Zero-G

by William Shatner

  “I’m battle-tested,” Lord responded. “And I’ve had a nap.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Stanton said. “Duty Officer!”

  “Commander?”

  “Get me engineering! Chief Brenner!”

  “No, Curtis,” Lord said. “I want someone I know.”

  “Brenner knows the tower.”

  “Then have him at your window, on my IC,” Lord said. “I want a teammate, a partner. Besides, you’ll need your staff in here, a commander when the station responds to the sail being cut.”

  “Sam, Ziv Levy is still on board,” Stanton said. “Let me ask him to go with—”

  “Ziv Levy may not really care if my team makes it back,” Lord said. “For all we know, he stole Dr. May’s tech. Or Beijing may reward him for sinking the Empyrean. Should I go on?”

  Lord didn’t care whether Ziv was listening to Adsila’s IC through his nanites. If he were innocent, he’d survive. Mossad agents—and CHAIs—had very thick skin.

  “Goddamn intrigue on top of everything else,” Stanton said, loading the word with decades of frustration and loathing. “All right, dammit. How would you alter the position of the sail?”

  “Doughnut and spindle,” Lord replied.

  “That equipment will cause whiplash,” Stanton said. “Not just on the tower, the entire station.”

  “I know.”

  “We’d have to secure everything.”

  “Is that an order, sir?” Lord heard one of Stanton’s communications officers ask.

  There was a long pause. The delay was causing Lord’s heart to race, the small of his back to burn, his human leg to want to move.

  “Yes,” Stanton said slowly. “Stationwide and all private ICs.”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  Sam Lord stood anxiously awaiting approval; he wouldn’t go without it. Too many moving parts, literally, had to be steadied on board. An internal knock against the station could translate as external movement. If anything fell with enough force, he could be jarred loose and hurled into space.

  Finally, Stanton responded with a single word: “Go.”

  Lord bolted toward the door, pausing only long enough to look at Adsila. “EAD, you’re with me—if you want it.”

  “I want nothing more, sir,” Adsila answered.

  Lord smiled at her, then turned to Grainger. “Janet, the comm is yours.”

  “Yes, sir,” she replied.

  “And get me that other data,” he said over his shoulder as he followed Adsila out the door.

  “Still working it, sir,” Grainger assured him.

  Abernathy shook his head. “Fellow agents, there is a leader who knows how to multitask.”

  Zero-G stored its extra vehicular activity gear in lockers located at both the top and bottom of the central column of the Empyrean. The 250-foot-high fractal truss tower—the mast of the sail—itself was on “top.” Lord and Adsila went to the upper locker, nearest the public docking bay. There, Lord removed his lunar suit and replaced it with one that was station-specific, magnetically and electronically aligned with Empyrean engineering. The suit’s circuits would automatically plug into the ICs of all department heads—including the Gardener—in case he had ­specialty-specific questions.

  While Lord and Adsila prepared, they reviewed the topside construction in their ICs.

  “We can’t cut the sail cables on the bottom,” Lord said. “We’ll lose tension entirely. We have to get to the single mooring point on top of the truss tower.”

  “I see that,” Adsila replied.

  “You also see that there are no handholds anywhere?”

  “Yes, but if we put on the External Maneuvering Units, that will take another seventeen minutes and the bulk will also leave no room for the toolkit,” she said as the Empyrean suit enveloped her. “And then we each have twenty-four separate thrusters to watch out for. That close to the sail, to each other—”

  “A wrong turn by us or any movement from the station, and nitroburn may cause damage,” Lord said. “Reluctantly agreed.” He continued to study the layout of the tower. “We’ll walk to the center of the rotating base and ascend behind the sail.”

  “Think of it as a descent, not an ascent,” Lord heard the voice of Dr. Carter.

  “Self-delusion?” Lord asked.

  “Precisely,” Carter replied. “Only we call it eidolon orientation. Absent physical evidence, the muscles believe what the brain tells it.”

