Spin Vector Symmetry

This story was written for the 2019 Geek Pride Event.

It's mostly non-erotic but it has some sex-talk and lots of physics.

The story is set in the same narrative universe as Every Man's Fantasy and takes place five years before the start of chapter 1. It describes an event in the early career of one of that story's geekiest heroines.

I hope you enjoy it. I welcome all comments.

Best wishes,

Erinaceous.

*

1Rigging team B

Danielle Goldrick, astrophysical engineer to a six-man space rigging team, stood at the aft observation deck on-board the Oakshott Engineering survey ship and took a long last look at the space station as it receded into the distance.

They were accelerating away from the newly-commissioned station, in orbit three-thousand miles above an Earth-sized planet, heading to a hyperspace beacon in geosynchronous orbit. Rigging team B had certified the station safe to be handed over to the terraforming engineers, who were preparing the planet for human habitation.

Aged twenty-three, with a Master's from Cambridge, a Ph.D. from Caltech, and an ambition as big as the planet, Danielle knew she could do the engineering tasks in her sleep, yet she felt a profound satisfaction from a job well done.

The small yellow star, no bigger than her thumb, emerged from the planet's shadow, making the silver space station glint for a second as it shrank to a dot. The survey ship's ion drive left a long stream of faintly-glowing particles below her, as Danielle gazed at the diminishing planet. A sandy world of vast deserts, desiccated highlands and blue oceans, it was being turned living-green by uncountable legions of nanobots and a man-made invasion of plants.

During her week on the space station, Danielle was sure she could see the vegetation spreading daily over the bare yellow deserts, expanding inward from the coasts, as the molecular nanobots ate the silicate surface rocks to release oxygen and nutrients, transpiring to convert atmospheric methane and ammonia into carbon-dioxide, water and nitrogen. When the nanobots wore out, their components would become mulch for the roots of the encroaching plants.

She stood by the triangular plastiglass window until the planet was as small as a billiard ball. Danielle reached out to hold the globe in her hand: a sentimental act of possession she could not resist.

"Princess?"

The bass voice with a soft lilting accent from the Welsh valleys belonged to a giant red-haired man, more than seven feet tall, crouching by the hatchway. His tone apologised for interrupting her.

"Yes, Geraint?"

"There's a comms. It's the boss."

"Not her!"

"It's Mister Oakshott."

"Oh, right. Thanks. I'm coming."

The boss of the rigging teams was Ellen Carswell. Danielle hated her; but Stephen Oakshott, owner of Oakshott Engineering, was Ellen's boss. Danielle liked him very much.

She climbed half-a-dozen ladders the length of the ship - past the engine room, store rooms, sleeping quarters, galley, and canteen - to the bridge, where Geraint held open the hatch for her to clamber up through.

On the bridge was the piloting console and the navicomms system. The other five men of the rigging team were already in their flight seats. Projected over the instrument panel of the navicomms system was a hazy pink-tinged hologram of Stephen Oakshott.

It was a recording sent by a communications probe through the hyperspace beacon from Earth. Communication through hyperspace was done by comms probes that emerged from a beacon, burst out a compressed message, sniffed for new messages, and bounced back through the beacon.

Instant communication was impossible by such a system, so senders put as much information into each message as they could. This happened to be Stephen Oakshott's natural method of communicating. He always spoke in short bursts.

"Well done, team," said the image of the robust red-faced, sandy-haired man, whom Danielle always likened to a big puppy-dog: all bark and no bite. "Sorry to ask. Now you're coming home. You're needed. Emergency. Asteroid-mine in Carina sector. Engineering station in danger. Briefing follows.

"One thing first. Doctor Goldrick's new. Can't risk her life. Drop her off on the way. Good luck."

Stephen Oakshott gave way to an engineer from the laboratory, a man Danielle worked with on Earth when she joined the company eight months before.

Oakshott Engineering was a small specialist firm with five astrophysical engineers, of which Danielle was the only woman, and three rigging teams, all men. She spent her first six months in the laboratory before being assigned to the space rigs. Now, having completed her third mission, she was so firmly (and unexpectedly) in love with being an engineer to a rigging team that she had no intention of letting the lads leave her somewhere safe.

