by Taiyo Fujii
Sekiguchi paused as if thinking. Kurosaki put an arm around his shoulders.
“I’ll be sure to bring him back, Kazumi,” he said. “Don’t worry. Any messages for the professor?”
Kazumi grabbed a few of the documents from Shiraishi’s case and held them up to the camera.
“Tell him I want to work with him on using space tethers to change the world,” he said. “Tell him we can work together to realize the plans Shiraishi left behind.”
Space tether technology would redefine space development forever. Shiraishi’s light-field image of the Earth alone would change attitudes toward the whole enterprise. Kazumi fervently described a few of the plans he had come up with based on Shiraishi’s work.
“Please, Kurosaki. I need Dr. Jahanshah.”
“Understood,” Kurosaki said. “I’ll be sure to tell him. As for Shiraishi … Well, he never was the type to be straightforward about his feelings, but I’m sure he’d want you to see these plans to completion too.”
With a final farewell, Kurosaki and Sekiguchi left the videoconference.
“Kazumi,” said Chris from behind him. “You’d make a good boss, you know that?”
Panjshambeh, 27 Azar 1399, 03:45 +0330
(2020-12-17T00:15 GMT)
Esperanto Hotel, Tehran
Kurosaki picked up the phone that they had connected to the television. “You were kidding about that drone repellant thing, right?” he asked.
Sekiguchi shook his head, phone pressed to his ear. “Why so suspicious? It’s all true—excuse me, let’s pick this up later. Salam!”
He began a conversation in fluent Persian. Kurosaki caught Jamshed’s name a couple of times, but apart from that all he could tell was that whoever Sekiguchi was calling, they weren’t from China or Japan.
After noticing the word interanet a few times, he finally realized who was at the other end of the call—the man who had been standing on the Peugeot the other day leading the student demonstration. Alef Kadiba.
Sekiguchi ended the call and gave Kurosaki the thumbs-up. “I’ve hired us a guide.”
“The guy leading that demonstration?”
“Yup. He’s also a friend of Dr. Jahanshah’s. Says he’ll show us the way to his lab. I went there yesterday, but I’m glad we won’t be going there alone at night.”
“I’m surprised he agreed.”
“He’s worried about his friend. That, and I told him that if we managed to persuade Dr. Jahanshah to rejoin our side, I’d have service restored to the Iridiums. “
“That makes sense.”
Kadiba and the students must have been crushed when the Internet cut out so soon after they’d received the phones yesterday. Sekiguchi explained that he at least wanted them to be able to use the Iridiums until Iran restored its connection on a national level. Kurosaki had no disagreement.
“Did he say anything about Jahanshah?” asked Kurosaki.
“Apparently he’s been acting strangely for the past few days. Now, we have fifteen minutes until our guide arrives. Let’s make sure we’re ready to leave.”
Sekiguchi placed a duralumin case on his bed. It was the last of the cases he’d brought in through diplomatic channels. He opened it up, pulled out a few handfuls of passports, banknotes, credit cards, and SIM cards, and distributed the items among the pockets of his suit.
Kurosaki craned his neck to see the paraphernalia still left in the case. A hypodermic needle wrapped in a plastic bag. Drugs. Some kind of white powder. He didn’t even want to think what it might all be for.
“The tools of the trade, huh? The SIM cards are a modern touch.”
“I had them add the SIMs after we talked to Akari.”
Sekiguchi peeled back part of the case’s lining and produced a pistol small enough to hide in his palm.
“Of course, some things never go out of style,” he said.
“You could put someone’s eye out with that. Let me hold on to it for you.”
“Absolutely not.”
Kurosaki caught Sekiguchi by the arm and snatched the gun from him.
“You don’t even know how to use a gun,” complained Sekiguchi. He had made only a token attempt to prevent Kurosaki from taking the weapon. No doubt he didn’t really want to use it either.
“Carrying the gun yourself will just make you want to use it,” Kurosaki said. “Remember, we’re going to persuade him.”
