The Raven High

  YURI HAMAGANOV

  GROND: THE RAVEN HIGH

  Copyright 2017 YURI HAMAGANOV

  All right reserved

  First edition: March 2017

  Cover Design by Alexandra Brandt

  Edited by Geoff Smith and Carol Thompson

  No part of this book may be scanned, reproduced, or distributed in any printed or electronic form.

  GROND SPACE DYSTOPIA series:

  GROND-I: THE RAVEN HIGH

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XCFT4D1

  GROND-II: THE BLITZKRIEG

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078X14W2F

  GROND-III: ALL THE KING’S MEN

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CQ1MTGZ

  GROND-IV: A KIND WORD AND A GUN

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07G2RGW6P

  TABLE OF CONTENTS:

  Оглавление

  CHAPTER ONE: MANUAL CONTROL

  CHAPTER TWO: STROLL

  CHAPTER THREE: GAME OF TETRIS

  CHAPTER FOUR: AMBULANCE

  CHAPTER FIVE: SAND AND WATER

  CHAPTER SIX: CHANGED

  CHAPTER SEVEN: VISIT

  CHAPTER EIGHT: HAILSTORM

  CHAPTER NINE: ROCK ’N ROLL

  CHAPTER TEN: PAST AND THE FUTURE

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: END OF CHILDHOOD

  EPILOGUE

  BONUS: GROND-2 THE BLITZKRIEG First Chapter:

  For Maria…

  CHAPTER ONE: MANUAL CONTROL

  February 1, 2086

  Quiet reigned in the darkened control room. Only the hushed hissing of the ventilation and a measured ticking of a mechanical chronometer that Petrov had taken off a discarded ship were breaking the silence.

  “Range: twelve thousand one hundred seventy-one meters,” the speech simulator intoned in a sonorous female voice. “Velocity: one hundred fifty point three meters per second. Mark: X-18, Y-21.”

  “Go on, Raven,” the curator said, cutting over the speech simulator. “Slow down, turn the ship to port, and bring her carefully to the pier. Watch the mass center.”

  Sitting in an operator’s spacious armchair was a chestnut-haired girl of around six wearing a light summer dress. Her gray eyes closely followed a green icon moving across the monitors, and her hands were poised an inch over the sensor panel. Arina Rodionovna, a lean dark-haired woman of middle age, stood over her with a hand on the girl’s shoulder.

  The green icon represented an automatic medium-capacity truck carrying twelve hundred tons of various cargos, mostly raw chemicals. As the truck floated through the last twelve kilometers of the void before docking the High House, the girl observed the craft on the shortwave radar through the telescope lenses and with her own eyes through the front porthole. Red and yellow position lights were fast approaching. If she didn’t change direction and slow down, contact would occur in seventy-two seconds — the truck would crash into her House.

  “Brake engine—launch: thrust forty percent, vector three five one, correction four—two!”

  The red and yellow lights vanished in the dazzling white flash of the nose nozzles. The flash lasted less than two seconds and then Olga shut off the brake engines. The radars and telescopes confirmed the completion of the maneuver, but a strong electric shock to her palms penalized the girl for her error. Her calculation of the approach vector was inaccurate—the truck started moving drifting too far to port, gradually deviating from the assigned course. Another three electric shocks of growing power drove Olga like a whip, urging her to rectify the mistake and bring the ship back on the straight line. A series of short maneuvers cost her another hundred fifty liters of the nearly depleted fuel, but it reoriented the truck onto the right approach path. The electric shocks from the control drastically diminished and the tingling in her palms now felt like the feet of many ladybirds.

  “Range—nine thousand eight hundred fifty-three meters, speed—eighty-seven meters per second. Mark: X-1, Y-0.”

  “How are you, Raven?” Arina asked.

  “I’m okay, except that I feel a sharp electric shock running down my hands,” Olga answered, massaging her palms. “A little more of this will make my hair stand on end!”

