Orbital Cloud

  “That’s …”

  “Yep. I borrowed it. Potent stuff, isn’t it?”

  “What have you … But I won’t be able to … to move …”

  Sekiguchi’s hand lost its grip on Kurosaki’s arm and slipped off the seat. Kurosaki tucked it back inside the blanket.

  “Everything’s fine, Sekiguchi,” Kurosaki said. “Sleep. Our work is done. Let’s leave the rest to Kazumi and the gang.”

  He felt movement under the blanket, but it soon began to weaken.

  “Kazumi … too much … Please … stop the professor …”

  Kurosaki smoothed out the twisted blanket and put his arm around Sekiguchi’s shoulders. “It’s been fun, Sekiguchi, hasn’t it?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Helping Kazumi these past few days. It looked like you were enjoying yourself. Am I wrong?”

  Weakly but unmistakably, Sekiguchi shook his head. “It’s been … fun …” he said.

  “There you go. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Enough … ?” Sekiguchi chuckled faintly. Then his head drooped and his breath grew slow and regular. Kurosaki rubbed his thumb on Sekiguchi’s cheek, still smooth and stubble-free despite all they’d been through, but there was no response. Sekiguchi had fallen into a deep sleep.

  Kurosaki leaned his arm on the headrest of the passenger’s seat. Alef turned to look at him.

  “Alef, could you take us to the Canadian embassy?” Kurosaki said. “I’m going to seek asylum for him.”

  When Alef gave him a dubious look, Kurosaki explained that Sekiguchi was a Chinese spy. He could hardly return to Japan now.

  “I see. Good fortune for you, then.”

  “What is?”

  “Well, it seems that you have saved your friend,” Alef said, closing his long-lashed eyes. “If only I had listened harder to mine.”

  Kurosaki thought again about Jamshed’s circumstances. The best years of his life spent in intellectual solitude, no one to talk to about his research—and then to learn that it had been stolen from him.

  “There might have been a better way,” he admitted. “To tell you the truth, I lost a friend of my own as well.”

  “My sympathies,” Alef said.

  “And this guy’ll live, but he’s about to disappear forever,” Kurosaki said, jerking his thumb at Sekiguchi.

  Once Makoto Sekiguchi passed through the gates of the Canadian embassy, Kurosaki would never meet him again. He would be sent to the US, where he would trade information about the illegal activities he had performed in China’s intelligence services for a place on the Witness Protection Program. A new name, even a new life, complete with its own history.

  Kurosaki pulled the crumpled package of Iranian cigarettes Sekiguchi had bought him out of his field coat pocket.

  “Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

  “If I can have one too,” said Alef.

  Kurosaki lit up two cigarettes and passed one forward to Alef in the driver’s seat.

  The car filled with white smoke as it moved through the rising haze of morning.

  Wed, 16 Dec 2020, 19:16 -0800 (2020-12-17T03:16 GMT)

  Western Days Hotel

  “So, the Earth moved, eh?” Chris said, taking a slice of the pizza that no one else had touched. She looked at the two globes projected on the whiteboard: one was the real Earth, and the other was based on the false signals currently being sent by GPS satellites.

  Kazumi’s plan was already in motion. All thirty-two of the US Department of Defense’s GPS satellites had been put under the control of NORAD’s orbital surveillance team. The satellites visible to the Cloud—eight at most, at any given time—were sending clock and orbital information crafted to mislead the Cloud about its position.

  These false signals were leading the forty thousand individual members of the Orbital Cloud to Desnoeufs airspace. Jamshed, having no way of observing the actual space tethers, would be relying on the location data they were sending back, which should still show them on their planned rendezvous route with the orbital hotel.

  Chris looked with satisfaction over the mass of information spread out before her—steadily scrolling feeds cast by more than thirty microprojectors on eight whiteboards scrounged from the hotel conference room. A map of the world, a grid of numbers, a 3-D globe, the staff at the Oregon radar site … According to Akari, it was easier to just use spare Raspberry Pis to project everything at once than to try to write a program to integrate it all into a single display.

