Orbital Cloud

  For a moment, Kazumi wasn’t sure what he was looking at. Skin the picture of health. Deep blue eyes, pink lips. A smile so big it seemed about to burst, filling the screen.

  “Hi there, everybody in Seattle! This is Judy Smark, astronaut. Call me Judy.”

  “There are two Smarks at our end, so go ahead and use our first names.” Judy gave an exaggerated wink for the camera. She needed her best smile.

  Judy let go of the camera arm and swung her upper body back, neatly extending her folded legs with the confidence that comes from repeated practice. The camera drifted away from her face and her body floated into the air.

  After she had traveled three meters, flying on her back through the empty room, her father caught her arm with strength that belied his age. Right, like that—

  “You’re heavy,” he whispered into her ear, pushing her shoulder to the ceiling and pulling her legs toward the floor.

  “Shut up! They’ll hear you.” Judy hooked her feet into a pair of straps on the floor.

  “Whoops,” said Ronnie, noticing the white cloud of his breath. He waved his arm, dispersing the condensation. The room was minus ten degrees Celsius. The heaters in their space suits kept them from feeling the cold, but they couldn’t control what their breath looked like.

  Judy turned her eyes to the monitor on the wall. Three men and a middle-aged woman were staring at her with surprise on their faces. The room they were in had silvery walls and was dimly lit, even though it was supposed to be daytime there. The exact opposite of the stark white room in the orbital hotel, which was illuminated to the farthest corner by the light that shone in through the oval window.

  The woman spread her arms. “I’m Chris,” she said. “CIA. Judy and Ronnie, thank you for getting in touch. This is Team Seattle, working on countermeasures for the space tethers as we speak. From the left, we have Daryl Freeman from NORAD, then—as you know—Kazumi Kimura, discoverer of the space tethers, and then Bruce Carpenter, also from the CIA.”

  Chris looked back at the shaven-headed woman standing behind Kazumi. “This is Akari Numata, another trusted partner,” she said. She finished by explaining about the JAXA employees on their mission to Tehran.

  “Wow, it’s like a spy movie down there,” Judy said.

  “You look very cold,” Kazumi said, concern in his voice.

  “It’s not a problem,” Ronnie said, shrugging casually. Judy smiled. Only Ronnie would put in the hour of practice it had taken to learn to shrug in zero gravity.

  Ronnie stroked the straps around his thighs. “Pretty slick, right? We were keeping them a secret, but these are strap space suits developed by Project Wyvern. Heater and all mod cons, of course. I could put a helmet on right now and step outside for up to twenty-four hours.”

  “Twenty-four hours?” repeated Kazumi.

  “Yep. Just in case of accident, to allow for pickup by the backup, Loki 9. Twenty-four hours is enough to save a customer in orbit. Amazing, right? This goes well beyond the Apollo series or the Space Shuttle.”

  The strap space suit required no time for low-pressure adaptation, Ronnie boasted. Rescue staff could bring customers directly inside the Wyvern return vehicle.

  “If not for those space tethers, we’d be out there calling for pickup right now,” Ronnie laughed. The faces at the Team Seattle end turned grim. “Oh, don’t worry about us. I hear there’s still three hours until the space tethers rendezvous with our hotel, right?”

  Ronnie held up one of the straps, woven with high-tensile carbon. A light but strong lifeline for extravehicular excursions.

  “Judy and I will connect ourselves with this, put on our helmets, and curl up. Even if the hotel gets torn apart, with luck my daughter and I will have another twenty-four hours together.”

  Ronnie’s knees shook at the lie. If anything hit the hotel at ten kilometers per second, the Mach 30 shock wave transmitted through the walls would flatten the both of them. The space suits would be completely useless.

  “Oh, that reminds me,” said Judy. “We have something interesting to show you. That’s why we’re calling, actually.” She raised her index finger beside her face and forced a smile. “The space tether dance! We hope you like it.”

  “A dance?” asked Kazumi.

  The five people at the other end of the call stared, their mouths agape.

  That’s right, a dance, Judy thought. We’re betting on that sixth sense of Kazumi’s that we heard about from Ozzy and NASA. Maybe this’ll give him the idea he needs to get us home in one piece.