  “No pain, no gain. Carefully watch the fuel consumption and the mass center at the final phase of the trajectory. You’ll cope!”

  Once again, the girl looked into the porthole. At this range, she could see the corporation’s emblem on the cylindrical body of the vehicle. The pumps started transferring fuel from the stern tanks to the bow. Olga prepared to activate the brake’s engines for the last time and moor the truck. The chronometer counted off the last minute of the flight.

  “Launch!”

  “Attention! Engine four on fire!”

  Olga cut off the fuel supply to engine four, but the order came too late. Engine four exploded, tearing out a sizable fragment of paneling. The thrust dropped, and the electric shock to her palms surged. The truck’s velocity was too high, and the thrust from the explosion had sent the ship into uncontrolled rotation around the longitudinal axis. The distance between the two objects was a mere three kilometers of emptiness, almost a contact at these velocities.

  Stoically enduring the electric shock, Olga doggedly used the three remaining engines to deaccelerate, stop the rotation and adjust course. The engine thrust was insufficient, so she activated the afterburner, mercilessly burning the remaining fuel. An emergency klaxon sounded, the bulkhead hatches slammed; the armored shutter shielded the porthole, and the safety belts secured to the armchair. The range was now just over one thousand meters.

  “Slow down, you old tub!”

  The fuel supply was dwindling rapidly, but the truck decelerated and pulled out of its spin. After just another second and a half in the afterburning mode, the engines could be switched off.

  “Attention! Alignment disturbed. Cargo in the hold displaced!”

  Under the extreme deceleration, the containers in the hold came off their fastenings, crushing the bulkheads. The shifting of the mass center destabilized the ship, and the relaunch attempt failed because of innumerable short circuits. An alarm siren wailed wildly and the electric flame burned Olga’s palms, but still she fought to regain control of the ship and prevent the collision.

  “Attention! Fuel supply exhausted. Engines stop!”

  “I’ve lost!”

  The pilotless spaceship, with a mass of one thousand nine hundred fifty tons, crashed into the orbital station at a velocity of sixty kilometers per hour. The truck’s bow split the manned compartment, and the blast of the brake engines knocked out the sealed hatches. The light went out, and the oxygen rapidly caught fire, filling the sections with a liquid flame. Fastened to her armchair, Olga was being burned alive. As her mind flickered out, she felt herself being sucked through the broken porthole into the atom-less icy void …

  “I remember a similar landing in 2073 on a lunar orbit,” the curator said. “Nobody survived then, either. All right. Switch off the simulator—the lesson is over!”

  The cloud of debris expanding from where the orbital station had been winked out, and Olga opened her eyes. She was safe and sound, sitting in the operator armchair. Her nanny, Arina, was still standing beside her, approvingly holding her by the shoulder. There was no sensation of her death except for the pain in her singed fingers.

  “Attention! Exercise over. Mark: X-1, Y-0. The speed at contact—seventeen point three meters per second. The cargo ship and the manned compartment destroyed, all crew dead. The evaluation of the exercise is three out of twelve possible points—failure.”

  The impartial computer-simulated voice had testified to yet another defeat. Another training day had neared its end, but the most essential of the exercises still wasn’t fulfilled.

  “I�
��m sorry …”

  The fat mustached man in a checkered shirt and jean overalls on the screen glared at Olga. “Sorry? You’ve annihilated an orbiter worth twenty billion!”

  “Curator Petrov, I disagree with your setting of the training assignment and the final evaluation,” Arina said. “True, there were errors, but Olga managed to moor the truck. That’s worth at least eight points, an acceptable result under the first year syllabus at the Academy. She didn’t cope with the catastrophe you tuned up for her, but the first year students aren’t taught to handle such situations. An emergency in all five lessons and three fatal crashes in the last two days!”

  “Arina, you know perfectly well that the coddling syllabuses of today’s Academy don’t prepare cadets properly. An astronaut unable to cope with an emergency is not worth a damn! I’ll keep pushing her because it’s the right thing to do. Raven must be prepared in compliance with the highest standards. You believe in her, but so do I. Someday, my lessons will save her life. And then don’t forget to say thanks. Olga, what can you say about the catastrophe?”

