The Quiet Pools

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  It was like asking Sisyphus if he had any interest in a five-minute break. “A pretty good chance, I’d say. What’s the problem, Mr. Marshall?”

  “Roger, please. I understand we’re processing a lot of the pioneers through Prainha,” Marshall said, folding his arms over his chest. “I’d like to talk to some of them. I want to get a handle on how they’re coping with all the disruption from C-Zero.”

  The first part was both true and common knowledge. Twenty-seat T-2s packed with colonists were flying out of the castle a dozen times a day, day after day. But for the twin bottlenecks of security screening and ferrying them from the low-orbit stations to Takara, the pace would be even brisker.

  The second part was both insulting and puzzling. Have I been demoted to tour guide now? Marshall did not need Dryke’s permission to visit Building 5, where the arriving pioneers were being assembled into groups, taken through a T-2 mock-up and orientation, and given a place to wait comfortably until their flight was called. And Training Section could provide far more knowledgeable escorts than he.

  But Dryke acceded to Marshall’s request, all the same. They took a wirecar over to Building 5, where Dryke ran interference with the harried Move managers. Then he stood in the background while Marshall talked with a group of Block 2 pioneers waiting for their midafternoon launch. One confessed to annoyance, one to apprehension. But the rest were almost defiantly eager—for them, the adventure had already begun.

  “We’re not going to let them stop us,” one woman told Marshall. “This is something that belongs to us, and nobody has the right to take it away.”

  Marshall did not seem to have to hear much to satisfy him. After fifteen minutes, he shook hands, wished luck, and took his leave.

  “Walk with me, will you, Mikhail?” he said to Dryke when they were outside.

  Mystified, Dryke sent the wirecar back and fell in beside Marshall. The unscreened sun was fierce. After a few dozen steps, Dryke was perspiring.

  “It’s going surprisingly well,” Marshall said. “Surprising to me, in any case. Nine thousand colonists, a thousand or so from Training—that’s a lot of bodies to move in less than a month. A lot of coordination. And so far, none of our watchdogs have barked. That’s a credit to you.”

  “It’s all being handled by staff,” Dryke said, already starting to feel the midday heat. “I haven’t had anything to do with it.”

  “Take the compliment and forget the blushing. You’d be blamed if they screwed up,” said Marshall. “Besides, I haven’t gotten to the tough parts. Tell me about the centers. What’s happening in Tokyo?”

  “Tokyo is closed down, for all practical purposes,” Dryke said. “The work that could still be done there under siege conditions isn’t worth the risk to our people. We have a hundred or so security officers and a couple of dozen operations techs inside, which is about the limit we can support from the air, with the roof pad.”

  “It’s important to protect the building,” said Marshall. “We do want to go back there—or at least be able to sell the building—when Memphis is gone and things have quieted down. What about the other sites?”

  “Still more or less normal, except for the absence of the pioneers. Munich can thank the German government. Houston has its own airfield and its own housing, of course—they can probably ride out most anything so long as the fences hold.”

  Marshall nodded. “It’s good to know that we’re still ready to fight on some fronts. This new strategy—I guess I’m a bit more of a scrapper than Hiroko. I hate to see us cede anything. Did you sign off on Contingency Zero?”

  “It wasn’t my call.”

  “And if it had been?”

  Dryke was wary. “If it had been my call, I wouldn’t have put the training centers in urban sites in the first place. We’re a lot more secure here than they are in Houston.”

  Nodding thoughtfully, Marshall said, “Maybe we should be keeping those people we just talked to here, then. Maybe shipping everyone up to Takara and Memphis is an overreaction.”

  “That’s where they’re going eventually,” Dryke said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. “And as you said, that part is going smoothly, at least. No harm, no foul.”

  The scream of a T-ship passing overhead distracted them briefly.

  “Some of us have noticed that you’ve been taking a back seat since you reeled in Jeremiah for us,” Marshall said.

  “Resting on my laurels,” Dryke said. A touch of the bitterness slipped out with the words.