"Pause the comms, please," Danielle said.

Geraint did so.

"Mister Oakshott is kind to worry about me," she said, "but I'm going where the team goes, regardless of the risk. I'm not scared. Maybe I can help."

She looked at the six men in the room and defied any of them to suggest leaving her out. They were big brawny men. The smallest was more than twice her weight. Tough, skilled and careless of danger, they would say 'No' if they thought bringing her on the mission was a danger.

But she was their engineer, their 'Princess', and her work on the last three missions proved she deserved her place. Even if her inexperience increased the risk, it was their job to protect her.

Geraint nodded to Danielle, conveying the unspoken resolution of the men. He resumed the comms.

Eddie Vane, the engineer who gave the briefing, was a serious young man who spoke earnestly and used lots of diagrams. He began by showing a map of a star system.

"This is Mu Carinae," he said, pointing at a big orange star. "It's very active with a few giant gaseous planets and a thick asteroid belt. The belt has been mined for its mineral content for decades. There's also an engineering station, marked here on the map."

He tapped a red circle. The ship's computer showed Mu Carinae on the star map, holoprojected in three dimensions by the guidance system. The image zoomed in to show the engineering station. It was a rotating wheel, on which men worked and lived, and a long spindle with ports for spaceships to dock.

"The engineering station is called 'Carina Sunspark'," Eddie said. "It orbits Mu Carinae at 120 million miles, about five million miles sunside of the asteroid belt, serving the miners and the freighter ships that visit the asteroid-mines."

"Two hyperspace beacons share the same orbit. One links toward Earth. The other links to the Hydrus solar system, which you can reach in one jump from your current location."

Hyperspace beacons were at the ends of hyperspace pathways, allowing quick travel across the settled galaxy between relatively fixed points. Because beacons used prodigious amounts of power, they were constructed near stars, where vast umbrella-shaped solar collectors beamed energy to them in gamma streams. The same power-sources fed space stations and engineering stations, where spaceships docked to refuel.

Eddie expanded the map to show the asteroid belt around Mu Carinae in more detail, pointing to a dot. Again, the navicomms system magnified the image, zooming in on an asteroid.

"This is MC10. It's an asteroid-mine about a mile in diameter and a billion tons in mass. Robot mining machines and a few human miners work it, excavating minerals. Now rigging team A is there with Ellen Carswell.

"Mu Carinae sometimes has small electromagnetic eruptions. Normally, they're nothing to worry about. The solar collectors near the star are simple robust technology. Not much hurts them. They just turn off for a while. Carina Sunspark has radiation shielding. And a nickel-iron asteroid acts as a Faraday cage. But ten days ago, a series of unusually powerful eruptions fritzed the electronic circuits on Carina Sunspark.

"The eruptions continued for days, causing severe damage and magnetising the asteroids. MC10 was set spinning quickly. Now the residual magnetism of Mu Carinae is pulling MC10 out of the asteroid belt, making it spiral inward half-a-million miles a day. It's on course to cross the path of Carina Sunspark. They're very likely to collide.

"When the eruptions died down, Oakshott Engineering received a request to help. Rigging team A was nearby. Ellen was with them at the time.

"Our men helped Sunspark get its power back on, so the team went to help on MC10; but there was another big eruption and now the engineering station is crippled again. About twenty men are trapped on Sunspark.

"The last comms we received from Ellen was twelve hours ago. She said that everyone was being evacuated from MC10. But we've heard nothing since.

"You're to go to Mu Carinae to see what you can do. MC10 is still heading toward the engineering station and will crush it if they collide.

"Your task is to get Ellen and the rigging team out of there as quickly as you can because there's a military cruiser on its way from Earth. It left Earthstation 7 yesterday and should emerge from the Earthside beacon at Mu Carinae a few hours after you get there. They've got orders to destroy MC10 completely while it's still at least a million miles from Carina Sunspark.

"Send us an update as soon as you get to Mu Carinae. Good luck."

******

"All right, boyos," Geraint said, reading off the trajectory projected by the navicomms computer. "We're forty minutes from the beacon here, then it's two hours between beacons at Hydrus. After we leave the beacon at Mu Carinae it's five hours to MC10, so we're less than eight hours out. We don't know what we're facing, look you, so let's prepare some likely tools. Be sharp, boyos."

