SpaceCorp (11 page)

The president crossed one frail leg over the other, then winced and put it back when his leg biceps cramped. “They tell me killings are no more common today than they were in 2000. But the difference back then was that they were so random. You never knew who was going to go off his rocker. You never knew who they were going to target. People shopping at a mall, people out for a night at the movies, even little children at school. Everyone screamed about it—the gun lobby screamed Second Amendment, the next of kin howled about the victims. Nothing ever got done of course, but in spite of all that murdering and screaming we still managed to run the country. Not so today. Today trained assassins go after...” The president squirmed around to face the secretary of defense who was standing behind the couch. “George, what’s that phrase the profilers are so fond of?”

“Persons of influence.”

“Yes, that’s it—persons of influence! They’ve replaced the voting booth with the long range rifle. Hell, we can’t even convene Congress because half of them are too scared to show up and the other half are dead—nobody even willing to run for office! Talk about cheap seats—no campaigning, no polling, no expensive advertising. All you have to do is raise your hand and for about a month you can be a congressman or a senator... until some bastard gets you in his crosshairs. That’s how I got my job six terms ago. I didn’t even have to raise my hand when the president was assassinated. I was in such a state of shock some Colonel raised it for me. I couldn’t even repeat the words. Kept looking around trying to see who was going to get me. When the judge finished I just said ‘yeah, whatever’ and they whisked me away in a helicopter. You can’t run a nation like that, boy. Not a democracy. But somebody has to run it, so I sit here setting policy for the entire country all by myself. Now I have another problem and you’re going to help me solve it because I can’t solve this one by myself.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Iran is going to shoot down all your lovely expensive space stations starting with your next one. They learned a lot about antisatellite missiles with that botched Centaur shot. They aren’t going for used up boosters or dead satellites anymore. They’re going for the eyes and ears of America—SpaceCorp!”

Hank felt his mouth drop open.

“You look shocked, my boy. Does that mean I finally have your cooperation?”

“Yeah, I guess so. But why are they after us? We carry some of their instruments and we don’t overcharge them any more than we overcharge anyone else.”

“They don’t give a damn about
SpaceCorp
, boy. They’re aiming at America! We’re weak now and they know it. Hell, if they’d just wait another decade, they could walk in and claim salvage rights. But vendettas are impatient. They want to stick the knife between our ribs now. They want to twist the blade and watch the life drain from the face of our once great nation. They want to watch us fall in a heap at their feet. They want to piss on our corpse. And they’ve wanted that since 1953.”

“What happened in 1953?”

“Operation Ajax. We had the CIA remove their duly elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh and put the Shah in his place.”

“Okay, I’ll bite—why did we do that?”

“Oil and communism, boy! Oil and communism. Back then everything was about oil and communism.”

“But sir, nobody in this room was even alive in 1953!  Can’t we just apologize or something?”

“Vendettas neither offer nor accept apologies.”

Hank shook his head then looked at the president. “Look, we’re trying to rise above all these... these...
politics
. We don’t do that at SpaceCorp. We really have no interest in perpetuating some puny Third World vendetta.”

“You don’t understand, boy. America, the high-minded and mighty defender of all things good and pure, America is and always has been just as addicted to vendetta as the puniest of Third World nations. Our politicians stay in business the same way they do. We manufacture a terrible monster to be feared and loathed and then we tell the people the survival of their way of life depends on their strict obedience and a willing sacrifice of all their fundamental rights. And anyone who does not play along gets labeled unpatriotic, sometimes even treasonous! It’s the same for all nations. The only thing that is different is the way-of-life philosophy, that transcendental ‘something’ we think we have to defend at all costs. In our case, it’s freedom and democracy which is absurd—we’ve been neither free nor democratic for centuries. In their case it’s Islam. But no matter, the idea is the same—keep the people corralled by fear and hate. It’s been that way for thousands of years, boy, and neither you nor SpaceCorp are going to change it.”

“Can’t we choose not to play?”

