by F X Holden
Ambre shrugged. She remembered the incident, but not the tour guide responsible.
“Yeah, that was Lyle, I’m sure of … oh, hey, is that Lyle?” Verge said, suddenly all friendly. “Yeah man, this is Officer Verge at Security. Look, are you missing a PAX? Russian guy name of … Sergei?” He thumbed a button, put the handset on speaker mode, and laid it on the table between himself and Ambre.
“Russian guy, Russian guy…” the man on the other end of the call sounded sheepish. “Don’t know if he was a Russian, officer, but there was one of the guests threw up in my bus. I put him off at the cafeteria on Hangar Road so he could clean himself up. Said I’d pick him up on my way back through…”
“Well, he aint at the cafeteria anymore, Lyle,” Verge said. “He’s roaming around outside the new Central Computer Complex on Phillips Parkway is where he is.”
“Oh my,” Lyle said. “Look, I’ll be back at the cafeteria in twenty … say … thirty? Max.”
Ambre pointed at the dot on the screen. “It could look like he’s on his way back to the cafeteria, Sergeant. Maybe the guy just felt better, decided to get some air.”
“Don’t you worry, Lyle, he’s my problem now,” Verge said and hung up. “Thank you very much. Freaking pain in the ass, Lyle. Freaking FBI.” Verge sighed and stood, walking to the door of his office and leaning out to see who was there. “Russ, you ready to move out?” he asked the young guy who had greeted Ambre.
Russell looked over, fastening a radio to his belt. Ambre had talked to him a few times. He’d grown up in Daytona, joined Space Force hoping to see the world, and then ended up in the Cape. But he was getting to the end of his four-year active duty tour and he’d actually managed to save most of that house deposit him and Maria were working on. There was this place opening up, Harbor Heights, fifth floor, sea views, had its own fitness center, pool, childcare place about a block away, looked pretty good. Maria had checked it out. In case that happened any time soon. Having met Maria once at a social thing, Ambre was pretty sure it would.
Russell stood. “Yes, Staff Sergeant, what’s up?”
“Got a stray for you.”
Ambre showed him Sergei’s location on her tablet – he was still wandering away from the Computer Center – while Verge filled him in. “Tour guest, got sick, guide left him at the public cafeteria. System flagged him low-level risk, but he shouldn’t be where he is so his tour pass is canceled. Get out there, pick him up, bring him back here. We’ll ask him a few polite questions.”
Russell looked at his watch. “He’s at the cafeteria?”
Ambre looked at her tablet again. “No, he’s stopped again. He’s near there, taking his time. Probably getting a bunch of selfies.”
“I’ll send his tag to your GPS,” Verge said. “Bring him in here when you get back.” He turned to Ambre. “You want to sit in when we talk to him? Hear his story? Could be nothing, could be interesting.”
“Me? No thanks,” Ambre said. “I got Soshane with me today.”
“Oh yeah, right,” Verge nodded. “That’s today?” He gave her a wink. “You owe me for that, you know. I don’t sign off on that sort of thing for just anybody. We’re talking a big bag of them homemade cookies, Ambre.”
“Yeah yeah.”
“A really big bag,” Verge emphasized. “OK. Get rolling, Russ,” Verge said and went back in to his office.
Ambre took Russell’s arm as he reached for his vest and black beret and pulled them on. “Hey, Russ, do me a favor?”
“Sure, what?”
“Drop us out at Launch Complex 40 before you go get the stray? Soshane wants a photo with a real rocket in the background and I arranged for someone at SpaceX to let us in where they’re putting a Falcon on the crawler…”
He looked at his watch, then looked toward Verge’s office. “Yeah but, how about … first I pick up the stray, then I drop you at the Vehicle Assembly Building. You can get a ride from there? It’s a long way to LC 40 and I’d catch all sorts of hell from Verge if I was playing limo driver for you and this guy suddenly went postal inside the cafeteria.”
