Glass Sky (40 page)

His nose pointed towards the shield. 1500 meters. Don’t mess this up. Now his tail pointed towards the shield. 1200 meters. I’m spinning too fast. Abort! His nose. 700 meters. His tail. He fired orientation thrusters 1 and 3 for a short burst to cancel the spin, followed by the main engine to back him off. He waited anxious seconds. The XPOS showed the shield receding again.

Regroup. Try again. There’s no hurry. I’ve got the rest of my life to figure this out.

***

Eight hours. Eight agonizing hours.

1.5 million kilometers from Earth, in an empty blackness, a metal bubble of pressurized air glided towards the vast structure on which the human race was pinning so many of its hopes. The spacecraft’s single human occupant was twice as far from his planet as any member of his species had ever voyaged. He wasn’t a trained explorer. He wasn’t even an astronaut. He was a nanoengineer from Beijing.

The main engine spat out a short burst of plasma.

‹Arrrgggh!› Jie shook his fist at the controls. ‹You dog-fucking turtle egg!›

The imprecision of the main engine bordered on randomness. A thrust that reduced his velocity by 5 meters per second one time, took 4 meters per second off the next. Once, he’d been just short of the shield control hub, perfectly aligned. Then his final docking maneuver had burned too strongly. It had taken him nearly an hour to get lined up with the shield again. And that was five tries ago.

The numbers on the console counted down the distance. 270 meters distance moving at 2 meters per second. Faster than I’d like, but the controls seem better at longer thrusts. 100 meters distance. 50 meters. 20 meters. He pressed the button, felt the momentary gravity as the main engine engaged.

Please. It doesn’t even have to be a full stop. Just enough so I can jump.

17 meters distance.  16 meters. 16 meters. 17 meters.  17 meters. 18 meters.

‹Oh, thank you!› Jie shouted aloud. He shot out of his seat and pulled on his gloves and helmet, racing against the drift that was already carrying him away. 20 meters. Safety line? He clipped it to his belt and then attached the other end to a fastener near the door. He checked his helmet and gloves again. 24 meters. At least I’ve had lots of practice putting on the space suit. But this time felt different. More vivid. Nobody would double check his gear today.

Jie pulled the switch to depressurize the capsule. The tubes in his suit swelled to familiar tightness. The GBOP logo unwrinkled. Hurry. He pulled at the hatch, fighting a slight resistance from the remaining air pressure, like pulling a suction cup off glass. The hatch puffed loose. Jie belted it to the couch. “Tether everything,” Sharon had warned. “Things wander in zero gravity.”

The doorway opened into starry night. Jie unreeled 2 meters of safety line and stuck his head through the hatch. Dog testicles! The closest he’d come to this sensation was when he’d swum past the headwall of the reef with Cheng and watched the sea floor plunge away beneath him. This was worse, as if the dropoff wrapped around 360 degrees. Jie clutched the door’s outside edge. I saved Rajit and fixed our power supply. I can do this.

Every nerve in his body jangled. The shield’s core loomed, huge and black, a 4-kilometer-wide disk of solar panels that blotted out the sun. The distant Earth cast case a dull blueish tint over the shadowed side, but other than that the dark was absolute.

Jie’s mind whispered weird impulses. Unclip the tether. Jump. That urge to leap off a tall building, just to experience those few seconds of flight. Float home. Or onward, the last 99% of the way to the sun. Until Earth becomes just one more tiny bright point in the sky.

Jie turned on his suit light. Shone it through the gloom at the dim shape looming just beyond ERV’s thruster. The shield’s control hub was made of four large pieces joined into a rough ring, like a donut flecked with metal hatches instead of chocolate flakes. A slowly widening gap, already 30 meters wide, separated it from the ERV.

“Yī bù zuò èr bù xiū.” The words sounded frightened. He said it again, more sternly: ‹I started it. I’ve got to finish it.›

Jie let out the line and monkeyed his way across the ERV’s skin. He dug his fingers into the tinfoil, pulling at the crinkly material, always maintaining a grip on some part of the spacecraft. The yawning void played tricks on his perceptions, oscillating between comfortable floating and terrifying free fall. He reached the curved heat shield, then the main engine mount.

“Don’t jump too hard,” Sharon had warned. “You don’t have to overcome gravity. Slow is more accurate, and it’ll be easier to reel yourself back if you miss.”

Jie felt like Cheng’s elf, lining up an arrow. He pushed, legs straightening in a single, smooth motion. Help! Help! Help! His brain sent meaningless panic signals, unable to reconcile the horrifying nightmares his senses were reporting. He swam in darkness, suspended above nothing, from nothing. No sense of motion. He was stationary. The control hub moved towards him. Then it was the other way around.

