Energized

by Edward M. Lerner

  He glided hand over hand along one of the guide cables, just for the practice, to a catwalk far across PS-1. The powersat was too vast and thin to be mechanically rigid, and as Marcus flew along he sensed the immense structure bending and flexing. But that was impossible; the perception was—had to be—in his mind.

  To form and focus power beams required knowing exactly the relative positions of all the many thousand microwave transmitters. Sensor arrays detected PS-1’s every flexure and tremor. Electro-elastic fibers constantly tensed and relaxed under real-time software control, synchronized by any of PS-1’s four atomic clocks, to maintain precise alignment by damping out any vibration. And just in case the anti-trembling system failed, transmitters turned themselves off—not that PS-1 was transmitting—if independent accelerometers ever indicated that flexing had gone out of tight tolerance. It was another complex set of functions that Savvy would be testing another day.

  Another day in which he would be on call, floating around and watching. He wondered if the workers might let him help … with something.

  A robot labeled 3056 waited nearby, inert. Marcus tapped command codes into the wireless keypad strapped to his left forearm, but 3056 did not stir.

  “Thad,” he radioed. “Why can’t I get a construction bot to move? We’re all supposed to have sysadmin privileges for our inspection. That authorization should be more than adequate.” Because there isn’t any more privileged level.

  “You’d think.” Thad sighed. “I created new accounts for your buddies, but you already had an account up here. I never got around to upgrading your authorization. Sorry. Give me two minutes. Once that’s done, you’ll need to jack into a local comm node.”

  “Okay, thanks. And I should have remembered about using the local terminal.” Because these are serious bots, doing serious work, not toys like Val and I use to stroll about Phoebe. The wireless links to these bots were heavily encrypted.

  Marcus linked his forearm keypad to a nearby comm node with a fiber-optic cable from his tool kit. This time when he gave an order, 3056 scuttled away from him. He lined up four idle bots and sent them off onto a hundred-yard dash. Controlling them with codes was less natural than with the game-controller interface he and Val used with the Phoebe bots, but still easy enough. With his helmet camera he shot a vid of them scrambling, and mailed it to her. Thinking of you, the accompanying note read.

  On his return trip across the powersat Marcus peeked into supply depots and counted oxygen tanks, water bottles, and charged batteries. He sampled the pap—both varieties were foul—from his helmet dispensers. He tried and failed to perceive the functioning of the attitude system, thrusters cooperating to keep PS-1’s solar cells facing toward the sun. With a grin every time he looked overhead, he savored the ever-changing panorama that was Earth.

  After a couple of hours, he was bored.

  “Savvy,” he radioed. “Private channel three.” For no special reason, he waved at her. She waved back. “How’s it going?”

  “I’m still poking around, but so far, no surprises. As advertised, several critical functions for aiming the beam are hardware controlled. Beaming only works if the designated collection point radioed to PS-1 matches—in hardware—lat/long values preconfigured in a control-module port. And the powersat’s failsafe handshake with an aiming beacon at the authorized downlink point is all done in hardware, too.”

  “That’s all good, isn’t it?”

  “Outstanding, if it holds up. I haven’t yet emptied my bag of dirty tricks. Even though I’ve confirmed aiming is hardware controlled, there’s still some access from the ground. There has to be. To choose from among the authorized downlink sites. To start and stop transmissions. To initiate and read out onboard diagnostics. To control thrusters for orbital station-keeping and the eventual boost to GEO. I need to make sure that when using—or misusing—those few ground-accessible functions, I can’t get into anything else.”

  “To do what?” he asked.

  “Just let me do my job, okay?”

  A priority alert started blinking on his HUD, but he figured he could finish the discussion. A comm emergency override took that decision from him.

  * * *

  Dillon’s stomach gurgled and he thought maybe he would head to the gravity ring soon. Some guests spent their whole stay in freefall, but Dillon did not see the point in eating from a squeeze tube when minutes away there was a four-star restaurant at one-third gee.

