by Taiyo Fujii
“Second stage disengaged. Visual contact made with objective.”
The Oregon staff cheered, and a new image source was added. It was the feed from the ASM-140’s warhead camera, currently showing two dots in a pitch-black field. SAFIR 3 and the Wyvern Orbital Hotel. The space between the two dots widened. The dot at the center of the screen gradually grew larger. As it became visible as a three-dimensional body, an uncertain voice came from the Oregon video.
“Hey … is that right? A satellite? Looks like a wreck to me.” The screen showed a battered metallic mass.
Chris breathed a sigh of relief at the knowledge that Team Seattle’s prediction had been correct. This was no Rod from God. It was just the wreck of a rocket, kicked across the sky by a swarm of space tethers. Operation Seed Pod was a failure. An overgrown bottle rocket, come all this way just to bathe a hunk of scrap iron in electromagnetic rays and ventilate it with a barrage of depleted uranium pellets.
The voice of Colonel Daniel Waabboy, operational commander at Peterson Air Force Base, came over the video. “Stop grumbling,” he said. “Mission proceeds.”
Chris thought back on the Operation Seed Pod orders. The ASM-140’s armaments all fired automatically. All that could be done from the surface was to stop them. Once the warhead was within five kilometers, it first used its electronic armament Blackout to burn out the electrical equipment on board the target satellite with powerful microwaves. It was only expected to be effective against civilian equipment, but it should work just fine on any sensors, cameras, or antenna protruding from a satellite. Just to be safe, the nearby orbital hotel had been asked to temporarily shut down all its electrical equipment.
“Roger. Blackout firing … What was that?”
The image from the camera was just a white screen. Chris blinked. The image flashed between white and black. For a moment, she saw a blue surface at an angle.
“Commander! The ASM warhead is revolving!”
At that moment, in the image being sent by the warhead camera, a number of bright-red lines raced across the black screen. Sounds of chaos rose from the ASM’s Oregon control center.
Chris gritted her teeth. She needed Kazumi and Daryl here. The video was being recorded. She would have to ask their thoughts on the revolving and the red lines later.
“The orbital hotel … Oh no!”
“What happened? Make your report!”
“The microwaves from the spinning Blackout have passed through the orbital hotel.”
“What did you say?!”
Chris felt as if the blood were draining from her body. The orbital hotel, with Ronnie and Judy Smark aboard, had received a dose of microwave radiation strong enough to fry sensors. They didn’t know yet if any damage had been done. But it couldn’t have escaped unscathed. The orbital hotel was a civilian structure with no reason to be shielded against electromagnetic warfare.
The vacuum of space … On the orbital hotel, life support was left entirely to the computers. Even a small amount of damage could have serious implications for the people on board.
Chris heard Waabboy’s voice again. “Abort! Stop all armaments! What’s the meaning of this? Why is the damn warhead spinning?”
Suddenly, Chris realized what was behind the spin. One of the space tethers clustered densely around SAFIR 3 had given the ASM-140 warhead a kick. Chris recalled Shiraishi’s sneering photograph.
“He’s a demon,” she muttered, glaring at the video from the ASM-140 warhead. It was still flashing black and white. She had expected Operation Seed Pod to be a waste of time but had never imagined that it might actually damage the orbital hotel. One way or another, they had to stop this. Should she tell Oregon, or perhaps Waabboy, why Operation Seed Pod had failed? No, that would be pointless. Giving them the background at this stage wouldn’t improve the situation.
Chris shook off her uncertainty and reviewed the cards in her hand. They had confirmed the existence of space tethers floating like a cloud in orbit. All transmissions to and from the base stations were being sent to the mountain of handmade computers Akari had thrown together. And they had located the mastermind behind it all.
Not too bad!
With the superior brains and bottomless motivation this team had, they were sure to come up with a way to stop the space tethers. Yet another reason why she absolutely needed Akari, Bruce, and Daryl to return safely.
