SpaceCorp (39 page)

“Yes, Mr. Larsen. That will do splendidly. We have followed your instructions almost exactly—the village has been built, the dummies in place inside the planes and buildings, and the planes are about to overfly it… in about twenty seconds I’m told. Do you have a good video feed?”

“I have our shared video plus several other feeds from the station’s high resolution cameras and also the gun cameras from the four laser cannons.”

“
Four
laser cannons? You must feel invulnerable up there to give out such information so freely—ah, it begins.”

*   *   *

There were two high res images showing satellite views from down below. One was focused on a flight of four aircraft. The other showed the village. Hank watched the devastation unfold, discomforted by the realization that in a real battle those planes would have had real humans inside instead of dummies as the powerful lasers neatly carved the fuselages in two. Real human beings screaming and waving their arms and legs in terror, some still belted into their seats. Real infants slipping from their mother’s grasp to be pulled into the near supersonic draft. Real people opening their mouths to gasp for air only to have it sucked from their lungs in the partial vacuum. Men and women having their limbs broken off in the slip stream as they plummeted to certain death. All four planes were destroyed in seconds. One laser focused on each, tracing a straight line across the hapless aircraft. They looked like model airplanes that some kid had tried to glide across the backyard remembering too late that he’d forgotten to glue the parts together. Fuselage halves separated. Wings came off. Parts fluttered to the ground. Only these real planes burned as they fell and they did not bounce when they met the ground.

The buildings on the ground did not fare much better. Most burst into flames as though an incendiary bomb had gone off inside. Again Hank was disturbed at the thought of real people inside enjoying their dinner, watching television, playing with their children, enjoying life the way families should. He imagined himself taking supper at a table sitting across from his wife, his twin boys arguing over who would get the last pork chop. He was sickened by the image of his loved ones suddenly engulfed in flames, himself incapable of helping them as he too was caught up in the conflagration.

When it was over, the president seemed a bit shaken whereas before the devastation he came across as cocky, almost like he did not believe the lasers could do much harm from space. The scenes on the video feeds had made a believer of him and his expression showed as much.

Hank fought for words. This was the time to make his point. “Those were remote-controlled planes, Mr. President. Both the planes and the houses were filled with dummies. Imagine the horror if had they been filled with live people. Live human beings whom you might have known.”

“I assure you, Mr. Larsen, I don’t need to
imagine
that horror.” The president’s vocal chords trembled as he forced the words past his lips.

“That’s good, Mr. President, because it was very nearly the same as what happened on the
Von Braun
two years ago, and what easily could have happened on the
Einstein
six months ago. We will not tolerate any more hostile acts on your part, Mr. President. It should be apparent that we can do a lot more harm to you than you can to us.”

“Indeed that is true, Mr. Larsen. Your point is well taken, perhaps more than you realize.”

“What do you mean?”

“We stand in awe of your military prowess. We are a simple peace-loving nation, albeit a trifle backward by your standards. You need not fear us since we have no space program. We have no capacity to launch missiles into space. And we do not have the people to mount such an effort should we be so inclined.”

“Yes, well that’s reassuring. But we want you to know that no longer will we permit you to launch
anything
into space. From this moment on not even suborbital flights will be permitted. Anything that penetrates the stratopause—that’s fifty kilometers—will be treated as a hostile act and shot down at our earliest opportunity. Do you copy that, Mr. President?”

“You may rest assured, Mr. Larsen. We will not attempt to place anything above the stratopause. Indeed, we cannot, given the war crime you just committed.”

“War crime? We have committed no war crime, Mr. President. It was
your
nation who attacked our space stations—first the
Von Braun
and then the
Einstein
. Those were war crimes!”

“Let me show you a different set of video feeds, Mr. Larsen. These come from inside the planes and inside the buildings which, as you can plainly see, were occupied by… how did you phrase it? Yes, ‘live people. Live human beings whom you might have known.’ Well, I can promise you, Mr. Larsen, I did know a great many of them. They were our best and brightest. The intellectual future of our space program, the very ones who were responsible for the shoot-down of the Centaur. We were going to relocate them to this new community in the Zagros Mountains… that is until you murdered them.”

