Zero-G

by William Shatner

  “Then answer the damn question.”

  Lord stubbornly regarded Stanton’s communications workers. “Can they speak higher math?”

  “Irrelevant. Why can’t she just dump it in?”

  “Two people put this together on slow ICs powered by a half-drained shuttle battery,” Lord said. “It has to be reconformed to your system and possibly tweaked—”

  “Jesus Christ, all right, enough!” Stanton cut him off. “God, Lord, you give me a pain.”

  Lord’s expression registered no insult, no anger. He simply waited.

  “Permission granted for you and Dr. May to enter,” the commander said after a moment, a hint of defeat, tinged with exhaustion, in his voice.

  “Commander, we will require Dr. Diego—”

  Stanton cut him off. “There’s only one channel to the Jade Star. Dr. May can have it.”

  Lord didn’t want to waste time arguing. He pointed at Saranya, who jumped forward. Diego stayed where he was. If a man’s posture could register insult, the scientist showed it. However, after exchanging a glance with Lord, he remained dutifully in the outer ring.

  Lord caught Saranya by the arm and helped her down.

  “Come,” Stanton said as he moved toward them.

  Both of the newcomers felt a slight electric tingle as they stepped up to the two floating communications officers.

  “Your IC outputs have just been put to sleep,” Stanton told Lord. “The only signals that leave here go through our equipment.”

  Lord knew that, and Stanton knew he knew it. It was a subtle reminder about who was in charge here.

  Lord and Saranya were introduced to Zoey Kane, who gave Dr. May the access code to her IC. That would enable her to send the shutdown command to the rogue module. As the communications pathway opened, Saranya and Lord exchanged looks.

  “Curtis, I need something else,” Lord said.

  The commander looked at him critically. “Have I mentioned that I don’t like one-man armies, Lord?”

  “It’s a lonely life,” Lord agreed, “but right now we have a solar system to save. And to do that, Commander, there’s one other thing we have to do.”

  “ ‘Have to’?” Stanton said. “Do you ever stop pushing? Your record shows nineteen infractions of articles 89–92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice—”

  “I’m over eighty,” Lord pointed out. “I’ve had time to break a lot of eggs, and all those accusations were eventually dismissed.”

  “Wait with Dr. Diego,” Stanton said impatiently. “I have a command to run.”

  “So do I,” Lord replied, “and I’ll go after you hear me out.”

  “Last time. You have ten seconds.”

  “Won’t need it,” Lord replied. “We have to move the Empyrean.”

  Stanton replayed the words in his head, then laughed. No other reaction was possible.

  “Get out,” the commander said.

  “He’s right, sir,” Saranya said. She was checking the figures she had scrawled in her IC, pausing them to make changes as they were off-loaded. “The angle from our current orbit is wrong.”

  “Angle for what?” Zoey Kane asked. “It’s a linear path.”

  “Only as the crow flies,” Dr. May said. “Even if we get through the plasma cloud with the higher-frequency antenna, we have to bounce the signal off Earth’s ionosphere or the surface, if the frequency gets too high—to align with the receiver, minimize cloud interference, and conceal the source as much as possible.”

  “A carom shot,” Lord explained.

  “Commander Stanton!” a voice broke in their ICs. “The Jade Star device is powering up.”

  “Direction?”

  “Nothing yet, sir! We’ll know in another few seconds—”

  The only thing moving in the secure communications wedge were Dr. May’s fingers, shifting between her IC and that of Zoey Kane. Lord moved over to the chair in which Saranya was seated, placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. She was still wearing her space suit but she felt his touch.

  Stanton could hear his own heart, his own breath. He had been in enough battles during the War on Narcotics and the Pan-Persia Occupation to recognize the Emergency Theory Response—what the medics used to call “fight-or-flight syndrome.” Early in his career Stanton had learned to cherish those breaths, those heartbeats, every stimulus his senses were delivering, keenly aware they could be his last.

