Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK®

by Easton, Thomas A.

  “It gets in the way,” she had said. “Doesn’t it? You could have it removed.” He had whimpered under her hand, growled quite involuntarily, and shifted his position. “I should do more than that,” he had said, and she had laughed.

  She had been as glad to see him as he had been to see her once more. They had missed each other. He still did, though he knew she was there, just within the walls of the Quentin.

  Her cargo was bladders of oil Congo bots had filled by tapping trees. He carried oil as well, but unlike her he also held refugees, giving them freedom as a reward for their labor though without that labor there would be no freedom—no room—to give them.

  The bladders deformed easily under gees, fitting snugly against walls and into corners, turning any compartment into a tank. They were made of the same plastic that was also lining lunar trenches and forming the first of the new habitats just behind the factory in its orbit. The bubblesat was a cluster of ten-meter globes distended by air pressure, their walls and connecting tubes translucent enough to show the workers who were fitting cabinets, environmental controls, wiring, and plumbing into place. When they were done, the workers would assemble more globes and tubes into still more bubblesats. They would continue until it was time to fill them with refugees. Everyone hoped they would have enough of them.

  The first trips to Earth had fetched only wood, which had then been vaporized with the heat of focused sunlight, exposed to catalysts, condensed, polymerized, and formed in sheets. Those sheets had made the first bladders, which were then delivered to whatever refugees happened to have gathered near oil trees. Oil was much easier to process than wood.

  Yet oil was not all the refugees were instructed to collect. While Lois brought her ship close to Hugin’s satellite factory, Renny approached the habitat. Like its sister Munin on the other side of the Moon, 120 degrees away in its orbit, it was a broad disk, spinning slowly to give its many decks a sense of gravity. One flat face of the disk was a maze of girders and metal plates expanding into space, extending the habitat’s volume, turning the disk into a stubby cylinder with room for hundreds more inhabitants. The other face turned endlessly about a motionless hub studded with accordion-throated docking tunnels.

  He positioned the Quincy and stopped. When the docking tube’s flexible mouth had fastened to his hull, he opened the hatch. Only then did he leave his controls to watch those he had brought from Earth debark, drifting in the air quite helplessly, unused to zero gee, clutching at each other and the walls, grinning with relief when the catchers Hugin’s crew had deployed grabbed their arms and legs and propelled them onward. They were bots and humans, modified and unmodified, gengineers and greenskins and ordinary people who had once owned gengineered devices or chosen to be decorated with tattoos and inserts. They were farmers and truckers, storekeepers and office workers, women and men and children. Everyone carried something, young bots in pots, sacks of seeds gathered against the day when they might be planted aboard the Gypsy, dolls and books and suitcases full of clothing and mementoes.

  When the Quincy was empty of all but those few bladders of oil Lois had not been able to fit into her ship, he returned to his controls and moved toward the factory. There, while he waited for workers to remove the bladders, he scanned the sky toward Earth. A glint of light was one of the other Q-ships, on its way not from the great basin of the Congo, but from the Amazon valley, or the Yukon, or… He touched a key, and his computer magnified Earth’s image. There, a spark as a warhead blew. There, a cloud of dust and smoke, surely a mushroom when seen from the ground. There and there and there, the craters Jeremy Duncan’s rocks had pounded into the Engineers’ forces. Everywhere, a growing haze of dust. If the Engineers kept up their attempts to attack the Orbitals, if the warheads kept betraying their age and instability, if Duncan kept on throwing rocks, food, water, and air would be contaminated with radioactive fallout. The atmosphere would grow opaque, and the air would cool.

  Renny wondered if the Engineers knew or cared what the consequences could be for them.

  * * * *

  “A launch,” said Donna Rose.

  “Africa,” said the computer’s electronic voice. “The Congo site.” Thor recited coordinates, and Duncan swore. “They still have the old defense radars, and they’ve managed to track our ships. They want to hit whatever we’re after.”

