On Earth, the younger Lords called him everything from a fossil to a Luddite, depending on which thesaurus the IC was running. His own granddaughter Genie Jr. lovingly called him “Big Bang Sam,” implying that he was old enough to have witnessed the birth of the universe.
All because I choose to witness the world—the cosmos, he corrected himself—with my own mind and senses, not the way a SimAI filters and interprets it.
Luckily, one of the few people who seemed to understand him was FBI Prime Director Peter Al-Kazaz. The sixty-year-old had been a field agent for Homeland Security, stationed in Dasht-e Kavir before the formation of the Middle East Confederacy. Living among nomads in the great Salt Desert of Iran, collecting intelligence, Al-Kazaz had learned the importance of spoken words, of gestures, of hesitation, of laughter, of the innumerable qualities that comprised actionable intelligence. The kinds of data Lord noticed with almost supernatural clarity.
“Everything else is a distraction,” Al-Kazaz had said before handing Lord this assignment.
Lord smiled inwardly. Kristine Cavanaugh seemed to understand him, at least a little. Or at least, she wanted to. And she was smart enough to know that Franco was a bit of a viper. He hoped he did get to spend some time with her before she left. Earthside, the dating options were mostly female vets from his old Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses squadron The Red Sabers . . . and those gals spent as much time reminiscing about the suppression of enemy air defenses during the War on Narcotics as they did making love.
Off-Earth you don’t even get that, he reflected. Everyone is a specialist, and none of it has to do with my area of expertise.
The corridor narrowed as Lord hurried along. He passed a series of long, wide planters made of highly porous clay: the sides absorbed the water to keep the distribution and balance of moisture stable. The bulbs had been created in a gravity-free environment, genetically trained to spiral around an imaginary plumb line for stability.
As he moved by, Lord gave a passing pat on the shoulder to a man working with the soil. The lean, rangy man did not pause in his labors. He knew whom the touch belonged to and simply raised a hand in acknowledgment.
The corridor ended in a bank of three cylindrical elevators that would accommodate no more than two people but compensated for any delay with a magnetic drive that sped occupants to their destination. The tight space forced occupants to embrace a central aluminum pole, as the elevator pivoted about its center of mass, aligning with off-plumb Coriolis acceleration in the whirling station.
“MIR wing,” Lord said as he entered the waiting lift.
“Directly, sir,” the voice-recognition elevator replied.
That told him there would be no intermediate stops.
It shot up and, with a trace of ceremony, Lord gripped the pole in the crook of his arm. As a small child, Lord remembered riding the subways in New York City. He couldn’t reach the overhead straps but he used to love the poles. When the cars weren’t crowded, he was able to swing around and around as the train moved. He even noticed, though he did not understand, the Doppler effect that made his mother’s voice seem to rise and shrink as she said, “Sam, don’t!”
The first time he rode the elevators in Empyrean, that feeling of euphoria came back so strongly that an ExoTech had declared him unstable and a potential menace. He’d had to explain the reason for the reading to Adsila, who had been touring the station with him before the other agents arrived.
“That sounds wonderfully . . . charming, sir,” the young woman had said, trying to be diplomatic.
“You mean old-fashioned,” he had replied uncritically.
“No, sir.”
He had smiled pleasantly. “I don’t need tech to read faces, Adsila.”
“Sorry, sir—in fairness, I’ve never ridden a subway.”
“But you’ve heard of them.”
She had answered uncomfortably, “From my grandfather. Once.”
“I see. Well, you know, I’ve upgraded countless things countless times in my life, and there’s one thing I’ve learned from that. There’s a big difference between an object that’s passé and one’s that’s an archetype.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lord wasn’t sure she understood, any more than he understood when his grandfather talked about a Mustang being a real car, not a solar-electric hybrid. But one day she would. Lord had studied the dossiers on all his people and they were smart, quick studies.
That was one reason he’d agreed to take this otherwise thankless political appointment where knives would be out for him from within the agency and without.
Lord emerged from the elevator and moved along the handholds to the Military, Investigations, and Research wing—if a series of small cubicles could accurately be called a wing. Labels took on an extra dimension of importance when they could dress up unpleasant reality. Jokingly dubbed the “military-industrial incomplex,” the center was located on the highest two floors so that scientists could use the microgravity at the station’s hub in their experiments and forensic work, and Lord could use it to help relieve his all-bone, original-cartilage spine. At present, the only other occupants of the wing were members of the Empyrean’s own security staff. They openly resented the autonomy of the Zero-G team and had little contact with them. Lord wondered if Colonel Franco would be looking into office space up here during his visit. Lord knew that the CIA wanted in, but had been blocked by Al-Kazaz grabbing the only available space; and he had heard that the DIA, NSA, Homeland Security, and other agencies did as well. But the FBI had persuaded NASA to give them first shot, partly because the other agencies were already spending a lot of money on the station’s SIC surveillance. The Empyrean was an expensive proposition, and the space agency needed that income to help run the station. The FBI had made a tactical decision to hold back in order to grab this piece of real estate.
