by Cixin Liu
A loud rumbling came from the launch area, strangely reminding Cheng Xin of the noise made by the Moskstraumen. The ground quaked and her legs felt numb. A great bright glow appeared in the launch area, and a shuttle rose into the air on a ball of flame, adding yet another column of smoke to the sky. A great billowing cloud of white fog flowed toward them, bringing with it a strange burning smell. The fog wasn’t generated by the engine of the shuttle, but by the boiled water from the coolant pool below the launch pad. As the launch area and the ships disappeared in the sweltering, muggy steam, people became even more agitated and anxious.
AA and Cheng Xin climbed up a slender set of stairs to board the shuttle. As the fog dissipated, Cheng Xin saw a crowd of children gathered not too far away. They appeared to be elementary school students under the age of ten, dressed in their school uniforms. A young teacher stood with them. Her long hair was buffeted by gusts of wind and she looked around helplessly.
“Can we wait a bit?” Cheng Xin asked.
AA looked over at the children and understood what Cheng Xin wanted. “All right. Go. We have to wait for our turn to get to the launch pad. It will be a while.”
In principle, shuttles could take off from any flat part of the ground. However, to prevent ground damage from the ultrahigh-temperature plasma generated by the fusion drive, the shuttles used a launch pad. The launch pad was equipped with a coolant pool and diversion channels to safely redirect the plasma.
The teacher saw Cheng Xin walking over, and came up and grabbed her. “This shuttle is yours, isn’t it? Please, please save the children.” Her bangs stuck to her forehead, and tears and condensed fog wetted her face. She stared at Cheng Xin intently, as if hoping to seize her with her gaze. The children came over as well, and looked expectantly at Cheng Xin. “They’re here for space camp, and they were scheduled to go up in orbit. But after the alert was issued, they refused to take us and sent others up in our place.”
“Where’s your ship?” AA asked as she walked over.
“It’s gone. Please, please!”
“Let’s bring them,” Cheng Xin said to AA.
AA looked at Cheng Xin for a few seconds. There are billions of people on the Earth. Do you think you can save them all?
Cheng Xin’s gaze did not waver.
AA shook her head. “We can only bring three more.”
“But our shuttle’s capacity is eighteen!”
“Halo can only seat five under maximum acceleration because it’s equipped with only five deep-sea-state capsules. Anyone not in a deep-sea state is going to be crushed into a meat pie.”
The answer surprised Cheng Xin. The deep-sea acceleration fluid was only necessary for stellar spaceships. But she had always thought Halo was a planetary ship and wasn’t capable of voyaging beyond the Solar System.
“All right. Then bring three!” The teacher let go of Cheng Xin and grabbed on to AA, terrified of losing this one chance.
“You pick three, then,” said AA.
The teacher let go of AA and stared at her, even more terrified than before. “How am I supposed to pick? How…” She looked around, not daring to meet the eyes of the children. She looked to be in utter pain, as if the gazes of the children burned her.
“Fine. I’ll pick,” AA said. She turned to the children and smiled. “Everyone, listen up. I’m going to ask three questions. Whoever gives the right answers first gets to come with us.” She ignored the stunned looks from the teacher and Cheng Xin, and held up a finger. “First question: Say we have a light which is off. After one minute, it blinks. Half a minute later, it blinks again. Fifteen seconds later, it blinks a third time. It keeps on going like this, blinking at intervals that are half of the immediately preceding interval. I want to know how many times it will have blinked by the two-minute mark.”
“A hundred!” one of the children blurted out.
AA shook her head. “Wrong.”
“A thousand!”
“No. Think carefully.”
After a long pause, a timid voice spoke up. The speaker was a gentle and quiet little girl and it was hard to hear her with all the noise. “An infinite number of times.”
“Come here,” AA said, pointing at the little girl. When she walked over, AA guided her to stand behind herself. “Second question: Say we have a rope whose thickness is uneven. To burn it from one end to the other takes an hour. How do you use this rope to track the passage of fifteen minutes? Remember, the thickness is uneven!”
