Time passed quickly - it always did when the mood was higher than usual. Just like in the shuttle, like in everything that flew, each seat here was equipped with a personal terminal with a video interface, allowing communication with the onboard computer, its public part. Someone had managed to send verbal messages there, to Mars. Most of these messages were full of curses, often the most obnoxious - Russian. Sooner or later, everyone mastered them.
Another familiar engineer who settled nearby, who had joined the underground almost last year, from the very beginning of all the Martian events, pointed to a group of three people dressed in characteristic flight suits. Judging by his words, they were the main organizers of this remarkable escape, and they were not pilots - they were from the security service. All three were not young, especially by the standards of the settlement - they were all about fifty, maybe a little older. One had a short-cropped beard, making him look like some kind of purely earthly intellectual.
There was still no connection with Earth. No open connection. This was the subject of constant butthurt. The small parabolic antennas of the first expeditions were an archaic past. Progress made one thing accessible, but could also close access to the previously ordinary. The appearance of communications and communications demonstrated this in full. It was not a question of the capabilities of technology, but a question of security, if not to say police brutality.
There were more than enough one-way broadcasts from the same TV channels, flowing in a wide stream from Earth to Mars. There was also a technological two-way connection, which had a certain delay. It was necessary for organizing any kind of flights to Mars and back. Technological communication was something that was known to most of the inhabitants, the personnel, only by its name - it was handled by a very few inter-communicationists, closely guarded by the security service. These special people, the Inter-Communication Service, ICS, were like a secret service themselves. The same Leita, who worked on general communications, had nothing to do with them.
As for the usual two-way communication, carried out, albeit with a delay, by the first unmanned vehicles in the distant twentieth century, it did not exist. It was prohibited. It was called unauthorized communication and was regarded as a threat to commercial secrets. And a threat to security in general. Once, at the dawn of the settlement's history, a nuclear reactor was blown up. The fact that it exploded was a fact, but why... It was claimed that it was due to outside interference. Commercial secrets, the second component of motivation for secrecy besides security, have always been an integral companion of private activity.
Everyone had long since taken it for granted, had gotten used to the fact that the entire Martian colony project was not governmental, was not state-owned. Although, even if you think about it impartially now, it couldn't help but surprise you - how the Big Government allowed itself to pass by or let pass by a project of the century, if not the millennium, comparable only to the discovery of the American continent. It was a private project of the Superholding, constellation, VFV.
On the other hand, in the last century, the project of the millennium was undoubtedly the exploration of the Moon, which was completely supervised by the already formed in its current form Government of the Confederation.
And as for the Moon, there was complete order with communication and the Internet. A delay of one second, of course, was noticeable during online communication and online work, but all data and files were downloaded without problems. It was impossible to establish an unauthorized Internet connection between Mars and Earth, even a specific one - all orbital repeaters of the Earth were configured to discriminate against delays. In other words, they constantly sent a small piece of data, which was a cipher. If the corresponding decoded response did not arrive within a set time interval, the data flow was interrupted.
This was the agreement that the VFV had achieved, which extended to the entire Earth communications system. There was, however, one exception, but it was also controlled by the "Big Artificial Intelligence" that belonged to the constellation.
Of course, it was also possible to make a transceiver station yourself, having previously agreed with a similar techno-geek on Earth. Knowing the available communications equipment, it was possible to hack a ready-made transmitter, prohibiting it from notifying the network of its activity. All these attempts were made, but each time the signal, this radio beam from Mars, being detected by radio telescopes on Earth itself, put the search systems located on Mars on their ears. In most cases, they managed without terrestrial radio telescopes - a radio beam sent from Earth towards Mars, which vice versa, was easily detected by the radar network of Mars itself. A network, in theory, designed to coordinate orbital activity and track the passage of all sorts of asteroids. If a Martian designer was caught, he would face a showdown with the security service and disciplinary action. There were few who wanted to deal with all this nonsense. There was no television broadcasting on the ship now - that stream was transmitted via an optical channel, and the ship had long since left the laser beam line. Here, on board, Somerset did not even have a personal disk - that piece of the Internet that the Earth network, guided by the user's interests known to it, copied to his, Somerset's, personal storage, and he, in turn, transferred all this to a physical medium and took it to Mars. This was allowed. From this, although not only from this, the local Internet was formed, slowly but surely replenished with new arrivals from Earth. What to order and receive was determined by the "Big Artificial Intelligence", which had a certain message with a similar artificial intelligence there, on Earth. This was the exception.