  Ronnie pushed off and soared to one corner of the room, then tossed one end of the strap to Judy, just as they’d practiced. The neatly rolled strap flew true, unrolling as it went. Catching the ring at the end of the strap, Judy clipped it onto the fastener at her belt and then moved to the wall opposite Ronnie.

  “Kazumi,” she said. “We want you to watch this most of all. You’ve never seen a real space tether, right? Well, we’re going to show you what they look like, choreographed by yours truly, Judy Smark. I hope this is worth the bruises we got practicing!”

  Judy confirmed that the strap was pulled tight. Next, the two of them each gripped a foothold on the floor with one hand and let their bodies rise into the air. They stretched out straight at opposite ends of the room, parallel to the floor but with their heads facing in opposite directions.

  “Three, two, one!”

  Judy gave the foothold a sharp push with her fingers. She began to move in the opposite direction, soaring headfirst through the air, and then Ronnie’s mass tugged at her belt and changed her path. She stiffened, keeping her body ramrod straight. Linked together, the two of them began to describe a circular path centered on the middle of the room.

  “Ah …”

  Judy heard Kazumi’s voice through the speakers. That’s right. Watch closely. This is how the space tethers move. Give you any ideas? Spark that sixth sense of yours?

  She felt the flush on one side of her body as her blood began to collect there. The skin on her face was being pulled toward the outside of the circle. A flaked-off piece of foundation bounced off her face and spun off into the room. She raised her head. It was a strange sensation. Inertia was pulling her body straight ahead, the strap was pulling it to the left. How many rotations had they done now?

  “Look out!” said Kazumi.

  The strap connecting her to Ronnie went slack, and Judy’s trajectory became a straight line. Bouncing off the soft wall, she dragged her hand on the ground to catch a foothold. At the other end of the room, Ronnie was clinging upside-down to the wall.

  The strap had come loose from his belt.

  “Oh, come on!” snapped Judy.

  “Sorry. I guess I didn’t clip it on properly.”

  “All right, let’s do it again. Are you watching, Kazumi? … Kazumi?”

  On the screen, she saw that Kazumi had gotten to his feet.

  “Judy, Ronnie,” he said. “Thank you. I have thought of a way to eliminate the space tethers.”

  “Really?” Ronnie bounced off the wall.

  “So quickly?” Judy heard Chris ask.

  “I will have to look into the details,” Kazumi said. “When and exactly how to do it, that I am not yet sure of.”

  “Underpromising as usual, I see,” Ronnie said. “So you’re saying that you aren’t sure if you can get it done before our time runs out? Three hours, two weeks, whatever it turns out to be?”

  Kazumi paused for a moment, conflicted, then nodded firmly.

  Ronnie kicked the walls and floor a few times to propel him toward the camera.

  “Okay, now we’re being honest,” he said. “Good. That’s fine. Your mission isn’t to save us. It’s to clear the space tethers out and keep orbit open. You’re saying that’s theoretically possible now.”

  “Yes. It is possible.”

 
“Fantastic. Then the flame of space exploration won’t be snuffed out.”

  Ronnie reached for an arm attached to the wall and moved his face closer to the camera. His unhealthy skin tone was visible through the cracks in his foundation, as were the dark bags under his eyes.

  “Whenever you try to make a theoretical possibility a reality, you’re guaranteed to hit a wall at some point,” he said. “If private space development taught me anything, it’s that. So let me give you one piece of advice.”

  Kazumi’s face was pinched and nervous.

  “Lucky you, Kazumi,” said Judy. “He normally charges a thousand dollars a minute for lectures.”

  “Quiet, Judy,” growled Ronnie. He turned back to the camera. Kazumi’s expression had softened. Good. “Listen carefully,” he said. “That theoretical possibility of yours is probably going to sound dumb to everyone else. Otherwise they’d have thought of it themselves.”

  “Yes,” Kazumi said after a moment’s thought. “Perhaps you are right.”

  A toothy grin spread across Ronnie’s grizzled face.

  “But that’s the best part,” he said. “You get to execute a plan that’s crazy. Completely nuts! Don’t let this chance get away.”