  Marshall smiled. “I knew Bill McCutcheon. Were you aware of that?”

  Eyes widening, Dryke admitted, “No.”

  “Well, you would be soon, I imagine. I assume that you’re building a matrix of his contacts, looking for the rest of the Homeworld leadership.”

  “Yes.” The truth was that he had not been able to work up any sense of urgency about what was certain to be a massive undertaking, and so had not even begun.

  “He beat me to a parcel of land in Mexico a few years back,” Marshall said. “I offered him more than it was worth, too, but he wouldn’t sell it to me. He never did anything with it, either. A lot of his holdings were undeveloped, as a matter of fact.”

  “Oh?”

  “If ten percent of what he owned produced income, I’d be surprised. He was land-rich and cash-poor. Not your traditional land speculator, though. More a land investor. Up until the last few months, he bought more than he sold—which is the hard way, since you don’t realize any gains until you sell.”

  “What was that about the last few months?”

  “Bill moved ten or twelve parcels since August. Knowing what we know now, I suppose he needed operating funds—but I’m not telling you anything you didn’t know. I imagine you’re following the money, too.”

  Dryke squinted sideways at his companion. “Why did you want to see me, Mr. Marshall?”

  “I always valued your perspective, Mikhail,” Marshall said. “Just because the Director is looking past you at the moment, I didn’t see any reason I couldn’t avail myself of it on my own.”

  Dryke could find no argument with that. “What do you want my perspective on?”

  “Has Homeworld been eliminated as a threat?”

  “I wouldn’t assume so.”

  “Nor would I. How would you characterize our strategy at this point?”

  Lips pursed, Dryke considered. “A controlled retreat under cover of darkness. Abandoning a vulnerable position for a more secure one.” It was clear now that their conversation was a footnote to an argument that had taken place behind closed doors.

  “But we’re most vulnerable now—halfway between.”

  “Yes.”

  “If they find out what’s happening before we’re finished, it’ll be like showing a gimpy leg to a wolf pack.” There was no need to define they—it embraced Homeworld, the media, and any other opponent or obstacle.

  “It wouldn’t look good, no.”

  “And it could happen.”

  “Disinformation campaigns are always vulnerable to the truth.”

  “Yes,” said Marshall. “Do you know why I wanted to talk to the pioneers?”

  “I assumed it was for the reason you told me.”

  “I spoke with Karin Oker this morning, and she told me something that raised the hair on the back of my neck. According to her, when the early call to report went out for the Block 2 and Block 3 pioneers, more than seven hundred—almost twelve percent—opted out. Quit on us.”

  It was a stunning, disturbing figure. In past calls, including those for Ur, no more than two percent had failed to report. “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “That’s seven hundred leaks waiting to happen. I know the calls didn’t contain any damning information, but the circumstances are damning enough. Someone’s going to talk, and someone else is going to figure out what we’re up to,” Marshall said. “I’m wondering if perhaps we ought to announce it ourselves before that happens.”

  “
What does that gain us?”

  “I know, it sounds like shooting yourself in the foot,” said Marshall, flashing a crooked, humorless smile. “Here’s my thinking. In his last address, Jeremiah hammered at the importance of keeping the colonists here. But once we’ve whisked them all away off-planet, there’s only one way to do that, and that’s to disable or destroy the ship. We’ve done our enemies a favor, really. Instead of a hundred strategies and a dozen attack points, they can concentrate on one goal and one big, fat, inviting target. Do you agree?”

  “Yes.”

  Marshall stopped and faced Dryke. “Then it seems to me that we can best protect the ship by making sure anyone and everyone knows that there are already three thousand people aboard, with more arriving every day. Considering how the Homeworlders feel about losing them, the pioneers are as good as hostages. They won’t dare a major assault.”

  “It doesn’t add up that way to me,” Dryke said with a shake of his head. “If they stop Memphis, they stop Knossos and Mohenjo-Daro and Teotihuacán as well. The numbers don’t look that bad—sacrifice a few thousand to slam the door on tens of thousands. If they were really sure of themselves, they might warn us in advance, tell us to evacuate the ship. But I don’t think that’ll happen. I don’t think they’re going to be as worried about who’s aboard as we’d wish they would be.”

