were ever turned off, and provided the option of starting them remotely.'  She walked over to a console with glowing buttons, and after consulting her datapad for the code punched in a long alphanumeric combination.  Then she selected options from the touch screen.  In response, the emergency lights in the floor and ceiling slowly illuminated, and after a few minutes, it was as bright as sunset in the corridor.  The corridor was a dull metallic light yellow finish throughout, with occasional splashes of blues, reds, and greens denoting upcoming corridors, room locations, hatches, safety equipment recessed into wall alcoves and  a variety of signs.  He also noticed that the paint was flaking in places, particularly on the areas of heavy foot traffic when the ship was moving, which was odd because he understood that it spent most its life in orbit.

'What did you turn on, Doctor,' Harrington asked, ‘and why is it so dark?’

'I accessed the reserve capacitors, and allowed the ship to start drawing power from them to light up the areas we are visiting today.  Once we get to the Command Centre we will bring the nuclear batteries on line, which will give us sufficient power to get one of the fission reactors going again, which will in turn allow us to get one of the fusion reactors going.  The ship works on a diurnal cycle, and in ship time, it is currently twilight.’ 

She stopped for a moment to admire her handiwork, and then added, ‘General, I think you will find that the lifts are working again.'

With that, she led them down a long corridor, until they reached a bank of lifts, with extremely wide doors.  They were at least five times wider than Cho had ever seen before..  After she gingerly pushed a button, the doors opened and they entered.  The lift car was unlike any Cho had ever seen before either.  It had over 100 seats, each equipped with multi-point seat restraints, and they were each capable of being rotated 90° each and locked into place in both positions.

His raised eyebrows must have been visible through his helmet visor, because Clark remarked, 'General, this ship is designed to be generally habitable normal travel conditions while under thrust from the stern.  However, it can also operated while the ship is in orbit and people and animals are confined to the contra-rotating carousels in the centre of the ship.  The individual rooms can be reconfigured to take into account a new down direction.  That does mean that certain parts of the ship reliant on a constant gravity direction are harder to use during that time.  We could also spin the ship and turn the ship's sides into the floor, but that would mean that we couldn't use the space elevator.’

'Why don't you just get us to the Command Centre, Doctor,' Cho said with sudden weariness.  Doctor Clark's explanations were starting to wear on his nerves.

'Of course,' she said in an excited voice.  Cho knew they were the first people on this ship for nearly 35 years.  In his case, he hadn't spent the last few decades thinking about getting on board, whereas Clark definitely had.  He began to wonder just what other classified information her father had given her.

After they strapped in, Clark, sitting in the controller's chair, punched in a destination address in the console next to the door.  There was a brief pause, and then the sensation of movement.  For the first time in days, Cho suddenly felt heavy again as the gee forces from his forward momentum pushed him back into his seat.  He had noticed on boarding that the Anubis did have a slight gravity, but not enough to prevent him drifting around if he wasn’t using magnetic boots.  Now his body was remembering what it was like to live in a gravity field again.  He had not really had the time to fully adjust back to it while on Earth, so what he was suffering was a uncomfortable reminder of what he had to get used to again.

Under the pressure of the unexpected weight, the trip seemed to take hours, but he knew it was only a few minutes.  'Just how fast are we moving, Doctor' he yelled at Clarke through his throat mike.

'About 300 km per hour,' she yelled back, her voice echoing around his helmet.  Even as she said it, he could feel weightlessness returning as the car slowed and then stopped.

Climbing out, Cho, to his chagrin, tottered slightly on his feet as he recovered from the sudden return of weight.

The doors opened, and they stepped out into what appeared to be a subway station.

'Where to from here, Doctor,' Cho asked.

She pointed at another set of doors set into the right hand wall fifty metres away.

'This is one of the exterior change stations, General.  From here we can continue towards the bow, or can go into the ship.  Command Centre Two is set in the northern carousel, and we need to take a cross lift/train there.'

The doors of the cross loft/train opened without incident, and again they strapped themselves in.  A few minutes of G-Force later, the car stopped, and the doors opened.  In front of them was the hub entrance to the northern rotating section of the ship's living spaces.  There were two of them, which rotated in opposing directions when the ship was in orbit.  They rotated around an immense hub, which meant that access to the various floors was simply a matter of stepping onto the relevant floor as it slowly rotated past.  Because of the immense size of the contra-rotating sections, where the floors terminated at the hub, there was no shortage of time to do this, and there were lift/trains which passed straight through the hub  from one side of the carousel to the other by dint of parking in the hub and waiting until the relevant floor became available.