  A moment later the voice returned with obvious relief.

  “Outward,” it said. “The blast is headed away from the Earth-moon system.”

  Lord looked at the time in his IC. “One hour, two minutes,” he said. “That’s when the last blast happened. Before that, two hours, five minutes. We may have that long until the next one . . . or we may have a fraction of that.”

  Stanton regarded Lord. “Where do we have to go to make this shot of yours?”

  “Dr. Diego worked out the coordinates,” Lord replied quietly.

  Stanton glared at Lord, then looked down at the scientist. He moved his fingers. “Dr. Diego—Engineering Station One,” he said, sending the scientist a map of the Drum and typing clearance orders to Chief Engineer Jimmy James.

  Diego stepped in and quickly sailed to the other side of the Drum. He stopped beside a man who was prematurely gray and visibly exhausted. The man seemed happy to surrender his position.

  Stanton turned to Lord. “You said you had somewhere to go, something to command?”

  On a visit to the Russian space station, the nationalist poet Smerdyakov described the Empyrean, then under construction, as “a wan golden flower turning against deep night, longing, helpless, for the sun-kiss to make it blossom.”

  Had the fiery Muscovite returned a few months later, he would have seen an Empyrean that was anything but helpless. He would have seen the station bloom and kiss not just the sun but the entire firmament.

  To adjust its orbit, the station was required to unfurl its vast ­Mylar-based solar sail. The nearly one-million-square-foot, ultrathin sheet was attached to the station by a row of six slim tethers, and these were attached to the base of a thin latticed tower that stood proudly atop the Empyrean. By coincidence, not design, the structure had the appearance of the sail on an ancient Phoenician round ship—civilization coming full circle, as NASA had once opportunistically described it.

  While the rest of the station had been created with practicality foremost in its design, the sail was, by its very nature, beautiful. Coated with liquid crystals of predominantly orange, yellow, and, especially, gold, the ultrathin sheet added and subtracted many other colors as it slowly moved.

  These colors seemed to have been streaked onto the sail by an invisible brush that remained endlessly, creatively active. The play of prismatic light made the sail look increasingly alive—like a butterfly, fresh from its cocoon, opening its wings. When direct sunlight and moonglow touched the sail, they created brilliant counterstrikes and dapples that gave the expanse additional animation. But light did not just give the sail its beauty, it provided the Empyrean with mobility.

  It was the position of this wheeling gold sail relative to the sun, riding its light pressure, that established the altitude of the space station. The first movement was always slightly jarring, as the tower moved counter to the spin that created the station’s artificial gravity. After those first steps, with their awkward fits and starts like a child just learning to walk, the Empyrean adjusted to the counterspin and began to rise or fall.

  As the Empyrean started to descend, following the coordinates provided by Dr. Diego, brighter and brighter light from Earth’s seas began to mute the brilliant hues of the sail, briefly washing them out—only to see them rise again as the sail shifted, maneuvering subtly.

  Lower and lower it went, the tower and sail defiantly still atop the turning Empyrean, facing the sun, glowi
ng with life.

  For those in the communications wedge, that was more than just a metaphor. At the moment, the microthin sail was all that stood between salvation and the slow destruction of civilization.

  On his way to the comm, Lord gave Janet Grainger a frequency and told her to lock on it. When she did, he and everyone in the comm found themselves listening to voices from the SIC wedge.

  “How did you do that, sir?” Janet Grainger asked when he arrived. Clearly, she was deeply impressed.

  “I put a jumper in Dr. May’s shoulder pocket,” Lord said as he entered the elevator and rode to the comm level. “Janet, I want you to get the IC address of Armstrong EMT Don Christie from NASA’s employee directory—and, working backward, track every communication that was sent to him from Earth, the Empyrean, or a shuttle since his deployment on the moon.”

  “What will I be looking for?” she asked.

  “Commander Tengan made an important find. I recognized it back on the moon. I want to know who gave Christie Project Implant technology,” Lord replied. “Agent McClure?”