“There are taikonauts on Tiangong-2 as well. I can’t let them die.”
“Enough with the ‘I can’t let them die’ and ‘I have to do it.’ You sound like Shiraishi. And you saw how he ended up.”
Recalling the procedure from a movie he’d seen, Kurosaki pressed a button on the side of the pistol’s grip. A resin magazine slid out, exposing the small bullets through a hole in the side. The weapon was loaded. Kurosaki pulled the slide and saw the empty cavity. So the first round wasn’t chambered yet. He pushed the magazine back in and pulled the slide again. In that moment, the machine in his hand had became a deadly weapon. The awareness gave Kurosaki shivers.
“You always think of the worst-case scenario,” Kurosaki said. “Think about what you’re going to do if everything goes well. Hey, where’s the safety?”
Sekiguchi silently pointed at the lever beneath the slide. Kurosaki lowered the lever and confirmed that the trigger no longer moved.
“If we kill the professor, your only choice will be to go to ground. I wish I could tell you to do whatever you like, but I promised Kazumi. To give Jahanshah his message and to bring you home.”
“What will you do if the professor won’t listen?”
“Knock him out and carry him back?”
“Knock him—” The tension in Sekiguchi’s face dissolved into his familiar indulgent smile. “What’s the difference between that and shooting him?”
“Are you kidding me? They’re completely different.”
Kurosaki decided to stow the gun in a large coat pocket. If Jahanshah was alone, the two of them—no, counting Kadiba, the three of them—could bring him back to the hotel and wait for the Canadian embassy to open in the morning.
“Might need these later,” Sekiguchi muttered, scooping up the drugs and needles and dumping them back into the case. Whatever Sekiguchi had used on Kurosaki after the demonstration must have been in that jumble. Truth serum?
Come to think of it, he still hadn’t talked about that with Sekiguchi, though he surely knew that Kurosaki realized. Should he bring it up now? As Kurosaki hesitated, the phone in their room rang. Sekiguchi picked up the receiver, spoke briefly, then announced that Kadiba had arrived.
“That was fast.”
“No traffic this time of night. He said he’s waiting in the lobby with his car outside. Whoops—these don’t autolock.”
Kurosaki followed Sekiguchi out of their room into the pitch-black corridor. The single light of the elevator hall was visible at the far end. Kurosaki patted his pockets as they went: phone, wallet, passport. Couldn’t find his lighter. No cigarettes.
“I have to go back,” he said.
“Here’s the key,” Sekiguchi replied. “I’ll carry your coat. Smoke a cigarette or two if you like—I’ll be talking to Kadiba.”
Sekiguchi took Kurosaki’s coat, waved, and headed off to the elevator hall.
“Thanks,” called Kurosaki.
Back in the room he found his cigarettes right away. They were in front of the television. He pulled one out and lit up. His first cigarette break alone since that suite at the Nippon Grand. Now that he thought about it, he’d hardly gotten any rest at all since meeting Kazumi on Monday.
Blowing a column of smoke into the air, Kurosaki looked around the room. Perhaps because he knew what was inside, the duralumin case on the bed looked particularly sinister to him.
“A spy, huh?”
Thu,
17 Dec 2020, 04:27 +0400 (2020-12-17T00:27 GMT)
Desnoeufs Island
Johansson watched Ozzy’s jiggling belly go. Headset over his ears, Ozzy waved both his arms as he walked around. The video call with Kazumi and the others yesterday had reinvigorated him. He had spent his time since then writing long emails and making some calls of his own.
“No, listen,” he said into the phone. “Tether propulsion. Doesn’t need any fuel. Hey— Dammit! He hung up.”
“No good?”
“Useless. How about over there?”
Johansson checked Ozzy’s screen and reported that there was no new email.
“Morons! ‘Is it profitable?’ they say. It’s never been seen before! Who the hell knows if it’ll be profitable or not? Building an ecosystem and making it profitable is the fun part! What are these people even investors for? If it’s money they want, they should switch to FX trading or speculation or something.” Ozzy pulled a Coke out of the refrigerator and opened it. “Looks like Ronnie and Judy are the only ones we can count on.”
