Zero-G

by William Shatner

  “Which could be within days, weeks, or months,” Saranya said.

  Lord didn’t want to consider that possibility. “Would a nuclear strike take it out?” he asked.

  That question caused Saranya to stop. She looked at him. “No,” she said. “Dear God, no.”

  Now Lord stopped as well, though his heart began to race. “Why?”

  “The structure itself is fragile,” she said. “I’m not sure the device is in any shape right now to resist a hammer, in fact. But the odds of getting to the machine during a period of relative dormancy—and I stress ‘relative,’ since we do not know the machine mind of this thing—those odds decrease exponentially every moment, even immediately after an emission. And that’s assuming the strike could be timed that precisely, which it can’t be.”

  “What happens if that’s the game plan?” Lord pressed.

  “Is it?” Saranya asked.

  Lord’s expression was noncommittal.

  “We have seen what the device does when there is no threat,” ­Saranya said. “It just lashes out. We have seen what the Jade Star’s defense system does when there is a modest threat, like the Empyrean incursion: it creates small energy bursts. Those are actually created by SAMI. In this instance, in the nanoseconds between a massive nuclear detonation and actual impact, the device will sense the magnitude of the nuclear threat and it will have ample time to push back.”

  “Meaning,” Diego said, “—and here is your headline to your ­superiors—that it may expend itself in a final burst of neutrino glory. The planet and everything in orbit stands a good chance of being destroyed if the thing starts feeling protective.”

  Saranya gripped Lord’s arms. “Tell me we can stop this.”

  “I don’t know,” Lord said, moving with renewed urgency. “We’ve got to get back to the Empyrean.”

  Entering the command dome, they found First Officer Robert Landry stepping into his space suit and a short, fit woman with short-cropped white hair in an Armstrong moon base jumpsuit talking into a landline.

  Despite the pressures of the moment, Lord put his hand out to the pilot. “Bob,” he said warmly. “How is Captain Kodera?”

  “Recovering nicely, thanks.”

  Lord turned to the woman, who was just hanging up. “Lieutenant Commander Jørgensen?”

  “Trine,” she corrected briskly. “Commander Tengan has impressed upon me the urgency of the situation. You’re cleared for takeoff as soon as everyone is suited up, Director. I’ve got to get back to repairs.”

  “Thank you,” Lord told her, seeing in her face the same dedication, conviction, and savvy he had seen in her superior. But that’s all he had time to glean as Landry took them into the passageway that led to the shuttle hatch. The corridor was nothing more than a ribbed, transparent, pressurized tube with a short, descending staircase at the far end. The sections would be retracted after they boarded.

  As they approached, Lord could see that the runway at Armstrong base was nothing fancy: a rocky hole cut below the lunar surface with an open entrance on one side and an exit on the other. Airtight rooms on extendable arms allowed workers to service the shuttles. Save for this entryway, they had all retracted.

  Lord turned his eyes toward the John Young, a twin of the shuttle they had come in on. There was something both proud and sad about the lonely spacecraft—though Lord had always anthropomorphized flying machines. They had tics and personalities and he had always taken it hard when they failed to return from missions. Lord had once gotten a look at his psych profile, and there was a curious notation about how he “romanticized” aircraft. That had briefly put him on a watch list, air force shrinks concerned that he might be encouraged to go down with a craft rather than abandon it. They were right, but it was also true that Lord had never lost a crippled fighter. Somewhere along the way, that notation got buried.

  Landry boarded first. Saranya and Diego followed him, with Lord just behind. He was busy sending data to Tengan for when her IC was fully restored. As everyone took their positions, Lord texted Adsila on his IC.

  Al-Kazaz, he instructed. Priority one. Listen in, kill nanites.

  Acknow’d.

  Only the prime director’s voice came through to conserve power. “Sam, happy to hear from you.”

  “You may not be,” Lord said. “Is Washington planning to use the AIMS?”

  A hesitation.

  “Pete—I need to know, now,” Lord said.

  “Affirmative.”

