Crossroads of the Galaxy

Chapter 1: Nexus-1

Chapter 1: Nexus

Alex Bredakoff had just turned on the viewscreen in his cabin when his father’s voice came out of the air. “Everything tucked away, son?” Gregor Bredakoff asked.

“Sure, Dad.”

“Take care to strap yourself in, too,” Alex’s mother said. “We wouldn’t want you hurting yourself during maneuvers.”

Alex sighed. His mother was still treating him like a baby, and here he was—fifteen years old, and a prime candidate for space training when he finished General Curriculum in another two years. He knew she worried about him, and he was glad she did, but there were times her constant attention annoyed him. “I’m all set,” he said, and turned his own attention to the beautiful vista appearing on his viewscreen.

As the Rimbound approached the Nexus system, tiny transmitters in the hull beamed an image of its destination back inside the ship, to be tuned in by any passengers who wanted to watch. Since Nexus was to be his home for the next few years at least, Alex wanted very much to watch.

The background of the screen glowed slightly with a milky luminescence that offset the dead blackness of space. It was hard to see any but the brightest stars through the glowing haze that surrounded Nexus. The clouds of gas were the remnants of a supernova that had occurred here thousands of years ago, when a giant star exploded with a force beyond human imagination. The area was quiet now, the expanding clouds being the only testimony to the act of incalculable violence.

Well off the edge of the screen to the left, Alex knew, would be the small white dwarf star whose meager glow lit the clouds around the area. It was all that remained of the once-mighty giant star, reduced to a pale semblance of its former self. There were no natural planets left in this solar system; if there ever had been any, they’d been reduced to rubble by the force of the cosmic cataclysm.

And there, directly in the center of the screen, was the group of artificial space colonies known as Nexus. They still looked small, like eight gems glistening in the star’s feeble light. Eight sparkling pinpoints, so far away he couldn’t yet make out their shapes. It was all so beautiful—and this was going to be his home!

“Screen, triple magnification,” he ordered, and the computer obeyed. The image blurred for an instant, to be replaced by another in which the satiny backdrop seemed not to have changed at all, but where the island colonies had jumped much closer to him.

Now their individual shapes were more apparent, looking exactly like the pictures he’d been studying for the past two months. Four of the glowing jewels were cylinders, four were spheres. Although they seemed to hang perfectly still in space, Alex knew they were dancing a stately pavane in a complex mathematical pattern while, simultaneously, each one spun rapidly about its own axis of rotation. They were much too far away yet to notice any distinguishing characteristics. Alex knew his destination was Nexus-1, one of the cylinders, but he had no idea which of the four it could be.

A small blue dot appeared in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, reminding Alex to prepare for the Rimbound’s arrival at Nexus-1. Alex glanced briefly around his small cabin, but there was nothing loose that might fall or cause damage when the engines came to life again; he had packed everything away quite some time ago, impatient for the moment of docking.

The maneuvering came thirty seconds later. The Rimbound had been coasting in freefall for nine days, its interior weightless; but in order to make its assigned rendezvous with the Nexus-1 colony, it had turned on its maneuvering jets, producing a false sensation of weight within the ship. Alex, who had grown accustomed to the weightlessness during the trip, suddenly had to cope with “up” and “down” again.

The acceleration was mild, barely one-third gee, but it was more than he’d felt in some time. The maneuvering continued for a while, and the images of the Nexus colonies grew ever larger until they filled the entire screen even without magnification.

As he watched the pictures grow, Alex grew more and more awed by the colonies. It was one thing to be told that they were large, and quite another to experience their immensity firsthand. The Rimbound itself was no small ship, holding several hundred passengers and tons of cargo—but it was dwarfed by the large spinning colonies, each of which could have had hundreds of Rimbounds rattling around inside without filling it up.

Alex had memorized the numbers long ago. Each of the spheres was 25 kilometers in diameter, spinning about a polar axis once every 37 minutes to provide gravity for the inhabitants. Each of the cylinders had a cross-sectional diameter of 25 kilometers and a length of 40, rotating about the central axis once every 56 minutes. The total population of Nexus, including all eight colonies, was over two million beings representing more than a hundred separate and distinct races.

Never, in all of recorded history, had there been a place quite like Nexus. Within these totally artificial space colonies, people from all over the Galaxy came to arrange the commerce and futures of a thousand worlds. Nexus was at a natural gathering point, close to almost everyone by one or another of the starpaths that ended here. The satellites were a hodgepodge of cultures and languages, worlds of constant change as beings came and went according to the dictates of their business. Nexus had been called—quite justifiably—the Crossroads of the Galaxy. Sooner or later, anyone or anything of any importance had to come through Nexus.

Alex suddenly felt very small and insignificant—particularly when he reflected on the fact that his father had just been named as the new chief of security for the entire Nexus system. It would be an awesome responsibility, and Alex made a vow to help his father whenever possible.

He was so intent on gazing at the large colony shells that he almost didn’t see the smaller objects swarming through space all around them. Some of the tiniest pinpoints of light were other ships like the Rimbound, loading and unloading goods and passengers to the ever-seething hive of activity that was Nexus. But there were other objects clustered around each colony like moths around a lightbulb. These would be the farming tanks where food was grown. These would be equally important in Alex’s life because his mother, Delya Bredakoff, had been assigned as a senior agritechnician for Nexus-1. It was not as glamorous a job as her husband’s was, but it was every bit as vital—if not more so.