  “So I fool myself into thinking I’m falling.” Lord briefly went private as he finished suiting up. “You don’t really think I’m going to go out there and fool myself,” he said.

  “Not at all. It isn’t your nature.”

  “You just called to let me know you’re here.”

  “I did,” Carter admitted.

  Lord smiled. “Thanks, Doc. Thanks very much.” Lord returned to the schematic and all-stations IC. “We’ll either have to buddy up or zigzag to cross the gaps in the tower and the microexpanses.”

  “Affirmative,” Adsila said.

  The microexpanses were areas where the girders had been laid side by side to strengthen the structure. Though appearing to be solid, these areas were actually comprised of microscopic structures that were, themselves, miniature fractal trusses of enormous strength. They had been manufactured in space, where gravity couldn’t corrupt the iterative patterns. To a space-walker, these stretches were not only smooth as glass, they prohibited grips of any kind, having been sealed to protect them from microcollisions.

  “We should use the tether,” Adsila said. “It’ll take less time.”

  It will also put both of us in jeopardy if one or the other of us tumbles, Lord thought. The upside was, having more than one’s own life at risk always kept pilots on extremely high alert.

  “Sam, Commander Stanton is correct,” Dr. May said over Lord’s private IC.

  “About what?”

  “You really shouldn’t be going out there.”

  “Shouldn’t you be number-crunching?” Lord asked.

  “I am . . . we are,” she said. “But this is important too. You shouldn’t do this, certainly not just the two of you.”

  “I felt the same way about parenting,” Lord said, “but here we are.”

  “Children are resilient, one can afford to make mistakes,” the scientist replied. “Not here.”

  “True, but there’s an old air force axiom that I’ve always followed, how one plane, flying low, can be far more effective than an entire squad—”

  Lord bit off the last word. He hadn’t meant to invoke the destruction of the Empyrean recon mission, but it hit them both and moved them to reflection.

  “I know it’s pointless to debate with you,” Saranya said after a moment. “Just come back safe.”

  “I’ll do that, if you’ll do a favor for me.”

  “Of course.”

  “Stay in the communications hub as long as possible,” he said. “I’ll explain later.”

  “All right, Sam,” she replied.

  Adsila faced him. “You ready, sir?”

  “I am,” he told her, screwing his helmet into place and switching on the air. “Let’s get it done.”

  Loading a backpack with tools and chemicals they would need to cut through the cables, and dragging forty feet of polybenzoxazole fiber from the upright locker, Adsila hooked the coiled tether to their waists and, with Lord’s help, slipped on the seventy-pound bundle. Up here it weighed very little; outside it would weigh nothing.

  “IC check?” Lord said.

  “Reading,” Adsila replied.

  “Commander?”

  “We hear you,” Stanton said.

  “Please don’t let anyone adjust the sail while we’re out there,” Lord joked.

  To the teams watching on their ICs in the Ze
ro-G comm and from the Empyrean command center, the two figures, tethered at the waist, were like the baseball mascots for the Juneau Polar Bears: white exterior, inflated arms and legs, and a big bubble head.

  The view was more striking from the windows of the Drum. Several members of Stanton’s team were clustered on the side of the Empyrean where the upward-angled window afforded an expanded view of Lord and Adsila. The pair emerged at the base of the tower, well above the runway, on the small platform that enabled the sail to turn. It was stationary now, and the duo crossed it with light but careful steps; any deviation in the Empyrean’s position would flip them off the station. The tower itself would be even more treacherous: there, because of its steep Eiffel-like slope, their boots would have nothing to hold on to. Their safety, and progress, would depend on the precision of their handholds. Every step, every grip seemed tentative as they made their way up the sheer wall.

  And then the silence was broken.

  “The device is powering up.”

  Lord had been expecting the alert from Stanton’s communications officer. It had already been twenty-two minutes since the last blast, and the wait times between blasts had been diminishing throughout the day.

  The Zero-G leader was some ten feet below Adsila, who was picking her way up deftly but with understandable caution.

