Teams pairing ground personnel with members of the ship's crew examined the docking bitts, the great hooks to which the tugs attached their cables. The motors of the Empress of Earth were powerful enough to lift the vessel at full load from a gravity well deeper than Earth's, but at that level of operation, the magnetic flux would be concentrated enough to sever the molecular bonds of bedrock. Normally, and always on Earth, tugs balanced a majority of the vessel's weight during lift-off and descent. The bitts which took that strain were tested by sonics and electrofluxing after each use—but they were also eyeballed by trained personnel who might notice corrosion or pitting before the hardware did.
The starliner's outer hull was not smooth. Apart from the podded fusion engines for deep space operation, their stores of reaction mass, and the hatches for passengers, crew, maintenance, and equipment routing, there were staples in rows running the circuit of the hull at twenty meter intervals. They were the handholds and safety-line supports for the Cold Crew, the men—and the handful of women—who maintained the Empress of Earth's drive engines, riding the hull even in sponge space.
In theory, the Cold Crews worked with double safety lines. To move, a crewman was to set a new line before he freed the other one. In practice, and especially when the crews were shorthanded (as they were generally shorthanded, even on the vessels of top-of-the-line firms like Trident Starlines), the men did what they had to do to make the speed and bring the vessel in on any schedule that the captain set
And every few voyages, somebody missed a step or was caught clearing a jet with his long-hafted adjustment tool when the engine sputtered and threw him—
Out. Into space, or into sponge space, without even stars for final companions. Into the Cold.
The Cold Crews worked four hours on the hull, followed by eight hours inside for sleep or rest or at least warmth (if their souls could accept it) before they had to return to their duties. The Cold Crews were clannish. They couldn't communicate at all in sponge space, and they spoke very little under other circumstances.
When they fought, which was often, they did so with the fury of men who knew Death and Hell too intimately to fear either.
Ran Colville stared, through the clear wall and deep into his past. After an uncertain time he shuddered to alertness again and resumed his saunter along the Empress of Earth's vast hull. He forced a smile, both as camouflage and because he'd learned that a pretense of mild calm helped to drag his soul back from an emptiness deeper than vacuum in the sidereal universe.
"Lieutenant Colville?" called the woman who stepped from the lift shaft twenty meters ahead of Ran. She wore a fatigue uniform with two stripes; a senior lieutenant, and almost certainly Staff Side Second Officer of the Empress.
"Yes, ma'am," Ran said. "You're . . . ?" He nodded in the direction of starliner filling the view through the clear wall.
"Lieutenant Holly," she said, taking the hand Ran extended cautiously in case the SOP aboard the Empress of Earth was different. He'd served on some vessels in which officers saluted one another. It was a matter of the captain's whim, like much else aboard a vessel operating scores of light years from home—and much of the time outside the sidereal universe.
"Let's get aboard," Holly continued, striding back to the structural pillar from which she'd appeared. At Top Level, it included a crew car as well as the paired lift and drop shafts. "I landed immediately to make sure that the Third Class loading would be under control, but there's always dozens of passengers having hissy fits during disembarking. It's almost as bad as the hour before we undock."
Ran wasn't sure whether Holly spoke sharply because she felt pressured by the immediate circumstances, or whether she was simply curt in all dealings with her fellow crewmen. There were plenty of Staff Side officers who saved all their social skills for their duties toward the passengers.
She wasn't a bad-looking woman, not that Ran cared much about looks—or the fact that she was probably a few years older than he was. Personality might not be everything with him, but it accounted for a good ninety percent of his interest.
Anyway, he didn't mix business and pleasure. Women were always cheap, once you figured out what coin a particular lady wanted to be paid in. He liked women as well as any man in the universe did, but he wasn't about to let his pecker get in the way of his duty.
The crew car was reeling back from an open hatch on top of the Empress of Earth. The transparent vehicles weren't intended for use by large numbers; the twenty or so personnel aboard this one put it well beyond its listed capacity. The supporting girder of basket-woven monocrystal fibers swayed dangerously. It was unlikely to shear, but it might well jam, unable to extend or retract. If that happened, the car would bob in the polar winds until a maintenance crew reached it from a cherrypicker.