Zero-G

by William Shatner

  As Lord struggled to get up in the bulky suit, Christie jumped up and got into the buggy. The ERB officer would not be able to activate the elevator airlock—but escape to the lunar surface was clearly not his intention. Sitting in the buggy, the door flopping wildly, Christie drove straight at the grounded Zero-G man. His plan was to stop Lord, in case the director had not yet transmitted Christie’s identity to Armstrong.

  The fact that Armstrong command was certainly watching wasn’t going to help Lord. By the time they got here, he’d be crushed. And, being crushed, he would not be able to stop Christie from getting out with the data storage unit he’d placed in the buggy. Lord had no idea where the man might hide—or hide the data for any accomplices he had here.

  Lord managed to flip onto his back and tried to target Christie. But between the rolling cage bearing down and the man ducking behind the steering apparatus, Lord couldn’t get a bead.

  Unable to stop Christie or the buggy, Lord turned the weapon toward the concrete floor and fired. The shot hoisted him two feet from the ground and sent him rolling in the opposite direction. The buggy missed him by a foot. As he landed—hard—Lord saw Christie swerve sharply and turn back.

  In that moment, the driver’s side was fully exposed. Lord flipped onto his side and fired. The pulse knocked Christie into the passenger’s seat and the buggy continued forward—into a wall.

  The crash was mild but it was enough, in one-sixth gravity, to fling Christie forward into the cage. The rock-resistant panel cracked his helmet and knocked him senseless.

  A few seconds later, the cavalry arrived: Tengan and the two security officers. The base commander ran to Lord while the two others hurried to secure Christie.

  “We’re going to have to footnote our Tactics and Response manual,” Tengan said with admiration. “There’s nothing about using a Pulsor as a personal thruster.”

  “What can I say, I was born to fly,” Lord told her.

  Tengan made the Zero-G director stay where he was as a medical team was summoned. Lord had a clear view of the security officers as they placed a pair of 2Bs on Christie—“black bracelets,” handcuffs that not only restrained a prisoner but tapped into their nervous system through the IC. Thus restricted, Christie was left facedown on the floor.

  “Search him,” Lord said to Tengan. “There’s evidence.”

  Tengan gave the order to security. Gloved hands patted him down and retrieved the small metal tube Christie had removed from the buggy. The commander asked for it, and for an extra pair of gloves.

  While Tengan examined the tube, Lord accessed the prisoner’s base personnel file. He only got to scan it before the medic arrived. He was driving a buggy like the one in the Empyrean loading bay.

  “Technically, this is now the property of Armstrong Base,” Tengan said, still looking at the tube. “But you can probably do a better job on forensics and—hell, you earned it.”

  Lord accepted the tube and tucked it into a pocket.

  At Tengan’s direction, the medic crew went to Lord first. Kneeling on either side of the Zero-G man, the young doctor made a quick assessment of his condition. He swiveled to give Tengan a thumbs-up and then went to attend to Christie. The medic must have been confused to see his former colleague facedown and in 2Bs.

  The unconscious marine was in far worse shape than Lord. Broken leg bones were stabilized with slap-ons—magnetic splints—and his neck was placed within a sprayed-foam brace before he was lifted into the medic’s buggy and driven away.

  Tengan surveyed it all from a distance. Her expression made it clear that she was gravely disappointed to have been betrayed by one of her own people. Lord had never experienced anything like that and ached for the woman.

  “Help me walk this off, Commander?” Lord asked, as much to distract the commander as to help himself.

  Tengan walked over. “Would it do any good for me to order you to wait for the medicar to come back?”

  “We need to figure out how to stop the SAMI as well as the person who did this,” Lord said. “Your man has allies, maybe here. You and I both want them, ASAP.”

  There was more than just a sense of assistance when Tengan offered a hand.

  “Any idea who they are?” the commander asked.

  “That item you recovered may tell us that,” Lord said, pushing from the ground. “There’s nothing in Christie’s file about his having a tech background.” He rose with an audible oof. Tengan kept her hand clasped tight on Lord’s until she was sure the man could stand.

