The day after our excursion to & Kin's, I ordered Rafe, Kie, Lili and Tenry to get the missile control system installed and tested. They moaned, groaned and argued that we'd no need to install it now, since we'd have plenty of time on the long voyage when we'd be looking for things to keep us busy. Good thing Vynnia wasn't around. Not only would she have been scandalized by their protest, but at my command style which allowed it. Their moaning and groaning was no real challenge, and I wanted the job done, so I told them that if they'd prefer to be unemployed, I'd see to it. I felt we couldn't afford to pass up any opportunity, however slight, to land a paying cargo. The A-level protection seemed unlikely to make any difference in Sanre-tay, but having nearly exhausted our credit reserves for it, I'd no intention of missing even the slightest chance it might help. It took them only two days to refurbish and test the various components, install them in the sensor pods and on the bridge and test the system, and the gang worked well together, if only to get it done and back to the party.
I slipped ashore that evening to spend some time on Lontria and was relieved that Leafa's gossip included no mention of Tallith Min. It wasn't proof, but given all the ties she had with the Lost Star, via Min & Co, not hearing anything about her in Leafa's stream of ship, trade and Lontria gossip was a comfort.
The following day Vynnia, Tenry, Illynta and I took the gig down to Lontria to meet Min in Metrolontria's long rift canyon urban complex to be authorized to access the Lost Star's new Unity Charter Central Bank account. We took the gig down to the small landing field of a bedroom community much like Bramble Vale. As is the case everywhere on Lontria, the crater was lush with foliage to keep the atmosphere fresh and breathable. The next two craters were farming ones with terraced fields climbing the crater wall followed by a recreation crater that featured a large, island studded, lake below the rugged, pine covered crater walls. Spider-like low-grav boats skimmed the lake's surface and holiday resorts lined its near shore. We passed two more farming craters before we entering the rift canyon of The Met proper.
The canyon was perhaps ten kilometers wide at this point, surrounded by kilometer high canyon walls lined with garden-terraced buildings, residences, offices and shops. A green carpet of forests, parks, ornamental lakes and market gardens ran down the center of the canyon between the terraced buildings. Every dozen kilometers, there was a wall of buildings across the rift built up to the dome, designed to seal the section from the next to limit any dome failure.
I was struck by a very palatable sense of age about the Met. Though clean and bustling, many of its buildings looked very aged worn. This section had been in place for almost 10,000 years and though renewed, it never changed. There are tens of thousands of cities on hundreds of planets far older than Metrolontria, but on planets, cities can be remade countless times. Moon cities are different. They are carefully designed to maintain a very narrowly defined environment in a harsh, airless world, so their essential structures and patterns can be rebuilt but not greatly altered without it disrupting the essential environmental patterns that maintain life under the domes. The Met's streets and buildings, farms, parks and forests have always been more or less as they are today. And though the actual structures may've been renewed a hundred times, it's always to the same pattern and that pattern seems to have worn a subtle groove into the fabric of reality by five hundred generations of living within the pattern.
The buildings all boast high ceilings and tall, clearsteel exterior walls with open views to the canyon, helping create a sense of openness and space in these enclosed cities. Without weather, the low, the public facilities scattered along the canyon floor are as open to the environment as security allowed. Cafes and restaurants, markets and shops, gyms and sports facilities rarely have roofs. Though the fabric dome overhead was self-sealing, fliers are not allowed. People travel by velowalks and levatrains with goods delivered by light wheeled vehicles.
We met Min in the CreditBox Department of the UCCB office. After exchanging greetings, we found the Security Section where each of us was scanned and our bio-metrics registered to allow access to the UCCB CreditBox to issue CreditTokens, the universally accepted currency in the Nine Star Nebula. I thought having five of us with access was a bit unnerving. I trusted them all, but I had to wonder why Min felt all five of us needed access. I rather hoped I'd be the only one who'd need to access it.
The UCCB CreditTokens issued by a CreditBox are manufactured, monitored and verified in real time by the Directorate of Sentient Machines, ensuring that each token and associated credit transfer is authentic. This system, and indeed the whole inner workings of the Unity Charter Central Bank, is run on devices designed and monitored by sentient machines using technology which involves instant, quantum communication between the devices and tokens anywhere in the Nebula – a technology that even after 10,000 years of research remains a mystery to humans. (The same technology can be used as communications, but with few special exceptions, the Unity sticks with radio communications rather than relying on the Directorate of Sentient Machines whose advanced technology keeps people who believe that the machines are feverishly plotting their return to ravish their wives and daughters awake at nights.)
After finishing this business, we lunched in an outdoor restaurant on a terrace with a panoramic view of the rift city, its extreme edges now vague in the hot, humid afternoon atmosphere, and spent an hour walking along lakes and through shaded groves with flocks of birds talking, until Min, with a long ride home, called it a day. We parted at the levatrain station and went our separate ways.
The CreditBox unit was brought up and installed in my office the following day.
Spaceers are a restless breed. Given idle time, they'll fill it with rivalry, racing and wagers – be it rocket boards, ship's boats, fliers, and in this case, crater buggies. Crater buggies are broad-wheeled vehicles used on the airless surface of moons for transport and recreation. They're also raced on every moon in the nebula. Why crater buggies came to be the rivalry, racing and wager vehicle of choice, I can't say, but a series of challenge races quickly grew to an anchorage wide mania. Spaceers were snapping up every available buggy and virtually took over the Starline Raceway for their races. With so many idle ships and spaceers, the races were staged around the clock and quickly organized into tiers of skill levels from beginner to pro.
At Captain Miccall's memorial dinner, Captain Artha Villiant of the Starsilver, had boasted that her chief engineer, Az Binric, was a pro buggy racer on his home moon and was cleaning up in these races. She advised us to put our credits on him. Not being a sporting fellow, I hadn't paid any attention, at the time.
That evening I discovered that we'd our own champion crater buggy racer. I knew Molaye had grown up on Yendora and that she was into racing – rocket boards, I seem to recall, but she'd never mentioned – to me, anyway – that she'd been the junior circuit's champion buggy racer of Yarsaan, Yendora's major city for three years running. She'd abandoned crater buggies as soon as she was old enough to fly rocket boards and had not looked back – rocket boards being so much faster, and more 'exciting' (i.e. dangerous). But with the Starsilver's boast being bandied about the ship, she mentioned this to Riv and Rafe who quickly formed a syndicate and talked her (rather easily, I suspect, by the sparkle in her eyes) into piloting the ship's new crater buggy. I'd not forgotten Molaye's parents' warning, but I was solemnly assured crater buggy racing was as safe as low gravity walking (I was racing crater buggies when I was 10, after all, Molaye explained with a sweet smile.), so I found myself reluctantly giving it my blessing, warning Riv and Rafe not to push Molaye too hard, and handed over my credits for my share in the syndicate. I was warned, in turn, to keep Molaye's junior championship to myself – you see, this was a credit making venture, and they didn't want word getting out that we'd a ringer in the race.