- We need to decide, - a voice sounded from somewhere on the lower tier, - Who will go into suspended animation and who will not. What are the considerations? The speaker's name was Dupare - this was visible on the individual console. - That's right, - responded one of the three organizers, the one with the beard, - I suggest we stop shouting and switch to communication, - he continued.
The transport ship was loaded with provisions for one hundred and fifty people - this was the standard option, prescribed by the regulations - there had to be a supply of everything necessary for a flight organized on an emergency basis on board. For once, all these regulations turned out to be in the hands of the underground. The coincidence was amusing, but it was logical.
Now there were two hundred and sixty people on board. Two compartments, one of which Somerset and the others were sitting in, made it possible to accommodate five hundred - the transport could deliver personnel to the nearby Moon. Here, the flight took much longer. In the current configuration, it was supposed to take sixteen days, during which the transport's power plant, operating in different modes, mercilessly burned the resources of its unique engines. The technology for building such installations was not available to VFV. Constellation purchased engines from AEA, which was deeply involved in Earth affairs. If the first expeditions, consisting of three to five people, got by with a couple of shuttles, then the industrial process had other requirements. But even the pioneers could not do without a magnetic curtain placed on the second unmanned ship, which deflected particles of the solar wind. It was a flight full of risk and heroism. Routine transportation of hundreds of people who did not claim heroism on a planetary scale, if only because their task was to subsequently work on exploration, extraction and construction, required a completely different organization. Transportation of personnel, as in the case of the first expeditions, required food, medicine, anti-ionizing and anti-X-ray bioprotection casing, a magnetic curtain and, most importantly, an increased reliability factor compared to the expeditionary one. Or rather, several different factors, by which the efficiency parameters of all the above measures and protection systems were multiplied. It turned out that, figuratively speaking, more and more sacks of grain, barrels of water, canisters of Coca-Cola, suitcases, and even outright junk were thrown onto the ship of the Vikings sailing to the new continent. The sagging ship of the brave Vikings was removed and a huge steel barge was built in its place. But the barge in its natural form was not suitable - it was too slow - it was necessary to quickly slip through, getting into those periods when the weather on the route was calm. Well, and if you get into a storm, then in one, no more. For this, several aircraft turbines were attached to the barge and a reactor was installed. This is how the process of the birth of these passenger transports could be described.
Now, even with two hundred and sixty people on board, the ship, equipped according to the minimum regulations, could cope with the task. Even without any anabiosis, the flight did not threaten to turn into a dystopian hunger tournament for survival.
Nevertheless, the option with anabiosis seemed logical beyond any doubt. This is how they were used to it, and this was how it was supposed to be. Theoretically, if there were problems with the reactor, the ship could skip the Earth and go on further orbits. And then it would only be necessary to wait for the rescue expedition. And then the food supplies would become precious.
On board, or rather inside this mast, several specially protected blocks were separately secured, which were medical compartments for anabiosis. This was the so-called small anabiosis - the least traumatic of all such procedures. During it, a person pumped with drugs simply slept for most of the day, about twenty-two hours out of twenty-four. Waking up after another "long night", he didn't feel exactly well - weak, as if after a good poisoning. It was muscle atony, which made it very difficult even to eat independently. There was a tube with broth and water for that. The toilet systems had also long been worked out and brought to a kind of perfection. Nevertheless, no one was eager to relax like that. They decided to draw lots, but there was a purely organizational hitch - what to draw. Someone already had options for everyone to dive for half the flight time. For some reason, the doctors did not like the idea. A hubbub began. Someone, by definition, was not supposed to dive into suspended animation, since the functionality of the ship's systems was maintained by at least three dozen people. It was also difficult with the doctors - they seemed to need a dozen of them, but, as far as it became known, there were only three. In the end, they came to the conclusion that everyone had to split into groups of several people and these groups would draw the lot, which were metal threaded pins. Some marked them with a marker, others did not. Somerset, without much fuss, entered the group of six people sitting right there, in the neighborhood. Dolbin, Leyta and all the rest of that glorious five that were there, on Mars, were now somewhere on another tier. Luck was not on the side of Somerset and his new unit - they got a pin, quite clearly painted with a red marker. However, considering all the circumstances, this was a mere trifle. In his life, Somerset had already dived twice and this was in real conditions, in the absence of gravity. The first time was during an internship, in lunar orbit. Then he was and worked at the orbital logistics station and this was a kind of certification test. The second time was on the way to Mars. There was also, if one could put it that way, a zero test cycle, which lasted a week - that was carried out back on Earth.