Rich Man's Sky

by Wil McCarthy

  “I liked her,” Alice answered crisply, as if to a superior officer. “She was polite and helpful.”

  “Did you suspect her of anything?”

  “Not until the computer flagged her file,” she said honestly. Always good if you could answer honestly. There was less chance of screwing up that way. “Before that, I never had reason to question her closely.”

  “And after?”

  Alice nodded. “Yeah, I mean, there was something off about her then. Her . . . cover was blown, I guess you’d say, but she didn’t want to admit it. She was struggling in this weird way. I think she might have lost out on a big reward.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Alice did the zero-gee shrug. “There was just something off—something sleazy—about the way she was reacting. She was angry. Would someone on a government salary be angry, if she got caught and had to, you know, abort her mission?”

  “Likely not,” he agreed. “What do you think she was planning to do?”

  “No idea,” Alice said—again, honestly. “Or why, or who she was working for. She didn’t exactly provide a lot of clues.”

  Pam asked, “Where did she learn to fly a space shuttle?”

  Alice did a double take. “Excuse me?”

  “It’s gone,” Pam said. “We’ve been trying to keep this quiet, but her shuttle disappeared. Transit Point tracked it for about thirty minutes, until they lost it behind the limb of the Earth. It never came back around.”

  “Jesus,” Alice said. “Did it blow up?”

  “No. There was no debris, no reentry plume. Transit Point would have seen those things. That shuttle navigated out of there. And it doesn’t hold enough fuel to leave Earth orbit, so there are a limited number of places it could have ended up. Like, a really short list.”

  Alice thought furiously, then spoke: “What about NORAD? Or PCBH in Russia? Or the People’s Liberation Air Force? They must have tracked it.”

  “Presumably,” Pam agreed, “but they’re not exactly sharing data with us. The shuttle’s transponder was also disabled, is also disabled, or we’d’ve picked it up. We’ve got tracking satellites all over cislunar space. She went totally dark.”

  “Where did she learn to fly our ship?” Renz demanded, of no one in particular. “How did she even know that was something she’d need to know?”

  Alice considered that. “She must’ve had help. Real-time help.”

  “What kind?”

  “Someone on the other end of a radio.”

  “What kind of radio?”

  Alice thought some more, and finally said, “Ultrawideband entangled. With line of sight it’s got a range of, well, from surface of the Earth to a military communication satellite. How far is that?”

  “Far enough,” Renz confirmed. “And our sensors wouldn’t be able to detect it?”

  “No way. That’s LPD/LPI signal, which stands for, I think, low probability of detection, low probability of intercept. It does have limited bandwidth, though. You can’t send, like, video or anything, but it’ll carry voices and text. Maybe a small number of low-resolution images.”

  Alice wasn’t quite sure why she was divulging all this, except (a) it wasn’t classified, (b) it didn’t interfere with the goals of her mission, and (c) she was as perplexed as Igbal and Pam. What the silking fuck was Dona up to? And why? And for whom? It definitely did not suit the goals of Alice’s mission to have a wild card like that in the deck.

  “How small would this radio be?” Renz wanted to know.

  “Oh, it could be pretty small. Size of a TV remote. It could be a TV remote.”

  “She didn’t have a TV remote when her belongings were searched in Paramaribo, but your point is taken.” Renz sighed. “There’s no security staff at Transit Point. You threw her in that shuttle, am I right?”

  “Me and Malagrite Aagesen, yes, but by then she wasn’t resisting.”

  Renz mulled that over for a couple of seconds. Then: “More about Malagrite in a minute. Right now my problem is that we don’t have any security personnel here, either. Our population is over thirty people now, and we all work hard and have access to drugs, and with bad actors attempting to interfere with us, it suddenly occurs to me and Pam that we’re in a generally bad situation.”

  Alice successfully held back a snort at the mention of drugs, because really that was one of the main reasons she was here. Bad enough for a trillionaire to control the sunlight, but an unstable druggie trillionaire . . . But Renz was getting at something else, so she simply waited, blank-faced, for the punch line.

