Zero-G

by William Shatner

  It was twelve hours ahead in Beijing. Chang materialized as he strode along a wood-paneled corridor lined with blossoming planters.

  “Sifu Hé Huā,” Chang said, using the honorific for teacher, “to what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”

  As he repeated, exactly what Lord had told him, Liba’s quiet but concise and dead-serious tone eliminated any pleasure in the call. Patriotism, party loyalty, and friendship collided hard.

  “What is the source of this information?” Chang demanded.

  There was no time to hedge, so Liba told him about Director Lord and Dr. May. The universe was obviously having a little laugh, bringing this back to Liba: he was the one who first told Lord about the scientist.

  “This decision to use the AIMS did not come lightly,” Chang said. “I was about to enter a conference hall to witness the results.”

  As Chang spoke, Liba kept hearing no in every word.

  “What you will witness is my death,” Liba responded bluntly. Another thirty seconds had passed. “Sigung,” Liba pressed, using the term for a teacher’s teacher, “the weapon on the Jade Star will destroy the AIMS, and all of us with it, to protect itself. Is there nothing you can do to help?”

  Chang whispered words that sounded like Nam mou san po. Liba’s translator didn’t pick them up, but he knew they meant “Oh, my great Buddha.” The minister’s next words were hollow and horrifying. “My friend, I do not have the authority to stop it—or, if I did, I lack the time to work through military channels.”

  “I understand,” Liba replied. “So, then—okay. I guess this is it. Thank you. Thank you for everything.”

  It wasn’t a ploy, or a play for sympathy. What Chang had said was the hard, harsh truth: there was nothing he could do in three minutes, fifteen seconds.

  The minister’s eyes were sad as he regarded his friend in the IC. “You are certain, Hé Huā, that both stations will be destroyed?”

  “If I had the science to back that up, I would send it,” Liba said. “I don’t. But we have the scientist who invented it, and this is her conclusion.”

  Liba saw a subtle shift in the man’s expression, his bearing. If Chang wasn’t directly involved with the creation of the device, as one of the nation’s highest-ranking scientists he would have been present for locked-door policy meetings. Chang must have known where the data came from. His fingers moved.

  “Assuming the circuits are still functional,” Chang told the Gardener, “the access code for the rockets that control the outermost module is the following expression.”

  A numeric sequence appeared in Liba’s IC:

  “Four?” Liba said. “An unlucky number.”

  “Not to a generation that rejects tradition,” Chang said.

  “That’ll learn ’em,” Liba muttered to himself. He also suspected some elders had approved it as well: anyone who knew the Chinese culture would never have expected them to use a four. It was the perfect disguise.

  “Sadly, I do not have the launch code to activate them,” Chang apologized. “It’s a two-key system; the military has the rest. Once you get in, you will have to find it on your own . . . somehow.”

  “Sifu, is there any way—”

  “There is not,” he firmly replied.

  “Ch’ih fu,” Liba replied, eschewing the translator. “Pray for blessings.”

  Chang signed off, a look of disappointment in his eyes. Liba understood why. Chang had put the lives of others above personal security. He had embraced friendship over ideology, erased borders in the name of humanity.

  A solitary minister had mutinied and had overruled the will of the Politburo. Whichever way this went, the agricultural minister would have to answer for that.

  Sorry, my old friend, Liba thought.

  Knowing that Lord would have already snapped up the data and gone to work, Liba sat on the floor, his fingers damp with humus, and wept into the leaves of the hydrangea. He too was praying—for Chang and for everyone whose lives depended on the team working with Sam Lord.

  “There is no launch code?” Dr. May exclaimed as Lord passed the numbers to both her and the Zero-G comm. “We can turn the rockets on but not fire them? What are we supposed to do, just press buttons?”

  “Whatever you do, you have two minutes, fifty seconds to do it,” Lord said.

  “The circuits on the Jade Star module are functioning,” Landry said in their ears. “Opened right up with this code.”

  “That’s good,” Lord said encouragingly.

  “Sam, it’s like we’re starting over,” Saranya said.

  “Agent McClure?” Lord said.

  “The code is an exponential statement,” the Zero-G scientist replied. “Start sending other raised or lowered powers.”

  “Diego?” Lord said.

  “Firing off exponentials of four,” the scientist replied from the cockpit.

  While the numbers flew spaceward, Lord peered out the viewport in the direction of the Jade Star. He saw nothing but the faint smear of the plasma cloud . . . and the terrifying pinpoints of light closing in, like unwelcome escapees from the asteroid belt. The clock edged past the two-minute mark.

  “Ras, I don’t think they’d carry it to the thousandth power,” Saranya said, tension in her voice as she played with the numbers. “We should probably try—”

  “Moving on to other integers,” Diego said.

  Terrible silence filled the cabin. There were ninety-five seconds until impact.

  “Lancaster, you still there?” Lord asked.

  “Here, Chief.”

  “Is there anything traditionally ‘Chinese’ that we should be considering?”