This time, no child spoke up in a hurry, and they all fell into deep thought. Soon, a boy raised his hand. “Fold the rope end to end, and then burn it from both ends at the same time.”
AA nodded. “Come over.” She pulled the boy behind her to stand with the girl. “Third question: eighty-two, fifty, twenty-six. What’s the next number?”
“Ten!” a girl shouted.
AA gave her a thumb up. “Well done. Come over.” Then she nodded at Cheng Xin, took the three children, and headed for the shuttle.
Cheng Xin followed them to the stairs for boarding the shuttle. She looked back. The remaining children and their teacher looked at her as if at a sun that would never rise again. Tears blurred the scene in front of her, and as she climbed up, she could still feel the gazes of despair behind her, like ten thousand arrows piercing her heart. She had felt like this before, during the last moments of her brief career as the Swordholder, and also in Australia when Sophon had announced the plan for exterminating the human race. It was a pain worse than death.
The cabin inside the shuttle was spacious; eighteen seats were arranged in two columns. Since the cabin was vertical, like a well, everyone had to climb a ladder to get to the seats. Cheng Xin experienced the same feeling she had when inside the spherical spacecraft she took to meet Tianming—the shuttle seemed to be a shell only, and she couldn’t see where there was space for the engine and the control systems. She thought back to the chemical rockets of the Common Era, each as big as a skyscraper, but the effective payload was only a tiny capsule near the top.
She couldn’t see any control surfaces inside the shuttle, and only a few information windows drifted by. The shuttle’s AI seemed to recognize AA. As soon as she entered, the windows gathered around her. They moved with her while she went around securing the children’s and Cheng Xin’s seat belts.
“Don’t look at me like that. I gave them a chance. Competition is necessary for survival,” AA whispered to Cheng Xin.
“Auntie, are they going to die on the surface?” the boy asked.
“Everyone is going to die. It’s just a matter of when.” AA sat down next to Cheng Xin. She didn’t buckle her seat belt, but continued to examine the information windows. “Damn it. There are still twenty-nine launches ahead of us.”
The spaceport had a total of eight launch pads. After each launch, the pad had to cool for ten minutes before the next use because the coolant pools needed to be replenished with fresh water.
The wait shouldn’t have mattered much to their survival. The flight to Jupiter would take a month. If the dark forest strike happened before they arrived, it really made no difference if they were on the ground or in space. However, the problem now was that any delay might cause them to not be able to take off at all.
Society had already descended into pandemonium. Driven by the instinct for survival, the more than ten million inhabitants of the city swarmed toward the spaceport. The shuttles, like passenger aircraft during ancient times, could only carry away a small number of people in a short period of time. Possessing a private space vessel was like owning a private airplane, an unattainable dream for most of the population. Even with the space elevator, no more than one percent of the population could reach near-Earth orbit within a week. Those who could finally make the voyage to Jupiter would be one-tenth of that one percent.
There were no portholes on the shuttle, but a few information windows showed the scene outside. They saw dark masses flooding into the parking area. Crowds surrounded
every vessel, screaming with their fists raised, hoping to squeeze onto one of them. At the same time, outside the spaceport, some flying cars that had landed took off again. The cars were all empty, and their owners piloted them by remote control in an attempt to stop any more space launches. More and more flying cars gathered in the air, forming a dark, hovering barrier above the launch pads. Very soon, no one would be able to leave.
Cheng Xin minimized the information window and turned around to comfort the three children seated behind her. AA screamed. Cheng Xin turned around and saw a window that had been maximized to fill the entire cabin. In the window, a blinding fireball had appeared in the forest of shuttles.
Someone had begun to launch while surrounded by people in the parking lot!
