Analog SFF, December 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Yes."

  She looked sideways at Lan, her eyes filled with tears. She shook her head. “Damn. How'd I get myself into such a mess?"

  Lan made a faint noise. I could feel Amanda's muscles twitch as she started to go to him, then held herself back.

  Bettina saw, too. She gave a bitter snort. “Yeah, me too. At this moment, I don't really care if he lives or dies."

  At that moment, with the combined hatred of two women weighing on him, I did not envy Lan Hielsby in the least.

  * * * *

  "In some ways, it would have been more merciful if Lan had died,” I said.

  "He got what he deserved,” my counterpart observed. “He got a concussion, faces charges for his part in reproductive cloning, and a separate charge of murder for killing the clone. Serious stuff, that. On top of that, he's got to endure a very messy, very public divorce in which he was clearly the bad guy."

  "Both women came out looking good,” I observed.

  He snorted. “Amanda McBey always looks good."

  "Bettina Harncort, for all the fact that she was Lan Hielsby's high-school sweetheart, has lived an ordinary life up until now. That's changing rapidly. She's been offered a very healthy sum of money for a book on her part in the story. I'm sure her heart was broken, but it seems as though she going to come out okay."

  "If the gossip is true, she's been seeing Martin Bosen, so she's got a rich, good-looking, A-list boyfriend."

  I laughed out loud. “Oh, there's one thing for sure ... she will not lack for candidates to choose from. Every man on the planet has this little secret question in the back of his mind—what has Bettina Harncort got that could drag a man away from Amanda McBey? And they're dying to find out."

  "It's probably not much consolation to her at the moment, but Amanda's free of that idiot,” he said, “and has the sympathy of nearly every man, woman, and child. Advance reviews of her next movie look good. In fact, if she could only get her love life straightened out, she'd—"

  The phone rang. I picked it up. “Hello?"

  "Jack, it's Amanda. I wanted to thank you for doing such a good job on this thing with Lan. It was a little painful and all, but that's not your fault. In fact, I was talking to Kyle Tattersall this morning and he said he may have a little problem you can help him with."

  "Isn't he the one that got the Emmy last year?"

  "That's him. Anyway, I gave him your number."

  "Well, thanks, I appreciate that."

  "Um, look, Jack, can I ask a favor?"

  "Sure."

  "The paparazzi are driving me crazy. This thing with Lan has driven them into a feeding frenzy, and they're crawling through the bushes around my house with cameras and recorders and all sorts of gadgets. I was wondering ... would it be okay if I came to see you? I'm tired of this whole celebrity aura thing, and I'd just like to spend some time with someone who isn't trying to interview me or trying to get me to read his script. And I thought of you, because I wouldn't have to explain this whole Lan situation to you since you already know everything, and we could just act like real people for a change."

  The expression on my software double's face was priceless. Being nothing more than pixels, he could manipulate his image at will. At the moment, his jaw was dropped so far it looked comically unhinged, his eyes were the size of saucers, and a little text ticker was running across the bottom of the screen: I HATE YOU ... DON'T BLOW THIS ... I HATE YOU ... DON'T BLOW THIS...

  I leaned back into the cushions and said comfortably, “Amanda, I'd like nothing better."

  Copyright (c) 2006 Grey Rollins

  (EDITOR'S NOTE: Jack Sawyer and his “Doppelganger” previously appeared in “Or Die Trying” [February 2001] and “Death As a Way of Life” [May 2005].)

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  OPENSHOT by Craig Delancey

  * * * *

  Illustrated by Vincent Di Fate

  * * * *

  Competition has often been a stimulus to achievement—but sometimes the prize is just a step to something bigger.

  * * * *

  No no no no no no no no no no no no no no,” T.J. said. “No. Penguin, no. Just no."

  "T.J., they're in trouble,” I said to her in as steady a voice as I could manage. Sweat stained my rumpled flight suit even though it was so cold in the capsule now that our breath clouded as we talked, floating this way and that in the microgravity. I envied T.J. her ability to have a crisp, ready-to-fly appearance at all times.