  “They can’t,” Lord said, and immediately reported what Saranya had told him. His superior didn’t sound happy to hear the information.

  “Well, that’s a nuisance,” he said.

  “Seems pretty straightforward to me,” Lord said. “We have a plan. We can make this better, they can only make it worse. Even the White House should grasp that.”

  “If it were only the president,” Al-Kazaz responded. “They’re calling it the Dragon’s Eye.”

  “Who is?”

  “China.”

  “They’ve acknowledged the device as theirs?”

  “Not in a helpful way,” Al-Kazaz replied.

  That bit of information silenced Lord. Al-Kazaz took no pleasure in it.

  “The state president in Beijing, the Council, and the Central Military Commission of the National People’s Congress contacted the president to let him know that they had no knowledge of the actions of what they called ‘the exuberant patriot’ running the Jade Star, that they were unaware of the project until after it had started causing destruction, and that they are unable to contact him.”

  “But they didn’t condemn him,” Lord said.

  “No, they’re fence-straddling,” Al-Kazaz replied. “Beijing says that the device—whose existence they blame squarely on America—is endangering their space station. They want it shut down as swiftly as possible. If we can’t do it, and since they can’t do it, they’re prepared to position their patriot as a victim . . . and as a possible hero.”

  “Depending on how everything plays,” Lord understood.

  “Exactly. They can always say they were studying our device to try and find a way of terminating such a deadly weapon.”

  “Which wasn’t a weapon until they made it one,” Lord said.

  “Right.”

  Adsila had taught Lord a very useful Cherokee word concerning deer droppings, and he used it now. Al-Kazaz gleaned its meaning from his tone.

  “Listen, Sam, I don’t blame you for being upset—especially if Dr. May is correct. But what other option do we have? We can’t prove the Chinese knew what this was, can we?”

  “Not directly, not yet,” Lord admitted.

  “So there we are,” Al-Kazaz said. “If the United States doesn’t do something, even the wrong something, Washington will get blamed for creating technology it can’t shut down.”

  Lord was dimly aware of thrusters racing and the push of upward momentum as the Young lifted off from the field. The rough, dark wall of lunar substrata dropped away to reveal the clean, brilliant tinsel of the heavens.

  “Pete, if the AIMS explode, they may destroy everything north of the ionosphere,” Lord said.

  “I’m told the EMP will only— ”

  “It’s not just the nukes, it’s the device,” Lord said. “It may go haywire.”

  “I see. But . . . the operative impediment is ‘may,’ ” Al-Kazaz countered.

  “Okay, tell the Pentagon Dr. May says it will do that.”

  “You want me to invoke the opinion of a woman who’s on the short list of people they think may have leaked the data?”

  “She didn’t. I’ll prove it.”

  “I don’t think that can happen in time.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Lord said. The bureaucracy somehow managed, just then, to get even worse.

  “Pete, is there
anything you can do to stop them?” Lord asked.

  “Not likely,” Al-Kazaz replied. “Chaos is growing. After Tokyo and Aspen, everyone is terrified, waiting to see what gets destroyed next. There are already riots and people are paying a fortune for rides to ­Empyrean. The political and military leaders have to do something, and soothing words or one scientist’s equations won’t cut it.”

  Lord grimaced with displeasure. Al-Kazaz was correct: he had been away from Earth for a while—just long enough not to make impulsive, dangerous, stupid decisions based on public pressure.

  “Can we try to get the Joint Chiefs to at least listen to her before launching?” he finally asked.

  “Trying is easy,” Al Kazaz said unconvincingly. “Succeeding is the challenge. Especially when I’m not sure I disagree.”

  “How soon?” he asked Al-Kazaz hollowly. “How soon before they deploy AIMS?”

  Al-Kazaz replied without enthusiasm. “Look out your shuttle window,” he said. “You may be able to tell me first.”

  Adsila Waters was listening intently to the disturbing conversation when she received word that Levy’s shuttle was two minutes from docking.

  “Dr. Carter, would you meet Agent McClure at PriD2?”

  “Saw the message, on my way,” he assured her.

