Energized (20 page)

“Enjoy the view of the powersat while you…” Blackwell chuckled. “Sorry folks, habit. My standard patter. You're the ones who'll decide when PS-1 gets the go-ahead for GEO.”

“No rush,” Savvy said, grinning.

Reuben, contributing once again to his barf bag, seemed to differ.

“With such a knowledgeable bunch on my ship, maybe I should be the one asking questions.” The captain paused. “No? Then maybe you have questions for me.”

“What about solar flares?” Reuben asked. From his tone of voice, he hoped one might put him out of his misery.

“Good question,” Blackwell said. “Sunspots run in eleven-year cycles, and we're near the peak of a cycle. We are apt to see more flares than usual. Flare radiation can travel at half or more light speed, so there's not a lot of warning.

“Earth's atmosphere blocks the radiation, but of course we're well above the atmosphere. That, and the short notice, is why space habitats have radiation shelters. The Space Place has the fancy kind: they can project a big electromagnetic field to deflect the radiation. Phoebe does it the easy way: a deep tunnel. This ship's metal hull is inherently a shelter, too, though not thick enough that you'd want to spend hours aboard during adverse conditions.”

“And if a flare hits while we're at work on PS-1?” Olivia asked.

“Little metal closets,” Marcus said. He wanted the inspectors in the habit of asking
him
their questions about PS-1. “Only for emergencies, though. With the typical warning, workers can get back to Phoebe.”

“About that warning,” Captain Blackwell said, “there are solar observatories for spotting solar flares and such. You'll always have several minutes warning, usually more. Plenty of time to get into a shelter. Solar astronomers can even sometimes predict a flare.”

“How good are space-weather predictions?” Reuben persisted.

“About like weather forecasting fifty years ago,” Blackwell answered cheerfully. “Enough about that. I need to get back to work, and you need to return to your seats.”

Buckling up, Marcus studied the cockpit-camera view. Black on black, very faintly, a glob stood out against the darkness of space. Phoebe. He watched it grow.

Reuben leaned across the aisle toward Marcus. “And such?”

“And such
what
?” Marcus asked back.

“The captain. She said solar flares and such. What's
such
?”

“Coronal mass ejections. CMEs. In layman's terms, a radiation shit storm.”

CMEs were among the space hazards with which PS-1 had to coexist, so Marcus knew a fair amount about them. The typical CME was a few billion tons of matter flung from the sun's corona, heated to plasma, traveling at a million or more miles per hour.

Given all the directions in which the sun
could
spit out CMEs, you hoped one did not come straight at Earth. When a major CME did, it fried electronics, garbled radio transmissions, and induced continent-spanning current surges powerful enough to disrupt, sometimes even crash, power grids. And that was inside an atmosphere to take the brunt of the abuse.

None of which, Marcus decided, would reassure Reuben. “But like flares, the space weather system monitors for them.”

Reuben groaned. “Tell me again why I volunteered for this joyride?”

“Final approach,” Blackwell announced.

A rocky mass emerged from the darkness, growing by the second. A sprinkling of lights marked the main base and its outbuildings. A necklace of strobing lights defined a landing zone. Distant from both sets of lights, glimpsed only in profile as a bite out of the star field: the automated infrared observatory. Blacker than black: the inky depths of the Grand Chasm.

Marcus had seen most of Phoebe on security cams and from rented bots—but never like this. Never in person. And in minutes, he would
be
on Phoebe.

Reuben Swenson looked like he still expected an answer.

“You volunteered,” Marcus told him, “in a good cause.”

 

Wednesday morning, September 27

The most fun to be had around Phoebe base involved flying a hopper to or from PS-1, but Thad could not shake a sense of impending doom. It did not help that Reuben Swenson, rather than trusting his seat belt or gripping the rear-saddle handholds, clung to Thad like a remora. Counterpressure suits, skintight, hid nothing.

Crescent Earth, mostly ocean and clouds, hung overhead. PS-1, straight ahead, glittered in the sunlight. To Thad's left and right, about forty yards distant, a hopper paralleled his course. Marcus Judson piloted on the left, with Olivia behind him. Savannah Morgan flew solo on his right, ideally not attempting, as she had joked, to “improve” the console user-interface software while on their way.

