by Taiyo Fujii
Ryu produced a phone and a charging cable from the pocket of his suit and placed them on the floor.
“I will leave this phone here,” he said. “The line is safe. Use it to contact me whenever you like.”
The door closed and the sound of Ryu’s defeated footsteps receded down the corridor.
Jamshed sighed and surveyed his dim laboratory with its hanging forest of paper.
Ryu was right about one thing. There was nothing he could do here. But should he follow Ryu to Korea, or should he contact the Chinese man in the suit who had brought him the Iridium?
He glanced at the Iridium on his desk. No, China was no good. He would be out of his element in so desirable a country. There must be somewhere where a researcher left behind by the times could feel at home. And weren’t such countries exactly the ones that Shiraishi had hoped the Great Leap would help to transform?
The Chinese man had known about the space tethers. If Jamshed took down Tiangong-2, no doubt the Iridium service would be cut off. In any case, the Iridium satellites were in low Earth orbit too and would not survive the massacre.
Jamshed picked up the phone Ryu had left by the door. The other end of the charging cable had a port for connection to a computer.
“A safe line …”
Could he connect to the network this way?
Wed, 16 Dec 2020, 16:03 -0800 (2020-12-17T00:03 GMT)
Western Days Hotel
Chris gazed at Daryl as he stood in front of the whiteboard. He had redrawn the diagram of the space tether and was now explaining it to the camera, writing notes and drawing lines as he went. This was part of a pre-countermeasure orientation for the benefit of those at the other end of the video call: NASA, the CIA, and NORAD.
The picture of the Orbital Cloud that Second Lieutenant Abbot had taken from the stratosphere during Operation Seed Pod had finally been accepted as reliable proof of Team Seattle’s claims, and a Space Tether Response Team had been hastily assembled. Daryl was currently bringing those new to the crisis up to speed.
“I think that about covers it,” he said finally. “If you have any questions, please send them over chat.”
The monitor displaying the chat room quickly filled with questions from the members of the NASA team who had been watching. Most of the questions were about the space tethers themselves and the principles of the tether-propulsion system.
Is that sort of drive really feasible? asked one of the messages. Chris felt a flash of anger. “Feasible?” There were forty thousand of them in orbit already! She was just wondering if it might not be better to cut NASA out of the loop when she heard keyboard noise over the speakers and superbly crafted answers began to appear from Colonel Lintz’s Orbital Surveillance team at NORAD. Clearly he didn’t want Team Seattle to have to spend their time teaching Space Tethers 101 to NASA either.
“Hey, Kazumi,” Daryl said, returning to the table.
Kazumi didn’t even look up from the papers laid out on the table before him—the contents of the blueprint case that Akari had brought back from Shiraishi’s hideout. He was physically present, but his thoughts were far away.
Kazumi had clearly not been prepared for the role he would have to play now that Jamshed had cut ties with them, Chris mused. Was studying these documents his way of escaping? Or had Shiraishi’s death right in front of him made everything seem less real somehow?
Akari was in a corner of the room silently adding calculation nodes to her Raspberry Pi cluster. Chris doubted that she had fully processed seeing her uncle killed right in front of her. It was Chris who had brought Akari into contact with Shiraishi without adequate preparation, and ultimately it was Chris who had caused Shiraishi’s death. Akari’s engineering skills had supported the team thus far, but it would be unreasonable to expect her to function on the same level now.
Bruce finished checking the camera and projector. “Chris,” he said. “Let’s get started.”
A 3-D globe indicating the Cloud’s current location glowed on the whiteboard. The video-call screen showed that the NORAD Orbital Surveillance team was ready and waiting, as were Kurosaki and Sekiguchi, standing in their suits in a dimly lit room. The NASA and CIA teams, who had just finished their orientation, would just be observers for this one. If they had something to say, they would have to say it in the text-only chat window.
“Let’s,” Chris agreed. She stood behind Daryl and Kazumi in their seats and took a deep breath.