The safety line jerked, spinning him. ‹Tā māde!› In his excitement he’d unspooled it too fast and it had tangled. Idiot! He reeled himself back to the ERV. Precious moments wasted. The gap to the shield had widened further, a chasm now. I must be near the range of the safety line. The cord had worked itself into an ugly snarl, and his frenzied attempts to remove the knots with his bulky gloves ate more seconds.

Jie lined himself up again. Push. This time he unspooled the line as he floated. Though it was covered with hatches and attachment points, he managed to hit a blank spot on the control hub. His fingers scrabbled on the smooth surface. He started to drift away.

‹No, please, no!› he shouted in frustration.

He spotted a ridge where two panels had been poorly welded together. He hooked his fingers on the seam’s edge. Careful. Don’t cut yourself. The drifting ERV slowly pulled out the last few meters of his safety line. He eased himself to an attachment hook and snapped in the carabiner his tether.

Jie clung to the cold metal hull, letting his nerves calm. He hadn’t even caught his breath when he felt the line go tight.

***

The access panel unclipped easily, exposing circuit boards and neat bundles of wires. As Jie had predicted, the computers were both Haier Extreme Environment Controllers. Jie found the blue wire that controlled the radio link to Earth. He disconnected it. Bye-bye. No sense allowing remote logins while he was trying to reset the system. He held down the button to restore the factory defaults.

Changing the passwords took less than five minutes. A trillion dollars of technology. And now only he and the lunar crew knew the new access codes.

His work completed, he unhooked his tether and reeled his way back to the ERV. When he reached the hatch he stopped. He spent several minutes scouring the sky, trying to get some sense of the magnificent machine he’d sacrificed so much for. Although only 2% completed, the shield’s hundreds of concentric rings already covered 250,000 square kilometers. A glass sky. But the soap-bubble-thin Nanoglass was invisible. The spokes radiating out of the control hub simply faded into the infinity of space. Jie couldn’t even make out the far edges of the massive solar array.

He turned towards Earth. His eyes filled with tears. We’ve done the right thing. Even if we lose this battle, we’ve done the right thing. We had to try. He stayed outside, gazing at the tiny blue disk hung in an endless sea of stars. Everything I have ever known. The only world we have.

Eventually, his oxygen light blinked red.

Where now? Wait, and let the radiation cook me? Or maybe Earthcon will help me reach Venus, just because I can. Wouldn’t that be ironic? After all Sharon’s years of preparing for Mars, I could be the first human to see another planet.

He climbed inside and restored the cabin air. Once settled, he set the engines to burn for just under a minute, nudging himself off his perch at the gravity well’s edge. There was never really a choice. Back into Earth’s arms. Back home. Even if it ends in fire.

THE DARK-SUITED man closed in. Tania and Ruth shrunk into their seats, looking down, as if that simple act might render them invisible. Footsteps sounded. Tania stiffened in anticipation of a hand. Or a paingiver. Nowhere left to run. It’s over.

“Ruth! Tania! Thank goodness!”

“Frank?” Ruth gasped.

Frank? Witty’s investigator! The man at the door must be Bruno. Tania moaned with relief. She hadn’t recognized them, backlit against the LA sun, masked by EyeSistants. Or maybe it was the way they moved. A secret agent swagger that didn’t fade with retirement. These guys really do all look the same.

“We’ve got to go.” Frank glanced at the front door. “If we can find you, so can Juarez’s people.”

Tania and Ruth scrambled up, jarred by the urgency of his words. They hadn’t taken two steps when Frank stiffened from some unseen prompt in his EyeSistant.

“Too late. They’re here.” He snatched Ruth’s coffee. “Out the back! Quickly!”

Frank rushed towards the front door, coffee in hand, barreling past customers. He took over Bruno’s spot at the doorway.  Bruno intercepted Tania and Ruth and fell in behind them, herding them past the counter, guarding their rear.

“This is the part when we run,” he said calmly.

Tania accelerated down a hallway cluttered with boxed supplies. An elderly woman chose that moment to step out of the restroom. She stumbled back as Tania, Ruth and Bruno barged past. They flung open the back door as two men stepped through the front. Frank turned his head towards the counter, as if he were talking to one of the servers. He shouldered right into the lead agent. Ruth’s steaming coffee arced into the man’s face.

“Yaaahh!”

“Oh. Shit!” exclaimed Frank. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you. Let me help.”

“Get off me, asshole!”

The closing door cut off the rest of the exchange. They’d exited into a pedestrian lane, a treed greenspace with a bikepath down the middle. It skirted the edge of a converted parking lot, now a park with four apartment towers at its center.

“I don’t get it. I haven’t turned my omni on since Vegas.” Ruth flung it into a recycling container overflowing with disposable coffee cups. “We paid cash for our coffee. How could you have tracked us?”

