Even the military crew, supposedly still at attention, broke out into cheers and hat-hurling now. And—

‘Why, Mac. I’ll swear that’s a tear on your grizzled cheek.’

‘He’s just a soapbox Joe. But, damn, he’s good.’

6

IN THE EARLY DAYS of the cruise into the Long Earth stepwise West from the Datum, Maggie gave her crews time for a final shakedown of the new ships by running at a leisurely one step per second, no faster than commercial twains.

And Maggie got a lot of self-indulgent pleasure in accompanying Harry Ryan, her chief engineer, on his inspection tours.

The crew persisted in calling the Armstrong’s habitable compartment the ‘gondola’, but in fact instead of being suspended below the ship’s main body as in older designs, the crew compartment of this craft was entirely contained inside the lift envelope, a slab two decks deep built into the forward half of the central plane of the ship, surrounded by the huge lifting sacs. The intention of this internalized architecture was streamlining, and the Armstrong was a sleek bird as a result. But it was also a tough bird; the lower hull, with its loading bays, holds and ground operations bays, was plated by Kevlar armour against attack from below, a tough sheet studded with ports for sensors and weapons.

The crew gondola itself was extensive, reaching back into the body of the ship from the wheelhouse and Maggie’s sea cabin in the prow: room for ninety crew and passengers to live and work. Bounded by observation platforms, the upper deck contained the crew quarters and such facilities as the galleys, mess rooms, exercise and training bays, and science and medical labs; the lower deck mostly contained stores and life-support gear.

From the inside, the gondola reminded Maggie of nothing so much as the interior of a submarine. With its metal hull – no iron or steel, of course – and airtight inner partitions, armour-plate hatches over the windows, and sealable, self-regenerating life-support system, it was a world away from the fancy gondolas of the big commercial twain liners that still plied the Long Mississippi route between the Low Earths and Valhalla, with their picture windows and hardwood dining tables for the Captain. If the early expeditions into the extreme Long Earth had taught humanity one thing, it was that you couldn’t rely on Datum-like conditions pertaining for ever. Joshua Valienté himself had discovered that when his ship had been wrecked by falling into a Gap, a world where there was no world at all. So the gondolas of Armstrong and Cernan were built to endure extremes of temperature and pressure, and they could sustain their crews on recycled air and water almost indefinitely, regardless of what horrors were unfolding in the outside world.

Maggie roamed further with Harry, even outside the gondola. She went into the cathedral-like belly of the envelope itself, within the aluminium frame, clambering up ladders and along gantries in the smoky light admitted by the fine translucent hull. The ship carried no ballast; it adjusted its lift by means of huge artificial lungs, into which additional helium could be forced from compressed stores. In all, it was able to lift more than six hundred tons.

The ship’s main power came from a compact fusion reactor hung from the structural frame at the stern, a good distance from the habitable sections to reduce radiation risks, its weight balancing the big gondola. The engine room itself was heavily armoured and shielded, designed to survive even a high-velocity crash. At the very crest of the envelope was a bay containing observational gear, antennas, a small atmospheric lab, drone aircraft and even nanosat space launchers – and a bubble observatory, a particularly striking location from which the whole of the Armstrong could be seen, stem to stern.

Such tours were a joy. Oh, there were plenty of small technical glitches to fix aboard each boat. But the engineering stuff was almost fun, compared with the issues with the flesh and blood passengers . . .

Unlike the Franklin, with its relatively small and tight-knit Navy crew, on this trip Maggie had enough civilian academics aboard the two ships to man a small university, covering sciences such as geography, astronomy, ethnology, climatology, mineralogy, botany, ornithology, zoology, cosmology. And smarter people were always harder to command.

Take the problem of the trolls, for instance.

For five years now Maggie had kept her little family of trolls on board her vessels, because they were useful. Trolls had evolved out in the Long Earth. Through their ‘long call’ they were in touch with their kind throughout the stepwise worlds. They could even sense some breeds of danger coming well before most humans could respond, such as the imminence of Jokers – anomalous and often hostile worlds in the Long Earth chain. Plus trolls were good, and willing, at heavy-lift jobs of all kinds. Plus their very presence promoted an image of diversity and acceptance which Maggie thought was important to her wider mission of being a kind of ambassador of the central nation and its values to the far-flung Long Earth colonies. And plus, dammit, it was Maggie’s ship and what she said was the law.

But that didn’t stop some crewmen from having problems. The trolls stank, they were noisy, they were dangerous animals loose inside the security cordon of the ship, and blah blah. Maggie had found ways to deal with this. Midshipman Jason Santorini had been with her a long time; he was no high-flyer but was a reservoir of common sense. She’d given him the task of organizing social events involving the trolls – noisy singalongs, for instance. He worked up briefing packages showing how useful the trolls had been aboard the Franklin. He’d even had the bright idea of restricting access to the trolls of an evening, when they preferred to huddle up in a corner of an observation lounge and sing, to winners of a prize in a performance-merit competition. Sailors and marines were competitive by nature; anything you had to work at to win had to be worth having, right?

She knew she had a handle on the issue of the trolls when she came upon a mass choir of Navy and marines, joining in with the trolls in the observation lounge in singing a sweet, silly round about feeling good, feeling bad, feeling happy, feeling sad . . .

But then there were the Chinese.

A few days further into the flight, Chief Engineer Harry Ryan asked Maggie to come down to a particularly exotic engineering sub-department: Artificial Intelligence. Contained in vats of Black Corporation gel, enmeshed in fibre-optic cable, here were the dreaming artificial minds who oversaw most of the ship’s functions, but whose key role was to step the Armstrong across the new worlds – for only sapient minds could step. To Maggie, who had to scrub up to operating-theatre cleanliness standards before even being allowed in here, this was an eerie, somewhat frightening place. What were these manufactured minds thinking, all around her, right now? Were they aware of her presence? Did they resent their enslavement to her purposes?

‘Captain?’

‘Sorry, Harry.’ She tried to focus on her Chief Engineer. ‘You were telling me about—’

‘Bill Feng.’

‘Ah, yes.’

‘Look, the guy may have been a big cheese on board the Zheng He.’

‘More than that, surely. He was the co-designer of all this. The beefed-up stepper technology they’ve now given us to co-develop.’

‘Yeah, maybe. Big shot back home. And his English is good—’

‘Mother from Los Angeles. Which is why he’s called Bill.’

‘That’s what I hear. But, Captain, he has his damn nose in everything. He has to be there, at every component test, every routine tear-down, every watch briefing, every handover—’