Chris glanced at the map. Daryl’s Chevy was stopped in the middle of the market. The snow. The dot indicating Bruce’s Mustang was tearing down Alaskan Way at breakneck speed.
2020-12-16T21:00 GMT
Project Wyvern
It wasn’t on the schedule, but today we had a disaster-preparedness drill. Let me tell you all about it.
The Wyvern Orbital Hotel is designed so that your routine is as close to an earthbound one as possible, but there’s one thing that’s completely different: the types of disasters that might happen here.
There’ll never be an earthquake in orbit, or lightning, or torrential rains, or a hurricane or cyclone. What there is instead is equipment failure, collisions with debris, and bursts of solar wind. (Equipment failure could happen on Earth too, but in orbit it could be fatal.)
Today, we turned off almost all the power in the Wyvern to perform a blackout test. Broadly speaking, the Wyvern has seven electrical systems. Power is generated by two fuel cells and a solar panel array, and stored in five separate batteries.
Today’s test cut everything but the light support battery, simulating what would happen in case of an equipment malfunction
Judy stopped typing on the laptop held to her lap by Velcro and pressed her palm to the display. Her skin, illuminated only by earthlight through the oval window, looked like a sculpture trapped in solid ice. The light was slightly dappled from the condensation on the cupola window.
Judy closed her laptop and peeled it off her lap. Once the ripping sound had faded away, the only noise was her father, Ronnie Smark, grunting one side of a conversation into his headset. He was floating free and ramrod straight in the middle of the room. During the forty-five minute “night” when the sun was blocked by the Earth, the water in their walls quickly chilled. Floating in midair like that was the best way to stay warm.
Ronnie raised his hand to his ear and switched the headset off. He arched his back like a cat and waved his arms to turn his body toward her, still clinging to the window frame.
“It’s always something,” he said. “We’re just lucky there aren’t guests on board yet.”
His breath came out in puffs of white. The temperature was just above freezing. Information from the CIA suggested that their air conditioning had stopped as a result of an accident during a USNORTHCOM operation called Operation Seed Pod. Countless other electrical devices had died too, including every one exposed on the exterior of the hotel and half the solar batteries. All that had survived had been the orbital maneuvering system, powerfully shielded against the possibility of solar bursts, and the core life-support functionality.
“More bad news?” asked Judy.
Ronnie bent forward and attached the strap that extended from his belt to a hook on the wall. This was the spider monkey technique, one of the many methods for relaxing in the hotel’s microgravity that they had been testing.
“Nothing serious,” Ronnie said. “Just our life expectancy. As things stand, apparently we have two weeks.”
Judy clenched her fists.
“One more thing,” Ronnie added. “Apparently some dangerous craft are flying around in low orbit. Let’s change into our space suits, just in case.”
Ronnie glanced at a container in the corner of the room and winked. “Hopefully we won’t have to ruin our first space walk experiments,” he said.
“I wouldn’t mind. At least it’d slim me down,” Judy said.
One of the hidden innovations of Project Wyvern w
as a pressure suit that didn’t use air pressure. Instead, the person inside was wrapped in countless belts containing tubes of water, the result adding up to one standard atmosphere of pressure. This “strap suit” had been tested countless times in chambers on Earth but had never actually been used in space. Either way, if there was an accident in orbit causing a hull breach, they would die from lack of oxygen before help arrived. The strap suit, designed for emergency evacuation, was nothing more than a temporary comfort.
“A space walk would be exciting, too.”
“Spare me the bravado,” Ronnie said. “Faking good cheer makes you hungry. Losing our microwave ovens—that hurt. Our molecular gastronomy packs aren’t any good if they thaw out on their own. What are we going to do?”
A ringtone that sounded like a pigeon’s coo came from Ronnie’s thigh. Judy remembered that ringtone. Whenever Ronnie heard it, he would throw whatever he was doing aside and tear out of the house, headed for his warehouse office. That had been fifteen years ago, when Ronne had been just another entrepreneur.