The plasma emitted by the nuclear fusion drive was tens of times hotter than the emissions of ancient chemical rockets. When launched from a flat surface, the plasma would melt the crust instantaneously and spill out in every direction. No one could survive within a thirty-meter radius. The video feed in the window showed many black dots scattering from the fireball. One of the dots struck a nearby shuttle and left a black mark: a burnt-up body. Several other shuttles around the one that took off toppled, probably because their launch frames had been melted.
The crowd quieted. They looked up and saw the shuttle that had probably killed dozens of people lifting off from the parking lot, rumbling, dragging its white trail until it was high in the air, then turning east. They seemed unable to believe their eyes. A few seconds later, yet another shuttle took off from the parking lot, even closer to them. The rumbling, flames, and waves of superheated air threw the stunned crowd into complete panic. Then a third, a fourth … the shuttles in the parking lot took off one after another. Amidst the fiery balls of flame, burnt remains of bodies flew through the air, turning the parking lot into a crematorium.
AA watched the horrifying scene and bit her bottom lip. Then she waved the window away and began to type on another small window.
“What are you doing?” Cheng Xin asked.
“We’re taking off.”
“No.”
“Look.” AA tossed another small window at Cheng Xin, which showed the few shuttles around them. A cooling loop was located just above the tail nozzle of each vehicle. The loops were used to dissipate the heat from the fusion reactors. Cheng Xin saw that the loops of all the surrounding shuttles had begun to glow with a dim red light, indicating that their reactors had been turned on in preparation for liftoff.
“We’d better launch before they do,” said AA. If any of these shuttles took off, the plasma would probably melt the launch frames of the rest of the shuttles, causing them to topple onto the molten ground.
“No. Stop.” Cheng Xin’s voice was calm, but unwavering. She had experienced even worse catastrophes, and she would face this one with serenity.
“Why?” AA’s voice was equally calm.
“Because there are people around.”
AA stopped typing and turned to face Cheng Xin. “Soon, you, me, the crowd, and the Earth itself will all turn into tiny fragments. Can you tell which ones are honorable and which ones despicable in that mess?”
“Our values still hold, at least for now. I’m the president of the Halo Group. This shuttle belongs to the Halo Group, and you’re the company’s employee. I have the authority to make this decision.”
AA stared at Cheng Xin for a few moments, then she nodded and closed the control window. She also turned off all the other information windows, thus isolating the cabin from the mad, noisy world outside.
“Thank you,” said Cheng Xin.
AA said nothing. But then she jumped up, as if suddenly remembering something. She picked up the laser rifle from one of the empty seats and climbed down the ladder. “Keep your seat belts on. The shuttle might fall over any moment.”
“What are you going to do?” Cheng Xin asked.
“If we can’t leave, they can’t leave either. Fuck them.”
AA opened the cabin door, went out, and immediately closed the door and locked it to prevent anyone from trying to force their way in. Then she climbed down the stairs and began to shoot at the tail fin of the nearest shuttle. Smoke rose up from the tail fin, leaving behind a tiny hole about the size of a finger. That was enough. The self-monitoring system within the shuttle would discover the damage to the tail fin and the AI would refuse to initiate the launch sequence. This was a safety measure that couldn’t be overridden by those inside. The cooling ring around the shuttle began to fade, indicating a reactor shutdown. AA turned around in a circle and shot a hole through the tail fins of each of the eight shuttles around them. As the crowd was in total panic, no one noticed what she was doing amidst the waves of heat and smoke and dust.
The door of one of the other shuttles opened, and an elegantly dressed woman climbed down. She walked around the tail of the shuttle and soon discovered the hole. She began to cry hysterically, then rolled around on the ground. She tried to head-butt the launch frame, but no one paid any attention to her. All the crowd cared about was the door to her shuttle, which had been left open. They surged up the stairs and tried to squeeze into the shuttle that could no longer fly.
AA climbed back up the stairs and pushed Cheng Xin, who had poked her head out, back in. Then she followed and shut the door behind her. She began to vomit.
“It smells like … barbeque out there,” AA finally said after the heaves subsided.
