Arkwright

by Allen Steele

  Yet Chandi seemed frozen. She was staring at the truck even as it raced toward them, her mouth open in shock. Matt followed her gaze and caught a glimpse of what startled her—the face of the driver behind the windshield: Frank Barton.

  “Go, mon! Get out of here!” A security guard suddenly materialized behind them; he shoved Matt out of the way and then planted himself beside the tractor’s bumper and raised the sonic in his hands. Other hollow booms accompanied his shots, but this was a time when old-style bullets would have been more effective; the truck’s windshield fractured into snowflake patterns from the focused airbursts, but it still protected Barton.

  “Chandi!” Matt had fallen to the unpaved roadside and lost his grasp on her. He fought to get back on his feet but was knocked down again by a fleeing protester. “Chandi, get—”

  Then a well-aimed shot managed to shatter the windshield and cause Barton to lose control of the wheel. The truck veered to the right, sideswiped the SUV, tipped over on its side …

  That was the last thing Matt remembered. The explosion took the rest.

  12

  Matt later came to realize that he owed his life to the guard who’d pushed him out of the way. That alone kept him from being killed when the gasoline bomb in the back of the stolen farm truck exploded. Matt escaped the blast with little more than a concussion and a scalp laceration from a piece of flying debris, but the guard had lost his life, while Chandi …

  In the days that followed, as Matt sat by her bedside in the Ile Sombre hospital where the blast survivors were taken, his mind replayed the awful moments after he’d regained consciousness. One of the first things he’d seen were two paramedics carrying away the stretcher upon which Chandi lay. His father had been kneeling beside him, holding a gauze bandage against his son’s head until doctors could get around to tending to the less critically injured. He’d had to hold Matt down when he spotted Chandi, unconscious, face streaked with blood, hastily being loaded into an ambulance parked alongside the tractor-trailer.

  Everyone said that she was lucky. Five people died that day: the security guard, three protesters, and Frank Barton himself. There were numerous injuries, though, and hers were among the worst. The force of blast had thrown her against the tractor’s right-front bumper, breaking the clavicle in her left shoulder and the humerus of her left arm and also fracturing the back of her skull. She might have died were it not for the fact that there happened to be a doctor on the scene who was able to stabilize her until the ambulances arrived. It was no small irony that the doctor also happened to be one of the protesters, and he’d put aside his opposition to the project in order to care for the wounded.

  The Ile Sombre hospital outside Ste. Genevieve was remarkably well equipped, staffed by American-trained doctors. Chandi underwent four hours of surgery, during which the doctors managed to relieve the pressure in her skull before it caused brain damage and repair the fracture with bone grafts. Yet she remained unconscious, locked in a coma that no one was certain would end.

  Matt stayed with her. He left the hospital only once to return to the hotel and change clothes before coming straight back. He sat in a chair he’d pulled up beside her bed in the ICU, where he could hold her hand while nurses changed her dressings or checked on the feeding tube they’d put down her throat. Sometimes he’d sleep, and every once in a while he’d go to the commissary and make himself eat something, but the next five days were a long, endless vigil in which he watched for the first indication that Chandraleska Sanyal was coming back to him.

  So he was only vaguely aware that the landing module had been unscratched by the explosion or that once it arrived at the space center, clean-room technicians had worked day and night to make sure it was ready to be sent to the VAB and loaded aboard the waiting Kubera. Although the New American Congregation had formally condemned the attack, no one at the project was willing to bet that there wasn’t another fanatic willing to try again. Matt’s father and grandmother determined that the safest place for Nathan 5 was in space; the sooner it got there, the better. The launch date was moved up by a week, and everyone at the space center did their best to meet the new deadline.

  The day Nathan 5 was rolled out to the pad, Chandi finally woke up. The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was Matt’s face. She couldn’t speak because of the plastic tube in her throat, but in the brief time before she fell asleep again, she acknowledged his presence by squeezing his hand. Then the doctor who’d responded to his call bell asked him to leave, and he went to a nearby waiting room, fell into a chair, and caught the first decent sleep he’d had in almost a week.