“That’s not his profile,” Ambre said. “He’s a low-level…”
“Being a Russian on an FBI watch list is not a profile?” Russell asked.
“Well, since being Russian in America isn’t a crime yet, no…” she said, but she didn’t want to get him in trouble. “OK, yeah. If you can drop us at the VAB after you pick him up, at least we’re halfway.”
“There’s our guy,” Russell said a short time later as they pulled off the Parkway into Industrial Road. A heavy-set man wearing a white shirt, tie, and jacket over his shoulder was walking up the road from the CCC toward the SpaceX engineering complex. “Who else would be out walking around in this sun?”
Ambre and Soshane were seated upfront in the Security Force patrol car, Soshane squirming around like she was sitting on an ant nest. She’d taken one look at the police car as she and Ambre walked out to it and said, “Momma, can I get a photo with the policeman too? Bethany is gonna die!”
“You can’t get a ride out to LC 40, hit me up again,” Russell said. “I’ll come get you once I’m done with Sergei here.” As the patrol car cruised silently to a stop about ten yards behind the man, Russell reached over and tapped Soshane on the leg. “You want to hit that button down there?” he said, pointing to a toggle on the dashboard above the radio. “See where it says ‘Horn’?”
Soshane leaned forward. “Yeah?”
“Just press that, once,” he grinned.
She pressed it and the siren on the car let out a single two-tone blast that stopped the man up ahead of them in his tracks and made him spin around. It made Soshane jump too, so Ambre put a hand on her leg. “It’s OK, hon, it’s supposed to do that.”
Russell climbed out of the patrol car and stood casually behind the door with one hand on the door frame and the other by his side. “Sir, would you mind coming back here, please?” he called out.
The man didn’t appear nervous. With jacket still slung over his shoulder, he sauntered back to the patrol car and stood near the door. Russell stepped out and closed the door. “How you doing today, sir?”
The man had a sallow, pock-marked face, like he’d had the worst case of acne as a kid that Ambre had ever seen. His black hair was parted on one side and neatly trimmed. He looked solid, but not fat. And despite the fact he was wearing a dark suit on a hot day, he didn’t appear troubled by the heat. “I’m fine, officer, is there a problem?” he said.
“Can I see your visitor badge please, sir?” Russell said, pointing at the badge clipped to the man’s belt.
The guy looked down, unclipped it and handed it over. As Russell scanned it using the chip reader in his belt radio, Ambre saw the guy looking inside the car, at her and Soshane. He straightened up again. “I was feeling sick so the tour guide dropped me off here. He said he’d be back. Is there a problem?” he asked. His accent was comic-book-thick Russian mafia.
“Name please, sir?” Russell asked. Ambre knew it would be showing on Russell’s chip reader, but he was asking anyway.
“Sergei. Sergei Grahkovsky.” The man looked at his watch. “The guide said he would be back. In about fifteen minutes.”
Russell nodded, put the badge in his shirt pocket. “Except he dropped you at the cafeteria, and this is not the cafeteria, sir. Can I ask why you are out here on foot?”
“Oh,” the man said, swinging his jacket over to his other shoulder and pointing. “He said they could be gone about an hour … and I got bored waiting. I’m sorry if I broke any rules.”
OK, yeah, maybe, Ambre thought. It kinda made sense. Except for the detour via Central Computing. Toilet stop? She was starting to feel like a bit of a fool for calling the guy to Verge’s attention now.
Russell was taking it pretty calmly too, or maybe just wanted to keep the other man at ease, because he simply smiled at the guy and said, “OK, look. There’s something wrong with your badge anyway, it i
sn’t reading properly. Probably just a technical glitch. I have to get you to come back to base with me and sort it out. We’ll reconnect you with your tour group once everything is in order.” The badge thing was probably a lie, Ambre figured, much better than saying, “I’m taking you in for questioning.”
Russell stepped back and opened the rear door of the patrol car to the passenger transport area. It was caged off and Ambre knew the doors could only be opened from the outside.
“This is very annoying,” the man said, pulling his jacket on. He didn’t move to get into the car.