Cho had experienced contra-rotating carousels on the Capitol class of Defence Force space ships, but had never been in one anywhere as large before.  Unlike much of the rest of the ship, the spaces in the carousels were capable of being used when the ship was in freefall.  When the ship was underway and the stern was down, the carousels were locked in place, and the south ends of the spaces became the floor.  When the ship was not under way, the outside surfaces were the floor, and the carousels rotated.  Duplicates of the major living spaces and functional controls were installed in the carousels, and because of the carousels modular design and lightweight prefabricated components, switching the down direction was a relatively straightforward process.  With thousands of workers doing the work that is.  The carousels were enormous, and used a similar approach to maglev trains to start them spinning.  Judging from the layout, it was currently configured for freefall, which made sense.  A lift train was currently parked in the carousel hub station they had stopped at, and they entered and strapped themselves in.  Another twenty minutes of substantially travel later, they emerged in another lift/train lobby, and took a moving pavement a further ten minutes until they reached an ornate entry lobby.  From there they walked for a few minutes until they finally got to where they were going.

They entered a reception area dotted with large chairs through a pair of the largest metal doors Cho had ever seen.  At the other end of the reception area, and rather jarringly, stood heavy metal guard posts jutting out from the wall next to a set of heavy grey steel armoured doors.  From their gun ports pointed the barrels of heavy machine guns.  It didn't look anything like the corridor construction that he had seen before.  It appeared to be a much later addition to the lobby.  Cho didn't imagine they wasn't anything but empty reminders of the paranoia of the leaders of the Western Alliance during the most perilous times of the Long War, when all hope for the future lay in the destructive power they were forging in this ship.

Shaking the image from his head, he proceeded towards the armoured doors.  The interior bars which held the door shut were in the locked position, and with some strain they pulled them up and opened the doors.  On the other side was a large conference room with a huge table in it, and beyond that a dais with a podium with the flags of the Western Alliance states draped on standards standing in front of the wall behind it.  Doors opening from either side of the dais turned out to lead through to spaces allocated for aides of the Western Alliance leaders, and their own spacious offices, and some luxurious personal apartments, all done in decor redolent of the mad years just before the outbreak of the war.  What was interesting was that the Western Alliance leaders had not left the luxuries of their presidential palaces behind when they vacated their capitals for the Anubis.  Forgotten works of art, silk sheets, expensive wall hangings, and even carpet reposed in their suites , apparently awaiting their return.

'Which way is the actual command centre, Doctor,' Cho asked as he completed his tour of what he expected would end up being his offices and the apartments of the senior staff on the ship when the ship was in orbit somewhere.

'It's that way,' she replied, pointing at a large electronic direction sign attached to the wall.  It was switched off, presumably because signage that wasn't emergency related wasn't included in the emergency lighting plan.

'Which way is that again,' he asked?

''Sorry, I'll show you the way,' she said.  Her space suited figure walked stiffly across the grey flecked metallic floor, and he followed her, as she pushed through an unlocked heavy armoured door to the left of the entry lobby.  Behind them the rest of the boarding team did the same thing.  Beyond the armoured doors was a short corridor and another set of armoured doors with armoured guard posts, again with the snouts of heavy machineguns pointing down the corridor.

'They certainly went in for security when they were on this ship,' Harrington remarked as they waited while Clark went through her datapad for the right alphanumeric code to get them into the Command Centre proper.  Eventually she found the code for the door, and punched in the key combination.  Nothing happened.  She tried again, with no better results.

'What's the problem, Doctor,' Cho asked, as muttered swearing started assailing their ears.

'This code isn't working.  The security pad has power, and it is recording the entries, but it isn't opening the doors.'  She paused for a moment, while she collected her thoughts.  'Maybe,' she remarked, 'there was a transposition error, and all I need is to try some variant combinations.'  She set to, trying a variety of different combinations.

'Alec,' Cho said to Detroit, 'how long would it take to cut through that door.'

Detroit looked the door up and down, and then took Cho back to the other set of armoured doors and examined them.

'A couple of hours, I think,' he eventually advised.  'We'll need to get some laser cutting torches sent over from the transport, and a portable nuclear generator, which will delay things a bit.  I'll need to get back to the airlock to get a message across.  They won't hear us in here.' 

As it turned out, that wasn't necessary, as while Detroit and his team started making their way back to the lift/train, they heard Clark's cry of success.