“Are we going to die?” asked one of the girls, poking her head into the aisle from the seat above them.
“We’re going to witness a magnificent sight of the cosmos,” AA said, a mysterious expression on her face.
“What sight?”
“It’s the most impressive thing ever. The Sun is going to turn into a giant firework.”
“And then?”
“Then … nothing. What can there be when there’s nothing?” AA climbed up and patted the three children on their heads in turn. She wasn’t going to lie to them. If they could answer her questions, surely they were smart enough to understand the situation.
Again, AA and Cheng Xin sat down next to each other. Cheng Xin put a hand over AA’s hand. “I’m sorry.”
AA smiled back. It was a smile Cheng Xin was familiar with. In her eyes, AA had always seemed young, less worn down by the darkness of the world that Cheng Xin had experienced. She felt more mature in front of AA, but also powerless.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s all just busywork anyway. In the end, the result is going to be the same. At least now we can relax.” AA exhaled.
If Halo really were a stellar ship, then it would be able to get to Jupiter much faster than she had expected. Although the distance between the Earth and Jupiter wasn’t long enough for it to reach maximum acceleration, the whole journey should take only about two weeks.
AA seemed to sense what Cheng Xin was thinking. “Even if the advance warning system had been completely operational, we’d get at most a day’s warning.… But now that I’ve thought about it some, I think it’s likely a false alarm.”
Cheng Xin wasn’t sure if that was why AA had submitted to her authority earlier so easily.
AA’s theory was quickly proven. The PDC official who was also a member of the IDC called Cheng Xin to let her know that Fleet International and the UN had issued a joint statement that the alarm was false. No signs of a dark forest strike had been detected. AA opened a few information windows, and most of them were broadcasting the announcement from Fleet International and the UN. Outside, the unauthorized launches had ceased. It was still chaotic, but at least the situation wouldn’t deteriorate further.
Once the outside had calmed down a bit, Cheng Xin and AA exited the shuttle. The scene that greeted them was like a battlefield. Burnt bodies lay everywhere, charcoal-black, a few still on fire. Many of the shuttles lay on the ground while others leaned against each other. In total, nine shuttles had taken off from the parking lot, and their trails were still cle
arly visible in the sky, like sliced-open wounds. The crowd was no longer frantic. Some sat on the still-hot ground, some stood in place, stunned, some wandered around aimlessly—and everyone seemed uncertain whether they were experiencing reality or a nightmare. The police had arrived to maintain order, and rescue operations were underway.
“The next warning may be real,” AA said to Cheng Xin. “You should come with me to the back of Jupiter. The Halo Group will build a space city for the Bunker Project.”
Instead of answering her, Cheng Xin asked, “What is going on with Halo?”
“We’re not talking about the original ship with that name, but a new miniature stellar spaceship. It can seat twenty during planetary voyages, and five for stellar flight. The board of directors agreed to build it for you, and you can use it as a mobile office at Jupiter.”
The difference between a planetary spaceship and a stellar spaceship was like the difference between a ferryboat with a single oar plying a river and an oceangoing container ship with a tonnage measured in tens of thousands. Of course, in spaceships, the difference wasn’t merely a matter of volume—there were small stellar spaceships, too. Compared to planetary ships, stellar ships had more advanced propulsion systems, were equipped with ecological cycling systems, and every subsystem had three or four backups. If Cheng Xin really rode the new Halo into the shadow of Jupiter, the ship would be able to maintain her for the rest of her life, no matter what happened.
Cheng Xin shook her head. “You should go. Take Halo. I don’t participate in the day-to-day operations of the company, and it’s fine for me to stay on the Earth.”
“You just don’t want to be one of the few to survive.”
“I’m here with billions of people. No matter what happens, if it happens to several billion at the same time, it won’t be frightening.”
“I’m worried about you,” AA said, and grabbed Cheng Xin by both shoulders. “I’m not worried that you’ll die along with a few billion others, but that you’ll experience things worse than death.”