  Soon, but not yet. Except for Maria Portillo, one of the women who had been on his shuttle, he had the northern hemisphere to himself and that hardly ever happened. Arms and legs fluttering, expending more energy than he cared to, she did slow laps through the air. With flippers on her feet, her long black hair loose and flowing, she brought to mind a mermaid.

  The only distractions were distant oofs and grunts. While the northern hemisphere was one wide-open expanse, nets and taut ropes ran every which way through the southern. Once you acclimated to zero gee, you could get a hell of a good gymnastic workout there; until then you could make your way through as though on monkey bars. Not coincidentally, arriving passengers disembarked their shuttles through the air lock at the hotel’s south pole.

  Earth shone through the wall. Dillon found it inexpressibly calming. If only everyone could experience Mother Earth this way, surely many more would fight the good fight to protect her.

  Whenever air currents nudged him to face south, the polo game came into view beyond the clear, curved wall. Hoppers darting. Tethered onlookers maneuvering with gas pistols to keep out of the players’ way. The strobing red balloon “ball” sailing hither and yon, now and again scoring through the illuminated goal loops sited at three points of the game triangle. Had another few people chosen to play, there would have been a fourth goal, defining a tetrahedron.

  The stupid polo game would not last forever. With a sigh, Dillon reached for the small gas pistol clipped to his belt—and his hand bumped someone. Twisting around to see whom sent them drifting apart. “Sorry, Maria.”

  “My fault.” Her English had a charming Latin accent. “I should watch where I am wafting.”

  “Where’s Adriana today? Outside?”

  “What happens in The Space Place stays in The Space Place.” Maria gestured at the nearest private bubbles, some of them set opaque. “Your colleagues, too?”

  “Maybe.” He changed the subject. Maria and Adriana had turned out to be high-ranking marketing execs at Bolivian National Lithium Company. He could handle getting some cartel money invested into Russo Venture Capital Partners. “I was about to head out for lunch on the ring. Care to join me?”

  “That would be very nice.”

  He offered a hand. With gentle puffs of his gas pistol he delivered them to the equator, to the webbing beside a door. She stowed her flippers in a mesh pouch. The inner ring was despun and they went, feet first, through the connecting tube onto an elevator car. They slipped their feet through loops on the car’s back wall. He pressed the panel marked OUTER RING.

  The inner door closed. Unseen circuits activated. Electromagnets in the elevator cars pressed against Earth’s much larger magnetic field, and the inner ring began to spin. The wall to which they had attached themselves became the floor. A progress bar on a wall display tracked their gradual spin-up.

  “After hours adrift, gravity feels odd,” she said.

  And it was not even much gravity. At max, on the outer ring, the spin simulated one-third Earth’s gravity. Spinning any faster, the Coriolis effect would have made many people ill.

  “Ding,” he announced, in unison with the elevator, evoking a smile. A floor panel slid open, and they stepped down the ladder in the connecting tunnel to the outer ring. What had become a ceiling panel slid shut, and a door opened in their tunnel. They walked out onto the central aisle of the outer ring.

  “Coming through,” a woman’s voice called.

  “Good day, Captain Aganga,” Dillon said, no matter that captain was a prete
ntious title for a hotelier. The long-term staff lived and, when they could, worked on the outer ring, where gravity helped maintain their bone mass. They still had to exercise, though.

  Their hostess was jogging toward them, in an odd gliding pace adapted to the low gravity. She was very tall and very dark. Sweat soaked her hair band, ran down her neck and face, and glued her T-shirt to an admirable physique. She blotted her face with a towel as she went past. “Mr. Russo. Dr. Portillo.” And then she was past them.

  “On to lunch,” Dillon said. He and Maria walked in the opposite direction to the captain, past machine shops, supply rooms, and engineering sections, toward the dining room. They encountered Jonas, wearing a sweatsuit, a towel draped over one shoulder, leaning against a doorjamb, phone in hand. Catching his breath, Dillon supposed.

  “Hello, boss.” Jonas saluted. Mockingly? “Maria.”

  “Hello,” they said.