“I apologize, sir,” Russell said. “If you’d get in, please, we’ll sort this out as quickly as we can.”
“I’m hot, momma,” Soshane said. The Florida sun was shining right in the window on her legs, so Ambre reached forward to the pocket in the door and pulled out a clipboard with some sort of logbook on it and put it on Soshane’s legs to give them a bit of cover from the sun. “We’ll be going in a short while, honey, and then you…” She heard a noise and looked up.
Russell was gone.
The man was leaning in the driver’s side door, toward Soshane. Ambre grabbed the girl, pulled her toward her, and drew a breath to scream, but the man held something inside the car and pressed a button.
Spray?
That was all Ambre had time to think before her world went black.
As O’Hare and Albers were getting briefed on the operation of the G-BAD laser system by DARPA and making sure their command system at the Cape could ‘talk’ with the X-37B, the creator of the Groza weapons system they were about to go up against again was boarding an aircraft at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport.
She had not advised the commander of the Titov Space Test Facility, General Yevgeny Bondarev, that she was planning to travel. Nor had she done as required and notified the Titov security office. She had not even told her mother.
The only person who knew she had left Russia, was her brother. But then, he had a need to know. He was an integral part of what was about to happen. He had checked in with her just before he left Russia himself. She had been making breakfast when her telephone started buzzing. It was a deliberately compact kitchen, so she just had to turn and take one step to reach the counter behind her where she always put it.
“So...” her brother said after the usual formalities. “I have my ticket and visa, money and passport on the table. Bag packed. Anything else I need to know before I get in the taxi?”
She smiled. “Nothing,” she said. “How is momma?”
“She’ll be fine, Nastya. She’s a tough old girl,” he said. “I told her I’ll be back in a week. Don’t worry about momma.”
He always called her at breakfast, caught her eating her porridge and drinking coffee. She knew it was because that was when he was most likely to think of her. He had never forgiven himself for leaving her alone at breakfast that day when he was supposed to have gotten her up and ready for school. But he had left early to go for a run because he was trying out for the school football team. And he also never forgave himself for not coming straight back to the apartment to check on her after the meteor struck. He’d gotten a message that his mother’s hospital roof had collapsed and had left the school right away without checking to see if his sister was even there. When he’d gotten to the factory, he’d learned his mother was alright, and he should have started looking for his Nastya right away. But he hadn’t, he’d stayed with his mother until she was examined by a paramedic and allowed to leave. His mother had asked after Anastasia and he’d lied. Said she was at school and she was fine. Three hours. Three hours they had waited for his mother to be released. Three hours Anastasia had lain weeping and bleeding on the floor of the kitchen, unable to see.
She didn’t understand his guilt. Had he come back to the apartment straight away, he could have done nothing. She would have gotten to the hospital quicker, but it was a hospital in chaos. She probably wouldn’t have been treated any quicker. The damage to her eyes was instantaneous; caused by the infrared flare of the explosion and then the blast wave. There was no miracle treatment for that. The cuts to her skin came from the flying glass. Yes, also from writhing on the glass covered floor in pain and confusion, but did it really matter whether she was scarred on just her head and arms or on her back and sides as well? It would not have changed the way the world recoiled from the sight of her.
She held him responsible for nothing. He was a ten-year-old boy at the time, but it was like his guilt grew stronger with each year that passed. It wasn’t pity. He was genuinely proud of her, he’d told her that. But just why he held himself responsible for the effects of a cosmic fireball, she would never really understand. But she had known that it meant that when she needed his help now, he would not say no.