  Nathan 5 lifted off three days later. They watched the launch together on the TV in the recovery room where Chandi had been taken. It was still hard for her to talk, and the doctors had told him that it would take time for her to make a full recovery; Matt had to listen closely when she spoke. Nonetheless, when the Kubera cleared the tower and roared up into the cloudless blue sky, she whispered something that he had no trouble understanding.

  “Knew it … it would go up,” she murmured.

  Matt nodded. He knew what he should say. He was just having trouble saying it.

  13

  A week later, Galactique left Earth orbit.

  By then, Nathan 5 was attached to the rest of the ship, and Galactique had become a cylinder 440 feet long, its silver hull reflecting the sunlight as it coasted in high orbit above the world. Its image was caught by cameras aboard the nearby construction station and relayed to Mission Control, where everyone involved with the project had gathered for their final glimpse of the vessel they’d worked so long to create.

  Although the gallery was packed, with all seats taken and people standing against the walls, this wasn’t where Matt and Chandi were. At Ben’s insistence, Matt had pushed Chandi’s wheelchair to the control room itself, where he parked it behind his father’s station. His mother was there, and Grandma, as well. Seated in her mobil, Kate Morressy Skinner regarded the young woman whose shaved head was still swaddled in bandages with a certain reverence Matt had never seen before. At one point, she took Chandi’s hands in her own and whispered something that Matt couldn’t hear but which brought a shaky smile to Chandi’s face.

  The final countdown was subdued, almost anticlimactic. Although the mission controllers were at their stations, most of them had their hands in their laps. Galactique’s AI system was in complete autonomous control of the ship; the ground team was there only to watch and be ready to step in if something happened to go wrong.

  At the count of zero, tiny sparks flared from the nozzles of the maneuvering thrusters along the service module. Slowly, the ship began to turn on its axis, rotating like a spindle. Then, all of a sudden, long, narrow panels along Nathan 3 at the ship’s bow were jettisoned, and cheers and applause erupted from the men and women in the control room and gallery as the first gray-black panels of the microwave sail began to emerge.

  It took hours for the sail to unfold, one segment at a time, upon the filament-fine carbon nanotubes that served as its spars. As it did, the ship moved out of geosynchronous orbit, heading away from Earth and closer to the beamer. No one left the dome, though, and the control team watched breathlessly as the sail grew in size, praying that the spars wouldn’t get jammed or that the rigging wouldn’t tangle, which would mean that the assembly team would have to be called in. But that didn’t happen. Layer after layer, the sail unfurled, becoming a huge, concave disk even as the ship receded from the camera.

  Finally, the last segment was in place. The thrusters fired again, this time to move Galactique into cruise configuration behind the sail until it resembled a pencil that had popped a parachute. Once more, the thrusters fired, this time to gently orient the ship in the proper direction for launch. On the control room’s right-hand screen, a plotting image depicted the respective positions of Galactique and the beamer.

  A dotted line suddenly appeared, connecting the starship and the machine that would s
end it on its way. The microwave beam was invisible, of course, so only control room instruments indicated that it had been fired.

  A few moments later, Galactique began to move, slowly at first, and then faster, until it left the screen entirely.

  By then, everyone in the dome was shouting, screaming, hugging each other. Fists were pumped in the air, and Matt smelled marijuana as someone broke a major rule by lighting a joint. His grandmother was on her feet, pushing herself up from her mobil to totter forward and wrap her arms around her son and daughter-in-law.

  Matt stood beside Chandi, his hand on her shoulder. They said nothing as they watched the departure-angle view from one of Galactique’s onboard cameras, the image of Earth slowly falling away. Then Chandi took his hand and pulled him closer.

  “Still think … it won’t get there?” she asked, so quietly that he almost couldn’t hear her.