  "This is Cutter we're talking about, right? The weapons developer who called Openshot a threat to human destiny?"

  I sighed. “This is serious, T.J. Steven Frazier is dead. Cutter and Caldridge are coasting in a decaying orbit. They may be unable to make the exit burn properly."

  "Bad situation,” Zen muttered. Zen held a cable bundle in his hands—he was always holding something in his hands, working on it, even during takeoff—but he looked at T.J., then at me, with his lips pursed, a slight frown on his wide brow. Zen was our lead engineer, a great, placid bear of a man from New Zealand, and a slightly furrowed brow was the closest he usually came to an emotional display. I was our systems expert. I'm instead a global motley, like the Openshot program itself: my mother's Danish, my father's a second-generation Swede of African descent, and I was raised in Berkeley.

  T.J. hesitated. Everyone thought Frazier was a good man. If things had worked out a very little bit differently, he might have been a member of Openshot. Finally, she said, with an exasperated tone that conveyed little sympathy for the stranded team, “Look, I'm not saying we shouldn't help them. Even though this is Cutter's team, I say okay, let's help them. But they're relatively stable now, not losing air or power or fuel, right? So, we should land, win this contest, and then help them."

  "We don't know what we might need to solve this,” I said. “We could end up needing the fuel in our landing module. Or some of its parts."

  T.J. narrowed her green eyes. “Hey, speaking of landing modules: you're talking about their command, their orbiting module—that's what's busted, right? Cutter's landing module is okay?"

  I nodded.

  "So what's keeping them from landing on the Moon?"

  "Insufficient crew,” Zen said.

  "No,” T.J. growled. “Cutter would land alone. It could be done."

  "Well,” I said. “They know they might need the landing module thrust for their orbit ascent, even for transearth injection—though it doesn't have enough juice for that. Because right now their orbiting module is dead."

  T.J. scowled and changed tactics. “We're halfway to the Moon, damn it.” She pointed at the small, triangular window behind her, making her long hair swing a wide sweep through the air as she spun quickly to face it. She was agile in space. She had lost both her legs from the knees down when she crashed some junk heap of a test stealth plane four years before, and in microgravity she ditched her artificial legs and moved through the ship fast and light. Legs just got in the way in space, though her superiors at NASA had not seen it that way.

  The window was opaque from condensation, and there was a fine filigree of ice outside, but the faint glow of Luna shone through. “The other teams are months behind us. Only Cutter is in front of us. We can come in first and get the prize money. One hundred million dollars to get Openshot out of the red. To prove Openshot was right—isn't that what you dreamed, Penguin? And the Moon—we can be the first to walk there on our own steam. We're not going to get another chance to be the first to return. Let's walk and then help them."

  It was a good pitch. T.J. supports Openshot, but she mostly just wants to win, to prove to NASA and all those people like Cutter who discounted her that she could fly still and fly better than them. But she knew that Openshot was my life's passion. Yet: the numbers were inexorable. I sighed again. “It is safer for everyone if we help them before we attempt any other maneuvers. Now, I've thought it out,” I held up my PDA. “And Zen checked and cleaned up my math. They're in our orbita
l path—"

  She couldn't help herself: she burst out, “And why? Because they copied our flight plan. All our plans were public, there on the web, and that bastard Cutter ridiculed us, and then he just copied most of our work and launched three days before us."

  "Right, okay,” I continued, waving my hands in a placating gesture. ‘Most’ was an exaggeration, but Cutter's team had definitely copied some of our work. “That's right. So they're in our trajectory. We can dock, use just a little fuel. Then see if we can help. And probably still land, if we don't need the lander. Worst case, we use a joint burn to bring them back. But the landing module can go down and back probably even so."

  "I don't like it.” She spun in place quickly, to align with Zen. “Zen, surely this is going to reduce our chances to land."

  He nodded, but said, “small difference.” He inhaled deeply and seemed to relax. Put a machine in front of him, or any technical problem like this one, and he was at peace. Hence the name.