Anastasia Grahkovsky had never traveled outside Russia before. Her passport was completely new. The visa in it was the only page used. She had been careful to apply for the visa in good time, expecting many problems, but there had been none. She was not traveling economy class. It might be her only trip outside Russia, so she had shunned the cheaper options and gone with Lufthansa, thoroughly enjoying the feel of their deep leather and wood finish business class seats. While those around her had worked or slept, she sat listening alternately to the murmur of their conversation or to audio summaries of scientific papers. She had never attended any kind of international astrophysics conference, but it occurred to her she really should. There was so much to learn, so many great minds to learn from. She knew she could never share with them what she herself had done, what she had learned, but she felt a strange liberation, a freedom of spirit and soul, the minute the Airbus A400 ATTOL (Autonomous Taxi Takeoff and Landing) airliner lifted off the ground.
Eight hours forty-five minutes later, as the aircraft approached its destination and cabin personnel began to fuss with their pre-arrival duties, she pushed the call button and ordered herself a final champagne. Whether because of her blindness or other visible disabilities, the staff had been fantastically attentive and despite being busy didn’t hesitate a moment before bringing her a champagne, pouring and putting it in her hand for her, even tidying up her cubicle so she didn’t have to do it herself.
German efficiency. It was something one could easily get used to. She wondered if she shouldn’t have been born a German, instead of a Russian. It might have suited her better. But then, if she had, she would not have been in Chelyabinsk when the meteor struck. Would not have become obsessed with the power of objects colliding with the earth. Would never have designed Groza. Would not be sitting on this aircraft, on the way to Shanghai.
At that moment, despite her blindness, scarring and crippling injuries, Anastasia Grahkovsky decided that if the world existed in a thousand dimensions, she would not have traded her life for any of a thousand other possible lives in the multiverse.
O’Hare and Albers could think of a thousand other lives that would have been more interesting to live than the lives they had lived for the last 24 hours. When not reading up on ordnance manuals, they had been running system checks and doing simulator time on the X-37B. Even though it was just a cut-down X-37C they found the handling and systems were generationally different – much less automated, much more manual, and the onboard AI was not much more than a glorified autopilot. Albers sweated under the workload. Not surprisingly, Bunny O’Hare loved it.
Before suiting up and sitting down with Albers to get ready for the engagement, O’Hare put a call through to Meany, whose compatriots were also busy getting his spacecraft into position for the active phase of the operation.
“Hey, there’s someone here who’d like to talk with you,” Meany told her. He was on videocon and she saw him tapping some keys on a console to patch the other party in. She figured it would be Paddington. She was wrong.
Meany was grinning. “Captain O’Hare, meet Angus. Angus, O’Hare.”
I am pleased to meet you, Captain O’Hare, a voice said, a total clone of the voic
e and accent of the twentieth-century Scottish actor Sean Connery. I hope we do not have such an exciting time working together on this mission as we did on the last.
O’Hare leaned forward toward the camera and pointed a finger at Meany. “You programmed it to say that.”
“Well, yes, but not totally,” Meany admitted. “I got bored with him just saying yes, Flight Lieutenant, no, Flight Lieutenant, didn’t I, Angus?”
The Flight Lieutenant assigned me a reading list on the Art of Conversation, which covered 4,120 books on the subject. By studying your own verbal interactions, I am able to tailor my conversation to a style adapted to your preferences.
“You just do your job and we’ll get along fine, Angus,” O’Hare said. “Which, by the way, aren’t you supposed to be flying that Skylon right now?”
I am, ma’am, the AI said. But unlike a human, I can walk and chew gum.
“Cute,” O’Hare said. “Angus, I need to talk with Flight Lieutenant Meany. I’ll let you get back to whatever you were doing.”
No worries, Captain.
“This is going to be a long mission if he is always that chipper,” O’Hare sighed. “How good is your motion detection algorithm at the ranges we’re going to be standing off, Flight Lieutenant?” she asked. “You’re sure you’ll pick up a mini-sat moving in?”
“Same optical sensor suite as we have on our photo recon satellites, Captain,” Meany said. “We can track a jihadi riding a scooter through a crowded market in Islamabad from nine hundred miles up, so yes, we can pick up a 40-kilo mini-sat at ninety miles. I doubt the Groza has anywhere near the same optics, but we’ll know soon enough, depending on how the Chinese take-down proceeds.”