Bruno strode towards the apartment buildings, putting trees and bushes between them and the coffee shop’s back door.  “We’d made your omni by the time you hit Vegas last night, but lost you for the evening. Then you showed up this morning paying for a ten-night hotel stay. Obviously barter. We searched the hotel’s surroundings for vehicles heading west. Of the fourteen matches, this one stopped closest to Mr. W’s studio.”

“I thought I was being so clever,” groaned Ruth.

“I’d say you did pretty well,” said Bruno. “Most people wouldn’t have made it out of Boulder. Not alive.”

***

Bruno ordered a car and they spent a while driving around, swapping vehicles twice. The final vehicle took them to a bland zone of sheet metal warehouses, heavy on loading docks, light on windows. They stopped outside a nondescript doorway, one of a dozen entrances along a corrugated frontage. A perfectly anonymous bolthole. The only marking was a small black and white sign that said “Burnside Productions” in a font that resembled handwriting. Bruno punched a manual code into the keypad.

They stepped out of the heat into an air-conditioned waiting room. Two chairs that might have been antique flanked a velvet couch. Signed video frames of famous actors plastered the walls.

Bruno’s eyes moved behind his EyeSistant. “Witty should be here in ten. He’s being followed right now. They’ll switch him to another car as soon as they get to a good spot.”

“Is it safe to use that? Don’t EyeSistants have wiretap hardware?” asked Ruth.

“Mine’s military,” said Bruno. “We’ll be fine.”

They passed a row of dressing rooms and stepped into what was obviously a movie set. The back wall was painted a uniform green, spotted with reference dots for the computer animators. Dozens of articulated arms extended from the ceiling, each holding lights for different moods and times of day. The set itself was bare except for a couch, a table, and about 20 green boxes that ranged in size from a book to a fridge. The boxes had the same reference dots as the walls, placeholders for whatever company bought the local rights to insert their products.

“What were they filming?” asked Tania.

“No idea,” said Bruno. “Anything from porn to a sci-fi musical. High budget though, if they’re still using props and humans.”

“We’ll have to keep an eye out for that couch,” said Ruth. “Assuming they don’t change the fabric in post-production.”

Bruno led them to a back meeting room. A few minutes later they heard conversation outside. Witty swept in, with Frank behind him. Coffee stained Frank’s shirt, and he sported a fresh cut under his right eye.

“You OK?” asked Ruth.

“The little one sucker-punched me.” Frank grinned. Apparently in some parallel universe getting punched was fun.

Witty hugged Ruth. His bathing suit was still wet, and he wore a towel around his shoulders. “I’m glad we found you.”

“How did you even know to look?” asked Tania.

Witty burst out laughing. “Oh, there’s a story. I had the Lohan quadruplets on my show; invited them back to my place. Then, I hear a tremendous bang at the front door. Government agents with a no-knock warrant. Apparently they don’t understand steel doors. They spent ten minutes trying to bash it down before my lawyer panicked and made me open it.

“You should have seen how mad they were,” laughed Frank. “I thought they were going to spike Mr. W. with a paingiver.”

“Scared the shit out of me, too,” said Witty. “I thought these clowns,” he nodded at Bruno and Frank, “had done one too many inquiries on Ethiopia. But the agents kept asking about you. Searched my house, and then my studio. Since I like to collect what other people covet, I figured a Tania and Ruth scavenger hunt might be fun.”

Witty sat down at the table, still chuckling. “So?” he asked. “How badly am I going to regret getting involved?”

***

Tania told Witty the story, starting with Jie’s call.

Witty groaned, and banged his head on the table theatrically. “Do I get an undo?” he asked Bruno. “How do I go back to where I suggested finding Tania and Ruth before the government does?”

“I could shoot them for you,” said Bruno, straightening.

Witty pursed his lips. “Yes, not a bad idea. Leave their bodies at the coffee shop.” For a chilling moment he seemed to consider it. Then he laughed. “Nah. I’m just being dramatic. I’m rich enough to afford the consequences.” He pounded the table. “Fair’s fair. I told you to catch the world’s attention, and I think you’ve found a way. Let’s do this. If my show gets cancelled, it’ll be with record ratings.” He turned to Tania. “Tania, you’ve had a day in the car to think about this. What’s our endgame? Is it still Pax Gaia?”

“It’s Pax Gaia without the UN,” said Tania. “The goals and execution stay the same. Measurable targets: CO2 emissions, species diversity, forest cover, adult literacy, percentage of people below the poverty line. But the management has to change. It’s time for the scientists to have a go. The political establishment has failed us again and again.”

“Damn right they have,” agreed Ruth.

“I propose an incentive system,” continued Tania. “We reward nations that meet their environmental targets by giving them shield time.  If the shield time is used wisely, it’ll help them meet more targets, earning more time.  A virtuous cycle.”