  “Now this is an operations center,” Chris said, and took a bite of the pizza.

  The whiteboard in the middle was relaying video from Orbital Surveillance at NORAD. Lintz was issuing orders rapidly, exercising the leadership skills he had been trained to use in case of nuclear war. Chris doubted he had imagined using those skills for something like this.

  On the left, video feeds of the teams carrying out Lintz’s orders were scattered across an improvised triptych of three more whiteboards. AWACS aircraft took off one after the other as FA-35s soared from the decks of the Atlantic Fleet. Almost four thousand aircraft from the navy and air force were taking part, chasing the Cloud that flew overhead at Mach 23.

  The AWACS aircraft with massive radar arrays on the top of their fuselages flew above the Cloud in an unorthodox upside-down formation that gave them a clear view of the space tethers, allowing them to confirm that they were proceeding along the expected route. Meanwhile, the FA-35s were using their superior electronic-warfare capabilities to send the Cloud additional spoofed GPS signals. Both ideas had come from Daryl.

  Akari watched the FA-35s taking off. “I hope the program I gave them is working all right,” she said to Chris.

  “I’m sure it is,” Chris said. “No need to worry.”

  The spoofed GPS signals being sent to the Orbital Cloud by the aircraft were generated by a program Kazumi had designed and Akari had implemented in response to a request from NORAD, who had worried that faking the satellite signals alone wouldn’t be enough.

  “Remember,” Chris said to Akari, “strategic responsibility now rests with those guys.” She pointed at Lintz, who was currently having his brow mopped by Fisher so that he could keep up the unbroken stream of orders. Fernandez was there, too, rushing to and fro in the background. “We just sit here and wait.”

  The operation had already moved out of Team Seattle’s hands. They were simply watching events unfold; the other teams no longer even asked their opinions.

  The only ones still talking busily into their headsets were Daryl and Kazumi. They were dealing with a fire hose of questions about the space tether drive from the theorists at NASA and NORAD.

  Chris checked the time stamps visible here and there on the whiteboards and realized that it was time to end the Q&A session. “Bruce, can you pull Daryl and Kazumi out of their meetings?” she asked.

  Bruce nonchalantly rose from his post by the door and relieved Daryl of his headset.

  “Sorry,” Bruce said. “I know this is the fun part, but that’s all for today.”

  He reached out with one long arm and tapped on the keyboard to end the videoconference, then tossed the headset onto the table.

  “Showtime,” Bruce said to the room. “Can we give this our full attention, everyone?”

  Kazumi, whose conversation with NASA had also been ended, looked up at Bruce. “Already?” he asked.

  “Yep,” Bruce said. “Everything meet with your approval, Kazumi?”

  Kazumi looked at the whiteboard, then half-closed his eyes and thought for a minute. He opened his eyes and read some more data, then half-closed his eyes to consider it with what NORAD was already calling his “sixth sense.” After repeating this process a few times, he leaned back into his chair.

  “Absolutely fine,” he said. “Everything is going perfectly. The orbit is a little skewed, but th
e Cloud is heading for Ozzy’s island.”

  Daryl reached toward the center of the table and turned on the speaker. “Call from Colonel Lintz,” he said.

  Lintz was beaming and waving from the central whiteboard. “Team Seattle!” came his voice over the speaker. “Just a moment of your time. Everything’s A-OK here. We strike the Cloud in ten minutes.”

  “And we have ringside seats, everyone,” Chris said, rising to her feet. She noticed another video feed in the corner of the whiteboard triptych, where someone was waving a sketchbook with let us in, too! written on it.

  “Bruce, add Mr. Cunningham to the call,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” Bruce asked.

  “We’re using his radar. Let him in.”

  “If he doesn’t behave, I’m cutting him off,” Bruce said, then turned on the sound for Ozzy’s feed.

  “Talk about ungrateful!” Ozzy shouted, his face red with indignation. He was wearing a tank top. “It’s my radar, remember? You know how much that thing costs to run?”

  “Our apologies, Mr. Cunningham,” said Chris. “We’ll reimburse your costs. Is your equipment all in order?”