  Lord checked his IC. “Adsila, we have nearly two hundred feet to go. We have to move faster.”

  “We can’t separate, we need four hands up there—”

  “I know,” Lord said. “Stay as low as you can, I’m going to push off and leapfrog. When I land, you do the same.”

  “You have to go straight!” Dr. May shouted. “If you veer and don’t secure the landing—”

  “One of us may pull the other off,” Lord said. “Have to chance it.”

  Lord was already breathing heavily, his vital stats pushing into the red in his IC. They rose even higher when he jerked his magnetic gloves free of the truss, tensed his leg muscles—real and artificial—and pushed off with his knees. He watched the tether uncurl then stretch tight. The tug caused his forward momentum to stop and brought him down some thirty-five feet ahead of Adsila. He quickly snapped his magnets to the surface.

  “Secure!” he shouted.

  He felt a hard jerk at his waist as Adsila took off. He curled his boots slightly for added grip as she soared through the void. The tug was stronger than expected and he pressed his toes to the truss, relying on the boot magnets to give him an added hold.

  Adsila swung over him like a bolo and landed a matching distance ahead.

  Now they were nearly halfway there. Lord took off again. At that moment he mentally cursed and kissed Dr. Carter: this was easier if he imagined going down.

  The jumps were ugly and awkward, with imperfect landings, but the magnets and tether all held and they made swift progress.

  “How much time left till the huking thing fires?” Lord asked.

  “About a minute, if the previous timing holds,” Saranya replied.

  They jumped again, Adsila reaching the top of the tower first. Grabbing on, she leaned toward the three cables that held the top of the sail to the structure.

  “Get ready to cut the cable,” Lord said, his breathing rapid as he scrambled behind her.

  Through his darkly tinted visor Lord saw Adsila reach into her backpack and remove a doughnut-shaped object that could be snapped open and then shut. Inside was a so-called “piranha solution” of peroxymonosulfuric acid and ammonium persulfate, which would immediately dissolve the advanced carbons of the tether. She clipped it around the cable just as Lord arrived.

  “Power up at half,” the officer advised.

  Lord reached into her backpack and retrieved a device that resembled the spindle of a spinning wheel. Typically, it was used to hold the cables securely in place when they were undergoing maintenance. The purpose now was different—and untested. He clipped the top end to the cable, just beyond the “doughnut,” and attached the magnetized base to the truss. When the cable was cut, the center of the sail would snap free of the tower and form a parabolic surface; that release would cause the reel-like spindle to telescope out, creating an extension that would support the sail in a new position. Working the spindle keypad would allow Lord to raise or lower the sail as needed.

  “Declination twelve-point-nine degrees will do it,” Saranya said.

  Lord entered the code. Adsila was watching him, her finger on a red button atop the doughnut.

  “Hold on to the tower,” Lord told Adsila, making sure his own magnets were as secure as possible. Then he nodded at her and said, “Activate.”

  Four things happened at once.

  An inch of cable dissolved, as planned.

  The sail inflated in the center, bulging as though it had caught a stiff wind.

  And the sun struck the sail with a wall of light so bright that—even pressing them shut—Lord felt as though his eyes were open wide. It punched the back of his skull like a rifle recoiling in both eye sockets.

  The last thing that happened was the Empyrean jerking as the sail turned a celestial white—a minor twitch that caused sections of the sail to counteract the movement; lower portions of the sail that were still anchored, still responding to Empyrean’s needs, turned darker in spots to increase the light pressure across the surface of the sail—enough to counter the wobble.

  “Gross reflectance at eighty-nine percent,” Dr. May said. “Plasma cloud has been breached.”

  Lord heard but did not respond; he was busy bracing himself against the tower. The Empyrean’s slight angular variation at the base of the tower was amplified by the time it reached the top and it was enough to fling Adsila forward, toward the sail. The young woman was alert enough to go with the movement and throw herself clear of the sail—but while she didn’t strike the surface, the action hurled her from the tower.