“And you’d coordinate this?” asked Witty.

“No. I can’t be involved,” said Tania. “Not personally. It has to be clear that I’m not bene-fitting, especially with these corruption allegations against me. We’ve all seen pro-democracy coups turn into dictatorships. We need two independent teams. The first is a panel of scientists and development experts. They set the environmental goals.”

“And the second team?” Witty was leaning forward now, eyes lit. “I assume they measure against those goals and hand out shield time.”

“Yes. That’s the tricky job,” said Tania. “Awarding time is going to create controversy no matter how we do it. I’m leaning towards an AI. Jie suggested that in his email.”

“An AI?” asked Witty. “I’m just a TV host. But didn’t an artificial intelligence launch India’s strike on Pakistan?”

“This is a much easier problem,” said Tania. “We already trust computers with everything from surgery to driving. If we collect data from objective sources, and are open about our algorithms, then an AI will be fair to everyone. And an AI can’t be bribed.”

Witty still looked skeptical, but he let it slide. “How do we stop this from becoming a zero-sum game? If I increase forest cover by forcing rural peasants into cities, don’t I win at your expense, depriving you of shield time?”

Tania got up, pacing in her excitement. They’d discussed these ideas many times in the Pax Gaia meetings. But they’d always stopped short, held back by politics. “The UN thinks along national borders,” she said. “But a river doesn’t end when it leaves a country. Neither does a forest. We’ll create policies that encourage cooperation and punish externalities.  Measures of a forest’s health must include the living standards in surrounding cities. Measures of a city’s health must include the rivers downstream from it.”

Witty nodded several times. “And how do we prove that Jie’s taken control of the shield? Won’t Juarez just deny it?”

Shit. “I hadn’t thought of that,” said Tania. “I guess an email from Cheng doesn’t count?”

“Could we borrow a satellite dish?” asked Ruth. “It can’t be that hard to communicate with a spacecraft. When I was in high school, some kids from Austin talked to the lunar station. Remember the fuss?”

“Don’t look at me,” said Tania. “Communication protocols are one thing I know nothing about.”

“And I’m just a pretty face,” said Witty. “Astonishingly pretty. But of no use on technical matters.”

“The signal will be encrypted,” offered Frank. “Everything is these days.”

“Fuck it,” said Ruth. “Who needs proof? Outrage. That’s what we’ll use. Enrage the public. Jie’s going to die!”

“Good point,” said Witty. “Jie’s going to die. And if you doubt us, try to call him… This is great stuff.”

“Great stuff?” asked Tania. “He’ll never see his son again. His last days will be spent in a metal can.”

“We can be sentimental later,” said Witty. “But today, the best way we can honor Jie’s sacrifice is by milking it for maximum impact. This isn’t a boxing match. It’s a street brawl. You’ve already seen how far our opponents will go to win. We can’t afford to ignore a weapon.”

“Then it’s time we exposed Juarez’s land deals,” Ruth said. “It’ll focus the public’s anger.”

Witty’s smile vanished. “That might be pushing it. Revealing the Jie story might get my show cancelled. But to attack a politician, I need much more than just a leaked document. The Truth in Politics Act is not something to take lightly.”

“The evidence exists,” said Ruth. “If we scare the rats enough, they’ll turn on each other. Somebody will come forward to save themselves.”

Witty bit his lip, contemplating. “OK,” he said finally. “Might as well go all-in. We’ll expose the land deals.”

Ruth gasped, as if she’d noticed something nobody else had. “You know what. That gives me an idea about how we can get some political endorsements. What if…?” She bubbled out her plan, barely restraining her excitement.

Witty nodded enthusiastically. “I like this. It’s bold, and it’s devious. Like we’re stealing a page from Juarez’s book of dirty tricks.”

When does the slope become too slippery? Khan Tengri killed Jimmy Wong. I funded Pax Gaia with illegal accounting tricks. And now this?

“I don’t know about this, Ruth,” said Tania.  “Your idea might work. But it feels like we’re crossing a line. Is this really how we want to start Pax Gaia? Is the public so immune to facts that we can only reach them through emotional manipulation and sneaky tricks?”

“Do we want a chance of winning?” asked Ruth.

Tania nodded. “I suppose you’re right.”

“Then we’re agreed,” said Witty. “We won’t get another chance. Tomorrow, we claim the shield for Earth’s citizens, and we use every trick at our disposal to put pressure on the baby kissers.”

“Tomorrow?” asked Tania. “Do you have any idea how many changes I need to make to Pax Gaia if we’re handing shield management to a panel of scientists and development experts?”

Witty tossed her a blue pill bottle. “Stims. You can sleep when you’re dead.”