War World X: Takeover (49 page)

The commo channel from the trailing shuttle, Klaus Vebler’s
Luft Fresser
, was scratchy and irregular in Avram’s headset. “Turbulence up twenty percent. There’s a lazy storm front receding from our equator-side. Our tail is clear.”

“And polar-side?”

“Should be clear, too.”

Avram heard the evasive tone. “Talk to me, Klaus: what’s coming out of the cold top?” Cold, of course, being a relative measure, since even the equatorial cloud belts of Cat’s Eye never went above a balmy -150 degrees centigrade.

“It’s probably nothing, Avram. But I’m watching some top churn starting about 200 klicks polar-side.” Top churn meant a problematic weather system lower down in the gas giant’s murky atmosphere. Whether it would ever emerge at their cloud-skimming altitudes—or head in their direction—was, at this stage, wholly uncertain. Wholly troubling, too. But those were the risks that came with the job, Avram conceded philosophically. If Earth’s ancient mariners had run home to port every time a cloud had troubled the horizon, humanity would still have been living landlocked and primitive. “Well, just keep an eye on it, Klaus.”

“Understood. Time to form up for the scoop run?”

“Affirmative. But don’t stay so far out on the trailing flank. Put a little more distance between yourself and that possible storm front.”

“Avram, that will also put me too close to your wake turbulence. How about I boost up, cross over your jet wash, and settle in on your hot side trailing quarter, away from the weather?”

“Negative, Klaus. There’s more water vapor in the hot side: if you shift over there, we’ll bring back less H2. That pushes up the filtration and refining costs. So you just stay alert and close the interval to twenty kicks. That way you can tuck closer and still stay out of my vortex.”

“Avram, that’s less than the minimum safe flight distance. A lot less.”

“Yeah, but you’re in more danger from a nasty weather surprise than from a chip of paint coming off of me. So close up and tuck into the cold-side sweet spot.”

“You’re the flight leader, Flight Leader.”

Avram smiled at Klaus’ wry communiqué. Klaus was a good pilot, but—as one might expect of an expatriate Schweizer—he was a bit overcautious, as well. And today’s run was nothing special; just another day flying though a hell that made Dante’s Ninth Circle of damnation seem positively balmy by comparison.

“Deploying scoops,” Avram signaled, bringing the shuttle’s nose up and matching its heading and speed to the prevailing weather patterns.

The scoops—rearward facing to minimize drag—opened, louvers rotating to create a vent in the lee of the upswept portion of the aft fuselage, where the shuttle’s belly began winnowing back into the tail section. Vacuum pumps activated with a howl that Avram could not hear; he only felt it as a faint, thready vibration added to all the many other jolts, jostles, and hums that were his craft’s customary operating cacophony.

Nearly pure deuterium started rushing in the vents, blasting through tubes into the cryogenic reduction and storage tanks. However, in the portside transfer tube, the tiny, high-velocity hydrogen atoms found thinner spots in the copper-lined conduit. Overdue for removal because of the constant “resettings” of its replacement date, the tube’s one flexure had become partially brittlized: the passive but persistent assault of the mono-atomic gas at pressure had turned its once seamless molecular structure into the equivalent of cheesecloth. Slowly but steadily, small quantities of the hydrogen leaked into the surrounding safety sleeve.

The sleeve—a vacuum evacuation system—had a safety measure designed to purge any leaked H2 out of the craft before it could come into chance contact with oxygen. However, this day, the left scoop’s under-maintained primary intake compressor stuttered and slipped, unable to achieve more than marginal performance. Normally, this would have put a red light on Avram’s system board, and would therefore have compelled him to immediately abort the mission.

But some weeks ago, during a software update of the shuttles’ automated safety system, this cautious protocol had been replaced by a more fiscally prudent subroutine. Now, in the event of vacuum under-performance in the scoops, the system diverted a portion of the safety sleeve’s own compression to the all-important task of sucking in more H2—at the expense of timely evacuation of any leakage. And to keep the pilot from worrying too much, such a failure had now been re-designated as a notable, rather than critical, hazard. This change, along with hundreds of others—all coded with non-descriptive labels—had been part of the pilots’ indecipherable, and thus, ignored, weekly update.

Avram saw a new orange light flicker into existence on his OpSys monitor board. The safety sleeve on the H2 intake tube was acting up—or had exceeded its maximum service interval: either condition would trigger an orange light.

Which was nothing special: Avram stared sourly at the board, which was almost half covered by dull amber lights. He checked the H2 inflow rate: nice and steady. Good. With a possible polar-side storm brewing, he wanted a short, clean run. To assure that it remained as short as possible, he edged the throttle forward slightly, attaining maximum safe airspeed, and increasing the slipstream back-suction under the shuttle, thus accelerating the speed at which the H2 was entering his scoops.

The increase in thrust sent a slight shudder through the aft section of
Cloud Scraper II
, and a coupling in the safety sleeve gapped two millimeters. The traces of H2 which had not been purged by the underpowered pumps rushed out into the fuel tankage compartment, where miniscule seal failures on the O2 tank had allowed a small amount of that reactant to diffuse into the interstitial spaces of the craft.

The slight unevenness in Avram’s acceleration further stressed the sleeve coupling. Which, brushing tight against one of the part-steel replacement struts, struck a single spark.

Avram felt no pain—indeed was not even aware—when
Cloud Scraper II
exploded in a bright yellow ball of incendiary plasma. Caught by the ferocious winds, the luminous sphere quickly elongated into a flickering amber smudge veiled in a growing swath of steam.