  “Then why haven’t they done it yet? What’s holding them back?”

  “I think that Jeremiah held them back,” Dryke said slowly. “I think he believed that he had the compelling case—that the ethical and logical correctness of his position guaranteed eventual victory. He wasn’t dueling with us. He was debating with us.”

  “Evan Silverman wasn’t debating. Those people in Tokyo aren’t debating.”

  “No. Jeremiah saw the writing on the wall. He knew he was running out of time. The game’s being played by different rules now.” Rules that Silverman introduced, and I ratified. “Matt Reid brings up this every time we talk. He agrees—the question isn’t if, it’s when and how. It’s entirely a question of logistics now. As soon as they figure out a way to take a shot at Memphis, they will.”

  Marshall’s cheek twitched, and his gaze narrowed. “Is the ship safe?”

  Dryke placed his hands on his hips and cocked his head before he answered. “I could run out a long list of precautions that we’ve taken and send you away happy and reassured. But it’s not the doors we bar that we have to worry about. It’s the one we don’t. It’s the surprise. Is the ship safe? The truth is, I don’t really know.”

  Well into the second century of the Space Age, it was no secret that the best way to destroy a space habitat was to throw things at it. The things did not need to be big, complicated, or explosive, so long as they were thrown hard enough. A few kilometers per second was just fine, as everyone who remembered the inglorious end of Freedom knew.

  Just nine years after it was completed, the American space station’s main module was shattered—and three astronauts killed—by an in-falling bit of space flotsam. According to one reconstruction, a fifty-gram binding rivet lost during the construction of the first Japanese direct-broadcast platform was the probable culprit.

  But it was very hard to throw things at Memphis—as hard as throwing a bowling ball out of the bottom of a well. Most of the major habitats, including all but two of the satlands, were part of the “Ring of Pearls,” only two thousand kilometers above the Earth. Memphis was riding along in tandem with one of the exceptions—just ten klicks west of Takara, in Clarke orbit, thirty-six thousand kilometers above the blue Pacific and the atolls of the Gilbert Islands. Nothing orbited higher save for a geophysical survey satellite or two and traffic bound for Mars or Heinlein City.

  Being at the top of the well was a considerable advantage. The fastest operational missile—the Asteroid Watch’s nuclear-tipped Stonebreaker—would take nearly an hour to arrive from low orbit. The Peace Force’s aging “shotgun” battle-suppression satellites could not do much better—their hypervelocity railguns would bridge the gap in twenty-six minutes at closest approach.

  But orbital mechanics was not Memphis’s only defense. The universe threw things, too, especially at starships traveling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Memphis had several layers of protection, including an ion deflector, the plasma bow cushion, and a particle defense system built around a pair of HEL free-electron lasers. Twenty-six minutes was more than enough time for the big gyros to turn the bell-shaped starship and bring the PDS to bear.

  And against the one threat Memphis was not expecting to face in deep space—laser weapons—Reid had deployed around the starship several agile crane-trucks bearing huge square scatter plates in their construction grapples like shields. Dryke thought of them as the Knights Peculiar.

  In that context, sabotage from within shaped up as a more likely prospect. But the memory of Javier Sola was strong, and putting a bomb aboard Memphis would be no mean feat.

  The loyalty of the Takara workers, already securely anchored by community pride, was guaranteed by a simple expedient— the finishing crews were made up solely of those who had been selected to the mission. The small fleet of buses which ferried workers and materials across the ten-kilometer moat to the ship was owned by Transcon and operated by Diaspora pilots. And Governor Wian was allowing Matt Reid to supervise the screening procedures in the satland’s euphemistically named immigration and import office, Takara Welcome.

  No possibility was too wild to take seriously—not even a pocket nuke smuggled into Takara and detonated there, turning the satland into a giant fragmentation grenade. Even the one scenario which most troubled Dryke, involving the hijacking of a Takara shuttle and its use as a 120-ton battering ram, had been covered nine ways to Sunday.