The lads went off to load a rocket launch with hydrogen fuel cells, electrical cables, oxygen tanks, hosepipes for air, water bottles, small laser-drills, a heavy plasma torch, hydraulic jacks and all the hand-tools they could store. But Danielle stayed on the bridge to study the details of the Mu Carinae system.

She learned about the asteroid-mines, especially MC10, which had a core of nickel-iron and a honeycomb of mine-shafts and access tunnels through its mineral-rich outer layers, with a small control room in the centre, hollowed out of the rock and accessed by sealed tubes. The mine maintained an atmosphere for the human miners, who carried spare oxygen for emergencies. The control room had airlocks and its own emergency supply of air.

Danielle did some calculations of mass, torque, angular momentum, electric charge and magnetic force.

The prospect of flying into danger did not frighten her. Though she did not relish risking her life, Danielle relished doing her job as well as she could as a member of the best rigging team in the galaxy (as she proudly boasted).

The six-man team consisted of team-leader, Geraint, 'old-timer' Rob (at age fifty, starting to lose his hair, so he shaved it off), pilot Chris and riggers Mack, Gil (short for 'Gilbert') and Jake, the curly blond-haired baby of the team, aged twenty-five. They all stood more than six feet six inches tall and weighed more than 250 pounds. Their big muscles were necessary because, although much of their work was in weightless environments, massive machines, hatch doors and plasma tools still had a lot of inertia or friction to overcome.

They were a tough bunch of men and Danielle had to put up with their mess, their crude humour and their rough gallantry, though she was gradually taming them. At first, she resented being called 'Princess'. As a woman who earned a doctorate at a progressive university in Earth-year 2549, she was programmed to be offended by all casual sexism, real or perceived. But her expectations bumped up against the reality of working closely in a dangerous environment with competent men who had their own ways of doing things.

An engineer was a resource for the rigging team; and the wrong engineer, whether man or woman, was dead-weight or a liability. So it was natural that a rigging team would be wary of a new engineer, especially someone straight out of university. Recent graduates who could handle life on a space rig were rare. Women graduates who could do so were almost unknown.

Besides the ever-present dangers, there was the pressure of deadlines, the claustrophobia, the physical exertion of the work and the smell of stagnant oily air that seemed to cling to Danielle's clothes, skin and hair, even after only a few days on a space-rig or cramped survey vessel. There were no proper showers in space, nor the routine comforts of a planet with gravitation. Worst of all, they lived in each other's pockets, often squeezing into bunks and sanitation cubicles designed for smaller men.

The blokes insisted that Danielle have a four-man cabin all to herself and a head for her own use. She tried to refuse from a theoretical duty to equality. But after she saw the mess that untamed men could make, she gladly jettisoned that feminist principle and accepted her own private facilities. She never made a rookie mistake like that again.

It did not take her long to be accepted as a worthy team-member. It happened a few days into her first mission.

The rigging team was helping construct a new hyperspace beacon, but a part was missing. There should have been two cooling flow assemblies, one left-handed and one right-handed. Instead, there were two left-handed units. Because they were pressed for time, Danielle jerry-rigged the spare assembly to make a temporary work-around. It involved some delicate welding and an advanced understanding of turbulence and flow-rates. The lads thought she was a genius and, from then on, none questioned her value to the team.

Also, from then on, Danielle no longer winced at being called 'Princess'. It was an Oakshott Engineering custom which began as a joke and a bit of a tease, but now she embraced it. It was a title she earned. She was proud of it.

By the second mission, Danielle had the swagger of an old space-hand, though she complained that the flight-suit made her bum look big. It had a white protective outer layer for radiation, a magnetic lining for artificial gravitation and inch-thick insulation.

"It must have been designed by a man," she said to herself the first time she squeezed her bum into the suit. When the top-half of the suit squeezed her breasts flat (and Danielle was a well-proportioned woman), she revised that judgment and said it was designed by a robot: a robot who thought normal women were stick-thin models from a magazine, and that her flight-suit should have pink flashes on the collars and a pink utility belt.