'Eureka,' she cried down the radio net.  'The 10^th and 11^th digits were transposed.  Cho, Detroit, and the others returned to the Command Centre entrance, where they found Clark pulling open the doors.  They were unusually heavy, and two of her assistants were assisting.  Eventually they got them fully open, and door restraints attached to the walls on either side of the doors in place.

'What was the point of these doors in here,' Detroit asked?  'The whole asteroid is effectively armour plated.'

'The Western Alliance was wary of internal coups,' Clark replied as she turned back from the open doors to address them.  'There were a couple of attempts by ambitious under-secretaries in the early years of the exile from Earth, and when the Alliance moved into the Anubis, the Alliance leaders made certain, well, as certain as they ever could, that is, that any attempted coups would fail.  Dad once told me that there were a couple of attempts on the leadership, but they failed.  The last one was by deep cover Eastern Federation operatives who somehow made it onto the Anubis.'

'What happened to them,' Cho asked?

'Probably the most unique form of execution ever devised in the history of mankind,' Clark replied with a tone of horror in her voice.  To the newly raised eyebrows, she added the words, 'You mean you don't know,' in a sympathetic questioning tone.

'No, were they tossed into space,' Cho asked, his own curiosity suddenly jarred by what something that Clark evidently regarded as being personal to him?

'Much worse than that,' Clark replied, the horrified intonation now stronger.  'They were kept imprisoned until just before the Anubis was used to attack the Eastern Federation.  Then they were forced into spacesuits, dropped into the mass driver, and used as the first projectiles the Alliance used to attack the Easterner megalopolis.  With a total mass of about 100 kilogram's and accelerated to near light speed their bodies would have done widespread damage when they impacted.  Of course, they were dead long before they left the mass driver, and they would have been torn apart when they hit the atmosphere, so as weapons they weren't particularly useful.  The real city killers were the asteroid iron bombs that made up the second salvo.'

'So why go to all that trouble,' Detroit asked.

'The war had been going on for a very long time,' she replied.  'The commanders on both sides had gone way past any sympathy for the enemy.  They just wanted the war to end.  What we would regard as inhuman cruelty was a daily occurrence.  All they were doing was sending the infiltrators back to sender, in the grossest manner they could think of.'

'But that's horrible,' Harrington enounced in her drawling Texan accent, as if saying so would somehow make the horror less.

Cho looked at them, and said, 'Those days are long behind us.  These days we live and work together, and we have all learned to get along.  That's something I want all the crew on this mission to be clear about.  Whatever our feuds in the past, survival in deep space relies on everyone working for a common purpose.' 

The awkward radio silence following Cho's speech was only broken when Clark said, ''We can get into the Command Centre now, General.  Please follow me.'

She led them down the passage, and they entered the Command Centre.

To Cho, it looked like some kind of bizarre combination of pictures he had seen of NASA's Mission Control in Houston, and the Enterprise's bridge from the classic series.

It was like a giant lecture theatre.  One side was made up of a curved wall, with a huge Tri-D display screen dominating it, with subsidiary screens flanking the main screen over the remainder of the curved wall.  Three shallow tiers rose away from the curved wall.  On each tier were dozens of workstations.  The screens and workstations sat without power, and only red emergency lighting pierced the gloom.  The white lights used in the corridors leading up the Command Centre were missing from the ceilings and walls, replaced by low level indirect lighting.  The workstations had small lights to illuminate the desks though.  Apparently the Command Centre operated in near dark, presumably to make best use of the screens.

Behind the banks of work stations were offices, presumably for administrators, and a main office presumably occupied by the ship commander and his immediate staff.  Outside this office was a semicircular desk with a single curved screen with the proverbial command chair addressing the curve.  That was clearly where the ship's commander sat, directing the activities of the ship.

'The Captain's chair, I presume,' Cho said in a slightly breathless tone.'

'Yes, it was modelled on the legendary captain's chair from, well, I'm sure you can guess,' Clark said with a chortle.

Cho viewed the Command Centre.  'This equipment doesn't look any different to the stuff I was using on Lunar 5,' he remarked.

'Well, most of this is only fifty or so years old, but you must know that computer systems haven't materially progressed in sophistication or capability since the late 21^st century, when the limits of chip design and quantum computing were reached.  The only big change was finally getting rid of the Qwerty keyboard around 2192, when consumer support for more efficient keyboards finally made the manufacturers see sense.' 

Cho had stopped listening to her just after she started, and simply asked, 'How long before we can get them up and running.'