  At first, Olga didn’t reply. She recalled the training flight in all its details from the first second to the last, searching for her error.

  “I couldn’t overcome the explosion on engine four, especially the cargo displacement and the vector control system failure. Besides, I was short of fuel.”

  “That’s true,” Petrov said. “But those are the results of your errors. Look here, Raven.”

  Petrov brought up a three-dimensional model of the truck along with the cargo placement diagram.

  “During intense maneuvers, the cargo only shifts if it’s laid in the hold incorrectly. Here and here you distributed the weight improperly, misaligning the center of gravity. The electric shock penalized you twice for this error at the very start of the lesson, but you didn’t draw the right conclusion. As for the fuel shortage at the crucial moment, who is to blame? Yuri Gagarin? Due to the disturbed alignment, the ship responded sluggishly and erratically to your controls, burning twelve percent more fuel than optimal. One error leads to another, and a collision occurs instead of docking. But didn’t the electric shock warn you about each mistake? That’s why the electrodes are there, not for torturing little girls, whatever Arina says about it.”

  Frowning, the curator went on. “It’s during the docking most accidents take place, and you must practice the procedure until it becomes instinctive. Only then will you be able to respond to any emergency that could imperil your comrades’ lives.”

  Tears trembled in Olga’s eyes, which only seemed to exasperate Petrov.

  “Get it right! The High House is not a self-sufficient station, you know. Your home can’t generate oxygen or water or produce food or manufacture the required spare parts. What happens if the deliveries are disrupted because you fail to learn how to dock the truck properly? Will you eat shoes like Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush?”

  Olga smiled slightly, but the curator wasn’t finished.

  “This isn’t as funny. Do you know about the cannibalism during the Freeport siege? About the crew of Kappa-11 drinking their blood before they died of thirst? Countless fatal disasters occurred during the Expansion and the First Space War. And all of them were the result of disrupted deliveries. Because of such stupid mistakes!”

  Petrov slumped back in his armchair. His arm waved hopelessly toward Olga. The girl lowered her head not knowing how to justify herself.

  “Curator Petrov,” Arina said. “This is hyperbole. No, Olga didn’t cope with the assignment. But it doesn’t mean she’s unaware of the importance of this exercise. You act like she’s some silly little girl, but at only six years old she’s more intelligent and skilled than a twelve-year-old ne’er-do-well from Earth! Shall I remind you of your marks at the Academy and how many times you failed before passing the manual docking procedure?”

  Arina took her hand from the girl’s shoulder and straightened herself to her full height as her eyes drilled into her colleague down on Earth.

  “As Olga’s trainer, I can judge her performance with no less competence than you,” she continued. “Let her try to dock the ship once more. Next time she’ll succeed in handling the accident you’ll contrive for her!”

  Petrov scratched his faces as he studied Olga, pondering something.

  “Bear in mind that I’ll invent something out of the ordinary,” he said. “All right. If you have time, we’ll have another go at the next turn. You have eighty-five minutes before the lesson starts.”

  The curator was grumbling something under his breath as he ended the communication. Olga rose from her armchair, arching her back like a cat, then walked to the porthole to look down at the weather-shrouded Earth floating far below.

  Much of Europe was covered with impenetrable clouds. Trying to ignore the pain in her hands, the girl watched the thunderstorm raging over the Tunisian coast, the dark sea, the lights of Sicily and the Peloponnese peninsula.

  “Olga, let me see your hands,” Arian said as she opened a medical kit. While treating the girl’s palms with an anesthetic compound, the nanny checked the essential biometric parameters: pulse, blood pressure, temperature, and heart rate. All was well.

  “Nothing serious. Make fewer mistakes, and you won’t hurt so.”

  “May I ask you a question?”

  “What is it?”

  “Was there cannibalism in Freeport?” The girl regarded her nanny narrowly.