“No, boy. In spite of all that high-minded horseshit I just fed you, you still have the practical problem of keeping your space stations flying. And for that I’m going to turn you over to my SecDef.”

“But I—”

The president raised his hand. “No more, boy. I’m tired now. George can answer all your questions far better than I can.”

*   *   *

Hank made his way back to the galley of the Grumman Jetstream and was met by a cabin crewman. “How do you get a drink around here?”

The crewman opened a cabinet to expose a minibar. “What’ll you have? We have a wine cooler and beer in the refrigerator also.”

Hank grabbed a fifth of what looked like a nice Scotch. “Can you pour me a couple of fingers of this over ice and the rest water?”

“Sure... I haven’t seen you before—do you fly much?”

“Not these things. I’ve been a groundie for ten years.”

The crewman smiled. “You were an astronaut? Were you on a station?”

Hank hesitated. “Yeah, I used to be skipper on the
Von Braun
.”

The crewman stopped in mid-pour, then turned his head slowly to look at Hank. “My sister was on the
Von Braun
.”

“Oh. I am so sorry... was she an officer?”

“Instrument specialist. Something scientific. Used to go on all the time about ice caps and sea levels.”

“Important work.” Hank took the bottle from the crewman’s hand and found a small plastic cup. He poured a finger of Scotch and handed it to the crewman, then picked up his own glass.

“I’m on duty.”

“When are we not on duty?”

The crewman stared at the glass for a moment, then held it up to touch Hank’s glass.

“To fallen comrades!” Hank said, then turned and made his way back to his seat.

*   *   *

 The Jetstream was arranged in two first class salons. Hank had them both to himself. Normally a jet of this size would never be scheduled for a single passenger, but its smaller cousin was down for maintenance and this trip had been deemed Very High Priority.

The cabin crewman made his way down the aisle to Hank’s seat. “We have a nice rib eye steak or a grilled half-chicken tonight.”

“Real meat?”

The crewman half-smiled and gave a slight shrug, “Pretty real.”

Hank laughed. He needed the comic relief. “How do you get bones in a ‘pretty real’ half-chicken?”

“You don’t. But it comes with white meat and dark meat simulants and it’s wrapped in a skin that gets nice and crispy.”

“Do I have time for a secure call while the chicken is cooking?”

“Take all the time you want. When you’re done, we can have your meal ready in ten minutes.”

“But I thought you were going to grill it?”

“We are. It’s a microwave grill. We sprinkle flavor pellets on it. It’s actually not bad. The rest of the meal is all hydroponic—no algal synthetics. You get baked potato and a mixed salad.”

“Okay. How about that phone?”

The crewman pressed a button on his arm console and a monitor dropped down from the overhead. “You can talk out loud or use ear buds. I need to log you in to an encrypted net from the plane. Then you log in to your conferencing app and you’re all set!”

“Thank you.”

*   *   *

A few minutes later the screen filled with several faces from the Executive Committee, including Victoria Musk—CEO, Oliver Smith—Engineering, Penelope Saunders—CFO, and Antoine MacPherson—Manufacturing.

“But that’s an absurd leap,” Antoine said after Hank had filled them in on the details of the meeting. “Are you saying a mishap with a Centaur is supposed to mean they want to deliberately shoot down all our space stations?”

“The secretary of defense wouldn’t tell me how they knew—something about sources and methods—but he believes it. And I believe him.”

“Okay, say we put this laser cannon contraption on the
Einstein
, what about the rest of the stations?” Oliver asked.

“Can we order them into higher orbits, say, three or four thousand kilometers?” Victoria asked.

“Won’t do any good. The inner Van Allen Belt starts at a thousand kilometers and goes up to six thousand kilometers. Two or three thousand kilometers would put your crews smack in the middle,” Hank said.

“So what can we do?” Victoria asked.

“Well, until we can get laser cannons on all the stations... I never thought I’d be saying this, but we better hope that diplomacy will work,” Hank said.