  “Yin and yang, completeness, fire and water—unity?” Liba replied, his voice stabbing at ideas. “Everything comes back to that.”

  “So if these numbers are half of something,” Lord thought aloud, “what’s the complement? What creates balance?”

  “Every equation, by definition,” Saranya said. “I’ve tried things with fours as bases, fours as exponents, fourth roots, negative fours. Nothing. I played around with the Four Exponentials Conjecture. Also nothing. Are we looking for an equation that plots the ideogram for the Chinese numeral si? If so, from the standard or financial character set? Does the equation itself have to have powers of four in it?” She shook her head angrily. “McClure, are you listening?”

  “Yes, and I think I got it,” McClure said suddenly.

  The others fell silent.

  “I was messing with some easier approaches,” he said. “Here . . . look.”

  Lord and Saranya both straightened. They watched as the agent began typing and the clock slipped under one minute.

  “Try this, written out,” McClure said, finishing the new expression:

  Diego punched it in, Landry sent it, and Lord turned back to the viewport. The stubborn familiarity of the lights remained, hovering in the darkness.

  And then, suddenly, with fifteen seconds remaining until impact, two dull white flares burst against the infinite blackness.

  Tse Hung was jerked awake when his entire office moved.

  At first he thought he had dreamt it. But then the area lurched again. There was an insistent humming in the porcelain-white walls, a vibration in the floor that ran up through the chair.

  The Jade Star is coming apart, he thought.

  The luckiest modules would burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. The others would become lost among the stars. His own? The power-­deprived SimAI did not anticipate that question by showing the exterior of the station. Tse had to bring up an image manually. As he did, the young man experienced an old, familiar sensation. He felt a little heavy.

  But it isn’t weight, he thought. He was being pushed back in his seat.

  The construction rockets had been activated: the module was in motion. That was confirme
d by the IC view. It had changed from before. The other modules of the Jade Star were still linked but they were in a different position. And in the glittering blackness he spotted four new stars arrayed like a diamond. No, they were asteroids—­large and getting larger by the moment. And they were coming toward him.

  Has the Dragon’s Eye turned on the station? he wondered. Or are they rockets fired by enemy ships?

  Not that it mattered. If just one of them bumped the compartment, grazed it, caused even the smallest fracture, the result would be decompression and destruction.

  Tse Hung felt the pressure against his body increase. The module was speeding up, keeping pace with the onrushing projectiles.

  The young man pushed himself to the floor. He tried to kneel but he fell face forward. That was fine: he could pray from there.

  “Merciful Ti-ts’ang,” he heard himself praying to the Buddhist Bodhisattva, “intercede on my behalf. Throw me from this bridge of pain. Deliver me into the river of reincarnation—”

  Tse’s body slid along the floor and tumbled to the wall. He settled on his back as the module raced ahead. His heart was thumping too hard for words to escape his throat so he prayed in silence. On his IC, the loyal assistant to Chairman Sheng watched as his office fled farther and farther from the space station, and the eerily iridescent aerogel cloud that surrounded it. The vision twisted again until all he saw were stars, countless numbers of them, and then his IC collapsed as it left the range of the Jade Star’s weak electronic signal.

  The air in the ejected module had quickly grown hot and thick, and he wheezed against the weight of his own carbon dioxide. The white walls turned a swirling, muddy black.

  And then, for the briefest instant, the module was white again. It was a silent, gleaming flash, not the eye of a dragon but the eye of a god.

  Then his lungs collapsed, his limbs bloated, his body burned through the last of the oxygen in his boiling blood, and Tse Hung passed into merciful oblivion.

  The man Tse had served shed no tears for him.

  Heroes do not merit tears but gratitude, Sheng thought, remembering his Party indoctrination as he floated toward his station’s engineering section—the heart of the Jade Star.

  Sheng had tried to reach Tse, who—alive or dead—would have remained at his post, awaiting instructions. The young man’s devoted attentions were needed now. But Sheng felt no remorse for failing to reach him, any more than he felt grief for the remains of the many crew members he had encountered—even though he had recognized each one. They had died in service of Mother China. And they had done it while boldly expanding her reach from the humble home of their birth to the realm of the divine process. Death here was a privilege.

  But Sheng had refused to dwell on that. He had to salvage this outpost, reclaim the reins.

  When Sheng felt the space station wrench, his struggling IC told him what had happened.

  Intentional jettison, translunar origin.

  And when he saw the hallways go pure white for the duration of a single heartbeat, his IC defined that as well: Rocket self-destruct, Earth origin.

  Sheng didn’t quite understand the reasons behind what had happened, though he knew that his station had been attacked and that the attack had been diverted.

  He hastily changed course and headed for his quarters, where he kept a pressure suit with its own oxygen supply. He passed a total of four living crew members, three of whom were working to restore functions or enter blocked rooms, one of whom was just floating and staring. Each acknowledged Sheng with a look, he looked back at each in return, and then he moved on.