  "Ground Control agrees,” I added. A monitor on the wall by me showed in two graphs the opinion on the Openshot network. The global members of the Openshot team were voting two to one against helping the Cutter Industries Team before landing, an angry red bar dwarfing a soft green one. But Ground Control was recommending that our ship, the Stallman, make the link immediately and attempt to help the stranded team. T.J. frowned at this. That her position was the more popular was no solace. The broader membership of the Openshot program tended to be a bit flippant, to react too quickly. I liked to compare it to the subcortex, generating your quick but base impulses, and Ground Control instead was like your cortex, filtering and directing those impulses.

  Nearly ten thousand people around the world were active participants in the Openshot, an open source engineering project to the Moon. Some were engineers, some scientists, many were amateurs, but they all had devoted their time, and some had given money to the project to join the International Lunar Peace Race to be the first nongovernmental organization to put a person back on the Moon. The prize money had been staked by a consortium of space corporations and governments. In two years, working with open plans posted to the web and vetted through these thousands of participants, Openshot had designed a complete Moon shot. The core Ground Control team, some devoting their entire personal fortunes to the effort, had built the ship.

  And nearly all ten thousand Openshot members would be listening now to this debate, albeit with a half a second delay.

  I repeated myself softly, speaking only to T.J. “Ground Control agrees, T.J. And it's the right thing. We do this well, and we should still be able to land."

  "You don't have what it takes to win,” she spat. “You think this is still a hack. We're not hacking here. We're in flight. We're on our way. We're winning. And that means the very idea of the Openshot is winning. But you can't see that."

  Silence hung for a moment. Then Zen said, “The right thing."

  "Oh, use a damn verb, will you, Zen."

  I cringed, but Zen just mumbled, “Not necessary."

  T.J. turned, prepared to push out of the room, through the open hatch and into the landing module, to steal the only bit of privacy possible in our ship. But then she stopped in place and turned slowly, an idea clearly dawning on her face. The displays on the walls were frantically blinking red with dozens of emergency messages from project members around the world, and no doubt many of them were warnings about what she just realized.

  "He'll land,” she said.

  "What?” I asked.

  "Cutter. If we announce we're coming to save them, he'll land. He'll figure he doesn't need the landing module's thrust, and he'll land it and be back before we even arrive."

  I had to think that over. It was plausible. Cutter was like T.J.: he wanted to win, and he would not be able to think about anything else but winning.

  Zen twisted the cable in his hands, and then muttered, “Most likely."

  "You tell them we help on one condition only,” she said. “We land first. That's it. Anything else and I'll blow the damn safety hatches and cripple us before I'll let you dock with their Command Module. I'd do it."

  "Most likely,” Zen repeated.

  I nodded very slowly. I didn't want to make that call—it sounded too much like blackmail to me—but T.J. had a point. “Okay."

  "Damn fortunate one of us thinks about these things,” she told me. And then she did push off and leave us to handle the mission replanning.

  * * * *

  "Hit the burn,” I told T.J. It was thirty hours later. Cutter had accepted our terms. We were strapped into our launch couches and had flipped the modules so that the main engine faced Luna. We needed another quick burn to drop us more quickly into our descent orbit where we could match up with the Cutter Team. Earth shone bright blue through the streaked condensation on the windows before us. Condensation was really getting to be a problem, and all the walls of the module had a sweaty sheen on them. The seats we sat in emitted a faint smell of mildew when we pressed ourselves into them.

  "Hit the burn,” I repeated.

  The Stallman was built on Russian surplus, a prototype module for the D.O.A. second phase of Space Station Freedom. Like all four teams attempting the race, the Openshot had used an Apollo approach, with separate landing and command modules. Rules allowed commercial transport to and from Earth orbit, so no team bothered with an Earth landing module. Our Lunar landing module was docked onto one end of the Russian module, and an engine stack was locked onto the other. But there were two side hatches, part of the space station build-as-you-go methodology meant to allow linking of several similar modules. We would use one of these to link with the Cutter Team's command ship.

