by Taiyo Fujii
Akari clung to Shiraishi’s neck, pressing at the wound with her hand.
“Daryl!” Bruce called. “Pull Akari away! We have to run—this place is gonna blow!”
With Kazumi’s help, Daryl peeled Akari off Shiraishi as Bruce ran toward them.
“No!” Akari cried. “We can’t just leave him!”
Bruce swung the struggling Akari over one shoulder and began running toward the pier.
“Uncle Ageha!” she cried. “Bruce, let me go!”
Bruce kept running. When that explosion came, he planned to be as far away as possible. Akari stopped struggling and went limp over his shoulder. The case in her hand bounced against his lower back as they ran.
“Why?” she wailed. “Why would they shoot him? Was what he did so wrong? He could still have called it off …”
Bruce was beginning to wish that he’d never learned Japanese. Then a brilliant light shone behind them, followed by a wave of unnatural warmth that washed past them a moment later. The explosion. Thermite?
Bruce tossed Akari into a drift of snow and flung himself to the ground. Looking back he saw the warehouse engulfed in flames, rocked by the occasional smaller blast here and there. Buffeted by the blast wind, Nash’s still-kneeling body swayed before slowly toppling over.
Sorry, Nash. You answered my call for help, and this is how I repaid you.
Kazumi and Daryl caught up with them.
“Are you two okay?” Bruce asked. “No burns? If you got any gas on your skin, rub it off with snow. You’ll get a rash otherwise. Akari—”
Akari was still on her knees, watching the warehouse burn to the ground. Shaking, she hugged Shiraishi’s case to her chest with arms that were still red with blood. She was in shock. She might understand that Shiraishi was dead, but it was unlikely that she had processed everything else that had happened that night.
Shiraishi, dead. All at once, Bruce felt the weight of the loss.
A man who had realized one unique idea after another, culminating in a scheme that turned a far-fetched concept for a new type of spacecraft into a reality orbiting the planet right now. And all he had left behind was the case in Akari’s arms—which, Bruce knew from the way it had bounced against his back, contained nothing but paper.
Shiraishi had schemed on a scale that approached the absurd. But he had kept it all in his head and taken it with him when he died.
Bruce threw his helmet into the snow and pulled his smartphone from his pocket.
How was he going to report this to Chris?
Wed, 16 Dec 2020, 13:02 -0800 (2020-12-16T21:02 GMT)
Western Days Hotel
The glass screen of the phone Chris held to her cheek had warmed above body temperature. She seldom received reports this long by phone.
“Ah,” she said. “I see. I’ll get on that right away.”
“What happened?” came Jamshed’s composed voice from the video-call speaker.
“Sorry to keep you waiting at this time of night,” Chris said.
“It is no problem. I have too much data analysis to finish for sleep anyway. Is something wrong?”
Chris had placed a video call to Jamshed to check whether he had made up his mind about their offer of refuge, only to be interrupted by a phone call from Bruce.
She debated for a moment whether she could tell Jamshed what Bruce had reported. But the demonstration today of the damage that hiding things could do was too fresh in her mind. If everyone had been sharing the same information, Shiraishi and Nash might both still be alive. In any case, it would all be public knowledge soon.
“Shiraishi is dead,” she said.
Jamshed was silent for a moment. “I see,” he said. “This is unfortunate. Did the CIA kill him?”
“No. It seems that he was shot by his North Korean handler.”
“Nations … I am not sure how to say this. They are … a problematic framework. I see. It was because he died, then.”
“What was?”
“I received a message. From Shiraishi.”
“Will you tell me what it said?”
Chris double-checked that the conversation was being recorded.
“Was very simple,” Jamshed said. “His goals for swarm of space tethers, which he calls a Cloud. His plans for the future. Also, controller and account for space tethers. He was perhaps expecting that he is killed or captured one day.”