  “I want to form a security team,” Renz said, “and I want you to be the head of it.”

  Alice blinked. “What?”

  “You, yes. We can bring up some professionals when conditions permit, but at this particular moment we’re not getting anything or anyone off of the Earth. The U.S. Navy is boarding and reflagging our ships in the Atlantic, and sailing them to Florida for storage. It’s goddamn piracy. At least they’re letting the crews go, but, I mean, goddamn, right? Outrageous! It won’t be such a problem once we get some factories and a refinery running in Suriname, but even that requires our workers sneaking some critical hardware past the blockade, in tourist luggage and whatnot. The Americans could shut it down anytime, and even if they don’t, it’ll be a year or more before we’re fully operational down there. The other possibility is launching out of Liberia, but that’s problematic for all kinds of reasons. Or we could revive our old sea launch platforms, but there’s no reason to think the U.S. Navy won’t just seize those, too. Point is, for right now we are definitely on our own up here, and we’re going to need a sheriff. Quite frankly, Alice—can I call you Alice?”

  She nodded once.

  “Silk. Call me Igbal. Quite frankly, most of our people have never been in a fistfight, much less fallen out of the sky with guns blazing. We’ve got a lot of PhD smartyskirts here.”

  “As you said. And?”

  “And you tell me. A lot of unexpected crap can happen in this business. I mean, it’s mostly unexpected crap. That little emergency on the shuttle, with Rachael Lee barfing in her helmet, that was also you and Malagrite handling that, am I right?”

  “Mostly her,” Alice said.

  “Right, well, if you had to pick a deputy, would it be her?”

  Alice thought quickly. She was tempted to name Bethy Powell right away, but (a) on what grounds? On paper, they barely knew each other. And (b) things were suddenly going a little too well! She didn’t trust a man like Igbal Renz to be that stupid. Was he playing her? Keeping his enemies close? Giving her enough rope to hang herself? Did it really not occur to him that Dona might not be the only bad actor in the mix? Alice was U.S. Air Force, for Christ’s sake. Of course, so was Derek, and probably half the men down on Transit Point. And some of the other space pilots who were supposedly kicking around. Air Force people had always made solid astronauts.

  Finally she answered: “First of all, I haven’t said yes to anything. I know you’re the boss and I’m the colonist, but just hold on a sec. Let me get my bearings. Second, assuming I agree to this, I’d need some time to figure out staffing. I don’t even know what kind of threats we’re talking about, here.”

  “Neither do we,” said Pam. “That’s the whole point. But it wouldn’t be your only job, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  When Alice didn’t say anything to that, Igbal told her, “Take a day to think it over. If you don’t want it, I’ll give it to someone else. But I can’t wait any longer than that. Fair enough?”

  “Sure,” Alice said. Because really, this might actually be the best possible thing for her. Then, sensing that she was dismissed, she tucked her flight bag, with its meager possessions, back under her arm and said, “Can someone show me to my cabin?”

  “We call them apartments here,” Pam said. “And yes, I’ll take you.”

  “We also have a shortage of medical personnel,” Pam told her, when they were out in the ha
llway or connecting module or whatever they called it here.

  Following along, Alice responded, “Not many doctors willing to sign away their wombs?”

  When Pregnant Pam didn’t immediately answer, she pressed further: “That bump of yours. Is it his? Igbal Renz’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “And there’s not going to be anyone here to deliver it when it comes?”

  Pam stopped and glared at her. “You’re pretty bold for your first day. You want to let me do the talking?”

  “Sure. Sorry.”

  “Have you ever delivered a baby?”

  “No,” Alice admitted, “but the Pararescuemen require a five-day course in obstetrics.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Pam said. “It’s one of the reasons I approved you for an Esley posting. But it’s not the only reason. Are you dying for a shit-shower-and-shave, or have you got a few minutes?”