Kazumi put Shiraishi’s papers down and turned to face the camera. Chris had to keep him sharp and motivated. The veterans at NORAD and NASA couldn’t be allowed to lord their professional status over him. She also nursed the hope that this meeting would bring Akari back to her old self.
Chris turned away from the sight of Lintz’s troubled gaze on the whiteboard and looked directly into the camera. Ensuring that your gaze met your listeners’ was the ironclad rule for maintaining control in a videoconference. You could not fall into the trap of looking at the screen where their faces were. You had to keep your eyes on the camera and put everything you had into ensuring that the meeting met the goals you had set for it.
Chris extended her awareness to her entire body.
“Colonel Lintz and everyone at NORAD, Mr. Kurosaki, Mr. Sekiguchi,” she said. “Welcome to Team Seattle.”
She spread her arms in a well-practiced gesture.
“Can you all see the whiteboard? Our objective is to bring the forty thousand space tethers in orbit down into the atmosphere. I look forward to a vigorous exchange of opinion.”
Kazumi raised his hand.
“Kazumi Kimura,” he said. He glanced at Bruce standing by the whiteboard. “Bruce, would you mind writing this up for me? I am going to explain the most rational countermeasure I can think of in our current situation: seizing control.”
Kazumi raised his index finger. Bruce obediently wrote 1 on the whiteboard.
“First, we cut off Dr. Jahanshah’s Internet connection. Next, we update the drivers for the D-Fi cables that make up the base station network—change them to give us control. Finally, we drop the Cloud into the atmosphere.”
Bruce kept pace on the whiteboard.
1. Cut connection
2. Update base station drivers
3. Control space tethers
Sekiguchi raised his hand. “Step one is finished,” he said.
“Huh?” Kazumi said.
“We suspended network service to the twenty Iridiums we provided to the students at Tehran U as well as the one we gave the professor personally. With luck, we’ve stayed Professor Jahanshah’s hand until the Iranian government restores Internet service—perhaps two weeks from now.”
“Well, that was easy,” said Chris, folding her arms with a look of satisfaction.
“It’s all done through the Iridium customer website,” said Sekiguchi.
“Thank you, Sekiguchi-san,” said Kazumi. “That gives us some breathing room. The next step is updating the drivers, then.”
“I’ve got people at the company working on reverse engineering them right now,” Bruce said. “Rothko, you listening? Hurry it up.”
Okay, appeared from the CIA in the chat window. Should finish in …
As Kazumi and the others stared at the screen, waiting for the ETD to appear, Akari spoke in Japanese from the corner of the room.
“Dr. Jahanshah’s connection hasn’t been cut,” she said.
Kazumi and Bruce turned their eyes to the base station communication console projected on one corner of the whiteboard. Bruce relayed the news to the non-Japanese speakers.
Kazumi couldn’t believe his eyes. “She’s right …” he said. New TLEs were being sent to the space tethers at a brisk pace.
“I just reconfirmed that none of the Iridiums are operational,” Sekiguchi reported.
“Then who’s doing this?�
� said Bruce. “The North Koreans?”
Something nagged at Kazumi about the TLEs that were scrolling past. They were different in some fundamental way than the ones Team Seattle had begun receiving from the CIA that morning. But how?
“Those TLEs have been calculated by hand,” Akari muttered in Japanese again. “They’re too neat.”
“Thanks, Akari,” said Kazumi. He had Daryl take a screenshot of some of the data and approached the whiteboard to look at it more closely. “Dr. Jahanshah must have written these TLEs himself,” he murmured. “Look at this. The epoch shift is exactly a hundredth of a second.” He pointed out some other parameters that were too neat. “If he did this with a computer, there’d be more digits after the decimal points. They wouldn’t all cut off after just two.”
“So he has another way to transmit directions to the Cloud,” Sekiguchi said.
Kazumi put his elbows on the table. The team had gotten stuck already. They had no way to stop Jamshed.
“Well, this is a problem,” said Daryl. “Now he can do whatever he wants with them.”
