Brin 2

This page is about the Brin 2 station. The Sentry Pod that survives it has its own page, the Second Brin Sentry Habitat.

Brin 2 is the station that carries the uplift project to Kern’s World, a terraformed planet twenty light years from Earth. It is also called the Brin, and Doctor Avrana Kern runs it. Its crew of nineteen has one job in orbit: release the Barrel and the Flask, then let the new species take the world.

Description

The station is a needle with a ring around it. The long central core is a weightless axle given over to power, processing and the payload. Around it sits a torus of life and science where the crew works and lives. At one end of the needle is the plain bulge of the Sentry Pod, built to be cast adrift as a research post. At the other end are the Barrel and the Flask, holding monkeys and the virus. The Barrel carries ten thousand of them.

There are no windows on the Brin 2. Rotation means that “outside” is always down, underfoot. Wall screens show a composite view of the world below with the spin left out, so the planet hangs still in space, a green marble to match the blue marble of home. The crew wear Mind’s Eye HUDs, hear messages inside their heads, and can call up the station’s schematics at a thought. Kern talks to the facility’s control computer over a relay link and checks the Barrel systems out of habit. Fifteen of the nineteen crew stand in the control hub for her speech. The engine core sits inside the needle, and the only way inward is a climb up the access shaft.

History

Kern got the Brin launched years before, against mounting opposition at home. The planet itself was prepared by engineering teams under Doctors Fallarn and Medi, who finished fifteen years of work there and began the thirty year return to Earth. What waited in the Barrel was a cargo of monkeys. Beside it, the Flask held the uplift virus, built to push their descendants through a century or two of change.

On the day of her speech the volunteer meant for the Sentry Pod is not in position. Sering is in the engine core instead. He has disabled the reactor safeties and rigged the escape pods, and he has locked Kern out of the systems she was not in the habit of checking, the ones that were not mission critical. Over the open channel he tells the crew that the NUNs are taking power on Earth and across the colonies.

Kern leaves the outer floor and climbs the shaft into the hollow needle, either towards Sering’s traps or away. She goes to the portal to the Sentry Pod, the one piece of equipment he left alone, and finds just enough room inside for the cold sleep tank. She works out a release path around his sabotage, climbs in and lets the pod go. The banging on the door starts after it closes, and the pod has room for one.

From the pod she orders the Barrel launched. The station’s destruction has knocked the lander off its planned trajectory, and it burns like a meteor through the atmosphere, carrying its monkeys with it. The Flask falls at a gentler angle and delivers the virus to a world that no longer has the simians it was made for.

The end of the Brin 2 reaches Kern only as damage reports. Escape pods detonate, the station comes apart, and her colleagues, the facility and Sering all become a cloud of fragments and escaping atmosphere. She corrects the pod’s course by the small amount needed and settles into the orbit prepared for it.

Aftermath

Kern sleeps in the pod with a copy of her mind running in its systems. She wakes fourteen years and seventy two days later to the news that the Brin 2 is gone and that Earth has stopped transmitting.

Its name outlives it. Later chapters still call Kern’s satellite the Brin 2’s Sentry Pod.

Unanswered questions

• What the number in the name refers to. No Brin 1 appears in the text.
• How many of the nineteen crew reached the escape pods before they went off, and how many died in the first blast.
• Whether anything of the station was ever recovered.

Trivia

• The Barrel and the Flask are described as holding monkeys and the future, respectively.