  “Yes, indeed. In 2029, the deliveries from Earth broke off. And then on Hebron-8, they killed people for the water in their blood. They’ll cut your throat for water in places even today. Space is harsh, get used to it. Now go and rest before the next lesson.”

  After Arina tenderly embraced Olga and adjusted the bow in her hair, the girl padded down the winding staircase. The lighting changed from on duty to normal mode, and soft music wafted from the speakers.

  The manned compartment of the orbital station High House Eight resembled a two-storied apartment. The upper floor was the control room, officially referred to as the Central Post, an elongated space with a rubber-coated floor and one wall fully taken up by a visual monitor. On completion of the studies, Olga would run the entire station from here, sitting in the operator armchair. Installed to the right of the armchair was a sluice chamber three meters tall and two meters by two meters wide. To the left were two small sections: the kitchen and Arina’s cubicle.

  The lower floor was dramatically different from the upper one. The impression was as if Olga were coming down from a darkened attic to a brightly lit country house. She had lived there since she was three months old, and that place was her apartment, school, gym, playground and entertainment center. In short, it was her home.

  The walls were paneled with synthetic wood that felt like genuine birch. The floor was covered with a fluffy white carpet that dampened the sound of footsteps. Instead of the narrow portholes, there were high windows in synthetic birch frames that looked out into a forest at dusk. Drops of drizzle beat against the glass and lightning flashed out. Arina had created the simulation. The air smelled of wet fir needles, birds sang, a breeze blew, and the torches on the ceiling gave a pleasing yellow light.

  “So, Olga, I must check on a couple of technical things,” Arina called down the staircase, “and then I’ll fix lunch for you. In the meantime, have a game of table tennis. You must stretch your hands once more before the next lesson!”

  “Maybe basketball would be better?” the girl called back.

  “Basketball might do. But first let’s play two sets of tennis, shall we?”

  “Okay!” Olga agreed and ran to the center of her world, the living room.

  In other rooms of the manned compartment, the environment was Spartan, essentials and nothing too excessive. But the living room was a special place. It wasn’t just a room where the child passed her spare time. It was space that belonged exclusively to Olga. When she was just a small girl learning to walk and talk, Arina used to play wit
h her here for hours on end, equipping her with the relevant knowledge and skills.

  All the required conditions were created here for the adequate development of a space child. The walls were fitted out with shelves stacked with toys, rare paper books, tablets, musical instruments, and a puppet theater with a folding screen. One of the large windows jutted out from the wall, forming a semicircular bay window that Olga called “my little balcony.” Here, Olga could activate any geographic or climatic video simulation. The balcony could convert to a summer lawn, a beach, an ice hockey goal—virtually anything. The girl has spent many happy hours here, walking and playing with her imaginary guests.

  Olga approached the part of the room where synthetic parquet replaced the white carpet. Arina had outfitted a small sports ground for her. There was a multiple-function trainer, wall-mounted ladder, suspension ladder, climbing rope, basketball hoop, stretching rig, and a folding table for tennis and billiards. The girl unfolded the table, took a paddle, and launched the simulator. A semitransparent figure popped up on the other side of the table. It is a boy of her height, dressed in a red T-shirt and black shorts, the uniform of the Chinese national table tennis team.

  “Medium complexity level, my service,” Olga said.

  The girl and her virtual opponent bowed to each other. A holographic ball hovered over the table. Gripping her paddle in the traditional Chinese pen-hold grip Olga served, and the game began.

  They played three sets, Olga taking one. Then she switched off the game, folded up the table, and picked up her favorite bright orange basketball ball. The ball is was to suit her age, and the hoop was lowered to a height that would allow her to shoot without compromising her form.

  “Hoorah!” Olga shouted happily when Arina came down ten minutes later carrying a large thermos filled with a mixture of curds, nuts, and chocolate—an ideal food for the late time of the day and specifically designed for the space girl. These were natural products and, therefore, very expensive.