Energized (3 page)

Thad only grunted.

“So, Thad. What
were
you making in the shop?” Gabe was just making conversation. Skimming the pitch-black rock face in the near darkness was eerie.

He felt a tap-tap on his calf and twisted around. Thad had only one hand on the guide cable, waggling his other hand. Two fingers were raised.

“Oscar, private channel two,” Gabe ordered. “Okay, Thad. What's going on?”

“Private channel two,” Thad repeated. Finally, he added, “You'll keep this to yourself, right?”

“If that's what you want.”

Hand over hand, they went. A rim of sunshield reappeared just before the Earth returned as a new crescent. Gabe doused his helmet lights. On his HUD the red and green dots were converging. Another few minutes and they would veer from the guide cable.

Eventually Gabe prompted, “Well?”

“Okay. I put my life in your hands.” Thad sighed. “I have a thing for Tiny.”

Tina Lundgren was big for an astronaut, even a male astronaut. The nickname was inevitable—and you used it within her earshot at your own peril. Gabe had to admit that, in an Amazonian kind of way, she was sexy. And she was one of only two women, and the only unmarried woman, on Phoebe. Gabe understood Thad wanting this conversation on a private channel.

Having bared his soul, Thad went on and on about Tina's womanly charms.

“Uh-huh,” Gabe finally interrupted. “And you were cutting pipe as an outlet for your unrequited love?”

“Not exactly.” A rueful laugh. “I'm making a still. Whether or not homebrew appeals to her, I figure it won't go to waste.”

“Does she know how you feel?” Gabe asked.

“Not from me! Not yet. Frankly, the woman scares the crap out of me. Maybe that's why I have to have her.”

To their left, a ghostly plume: an ice pocket flashing to steam bursting from the ground.

Behind its sunshield Phoebe should be colder than the night side of the moon: for two weeks out of four, every part of the moon but a few deep polar craters felt sunlight. But shield or no, some sunlight
did
reach Phoebe. No software was perfect, and occasionally the sunshield—tugged by Earth, moon, and Phoebe; pushed by the solar wind and by sunlight itself; balancing the many conflicting forces with its own feeble thrusters—drifted out of position. Whenever that happened, sunlight beat directly on the surface. Even when the shield balanced perfectly, the traces of sunlight penetrating the shield scattered in unpredictable ways. Earthlight and moonlight were, in the final analysis, echoes of sunlight. And heat leaked from the underground base and its nuclear power plant. All that energy mingled, meandered, and reradiated in unpredictable ways.

And so, seemingly at random, little geysers. The vapor was too diffuse to do any harm. Most times. If you were unlucky, a geyser could sweep you right off Phoebe.

“A still,” Gabe repeated, his thoughts divided between the plume, already trailing off, the topo map on his HUD, the landscape sliding by inches beneath his visor, and the conversation. Ethyl alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, so alcohol fumes waft up a still coil before water vapor. You separated out the early condensate. But
up
comes of having gravity. “Will a still even work in Phoebe's grav—”

Too much happened at once, the sequence unclear:

—A sharp tug on Gabe's backpack.

—Thad saying, “Wrong answer.”

—A power alarm.

—A second yank.

—Helmet lights and HUD going dark.

—A hard shove forward.

Gabe twisted around. Earthlight showed Thad a good twenty feet away, receding. Just staring. And bulging from the mesh pouch of Thad's tool belt: two battery packs.

Without power for his suit's heating elements, Gabe would freeze within minutes. Already the cold seeped into him, body and thoughts turning sluggish. He got his feet beneath him, even as he ripped lengths of tether from their reels. He leapt.

His right foot slipped on loose gravel and he sailed far to the side.

The shorter tether pulled him up short. Its yank started him spinning even as the tug started him back toward the surface. Too slowly. He took the maneuvering pistol from its holster—but it slipped from fingers already numb with cold. As he drifted down he managed to grip a rock outcropping.

All the while, maintaining his distance, Thad watched. Stared.

“Why?” Gabe screamed. Not that his radio worked without batteries. Not that his shout could cross the vacuum. “Why are you doing this?”