“Hotmail?” Judy asked. “You still have that account?”
“It’s a handy way for old friends to reach me,” Ronnie said.
He reached into the thigh pocket of his overalls, reciting names from his start-up days: Ethan, Farrell, Mike … Judy remembered the faces of at least half of them.
“Unbelievable. Can’t you think of a better way to keep in touch?”
“For some reason, it’s hard to give it up,” Ronnie said. “Hey, it’s Ozzy. Remember him?”
“Mr. Cunningham, the landlord? Based in Seychelles now, right?”
Ronnie stroked his smartphone. “He’s living like a hermit on an uninhabited island he converted to an observation base,” Ronnie said. “Huh, so he was the one who made up this Rod from God thing. Well, he would.”
Ronnie laughed, no doubt picturing the world in a panic over Ozzy’s tall tale.
“And what does he have to say now?”
“Hold on. The guy’s not known for his brevity,” Ronnie said, attaching the strap that extended from the wall to a loop on his belt and floating lightly in the air. He curled up and stared at his smartphone. Apparently what Ozzy had to say was of great interest. After a while, he finally looked up.
“You’ll like this, Judy,” he said. “Go ahead and read it.”
He pushed his smartphone with his finger and sent it sailing toward Judy’s chest without any spin. After getting comfortable in microgravity, the two of them had spent the past two days competing to see who could handle the center of gravity in small objects more accurately.
Judy allowed the smartphone’s mass to come to rest against her gently yielding index finger, then spun it around and pressed it against her palm. One set of phrases leaped out at her immediately from the avalanche of text.
Tether-propulsion system. Space tether. Really?
“Like father, like daughter,” Ronnie said.
“What do you mean?” Judy asked.
“You’re smiling,” Ronnie said. “Just after being told you have two weeks to live.”
“But isn’t this amazing? A tether-propulsion system. Really in use. Who should we go to to talk about it? This Kazumi guy? Let’s invest in it!”
“I knew you’d say that. But apparently he doesn’t have a company for tether propulsion.”
“We can figure something out, can’t we? I thought you were Ronnie Smark!”
Ronnie doubled over with laughter. “You’re right,” he said. “Let’s get right on it.”
“It’ll be a development company, so we’ll start up as an LLC. Okay? Next we have to decide on a DBA and business address so that we can obtain an EIN …”
“It takes two weeks to register an EIN.”
“Let’s ask Ozzy to take care of the rest. He may be fat, but he’s a start-up pro, right?”
“He’s in Seychelles now.”
“Who cares where he is?”
Judy kicked the wall and flew across to the oval window that faced up toward Earth. She wiped off the condensation. “We can still get people working on things,” she said. “If this becomes the next big step for space exploration, how great would that be? Can I call a board meeting to get approval for investment from Project Wyvern?”
“Why would we want to do that when I can just invest from my personal funds?”
13 Pier 37
Wed, 16 Dec 2020, 12:15 -0800 (2020-12-16T20:15 GMT)
Alaskan Way, Seattle
A mass of snow flew at Akari’s face. She ducked and tried to dodge but lost her balance. The rear wheel of her mountain bike skidded out of control. She squeezed both brakes frantically but finally went down, leaving two long tracks in the surface of the road.
Alaskan Way was covered in snow. This was Akari’s third fall since speeding past the sign declaring the highway closed. Snow filled the pockets of her cargo pants. She pushed herself up from the ground, burying her hands in white to her wrists. Her fingers were as cold as ice.
Akari checked the map on the smartphone attached to her handlebars.
“Just five hundred more meters.”
She was almost at the warehouse … but then what? Akari wasn’t sure herself. Hearing the CIA agents accuse her uncle of being some sort of terrorist mastermind had enraged her so much that she had simply run out of the room, with no particular long-term plan.
Straightening up, Akari yelled into the snow that beat at her face.
