Zero-G

by William Shatner

  Don Christie excused himself as Tengan neared.

  “Deputy Director Sam Lord,” the base leader announced, her hand already extended, her voice traveling well ahead of her. Lord turned to meet her.

  She was a woman of medium height, about five foot five, but she owned the area around her. She did not bound, despite the lesser gravity; she walked with odd kicks, like little goosesteps, that moved her forward but not upward. She had a perfect smile, not insincere, that rendered well in IC phosphenes. She was a woman who looked better in the mind’s eye.

  “Magna job,” she said, grabbing Lord’s much larger hand, “just magna. Don’t let NASA tell you the FBI owes them a shuttle.” She leaned closer, conspiratorially. “We recycle everything up here—except people. And you saved my crew and scientist. What a feat. What a feat.”

  “It was a team effort,” Lord answered truthfully. “Dr. May came up with—”

  “You were in the pilot’s chair,” Tengan cut him off. “Anyway, there’s no modesty on the moon, Mr. Director. Not legal. This is the frontline of space and you’ve earned your spot in it.”

  Tengan turned to the scientist, who was busy unsuiting.

  “Dr. May?”

  “My departure was legal,” she said peremptorily.

  “Self-authorized off-world travel is permissible only in the event of a life-threatening medical emergency,” Tengan said evenly. “That threat was—?”

  “Fear for my life,” she admitted.

  Tengan’s demeanor shifted. The strong hazel eyes showed concern. “Elaborate, please.”

  “Can we do that later, Commander? I must get to my lab.”

  “For?”

  “Threat assessment and solutions,” she said.

  Before Tengan could respond, Dr. Ras Diego sprang from one of the adjoining tubes and approached in quick, arching jumps, a stride he had practiced during long hours spent outside the base at the external science station. The lean, almost antlike scientist stopped right before the taller woman.

  “How dare you leave!” Diego said, snapping at Dr. May. “You knew something like this could happen!”

  The woman looked like she wanted to bite back but checked herself.

  “That’s your work out there.” He gestured past her toward the egress port. “Your calculations are responsible for what happened!”

  Tengan felt Lord tense. The base leader placed a cautioning hand on the shoulder of the Zero-G leader and shook her head once. Whether Tengan wanted to let the challenge play out or burn out, it was moving forward.

  “Rasputin, that’s not true,” Saranya said dismissively. “My calculations would have worked, not gone spinning out of control. Anyway, I’m not interested in arguing. I’m here because we have to find a way to fix this. Together, if that’s possible.” She made a point of turning to the other two. “Director, Commander, Dr. Diego is referring to my work in designing a powerful electromagnet that would focus via transition magnetic moment, neutrinos like optical light. I had one purpose: to resolve neutrino sources in space, to understand the invisible preponderance of the universe. Full stop.” She made a tight, almost vibrating fist, her skin white. “But increase the field strength a little, and the flux density becomes enormous, the collision frequency becomes enormous, and, as Majorana fermions, the neutrinos self-annihilate in a perpetual antimatter explosion.” She looked to each face to make certain they understood. “But I armed my machine against itself, to ensure that we would never reach these field strengths. That safeguard is not present in the current iteration of my work. Whoever stole it”—she turned pointedly back to Diego—“has a much different application in mind for my SAMI. Or else they made it wrong.”

  Lord was still trying to understand the change that had come over the woman. Dr. May suddenly seemed on fire. That was partly due, no doubt, to what she had experienced on the way to the moon. Proximity to death often loosened caution. She also had to feel safer being home with Lord having her back.

  But the tension between her and Ras Diego was like jet fuel and fire creeping toward ignition. She clearly suspected him of wrongdoing. He seemed to mistrust her as well. Lord wondered how many people he had not yet met who were also a part of this network of mistrust—and which one had helped the Chinese create their weapon.

  Dr. Diego glared at the woman. “What do you propose to do, now that your research is apparently in the hands of an unaccountable adversary who can’t seem to—”

  The scientist’s charge was interrupted by an alarm that sounded loud and large throughout the Kevlar structure.