  “They must know we’re picking up refugees.”

  He touched his keyboard, spoke to the computer, and a LEO rock began a full-power dive toward Earth’s surface.

  “It’s on track,” said Donna Rose. “Impact… Just as it leaves the atmosphere. Over Odessa.”

  They watched their screens as the rock and its target approached each other, merged, and vanished. Another screen showed the bright spark of a Q-ship’s plasma plume against the broad expanse of central Africa. “Which one’s that?” asked Duncan.

  “The Quiggle. It’s safe now.”

  * * * *

  Earth, white-mottled, blue and tan, sliced through by night, hung above the grey lunar surface. The long line of the railgun stretched toward the distant peaks, jagged and black-shadowed.

  To either side of the railgun, the surface was scarred by the tracks of vehicles and workers and by the trenches from which the shattered regolith, lunar soil plowed by eons of meteoritic impacts, large and small, had been scooped. Near the railgun’s loading station, Sam and Sheila Nickers occupied a metal pressure hut, a ten-meter half-cylinder covered over with regolith. This was their living quarters and the office from which they oversaw the labors of the Orbital workers and their refugee helpers, but they were not often there.

  At the moment, Sam was seated in a balloon-tired mooncar, watching as a crew sprayed liquid plastic over the walls and floor of a trench, stabilizing it against movement even under the occasional prod of a moonquake, sealing it against any possibility of leaking air. They had already installed an arching framework of metal girders and an airlock that for the moment led only from vacuum to vacuum. Shortly they would spread plastic sheets from the Hugin factory over the girders, seal their edges with more liquid plastic, and bulldoze lunar soil over the whole as insulation against heat and cold and as protection against the smaller stones that fell from space. Soon after that, the plastic would have given up its solvents to the lunar vacuum. They would pressurize it, and another barracks would be ready.

  Beside him sat Jackie Thyme, who never seemed to wander far away. She was staring not at the workers but down the length of the railgun, pretending to watch as the steel launching buckets zipped invisibly fast down its single superconducting rail, propelled by the electromagnets that looped over it at precise intervals. At the gun’s far end, the buckets were diverted onto a return track while the lunar soil they carried flew onward toward the catcher nets in lunar orbit. There, where sunlight and energy were continuously available, interrupted by neither the two-week night of the Moon nor the 12-hour night of Earth, metals and other materials had long been refined for the Orbitals’ use. Now, much of the lunar soil was simply melted and cast into rocklike shapes for Jeremy Duncan’s use.

  “Why don’t they use the Q-ships?” asked the bot.

  “They could,” said Sam. “But the ships are busy with other jobs. And this system works just fine. They’ve had it going since long before they invented the Q-drive.”

  “Of course.” Jackie Thyme shifted her attention to where Sheila Nickers was using a bulldozer to shape the walls of another trench, pushing excavated regolith into a heap from which an auger loaded the conveyor that stretched toward the loading station. Workers in bulky vacuum suits waited nearby, standing beside the stack of curved girders that would become the framework of still another barracks. Others bent over molds that turned a mixture of liquid plastic and regolith to chairs, tables, beds, soil troughs, and other furnishings.

  Other trenches, soil heaped beside them,
awaited finishing touches, while heavy equipment scooped out still more in the distance. Just three barracks had already been completed and partly occupied. They would not be filled until many more were ready and the final, full-scale rescue effort could begin. In the meantime, more bots did arrive each day, adding their hands to the labor and accelerating the digging and sealing of more trenches.

  Atop one of the finished barracks, several suited workers were pacing back and forth, inspecting the shielding layer of regolith. “Sam?” The radio crackled. “Over here, on Number 2.” He looked, and one of the workers was waving both arms.

  “I see you. What’s up?”

  “We need more light inside here.” The voice was feminine. That and her comment told him the workers were bots. “Can we expose the plastic?”