  “Sir?”

  “See what you can dig up on that program,” Lord said. “It was a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency black-ops project circa 2030. They wanted to place data directly into the human brain, along with kill codes. I want to know where that research ended up. Don’t contact anyone, just look for files.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We just got the all-eyes alert that the Empyrean is undergoing an orbital shift,” Adsila said. “I take it from Dr. May’s comments to Stanton that this is our doing?”

  “It is,” Lord said as he emerged on the comm level. “Dr. May has a possible kill code, needs a better angle of attack.”

  Lord was just finishing the statement as he entered Zero-G headquarters.

  There was a slight lateral disorientation one way and then the other as the Empyrean began drifting to its temporary orbit. Lord stopped just inside the doorway and planted his CHAI leg hard; the artificial limb kept him from scudding in either direction. It wasn’t the metal core of the limb that stabilized him but the ability of the joints to lock firmly and remain that way.

  As soon as the space station stopped moving, Lord continued to his seat. He used the jumper to listen in to whatever conversation was taking place in the Drum.

  It was suddenly very silent. There was no point speculating why; he’d wait to hear.

  The Zero-G director saw Adsila shift to female just before he shut his eyes. They were tired, he was tired. He was still in his space suit, hot and perspiring. But his exhaustion was more than that. So much of his life had been spent watching air-to-surface and air-to-air ordnance; though he could ask Grainger to pull up exterior visuals of the Empyrean’s relocation, this time he wanted to just listen.

  “Upload complete,” he heard.

  It was Dr. May’s voice, low and thick.

  “Ready to send,” said Zoey Kane.

  “Engage,” Stanton replied quietly.

  There was no reaction from the Empyrean. No sibilant roar, no jolt as he felt in combat. The attack was a series of numbers, codes, data, fired to a receiver that had been instructed to stand still and take it.

  “Propagation angle conforms to predictions,” Dr. May said cautiously. “Transmission frequency exceeds expected plasma frequency, from electron density estimates. With any luck, we’re through the cloud and hitting the Jade Star’s SAMI module.”

  Then there was more silence. It was probably only two seconds, but it seemed much longer. Lord opened his eyes. The Zero-G personnel had not moved.

  Then Dr. May’s voice crashed through the silence.

  “Signal’s degrading!” she suddenly declared. “Anisotropies in the plasma cloud—”

  “Variations in the electron density exceed predictions,” McClure remarked. “The Chinese particle beam must have caused even more havoc in that region than we thought.”

  “What does that mean, Dr. May?” Stanton asked impatiently.

  Lord heard Dr. May sullenly reply, “It means, Commander, that there is no way to get our data in.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  DR. MAY’S WORDS hit the Zero-G comm like a battering ram.

  From the time Dr. May had first come aboard, all of their efforts, especially those of Sam Lord, had been focused on finding a solution. Now, no one seemed to know what was worse: the failure of the mission or the failure of their leader.

  But there were other words, words that had directed Sam Lord’s life since he first read them in a history book when he was eight. It was the story of American sea captain James Lawrence, who took command of the USS Chesapeake and sailed from the port of Boston on June 1, 1813. He immediately encountered the enemy, the Royal Navy frigate HMS Shannon, which not only crippled the Chesapeake but gravely wounded Captain Lawrence. Though dying, the thirty-one-year-old commander admonished his officers, “Don’t give up the ship. Fight her till she sinks.”

  Only the mission had failed. The Empyrean was still afloat and the crew still had fight.

  “Dr. May, Dr. Diego, Zero-G—I want a new plan, ASAP,” he said.

  “Lord? How are you talking to Dr. May?” Stanton demanded. “This area is secure!”

  “Not important now,” Lord said. “Dr. May, did your original neutrino research include designs for a structure to house your SAMI designs?”

  She was silent.

  “Dr. May!” Lord barked.