Chris felt a wave of relief. Now they could learn what the North Koreans planned to do with the Cloud and also seize control of it. The final pieces of the puzzle had come together.
“So you can stop the space tethers now?”
“Yes, that would be possible.” Jamshed’s gaze did not meet the camera as he spoke. He was looking at another screen. He stroked his beard and rocked his head slowly from side to side. “This control panel is very interesting. Everything I proposed in my paper is realized perfectly. It seems Shiraishi understood my space tethers completely. I wish we could have talked just once.”
Through the speakers, Chris heard the sound of Jamshed’s mouse clicking.
“So Shiraishi was a compatriot of Kazumi’s. A wonderful country, Japan. It reminds me of when I was first learning about tether propulsion with Lorentz force from an illustration by Japanese space agency. Spacecraft that use only electricity—no need to make engines. Iran could research this, develop it. So I thought.”
“And you were right. Your paper was the starting point for those space tethers flying around up there right now.”
“Thank you, Chris. But for real development I needed an environment with interest in technology and engineering. Tehran is not such an environment. I had no way to share these ideas.” Jamshed was still looking at the other screen. “Hmm. This is quite brilliant too.” His mouse clicked. “I will read from Shiraishi’s notes, yes? He planned to use the space tethers to cause accidents of unknown origin in low Earth orbit. Many times, hundreds of times more accidents than orbital-debris density suggests, sparking uncertainty and fear of space. This creates opportunity for countries that know of space tethers and where they are to attract workers from all through the world and take the lead in space development. He calls this plan the ‘Great Leap for the Rest of the World.’ Very well named.”
“He planned to … to close orbit off entirely, then,” Chris said. “But the space tethers have been discovered. Even if there are accidents, they won’t be mysterious.”
“This is true. Kazumi saw through to the truth. Brilliant work. With someone like that, you may even think of a way to stop the space tethers.”
“I’m sure we will. But he’ll need your help too.”
Jamshed’s hand stopped moving. His gaze returned to the camera, meeting Chris’s eyes across the connection.
“He does not need someone like me.”
“That isn’t true. Kazumi’s an amateur.”
“An amateur who is more than a match for me, Chris.” Jamshed laughed, giving Chris goose bumps. “It is I who am ‘the rest of the world,’ as Shiraishi says. I am the left behind. So I shall see that the Great Leap becomes reality. Even if space tethers are known to exist, there is a way to break the will of developed country to go into space. This is Shiraishi’s final message to me.”
“What is?” Chris demanded. “Tell me what you’re going to do!”
“Kazumi might know. Ask him. I must be going. My workload has just increased significantly.”
The video call was disconnected. Chris tried to reconnect but received only a “User unknown” message. Jamshed had deleted his account.
Chris’s goose bumps had spread across her entire body.
They had lost Jamshed.
Shiraishi was gone, but his forty thousand space tethers were still up there in orbit. The threat had not been reduced at all. On the contrary—it had grown. Jamshed would surely take mea
sures more extreme than anything Shiraishi had done.
Chris glanced at her watch.
She had to get the team back on track and start working on countermeasures. And she had to do it before Jamshed made his own move.
14 Team Seattle
Panjshambe, 27 Azar 1399, 03:22 +0330 (2020-12-16T23:52 GMT)
Tehran Institute of Technology
Inside the dim laboratory, Jamshed reached for one of the yellow pieces of paper hanging from the roof and pulled it toward him. He copied the blurred numbers on the cathode tube onto it, then went through a few calculations to obtain a set of coordinates which he circled and numbered: #343.
He was still less than one hundredth of the way through the work he needed to do.
Letting go of the paper, Jamshed folded his arms above his head and slumped in his chair. Clearly, tracking and controlling each of the forty thousand space tethers individually was not going to work. He looked at the swaying slips of paper, checking the coordinates one by one.
Shiraishi’s Cloud had been divided into three separate clusters, moving independently, but Jamshed could see no order in their spin, velocity, or formation. This meant that the calculations had been done using computers, not by hand.