  Another voice, male, broke in. “Keep some patches handy, or you could wind up with more ventilation than you like.”

  Sam grinned as he recognized the truth of the recommendation. He had not been in space long enough to think of such a thing himself. “You’ve been here awhile.”

  “Years,” said the voice. “And I’d keep that ceiling just as thick as I could. I’ve seen blowouts.”

  The bot’s voice returned: “Then what can we do?”

  “Make a plastic cylinder?” asked Sam. “Embed it in the dirt?”

  “That should do,” said the veteran. “Though it won’t help at night.”

  “Of course not,” said the bot. “But we’re used to that.”

  “Night’s two weeks long,” said the veteran.

  After a moment of silence, the bot said, “I’d forgotten that.” Her voice, even over the radio, sounded sheepish.

  “Go ahead and do it,” said Sam. “You’ll have light half the time, anyway.”

  He then looked toward his wife. She was backing her ‘dozer away from the trench she had prepared and turning toward another. Suited workers were already lifting girders into position. His own spraying crew was beginning to move in that direction, ready to seal and stabilize the walls.

  They were making progress at last. It had taken time to get the plastic factory running, to design and make girders and airlocks for the barracks, to train the refugees and volunteers in new tasks. But that time was past. Their barracks machine was rolling, even as the habitats were being expanded and bubblesats were beginning to take shape in space. They would soon be ready for all the refugees the Orbitals could deliver.

  Not for the first time, he thanked fate—or God, or fortune—that the Orbitals had found the Q-drive. Without it, he would still be on Earth. He would, in fact, be ash and smoke. So would Sheila and their bot friends. In time, so would all the other bots on Earth, and every human who did not share the ideology of the Engineers.

  * * * *

  “There hasn’t been time to think of…” Alvar Hannoken stood behind his desk, gesturing toward the pot that still stood empty before his office picture window. Its soil was dry, cracked, sterile. “I have her cells in storage, but she’s out there with Duncan, in the ODC. We haven’t had a chance to talk of a new design.”

  Frederick Suida sighed and slumped in his seat. “I miss her,” he said softly. “Narcissus Joy is a good assistant, but…”

  “You were happy with Donna Rose,” said Probe Station’s Director.

  He nodded. “We had our differences. That’s why she left. But still…” He had people around him, friends, perhaps more than he had had before he met her. But he was far lonelier now, as lonely as he had been just after the massacre at the zoo, as lonely as he had been just after getting his human body. “And Renny…”

  “Lois is back. So he’s with her when he isn’t flying the Quincy.”

  “He visits, but it’s not the same.”

  “You’re doing good work,” said Hannoken. “All of you. The new quarters are shaping up rapidly, and Duncan saves us every day.”

  A chime sounded from Hannoken’s desk. The Director said, “Athena, I’ll take the call.”

  The face of a com center technician appeared on a small screen on his desk. “Sir? There’s a call from Earth.”

  “Put it on.”

  Arnold Rifkin once more appeared on the screen, his desk invisible below his blue collar. His expression was sterner and more unforgiving than it had been the first time they saw him. Metal dangled from his ears. Copper wire was threaded through his hair. His cheeks were hollowed as if by asceticism or hunger. His voice was abrasive.

  He said, “Director Hannoken. We’ve asked for your help. You’ve refused it. Worse yet, you have chosen to attack us. You steal both oil and people. You bomb our farmland.”

  When he paused, Hannoken replied sharply, “You did not ask, sir. You demanded, and you threatened the prisoners you have taken. Now you launch missiles at us, and you dare to complain that we try to stop them.”

  “We still need your help. And we have many more missiles. You cannot stop them all.”

  Frederick stepped into view of the com’s vision pickup. “Don’t you care that so many of your missiles explode by themselves? That using them poisons your world?”

  The Engineer’s glare was cold. “Your saboteurs are skilled. But that will not stop us. We will prevail.”