Maybe his murderer read Gabe's lips. Whatever the reason, Thad shrugged.

Gabe advanced. Thad retreated.

As cold became all, as consciousness faded, the last thing Gabe saw was the waxing crescent Earth.

Earth no longer seemed close enough to touch.

*   *   *

“He just went
nuts
!” Thad said once more.

With minor variations the words had become his mantra. First with Tiny, when he had called in from across Phoebe about the “accident.” Over and over with Bryce Lewis and Alan Childs after they joined Thad on the surface. And now hopefully for the last time, in the station's comm-gear-packed command center, with Lyman Hsu, the dour station chief.

“Details, please.” Hsu rubbed his pencil-thin mustache as he spoke.

Thad ignored the request. “You should have let me go with the other guys. You can't imagine what it was like.” I damn well hope you can't imagine it.
He
struggled to understand it.

“You'd been outside long enough for one day. You know the rules.”

Because their utility craft were little more than flying broomsticks: compressed-nitrogen bottles, saddles, and minimal controls mounted to latticework frames. A counterpressure suit was your only protection.

“But I don't have to like the rules,” Thad said. Which, emphatically, he did not. What if he had overlooked something? Joining the rescue team might have given him a chance to cover his tracks.

“Details,” Hsu prompted.

“You heard Gabe switch to private channel two.” It had all come down to Gabe taking his cue, because everything on the public channel got recorded. Sooner or later, he would have figured out what Thad was building. Certainly the bullshit about Tiny and making a still for her would not bear scrutiny. That fable was all Thad could come up with on the spot, blather to occupy Gabe's mind until they got farther from the station. “When I linked in, Gabe was already mid-rant. He missed Jillian, unbearably. He knew—but couldn't explain how—that she was cheating on him. He loved her and needed her and couldn't bear for anyone else to be with her. He would show her. And then”—Thad paused dramatically—“he unclipped his tethers.”

“And you…?”

“What do you
think,
Lyman? I tried to talk sense into him, damn it.”

“And not a word of this reported to base.”

“I didn't dare switch channels! There was no telling what Gabe might do if I wasn't on. If I didn't respond when he expected an answer.”

“And he jumped anyway.”

“As I keep telling you,” Thad said.

He had never been much of a basketball player. On a good day, his vertical leap was two feet. On Phoebe, that was more than enough leg strength to vault two men and their gear past escape velocity. He had let go of the body, untethered, before coming to the end of his own fully unrolled tethers. After the ropes pulled
him
short with a jerk, Thad had watched the corpse recede into the darkness.

Hsu tipped back his head, staring through the command-center dome. “He had second thoughts.”

“What do you mean?” Thad asked.

“When Tina and Lewis found Gabe, the suit heater was on. He must have been in late-stage hypothermia by then, half delirious. It's a marvel his suit still recognized his voice.” Hsu sighed. “By then it was too late.”

The heaters kicked back on once Thad replaced the batteries. Not done till Gabe was, unequivocally, dead.

But Hsu hadn't finished. “The flight surgeons suspect that the suit heater kicking back on was the coup de grâce. Evidently the human body resists hypothermia by constricting blood flow to the extremities, conserving warmer blood for the vital organs. The rush of heat would have dilated the blood vessels in Gabe's arms and legs—and flooded his heart with cold, oxygen-poor blood. That afterdrop likely triggered a fatal arrhythmia. We'll know more once the docs groundside get a look at the body.”

He'd left Gabe
alive
? With a working
radio
? Jesus!
“Arrhythmia?” Thad managed to get out.

“An abnormal heart rhythm. After a little while Gabe's heart would've just stopped.”

“It's a shame,” Thad said, meaning it. Gabe was not a bad guy, only in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“A damn shame.”

Silence stretched awkwardly. After a while Thad said, “It's been a hell of a day. I'd like to … hell, I don't know what.” Except that he knew damn well. He had to finish what Gabe had interrupted, and get everything stashed away. At least then the man would have died for a reason. “Something other than relive this disaster.”