“I’ll just have to reunite the Cloud,” he murmured to himself.
He would gather the whole group of forty thousand space tethers in one place. That much would be easy. If he directed them all at the same destination, before long they would all arrive. By adding a few tiny variations to the orbital elements he sent, he could shape the swarm into a dense spherical cloud.
That was more in line with his goals, too. He had neither the technique nor the time to destroy satellites with the sort of finesse Shiraishi had exhibited. Over in Seattle, Kazumi was desperately searching for a way to knock the space tethers out of orbit. Jamshed had to sweep low Earth orbit clear of satellites before that happened.
Jamshed Jahanshah, genius spacecraft inventor, was now flying the flag of the Great Leap, entrusted to him by Shiraishi at the moment of his death.
Jamshed gathered up all the yellow posters lying on the floor with nothing written on the back yet and carried them to his desk. Pen in hand, he visualized the three subclouds that Shiraishi had left behind and began working out an orbit that all three could easily converge on.
After a few minutes of experimental calculations, a suitable orbit began to emerge from the figures. If he had the space tethers move at top speed, the Cloud could be reassembled in four hours. Now he needed a TLE with that moment as the epoch. Inclination 43 degrees, right ascension of ascending node 120 degrees … Velocity expressed as mean motion, 15.1 revolutions per day.
“This will do nicely.”
There was, it occurred to him, another celestial body with a similar TLE. The Project Wyvern orbital hotel. Let that be the first object the reformed Cloud devoured, then. If he set the space tethers to their maximum rotational speed, their terminal apparatuses would move at ten kilometers per second. Whatever sort of spacecraft the orbital hotel might be, this would surely tear it to shreds. The two civilians aboard would become symbols of the LEO massacre.
“And after that, Tiangong-2. I’ll just need to raise the orbit a little.”
After cleaning up his target TLE and adding a small margin of error, he entered it into the controller he had inherited from Shiraishi and hit Submit.
The controller transmitted the instructions to the sixty thousand base stations scattered around the world, which sent them on VHF waves to the orbiting space tethers. Receiving their new orders, the tethercraft used the feedback program Jamshed had devised to skew their motion toward the target orbit.
Jamshed checked the mass of coordinates flowing down the screen and confirmed that things were in motion. He was master of the space tethers once more.
“Marvelous.”
Shiraishi’s design embodied Jamshed’s theories perfectly. From the use of spin and randomly moving ballast for stabilization to the flocking flight pattern and trial-and-error feedback mechanism for attaining the target orbit, Shiraishi had understood and given form to all of the possibilities Jamshed had hinted at.
What kind of man had this Shiraishi been? A Japanese engineer who had built the space tethers with North Korean resources. A man who could achieve an impossible task like that would surely have had no difficulty finding employment away from the shadows if he had so desired.
Jamshed closed his eyes. As he did, he heard the door open.
“Who’s there?!”
An Asian man with thinning hair in a mousy suit stood at the entrance with a flashlight in his hand. The flashlight’s beam reflected from the floor to illuminate his face from below, lending an eerie cast to his already tired and unhealthy-looking features.
“Professor Ryu,” Jamshed said. “What brings you here at this time of night?”
Jamshed had met Ryu before. He was here on the technological exchange program between Iran and North Korea. Iran had sent Jamshed’s old advisor Hamed to North Korea in exchange, apparently with Jamshed’s space tether paper in his suitcase. About Ryu’s personal life Jamshed knew nothing, although rumor had it that he had been sent to Iran as punishment for his role in the failure of Taepodong-2.
“My apologies for disturbing you at this hour,” said Ryu. “May I have a few minutes of your time?”
He turned out the flashlight and walked toward Jamshed.
“According to one of our agents in the US, Professor Jahanshah, you have stolen a weapon belonging to my country.”