  That done, Waters reinstated the nanite eavesdropping. Ziv might as well hear this; it wouldn’t be a secret for very long.

  “Janet, AIMS launch is imminent,” she said. “Begin tracking.”

  At once, a map of California filled the space above their heads. As Grainger focused in on it, three-dimensional features began to appear—geology first, roads and buildings second. The view soared past aircraft, through clouds using thousands of satellite-, drone-, and ground-based images to create a seamless, live holographic representation. Vandenberg loomed large, visual access granted by the FBI-permitted software—and then they saw the silo. The maw was already open. It would be easy to mistake the nuclear missile for a vintage spacecraft. It was a brute of a thing, 220 feet high, with a round base and a tapered top. The base had several stunted boosters around a main thruster, with vectored nozzles as well as a sensor complex and robust orbital maneuvering system. These would be used to lock onto the target wherever it might be . . . or wherever it might move. Upon locating the target, four X50 warheads would roll out, their rockets would ignite and thrust-vector them straight to the sensed targets.

  “Missile data is protected by the same software we saw before,” Grainger said. “We won’t know its exact trajectory until it happens.”

  Adsila’s IC filled with interpolations of the target and the missile to suggest a possible route. It would follow a minimum-time trajectory, finding the target in a fraction of an orbit.

  “The nuclear bursts are likely to occur just beyond the demonstrated reach of the module’s self-defense system,” Grainger said.

  “How do we know that?” Adsila asked.

  “Washington asked and China denied any knowledge of a self-­defense system,” the AEAD replied.

  “It’s there,” said a new voice over the team’s ICs. “I can assure you of that.”

  The team in the comm smiled as one. “Agent McClure?”

  “Alive and thinking,” he said.

  “Doctor?” Adsila asked.

  “The quick-scan says he’s medically sound,” Carter replied. “He’s responding well to the oxypills.”

  “Well enough for duty?” Adsila said. A sports doping rage in the late twenty-teens, oxypills were called “the aspirin of the cosmos,” the cure all of space travel. The modified EPO hormone increased a person’s red blood cell count, boosting the body’s capacity to transport oxygen.

  “Agent McClure took quite a beating out there,” Carter said. “He’s wobbly but he’s mentally fit—”

  “I don’t want to miss this, Doc,” McClure implored.

  “—and I’m sure that physical uncertainty will be gone as soon as he returns to his station,” Carter added helpfully. “I’ll lend him an arm and update him on the way.”

  Adsila didn’t have time to debate the matter. She okayed McClure’s return to the comm.

  “What about Mr. Levy?” Adsila asked flatly, aware that he was listening.

  “He and his pilot are still onboard,” Carter replied flatly. “The CHAI graciously declined medical attention.”

  “Very good,” Adsila said.

  “Thank you, EAD,” McClure said. “I’ll be there—”

  Adsila heard a thump.

  “When you can walk,” Carter said. “He just propelled himself into the ceiling. I’ll help him back.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.” Her mind was already back on the impending strike. “Janet, let’s see the target up there.”

  The view of the silo shrank slightly and was joined by a floating image of the cloud-shrouded Jade Star planted amid a sea of apathetic stars.

  “Shuttle John Young coordinates,” she asked Abernathy.

  “Two hours, six minutes to Empyrean arrival.”

  Just then, the view of the silo seemed to catch fire. The entire image was suffused with a white-orange glow that rolled in all directions from the silo’s mouth, suddenly obscured by a tower of ivory-and-gray smoke through which the sharp point of the AIMS rose decisively.

  The silence in the comm was profound. It seemed a harbinger of things to come, of the dead quiet that would infuse a dead space station if the module reacted as Dr. May had predicted.

  “Director,” Adsila said as she rejoined Lord’s IC feed, integrating it into her own. “The AIMS is on the move.”

  “I saw,” he replied.

  The silence resumed. Carter and McClure wordlessly joined the others in the comm to stare at the AIMS as it rose through the clouds. In their ICs they saw the rising contour of Earth, watched the image zoom out until both the Jade Star and the pinpoint of rocket light were visible in the same picture.