Hank was silent while the videos played back giving reality to an imagined horror that he had only seen with his mind’s eye as real bodies flew into the searing cold of the thin outside air as the fuselages were rent asunder. Real families sitting at table before they were suddenly and completely engulfed in flame.

“You bastard,” he said when it was over, his voice dripped like molten lead.

“The
Von Braun
was unfortunate, Mr. Larsen. A chain of technological blunders, completely lacking in criminal intent. And what we attempted to do to the
Einstein
was only that—a failed attempt. But what the
Einstein
did to those innocent people just now did
not
lack for criminal intent. That, Mr. Larsen, is the true war crime. Appearances are everything in the court of world opinion. And the appearances shown in our video footage are quite damning, don’t you think? We are prepared to broadcast those videos to the entire world if you do not agree to our terms.”

Hank Larsen did not speak. He just glared at the monitor, wishing he could somehow travel to the other side and strangle the ruthless little man who mocked him from the other side of the world.

“Our Supreme Leader demands that you respect our air space. That means all of our air space, Mr. Larsen. From the surface all the way to the steps of heaven. You have ninety days to comply. After ninety days if we see a single space station violating the sovereign airspace of Iran, those tapes will go public and you and the entire crew of the
Einstein
will be charged with crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court at The Hague.”

23:30 HRS, June 8
^th
, 2072

Balcony of the V-berg Café

“We have a fundamental problem living here at Vandenberg,” Hank said. “We are shielded from the ugliness of the rest of the world. We are high up on a cliff—112 meters is the elevation at the airstrip. We hardly noticed the five-meter sea level rise that’s taken place since 2010. Our local population density has been stable since then also. But the biggest thing is our people. They are bright, motivated, giving of themselves—we see that all the time. And the biggest thing
about
our people is that they are not ruled by paranoia, ignorance, gullibility, and superstition the way so much of the rest of the world is, especially the rest of the country formerly known as the United States of America… What’s funny, Monica?”

“I was just thinking about your description, ‘paranoia, ignorance, gullibility, and superstition.’ It makes a funny acronym.”

Hank snickered. “Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that. I guess it does.”

“We do enjoy a safe bastion here,” Mack said.

“Yeah, but how long can we keep it safe?” Jason Byerly asked. “I mean, hey, I’m the new guy in this community. But I spent my formative years and a good deal of my adulthood living among the ‘PIGS’ as you call them. In many respects I was one. They will not stay east of the Sierras. They will deplete their resources; they will overpopulate; they will invade.”

“Invade?” Monica asked. “How? We can fry anything that tries to cross the Colorado River. I mean that’s one tiny thing we can thank the Iranians for—firsthand knowledge of how bad-ass we can be.”

“Besides, frying our invaders might work the first few times,” Jason said. “But just the ability to eliminate surface targets from space is no guarantee our space stations can’t be attacked from the ground. Eventually they will develop adaptive optics to get a focused beam through the atmosphere and attack us in space.”

“So we’ll fry them too,” Monica said. “We’ll be the grand bad-asses from on high, raining brimstone on all who would seek to harm us.”

“I’m not sure I want to be that bad-ass,” Mack said. “That was some pretty grisly footage Hank showed us.”

“Remember the
Von Braun
,” Monica said.

“As I recall, I was on the
Von Braun
, Monica,” Mack said, eyebrows arched. “But my point was that SpaceCorp was always supposed to be apolitical.”

“Pretty hard to stay apolitical when assholes are shooting you out of the sky,” Monica said.

“Guys, it’s late. Go home and get some sleep. I want to reconvene in thirty days with a new plan. A whole new business model.”

“What sort of plan?” Mack asked.

