Right now it was encircling Akureyri, a big (population 1.1 million), newish (eighty-four years old) habitat constructed in the style known informally as the double barrel, historically known as the O’Neill Island Three type. It was two large cylinders, parallel to each other, rotating in opposite directions. Each was enshrouded in complexes of mirrors and other infrastructure. The mirrors were aimed at the sun, whose light was bounced through windowed strips on the cylinder walls to illuminate the landscapes within. But it was about six in the evening local time, and so those mirrors were gradually being feathered to simulate twilight. By using the varp to zoom in, Kath Two could have peered through the windows to see the farms, forests, waterways, and habitations inside Akureyri, but she knew generally what it would look like, so she remained zoomed-out for now.
Which she had to, if she was going to take in the Eye. Akureyri, big as it was, was dwarfed by the construct surrounding it. Of this, the most eye-catching part was the Manhattan-on-a-roller-coaster spectacle of the Great Chain, whipping around at terrific speed, completing a full circuit every five minutes.
But that wasn’t where they were going. As the Eye became larger and larger in her view, its whirling iris drifted to one side, and it became clear that the flivver’s tiny corrective burns had aimed them toward one of those inhabited bits contained within its massive, pitted iron frame: a ring of four score docking ports encircled by a large, glowing yellow letter Q that was universally recognizable as the logo and the badge of Quarantine.
At a glance, two-thirds of the ports in the Q were already occupied by other ships, mostly flivvers of various types plus a couple of liners. The ports were individually numbered with glowing digits, and annotated, in the mixture of Latin and Cyrillic used throughout the ring, as to their purposes:
TRANZIT
IMMIGRAШON
MILITARY
CURVEY
CPEЦ
A ring of green lights surrounding a vacant port—number 65—began to flash. The systems that were controlling the flivver already knew where to go, so this was solely for the benefit of human beings, as well as serving as a backup plan in the rare event that a vehicle needed to be piloted by hand.
Kath Two had seen enough dockings in her time, so she peeled off the varp and held it in her lap through the ensuing series of nudges and jerks, which terminated with the opening of the airlock door.
A yellow-striped tube stretched away into the part of Quarantine set aside for people who, like them, were returning from the surface of Earth. A few meters in, they were confronted by a one-way door, constructed so that only one person at a time could pass through it. Hanging on a rack nearby were a number of hard bracelets, color-coded to indicate that they were intended for Survey personnel, also striped with machine-readable glyphs. Kath Two selected one and ratcheted it around her wrist. After a moment, a red diode began to blink on its back and digits began to count time. She waved it at the door, which unlocked itself and allowed her to pass into the tube beyond.
This part of the Q consisted essentially of plumbing: a snarl of human-sized pipes that drained people away from incoming ships and let them pool in separate reservoirs until they had passed muster. Kath Two, Rhys, and Beled would be inspected visually for invasive species and pathogens, their clothes and equipment sterilized. There would be mandatory showers and scrubbings. Stool and blood samples would be taken and tested. Because they were Survey, however, little interest would be shown in their backgrounds, their politics, their emotional stability, their motivations. Survey personnel had already been vetted for that sort of thing. Depending on how busy the lab facilities were, it could take anywhere from six to twenty-four hours.
THE SUSPICION, FOLLOWED BY THE CERTAINTY, THAT KATH TWO WAS being detained crept up on her. After a few hours, she was given clearance to move freely about the common areas of the Q’s no-man’s-land: eateries, shops, lounges, and recreational facilities strung around a torus with about half a gee of simulated gravity. This meant that she had passed all the biological tests. But the bracelet continued to blink red. The digits counted up to a day, then a day and a half. She shifted her sleep schedule to Eye time and began to experience jet lag.