Klaus Vebler’s quick pulse of panic manifested as a fleeting coronary twinge: the delta icon denoting
Cloud Scraper II
had flickered and then disappeared from his radar plot.

Suppressing an emotional wave that was one part horror and two parts grief, he flipped the toggle switch that would retract his cockpit canopy’s weathered shields. Always a by-the-numbers pilot, Klaus was now in the one situation that demanded he no longer fly strictly by instruments: he had to make a visual confirmation of the catastrophe that his sensors insisted had befallen his flight leader. However, having flown
Luft Fresser
close against
Cloud Scraper II
’s air stream, Vebler was now at the outer peripheries of the debris cloud which had been Avram’s shuttle.

A razor-sharp shard of
Cloud Scraper II
’s wing tip came corkscrewing out of the mists and punched a glancing hole in
Luft Fresser
’s blunt, shark-like nose. Riven upon impact, the wing tip shattered into a spray of fragments. One of the slenderest—resembling a spearhead but traveling many times faster than any spearhead had ever traveled—jabbed point-first into the front screen of Klaus Vebler’s reinforced cockpit canopy and dug a divot out of the glass before tumbling away.

The atmosphere roared into the nose gash—friction heating and widening the hole like a blowtorch—while the same high-pressure atmospheric friction attacked the wounded canopy as Klaus fought to keep the mortally wounded
Luft Fresser
’s nose level. Relentless, the supersonic gust drilled further into the wounded glass, which crackled sharply, a star-shatter pattern instantly coursing outward from the failure point. A half second later, it blasted inwards, becoming a sleet-storm of supersonic glass needles and knives. Riddled, Klaus Vebler was dead before his flight helmet slammed back into the now-bloody headrest.

The gash in the
Luft Fresser’s
nose yawned wider: the fuselage started splitting apart there, and the shuttle’s nose dropped, pulling the craft into a rapid series of end-over-end tumbles that carried it down into the crushing depths of Cat’s Eye.

Nadine reached out a slow finger to close the comm channel. She stared at the blinking cursor on her computer: What now? H2GAS’s original refueling fleet of six shuttles was down to two, and one of those had been in the maintenance bay for three weeks and showed no sign of emerging any time soon. Replacement shuttles were neither available nor affordable. And pilot insurance was now sure to be unattainable at any cost.

Nadine’s determined focus on the material losses of the disaster was selfish, she conceded, but necessary for now. She had had a brief, very energetic fling with Avram Meissen when he had first arrived on Haven about two and a half years ago. It had been a great lust, made easy by the big Sabra’s companionable
bon homie
. The end had been as predictable as it had been emotionally effortless.

But that also had meant a complete lack of animus. So Nadine’s memory of him was one of fond recollection. And on Haven—where the stuff that made happy memories was in short supply, any loss at all cut deeply. And so Nadine focused on the lost shuttles, not the film of mild but very desolate grief that seemed to settle on the world like a layer of fine gray dust.

So. Her heart was injured but not broken. However, the same could not be said for H2GAS’s fuel collection contract or the company’s fiscal viability. She did not have to wait for the actuarial analysis or legal announcement: H2GAS was irremediably bankrupt. And unless she was very wrong in her guess, the company would become the target of innumerable and well-deserved “culpable negligence” and “due diligence” investigations. Meaning, of course, that every H2GAS executive who could afford a ticket would be on the first outbound ship.

Prompt departure was not merely a way to flee prosecution but to stymie it; with almost all the principals out of range and out of reach, the nascent proceedings would die, stillborn for want of sufficient depositions and clear accountability. Yes, the rats would all jump ship together—and all survive, as a consequence of the simultaneity of their flight.

And realistically, their guilt and flight would quickly be eclipsed by the more pressing sequelae of today’s disaster. The next CoDo ship to jump out of the Byers System would do so bearing news of the complete collapse of fuel production there. Word would spread: corporate shipping lines would become skittish; independent operators, reasonably concerned with becoming stranded in the system, would avoid it like the plague. Nadine could hardly blame them: located at the ass-end of nowhere, Haven was a backwater with only two noteworthy resources: shimmer stones and an almost infinite capacity to absorb a steady stream of refugees, rebels, and ruffians.

But the developed worlds could live without shimmer stones, which were simply a luxury—as was the cost of exiling, rather than exterminating, “social undesirables.” Without a robust deuterium production facility, Haven’s future would follow a course as clear and ineluctable as its own orbit: isolation, decline, die-off, extinction. As things stood now, nothing less than a miracle could save it—

—Or maybe, thought Nadine, Haven didn’t need a miracle: just simple common sense. Her index finger wandered to touch the top of Paul Nkomu’s proposal for a refueling station on Cat’s Eyes’ sixth—and second largest moon, Ayesha.

Comprised of rock and ice, its surface was ninety percent shallow, frozen seas. Extraction would be simple enough, and the byproduct of the electrolytic separation—oxygen—would not only provide the majority of the station’s life support, but become a secondary revenue stream from passing freighters: without one-hundred percent self-sustaining bio-loops, ships needed to top off their O2 and H2O supplies, too.

A fusion plant would be the best way to power the operation, but cheaper stand-off solar satellites could, in the early phases, beam power to ground-based rectennae. After a few months of operation, revenues would make it possible to buy a brand new fusion plant, if Nkomu’s decidedly conservative profit estimates bore any resemblance to reality.