In the accessway, the same lithium niobate sensors that relayed thoughts to the IC now captured a biometric encephalogram of Lord, invisibly affirming his identity. A door unbolted itself at the end of the passageway—a real wooden door, emblazoned with the familiar FBI logo. Behind it was a wide, three-storied circle of offices surrounding Lord’s central command center.
None of the team members acknowledged Lord’s presence with more than a look or a single nod. They were busy gathering data on the Japanese disaster.
Lord sat in the ergonomic, sculpted seat behind his desk. It felt good to sit and he both appreciated and disdained the fact that his artificial leg worked more efficiently than his real one.
He linked his IC into the operations center and looked up. Connecting to the system had given him access to a hovering, 1/100th-size, transparent, 3-D projection of the 1,022-foot space station itself, floating in a geosynchronous orbit, levitated by its solar sail above the West Coast of the United States. The private and public sectors were clearly tagged, as were the three docking bays—one of which was almost always reserved for one of the two shuttles, the Grissom and the John Young, moving in nearly constant rotation from the US Armstrong Lunar Base. Typically, that traffic consisted of robotic shuttles transporting helium-3 from the moon to power the space station’s second-generation aneutronic fusion reactors. Security scanners appeared as red dots; there were more than three hundred of them on the Empyrean, all of them feeding into Lord’s command. Also within the projection were figures representing each of Lord’s agents. The avatars moved as the people moved, colored according to rank.
Lord’s icon was purple. Agent Michael Abernathy, the IC tech expert who had assigned the colors, swore he did not know that purple stood for royalty.
“Why did you pick it, then?” Lord had asked him when he first saw the display.
“Newton placed it at the end of his prismatic chart, sir,” the thirty-one-year-old had explained. “It is a place of honor—”
“Or the ass end,” Lord said.
“That’s purely a matter of perspective, sir,” Abernathy had said defensively. “It is not mine!”
Lord had grinned. Many FBI veterans would have put him on that side of the grid. But some would not.
Lord glanced out at Adsila Waters, who stood at a desk facing his, but slightly below it. As Lord’s number two, she was expected to have eyes on him as well as the rest of the team. In a crisis, reading body language and watching for hand signals could save precious moments. Being alert to visual cues for stress, fatigue, and particularly inner-ear imbalance in space were also essential.
Lord saw that there were two ongoing investigations. One was the PAd, the other a new IR. The internal recon—triggered by a wayward profile picked up by the SimAI—would continue automatically and would alert them to any activity that fell squarely within their purview. Lord was always careful not to step on the shadows of Stanton’s security force.
“Update on Japan?” he asked Adsila.
“JORO reports that an underwater power facility sent a radiation alert point-four-two seconds before the lab went silent,” she replied.
“Likely causality?” Lord asked.
The answer came from boyish, ginger-haired Special Agent Ed McClure of the Laboratory and Space Science Division.
“We don’t know, sir,” McClure said. “World oceanic groups are working on it.”
“Was JORO responsible?”
“They won’t say.”
“Why?” Lord pressed. “Did they break the planet?”
“Either they don’t know anything,” McClure suggested, “or Tokyo wants to make sure they haven’t discovered a valuable new power source before they give it away.”
“What kind of power source could send the ocean into the atmosphere?” Lord asked.
“Localized null-gravity, antimatter . . . a host of theoretical possibilities,” McClure told him.
Lord shook his head. “Let’s destroy the world as long as we get the patent. All right. This IR matter?”
“Our chem-scan picked up a young woman trying to smuggle Star Dust in jewelry she was wearing,” Adsila told him.
Lord did not react visibly to the news but inside he was angry. Star Dust was developed by the military as a limited-use replacement for special-operations eyewear. A laboratory subcontractor slipped samples to black-market scientists and it became a go-to drug of the spacefaring young and wealthy. It allowed users up here, and under the right conditions, a glimpse of the dazzling near-infrared sky, brought out the glow and palette of otherwise unseen stars, born or dying in enormous cosmic clouds. Over a very short time it also destroyed the ability of the brain to perceive the visible world at all. The result was blindness or madness, sometimes both.
“Was there a potential buyer?” Lord asked.
Adsila deferred to Janet Grainger, who sat on her left.
“It appears to have been recreational, not for sale,” the thirty-five-year-old African American replied. “I’m in the user’s IC now, running down leads, seeing where she’s been.”
“Thank you,” Lord said.
He allowed his thoughts to linger on Grainger a moment longer. He liked and very much admired the former director of the Tampa field office, who had been Lord’s first hire two months before. She had regularly consulted on security matters involving Cape Canaveral, was passionate about the US space program, and was newly divorced. She told Lord that twenty-six thousand miles straight up was about how far she wanted to get from her former husband.
“Sir,” Adsila interrupted, “I’ve just received a coded signal alert from HooverComm.” She was referring to the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington.
“Details?”