“It’s impossible!”
She knew this wasn’t true, of course. She didn’t even believe what she was shouting. The CIA’s deduction that Shiraishi had masterminded the Cloud fit perfectly with what she knew.
The technique for corrupting the online translation engine. The shadow-ware hidden in advertisements. The rose-scented D-Fi audio cables. The SIM card switching. And the program specifically written to view the Earth … She had not found these things by accident. She was chasing her uncle’s shadow.
He was enjoying running the Cloud. He wouldn’t be using up his bag of tricks on it otherwise. Asking herself what her uncle would do had always led her to the answer before. Even back when he had happily taught her how to program.
By the time he had left Japan, Shiraishi had changed. He allowed his irritation with companies who refused to take his security warnings seriously to show clearly, speaking with undisguised contempt. His geyser of ideas, once so abundant, dried up. “No one cares what an engineer has to say,” he would say bitterly. Akari had distanced herself from him after he became like that. Even hearing that he had left Japan had meant little to her.
Not wanting to end up like him was the main reason she had come to Fool’s Launchpad after finishing school. People there let her make full use of the skills she had cultivated. Especially Kazumi. Even minor refinements and tricks delighted him. She felt that this helped her stay focused on what lay ahead, even though her skills far exceeded her experience.
Akari forced herself to her feet. She heard the snow that had fallen on her head slide onto her shoulders. To the right, through the gaps in the line of trees by the side of the road, she could dimly see the cluster of snow-covered warehouses at Pier 37. Shiraishi had long sought a role that would recognize his talents, and he had found it in the field. He had to be in one of those warehouses.
She heard a metallic squeal behind her and saw a black Mustang stop on the rails under the Alaskan Way Viaduct. The passenger-side window opened.
“Akari! Get in!” called Bruce.
“I’m going to see Uncle Ageha!”
Bruce leaned across the passenger’s seat and opened the door. “Yeah, I know!” he said. “Me too, so get in!”
Akari shook her head and righted the mountain bike, swinging her leg over the seat.
She was almost there. She didn’t know what the CIA planned to do with Shiraishi, but
she had some questions she wanted to ask him herself. Why had he abandoned Japan? Why was he involved in some North Korean scheme that amounted to terrorism?
Bruce spun the wheel to steer the Mustang off the tracks and into the street. Its once-shiny bumpers were cracked now, covered in snow and scratches.
“Just tell me one thing,” he said. “If that’s really Shiraishi in that warehouse, will he have realized that we’ve found him?”
Akari nodded. Her uncle would have noticed as soon as his new SIM card connected to the fake China Mobility hotspot, quickly ascertaining that the hotspot was actually a honeypot running on a Raspberry Pi.
“Better hurry, then,” Bruce muttered to himself, then leaned toward her again. “I’m going to drop by the coast guard on the way to the warehouse,” he said. “If you find Shiraishi, don’t try anything. Just sit tight and wait.”
The Mustang tore down Alaskan Way, half-skidding rear wheels kicking up flurries of snow in its wake.
Wed, 16 Dec 2020, 12:17 -0800 (2020-12-16T20:17 GMT)
Pier 37 Warehouse, Seattle
Shiraishi stepped out onto the external staircase on the north side of the building only to be forced back behind the door by Chance, who had gone ahead of him to check their surroundings. A black Mustang was tearing down Alaskan Way toward them, clouds of snow in its wake.
“The driver looked at me,” she said.
“Sure you didn’t imagine it?” he replied.
“No, he turned his head. Look how fast he’s going. No one would take their eyes off the road in weather like this without a good reason. He knows we’re here and he’s coming for us.”
“You worry too much.”
Chance pointed to the stairs. “Move,” she said. The snow had been falling since the night before and was now ankle-deep. Shiraishi held his blueprint case in one hand and gripped the railing with the other.
“Wait!” Chance said, then changed her mind. “No, hurry! A bike’s coming.”