Читать книгу Star Map - Fabienne Gschwind - Страница 8

"The Block" was Abhysal's nickname. Whether any designer had ever seen its design remained uncertain. Most people who saw the Abhysal said it was the most hideous spaceship ever built.

It was essentially a pear-shaped cylinder, littered with humps, bays, and crooked fins.

"Takes some getting used to it." Joe had said when she saw the Abhysal. "At least we're inside and don't have to see it from the outside," Nemo said with a shrug and got in.

But the interior was about as bad. Depending on where you were in the seventy-meter-long spaceship, there were anywhere from 5 to 11 decks. The interior designer had also accomplished the feat of creating a quarter-deck. Thus, the hydroponic garden was on deck 2 1/4, right next to the fission reactor, which extended from deck 6 to 11.

To complicate matters, the vertical levels were divided into horizontal zones, but they were all different sizes and three-dimensional. The stasis room for food was on deck 8 1/4, zone A, area 65, to give one example.

But once you got used to the system, the Abhysal provided a huge adventure playground. Ladders, poles, conveyor belts, and even a small chairlift were used for transportation on the ship, which was also desperately needed. The only thing no one could understand was how they got the idea to install a chairlift. After all, it was assumed that the chairlift only served to mentally distract the ship's crew.

In the stern of the ship—or where there should have been stern in a sane ship—was the fission reactor, which provided power for the ship. Should it fail, there was a second reactor amidships and, in an emergency, a fusion drive in the bow. Below the fusion drive was a hangar with two shuttles. These were to serve as emergency shelters or to approach a comet and collect water or hydrogen if needed.

The crew quarters were partly on deck 5.5 and partly on deck 3, averaging about deck 4. The living and working areas were therefore simply called deck 4.

The Abhysal was originally designed for 15 crew members. When the ship was designed, it was thought that a group of subspace scientists would accompany the flight, but that had not happened. The quarters were scattered all over the deck, so everyone had to walk about the same distance to get to the lounge with a combined kitchen. The quarters were nothing more than prefabricated containers that contained the furnishings of a luxury hotel. Each quarter had a bedroom with a large bed. A bathroom with a toilet and shower, and an office/living area. In advance, everyone had had time to furnish their cabin to their taste.

The vacant quarter had been converted into studios, music rooms, and other facilities, as mentioned above. Nevertheless, there were still five quarters available. The salon and kitchen were also designed for 15 people and there was plenty of room. On the same deck was the bridge—Jay's office—and the astrolab with the attached AI room. Lex, Milo, and Jay theoretically didn't have to leave Deck 4 to work. Only Nemo and Joe had their workstation in the combined engine room.

The Abhysal itself was a pure subspace ship. It did have a sublight drive to maneuver into a hangar if needed or to avoid a speeding planet, but that was all it had. But it certainly wasn't meant to run sublight races. In normal space, the Abhysal was as maneuverable as a sperm whale on a beach.

The dive generator that submerged the Abhysal into subspace was relatively small. So small, in fact, that most visitors didn't even notice it. It even happened that visitors mistook the large hot water boiler for the dive generator, and the dive generator was more often mistaken for the washing machine because that's what it looked like. The subspace distortion was channeled through the crooked fins in space, where it opened the subspace fissure.

The advantage was that the Abhysal had huge cargo holds that contained many spare parts. For example, several containers were scattered around the ship and contained about 30 dive generators in case one failed.

In any case, the ship was full of spare and replacement parts. "Enough to build the Abhysal from scratch," Joe likes to claim, and Nemo added, "at least three times...."

On the top three decks were 500 radio buoys and 500 carrier pigeons. The radio buoys were the markers that the Abhysal laid out along its path. After 14 years of installing only 120 buoys and sending 98 carrier pigeons, the vacated space was commandeered by Jay.

This was his sparring ground and shooting range. The crew was quite amazed when guns kept showing up hidden on the ship. No one knew exactly how Jay had come by all this war material. Unfortunately, Jay couldn't use his many weapons in the ship itself and had to make do with simulation weapons. But his weapons were his treasure, and he spent a lot of time cleaning and maintaining the rifles and pistols.

The laboratory, sickbay, and workshop also took up an entire half-deck and were located on Deck 5 as above the living quarters. Next to Nemo's technology workshop was of course the 3D-printer lab. All possible 3D-printers were available to the crew and every imaginable part could be created. Of course, there were also containers of raw materials available to feed the 3D-Printers.