  “No. It’ll get there.” He bent to give her a kiss. “I have faith.”

  INTERLUDE

  Ghost of a Writer

  The ballroom of the Hotel Au Soleil was filled nearly to capacity when Ben Skinner walked in with his mother, wife, and son. This particular part of the hotel was seldom used anymore, but in the past, it had been the setting for the dinner parties and receptions of Ile Sombre’s wealthy seasonal visitors. Today, it was the location of another sort of event: Galactique’s postlaunch press conference.

  Looking across the rows of reporters seated behind a small forest of tripod-mounted cameras—the ceiling wasn’t quite high enough for minidrones, so Jill had requested that they not be used; flying cameras would simply get in the way—Ben was glad that his wife had decided to move the media briefing from the space center. There had been few enough reporters at the earlier launches for everyone to squeeze into a conference room, but when the foundation started getting flooded with requests for press credentials, it became apparent that Nathan 5’s liftoff and the subsequent orbital launch of the completed starship would be witnessed by a larger number of journalists.

  And this was even before the violent events of a couple of weeks earlier. The truck bomb had done more than take the lives of five people and nearly kill Matt’s girlfriend; it had also focused public attention on a story to which, up until now, relatively few people had been paying attention. Many of the journalists who’d flown to Ile Sombre for the launch had to camp out in the parking lot; only a lucky few had gotten rooms at the hotel, while others had been forced to scrounge for overnight accommodations at homes in Ste. Genevieve and the outlying villages, where the locals had made them pay even higher rates than the hotel.

  So the ballroom was to be the scene of the latest—but not the last!—act of a play that was taking generations to perform. Ben smiled to himself as he watched Matt help Kate out of her mobil and up the steps of the temporary stage erected at the front of the room. Perhaps it was just as well. Glancing over to the left side of the stage, he confirmed that the diodes of the holoprojector set up over there were lit. For this final press conference at Ile Sombre, they had a little surprise, and it would work better in a larger room.

  There were three mikes on the table, one for each person sitting there. Matt made sure that the mikes were active and there was a glass of water at each seat, and then he hopped off the stage and went over to the side of the room to stand near the door. The Arkwright Foundation logo was on the projection screen behind the stage; Jill stepped to the podium in front of it, and the murmur of voices gradually subsided.

  “Good afternoon, and welcome to the last official press briefing for the launch of Galactique.” As she spoke, Jill’s gaze moved restlessly across the room. “As before, any remarks made from this stage will be on the record. The exception will be responses made to individual questions from the press that are to be answered in private, and those will be handled on a case-by-case basis. When we get to the question period, please identity yourself and your affiliation, even if I call you by name.”

  Nods from a few people, but most gave her blank stares. The vast majority of reporters here were pros familiar with the protocols. “For those who don’t know me already,” she continued, “I’m Jill Skinner, senior media liaison for the Arkwright Foundation. With me are my husband, Mission Director Dr. Benjamin Skinner, whom you’ve probably already met”—Ben smiled and gave a quick wave—“and his mother, Kate Morressy, executive director of the Arkwright Foundation.”

  “Not to mention our son, Matthew Skinner, who’s been working with his mother at the press office.” Ben pointed over to Matt, who forced a smile but said nothing. The young man was embarrassed, but Ben couldn’t help himself. Matt had come a long way in the past few months on Ile Sombre, and Ben was particularly impressed by the way he’d stuck by Chandi when she was in the hospital. If your dad couldn’t brag about you just a little, then who could?

  “Um, yes,” Jill said, flustered that she’d been thrown off script but recovering quickly. “We’ve been having something of a family reunion. Glad you all could come.”

  Some appreciative chuckles, and Ben noticed several reporters jotting notes on their slates. He suddenly realized that this particular aspect of the launch would be a likely human-interest angle for the stories many of them would write.