  “If you were close enough, Director, you could ram the thing,” Adsila told Lord.

  That was for Ziv’s benefit. She hoped that he took the hint and at least tried to intercept. Lord himself shot the idea down.

  “I’m informed by the PD that there’s a manual override,” Lord said. “If the AIMS doesn’t detonate automatically, it will be triggered from Earth. They feel the radiation bath alone might be enough to stop it.”

  “It won’t,” McClure said. He finally downloaded the readings he had taken from the sled. Data flooded the IC of everyone in the comm. “That plasma cloud is like a trail of gunpowder. A nuclear spark anywhere nearby will likely set it off.”

  Lovely, Adsila thought. So there’s that too.

  There was a brief silence after which Lord said, “My companions agree. The missile has to be stopped intact.”

  “It’s traveling at twenty-five thousand miles an hour in the wrong direction for us to do that,” McClure informed them. “Nothing from here could snare it, not even Mr. Levy’s impressive net.”

  Everyone on the comm watched as the missile flashed once, vanished, and then one spark after another appeared in its place until there were four glowing dots—each moving faster than the rocket that had borne them aloft, all heading like fireflies toward the Jade Star.

  “Five minutes to impact,” Grainger said.

  “Agent McClure, you may have hit on it,” Lord said, sudden enthusiasm in his voice.

  The agent frowned, replayed in his mind everything he’d said.

  “Sorry, sir?”

  “Lord out—I’ll see you on the other side.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE INSISTENT IC pinging woke Dr. Lancaster Liba from a sound rest and a satisfying dream. One arm was asleep beneath him, so the Gardener raised the other to jab at his ear and answer.

  “Here,” he said groggily.

  “Lancaster, call
the highest-ranking official you know in Beijing, now, and have a Jade Star section jettisoned,” a voice ordered.

  Sam Lord’s urgent tone brought the Empyrean operative to full alert. “Sam, what’s—”

  “Fast!”

  “Okay, but—that’s big. What’s the ‘or else’?”

  “Everything in Earth orbit may be destroyed by AIMS warheads,” Lord told him. “That’s from Dr. Saranya May, who wrote the science they stole. The incoming nuke must be distracted.”

  “Incoming nuke?”

  “Lancaster, we have less than five minutes. Move it!”

  “Moving,” Liba said without a hint of resentment as he swiped Lord to hold. That would mute the director’s presence while allowing him to see everything.

  The SimAI in the Gardener’s IC began an automatic countdown clock at 4:45. Liba did not wonder, What the hell happened since I went to sleep? He thought, with frightening understanding, Space politics has finally grown up.

  The Gardener sat up in the stiff, narrow cot in his small residence adjacent to the agricultural center. He had already activated the FBI’s VerbAL—the all-language translation program he used for spying on Empyrean visitors—and was quickly fingering through his IC contacts.

  Four and a quarter minutes, Liba thought as unfamiliar anxiety raced through his system. The Gardener worked with soil and seeds. He didn’t do anything this fast.

  He stopped at the name Chang Kar-Leung. Memories returned of long, happy nights they had spent discussing the importance of foliage in one’s environment.

  “How can one even begin to address the relationship of feng shui, of wind-water, without the presence of plants and trees?” Liba had said.

  The two had fashioned an almost immediate bond and both men had remained in contact over the years at all times of the day or night—sometimes just to talk about bamboo. From the start, the agricultural professor—now minister—had nicknamed the American Hé Huā, “Lotus,” because of his ability to raise purity from mud.

  I wish that was the case now, Liba thought as he hit the man’s icon. As the clock closed in on the four-minute mark, it suddenly struck the Gardener that this wasn’t just another assignment to follow a dignitary around Empyrean or spike a tomato. The readout might be counting down the seconds he had left to live. Liba rose, went to a hydrangea potted in a corner, and sat beside it. He put the fingers of his left hand in the rich soil, dug them deep until he touched root. He did not want to die alone.