'We need to fire up the nuclear batteries.  That will be enough to get these terminals going, and query the status of the ship's other systems,' Detroit said.  He moved over to the Command chair, sat down, and said, as if addressing an invisible crew, 'Status, Mr Sulu.'  He looked sheepishly back at the others.  'Sorry, I always wanted to say that.'

'Shouldn't you be in Mr Scott's seat then,' Cho said in a light tone, pointing at a work station titled 'Ship's Chief Engineer' located on the third tier.

'Of course, Sir,' Detroit said.  He made his way, and after consulting his datapad, entered a series of alphanumeric codes into the terminal.   Indirect lighting snapped on in the walls, the immense Tri-D screen glowed into life and they all found appropriate workstations to operate from.  Cho sat down in the command chair.  The screen flicked on, breaking aspects of the ship's operations into ten discreet sub-screens around the curved screen.  Some of the sub-screens showed aspects of the ship he really hadn't expected.

The first sub-screen dealt with the ship's position in space, the nearest large bodies that might represent a risk to it, and the ship's orbit characteristics and velocity through space.  The second sub-screen dealt with life support issues on the ship, the third with power generation and consumption, and that presented some considerable surprises, the fourth and fifth screens dumped data from a variety of onboard and outboard sensors, and he noted the presence of the transport on some of them.  The sixth screen dealt with small object repellent systems, including the status of the ionizing lasers at the bow of the ship, and the polarity and strength of the electromagnetic shield formed by running a positive electric charge through the iron hull of the ship and the seventh was...

'Woah,' Cho said quietly.  The shock of what he saw created the feeling of great tension in his chest, as he struggled to gain breath, and became seriously worried that he might have a heart attack.  Time appeared to slow down, his movements over the work station requiring huge effort as his hands slowly worked the controls.  Then time resumed its normal course, as he quickly worked through the remaining three sub-screens.  'Woah,' he repeated more loudly.  This time people took notice, and, while waiting for their work stations to make contact with the system's computers, looked over at him.

'Mr Detroit, please display Commander's Readiness Screens 3, 7, and 8 on the big screen,' Cho said in a sotto voice.  After some fumbling at his station, Detroit found the relevant command sequence, and the giant screen suddenly displayed what Cho could see on his command system screen.

A chorus of shocked surprise echoed around the room.  Before them, On the far left of the big screen, Readiness Screen 3 displayed the ship's power generation systems, and they were vastly greater than anyone had expected.  Readiness Screen 7 displayed the inventory, and the launch readiness status, of the Anubis' previously unknown and, since the Earthgov Treaty, entirely illegal, nuclear arsenal.  The ship was for all practical purposes, in terms of sheer firepower alone, a superpower.  Many thousands of megatons of nuclear annihilation were stored and ready to use in hundreds of missiles stored in silos dotted across the ship's hull.  Next to that was the contents of Readiness Screen 8, which dealt with the ship’s defensive systems.  While many were returning non-functioning red reports, presumably because the laser and anti-missile and anti-ship missile units were damaged or destroyed by the Eastern Federation nuclear attack, but there were still scores of working laser and missile turrets now monitoring their immediate space for unidentified intruders.

'Switch those off, Mr Detroit, before they decide to shoot at the transport,' Cho commanded.  His command voice echoed through the strained chill of the radio net, the first time that many of them had really heard it.  After further fumbling Detroit found the relevant system command menu, and turned them off.

'I had no idea,' Clark's voice said, as it whispered through the radio net. 

She was right, Cho thought.  The Treaty provided that both sides would to destroy their remaining nuclear weapons, and they did so in heavily guarded facilities monitored by both sides.  Earthgov had been assiduous in ensuring there were none left, and strictly controlled access to remaining fissionable material.  The general switch to fusion power generation at the end of the 21^st century had removed the need for fission nuclear power stations, and over the next fifty years they were replaced with small fusion plants.  With them went the main source of fissionable material.  The only ones left after that were small military installations run by the nuclear powers to maintain their nuclear arsenals, and what had been left over in the plutonium storage banks of the old fission reactors scattered across the globe.  Long prior to the Long War, they had been shut down and dismantled, and their remaining inventory had either been used in bombs or had disappeared during the war.  Earthgov had engaged in several well publicised hunts for the missing fissionable material, but had never found much more than a few caches entombed in the destroyed Eastern Federation cities.  Now Cho knew where the rest had ended up.  The Western Coalition had put it on board the Anubis, as part of a vast and secret nuclear arsenal.  The only reason they hadn’t been used was that the Anubis incorporated an even more devastating weapon; its gigantic mass driver.