“We’ve been talking the dream of becoming a spacefaring society since we founded SpaceCorp,” Hank said. “But we’ve been stuck in LEO the whole time, hell-bent on making money. And I’ll grant you, we’ve made a lot of money, but what good is that going to do us going forward? Does anyone even care about the American dollar anymore?”

“Maybe not, but don’t they still care about the information we provide?” Monica asked.

“For now,” Jason said. “But for how much longer?”

“More to the point, what will they pay for it with?” Mack asked. “The financial collapse of 2035 was a polite burp compared to the one we’re staring at with no dollar at all.”

“Listen! The tide’s coming in,” Monica said. “When the breakers start to ‘whump’ like that, low tide is over.”

They all paused to listen for the next whump of the breakers. After it came, Hank said, “That’s why we need a new plan. We need to stockpile as many resources as we can and then we need to move SpaceCorp Headquarters, and the research center, and launch ops, and our families, and hell, even the V-berg Café.”

“You mean inland?” Mack asked. “Edwards is 700 meters and something, I think.”

“Farther than that. Forget about sea levels.” Hank said.

“Hawaii… Alaska?”

“Even farther.”

“Where then?”

“Cislunar space.”

E
PILOGUE

Launch Day, September 29
^th
, 2103

SSS Einstein
, the Sovereign Nation of Cisluna, L1 Lagrange Point

Today was the second anniversary of Logan’s death. He was seventy-eight when he died. Hank Larsen passed away back in 2085, age eighty-one. I forget the date. Both of them went to prostate cancer. Everybody dies of cancer up here. ‘Quarantined’ as we are in Cisluna, we no longer have communicable diseases. It’s been… let’s see… almost ten years since anyone died of an accident—a testament to our anal retentive safety procedures. There’s no crime to speak of—certainly no violent crime—but then there never was much of that on the stations down in LEO. The few cases of heart disease are treatable with diet, exercise, and meds—oh, do we have heart meds up here! We age, but the big C always seems to beat Father Time to the finish line. Having eliminated all the other failure modes, cancer is the price of living in Cisluna.

In case you’re wondering, Cisluna is not a ‘place’ like California on Earth or
Mare Imbrium
on the Moon or
Hellas Planitia
on Mars. It’s more of a mathematically defined concept, the L1 Lagrange point where the Earth and Moon’s gravity balance one another—326,000 kilometers from Earth and 58,000 kilometers from the Moon. A balanced gravity point makes for very low energy launches to other locations in the Solar System—far more efficient than, say, battling your way out of LEO to Mars, or worse, lifting off from the Earth’s surface for a direct trajectory insertion.

Cisluna is well outside the Van Allen radiation belts—that’s good, but it’s also outside the Earth’s protective magnetic field—that’s not so good. We are exposed to the full dose of interplanetary radiation—ultraviolet from the sun, gamma radiation from the galaxy, and intermittent solar electric particles when the sun has a flare which it does a couple of times a year. So we sit here bathed in a continuous 60 rems/year, except during solar flares when we go up as high as 350 rems. Fortunately, those only last a few hours. We can shield the whole station for 60 rems with a water jacket—the algae like that—but we can’t shield for 350 rems. For that everybody drops everything and runs to hide inside special isolation chambers. That’s what I think does us in. There are always stragglers—been guilty of that a few times myself.

Theoretically you should be able to find the exact L1 spot and sit there with no energy expenditure at all. But then theoretically you should be able to balance a pencil on its point, and anyone who’s tried it knows it’s impossible. Besides with over a dozen space stations trying to occupy the same point it might get a little crowded. So we travel around the L1 point in what the orbit jocks call a Lissajous orbit. To me it looks like a giant potato chip 50,000 kilometers in diameter—takes us two weeks to make a full circuit. And it’s big enough to provide about 13,000 kilometers of separation for everybody—I like that. Still, we’re not so far apart we can’t visit now and again. Energy-wise it’s super cheap. Station-keeping burns are only nine meters per second of ΔV about 9 times a year—barely a burp from our nuclear thermal rockets.