  “What is it, XO?” Tengan demanded into her IC.

  “Ma’am—the surge that hit the Grissom! It’s happening again!”

  SEVENTEEN

  PEOPLE IN ASPEN, Colorado, always regarded Jason Stillman strangely when he called his mountain retreat “my orogenous zone.”

  “Orogeny,” he would patiently answer their empty stares. “The process of mountain building.”

  Customers at his Air Fare Café—where the waiters were all mini-drones—would still look at him blank-eyed, uncomprehending.

  “It’s a play on ‘erogenous zone,’ ” he would go on. “The mountaintop is a place of happiness.”

  The peaks were actually more than that. They were a place of worship. Each Sunday, come deep snow or battering katabatic downwind, he rode his hovermobile five thousand feet up to the ridge he owned, to the log cabin he and his father had built. Through the thin, luminous air, the thirty-eight-year-old could see Elk Camp, Two Creeks, West Buttermilk, Snowmass Village, and Aspen stretched out before him. The postcard beauty hid the exhausting dynamic of the people, the pace, the interactions. Up here he communed with Latobius, the Celtic mountain god, whose adventures his father, Aengus, used to extemporize by a campfire. Up here he transformed to Nodens, god of the hunt. He foraged for his own food with a swift-kill laser rifle, and what he didn’t eat or store he brought back for a grateful, shrinking group of venison eaters.

  Until the moment came, Jason Stillman had been dressing a small, short-antlered deer the way he had been taught. He had hung his kill from a small winch and hook attached to the edge of his roof, just as his father had taught him. Though it was still afternoon, the sun was already blocked by the higher peaks; by the light of a solar-powered lantern he had begun gutting the animal, pausing only to haul buckets of water from the well to wash blood over the ledge. When he was done the remains would follow, a feast for scavengers.

  Jason Stillman lived up to his last name until his final few seconds of life. He stood, silent, pensive, his hands inside the deer, when his head rose, suddenly alert. He was experiencing a sound he had heard before . . . but never up here.

  It was a deep rumbling that he felt in his feet before he heard it with his ears. It was a sound well known on the ski slopes, the sound of cascading snow, the sound of an avalanche.

  He turned and looked up through the trees, a bloody hand shielding his eyes from the lantern’s glow. The sound grew loud, fast. It wasn’t just snow, it wasn’t that self-muffling roar. There were bangs, cracks, boulders falling, trees snapping. And something more, something foreign. A shattering sound, like a stack of plates crashing.

  And then he saw it. The dull sunlight turning gunmetal dark. A shadow falling forward, over everything, even the landslide itself.

  No longer frozen with indecision, he bolted toward the cabin. There was no outrunning the landslide but the structure had a meat cellar; if he could get there he might survive the first pass.

  But Jason Stillman did not get there. In his last moments of life, screaming from the assault of sound that broke his eardrums and rattled him like a tuning fork, he saw the avalanche cascading behind the cabin, then through it, not just snow and stone but countless points of light reflecting distant sun.

  It wasn’t possible, but there were diamond-like, fist-size sh
eets of glass sledging toward him like God’s angry hammer. He felt the slashing punch across the entire front of his body, was pushed back flat and buried with the deer, and moments later the two had been reduced to pulp and mashed into the Earth.

  The side of the mountain continued to slide, tearing up more and more of the peak as it rolled toward the foothills. But that was just the particulate matter. Behind it, driving it faster and faster, the entire top third of the mountain fell in a slamming, tumbling mass. It rocked the peak to its roots, ripped cracks in the Earth below, caused roads and homes and woodlands to vanish in sinkholes that joined to become a canyon that was buried as soon as it was born by the inverted stone pyramid that crashed on top of it—an absurd cone of rock jutting from the Earth like an otherworldly mesa. The fissures continued to radiate outward, not just here but along the entire Elk Mountains Range, where other peaks were sheared clean and had toppled to the ground.