  “Huh?”

  “Tell someone as soon as you can. Your team will understand. And then keep working to convince everyone else.”

  Kazumi’s eyes wavered as they stared into the camera.

  The hand Ronnie was gripping the wall arm with was beginning to go white. “Now,” Ronnie said. “Do it now.”

  “Yes,” Kazumi replied. “I will do it right away.”

  Ronnie raised one trembling index finger. “Just once,” he said. “You only have to succeed once. Do it, Kazumi!”

  Kazumi’s face crumpled, his eyes gleaming.

  “Understood,” he said. “I will do it.”

  15 Meteors

  Wed, 16 Dec 2020, 17:05 -0800 (2020-12-16T01:05 GMT)

  Western Days Hotel

  No sooner had the Smarks signed off than Lintz’s face appeared in close-up on the NORAD monitor.

  “Kazumi,” he said. “I heard everything. You say you have an idea?”

  Put on the spot like that, Kazumi started to feel nervous. Was he sure he hadn’t missed anything?

  “Don’t hold back, Kazumi,” Daryl said. “NORAD has rooms full of professionals ready to check your ideas. What they don’t have is someone with your intuition.” He kept his voice light, but his fingertips drummed tensely on the keyboard.

  Kazumi made up his mind. As far as he could see, his idea was the only way to wipe out the space tethers quickly enough. Was it crazy? Maybe. But he had to propose it anyway.

  “We burn through the tethers,” he said, “with powerful, long-wavelength radiation.”

  Lintz gave him a quizzical look. “Didn’t you say earlier that if we burned through the tethers the terminal apparatuses would fly off in all directions and make things worse?”

  “I thought of a way to prevent that,” Kazumi said. “The Smarks’ space tether dance gave me the idea. If we do it my way, we can control exactly which way the two terminal apparatuses fly.”

  Everyone’s eyes were on Kazumi now. He felt their stares acutely.

  “This is what we do,” Kazumi said. “We burn out the tethers while they are exactly perpendicular to their direction of overall motion.”

  “But that will just send the apparatuses flying from centrifugal force,” Lintz said. “Forty thousand—no, eighty thousand high-speed objects in orbit. It won’t change a thing.”

  “There is no danger of that,” Kazumi said. “One of the terminal apparatuses will fly forward in the direction of the Cloud’s motion. The other will fly back in exactly the opposite direction.”

  Lintz furrowed his brow. Voices began to come through from the NORAD feed, some siding with Kazumi, others still doubtful. It was the reaction Kazumi had expected.

  Daryl looked up at the roof and twirled his fingers in front of him. “Centrifugal force …” he said. “I get it. It’s a fictitious force.”

  “Exactly,” Kazumi said. “Everyone, please recall when that strap came undone during the Smarks’ space tether dance. Judy and Ronnie both went flying in the exact direction their heads were pointing. They didn’t drift off to the side a bit. They flew at an exact tangent to the circle they were moving in.”

  “Like the hammer throw at the Olympics,” Lintz said.

  “Yes. The two terminal apparatuses of each space tether will fly precisely in opposite directions too. We just need to control the timing.”

  When a pair of apparatuses went flying as their tether was cut, Kazumi explained, each apparatus’s rotational velocity of ten kilometers per second would be combined with the velocity of the Cloud as a whole, roughly seven kilometers per second. In the case of the apparatus that flew backwards, its final velocity would be the former minus the latter, and three kilometers per second was too slow to stay in orbit. It would fall into the atmosphere and burn up. On the other hand, the apparatus that flew forwards would have the Cloud’s overall velocity added to its rotational velocity, and seventeen kilometers per second would kick it out of orbit entirely.

  Daryl grinned. “Now those are some numbers, Kazumi!” he said. “Seventeen kilometers per second? That’s faster than the third escape velocity. Those apparatuses won’t just leave Earth—they’ll shake off the sun’s gravitational pull, too, and head into deep space!”

  Kazumi smiled back at Daryl. Shiraishi had written about using rapidly spinning space tethers for orbital projection in the papers he had left behind. It was another possibility inherent in the technology.