  “I don’t see how,” said Hannoken.

  “We no longer want just your help. We insist on your unconditional surrender.” When Frederick snorted, the other added, “We have not yet cleansed this world of all our opponents. We have many thousands of prisoners.”

  “Slaves, you mean,” said Frederick.

  “They expiate their own sins, and yours. But we will not contaminate our souls with them much longer. If you do not surrender…” He turned aside and drew a veedo set beside him. “We held this cleansing yesterday.”

  The picture was small and grainy, but the scene was clearly a labor camp. Beneath the guns of Engineer soldiers, several hundred bot and human prisoners labored with shovels to excavate a broad, shallow bowl. When it was prepared, they emptied drums of oil into the bowl until the soil glistened with fuel. Then the Engineers forced their prisoners to march into the bowl, arranged them in ranks of almost military precision, and threw a torch among them.

  “Athena, off.” Hannoken’s voice shook with rage and pain. “But put it on the com. Let everyone see that.”

  “They’re mad,” said Frederick.

  * * * *

  When the recording ended, Jeremy Duncan put his hands over his eyes. He ignored Donna Rose’s sobs, thinking only that he might have been there. He might have been one of the shoveling slaves, pouring oil around his own feet, standing still under the threat of the guns while the torch was readied, knowing all the while that he was about to die.

  He wished he could believe that he would have screamed and struggled, led his fellows in a desperate fight for life. They hadn’t. They too rarely had in all the history of humanity’s stay on Earth. He thought of what the Germans had done to the Jews, herding them into cattle cars, taking them to camps, lining them up for “showers” that even the victims had to know—they could see the heaps of bodies, smell the stench of burning flesh, hear the rumors—were devices of efficient, mass extermination. They had not fought because they had prayed for last-minute reprieves, that their oppressors would change their minds, declare it all a monstrous practical joke, that they would, perhaps, be singled out and removed from the doomed mass, even that they would be rescued by some other force. It had not happened then. It had not happened now.

  He thought of the Moslem terrorists of the Mideast. Like the Engineers, unlike the Nazis, they had thought to play upon the sympathies of their opponents. They had kidnapped innocent passersby and held the passengers of planes and ships at gunpoint, threatening their deaths if the world did not give the terrorists what they wished. It had taken many years for the world to
learn that giving in did not end the problem. The terrorists would take their prizes and then refuse to surrender their prisoners.

  He knew that he too would have hoped, right up until the moment when the torch hovered in the air before his eyes, tumbling, arcing into the oil at his feet, and the flames burst up around him to sear his lungs and eyes and very life.

  “We have to do something,” he said.

  “We can’t,” cried Donna Rose. “We don’t have enough ships to save them all. We don’t have the places to put them yet. We don’t have time.” She wailed.

  “I know,” said Duncan. “But we can… Thor. Give me the coordinates for Washington, Chicago, Denver, Moscow, London, Beijing, New Delhi, Paris. For every missile control center that we know of. For every Engineer military base. For labor camps and industrial centers.”

  “You can’t!” cried Donna Rose.

  He ignored her. He could. Of course he could. He had to. It was the only way to end a terrorist threat. The world had proved it with the obliteration of Lebanon. “Thor. How many is that?”

  “Two hundred and sixty seven.”

  He thought while Donna Rose tugged futilely at his arm. He did not dare to use the rocks that waited in low Earth orbit or around the stations and habitats. Nor did he dare to divert all the rocks being produced to those targets. He had to continue to strengthen the Orbitals’ defenses. But… “Thor. Set aside half of the next thousand new rocks. Park them in low orbit. Program them with those coordinates.”

  “This will take ten days,” said the computer.

  “Don’t worry, Donna Rose,” said Duncan. “We can’t do anything yet. But if they continue with their cleansings…”

  “I left Freddy. I came to you because you seemed more willing to fight. But this! This… If you do it, you’ll be no better than them,” said the bot.