“Can we tell what satellite he’s aiming for?” Chris asked.
“Leave that to us,” said Lintz from the NORAD screen. “We just need to check what crosses paths with the orbits in these TLEs, right? Hey, Harold! Get half the team working on this. Just start from the top and work your way down.”
That would take more time than they had. Kazumi half-closed his eyes.
He held up his index finger, overlaying it in his vision with the globe projected on the whiteboard, then visualized the TLEs being sent to the space tethers. The orbits they described were circular and simple in the extreme. He allowed the slight variations added by hand to give him a sense of what form the finished Cloud would take. Jamshed’s manual calculations made the results easy to follow. He moved the Cloud in his mind’s eye, searching for an orbital object in his memory …
“The target is Project Wyvern’s orbital hotel,” he said.
“What?”
Kazumi ignored Lintz. He had to stay in the zone.
“Then it will raise its altitude and intersect with Tiangong-2. Next, Hubble and the spy satellite KH-12. The Cloud’s shape will be a flattened spheroid fifty kilometers in diameter on the orbital plane and twenty kilometers thick.”
“Listen, this is no time for fortune-telling!” shouted the man sitting next to Lintz on NORAD’s screen. He was red with indignation, pointing his finger at the camera.
But this was no worse a reaction than Kazumi had expected. He calmly advanced the hands of the clock in his vision.
“Rendezvous in approximately four hours over the Atlantic—no, the west coast of Africa, where the Cloud will engulf the orbital hotel as it gathers,” Kazumi said. He opened his eyes again and turned to the camera. “Please double-check that projection before you do anything,” he said.
“Listen, uh—Kazumi, was it?” said one of the NORAD team members. “We’re chasing an entirely unknown tether-propulsion system here. There’s no way you could predict its movements so easily.”
“Drop it, Harold,” said someone else at NORAD.
“But it makes no sense,” protested the first man. “Isn’t this guy just some amateur?”
“Bruce,” Chris said. “Cut the camera.”
Bruce reached for the button, but Kazumi stopped him. “That will not be necessary. Daryl, please show the orbital hotel’s position four hours from now.”
“You got it,” said Daryl. “Check it out, folks: Kazumi’s sixth sense.”
Daryl’s fingers danced across his keyboard. The globe on the whiteboard spun forward four hours. The icon indicating the orbital hotel was over the west coast of Africa, just as Kazumi had predicted. There were cries of surprise.
“You see that? He got the orbital hotel’s location right. Now I’ll overlay the TLEs sent up to the space tethers. You won’t believe your eyes.”
Daryl hit the Enter key and a single point appeared over the orbital hotel. He hit Enter again, and again. Each time he did, a dot appeared in a slightly different position. Gradually the orbital hotel was obscured by a flattened spheroid of dots accumulating around it: the Cloud, right in line with Kazumi’s predictions.
“That’s impossible,” said Lintz, his gaze fixed on the screen. The red-faced man next to him, who had risen to his feet, froze with his index finger still raised.
Kazumi pointed at the screen. “These are the instructions Dr. Jahanshah sent,” he said. “About four hours from now, the Cloud will rendezvous with the orbital hotel. However, my method cannot give an exact time. So please start working on some more exact calculations.”
“How does he—”
“Later,” Chris said, cutting Lintz off. “Kazumi, if your prediction is correct, what then?”
“The orbital hotel will be torn apart by terminal apparatuses moving at ten kilometers per second. Two hours after that, the Cloud will reach Tiangong-2, which will meet the same fate.”
There was a burst of conversation on the NORAD side: “Ten kilometers per second?” “That’s unbelievable.” “We’d better tell China.” Questions from the CIA and NASA popped up at a furious pace in the chat window.
“Four hours … Daryl, if we sent an evacuation order now, would that be enough time?”
“Not for the orbital hotel,” Daryl said. “They don’t have a return vehicle anymore. And they aren’t capable of much in the way of orbital maneuvers after all the damage they took.”
“What about Tiangong-2?”
“Six hours till impact. Probably enough time to evacuate.”