  “So we cut the tethers at just the right moment and all our problems are solved,” Lintz said. “Understood. Next: how? Do you have a plan for cutting through only those tethers that happen to be lined up nicely?”

  Kazumi studied Lintz’s face on the screen. He would have to explain this part of the plan carefully.

  “We must bombard the Cloud from the direction of its movement with radio waves a fraction shorter than the tethers themselves,” Kazumi said. “The tethers will only receive enough radiation to be damaged when they are perfectly side-on. At all other times, the radio waves pass through harmlessly.”

  “How’s that again?” Lintz frowned. “I don’t follow you.” Other members of the NORAD team could be heard voicing their doubts. But Kazumi knew he was right.

  Leaving his inconspicuous post by the door, Bruce approached the table. “Kazumi, that’s brilliant,” he said. “You’re saying we should treat the space tethers themselves as antennas. If they aren’t facing the ‘station,’ they won’t pick up the signal. So if we bombard them from directly ahead, they’ll only get the full dose when they’re perpendicular to the Cloud’s direction of movement—just where we want them. Plus, a two-kilometer wavelength means a frequency of 157 kilohertz. That’s ham radio range. We can do that.”

  Lintz shook his head. “No good,” he said. “Waves that long will just bounce off the ionosphere. That’s why ham radio works in the first place.”

  “Ah,” said Kazumi. He had forgotten about the ionosphere.

  And after Jamshed had mentioned it, too! The ionosphere had been why the AM radio signals Jamshed used for his balloon-borne prototypes wouldn’t work on the space tethers, leading Shiraishi to use the D-Fi cables and VHF.

  Kazumi had made a fundamental error. They couldn’t burn through the space tethers this way after all.

  He pounded the table, staring at the circle drawn on the whiteboard. Why had he told Ronnie and Judy that he could do it?

  Bruce clapped a hand on Kazumi’s shoulder. “Kazumi!” he said. “You should see your face! Team Seattle has transmission equipment strong enough to punch through the ionosphere, remember? Am I wrong, Daryl?”

  “Huh?” Kazumi look
ed up. Daryl was giving him the thumbs-up.

  “Yes, sir,” Daryl said to Bruce. “We have pretty much everything.” He tapped at his keyboard and displayed a page of background material on the whiteboard. “Colonel Lintz, we have access to Cunningham’s Sampson-5 multipurpose active phased array radar.”

  “Cunningham?” Lintz said. “Don’t think I’m familiar with that ship. Is that the captain’s name?”

  “No, sir, the Sampson-5’s owner’s name. Ozzy Cunningham, based on Desnoeufs Island in Seychelles. He’s a stockholder in Kazumi’s company. He’ll give us whatever access we need.”

  “The owner’s name?” repeated Lintz in amazement. “A private citizen? Does he know how powerful that thing is? It was designed for nuclear vessels! Could burn a human to a crisp. What on earth does he use it for?”

  “Observing debris in low orbit, sir,” said Daryl. “A hobby of his.”

  Lintz paused to take this in. “Who is this Cunningham?” he asked finally.

  Kazumi’s certainty had returned. This was how they would finish things. “Ozzy Cunningham is part of our team, Colonel,” he said.

  It was Ozzy’s Rod from God hoax that had set everything in motion, sweeping a simple stargazer like Kazumi up into an international incident that had left two men dead and turned another into a terrorist. And now things had circled back to Ozzy again.

  Now they knew where they would make their stand.

  Kazumi’s gaze met the camera, looking at the NORAD staff. “We burn through the space tethers by firing radio waves from Desnoeufs Island,” he said.

  On the NORAD video feed, Kazumi saw Harold Fisher whispering something in Lintz’s ear before taking a seat in front of the camera.

  “Kazumi,” Fisher said. “In that case, there’s another problem. I checked the orbits. The Cloud will hit the orbital hotel in just three hours, long before it passes over Seychelles again.”

  Lintz’s face looked pained.

  “In fact, it’s not due to pass over Seychelles for three days,” Fisher continued. “And that’s assuming it doesn’t change course. Jahanshah’s going to have plenty of time to knock down satellites before the tethers are burned through.”