  With a deep sigh, Ozzy fell back heavily into his chair. “It’s fine,” he said. “I just had Johansson polish the dish.”

  Daryl shook his head. “Unbelievable,” he said. “Mr. Cunningham, if he’d mistimed that, he would have been burned to a crisp. Please be careful. That radar’s not designed for civilian use.”

  “He’s fine,” Ozzy repeated. “How many years do you think we’ve been using that thing? More to the point, check this out. I treated myself to a new button for the occasion.”

  He dangled a brand-new tracking ball before the camera, pointing at the button with a fat round finger.

  “Is he going to operate the radar?” Chris asked Daryl.

  Daryl snorted. “Are you kidding? It’s locked to a timer set by the NORAD site in Oregon. He just likes theatrics.”

  Ozzy was peering at his watch. “You said 7:32, right? Almost time. Let’s start the countdown. Eight, seven, six …”

  Chris cast a hurried glance at the times projected on the whiteboard. There were still almost ten seconds left. Ozzy hadn’t synchronized his watch.

  “Ozzy!” she said. “You’re four seconds off. Three, two, one, go!”

  They saw the room Ozzy was in dim for a moment. Johansson and Ozzy looked up at the ceiling.

  “Team Seattle,” came Lintz’s voice through the speaker again. “Oregon reports that they have begun the attack. Our next step is to analyze the AWACS data from overhead and confirm its effect.”

  “Roger that,” Chris said. “Looking forward to hearing from you.”

  Ozzy leaned in toward the camera. “Hey, Kazumi,” he said. “Don’t you have any way to see whether it’s working or not?”

  “We just have to wait for the observation data from NORAD,” Kazumi said.

  “We can see that from here, Mr. Cunningham,” Johansson said. “Kazumi, I will send the video from the optical telescope. It captured the space tethers burning through.”

  “What?!” Lintz cried. “You can see them?”

  A deep-blue gradient appeared on a whiteboard. Against the blue were a few shining horizontal threads.

  The Sampson-5 on Desnoeufs Island had fired a full-power twenty-five-kilowatt burst of long-wave radiation, frequency 157 kilohertz and beam narrowed to just 0.2 arc seconds, which had punched through the atmosphere and burned the tethers out. These shining threads were the proof. The Orbital Cloud’s fifty-kilometer radius meant that it should have taken seven seconds or so to pass through the target area, but the space tethers went through one full rotation every 0.6 seconds, burning each time they were directly in line with the radar.

  In just a few moments, they had all been eliminated.

  “We did it!” Daryl said. “We did it! They’ve all burned through at the same angle! We did it, Kazumi!” He kicked his chair away and jumped to his feet to give Kazumi a hug.

  Akari stood too. Kazumi held out his hand to her. She produced a projector from her pocket and placed it on the table.

  “We can confirm the interception right away,” she said. “Ozzy’s radar has switched to observation mode.”

  She turned on the projector, and a map with Desnoeufs Island at the center appeared on a whiteboard. Most of the map was ocean, but there were a few dots heading east-southeast and north-northwest on it. Akari read the figures that appeared in her lens display.

  “The space tether terminal apparatuses were successfully severed,” she said. “Those thrown off in the direction of the Cloud’s movement are all at the predicted speed of 17.7 kilometers per second. This is cosmic velocity?”

  “Yes,” Kazumi said. “Yes, it is. That is faster than the third cosmic velocity.”

  His hand was still extended. Akari seized it and switched to Japanese. “Congratulations, Kazumi,” she said. “It really worked.”

  Kazumi pulled her in for a hug.

  Seeing this, Lintz tapped his forehead on-screen. “What’s this?” came his voice through the speaker. “You’ve beaten us to the punch again?”

  “Colonel Lintz, I …” began Kazumi, but couldn’t think of how to continue.

  “Oh, it doesn’t bother me,” Lintz said. “Our job is establishing proof, after all. Sylvester! Tell the AWACS pilots to hurry up. The amateurs are beating us again.”