  We were helmeted, which was safety procedure for any burn, and I watched stats from Ground Control as they projected across my visor. But after the silence stretched on, I looked over at T.J. My shoulders turned awkwardly as I bent forward so that she could see me through the narrow view of my helmet. Green lights played in pale faded writing across T.J.'s face. Her hand hesitated over the ignition switch.

  "If you don't burn now we might overshoot,” I whispered.

  "Yeah, Penguin, I was thinking just that,” she said. And then she slapped the switch. A dull roar filled the ship. We waited until the onboard computer cut the fuel.

  "Good burn,” Zen said.

  "Sorry to hear that,” T.J. told him without looking up.

  We spun our ship ninety degrees, letting Luna loom and then fill our view. We talked only over the necessary preparations, watching the ancient companion of Earth in silence the rest of the time, until after two hours Zen said, “There it is,” and pointed out of the small window.

  Floating a kilometer before us was the Cutter Team's ship, just visible in hard bright contrast against the dark gray of the shadowed Moon beyond.

  It was a long white cylinder, built from scratch but otherwise not much unlike our own ship in size. It had only a single docking hatch, though, and so they had removed their landing module to free it up so we could dock. After a moment scanning the scene, I saw their lander, a black and gray sphere with six legs, drifting two hundred meters off. They had tethered it to the ship, I think, but no line was visible to the naked eye. It looked safely distant.

  "Tricky,” Zen said.

  "Right,” T.J. told us. “It's going take skill to bring this thing in sideways and dock to that dog of theirs. So you two better be nice to me. It's bad enough that my heart ain't in it."

  "Right,” Zen and I both said cautiously.

  * * * *

  She did it, of course. Our docking hatches slapped together hard when we finally drifted in for the clasp, but the armatures took hold and we had a lock.

  I confirmed the positive seal with Cutter's engineer over radio, but before I finished talking, T.J. unbuckled from her seat and drifted down to the dock. I unbuckled and followed.

  "I ain't keen on seeing Cutter, but if anyone is going to face him first it's going to be me,�
� she said, as I drifted next to her.

  After a check and a cross check, we slipped our hatch. Nothing seemed to be leaking, and so they opened theirs. In a moment the round top of Cutter's helmet filled the narrow passage. Cutter's helmet was a solid clear dome, like something out of an old 1950s science-fiction painting.

  He pushed through and drifted into our ship, then aligned with us. It was crowded with the four of us surrounding the hatch. Our legs and arms bumped as we floated towards and away from each other.

  T.J. used a closed line to whisper to me, “God, look at his golf tan. He looks like a carrot.” I fought down a smile.

  Cutter popped his helmet off. He looked at me, at Zen, at T.J., and then he looked at where T.J.'s legs ended at her knees and she had folded her suit back. After an awkward pause he held his hand out with a hesitant smile. We popped our helmets and I took his hand.

  "Austen,” he said. “Austen Cutter.” He was a thin, lithe man, balding with brown hair. He looked muscular even in the suit.

  "People call me Penguin,” I said.

  He took T.J.'s hand. “Colonel Bianco,” she told him.

  "Colonel,” he nodded. He wrinkled his nose. No doubt our ship stank. I had an unusually bad and persistent case of microgravity flatulence, and our collective skills in microgravity toiletry were completely inept. Plus there was the damn condensation and mildew. Cutter shook hands with Zen. Zen pointed at his helmet.

  "Ceramic plastic?” Zen asked. He had a dreamy look in his eye. Cutter smiled proudly and handed it over.

  "Bleeding edge materials science,” Zen said to T.J. in a tone of awe, as if in reply, when she rolled her eyes at him. “Rigid and hard but not brittle. Cracks but doesn't shatter."

  "Two verbs! That was almost a sentence,” she told him.

  Cutter cleared his throat. “Listen,” he said. “I want to thank you for coming to help. I know that you are putting your own mission at risk, and Dave and I appreciate it very much. You've really proved a lot of doubters wrong with your project, and I guess it's fair to say I was one of them, but—"