  Secure without, secure within. The slogan was displayed in English and kanji throughout the Project quarter on Takara and Memphis. Seen so often, it had become a state of mind, a statement of reality. It would be unfair to say that Reid’s team was cocky, but they were confident.

  Which is why the attack on Memphis, when it came, was every bit as much a surprise as Dryke had projected.

  The black cylindrical satellite had been on station three and a half degrees east of Takara for nearly three months. It was listed in the Highstar registry as Slot 355, 177.5° East, Hughes TC-2000—a dedicated data communications satellite owned by RJR Financial Services, Wilmington, Delaware.

  In adspeak, the TC-2000 was referred to as a mature technology—which in this case meant it was guaranteed to be slow, expected to be reliable, and presumed to be a bargain. In spacespeak, the TC-2000 was disparagingly referred to as a tin can. Compared to the huge Skylink 4 and Nikkei N-2 com platforms at 175° east and 5° west, the little satellite was a mouse among the lions.

  But the mouse had a secret: It was not the satellite that RJR had ordered, that Hughes had built, that the United Parcel Service had accepted for delivery to a towing and retrieval company on Technica. It was, instead, a seven-year-old TC-2000 which had been originally built for the Royal Sultanate of Brunei, but was never placed in service. It had appeared on the secondary market in midsummer, offered by the People’s Revolutionary Government of Brunei during a budget crisis—a bargain Jeremiah could not resist.

  When Taiwanese technicians were finished modifying it, the TC-2000 featured a high-thrust ascent engine concealed behind the antenna skirt, an extra guidance package wired to the satellite’s transponder 4 relay circuits, and five hundred kilos of enhanced chemical explosive. For all that, it weighed just eleven kilos more than the satellite it was to replace. The switch was made at the UPS depot outside Miami, at the price of a Corvette sport flyer for the depot chief and a joybird’s enthusiastic friendship for the driver.

  Three days after Dryke and Marshall’s conversation, a man in a white turtleneck and brown duck pants walked into an RJR office in Hong Kong. He inquired about certain new stock offerings and applied for a modest life insurance policy. Both transacti
ons were bounced to the home office on transponder 4 of the satellite in slot 355. A monitor program took note, a nanoswitch closed, and the mouse roared.

  Trackers at Highstar saw the satellite start to move in its orbit within seconds. But Memphis, looking ahead in its orbit past the bulk of Takara and the clutter of Skylink 4, saw nothing, even after the Highstar alert was received.

  It was well past midnight in Prainha, and Matt Reid’s call roused Mikhail Dryke from a light sleep. Barefoot, hair tousled, with only a pair of half-jeans hastily added to the briefs and T-shirt he slept in, he ran down the stairs and through the halls to the orbital operations center.

  By the time Dryke reached it, the center staff had a plot up on the main window, and the danger was apparent. Relative to the starship, the satellite was already moving at nearly 1,500 kph, on a looping path that would hide it behind Skylink 4 or Takara for most of its journey. The orbital mechanics were tricky, but predictable. By the time the satellite skimmed over the top of Takara, it would be just a few short seconds from its target.

  “Takara’s got nothing to knock it down with,” Reid was saying, his face grave. “We’re turning the ship now”—Dryke could hear the alarms sounding in the background—“but it looks like the only shot we’ll have will light up Takara as well.”

  “How much can the skin take?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not enough to take the spill. I’ve got someone on the line to Governor Wian’s office. Wait—I’ve got the PF on another channel.”

  Reid did not mute the link to Prainha, and Dryke listened as he talked with the Peace Force monitors on Technica.

  “Yes, that’s right. We’ve got a threat to Takara and Memphis. Can you help us? No, our angle is bad. A destruct on the Hughes? No, I don’t think so. Beth—are you on with RJR? Ask them if they’ve got reentry destruct on the satellite.”

  “Range, five hundred ten kilometers,” said an AIP voice in the background.

  “They say reentry destruct failed,” said a woman.