  “I have a few minutes.”

  “Okay. What you’re about to see falls strictly under the nondisclosure clauses of your contract. Can you keep your mouth shut?”

  “I have a Top Secret clearance from the U.S. Air Force. I mean, had.”

  “Come with me, then.”

  Pam clearly didn’t like Alice, although it was hard to say whether that was on general principle or her scintillating personality. On both of their scintillating personalities. But despite her disdain, Pam just as clearly needed something, and needed it badly. Was that something Alice could exploit?

  God, that sounded so ghoulish. And yet, there it was: Alice was here to do a job. Probably an unpleasant one—probably one that Pam would truly hate her for—but in the meantime she had to win trust and find weaknesses, until she and Bethy figured out exactly what needed doing.

  Pam changed direction and, after leading Alice through a lab and a kitchen and a hallway lined with doors that reminded her of the guest-room levels of the Marriott Stars, emerged into a comic-bookish chamber containing four transparent capsules—one occupied by an apparently nude, apparently hibernating human male. Except that the life signs monitor beside his head was reading all flatlines, and the capsule had insulation blankets duct-taped all over it, and there was frost on the inside of the clear plastic. Frost!

  “What the fuck?” Alice both exclaimed and demanded.

  “That’s Hobie Prieto, one of Derek’s pilot buddies.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “He’s hibernating.”

  “Jesus fuck,” Alice said. “He’s frozen.”

  “Nearly,” Pam agreed. “He’s packed full of proteins that inhibit crystallization, so his repair enzymes can stay in a fluid state. So, not really completely frozen. But his core temperature is minus two centigrade. If you dropped him on a concrete floor, he’d break.”

  “Jesus fuck,” Alice said again. “How long has this been possible?”

  “It may not be possible now,” Pam said gravely. “We still need to wake him up, and confirm that he’s healthy. And then . . .”

  “And then?”

  “And then I need you to put me in there.”

  Alice thought that one over for a second. The stonehearted part of her whispered that here was a perfect opportunity (again, handed to her) to get a problematic person out of the way. The medic in her whispered that it would be an interesting and educational process. But it was the simply human part of her that spoke: “I can’t ethically do that. You’re pregnant.”

  “I am,” she agreed. “And that’s the whole point. The future of humanity could be riding on this, and I can’t ask anyone else to take the risk. And the longer we wait, the greater the risks, which means it needs to be now. Your crewmate, Rachael Lee, was supposed to be our backup obstetrician, but she’s still under evaluation at TPS. Won’t be here for several months, if at all. Which means it needs to be you.”

  Alice let that sink in for quite some time, and when she finally spoke it was the human part of her again, with a petty complaint: “Jesus Christ. Is there anyone in this place who doesn’t want me for their fucking assistant?”

  Alice’s “apartment” smelled like a new car. Though smaller than her room at the Marriott Stars, it was about the size of an old minivan with all the seats ripped out, which was still pretty big by spaceship standards. It had its own private zero-gee bathroom, and a “bed” up against the wall to maximize space. There was room (though barely) for somersaults, as long as the inward-opening hatch was closed.

  Instead, finally alone, Alice did a quick visual sweep for cameras. Even with quantum optics, there was a limit to how small a camera could be and still capture, store, and transmit intelligible images. That size was about half a millimeter, so it took her about twenty minutes to search the room, and another twenty to search it again.

  When that was done, she dug out her “personal effects” and assembled her EMF detector. Disguised as a set of headphones, it plugged into the tablet computer she’d been using as a book reader for the past umpteen years, and would light up if it detected any electromagnetic field stronger than three volts per meter, whatever that meant. The room was of course full of electric fields (this was a space station, and it combined all the functions of an apartment complex, an ore refinery, a factory, and a huge electrical power substation), but by identifying and subtracting out the baseline fields, she was able to find the outlines of signal and power lines buried behind her walls. Other than the comm panel beside her dogged-shut hatch, she did not find any suspicious pinpoints that would mark a planted microphone or other sensor. And the comm panel was electrically dead.

