Starcorp 1: Escape from Sol

“Good morning,” Daniel Beck announced as he strolled into the kitchen.

Six months had passed since the Beck family’s arrival aboard the Starship Amundsen. Daniel Beck was fully dressed and groomed to start his work day. His attire had an almost sporty appearance to it. His footwear was white and similar in appearance to tennis shoes. His clothing was a matching two piece pants and jacket ensemble, tan with a black stripe down the sides. The material looked to be light and comfortable. The length of his jacket went down to the length of his arms and was utilitarian in appearance. It had no lapels, and it zipped all the way up to the base of his neck. His com-link bracelet was wrapped around his left wrist. Wendy was similarly dressed with an exception for the color scheme. Her ensemble was light blue and with a white strip down the side.

“Good morning,” Wendy responded after a quick glance towards her husband.

Wendy was seated at the family’s kitchen island. Daniel noted when he walked into the room that all her attention was divided between the cereal bowl in front of her and the tablet next to it. He gave no thought to this as he crossed the room. He was accustomed to seeing his wife assimilating new information concerning her profession, and he knew better than to inquire about what that was. This would almost certainly be about something he had little understanding of and even less interest for.

Daniel crossed over to the refrigerator and opened it. With seemingly little thought to the effort, he removed a frozen breakfast platter from the freezer and placed it into the nearby microwave. He then closed the microwave and switched it on with a press of a button. After doing this, he removed a cup from a cabinet and filled it with coffee from an automatic percolator.

“Are the kids gone?” Daniel questioned Wendy before taking a sip of his coffee.

“Adam left a few minutes ago,” Wendy reported without looking up from her tablet. “Daphne and Sawyer have been gone almost two hours now.”

This was news that Daniel was expecting. It was not uncommon of late for him to awaken and find one or more of his family members gone from the home. The family’s daily routines were drastically altered by their move to the Starship Amundsen. This was a change that the children became quickly accustomed to. Daniel was still having a problem acclimating to the infrequent presence of the whole of his family. For him the driving force behind their move to DCT01E21480610 was family. His application for residency within a starcorp was motivated solely by his desire to elevate their standard of living and to provide a good upbringing for his children. However, he did not anticipate that this move would change the family dynamic. The absence of the frequent family gatherings, which he enjoyed on Earth, was a discomforting loss for him.

Aside for Daniel’s nostalgia for daily assemblies with the family, all were well settled into their lives here. The children, Daphne, Sawyer, and Adam, were assigned schedules for their continuing education on the day after their arrival. One week in with their new school they were spoiled for any other place. There were many reasons for this. All of them came down to the fact that all the schools on Earth were deplorable by comparison. Unlike most Earth schools, the classrooms aboard the Amundsen were not crowded. There were never more than ten students to a room. The school was clean, nearly to the point of sterile, and lunches were free. The added attention from their teachers, the cutting-edge technology within the classrooms, and the safe environment gave the children and their parents peace of mind. For the Beck children, the Amundsen was a happy place to be.

There was only one school on the Amundsen, and it had no special designation other than the Education Center. The student population of the center had an age range from three years to infinity. The configuration of the complex looked similar in appearance to any other sector of the Starship. The layout of the ship and the need to employ space judiciously hindered ideas of unique architectural designs. A small segment of the ship was assigned for educational purposes, and this allotment varied in size as the need changed from season to season.

In basic design, the Amundsen was no different to any other Starship. The primary living and communal areas were on the top level of the ring. The ceiling for this level was one-hundred feet above the floor and crammed with light fixtures that spanned the ring. The lights dimmed and brightened to simulate the passage of the days. Below the lighting was a five-hundred-yard-wide indoor park with a walkway that ran through the entire twelve-mile circumference of this level. The park was commonly called the promenade. At intermittent locations, four large structures, the auditorium, the shopping center, an office complex and a stadium were built into the center of the park, from floor to ceiling. The overhead lighting was built around them, on either side. Smaller structures, like restaurants, a public swimming pool, tennis courts, basketball courts, and an ice rink were in the park at various locations. On either side of this park, along the outer walls, were the living quarters for all thirteen-thousand of the Amundsen’s occupants. To the eye, they looked like units inside of multiple, eight story high, apartment complexes, situated side by side. In reality, it was a single structure that went all the way around the ring. Elevators and stairwells, affixed to the front of the structure, in fifty-yard increments, were accessible from the external walkways along each floor of the complex. The back sides of each apartment complex were built into the sidewall of the ring. Behind the wall were multi-level alleyways. These were used for utilitarian access to these compartments. Garbage, sewage, power lines, plumbing and environmental systems were all processed and/or maintained and/or monitored from there. The alleyways also provided rear exits for all compartments built into the sides of the habitat ring.