The utility belt spoilt her sleek looks, especially when its pockets were bulked out with the regulation tools. Danielle left the tools in her cabin. The men carried more than enough tools for any problem. Instead, she filled the pockets with her own version of emergency equipment: nail-file, hair-ties, comb, moisturising wipes, lip-gloss and, best of all, chocolate.

At nearly five-foot ten-inches, Danielle was two inches taller than average for an Anglosphere woman in the twenty-sixth century. With a high forehead, dark-blue eyes that danced with intelligent joy, a wide mouth full of good strong white teeth and an engaging smile she loved to use, Danielle was healthy and vibrant, revealing herself to be a physics geek only when she spoke. To make things easier in space, she cut her long straight mousy-brown hair to just above her shoulders.

On her second mission, Danielle learned that the art of chivalry still existed when a servo motor froze on a compression hatch in an airlock chamber.

She was the nearest to the fault when the alarm went off. She ran into the chamber and pushed on the hatch with all her might, trying to shut it before the cylinder crumpled and the outer door sheared off, opening the module to the vacuum of space, sucking her out of the ship.

The hatch would not budge, however hard she pushed. Then Rob, the lightest and smallest rigger, arrived. He barged past her and threw himself against the chamber door, putting his body between her and instant death.

"In you go, Princess," he said.

Danielle did not hesitate. She ducked under his arm into the ship. Rob braced himself and slammed the hatch shut with one push, as if he had more strength in one arm than she had in her whole body.

"It's a knack," he said, punching the button that balanced the pressure of the chamber to stop it crumpling. "Those damn cowboy builders cut corners by not using the proper grease."

Now the need to suppress her panic was over, the adrenaline began to drain from her body and she understood how close she came to death. Her eyes misted up and she shook. Danielle felt cold and weak, but she shivered from exertion, not from fear.

"Hey, Princess. It's all right."

Rob held her in his arms, as a father would his daughter. She rested her head on his chest and shut her eyes, just for a moment, until the tremor passed.

"It's all right," he repeated.

When the rest of the lads arrived, they escorted her to the rec room, sat her in a comfy chair and gave her a beaker of hot chocolate to sip. No one said she should have waited for one of them before trying to close the frozen hatch. No one mentioned her tears.

They protected her because she was their Princess. It was like one of those stories that her mother read her when she was a girl. Cinderella and the six giants, or whatever the nonsense was. She paid no attention to it because she would far rather play with her older brother's toy cars and aeroplanes.

It was the only time she felt small and vulnerable on the space-rigs. Not because she was rescued by men twice her size but because the damn hatch would not close. From then on, Danielle was as protective toward her boys as they were toward their Princess.

Which was why she had a row with Ellen Carswell, the manager of the rigging teams.

Shortly after their return from Danielle's second mission, Ellen sent the blokes out again on what she said was a simple job for which they did not need an engineer.

Not only did Danielle object to being separated from the team, it was not a simple job at all. There was an accident. Rob returned with a temporary patch over his left eye and burns on his arm. Chris, the pilot, had a leg in plaster.

When she learned that the job was a salvage operation that robots could have done without risk (because collapsing beams and leaking acid would leave them unscathed), Danielle angrily confronted Ellen.

"You sent my blokes on a salvage mission!" she accused.

"They're our blokes, not your blokes, and they go where I tell them," Ellen answered.

"You put machines before men!"

"Yes. Robots are expensive to buy and program. Men are cheaper."

Danielle was incensed at Ellen's lack of concern and silenced by disbelief.

"You're new to the industry, Doctor Goldrick," Ellen continued. "So however impressive your qualifications, you have a naïve view of our work. Ask the men if they disapprove me sending them on a salvage mission and then come and vent your righteous anger toward me. Meanwhile, I'll decide who goes on what jobs according to the best interest of our company, not your academic morals."

Regardless how protective Danielle felt toward her boys, what grated most was the patronising arrogance of the woman.

When she asked the lads what they thought about the salvage trip, she was surprised at the answer. Chivalrously (and wisely) refusing to get involved in an argument between two women, the men made no comment until Danielle insisted, when Geraint said:

"Miss Carswell was right, look you: men are cheaper than robots."

"But that doesn't mean she can risk your lives," Danielle insisted.