“Weapon?”
“Something called a ‘space tether.’ ”
Jamshed leaped to his feet. The paper piled on his knees tumbled to the floor.
“You are the ones who stole it!”
Ryu shrank from the outburst. “Wait,” he said, backing away with one palm upraised.
Jamshed kicked a folding chair out of the way and closed the distance between the two of them, treading on the fallen paper without a second thought. “The space tether was mine,” he snarled, “until North Korea stole it from me!” He seized the smaller man’s collar in his fist.
“I can’t breathe!” Ryu said. “Let me go!”
His flashlight fell to the floor and broke, sending shards of plastic flying.
“Listen!” gasped Ryu. “The space tether is yours. We have decided to give it to you—no, return it to you. We only ask one favor. Do not carry out the plan the previous mission leader conveyed to you. There must be no LEO massacre.”
“What?” Jamshed loosened his grip. Had the plan to destroy all satellites in low Earth orbit been against North Korea’s wishes? “We clean out low Earth orbit so that North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan can begin space development together—the Great Leap. That was the plan. Surely you aren’t getting cold feet now?”
Ryu looked down at his stretched-out collar. “I am only a messenger,” he said.
Jamshed’s fist clenched again. “That does not answer my question,” he said. “Tell me.”
There was a pause. Finally, Ryu said, “Yes. Apparently Shiraishi was acting on his own initiative. When the mission to move the Iranian rocket was played up as a ‘Rod from God’ and our leader delivered his speech, we thought the Great Leap would succeed. But only because there was no evidence tying the orbital phenomena to our country.”
Ryu revealed that he himself had been sent to Tehran as a scout for the Great Leap. However, the existence of the space tethers, supposed to be kept top secret, had been exposed by a Japanese meddler. The CIA had seen through Shiraishi’s carefully arranged diversion. The leader had lost his nerve.
Nevertheless, the leader and the intelligence community had both continued to place their trust in the always-resourceful Shiraishi. It seemed that right up until his final moment, they had hoped that he would figure out some new direction for the Great Leap
to head in.
“But Shiraishi is dead,” Ryu said, shaking his head weakly.
“Yes,” Jamshed said. “As I heard it, it was his North Korean minder who killed him.”
“I haven’t been told the details,” Ryu said after a brief pause. “But his death leaves a hole at the heart of the Great Leap.”
“So you refuse to go through with it?”
“The leader and his associates have finally realized what a serious thing orbital sabotage is. How strong the international reaction would be.”
“And this is all fine with you, Professor Ryu?”
“Wh—”
As Ryu looked up, Jamshed slammed him into the wall again.
“When Shiraishi told me about the Great Leap, my heart sang,” Jamshed said. “To reach out and touch space, even from a place like this! What did you feel, Professor Ryu? My space tethers will put orbit beyond the grasp of developed countries. Researchers and engineers will flock to the rest of world—to us. Real space development with real professionals, right here in this country! You are prepared to give this up?”
Ryu closed his eyes and turned away.
Jamshed loosened his grip and jabbed Ryu in the chest. Ryu’s legs had gotten crossed in the tussle, and he fell back and sagged against the wall.
“Get out,” Jamshed said, pointing at the door. “I see that Shiraishi’s death was in vain. You are right about one thing: the Great Leap could never work with cowards like you at the reins. I will do what is necessary myself.”
Ryu straightened his collar and picked up his flashlight before turning back to Jamshed. His knees were shaking.
“You have something else to say?” demanded Jamshed.
“I beg you, at least rethink the LEO massacre,” Ryu said. “And I have one more message for you. Will you come to Korea? We want you to develop the next generation of space tethers in Shiraishi’s place. No one else understands how they work.”
“To a country controlled by incompetent cowards?”
“Professor Jahanshah, do you not want to share your research? Was the space tether not an amazing development? You cannot go on working alone like this. Please think it over once your temper has cooled.”