  His quarters were intact. Since everything was bolted to everything else or secured with powerful magnets, that was no surprise. Drifting to his locker and donning the suit, he felt refreshed as he floated back into the corridor. He turned in the direction of the destroyed science section, bound for engineering.

  Even in this crippled station with a skeleton crew, the chairman felt empowered. Sheng considered that this feeling of superiority might be nothing more than a coping mechanism, a delusion, but he pushed it from his mind—he could do nothing about it even if it were.

  The explosion in the science module had bent the door to the engineering section, leaving it wedged open. Sheng pulled the panel hard and far enough that the corpse attached to the inside simply floated away, allowing the chairman to gain entrance.

  The room was blacker than space. There were no lights, no readouts, no light of any kind save a phosphorescent panel to the left of the door. The room had its own solar storage system, but it had to be activated manually to conserve power. Sheng entered an emergency code and, above him, six volumetric monitors popped on. His IC was also fueled and returned to full operation status.

  Sheng stared in grim appreciation at the images floating around the room as his IC plugged into still-functioning electronic hubs. One caught his attention. He pushed off the wall and drifted toward it. The display showed empty space where the command module should have been. He engaged his IC, ordered the image to run backward five minutes.

  Sheng watched as glowing specks came toward the plasma cloud that shrouded the Jade Star.

  American AIMS missiles, his IC informed him.

  Then he saw the command module rockets fire, separating it from the station. He saw the onrushing lights change course and turn toward the new bright, electronically active target.

  Diversionary maneuver, the IC explained.

  Sheng felt his heart grow full. Not for Tse, who could not have made this happen, but for his proud space station.

  My Jade Star is not a brainless chunk of space debris, but your bombs are, he thought triumphantly.

  Sheng slowed the image. The launch of his own command module into space had hijacked the attention of the American X50 missiles, which would not have been fed a precise vector—since the Jade Star was no longer moving predictably and was hidden inside the plasma cloud. But the missiles would have been fed a specific configuration: the known shape of a generic module of the Jade Star. The intact command module fit that programmed criteria better than the damaged Development and Research module. Like dogs, the warheads had turned to follow it. The science module had been spared.

  Sheng watched the replay with growing satisfaction as the hope of America, the four lights, grew brighter then duller and duller until their rockets winked out. Taking the bait had caused the rockets to exceed their structural limits until they broke apart harmlessly, far from the Jade Star, destroying only the heroically jettisoned command module.

  The chairman observed it all with a sense of satisfaction so potent even he found it disquieting. His shoulders shook once with laughter: the Americans might not even know they had failed, not yet. They wouldn’t be able to see anything clearly because of the ionized debris cloud.

  Sheng grabbed a support strut and, pushing off, sailed back toward the door. Safe in his suit, he headed in the direction of the science module, to the device, to the Dragon’s Eye. He would mount the serpent and ride it, repay violence with violence, only this time he would direct it at the heart of American power—as Beijing had always intended.

  He hadn’t gone ten meters into the corridor when he felt a familiar sensation in his stomach and spine, one that he had felt four times prior. Apparently, the Dragon’s Eye would not, could not, wait for its master. It had just opened a fifth time—more powerfully than before.

  He continued on his way, a proud father wondering where his ferocious child had turned its attention this time.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  WELL DONE, AGENT McClure. Very well done.”

  Adsila’s remark followed confirmation from Director Lord that the AIMS had exploded beyond the Jade Star and had not ignited the plasma cloud of debris.

  The other members of the Zero-G team, all present, gave McClure quiet congratulations—even Dr. Carter, who nodded in
appreciation after unplugging his med IC from McClure.

  “Just don’t push yourself,” the doctor warned. “It will take about an hour before you’re fully recovered from near syncope and benign paroxysmal positional vertigo.”

  As one, three other SimAIs defined the medical terms for “nearly fainted” and “dizziness.”

  At the same moment, there was an “all eyes” message from PD Al-­Kazaz. His face hovering before them—and they before him—he asked the team if anyone had picked up any data from the AIMS mission.

  “Very little, sir,” Adsila said. “We only know that the AIMS shut down, sir.”

  “The warheads didn’t explode?” Al-Kazaz asked.

  “No, sir.” She added, “The rockets missed their target.”

  “So the missiles were destroyed by PEAR,” Al-Kazaz said. Preventative Emergency Action Response was a fail safe system built into the electronics and triggered from Earth to keep wayward missiles from being snared by an enemy or destroying something else. “That’s probably why we aren’t getting anything from Vandenberg. They didn’t want very sophisticated, primed nuclear weapons swinging through the solar system. You have timing on that?”

  Adsila checked the telemetry. “The missiles were headed off-target for a full seven-point-three seconds after the anticipated impact.”

  “Helluva miss,” Al-Kazaz said. “Heads will roll.”

  “That is for certain, sir.”

  “Has Director Lord reported in since the blast?”

  “He has, saying only that the explosion took place.”

  “Why isn’t he on this call?” Al-Kazaz asked.