  She responded as though rising from a stupor. “No,” she said. “I refused to do that for exactly the reasons we’ve witnessed.”

  “All right, so the Chinese did it on their own. What would it be made of?” he demanded.

  “SMASH tech,” she said absently. “Shape Memory Alloy Self-­Healing. It’s a variety of smart metals that self-repair. You’d need those in a high-power energy system that would result in cracks and micrometeoroid damage, that sort of— ”

  “So it is not like a bank vault,” Lord said. “The housing is not inherently impervious.”

  “To the contrary,” she said. “It would be light enough, malleable enough to take the kind of recoil any weapon creates.”

  “Fine, good,” Lord said. “So far, we’ve been targeting the software. What we have to do is figure out how to destroy the casing.”

  “We were going to try that,” Stanton said bitterly. “Remember?”

  “We tried one way,” Lord replied. “There has to be another.”

  “Such as?” Stanton asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lord admitted. “That’s what I want to know from some of the greatest minds around. Doctors?”

  A more thoughtful silence engulfed the comm.

  “Engineering, return to standard orbit—” Stanton began.

  “No, wait!” Adsila said. “Wait.” She was looking at the sail in her IC, at the dilution caused by earthshine. “Director Lord, Commander Stanton—Dr. May. Native Americans and many other cultures used to communicate by mirror, flashing sunlight across great distances.”

  “Heliographs,” Lord said.

  “What do you want to do, blind the Chinese weapon?” Stanton said.

  “No,” Adsila replied. “I want to burn it. Using the sail.”

  The Zero-G director was looking at Adsila, who was looking at him. The silence that followed her statement was different from the others. There was an urgency beneath it, as everyone quietly raced through the steps—and dangers—this theoretical mission would entail.

  “Dr. May, won’t the cloud stop any kind of radiant flash?” one of Stanton’s people asked.

  “Not at all,” Saranya said with rising excitement. “Not sunlight. We can still cook them through the debris cloud.”

  “That’s probably true, but the plan itself won’t work,” Dr. Diego said after doing some rapid calculations. Lord had patched him
in through his own comm so he could hear what Dr. May was saying.

  “What’s the problem with it?” Saranya asked.

  “The angle is wrong, again. To face the device full-on, the Empyrean would have to drop to an altitude that would cause deorbit.”

  “Not necessarily,” Lord said impulsively. “Are we close enough now?”

  “Probably,” Saranya said.

  “Good. Then we cut the sail free, do it by hand,” Lord said.

  Stanton made an inarticulate sound, but Adsila was inspired.

  “We climb the tower,” Adsila said. “It could work.”

  “Just like that?” Stanton said with exasperation. “You climb a structure that was not designed to be climbed, then cut away the sail we use to maintain and adjust our orbit?”

  “I didn’t say it would be risk-free—” Lord began.

  “It’s potential mass homicide!” Stanton yelled. “If you corrupt our orbit, upset our stability, the Empyrean burns or shakes apart!”

  Lord’s own patience was slipping. “Commander, I would love to hear a better plan, I truly would.”

  “Dr. May has sent her data to several colleagues and we’ve forwarded it to NASA’s Advanced Situation Team,” Stanton said. “They’ve got people coming at this from different angles—”

  “Can they get us something in time, before that device kills another ten or twenty thousand people?”

  “You know I can’t answer that,” Stanton said. “No one can.”

  “Then we have to do this,” Lord said quietly, rising from his seat. “We have to try.”

  There was another silence. Lord had experienced this kind of quiet before: very still and very deep. It had the poignant echo of history behind it, of a dangerous commitment being made before a mission, where the outcome was uncertain at best.

  “If I okay this, are you planning to go out there?” Stanton asked.

  “It’s my mission, Commander. I always lead them.”

  “This isn’t the time for platitudes,” Stanton said. The next time he spoke his voice was softer. “You’ve been through a helluva lot today, Sam. You’re past eighty.”