The Rimbound nudged gently inward toward one of the large cylinders that had to be Nexus-1. As the captain maneuvered the ship toward the rotational axis at one end, Alex looked closely at the sides of the cylinder, and could see that the outside alternated sections of metal and glass—three of each around the perimeter lengthwise down the tube. At the far end of the cylinder were enormous mirrors that reflected the feeble light of the white dwarf star down through the windows and into the colony, giving it sunlight during the “day.” At “night,” the mirrors were simply tilted away and no sunlight entered. Each day on Nexus was 25 Earth-hours long, and was divided into a hundred units called “centures.”

As the Rimbound reached its assigned parking spot, small grappleboats came out from the large colony to guide it into its position. The Rimbound’s captain shut off the ship’s engines, and freefall reigned once more in the ship. In the viewscreen, Alex could see a long metal tube snaking out from the colony to attach itself to the side of the Rimbound.

A flashing green light and a general announcement filled the air, breaking his concentration: “Docking at Nexus-1 now completed. All passengers for Nexus prepare to disembark.”

Suddenly Alex found he couldn’t move fast enough. This was it! They were here, at one of the most fascinating settlements in the Galaxy. Ever since he’d first heard about his father’s new job, he’d dreamed of this moment—and now he’d arrived.

“Screen, off,” he commanded, and the viewscreen faded to its normal blankness. Then, with a slight turn of his head, he added, “Drawers, open.”

From out of an almost seamless wall, the drawers, which had held his clothing during the nine-day voyage from Earth, slid open, revealing their contents: a series of boxlike force fields. Enclosed within the fields were Alex’s personal possessions, all neatly packed away. Alex touched a stud on his belt and the force fields floated out of their drawers and wafted gently through the air to his side. “Baggage slot, open,” he commanded, and a hole opened in the wall. “Route my field bags to new assigned quarters in Nexus-1,” he said and, one by one, each of the bags was sucked into the hole. Computers would guide them through the terminal and take them automatically to whatever housing had been provided for the Bredakoff family—sparing him the drudgery of carrying his own luggage. Each force field was coded with his own personal ident number, so there was no chance of its being mistaken for anyone else’s.

That task accomplished, Alex quickly brushed a hand through his curly brown hair and swam out of his cabin. It was noisy and crowded in the narrow corridor as other passengers milled about in freefall, eager to get off the ship after their nine days’ confinement. Even though his parents were just down the hall, it took Alex a couple of minutes to reach them.

Gregor Bredakoff was a tall, dark-haired man with a serious face that could burst into sudden, unexpected smiles. He was a trim and active seventy-two—still very young in an era when people routinely lived past two hundred. Delya Bredakoff was thirty years younger than her husband and a strikingly beautiful woman. Normally she let her long blonde hair flow freely down her back—but aboard the ship she’d been wearing it in a coronet braid so it wouldn’t be a nuisance in freefall. Her gray eyes were usually calm and filled with understanding—and if there was any subject she didn’t know something about, Alex hadn’t yet discovered it.

Alex smiled as he approached them. He was so excited about finally arriving at Nexus that his freefall swimming was sloppy, and he bumped into the walls four times. Delya took his left hand and Gregor took his right, and together the Bredakoff family followed the blinking lights down the corridors of the Rimbound to the transfer tube that would take them into Nexus-1.

There was already a line to disembark, and Alex had to wait impatiently with everyone else until his family’s turn came. Other people were babbling around them, a general buzz of conversation, but Alex was much too excited to talk. Gregor Bredakoff looked at his wife. “Any regrets?”

“None at all,” she smiled back at him. “It may be a big disruption in all our lives, but it’s a whole new and exciting world—and just think of the possibilities for Alex.”

At last they reached the front of the line, and swam forward together into a blue cubicle. The walls glowed momentarily as a force field formed around them, detectable only by a slight shimmer in the air. Once the field was in place, it acted like an elevator car to pull them rapidly down the length of the tunnel that linked the Rimbound to Nexus-1. The walls of the tunnel were studded with advertisements for restaurants and shops within the colony, but Alex was too excited to do more than glance at the colorful holographic displays. No single place within the colony could interest him half as much as the colony itself.

At length their force bubble began to slow down, and a mechanical voice warned them to prepare for the feeling of gravity once again. Glowing arrows on the tunnel walls indicated which direction would be down, and the Bredakoffs oriented themselves properly. Ahead, a spot of grayish light grew brighter until it could be clearly seen as the end of the tunnel. The Bredakoffs’ force bubble shot out of the tube, hovered in midair for a moment, and then slowly began its descent to the surface of the colony.

Alex was disappointed at first, because they seemed to have emerged in the middle of a thick fog. The transfer tube from the ship entered the colony right along its central axis—in the middle of the “sky,” as it were—and there was nothing to see here but the clouds formed from excess water vapor in Nexus-1’s atmosphere. As the force bubble floated gently “downward,” however, the clouds parted to give Alex his first real view of the colony. And this time he was not at all disappointed.