“Can we talk about the money?” Penelope asked. She had a habit of spinning an old government ballpoint pen around on top of her index knuckle of her right hand. She couldn’t write with it—it had probably run out of ink decades before she found it in the back of an old gray steel desk drawer. But everyone marveled at her dexterity in spinning it around on her knuckle—she didn’t even have to look.

“He said we’re supposed to bill them for any expenses incurred. And he said we can expense lost revenue. Said we’d be paid net thirty.”

“Paid in what?” Penelope asked.

“Federals.”

“Oh god, no wonder they’re being so generous!” Penelope said.

“Maybe we can work out a barter arrangement,” Victoria said. “We’re going to need a lot of U-235—the highly enriched stuff if we’re shifting to nuclear rockets on the new stations. The Feds have been pretty stingy about the good stuff—like they think we’re going to make bombs or something. Penelope, can you get on that?”

“Sure, no uranium, no deal.”

“Anything else, Hank?”

“They’re sending some hot shot laser man out from Huntsville to coordinate design mods. Name’s...” he consulted his notes “ah, here it is… Jason Byerly. He’ll be at Vandenberg next week.”

“Well we better give Mack a heads-up or Mr. Byerly will be going back to Alabama in a plastic bag,” Oliver said.

“You’re exaggerating—Mack’s not a violent man,” Victoria said.

“No, but his girlfriend is,” Oliver said.

“Mack and the Carvalho woman are an
item
?” Victoria asked.

Everyone in the room nodded.

“Why am I always the last one to find out the juicy stuff?” Victoria asked. “Forget I said that, is this… uh…
relationship
going to affect their work?”

“Too soon to tell,” Oliver said.

“Okay, I think we’re done here,” Victoria said. “Good work, Hank. Have a safe flight.”

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

September 2070

SpaceCorp Hangar, Vandenberg Space Complex

The hangar floor had about the same area as four soccer fields. It was covered by a large geodesic dome with large panels that could be opened for ventilation when the weather was nice. A network of catwalks suspended by cables from the dome traversed the 1/10 scale model of the space station under construction below. Segments of the catwalks could be lowered so the occupants could examine the details of the model below. Mack and Monica were standing on one such catwalk with Jason Byerly as Mack explained how the new
Albert Einstein
class space stations were going to be built.

Byerly was medium height, stocky build. His hair would have been strawberry blond if he’d been a woman. He had a permanent wiry stubble on his face that was more than a five o’clock shadow but not enough to call a beard. He spoke with a slight drawl—common among southerners who attended Ivy League universities in New England. After taking his PhD in high energy laser physics, he’d gone straight to the U.S. Army Space & Missile Defense Command in Huntsville, Alabama where he’d spent the last decade pursuing his one true love—high energy lasers.

“This thing seems like more than a model—it looks like it could actually work,” Jason said.

“The passageways might be a tight fit,” Mack said, “but you’re right, if we buckled all the pieces together and somehow got it into space, it could fly.”

“We use scale models like this not so much as visualization aids, but as procedural aids so we can figure out how to build these things one piece at a time up in LEO,” Monica said. “The
Einstein
class space station is a radically new design. We don’t haul giant sections into space and bolt them together like we had to do with aluminum structures. With this station, we start with algae farms that produce nanocellulose. Once algae production is up and running, we form the nanocellulose into building blocks. Up in space the robots will take the individual blocks and snap them together building the outer hull one block at a time. This new procedure has been in development for eight years now.”

“Most of the construction down here is done with miniature versions of the robots that will operate in space,” Mack said. “Those human technicians you see down there will not be in space. Even inside the 2-km ring of the
Pelican
, we try to keep human exposure to a minimum both for debris avoidance and radiation. So they do all the programming of the robots down here on the ground where it’s safer. When it’s time to take the full scale version on the road, we just multiply everything by ten.”

“The ring is divided into quads,” Monica said. “Right now we’re looking down on Quad-IV, your quad. The midpoint of the quad is where the spoke joins the quad to the hub.”

“Can we go over to the hub?” Jason asked. “I want to see where my laser is going to be mounted.”