On Thad's command console, the PS-1 icon remained centered in the nav window. In his rearview camera, the compressed-nitrogen spray propelling the hopper dissipated over a very short distance from white fog to invisible. The hopper trembled as Reuben squirmed on his saddle. The wiggling was nothing their gyros couldn't sense or attitude jets manage—just annoying.

A console LED blinked twice as Thad's countdown timer, its digits green for
go
phase, broke sixty seconds. “Coming up on coasting phase,” he radioed. “How's everyone doing?”

He got back a chorus of goods and fines. Only one response sounded insincere, but even Reuben, on the ass-end of the curve for acclimating to zero gee, had performed suit and hopper exercises to Thad's satisfaction.

And in a pinch Thad could activate the autopilots on any of the hoppers, fly one by remote control, even fly all three in formation. For now he only kept watch, the imagery from his hopper's sideways-looking cameras streaming into corners of his HUD.

“Are the hopper nav computers ever turned off?” Marcus asked hopefully.

“Not on purpose,” Thad lied. “Pilots, watch your timers.” At zero he cut off his hopper's thruster. Only a few seconds late—nothing the nav software could not handle—his charges did, too. On his console the timer reset to seven minutes, now in the yellow of the coasting phase, and resumed counting down.

“Thruster reversed,” Savannah was the first to announce. “But for the record, I feel cheated.”

“Not me,” Marcus said. “I want to
see
myself arrive at PS-1, not back into it.”

Amen to that, Thad thought. “Test reversal, everyone.”

If anyone's gas valve had malfunctioned, they had time to pivot with their attitude jets. Savannah might get her wish. But every hopper gave a puff of thruster gas from its bow.

They coasted, while PS-1 grew and grew. Marcus and Savannah switched to a private channel, presumably to discuss an inspection protocol.

These were competent people, even (in other circumstances) likable people. Almost certainly, Thad had concluded after a day spent working with them, after finding some reason to be alone with each of them, they were not—not any of them—Yakov's people.

Prepare the artifacts and await contact. Do not reveal yourself unnecessarily, but the success of the mission comes first.

None of the newcomers had even hinted at another role, or shown awareness of what Thad had built—and hidden—so long ago. If he was not to hand off the devices, what had Yakov meant?

Flashing interrupted Thad's brooding. “Prepare for maneuver,” he radioed. With better precision than on their earlier maneuvers, his apprentices started their hoppers decelerating. The timers had reset again, now decrementing in the red of
stop
phase. PS-1 loomed larger than ever. In fifteen minutes they would be docking.

Prepare the artifacts and await contact. Do not reveal yourself unnecessarily, but the success of the mission comes first.

His mind skittered around and around the same nasty suspicion. He wasn't delivering his contraband devices
to
a visitor. Did that mean he would be turning the devices
against
one?

How much longer must he wait for Yakov's mysterious contact?

*   *   *

Dillon floated in the hotel's renowned Grand Atrium, a clear bubble more than two hundred feet in diameter. Many of the guests—and so, too, much of the staff—were outside, suited up and riding hoppers, playing or observing space polo. He hoped they would stay outside for a good, long while. He liked having this volume almost to himself.

After the past several weeks, he needed to relax—and at last he could. He had gotten Jonas, Lincoln, and Felipe aboard The Space Place, with no trace of a connection to Yakov. And accomplished it so smoothly Dillon could almost wish he had asked Crystal along.

Not that she would have come. The extravagance of his outing had made her furious, and he could not explain. Once he got home he would make it up to her. Somehow.

My job, thank Gaia, is done. And that means
I'm
done. Yakov had promised.

Air currents had wafted Dillon toward the hotel's north pole, giving him a great view of the hotel's rings. The outer ring spun as always at a stately two revolutions per minute. The inner ring (really, only three “elevator” cars connected by curved structural elements) was spinning down. He wondered who was entering and leaving this unspun central volume.

