An eight-hundred-pound Cerberus Pug did not belong in zero gravity.
Austin had learned this on the second day of ring construction. Pug had eaten an entire fifty-pound bag of roasted spiritual bacon snacks, then tried to leap after a floating roll of silver duct tape. With nothing beneath his paws, the three-headed dog spent the next forty-five minutes drifting through Dreadnought 01’s cargo bay. His four stubby legs paddled wildly while all six jowls flapped in silent indignity.
“A dog needs traction,” Austin had said, tapping his pencil on a blank notepad. “If he can’t plant his paws on a solid rug to scratch his ears, he gets neurotic. And if an eight-hundred-pound, three-headed dog gets neurotic at thirty-six thousand miles, he starts chewing the main fiber-optic cables.”
That was how the Canine Orbital Defense and Recreation Module Alpha-One was born. The ring crews called it the Sacred Celestial Kennel of the Ancient Hound.
The module was a forty-foot sphere of double-walled aerospace silver-steel. Magnetic bearings let it travel along a track on the ring’s outer edge. Inside, an electric motor rotated the cylindrical living drum at twelve RPM, producing a steady one G along the curved floor.
Austin had spared no expense on the interior.