  “I’m okay.” Lord smiled. “It’s that damned virile CHAI leg of mine. Forces the rest of me to keep up.”

  “You just took down a man one-third your age who was fully acclimated to lunar gravity,” Tengan said. “You’re allowed to— ”

  “Wait!” Lord interrupted.

  Tengan fell silent. The Zero-G man felt something in his cyborg leg—a vibration. His eyes narrowed with curiosity. He wondered if it were some kind of fluid reaction, an uneven flow caused by shock ­combined with one-sixth gravity.

  And then the trembling sensation moved up his spine. He looked quickly, knowingly at Tengan.

  “Hang it!” the base commander started to shout as the entire area began to shake. She pushed Lord ahead of her. “Out of the bay!” she yelled. “Fast!”

  Chairman Sheng not only felt the shuddering blast, he saw it through the viewport in the module. As before, the flash was the color of translucent flesh, with a tiny core of blackness—like a dragon’s eye, he thought.

  A dragon he had ordered Dr. Lung to wake.

  Where was this one headed? His confused mind sought to make that determination. Earth was outside the viewport, so—this explosion had gone out into space, possibly toward the moon . . . he could not be sure.

  Floating before the viewport, Sheng tried to collect his thoughts.

  What has happened?

  Parts of it were vivid, like Ku Lung being there one moment, all of the scientists hovering dutifully at their posts—and then gone the next. After that, with consciousness that came and went, Sheng had no idea who was there and who was not, who was alive and who was dead. He vaguely recalled seeing Dr. Hark’s face stretched across his vision, unsure as to whether the physicist was laughing or screaming.

  He recalled seeing sinuous red clouds—liquid red, the color of blood. He remembered faces without expression, without life, without bodies. He thought he had seen bodies without limbs.

  Sheng looked at his own hands hovering beside him. He turned them around. The backs were black, raw. He remembered shielding his face from that first explosion, the one that flung him through the weightless environment, bounced him behind a strut that must have saved his life—

  He glanced at his clothes, saw the fringes of his uniform that had been burned where the strut had not protected him.

  After the blast he remembered nothing until he found himself gently bumping his head on the door of the Development and Research Center; he remembered trying to open it, dimly recalled that it refused to yield—

  Decompression protocol, he thought as memories returned. That was the only reason doors shut on the Jade Star.

  I am suffering trauma, he told himself. I must recover. I am no good to my family or my country in this condition.

  Sheng turned to the door. He raised a trembling hand to a chain around his neck, pulled a card from within his tunic. He touched an unsteady thumb to the surface to activate it, then touched the card to the door. His Supreme Override Authority caused the door to slide open. Even if the rest of the station had been destroyed, if nothing but the vacuum of space awaited him, that panel would have slid back.

  Better to perish than to stay helpless in this chamber, he had decided.

  But Sheng did not die. Turning his face toward the opening, he saw bent and twisted halls filled with floating pieces of both str
uctural material and dead crew members. In the distance he heard rescuers shouting orders, the serpentine hiss of welding tools, metal thunking on metal. Louder and nearer he heard squeaking, like a child playing with a balloon—the sound of air escaping into space.

  He tried his IC. It did not respond to his touch. He wondered if Tse were alive and, if so, why his assistant had not come looking for him. When Sheng was just starting his career, nothing mattered more than the well-being of those he served—not even his family.

  I must get to my command quarters, Sheng told himself. Beijing would be expecting a report.

  The chairman turned and stretched toward an aimlessly drifting torso. He pulled it over with his fingertips. The lab coat was shredded and he tore away a sleeve to use as a mask. Pushing the remains away, he held the fabric to his face with one hand, used the other to grab the door frame, and launched himself into the battered corridor.

  Sheng passed bodies, all seemingly sleeping—whether unconscious or dead, he couldn’t be sure. Nor did it matter. In either case, they were beyond his help. Nor were they a priority. The words of a party leader came back to him, words spoken to Sheng when he was just starting his political career: “If there is one thing China has in abundance, it is people. They are as easily replaced as sand on a beach.”