Hsu nodded. “Sounds like a good idea. Get some sleep.”

“I will,” Thad said. And wondered if he could.

 

CONVICTION | 2023

 

Monday, April 10

Marcus Judson slipped into the back of the downtown Baltimore hotel ballroom, more than an hour late. Though the room was packed, it did not seem like anyone was having a ball. Certainly not his colleagues huddled at the speakers' table at the opposite end of the room.

He surveilled from behind a freestanding sign that read:
THE POWER OF POWERSATS: A TOWN MEETING
. From the way Jeff Robbins, one of the EPA representatives on the dais, blotted his face with his handkerchief, the townsfolk bore, however metaphorically, torches and pitchforks.

The PowerHolo orientation spiel (of which Marcus was thoroughly sick, after many such gatherings) ran about thirty minutes. That meant the Q & A session had just begun. It did not bode well to find Jeff already wound so tight. Plenty of head-in-the-sand types in the crowd, then. Damned Luddites.

Marcus hated being such a cynic—but he was more this way every day.

This could have been any public meeting room anywhere. High ceiling. Cheap carpet and cloth-covered walls to muffle the audience noises. Sidewalls comprised of narrow segments that, folded into accordion pleats, would open into other, similar rooms for additional space. Recessed ceiling lights. Amplifier and loudspeakers deployed across the foot of the dais. Holo projection console.

Men and women filled the rows of chairs, and yet more people had queued up in the aisles for turns at the audience microphones. At the right-hand mike, a tall, balding man, his sleeves rolled up, was gesturing grandly. Marcus had arrived too late to catch the man's point. If he
had
a point. They often didn't.

“… would be a better use of public land,” the balding man finally concluded.

“Thank you for your comment,” Lisa Jackson began. As she—as all the panelists—had been trained. “We agree that parks are important. That said, so is a sufficiency of electrical power. We at the Department of the Interior must consider both.”

The novelty of powersat town meetings was long past; the room's lone tripod-mounted camera might feed only the municipal Internet server. With
no
media visible the protocol would have been the same, because half the audience sat holding comps or phones or datasheets. Any slipup would be on YouTube within minutes. So all panelists were trained in changing the subject. Better a nonanswer than an impolitic one.

If inconvenient questions were to be evaded, what was the point? Why hold these town meetings at all?
Marcus had asked, and his question, evidently, was also impolitic. “It's policy,” a long-ago boss had once told Marcus in similar circumstances. “It doesn't have to make sense.”

But coaching by a NASA spin doctor was not what had made Marcus a cynic.

He half listened, half pondered how and when to move to the front of the room. On the dais, behind the long, skinny table and its billowing, ruffled skirt, sat eight chairs: two places each for Interior, Energy, the EPA, and NASA. The lone unoccupied seat was Marcus's.

With Lisa expounding from five chairs away from the empty seat, this seemed as good a time as any for Marcus to claim his spot.

He edged through the least crowded aisle, murmuring apologies as he went, answering dirty looks by tapping the NASA ID badge clipped to his suit lapel. I'm with the government. I really
am
here to help.

Once through the crowd, he slid into the empty chair at the speakers' table.

Ellen Tanaka, NASA program manager for the powersat—and Marcus's boss—looked weary. They all did. Her eyes, too myopic for LASIK, were owl-like behind thick, round lenses. She covered her mike with a hand. “Good of you to join us,” she whispered.

That he had texted ahead changed nothing. Everyone had made the drive that morning from somewhere in metro D.C. She would not want to hear about the rain, the line at the gas station, or signals flashing red throughout Fairfax County because the traffic management system had crashed or been hacked. He would not have, either.

“Car trouble,” he mouthed. “Sorry.”

Lisa was still answering the balding man. “We'll be using property already dedicated to power generation, in this case for ground-based solar power. In particular, we'll retrofit selected solar farms with arrays of short antennas suited to receiving power downlinks. Land recycling, if you will, very environmentally correct. The antennas will be vertical, scarcely blocking any sunlight from the solar cells on the ground. So, you see, the powersat demonstration does not preempt any parkland.”