  Maria followed Dillon’s lead and kept walking.

  Farther down the hall, they found Felipe also standing, also dressed to jog and holding a phone. “That’s two of you. Where’s Lincoln?” Dillon asked.

  Felipe made a crude gesture. “Occupied.”

  “Show some manners,” Dillon snapped, appalled.

  He and Maria came to the dining room. Chamber music played softly. Mozart, he thought. Something smelled wonderful. The maître d’ came scuttling up—

  And sirens began to wail.

  * * *

  In the tunnels of Phoebe and in the chambers, large and small, of The Space Place, loudspeakers came to life. Aboard every ship and within every spacesuit—around PS-1, too—every radio receiver flipped to its emergency channel. Everywhere, sirens wailed.

  Then the recording began, identical in every location.

  “Alert. Alert. This is not a drill. The Space Weather Prediction Center predicts a major solar event. Report at once to the nearest radiation shelter. Alert. Alert…”

  Wednesday afternoon, September 27

  Dillon and Maria swam from the elevator into the Grand Atrium—and chaos.

  “First things first,” he told her. “Spacesuits.”

  “Right.”

  They pulled themselves along ropes to the southern row of rooms. In the bubble next to him, the wall rippled and vibrated, frantic rather than erotic. Dillon said, “The fastest way to change is with a partner.” He followed her to her room and helped her into her counterpressure suit. In his room, she returned the favor. Each stripped naked in the process, and there was nothing erotic about that, either.

  The loudspeakers blared, and he recognized Captain Aganga’s resonant voice. “All guests are to put on vacuum gear and proceed to the southern air lock. This is not a drill. The elevators will cease operation shortly, once supervisors confirm evacuation of the outer ring. Proceed as quickly as you safely can to the south-polar air lock. Staff there will check your suits. Once outside, other staff will guide you…”

  The polo players and observers were mostly still outside. Through the clear walls of the Grand Atrium, Dillon saw a freefall scuffle break out over a stash of oxygen bottles, even as a hopper approached towing a fresh supply.

  “I don’t understand,” Maria said. “Why are we going outside into lethal radiation? I thought the hotel has electromagnetic shielding, that the whole place is a radiation shelter.”

  That had been explained, but he knew he hadn’t internalized all the bad news. He guessed she hadn’t, either. “I heard the captain say the shield generator has failed. We have to evacuate.”

  “To Earth?”

  From more than four thousand miles up? Anyone evacuating by escape pod would get a fatal dose of radiation long before reaching the ground. And—sudden intuitive flash—their safe evacuation to Earth could do nothing to advance Yakov’s plan. Whatever the hell that was.

  “I don’t know,” Dillon lied. “We need to get going.”

  Captain Aganga had been drenched with sweat from her jog, but Felipe and Jonas had been fresh and dry. Because rather than catching their breaths, they were lookouts. They had been keeping watch for Lincoln, the electrical-engineering wizard. Had EM SHIELD been a placard on a door between the two men? Dillon was almost sure it was.

  By the south-polar air lock, people had queued up. Some carried bags, small suitcases, or even, in one case, a backpack. Most, like he and Maria, had only the spacesuit they wore.

  He thought, We look like refugees.

  Aganga continued directing the evacuation. “There are too few staff to pilot all the hoppers. Any guest qualified to fly a hopper is invited to identify herself to the staff inside the air lock. Hotel personnel will assign guests to hoppers for the flight to Phoebe.”

  “Phoebe!” Maria shuddered. “That’s far. And off-limits.”

  Two hundred miles. “The depths of Phoebe are the only possible radiation haven we can reach. They have no choice but to accept us.”

  And that must have been Yakov’s plan! Somehow. Part of it, anyway. Dillon no longer flattered himself he understood his erstwhile “partner.”

  How could even Yakov plan for a CME to come shooting at Earth?

  Someone in staff livery came speeding by, and Maria grabbed his sleeve. She said, “Hoppers? Why not the escape pods?”