“I wonder how they are doing,” Johansson said. He turned his gaze to the sky. There was a hint of blue in the darkness now as dawn approached. The Smarks were four hundred kilometers above the Earth, still at the center of a dangerous maelstrom even as they approached the ISS. Ozzy had told them about the space tethers, so they at least understood what was happening—but they remained powerless to do anything about it.
“Ronnie? He dumped it in my lap. Told me to found a company for Kazumi to do his space tether thing. The jerk’s acting like he’s about to die. You know what I told him?” Ozzy slammed the Coke bottle down on the table. “I told him to get back here and do it himself!”
Johansson nodded. He had heard this story four times today.
“Mr. Cunningham, about the Cloud …” he began.
Ozzy looked away. It was no surprise that he should not wish to discuss the matter that was threatening Ronnie’s life. But today’s observational data could not be dismissed.
“It is now visible through the optical telescope,” Johansson said.
“Huh?” Ozzy turned to face him again.
Johansson brought up the photograph showing a dim, smoky form on the wall monitor, explaining that it had been spotted passing over Desnoeufs by a program designed to scan the whole sky for unknown satellites.
“It appears to be more densely grouped than, er, Kazumi, was it?—than Kazumi suggested,” he said. “Under the right conditions, it might even be visible to the naked eye.”
“It’s … it’s enormous.”
Ozzy’s shoulders shook. Johansson did not think of the space tethers as anything other than directed debris, but tens of thousands of objects so close together was a threat in itself, able to destroy satellites simply by allowing them to pass through.
The Cloud and the space tether propulsion system had yet to appear in any news source. As Johansson understood from Ozzy, the true situation in the orbital hotel was the exact opposite of what Judy’s cheerful blog suggested.
“Has Kazumi gotten in touch with us?” Ozzy asked. “It’s still evening in Seattle, right?”
Johansson shrugged. “We only started sharing radar data the evening before last. They may still be reading through it, no?”
“No,” Ozzy said. “Kazumi would already be at the next stage.”
“Oh, come now …”
Johansson felt a deep sympathy for the young man he had seen on the video call. No doubt he was hearing the same demand from everyone these days: find a way to neutralize this orbiting swarm. Worse, it was now a matter of life and death. He could hardly imagine the pressure Kazumi must be under.
“Let’s wait for him to contact us,” he said. “I will make breakfast. Will you be needing some?”
Ozzy took a packaged hot dog from the freezer.
Johansson shrugged and turned to gaze out of the enormous window, with its unobstructed view of the ocean below and the cloudless sky above.
Wed, 16 Dec 2020, 16:54 -0800 (2020-12-17T00:54 GMT)
Western Days Hotel
Under the watchful gaze of the NORAD team, Kazumi was engrossed in the video from Operation Seed Pod.
Chris stood behind him with her hand on the back of his seat. There was, she had said, one part she particularly wanted him to see. Second Lieutenant Harold Fisher of NORAD provided commentary on how to read the simultaneous telemetry from the ASM-140’s warhead.
“The bottom left shows the warhead’s pitch. Right now it’s moments from impact. Will this do, Chris?”
“Perfectly, thank you,” said Chris. “Pause it for a second.”
Kazumi realized that his coffee cup was empty and reached for the pot.
“Have a doughnut too,” said Bruce.
“Maybe later,” Kazumi said. “They are a bit sweet.”
“You skipped lunch too. You have to eat something.”
Bruce, however, hadn’t taken a doughnut either.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Lieutenant Fisher said. “I’m going to play it in slow motion, starting just before Blackout fired.”
“There! Right there!” Chris pointed at the screen from over Kazumi’s shoulder. A number of red lines were crossing the screen. “Do you see that, Kazumi? The red streaks.”
“I see them. What is Blackout?”