  Even then Sheng had understood the implicit message: so was he, unless he made himself visible, unique, indispensable.

  Sheng looked out the cracked corridor window, the source of the leak. He saw the tips of the module defense system cannons above and below. Between them, both ends of the station were spread out before him, vanishing into a plasma cloud. The first and last modules were slowly and fatefully spasming toward each other, into the shape of a silvery Ourovoros Ophis—the ubiquitous symbol of a tail-eating snake, the forces of positive and negative that consume each other until they have no choice but to renew.

  Sheng clawed at an emergency oxygen station. They were legion around the Jade Star, marked by the red-knotted decorations. Behind each knot was a small sliding panel with a recessed platform holding a mask that slipped over the nose and mouth. A half hour’s oxygen was cleverly hidden in compressed-air tanks built into the mask itself. Sheng let the fabric drift away and pressed the device to his face, inhaling greedily, feeling the last of the clouds clearing from his mind.

  He now recognized where he was in the station: he was on the heavily populated side, the original foundational structure of the Jade Star. His office was not far. His IC sputtered weakly to life as it found a signal. It told him what he already knew: that the Jade Star was in crisis.

  Continuing his passage through the hallway, Sheng was encouraged almost to a smile by the thought of the Ourovoros Ophis.

  Yes, he told himself as he swam forward, pushing off the walls and ceiling. That’s what he would tell his superiors: We have achieved great power and we will now learn to control it. The station will be repaired, restaffed. We shall be renewed.

  They would understand that. They would accept that. Never admit defeat, never retreat.

  Mother China—and Commander Sheng—would move forward, even from this.

  TWENTY-TWO

  WHEN THE CHINESE module caused another black ripple in space and an orbital image of the moon’s Mare Crisium exploded in their ICs—appropriately, the Sea of Crises—the staff of Zero-G shared a moment of horror and the same chilling thought:

  Is that the location of Armstrong Base?

  Programed to anticipate relevant questions, the Zero-G SimAI assured them it was not: the base was in the north polar region, just beyond Mare Frigoris, the Sea of Cold. But when Janet Grainger was unable to raise Sam Lord, it became clear that the blast from the Chinese module had at the very least rattled the lunar colony. And at the worst—

  No, Adsila Waters thought. I won’t consider a fatal structural mishap. Not yet.

  “We are not receiving life signs,” Grainger added tensely.

  “Continue trying to raise Director Lord,” Adsila said. That was obvious, but she needed to say something, to insert humanity into an unthinkable event.

  Grainger acknowledged the order as Adsila continued to monitor the attempted recovery of Special Agent McClure. Ziv Levy was still en route, unaffected by the blast.

  Grainger had been on duty since the reception and was exhausted. Adsila was also running on sheer willpower, despite her brief rest in sick bay. She was still recovering from the lingering effects of the can she had inhaled, sore and weak from the rough sexual encounter with Ziv, and hurting from Dr. Carter’s intrusive removal of the nanites.

  The only other comm agent was Michael Abernathy, who, in stark contrast, was fully alert for the first time since arriving at the Empyrean two weeks before.

  The youthful-looking tech expert was the only team member who had expressly trained for space detail, the first to matriculate from the new and exhaustive Zero-G program. He had graduated at the top of his class at the FBI’s Quantico facility, spent two years with the astronaut trainees at NASA, then endured six months of sleep deprivation on urban stakeouts as well as weeks of survival training in desert heat and mountain cold. The San Diego native had aced it all, but that was not what had put him on Sam Lord’s team—or caused him to be energized here and now.

  Abernathy had spent a year in India studying Vajrayana—Tibetan Buddhism. In particular, he had used that time exploring the seven human energy centers, the major chakras. During his interview with Lord, Abernathy commented that he had a strong desire to prove how, in space, “the subtle winds of the body could flow unimpeded to the central channel of the body and bring off-Earth personnel closer to Buddhahood.”