  Jill returned to the business at hand. For the next several minutes, she delivered a rundown of the major events of the liftoff and launch, beginning with Nathan 5 clearing the tower and ending with Galactique deploying its sail, catching the initial microwave burst from the beamer, and leaving Earth orbit. Everyone who’d been in the launch control center had witnessed all this, of course; she was simply recapping them, supplying such details as exact times and technical names. She used the podium interface to throw flight data on the screen behind her and let the reporters download copies for themselves.

  “I’ll now take questions,” she finished. “Anything I can’t answer myself, I refer to Ben or Kate.” A half dozen hands were already in the air. Jill pointed to a middle-aged black man seated in the first row. “George?”

  “George Claxton, Reuters.” The reporter stood up as he spoke. “As I understand, Galactique’s mission control operations will soon be shifted to another location now that it’s been successfully launched. Could you tell us a little more about that, please?”

  “Perhaps my husband can answer that. Ben?”

  “Certainly.” Ben hunched closer to his mike. “Once we close down our operations here, command and control of the spacecraft will be taken over by the foundation’s tracking facility in New England. This is the former Juniper Ridge Observatory in Crofton, Massachusetts, which used to be owned by the University of Massachusetts until we took over the site and refurbished it. Juniper Ridge will receive telemetry relayed to it from the laser rectenna on the lunar far side, and our staff will continue to observe and communicate with Galactique while it’s en route to Gliese 667C.”

  Claxton grinned. “You’re going to be waiting quite a while.” This brought a few chuckles.

  “No doubt.” Ben smiled in return. “But Jill and I are already planning to move out there, and we believe that we’ll soon be joined by other members of our family.”

  As he said this, he couldn’t help but glance in Matt’s direction. His son didn’t say anything but gave his father the slightest of nods. Ben had told Matt that he was welcome to join him and his mother on Juniper Ridge and that if he cared to make his relationship with Chandi permanent, she would be welcome as well. Matt hadn’t yet given him an answer, but Ben had little doubt that it would be positive. It appeared that the boy was done with his wandering days and was ready to settle down, get married, and start a family. And the observatory, while somewhat remote, was the perfect place to do this.

  Jill pointed to another raised hand. A young Asian woman in the back stood up. “Liu Hsing, China News Service. Now that the foundation has successfully developed a microwave propulsion system for long-range spacecraft, does it have any plans to use this system for other purposes?” />
  Again, Jill deferred to Ben. “Once Galactique ends its acceleration phase 920 days from now,” he said, “we’ll be temporarily shutting down the beamer. However, we won’t be permanently taking it out of service, but instead will offer it for lease to commercial space companies interested in sending spacecraft to Mars and beyond. In this way, the foundation hopes not only to fund its operations at Juniper Ridge but also promote future deep-space initiatives.”

  Even as he spoke, Ben found himself saying as little as he could while still answering the question. There was already commercial interest in interplanetary beamships, yes, but also rumors that a few companies, including at least one in Hong Kong, were already planning to build their own beamers instead of leasing time on the foundation satellite. The Arkwright Foundation had done its best to protect its proprietary rights, but there was nothing to prevent competitors from building their own laser or microwave beamers from scratch or placing them in orbits closer than Lagrange points. So the less said, the better.

  “Jason Floyd, Associated Press. Are there any plans to press charges against the New American Congregation for their role in the attack on your vehicle?”

  Ben cupped his hands in front of his face to hide his expression. Every day since the attack, there had been questions from the press about that. It wasn’t hard to see that many of the reporters in the room wouldn’t have been there if Frank Barton hadn’t tried to ram Nathan 5 with a bomb-laden truck. From the corner of his eye, he saw Matt look down at the floor, and he was glad that Jill was here to handle that question. The tragedy was still fresh in everyone’s mind, but especially his.

  “Yes, the Arkwright Foundation will be pressing charges against the church,” Jill said. “We believe that they’re responsible for inciting one of their members to make the attack. However, on the advice of our legal counsel, this is all I can say at the moment.” She looked around the room. “Next?”