‘All nukes were supposed to have been destroyed, as part of the general peace,' Cho said, as he looked over the inventory.  'What are they doing here?'

'They must have been installed during the Western Alliance's time here,' Clark added, demonstrating what Cho hoped would not prove to be a frequent habit of stating the obvious.  'Why didn't my father tell me,' she added plaintively.

Cho ruminated briefly over the implications.  ‘The issue now is whether I report them or not,’ he said  ‘If I report it, and the news leaks, it could set back Earthgov for decades, maybe even damage the Treaty itself.  If I don't, and the story still gets out, then the Westerners will be suspected of preparing for nuclear war against the Easterners.  Member states could secede, restarting the war.'

'Best not to say anything,' Clark said, her voice stronger over the net than before.  'They might be needed on the trip.'

'I can just imagine a time when I would need to firestorm a planet,' Cho replied acerbically.  'I have a scheduled progress briefing for Field Marshal Kessler when I get back to the transport.  Maybe he can explain why the nukes are here.  As for what we do with them, it might well be safer to take them with us.  Weapons tend to give people ideas.  These ones could give a lot of people ideas, and not good ones.'

Experimentally he highlighted one of the silos that wasn’t returning a non-functioning red signal, and queried its status.  He selected the launch option, and a screen demanding a launch release code popped up.

'I thought so,' he remarked.  'Dr Clark, do you have anything resembling launch codes in your files?'

'No, of course not , General.  I don't know who would either.'

‘What about your boss?  I read in his bio that he had a hand in the construction of the mass driver.  He probably knows about the nukes as well.’

‘You’ll have to ask him about that yourself,’ she said sharply, apparently annoyed at his accusation about her boss’ motives.

'What about the last serving crew then.'

'The commanding officer and his immediate subordinates would have had the authority to fire, but the launch codes allowing them  to do so were in all probability only held by the most senior political figures in the Western Alliance, and even then it would have required a majority of the leaders to agree to a nuclear attack.  To prevent an unauthorised launch the ship's crew would have been locked out of the system until the right launch codes were provided.  When the Western Alliance was folded into Earthgov, the launch codes would presumably have been transferred through to the President's office, but I have no idea if the current President even knows about these weapons.'

'I'll have to raise it with her then too.  In the meantime, I expect each of you to keep your mouths shut about this until the powers that be have decided what to do with them.'  A chorus of assent came back, and Cho decided to move on with the inspection.

'What about the extra fusion reactors?'  When Cho had opened the Commander's Readiness Screen 3 for the ship's power systems, he had found far more entries for reactors than there were originally installed.  A further 1241 micro fusion reactors were listed, collectively capable of producing more power than the combined demand of North and South America.  The number of potential terawatts available was awe inspiring.

'The Western Alliance must have stripped them from cities it evacuated during the early phases of the war,' Clark said  'How on earth they keep it a secret is beyond me.  But they explain the end of the war salvo at the Easterner cities.  I thought they relied on the ship's capacitor banks, but I could never work how they kept up the rate of fire.  Now I know they were simply using mains power.  It's quite extraordinary.'

'Be that as it may, Doctor, can you get us to the cold sleep, agricultural, and industrial spaces today.' 

Clark consulted her datapad.  'Not with the power systems we currently have running,' she replied.  'We had just enough juice left in the capacitors and the nuclear batteries to get the train here and go back to the airlock, but not enough to power those levels as well.  We need to get the reactors on line.  I would say it will take at least a couple of days to get the ship up to minimum power.'

'Can't you do that any faster,' Cho inquired?

'No, Sir,' Detroit interjected.  'That's my minimum estimate too.  It's more likely to take up to a couple of weeks, possibly months.  It's not like flicking a light switch.  The power systems have been out of action for over thirty five years.  The engineering team need to assess their condition, make any repairs required, and then start them up in the right sequence.  Our restart plans are based on what we knew were installed during the original construction.  The extra reactors seriously complicate things, and we need to work out the changes.  We also need to check the power relays for damage.  Otherwise things could turn bad around here.  I suggest you and your aide return to the transport while we make a start here.'

Cho and Harrington had little choice but to return to the transport while Clark and Detroit directed the engineers.  There he was kept busy setting up a secure link with the President’s Office, and having a frustratingly drawn out conversation with both President Kazulu and Field Marshal Kessler, courtesy of the transmission delay.  Both Kazulu and Kessler disclaimed all knowledge of nukes, or the other changes to the Anubis, and promised an urgent internal inquiry.