If the rings marked the hotel's equator, he was at around fifty degrees north latitude. (
Fifty-four forty or fight,
bubbled up from some deep recess of his memory. He had no idea what that meant.) Small bubbles, zero-gee private rooms (and, in the unlikely event of an air leak, shelters), ringed the atrium at thirty degrees latitude, both north and south. Hatches to the two arcs of escape pods lay at about sixty degrees south latitude.

Jonas, Lincoln, and Felipe disdained most zero-gee sports, so they would not be outside playing or watching polo. They were not enjoying the freedom and view here in the grand atrium. So where were “his” employees? After sports and zoning out, the main attraction here was freefall sex. Maybe they were to be found among the wobbling private bubbles.

If Yakov had had a reason for placing three deniable representatives aboard this hotel—and ruining Dillon's life to do it—he had yet to discern it.

*   *   *

A vast, dark plain hid half the sky. PS-1 did not
really
extend forever, but from where Marcus glided, a few feet above, the difference was not obvious.

“Be alert, people. We're coming up on a row of docking posts,” Thad radioed.

Marcus's hopper had slowed to less than a slow walk. He switched his main display from nav mode to landing mode, then guided a targeting circle over the nearest docking post. The circle flashed. “I have target lock,” he reported.

“Lock here, too,” Savannah called.

“Go,” Thad said.

Marcus double-tapped the console's touch panel and his hopper ejected its docking tether. The gas-propelled tip—guided by hopper sensors through the cable at the tether's core—wrapped itself around and around the post. With another few taps he turned off the hopper's main thruster and started the take-up reel. A spurt of gas killed his forward momentum as the last of the docking tether wound onto its spool.

“Touchdown. The crowd goes wild,” he radioed.

From the adjacent post, Thad said, “We'll call it a two-point conversion if you dismount without floating away or putting a boot through the solar cells.”

Marcus and the rest had practiced dismounts in the neutral buoyancy tank in Houston and again on a mock-up on the surface of Phoebe; this was
not
the same. The surface that glittered a few feet beneath his boots was fragile and wafer thin. A typical expanse of the powersat (moved to the Earth's surface) would have weighed a fraction of an ounce per square foot. By the time he had reached the annular platform at the base of the post, he was soaked in sweat.

Olivia clambered down beside him. “Wow,” she mouthed.

“You said it.” Only
wow
did not begin to express his feelings. Maybe no words could.

They had docked about halfway out from the powersat's center, near a diagonal. Guide cables and catwalks crisscrossed the delicate surface. A primary computing node, where Savannah would do much of her inspection, was a mere few hundred feet away. Beyond the computing node, Marcus spotted the array of connectors, most still unoccupied, where robotic spacecraft would someday dock to designate new downlink coordinates.

Here and there, metal closets: radiation shelters. At risk of freezing off your privates, they were outhouses, too, because the closets stocked urine collection devices. Bleed oh-two into a shelter and you could safely open a counterpressure-suit fly. Only be
really
careful about resealing the fly before opening the shelter hatch.…

He scanned more systematically. All around, scuttling robots. A pair of human workers removing a solar panel to access the klystron-and-antenna array on the satellite's other side. Farther still, along the powersat's closest edge: some of the many thrusters that would—if this inspection trip went well—lift PS-1 to GEO. And in the distance, back the way they had come, two hoppers flying in tandem, towing a loaded cargo pallet. Midsurvey, when he turned his back to the sun, his visor automatically depolarized.

One by one, everyone descended their docking post and checked in. “All right,” Marcus said. “Everyone has their assignments for today—”

Text popped up on his HUD.
Incoming call from Earth.

Huh? This was not a public link. “Going private for a moment,” he told everyone. “Take the call,” he told his suit. “Hello?”

“Hey there, spaceman,” Ellen's familiar voice greeted him. “It's Wednesday.”

So? “We just docked with PS-1. We're about ready to get to work.”

“How does it feel?” Ellen asked. “Having status to
give
at a weekly meeting? And from PS-1, not our dreary conference room?”