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Chapter 20: From Technician's Viewpoint Enroute

John Fornier stood up in the spacerail spacecraft, having noted that the person in the invader's spacesuit was unconscious but breathing, just as General Beasely strode over to the pair. John managed a salute despite his spacesuit, and the General returned the salute. "Report!" barked the officer. "Airman Fornier, sir; this unconscious person here is someone from the pirate earthsurface spacecraft which attacked the KESTS but fortunately was not quite able to nuke us all. It appears to be a woman, and the pilot's maneuvers suggest a highly intelligent, dedicated and clever soldier."

General Beasely, who was traveling up the KESTS to GEO after completing a tour of duty as commander of the defensive guard of the 600 mile perimeter around earthsurface KESTS terminal in Ecuador, rapidly evaluated the situation, requested assistance from several Marines also on that spacetrain railcar, and the slowly reviving figure in the spacesuit was placed in a spare acceleration couch, and safely strapped there.

Donna, former Haremmate of Bullguarde, and (almost) the greatest bombpilot of all, awoke to find herself in some vehicle, but not her flying bomb spacecraft, however. She had to get to it and trigger the nuke, and do it now! But she was only able to sit up, strapped into a cushiony couch, and there were other people in couches near her, in ordinary clothes. KESTS Spacetrain riders; they were alive, not fried; she had failed in her glorious mission. Well, there were more like her far below, even now playing simulation games on converted ground launch vehicles, the glory would be to one of them. The hated KESTS to GEO would be brought down, and then the Breeding Men and their Harems of earthsurface would own all of Earth forevermore. Meanwhile, maybe she could dispose of the KESTS from up here; she was an undefeatable woman.

Asperger Passenger (AP) stiffly pried himself out of the deceleration activated couch, where he had been sunken into so quickly as the spacetrain had suddenly decelerated from the 4,000 mph it had been sliding at along the upper maglev rail on the KESTS prior to the detection of the impact ahead of them. He understood the mechanisms of what had happened better than most people, but the people events around him were always baffling, and the two spacesuited figures which had come through the disembarkation airlock in full view of his couch were just more mystery, why do people do all these things? Some of the other passengers were now also squeezing up out of their floatation couches, some excitedly babbling to their partners. He had made the 12 hour trip along the 45,000 mile half-perimeter between the Earth surface and the Clarke Belt Habitat Ring many times, and it was certain that they were nowhere near the Clarke belt disembarkation site yet. The human drama playing out in front of him would be comprehensible later to him, but for now it was all like seeing a three ring circus as a toddler would, much people-action without much meaning.

However, nearby was a portal to the world he knew so well, as one of the maintenance operators of the spacerail transportation system. Along with all the entertainment channels available to passengers on the spacetrain, there were KESTS maintenance channels, and into one of these he plugged his hologram awareness interface, and into the identity of the KESTS his self-awareness went.

The life sized dynamic hologram that interlaced with all parts of the KESTS elliptical rail structure, was livid with position servo information for restoring homeostasis after the collision by the two spacecraft 500 km above the earth's equator. All but one of the spacetrain rails were obstructed by the crash site, so all the rail cars were halted on those tracks on the downward side of the KESTS. The living hologram told its ongoing real-time story in sight and sound to the earth terminal, where already the velocity vectors of the outgoing armature segments were compensating for the unexpected collision impulse and added live load of the weight of the spacecraft far above the ground. The great armature mass stream thrusters high in space on the KESTS also adjusted their input energy to the downward mass streams, as they input their solar powered thrust to the armature mass streams while also urging the orbital-transfer-trajectory shaped Kests to precess around once each 24 hours to match the rotation of the planet to which it was attached far below.

The hologram resonated at the speed of light all around the KESTS, interacting with every part of the transportation system, and brought the operators of the KESTS into full arousal at their stations located in the Clarke Belt Habitat Ring. The operators were enmeshed into the KESTS matrix as if their very bodies included images of each particular part of the KESTS. The operators dedicated to the area where the crash site was, gave out message patterns for equal and opposite unbalanced thrusts from armature mass segments, peaking out at the crash thrust area, dampening out with distance from there. The impacting spacecraft had not only mangled fourteen of the railcar tracks on the outside of the KESTS structure, but also had bent in one of the inner trackways, which carried the armature mass stream segments at nearly three times the velocity of an orbital transfer trajectory. The dent in the trackway was providing a powerful new lateral thrust vector where the mass stream encountered the bump, then upstream an equally strong vector in the opposite direction, forming a twist force on the structure.

The nearest repair trolley sped to the scene, enlivened as if inhabited by the operators who actually were far above in the Habitat Ring in Geostationary Orbit. The repair trolley encircled the girth of the KESTS there, stored some energy from the mass stream, then gave a brief contracting squeeze, reforming the inner track back to its original shape.

Although he did not have access here to his usual remote manipulator interface, AP felt a bit powerless as he watched as other repair trolleys arrived near the tangled wreckage and halted spacerail trains. Their grapples quickly transferred the bulk of the two mangled spacecraft onto the upside track industrial lift trackways, to rail cars designed to be able to carry full grown whales and their ocean water tanks up to those habitats in GEO which were dedicated to perpetuating the sea world's living systems. The KESTS stator structure was squeezed back into its original shape by the repair trolley contractions, then the damaged maglev trackway sections were unsnapped, and replaced with fresh trackway sections, to restore the high precision tolerances of the trackways. This repair work was not much different from the usual continuous replace and upgrade process that endlessly continued all along the KESTS, ever refreshing the structure's components much as living bone is continually being recycled in the human body. The maintenance-repair trolleys sprang back under the KESTS structure and headed back to their berths, and the spacetrains again began absorbing energy from the high velocity armature mass stream's upward-bound sections, resuming their travel once again, almost back to normal, only an hour behind schedule.

Unplugging his holodynamic awareness interface from the railcar's passenger communication patch panel, AP suddenly was back in the real physical world within the spacetrain rail car, alive with people's business. They were now re-accelerating upward along the magnetic levitation sliding trackway, the other passengers now only partially sunken back into the flotation couches, still chattering about this peculiar interruption to their trip. AP wished that the research into bringing the social world of multiply interacting people into understandability, would soon be able to make it as comprehensible to people like him as the KESTS was, those who were unable to immediately comprehend the complex social dynamics of society, like most other people could apparently do without effort.

General Beasley and his wife were next to AP, and Mrs. Beasley was angrily demanding that something be done about those irresponsible earthsurface warmongers. No, General Beasley told her, we are not going to drop the viruses to exterminate all remaining human life on the planet, so that the restoration of the Earth's ecosystem could get back on schedule. "We are not inhumane, we must find a way to balance the needs of everyone concerned". And yes, it must be done quickly, this latest attack by the earth pirate people nearly had destroyed all that mankind's civilization had striven for these many centuries.

AP listened to Gen. & Mrs. Beasley with confusion, glassy-eyed though quickly glancing here and there. This world of violent-thinking people was incomprehensible, why weren't all people everywhere working together in friendship to the goals they all had in common? Why waste effort and precious resources bashing at each other? He longed to return to the KESTS' hologram reality world, where the only intention was the cheery flow of energies of myriad kinds, places and beings, in the pursuit of homeostasis within an ever-changing larger entity, the KESTS to GEO Habitat Ring.

posted by Unknown @ 3:18 PM