“Think of it as a microwave oven on steroids,” Fisher said. “It uses microwave radiation to burn out electronics.”
“In this case, including the orbital hotel’s computers,” Chris said. “Their life support will be operational for just two more weeks.” She managed to keep her voice under control until the end of the sentence.
The room fell silent.
There were only three hours left before the Cloud would rip the orbital hotel to shreds. Everyone knew it, but presumably Chris was worried that speaking it aloud would put too much pressure on Kazumi. The crease of concern on her brow spoke volumes.
Daryl pointed at the screen. “Hey, Kazumi,” he said. “I wonder if these red lines are the actual tethers.”
“I think they are,” Kazumi said. “And they were burned through.”
The tethers did not form a circuit and were not grounded. Even when free electrons within them were excited by the strong burst of microwave radiation at close range, those electrons remained trapped with nowhere to go. As they collided into each other, their kinetic energy was converted to heat. The principle was the same as the one behind the miniature fire that Mary had started in the Fool’s Launchpad microwave oven.
“So we can burn them out with strong EM radiation,” Lieutenant Fisher said excitedly.
“Yes. It had not occurred to me.”
“EM radiation,” Colonel Lintz said from the NORAD screen, audibly relieved. “So there’s a way to get at them physically. That’s a major advance. And we learned it from Operation Seed Pod. I wish the orbital hotel hadn’t gotten caught up in things, but I suppose you never know where things will go right.”
“Could we use nuclear weapons, Kazumi?” asked Lieutenant Fisher. “That’d give us a strong EM pulse.”
“No, Harold,” Colonel Lintz said immediately.
Chris stepped into the camera’s field of view. “No nuclear weapons,” she said. “We’re already playing fast and loose with the COPUOS guidelines. We can’t tear up the Outer Space Treaty too.”
“But the Smarks—”
“Harold,” Kazumi cut in. “If we use nuclear weapons, we will ruin orbit for good.”
“What do you mean?”
“The terminal apparatuses are rotating in pairs at ten kilometers per second. If we cut all those links, they will be completely scattered. Eighty thousand new pieces of debris in orbit.”
“He’s right,” said Daryl, who had been running a simulation. “If we burn them all out at once, forty thousan
d pairs—eighty thousand individual chunks—will spread out in all directions. Orbit will become a junkyard—completely impassable. Nuclear weapons are out.”
Murmured acknowledgments came from NORAD as the people on-screen took notes.
“Conclusion,” Chris said, clapping her hands to get everyone’s attention. “No one needs to investigate nukes. Agreed? However, just in case, I’d like NORAD to perform some preparatory calculations for launching an ICBM into low Earth orbit, and select a facility that could carry this out.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said someone on the NORAD side.
“Next—excuse me. Headquarters.” Chris produced a headset from her pocket and slipped it over her ears. Bruce stood to take over the meeting, but Chris shook her head to stop him. “Everyone, please stop what you’re doing for a moment. I have a video call.”
“From whom?” asked Bruce.
“Ronnie Smark. He’s calling from orbit.”
“What?!” Daryl spilled his coffee. “Ronnie Smark?”
“Why’s he calling us?” asked Bruce.
“Ozzy Cunningham. Looks like he told Ronnie about the space tethers and our operation. Apparently he’s already started working on some space tether–related investments.”
“That idiot!” Bruce clutched his head. “What is he thinking? What happened to ‘top secret’?”
“We’ll let it go this time. It might be the last business Ronnie ever does, after all.”
Bruce sighed and rose to his feet to clear away the doughnuts and empty coffee cups from the table.
“Kazumi, Daryl,” he said. “The Smarks have CIA clearance. You can tell them anything. They only have three hours until the Cloud engulfs their hotel. The position they’re in is unbearable. But don’t try to comfort them. I’ll take care of that.”
“Here’s the call request from Ronnie,” Chris said, tapping at her laptop’s keyboard. “Putting him through.”
The familiar flutes whistled, and the whiteboard brightened. Bruce hurried to take a seat at the end of the table.