Noumenon. Marina Lostetter J.

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СКАЧАТЬ your wedding before I die. Consider it a last request.”

      Reggie patted McCloud’s tweed-covered shoulder. “Oh, you’ll be around for plenty more than that. She and I have talked about it—getting married. For a long time I was afraid to broach the subject.”

      “Why was that?”

      Reggie gestured around.

      “Because of the project? I’ve heard a lot of lame excuses for a man keeping his emotions all knotted up in his bowels—”

      With a light touch on the arm, Reggie interrupted him. “Because of the possibility. You know, that I might …”

      “That they might put you onboard.”

      “Exactly.”

      Laughter erupted in a corner of the room, pulling them from that somber thought, and they both looked over to see Donald Matheson—the mission expert on social systems—doing a drunken chicken dance on one of the flimsy folding tables. His blue shirttails dangled freely from his trousers, and he made a strange sort of beak-like gesture around his overtly-large and very Roman nose.

      “He’s going to hurt himself,” Reggie mumbled, moving in the direction of the ruckus.

      McCloud stopped him. “You reap what you sow. Adults are the same as children—let them touch the stove once and they won’t touch it again. You were explaining why you haven’t driven off the cliff of marital bliss just yet.” Reggie tried, halfheartedly, to pull away, but the professor’s grip was firm. “Someone will catch him if he falls, Reggie. Damn it, I don’t get to see you that often these days, Straifer. Speak.”

      Reggie shifted restlessly on his toes and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I asked years ago if she could come. The consortium made it clear that no nonessential personnel would be allowed. If I were to go, she couldn’t.” McCloud nodded; Reggie continued. “And it’s not like I’d be a soldier going off to war, with some slim chance of returning. It would be the end.”

      “So, what was your plan? To break up? ‘Nice knowing you, kid, but duty calls’?”

      McCloud tried to catch his eye, but Reggie avoided the stare. “Something like that. Hell, most relationships can’t survive being separated by state lines. You think one could stand up against AUs of disconnection with no chance of reunion?”

      “So you didn’t talk about marriage because you were afraid of making a commitment to a relationship that might become intangible.”

      “Right. It wouldn’t be fair to either of us. Especially her. She’d be here, going about life just the same, but without me. Without someone. I didn’t want to rob her of the chance to have a real partner, you know? To be bound and loyal to a ghost, when there are so many flesh-and-blood possibilities …”

      “But now you’ve talked about it. What changed? You decided to stay?”

      Reggie smiled. “The decision was made for me. The consortium knows how it wants to populate the convoys, and I’m not on the list.”

      “Ah. So now you’ll finally pop the question.”

      “Yeah. And I know she’ll say yes. I just have to find the right ring and the right time.”

      “Oh, don’t give me that. Now that you’ve made your choice, the right time is always now. After all, I’m not the only one that time’s pushing along. If you want to get her pregnant you’ll have to do it soon.”

      Reggie frowned—he was amused, but Heaven forbid McCloud know that. “You’re toeing the line there, professor.”

      “I’m not anyone’s professor anymore. Just some old blowhard tossing his BS at a wall, hoping some will stick. Let’s grab some of that cake, get a good sugar-high going, and talk to some of your colleagues here, eh? I know you’re champing at the bit. And look, Mr. Matheson is still with us—all in one piece.”

      A few minutes later Reggie had the team gathered round. On a party napkin he drew a quick diagram while speaking through a mouthful of cake. He had C operating on his tablet, and it was synched with a wall screen. “There are going to be nine ships—is that correct?”

      “That is correct, sir,” said C, bringing up proposed concept sketches for some, and a few basic schematics for those that were already rolling on production lines.

      “Thanks, but I was asking Nakamura.”

      Nakamura Akane, head of the specialty-ship design team, nodded concisely. Her eyes were a dark brown-and-gold under harshly cropped black bangs. Her expression carried the utmost seriousness, and her powerful, pointed movements were what Reggie might have expected from a strapping Russian man, not a petite Japanese women.

      Matheson pointed flippantly at the tablet. “You still have an IPA? I thought those things were extinct. Nobody likes them. Too chatty.”

      “Its name is C—it’s not a beer,” Reggie said. “And I like it. It’s been with me a long time. Keeps me on schedule, and keeps me company in the lab.”

      “No picking on my lad for his choice of friends,” McCloud said.

      “Can we get back to the ships?” asked Dr. Sachta Dhiri in her heavy, bubbling accent. Her focus was observational tactics and strategy. She was a plump woman, and wore a well-loved green-and-gold salwar kameez; the long tunic and billowing trousers were faded from many years of washing. “What on Earth—pardon the expression—is the use of nine? They’d need shuttles to travel to and from. Think of the extra fuel that would require. Not to mention the wear and tear accrued. Isn’t it more practical to put everything into one ship?”

      “No,” Matheson said plainly.

      “Care to elaborate?”

      “We on the design teams think each research division could use its own ship,” Akane jumped in. “And then there are the supplies. It’s not practical to make each ship entirely self-sustaining, what with the number of crew members the consortium wants the convoys to consist of: sixty to one hundred thousand. So, while some food and water, etcetera, will be kept aboard each ship, the majority of the supplies will have to be stored and maintained separately. Otherwise we’d need ships larger than we can currently build.”

      “One hundred thou … That’s—that’s over a million people. Twelve convoys and a million people,” Dr. Dhiri said. “They want to send one million people into space? Where are they going to find that many volunteers—expert volunteers? Do they want to send as many of our scientists, engineers, and thinkers off-world as they can, and hope everyone else picks up the slack?”

      Reggie and Akane shared a look. “I know,” said Reggie, lapping at a smear of buttercream at the corner of his mouth. “I thought it sounded crazy, too. Before I talked to Matheson and learned exactly what the consortium has in mind.”

      All eyes turned to Matheson. He sobered up quickly. “Um, yeah. My preproject research focused on social stability in isolated societies. And what’s more isolated than a bunch of self-contained space cans, am I right? Obviously there are thousands of factors that go into societal consistency, but one is size. Size in terms of both population and area. If you have too many people in a small СКАЧАТЬ