There were five levels beneath the top-level ring. Each of these had fifteen feet high ceilings. They were referred to as the basement levels and it was employed for multiple uses. First among of these, it was used as the primary artery and parking garage for the transportation pods. Other uses for these basement levels included locations for places like machine shops, warehouses, and maintenance closets. The water treatment plant and the recycling centers were located here as well. The industrial zone of the starship was the basement levels.

The Amundsen was not the only starship that Starcorp DCT01 had. However, it was the only one designated as just a starship. The starship designation by its self was given to city size habitat ships that were primarily used as a residence for humans. Other habitat vessels of similar size, within the DCT01 cluster, were classified as factory starships, agriculture starships and construction starships.

Nothing propelled human colonization of space better than the starships. They were the homes and work spaces of off-world humans. The manufacture of these mammoth vessels became surprisingly simple shortly after the end of the third world war. The sudden and drastic need for living space supplied the motivation to try a new method that was, until then, theoretical. It was called casting.

The costs associated with building parts of a ship on Earth, or on some other planetary surface, and transporting them into space was astronomical. Manufacturing small sections in space and piecing them together was both costly and time exorbitant. The new process involved gathering together large amounts of a prerequisite mineral in open space and then capturing, focusing and directing rays of the sun onto them. When the minerals melted together into a free floating molten globule, it was spun. The centrifugal effect shaped the mass into a hollow disk. After it cooled, it was cut into large sections, transported to a construction site and reassembled around the interior wheel and framework for the habitat. This method of manufacture was used for the hull and the interior wheel of the starship. All other aspects of a starship were constructed in a factory and assembled within the hull and the interior wheel.

Casting drastically reduced the cost of constructing large habitats in space. It also reduced the timeframe to a fraction of one percent for a spaceship of this size. This evolution in manufacturing and construction made the migration of large numbers of people into space possible. To accommodate the demand for living space, bigger and better starships came into existence every six months. The convention that gave birth of the starcorps occurred aboard a starship.

The Starship Amundsen provided housing for all of the DCT01’s employees in its cluster. Most that worked here had to travel off the Amundsen to get to their jobs aboard one of these other star class spaceships. This was true for both Wendy and Daniel. Their jobs required them to report to the Agriculture and Factory Starships, respectively. This was a chore that Daniel performed dutifully. He had no great love for his work, but he was proud of the skill level he had attained in his chosen profession. Wendy, however, was very much the opposite in this. She set off for work eagerly each day, and she was late returning home nearly every night. She loved her job. More importantly, she loved her profession.

Wendy felt no rush to hurry home to her family. Her six months in space allowed her to acclimate to life here in more ways than one. She felt secure in the thinking that her children were safe. Crime was virtually nonexistent. Transportation and communication were readily available throughout the cluster. Food was accessible from anyplace where it was being dispensed without upfront payments. And there were no hazardous weather conditions to be concerned about. Wendy needed only to access the Amundsen’s computer to learn where her family members were, and what condition they were in. However, this was something that she rarely did. More often than not, Wendy was too preoccupied with her work.

The apartment that the Becks lived in was on the fourth and fifth floors up from the top-level ring. A guest bathroom, the family room, kitchen and dining room was situated below four bedrooms and two bathrooms. On the lower level, the front door opened in from the six-foot wide communal walkway. The family and dining rooms had ceiling to floor glass walls with views of the walkway and the promenade beyond that. The bedrooms on the upper floor had ceiling to floor glass sliding doors that provided access to small personal patios. The promenade was also visible from the patio. Wood, drywall, and plaster were nowhere to be found in the structural makeup of the apartment or the starship as a whole. In their places were aluminum, glass, fiberglass, and plastic. The apartment was spacious and clean. The latter was the result of the ship’s cleaning service that attended to all the occupied residences aboard the Amundsen at regular intervals. The apartment was comfortably furnished and decorated to suit the taste of its occupants. By comparison to what the Beck family was accustomed to this was perfection.