  Experimentally, she pressed the single button situated beneath the speaker.

  “Hello?” she said into it.

  “Yes?” replied an inhumanly deep voice.

  “Who is this?” she asked.

  “I am Lurch,” the voice said, “the personal assistant.”

  “Oh,” she said, and let go of the button. The wires in the wall, which had lit up while the button was held down, went dead again. She swept the room a second time, still finding nothing. Of course, anything else that was currently switched off would register as null, so she briefly triggered an induction mode, to light up any wires at all, even in the off state. She did this very quickly, lest her own signals start raising suspicion. But that didn’t pick anything up, either. The comm button appeared to be a physical switch, connecting physical wires to a distant computer somewhere. Which was okay with her; she just wouldn’t press the button.

  Finally, she sprayed every surface with “body spray” from a pump-action bottle that had cleared RzVz inspection. She didn’t know exactly what was in it, but Dillon the CIA Guy had showed her how to use it during one of her ground-based training days, and apparently it would shut down certain kinds of microelectronics. Fortunately, there was no TV screen in here, or she might well have fried it.

  “Regardless of any precautions,” Dillon had told her, “you can always still be imaged by your near-field/far-field entanglement shadow. You can encase yourself in lead if you want, but the field shadow can never be completely hidden. Still, they won’t be able to make out fine detail that way. It’s not a popular imaging mode with Peeping Toms, for example.”

  So, reasonably confident she was unobserved, she assembled a pistol from her drinking straw and components of her hair clips, leg shaver, and the disk drive from her old-fashioned laptop. In training she had gotten to fire this weapon exactly five times, which was the number of shots she had available to her here on ESL1 Shade Station. “Make them count,” Dillon had told her. “Or better yet, don’t need them at all.” It fired electromagnetically accelerated, pea-sized capsules of plastic birdshot pellets—“probably nonlethal, but you never know.”

  The gun actually did still look a bit like a shaver, which would still look weird if anyone (or anything with see-through vision) spotted it in her pocket, but there was only so much she could do about that.

  Finally, she unplugged the EMF detector and plugged in her wideband entangled.

&
nbsp; In the texting app on her tablet, she pulled up a contact called TOMPKINS and tapped out the following message:

  I am in position. Initial situation promising.

  Expecting no reply, she turned the tablet off and put it away in a drawer, and then really did take a badly needed shower and an even more badly needed nap. Not a long one—Alice had long ago perfected the art of the catnap—but enough to get her brain in working order.

  After that, she fished out the tablet again and typed up a message to Igbal Renz, accepting his offer and promising to select a deputy within a day or two. Pam had put Igbal’s contact info into the tablet for her, so all she had to do was put his name at the top of the message and hit SEND.

  She didn’t expect a reply from Renz, either, but one came back almost immediately:

  Excellent. You have run of the station, anywhere you like. Check back in with me in a few days.

  Huh. Jesus. Was Renz trying to slit his own throat?

  4.5

  23 April

  ✧

  Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot

  Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1

  Cislunar Space

  Grigory had contacted Dona Obata through intermediaries of intermediaries—a murmured phrase, Russian mafia to Algerian mafia to Dona herself. A man like Grigory had friends all over the world, at all different levels of government and industry, and he had caught word about the deep-black-classified ESL1 interdict mission well before its participants had launched, and so, through layer upon layer of deniability, he’d put the question to her: “Are you amenable to parallel mission on freelance basis?”

  And when the answer came back affirmative, he’d had his people slip her an entangled ultrawideband radio handset, disguised as an old smartphone. All subsequent contact—and there wasn’t much—had been via that device.

  So now, months later, when the two of them were lounging in bed together in the brand-new, matching 3D-printed pajamas she’d insisted on ordering, Grigory was surprised when she pulled out the device and said, in English, “The French government has tried to contact me.”