Chapter 5

 The transport hung in a circular orbit more than a thousand kilometers above the surface. Outwardly, it resembled a huge openwork tower that had somehow miraculously flown into the sky together with a massive concrete foundation. In fact, what looked like a foundation was the main complex with a power unit - with thermonuclear reactors and ejectors, that is, engines. There were also transit docks - those docks where shuttles were docked that were supposed to travel together with the transport.

Another complex module, located in the first third of the mast, had a group of docks capable of accepting shuttles in a static state, but not capable of dragging this load along with them - when the cruise engines were turned on, a certain overload appeared and the tower began to perceive loads in the same way as if it were standing on Earth. Well, of course, much smaller. On the Moon or thereabouts.

 In the core of the tower structure there was a series of light-colored pipelines - these were habitable galleries and pipelines with heat and gas exchange communications and much more.

 In height, that is, in length, the tower was one and a half kilometers. It was a Rutherford-class transport. This was not the largest - it had an advanced heat-removal system that required smaller dimensions. The first transorbital transports - Oppenheimer-class ships were more than two and a half kilometers long and they were still flying. But once upon a time, the first expeditions got here, flying on ships that were much smaller and simpler than the shuttle - this is essentially a bus.

 Those who remained to endure the takeoff in the airlock now floated into the compartment. There were ten of them. The shuttle thus took out sixty passengers plus two pilots, one of whom simply took a free seat behind the pilot's station panel.

 The airlock went as usual - everything was done automatically. This time, the transition was to be made without making an extra journey - through a pair of airlocks located in the front part of the passenger compartment. They, these chambers, were an integral part of the space, if one could say so, of the "salon", forming with their blocks a kind of corridor, to a certain extent separating the control post and the main space.

 The entrance chamber of the ship greeted us with soft white light and light tones - that's how it was painted. In the shuttle compartment, everything was painted in a dark color, everything was dotted with lights that were constantly on. In fairness, it should be said that there, the care for comfort was supposed to be entrusted to the glasses for light correction of the image, but who would carry them around. Here, however, there was the atmosphere of a classic, if you like, aristocratic interplanetary ship.

 Then there was a tunnel and a passage to the compartment, where we were to meet the beginning of the acceleration stage and conduct a kind of pre-flight briefing. The compartment was outside the block - the "foundation" and was located in the secondary, the one removed from the main one by a third of the mast. The maximum overload during standard acceleration or braking barely reached one tenth of the Earth's gravity, but weightlessness disappeared. Thus, all longitudinal tunnels turned into vertical shafts, but under the conditions of those insignificant accelerations it was easy to push off from the side and grab one of the handrails. There were also safety diaphragms made of mesh that did not allow acceleration, even having lost all contact with the surface of the tunnel.

 The next compartment was a cylindrical room with perforated steel ceilings that formed three tiers. Along the perimeter and in the central part there were seats that could be transformed into semi-recumbent ones.

 About an hour after Somerset moved from the shuttle to the transport, the main engines turned on. A joyful hum rolled through the compartment.