  There was no organization to the new palisade that had been formed along nearly forty miles of valley and hillside, burying cities, towns, and ranches, crushing countless lives and infrastructure.

  It was not orogeny that had created a new range. It was a deed that Aengus Stillman might have ascribed to Fionntain—the god who put fire in the head of man.

  After a brief rest, Adsila Waters felt somewhat refreshed, somewhat relaxed.

  She was also relieved to be going back to her job, relieved to have the opportunity to reclaim her dignity after being played by Ziv Levy, and she was truly relieved to have the bugs behind her—literally. They were in a dish in Dr. Carter’s lab but they were routed into her IC. The doctor believed it was important that Ziv think they were still inside her, eavesdropping. The repetitive songs might suggest otherwise, but Ziv would not—could not—be certain they had been removed.

  “When you want to shut them out,” Carter had told her, “push the red tab I’ve inserted in your IC. That will cut the signal to the medbay. Ziv will still receive nanite impulses from here, just not whatever information you want to conceal. Don’t stay silent for too long,” Carter cautioned, “or he will suspect the truth.”

  Unfortunately, Adsila’s relief was short-lived. Returning to the comm, she learned of Lord’s near-escape in the Grissom, of Stanton’s plans to assemble a recon mission to the damaged Jade Star—and, almost at once, of a disaster that had reduced a section of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado to boulders and sediment.

  “Five mountains are gone,” Adsila told Lord on their IC link, “along with Aspen and most of the White River National Forest. Stanton has put the station on high alert.”

  “He’s not the only one,” Lord informed her. “Hold on, EAD. I’ll be with you shortly.”

  Lord left the link open so he would not have to update Waters. Still wearing his ragged pressure suit, Lord waited while Tengan ordered everyone at Armstrong Base to move at once to the lowest, deepest level of the camp.

  “That won’t protect anyone,” Saranya warned.

  “They don’t know that,” Tengan said. “I need them as calm as possible, not overtaxing the oxygen output.”

  Smart, Lord thought.

  “I’m not going,” Saranya insisted as the others turned toward a reinforced stairwell near the mouth of the lava tube.

  “You weren’t given a choice,” Tengan snapped, turning back.

  “Commander, we have to stop the next one, not hide from this one.”

  Tengan was about to speak when, to everyone’s surprise, Ras Diego stepped between them.

  “Dr. May is correct,” the scientist said softly. “You must understand, it doesn’t matter how deep any of us goes. Neutrinos cannot be stopped by other matter.”

  “What can stop them?” Lord asked quietly. He wasn’t usurping Tengan’s authority, his tone made that clear. He genuinely wanted to know.

  “The only way is to get that device out of commission,” Saranya said.

  Tengan’s jaw set, but her eyes shifted from the scientists. Lord could see the woman redirect her thinking.

  “Go,” she said directly to Saranya. “Get to work. Can he help?” She turned back to Diego.

  Saranya nodded.

  Tengan waved him on. Saranya was already striding quickly up the corridor.

  “Where are they going?” Lord asked.

  Tengan watched the two scientists for a few moments more, then turned back to their visitor. “The dark-side section,” she replied. “I’m going below to organize personnel and supplies in case we are partly incapacitated. I suggest you change into a radiation jumpsuit ASAP then join us. It may offer some protection like the shielding in the Grissom.”

  “Thank you,” Lord said. But that wasn’t why he had come to the moon.

  Tengan touched her IC, fed Lord directions to the locker room, then marched off with the lunar colonists, who were already making haste slowly: there was purpose but no panic.

  Lord was impressed by their efficiency. He was certain they had drilled for emergencies, but dry runs can never replicate the heart-thumping drive and disorientation of a real situation.

  He watched Tengan go, waiting until the woman had disappeared. Then, following the IC, he turned and started walking swiftly in the opposite direction from where he’d been directed. Before returning to his EAD, he brought up data on Armstrong.