“Find the meeting attendee who can get a message to the Chinese the fastest. Report back to me in ten minutes.”
“Chris,” Sekiguchi said, raising his hand on the JAXA screen. “I sent a message to Director Huang at the China National Space Administration about Tiangong-2 earlier. Please just focus your efforts on sending a formal recommendation through diplomatic channels.”
By the time he had finished speaking, all eyes were on the JAXA screen.
“You, uh …” Chris was lost for words. “Without even asking … ? But how did you know?”
“Unfortunately, we don’t know much about orbital mechanics, so we can’t help with the countermeasures,” Sekiguchi continued, ignoring her. “But we are in Tehran. We’ll try to convince Professor Jahanshah to call off the Cloud.”
Chris found herself swept along by Sekiguchi’s smooth patter.
“If he won’t agree to our request, well …” Sekiguchi smiled and drew a leisurely thumb across his neck.
Kurosaki put his hand on Sekiguchi’s arm. “None of that, Sekiguchi,” he said.
Sekiguchi shrugged, apparently not bothered either way. “Fine,” he said. “We’ll just try to convince him with our debate skills, then. Can we offer him asylum in the US as a bargaining chip?”
“But there’s no US embassy in Tehran,” Kurosaki said.
“I know that. But there’s a Canadian one. And Mexican, Japanese … Plenty of windows the CIA could reach through if they wanted to. Chris, could you please lay the groundwork?”
Chris thought for a moment. “All right,” she said. “If he finds his way into the Canadian embassy by the end of tomorrow, I’ll see to it that he gets asylum in the US. Bruce, make it happen.”
“Your wish is my command,” Bruce said. “But, Sekiguchi, I wouldn’t recommend going to visit him. There are still drones—Anjians—in the air around Tehran IT. It’s not the sort of place a tourist can just stroll around.”
Sekiguchi reached out and grabbed the camera trained on the two JAXA members, then adjusted its angle to show the phone he was holding up in his other hand. He pointed at an icon on the screen.
“It’ll be fine,” he said. “I’m carrying my amulet against Anjian strikes.”
Chris’s eyes
went wide.
“You …”
“Yes,” Sekiguchi said lightly. “I’m a Chinese spy. That’s how I was able to contact Director Huang. But the only orders I’ve received about this matter are to gather information. Things are moving so fast that headquarters is on the back foot. Anyway, the drones won’t be firing at me. This app deactivates the fire control system on every Anjian within twenty kilometers.”
Bruce opened his mouth in amazement. “A back door … I’d heard rumors, but I never imagined it’d be a smartphone app. Does it really work?”
“I’ll let you know when I get back.”
“Hamas or someone like them are out there too,” Bruce warned. “The Anjians aren’t the only danger. Don’t take on more than you can handle.”
With a smile, Sekiguchi rose to his feet and pulled on his field coat.
“Hold on,” said Kurosaki, stubbing out his cigarette. “I’m coming too.”
“As long as you don’t cramp my style,” Sekiguchi said.
“Things might get physical.”
“What are you talking about? We’re just going to talk to him. “
The banter between the two JAXA members in Tehran echoed through the quiet operations center. Chris studied Sekiguchi’s smooth face more closely.
“Sekiguchi,” she asked. “Why are you doing this?”
Sekiguchi rubbed his face and smiled. “I don’t want any more Shiraishis,” he said. “My mission is to put people where they can do their best work. I headhunt engineers. I’m the one who gave the professor his Iridium. I’ll admit that I did it because I was hoping to recruit him, but …”
“And what about you? What will you do after this?”
Sekiguchi’s smile was warm and genuine. “Good question,” he said. “Headquarters isn’t going to let me walk around free now that I’m known to the CIA. I suppose I’ll go into hiding.”
“No!” said Kazumi, waving his arms as he stood in front of the camera. “It would not be good for you. Shiraishi did the same thing, went off on his own—and look what he ended up involved in. Do not get yourself in trouble. Please be sure to come back.”