  Lord loved the idea that a candidate could talk of “winds” in a vacuum and give it meaning. His response to a qualified man from whom he could clearly learn something was: “Welcome to Zero-G.”

  Abernathy had found it difficult, so far, to keep those chakras balanced. Since leaving Earth’s atmosphere, his spiritual side had refused to shut down, leaving him wide-eyed and occasionally distracted. It was one thing to contemplate the cosmos from Earth, as mystics had done since the dawn of humankind; it was another to plug that uppermost seventh chakra directly into the universe.

  Until today.

  Since Lord’s adventure in the cargo bay, Abernathy’s descending chakras—third-eye wisdom, vocal communication, heart-based concern, visceral strength—had finally come fully alive. When the surface of the moon erupted and Lord’s data vanished, Abernathy was the first to think to plug into the Armstrong shuttle John Young, which was in its lunar bay and had automatically switched to internal power when the base electricity went down. It had taken him a minute but he had located the vessel’s high-gain antenna.

  “EAD Waters,” Abernathy said, “Armstrong power is off, but—hold on . . . quick scan reveals thirty-four ICs in proximity of the shuttlecraft Young, basement level, still functioning.”

  “Director Lord?” Adsila asked.

  “He and Commander Tengan are not showing up,” Abernathy said, then added hopefully, “yet.”

  “Thank you,” Adsila said.

  While Abernathy gave Grainger the frequency, Adsila looked through the IC to see if there were any updates from Prime Director Al-Kazaz. There were none, so he punched Stanton’s IC. The ­Empyrean commander would be busy, she knew, possibly justifying the catastrophic recon to his cover-your-ass superiors earthside—but Adsila wanted to know anything else he might know about Armstrong.

  Adsila’s request to talk with him wasn’t just unanswered, it was blocked. She shut the nanite link to Ziv. “What’s going on with Stanton’s IC?” she asked Grainger with foreboding.

  The AEAD checked her sophisticated tracking tech. “Your message is being obstructed by military-grade tech,” Grainger reported with concern. “Point of origin—Washington, D.C.”

  “Then it’s not a debriefing,” Ad
sila said.

  “No,” Abernathy agreed. “That would be secured on this end using Empyrean software.”

  “It has to be the Pentagon,” Adsila said.

  The implications were not lost on them.

  “Damn,” Abernathy said quietly.

  “They’re prepping an Earth-based assault against the Jade Star,” Grainger said. “That has to be it.”

  “And the only way to do that is with the AIMS,” Abernathy added ominously.

  He was referring to the Asteroid Interceptor Missile System, developed to prevent collisions between planetoids and Earth. Launched from a silo at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, it was a nuclear cluster bomb consisting of four warheads that would disperse, explode, and obliterate any space rock up to one-quarter the size of the moon.

  “We don’t know any of this,” Adsila cautioned.

  “No, but if an attack is being planned, I don’t see any other options,” Abernathy said. “Except for a few old Scud-Fs on the Russian space station—all of which are pointed toward Earth—there are no other military assets out here.”

  “Would we even risk detonating nukes in space?” Grainger asked.

  “That could be what they’re discussing with Commander Stanton,” Abernathy said.

  “Let’s not speculate,” Adsila repeated.

  “I agree, but can anyone suggest another course of action?” asked a deep voice on the IC.

  The voice belonged to Dr. Carter. Though the Zero-G medic was stationed in the sick bay, he was plugged into all comm activities. “We’re faced with a weapon that has apparently shucked the reins of its makers and is spitting death by the gigaton,” Carter went on. “It must be destroyed at any cost.”

  “If it can’t be tamed, Doctor,” Abernathy said.

  “Agent, I am often accused of consistency,” Carter said. “I believe in aggressive, proactive approaches to threats, be they internal or external. There is apparently no time to rehabilitate that mechanism.”

  “Doctor,” Adsila said, “there are other factors in play. If the AIMS is fired, never mind us—but the Jade Star will be destroyed and any survivors killed. That would trigger a diplomatic crisis at best, earthside hostilities at worst.”