“Are you taking in a seminar this evening?” Daniel questioned as he set his newly heated, precooked, breakfast platter on the kitchen island top.

A second behind the asking of this question Daniel sat in the chair situated at a right angle to Wendy.

The children were not the only ones taking classes. Wendy and Daniel were taking courses related to their respective professions. This they did part-time, and it was a major factor in the family disconnect for the majority of the time. These regularly scheduled periods of separation were times that Daniel had committed to memory. The occasional seminar was usually an event that came up on short notice.

Daniel’s question was a distraction for Wendy. It intruded into her concentration on the subject matter that she was reading. Because of this, it took her a second to focus her thoughts on the correct answer.

“No,” Wendy replied to Daniel’s query with a confused expression. “I should be home at the usual time.”

Daniel accepted this answer as though it was expected. He was accustomed to Wendy giving him notice in advance of an upcoming seminar whenever possible. His only reason for asking was her preoccupation with what she was reading. This was usually a sign that she was cramming something new into her head. This only occurred when a seminar on a new process, procedure, or discovery suddenly popped up. When it came to Wendy’s scheduled curriculum, she was always ahead of the class timetable.

“So, what’s the story with the tablet?” Daniel questioned, reluctantly, just before inserting a fork load of in vitro grown sausage and eggs into his mouth.

This question brought Daniel into Wendy’s sphere of concentration. She, suddenly, had someone to share her thinking with and this she did without hesitation.

“There’s an editorial here by Terry Lambert,” Wendy reported with a look of intrigue. “He says that Earth and the starcorps are on a trajectory for war.”

Daniel was not fazed by this report. He had a long practice of entertaining discussions with friends and co-workers about the future of Earth and the starcorps. The opinion of one editorialist carried no weight with him, but this was not true for Wendy. She seldom took any interest in politics or discussions on politics. If her immediate environment was reasonably comfortable and secure, she gave little thought to the political winds beyond. What caused this editorial to be of so much interest to her was the suggestion of war. There had been no talk of a major military action since the end of the World War III. The primary reason behind this was the perception that the Earthers were incapable of projecting any kind of military action beyond a border war. The absence of this kind of rhetoric gave Wendy cause to fill at ease with her residency within a starcorp. She knew only too well the extent of most Earthers contempt for Spacers. For most of her life she partook in this enmity towards Spacers but to a far lesser degree. So long as this was just idle talk by the Earthers she was content with her decision to become a Spacer. The benefits that the starcorp provided for her children outweighed the cultural prejudice that was instilled in her from birth.

“He’s just overreacting,” Daniel dismissed cavalierly just before inserting another fork full of food into his mouth.

Wendy was not reassured by this comment and quickly countered it with a look that was near to desperation.

“He says that in less than a decade all or a large portion of Earth’s governments could combine to become the dominant power in the solar system.”

“That won’t happen for another century,” Daniel rebuffed without disrupting his feeding.

“They’re doing it right now,” Wendy argued back an instant behind. “They’re trying to put together a seventeen-state union.”

Daniel assigned no importance to the hysterical tinge in Wendy’s speech. He chewed his food and took a sip of his coffee at his leisure before voicing his opinion on the subject.

“They’re just talking, Honey,” Daniel promised in a comforting tone. “The states have been grumbling about investment treaties—trade agreements—alliances, for the past half century. It always falls through. Earth is a mess. Nothing is going to happen down there until they set aside their hostilities towards each other, and that’s not happening anytime soon.”

Wendy took some solace from Daniel’s confidence in his position, but it did not set aside her concerns completely. She took a moment to weigh one against the other and then vocalized her final thought on the matter.

“We didn’t bring the kids up here to become targets in a shooting gallery,” Wendy softly asserted with and a shake of her head.

“It’s never going to happen,” Daniel softly countered with a partial smile. “I promise. Earth is a century away from reconstituting its industrial might.”