  “I’m with you, Adsila,” Lord said, reconnecting his IC link. During the brief transmission delay he minimized Adsila’s face so he could concentrate on where he was going. He did not mute her eyes-on view of his situation, however; he might need help.

  As he walked, Lord’s eyes probed ahead, searching for more than just the changing facility. He flicked on the infrared sensor.

  “I see Armstrong is on Level Red status,” Adsila said.

  “The hive is humming,” he agreed. “Are you all right?”

  “Unchaste but chastened,” she replied.

  Lord was surprised and impressed by the candid admission. “We’ll talk later. Update on the disasters?”

  “All sources track at least the last two incidents to the Jade Star,” she reported, her eyes dancing across the ever-growing influx of information. “It was probably responsible for Japan as well. McClure, jump on?”

  “Here,” the Laboratory and Space Science special agent replied. “We weren’t certain about Japan, since the Jade Star was on the other side of the planet. But the burst seems to have cut through Earth, which is why it impacted the seabed first.”

  “A burst through the planet,” Lord repeated. “Dr. May was talking about neutrinos being able to pass through atoms, about antimatter and density—”

  “Dr. Saranya May, sir?” McClure asked.

  “The same.” There was no point keeping her identity a secret. With luck, she’d be showing up in his IC feed within minutes.

  “Her involvement explains a great deal,” McClure said.

  “What does it mean to you?”

  “Director Lord, the device she designed can, it appears, make a latent bomb from just about every square centimeter of the universe—”

  “How?” Lord asked.

  “Well, as I’m sure she’s explained, sir, when the neutrino flux density exceeds ten to the ninth giga electron volts—”

  “I mean the mechanism, not the science,” Lord said patiently. “Dr. May spoke of a ‘doomsday device,’ the SAMI, she called it.”

  “Melodramatics,” McClure said dismissively. “To answer your question, the SAMI is just an ogre of a generator with an on-off switch.”

  “One that appears to be malfunctioning and carving up sections of the Earth-moon system at random,” Adsila added pointedly.

  “At present, yes,” McClure agreed.

  “Any thoughts about how to fix it?” Lord asked.

  “Not one, sir, sorry.”

  “Thank you, Agent,” Lord said.
<
br />   McClure signed off.

  Just then Lord spotted two fuzzy red images in his IC. He hurried toward them in big, arcing steps.

  “The Jade Star is clearly in crisis,” Adsila continued her update, “but the Chinese government is denying culpability, refusing assistance, and will not consider an immediate on-site investigation by knowledgeable personnel.”

  Lord scowled, his pace increasing. This was nothing new. It was also not his concern.

  “The diplomats, scientists, and military can hash all that out,” Lord said. “Our job is to find out who made this possible.”

  “Janet checked finances,” Adsila said. “No one at Armstrong has showed an unusual bump in globals, stock, property, or services.”

  Lord wasn’t surprised. With privacy shot all to hell, criminals had taken to what they called Blackbearding: leaving cash in chests or under rocks like pirates. Still, it was worth a look. Sometimes criminals got careless.

  “Very good,” Lord said. “I want to know every possible benefit Rasputin Diego could gain from stealing or sabotaging Saranya May’s research, including a boost to his own research grant.”

  “Do you have reason to believe that he was in collusion with the Chinese?”

  “I don’t know. I want to. There may be intermediaries. Let me know when you have something else.”

  “Yes, sir. May I ask where you’re going? If I’m correct, the level-one bunker is in the opposite direction.”

  “You are correct,” Lord told her. That was all he said.

  Adsila did not press him.

  As Lord moved with increasing confidence and necessary speed through the lunar environment, he was surprised at how spare, how makeshift everything looked. He remembered the old joke that went around during the outpost’s hurried construction:

  “Armstrong Base wasn’t built in a day.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  The need to have a base that bookended the Chinese and the Russians with Earth-based assets was considered paramount; the funds were authorized and the plans were carried from theory to reality in less than three years. The main reason Empyrean was greenlit was to support the ongoing and expanding lunar efforts.