  “Shit,” Lord said through his teeth as the tether grew taut between them. He stiffened his legs against the back of the tower to resist the tug, held the reins as if he were trying to halt a horse, then swore again as the line reached its limit and snapped against his waist. Overpowering the pull of his magnets, it yanked him from the tower as if he were a ladybug flicked from a sleeve.

  For all the high-G barrel rolls, low yo-yos, and cobra turns he had done as a fighter pilot, nothing had prepared Lord for spinning like a pinwheel as the 3 Es—Empyrean, Earth, and eternity—circled in his view screen.

  “Sam!” he heard Saranya say. “Waters!”

  Have to focus on something, Lord thought. Pilots did it, ballet dancers did it, martial artists did it: they picked a point and focused on it to come out of a spin. His eyes went to the rippling blaze of white light undulating toward the Jade Star as the colors of the lower sail blanched and diluted under that ferocious burn.

  Bifrost, he thought, picking out the wavy colors. The rainbow bridge of the Norse gods. That’s where you want to be.

  But that’s as far as Lord got with his pinpoint maneuver. His mind was spinning inside his spinning body. Being pulled from the tower had knocked his spine, his skull, one into the other and left him only partly conscious.

  Lord and Adsila circled each other around the tether, a deadly ballet that carried them away from the Empyrean and toward the looming edge of Earth.

  “Sam!” Saranya cried again.

  He didn’t answer, couldn’t answer. His head was light due to the jolt. Stuffed in his pressured space suit, he couldn’t shake it out. He was like a kid making a snow angel in the vastness of space, arms and legs stiff.

  He hadn’t quite gotten to It’s been a good run, Sam, or Dammit, Stanton was right. He was just—enjoying the ride? The rest? Lord wondered. He felt as if he’d been on the go for six decades. He smiled. This would be quite a finish.

  “Sir?” he heard in his ear.

  It was A
dsila.

  “We have to steady ourselves,” she said, “stop the spin. One of us has to kick off toward the Empyrean.”

  “Kick . . . how?” he asked dreamily.

  “Don’t worry, sir. I’m coming over.”

  “Okay,” he said, pushing through the daze. His eyes were still on the light, wondering what it was doing inside the plasma cloud.

  Grabbing the tether, Adsila pulled herself toward him. Their spin began to speed up through conservation of angular momentum, but Lord kept his eyes on a fixed star in space; the turning of the universe seemed improbably secondary to the lone stationary point. When she was nearly facing him, she gave the line a hard tug. The momentum sent her across his body, shifting their path slightly in the direction of the Empyrean. It wasn’t enough to bring them back, but that wasn’t what she wanted.

  Lord’s view shifted with the maneuver. He was facing Earth now. It seemed near and large and getting nearer and larger by the moment. Adsila was at his back, the tether arced wide on their right.

  “Sir, hold the tether,” Adsila said.

  Lord moved his arms mechanically. They felt as though they were pushing through deep water, but he was able to wrap his gloves around the tether.

  “Regulator, vent O-tank, two-second burst,” Adsila said into her IC.

  There wasn’t a jerk; just a slow, steady acceleration as his EAD purged oxygen from her tank, a powerful jet of air passing silently, invisibly just below the backpack. At once, Earth began to recede. Lord was pulled around by the tether, once again facing the Empyrean. His eyes went back to the bridge.

  At least your pinpoint instinct is still working, he thought.

  Both the space station and the rainbow bridge were growing larger. And then, off in his peripheral vision, from the direction of deep space, it happened. A tiny flash, like a struck match, inside the plasma cloud. Then another and another. Then multiples of that, in a row, like firecrackers, as bits of matter were annihilated.

  And then a big, full cottonball-like cloud spread silently as the Dragon’s Eye spit pieces of itself in all directions at once, blasting the plasma cloud to something less than atoms and clearing the space between the Empyrean and the badly wounded Jade Star.