  “Come on, Colonel,” said Fernandez. “We can’t compete with Team Seattle.” He poked his head into a corner of the frame. “Looks like they didn’t notice our present, though. Everyone gather round!”

  “Present?” said Kazumi.

  Lintz grinned and pushed his chair back. The NORAD team gathered around him. Kazumi recognized Fisher in the crowd too. Everyone had their hands behind their backs.

  “Congratulations on a successful interception!” the group shouted together. They produced red-and-white Santa hats from behind their backs and put them on their heads.

  “Merry Christmas!” said Lintz. “It’s one week early, but we have a present for you, Team Seattle. We’re sure you’ll like it. Especially Kazumi. Well done—and make sure you use it for Meteor News.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Kazumi.

  “It’ll be obvious soon enough,” said Lintz. “Answer me this: Where will the terminal apparatuses that fall into the atmosphere go?”

  “They will turn into shooting stars somewhere,” Kazumi said. “Wait a minute …”

  He looked at the map of Desnoeufs Island that Akari had projected. Then he closed his eyes halfway. The apparatuses that had lost orbital velocity would head back the way they had come—north-northwest—at three kilometers per second, losing altitude as they went. As they exited African airspace and passed over Europe, their altitude would be about 200 kilometers. They would graze Greenland’s airspace at 150 kilometers. Then, on the map, their course would flip around to take them southwards, down over North America. Through Canadian airspace, and then …

  They would be quite a bit farther north than the orbit he had worked out a few hours earlier.

  “Over the Rocky Mountains,” Kazumi said finally, “and then Seattle. Here.”

  Akari looked at him wide-eyed.

  Lintz coughed. “This is NORAD’s present to Team Seattle. The blizzard’s cleared up, too. It’ll be a once-in-a-century cosmic show.”

  “I never thought I would see such a thing,” Kazumi said. “I must update Meteor News.”

  Daryl threw his hands up, balled into fists. “Awesome!” he cried.

  Akari leaped to her feet, finally realizing what Kazumi was talking about. “Really?” she cried. “Really?!”

  The room filled with the sounds of celebration. Chris hugged each of the three young people in turn.

  “Report from AWACS in the fi
eld,” said Fernandez from the NORAD monitor. “Thirty-eight thousand pairs confirmed shot down.”

  The space tethers had been cleared from orbit. The video from the various operations centers projected on the whiteboard showed team members hugging and congratulating each other.

  Bruce alone stood unmoved by the festive mood. He was watching a single surveillance feed projected onto one corner of the whiteboard. No one noticed him produce the pistol from his ankle holster.

  She was too late.

  The sounds of celebration coming from within the hotel room she was standing outside were proof. She had failed. Her utility to her employers had dropped to zero.

  Her final mission had been to make contact with US authorities, provide them with all the information she had about Shiraishi, and launch a joint operation to clear the space tethers from orbit.

  The Chinese government was behind this change in direction, having brought pressure to bear on North Korea when they realized that Tiangong-2 was in the Cloud’s sights. Call off your orbital weapon, right now, or prepare to face the consequences—that had been the gist. But losing Shiraishi had left North Korea without any way to stop the space tethers.

  And so Chance had received her new orders. She had doubted that the US would be interested in the offer; it was a little too convenient.

  But it was all moot now.

  Chance looked down at her hotel uniform, which bulged oddly from the explosives she had strapped to her body. She wobbled off-balance and felt a wetness at her ankle. Bruce’s M5 had blown most of her calf away at the pier. She had bound the wound with tape, but the bleeding hadn’t stopped completely.

  Enduring the pain, she had followed for a while the tracking device that she had previously attached to Shiraishi’s blueprint case, but somewhere around the Space Needle the signal had dropped out. Unable to detect anything resembling the electromagnetic signature of an anti–space tether base of operations, she had finally identified and infiltrated the hotel only after spotting Akari’s bicycle in its parking lot.

  The tacky feel of the blood in her pumps crawled over her whole body. This was an illusion, she knew. Her senses were off-kilter from the combination of morphine and amphetamines she had self-administered to kill the pain without dulling her edge.