She waited a moment more. “Not yet, sir. Just a stand-by from Prime Director Al-Kazaz.”
“Thank you.”
HooverComm had not sent a representative to the Empyrean for the ribbon-cutting. Lord assumed it was political: keeping their distance during the shakedown period, in case he screwed something up. That was one reason, he assumed, why not just the FBI but most of the major government agencies had failed to come up for the ribbon-cutting.
Or maybe Al-Kazaz or one of his deputies were afraid of getting space-sick, he told himself. Views of officials becoming ill during takeoff and reentry were favorite IC shares.
“Incoming,” Lord heard his IC announce.
Lord touched the air to receive. At once, Colonel Franco’s angry voice stabbed into his ear.
“Lord, you smug son of a bitch! Where is she?”
Lord didn’t have to ask who he meant. “Colonel, what are you talking about? Ms. Cavanaugh was at the party.”
“Cute.”
“You’ve lost me,” Lord said.
“I asked her to wait outside our room as I took an IC call,” Franco said. “When I ordered her back in, she didn’t respond. Are you two having a laugh at my expense?”
“That’s ridiculous. I left her there, you saw. She was walking around when I first saw her, she could have wandered away again. Or—she asked to see the station. I gave her a pass. Maybe she’s exploring it on her own.”
But suddenly, Samuel Lord didn’t think so.
“I don’t believe you,” Franco shouted. “I’m going to contact station security and have them—”
Lord closed the call, cutting him off. He all but launched from his seat.
“Adsila, stay on that HooverComm signal,” he said. “Janet, institute a code red for guest Kristine Cavanaugh.”
“Yes, sir,” she confirmed. “Full search.”
“Sir!” Adsila called after him. “Keep your IC on!”
Like a pilot signaling the deck crew, Lord pushed a thumbs-up as he flew through the door.
FOUR
A TIPSY KRISTINE CAVANAUGH tripped. Somehow, she landed on her face several inches behind where she started to fall.
She’d experienced her stumble at the top of a staircase that, rather than rising in a sensible straight line, curled upward like a butterfly proboscis—or at least she thought it did: it was difficult now to discern whether she was up or down, right or left. She didn’t know if that was due to the wine or the whirling of the Empyrean or both.
“Goddamn space,” she said, pushing up onto her hands and knees. She braced herself, placing one hand against the smooth, white wall, and looked ahead. “Goddamn Franco,” she added.
“Wait outside,” he had barked moments after they reached their small stateroom. “I have incoming.”
“Incommming,” she said, slurring. “What you have is nooo manners, bungho. You pay me to show off, not to . . . to be tossed aside. Ignored. Okay, then, I’ll shove off.”
The corridor looked like it was moving. The walls seemed to lean away from her, putting her destination, the elevator, farther away.
“Come the hell on, brain,” she said. “It was only two glasses.”
But it was more than just the drinks, she realized. What had Lord said?
“Cornwallis . . . canola . . .” Both of those references dropped into her range of vision. Neither was what she wanted. And then, “Coriolis,” she said triumphantly. “Coriolis cross-coupling.” She slurred again, repeating the term to herself. The IC still managed to conjure an explanatory animation of perilymph swirling around the inside of someone’s ear, causing a chaos of space-sickness in the vestibular system. She almost threw up right there, but gathered from the running SimAI tutorial that the contents of her stomach would trace a spectacular ribbon shape in the air, and the thought was helpfully sobering.
She shook her head in emphasis and the momentum nearly twisted her around. Standing, she put her right hand on the wall to steady herself, and continued toward the elevator. She reflected that Coriolis would make a lovely name for a little girl.
Kristine giggled as she walked forward. She was still battling
an invisible hill, now absurdly steep despite the floor’s perfect flatness. It was the greatest funhouse trick she’d ever seen. She tried not to think about the time she puked on the whirling metal cylinder ride at the state fair in Great Falls.
“You’re turning too,” she said to the station. “Aren’t you?”
Centro . . . no, centri . . . i . . . petally. “Centripetally!” she enunciated the word with a flourish.
The green light above the door indicated that the elevator was available for a passenger.
“Open, please,” she said, still braced on the wall.
She didn’t move. She couldn’t.
“Welcome,” the lift encouraged her in a cool gender-neutral voice.
“Coming,” she replied as she peered in. “Just let me . . . let me . . . do this.”
Kristine switched her right hand from the wall to the door frame to steady herself, then she swung in. The curved pocket door slid shut behind her.
“Destination?” the elevator queried.
“Home,” she replied.
“Your quarters?” the SimAI inquired, interpreting and identifying her voice. “You do not require my—”
“No, Elevator. Home-home,” Kristine replied as she gripped the pole with both hands. “I want to get the huke out of here. I don’t like the colonel any more. I don’t like this party.”
“Docking bay?” the SimAI suggested.
Kristine smiled and nodded. “That’s a good idea. I can have my bag sent up, right?”
“I will inform Station Services, and I will make a reservation on the next shuttle.”
“Thank you.”
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