  “Sorry, ma’am. The pods do one thing: return to Earth if something goes catastrophically wrong.” (Something had gone catastrophically wrong, Dillon thought. As always, people had anticipated the wrong catastrophe.) “To keep the pods simple and reliable, that is all they can do. Once lit, the solid-fuel retrorocket runs till it burns out. The pods will deorbit; they cannot be used to maneuver in orbit. If you’ll excuse me?”

  “But I don’t want—”

  “That’s just how it is, ma’am.” Shaking off Maria’s hand, the hotel worker rushed off.

  * * *

  By the time Thad’s charges had regrouped at their docking posts, the evacuation of PS-1 was well underway. “We have plenty of time,” he had assured them, hoping he was right.

  They had the good sense to keep chatter to a minimum, or at least to use private channels among themselves.

  Forty tourists? Twenty hotel staff? Phoebe’s population was about to quadruple. It was going to be cozy in the shelter.

  Oxygen and water for the extra people would not be a problem; Phoebe produced those for The Space Place in the first place. But what else might they need in the shelter? Food. First-aid kits. Blankets. Flashlights and a battery assortment. Datasheets, because the CME could take hours to stream past. Critical spare parts for—he was not sure what, and hoped someone had had time to think that through. Counting only the staff, the number of toilets in the shelter was marginal. So: bunches of urine collection devices, and fresh piddle pads for the ladies.

  A CME could fry satellites and much of Phoebe’s surface gear. The bigger the structure, the more susceptible, to both charge buildup and induced currents. In theory, PS-1 had been designed to handle a CME. He guessed they would find out.

  The hopper garage was crowded by the time Thad got to Phoebe. Waving the inspection team toward the main air lock, he advised, “In you go. Anything small you guys may want with you in the shelter, get it now.”

  “Is there time to change into clothes?” Reuben asked.

  “Is there time to check messages?” Marcus asked.

  “You figure that out,” Thad said. “Just be inside the shelter in fifteen minutes.” Because in not much longer, the first wave of the Phoebe evacuees would descend on them. Soon after that Phoebe would emerge from behind Earth.

  Soon after that, the leading edge of the CME would burst over them.

  After cycling through the air lock, they grabbed Velcro slippers from the wall rack and scattered. Thad joined them in flouting the rule about keeping spacesuits near the entrance. He dashed to his own room to find the message-waiting light blinking on his comm console. Not forwarded while he had been out, he supposed, because the recall had put local networks into overload. He tapped D
ISPLAY NEXT.

  Take care of yourself. Cousin Jonas is coming. Your cousin, Jacob.

  This is not happening! Thad told himself.

  He yanked open the deepest drawer in his small dresser and flung the clothes from it into his hammock. With a nail file jammed into the crack he pried up the drawer’s false bottom. Beneath lay the parcel hidden for so long. He stuffed the parcel and fresh batteries into a tote bag, covered everything with a clean jumpsuit, and put the false bottom and wadded clothing back in their places.

  Then he sped to the main air lock. “Cousin Jonas” would be among the soon-to-arrive tourists.

  * * *

  Do not reveal yourself unnecessarily. The words gave Thad hope Yakov’s other agents would not reveal him if he cooperated. He might yet come through …

  Through what? He had no inkling, beyond something bad.

  Just inside the main air lock he found a frightened-looking crowd, all wearing red or yellow counterpressure suits: tourists or hotel staff. Helmets in hand, borrowed Velcro slippers crammed over their boots, they shuffled down the station’s central corridor into the station. Here and there an evacuee carried a suitcase or a pitiful satchel.

  Thad noticed three men in red at the rear of the procession, looking all around. Why had they caught his eye? Because they looked more composed than the rest?

  The chief had put on a fresh jumpsuit for the occasion. “This way,” he urged, waving evacuees down a cross corridor. “I’m Irv Weingart, station chief on Phoebe. Our deep shelter is this way. This way, people. I’m…”

  The shortest man among the trio fixed his eyes on Thad. “Cousin Thaddeus?” The man managed the Polish pronunciation, something Thad had only heard from a great aunt. “Is that really you?”