by Niko Perren
‹I was wondering when you’d call,› said Jie. ‹I’m guessing you’re the negotiator?›
‹My name is Wong Choy,› said the man. ‹My job is to help you.›
‹It’s simple, Choy. We want the UN to adopt Pax Gaia next week. The Chinese and American monopoly on the shield is making other countries scared to offer public support. So I’m going to reset the passwords and buy Pax Gaia a bit of publicity.›
‹A noble goal,› said the man. ‹But the international community couldn’t even manage CO2 cuts this summer. Pax Gaia is an order of magnitude more ambitious. How many countries have the discipline to implement it?›
‹Access to weather control will create a strong incentive to cooperate,› said Jie.
‹In that case you’re describing Tamed Earth,› said Choy. ‹The US and China will manage the climate to the benefit of the largest number of people. In return, they’ll enforce CO2 targets.›
‹We want more than just CO2 targets,› said Jie. ‹We want to fix our world.›
A pause. ‹Jie, we don’t have time to talk in circles. The flight engineers tell me you don’t have enough fuel to return. Are you aware of that?›
Fear escaped from its prison for a moment, tearing at his heart. In the back of his mind, he’d nursed the dim hope that Rajit had made a mistake in the calculations. He fought back dismay. ‹Inconvenient, isn’t it? It means I’ve got nothing to lose.›
‹We can still get you back,› said Choy. ‹Not to Earth of course. But to the moon. In four hours there’s a window on an elliptical return trajectory. After that, the moon’s orbit carries it out of your reach. What if we use this as an opportunity? The Americans and Chinese will meet some of your demands; we’ll add tougher environmental targets to Tamed Earth, and enforce them through our control of the shield. And you’ll come home, as a hero. You’ll see Cheng grow up.›
Or I’ll vanish. Crash into the far side of the moon. ‹I accept your offer,› said Jie. ‹Arrange a press conference. I want Tania Black there, and full two-way communications so that I know I’m not talking to a bot. I’ll talk to you in three hours.›
‹Jie! Whoa! I can’t set it up that soon.›
Jie turned off the radio, and the cabin fell into silence.
***
‹Choy, are you there?›
‹Jie, yes!› Choy’s voice radiated enthusiasm. ‹Great news. Both Presidents agree. We’ve got the press conference set for tomorrow.›
A lie. So predictable that Jie wasn’t even disappointed. ‹Then tomorrow’s when I give you control of the spacecraft.›
‹Politics doesn’t work that fast, Jie. There are subtleties. But I can send you their pledge. Please. Let us save your life.›
‹Set up the press conference,› said Jie. ‹Until then, I have no choice but to keep going.›
‹Cheng’s begging for you to come back.› Choy’s melodic voice darkened ever so subtly, adding a minor chord that raised the hairs on Jie’s neck. ‹He won’t stop crying.›
Jie felt as if he’d just been splashed with water. Was I that stupid? He’d been worried about putting Tania and Ruth in danger. The American government was known for its ruthlessness. But my government? No. It’s just words. They’re trying to rattle me. Jie turned off the radio before Choy could inject more doubts. Outside the window there was only darkness. Stars. Somewhere behind, Earth dwindled.
They won’t hurt Cheng. The Chinese government doesn’t hurt ten-year-olds. Do they?
***
‹Hello Jie,› said Choy.
‹Is it time for the press conference?›
The communications delay had grown noticeably.
‹The Americans captured Tania Black this afternoon. They no longer feel a need to negotiate. You’re alone out there, Jie. Nobody knows about you except us.›
Don’t panic. I knew they were going to say this. But it was still disconcerting. If he’s lying, he could have done it yesterday. Why delay? Jie took a breath. Look at me. Doubting myself. He’s getting to me.
‹We’d still like to talk,› said Choy. ‹It will be costly and embarrassing if you change the password. Not to mention risky. You might damage the shield. Cause millions of deaths.›
‹Let’s bring in Tania then,› said Jie. ‹I’m just the man standing in front of the tanks. She can negotiate for me.›
Choy laughed. ‹You don’t talk to anyone but me. Not until you start cooperating. That’s our leverage.›
‹I’m crazy enough to die for this,› said Jie. ‹You overestimate your leverage.›
‹Think about what you’re doing, Jie,› warned Choy. ‹The shield is delicately balanced. If you turn off the control hub computers, sunlight pressure may push it irreparably out of position.›
Jie switched off the radio.
***
One day.
Two days.
Jie rotated the spacecraft so that he could watch Earth. The entire planet had shrunk to a colored ball the size of a full moon, the continents too small to have form any longer. 1.3 million kilometers away, according the XPOS. 1.3 million kilometers. How could such a big number seem so small, cold, and lonely?
Is Cheng safe? Is Tania?
But the only person he could talk to was Choy. Choy, with his silver forked tongue and poisoned logic. Always there, day and night. Jie’s only tie to the rest of humanity. Jie defended his sanity by keeping the radio off. But every eight hours he called Earthcon. Just to see. Just to feel human.
***
At the Lagrange point, the earth’s and sun’s gravities were perfectly balanced, which meant that anything placed there could be kept in position at almost no cost. Earth’s gravity had already slowed Jie substantially by the time he approached, like a tossed ball nearing its apogee. But he had enough extra velocity that he needed to program a long braking thrust, the biggest test of his navigational skills so far.
For several anxious minutes he felt the push of the main engine. The burn was intended to get him to a manageable speed 5 kilometers short of the shield. Once the thrust ended and he returned to full weightlessness, he looked at his new relative velocity from the XPOS. 12 meters per second. A little bit fast. He typed more numbers on the absurdly small keyboard, and fired the main engine again. Another wait. Now the XPOS showed the spacecraft spinning slightly off axis.
This is going to be a nightmare.
Jie’s head spun with mental calculations. This close to the Lagrange point, gravity was essentially zero, so he was dealing with Newton’s laws of motion in their Platonic ideal, freed from the messy constraints of friction. Unfortunately, a billion years of instinct had wired Jie’s ape brain to assume that a moving object would eventually stop. And while Jie could do the math, the emergency flight controls weren’t making it easy. They lacked even a voice interface.
Jie typed another pair of commands.
> Fire orientation thruster 4 for .1 seconds at 25%
> Wait 2 seconds
> Fire main engine for .1 seconds at 25%
Lurch… Lurch. Stars swung outside the viewport. Tsat tau! The orientation thruster should have canceled his rotation, not sent him spinning in the opposite direction. But the ERV had not been designed for such delicate maneuvering. It was built to survive a trip down through Earth’s atmosphere on the tail end of a long burn down from the moon.
His nose pointed towards the shield. 1500 meters. Don’t mess this up. Now his tail pointed towards the shield. 1200 meters. I’m spinning too fast. Abort! His nose. 700 meters. His tail. He fired orientation thrusters 1 and 3 for a short burst to cancel the spin, followed by the main engine to back him off. He waited anxious seconds. The XPOS showed the shield receding again.
Regroup. Try again. There’s no hurry. I’ve got the rest of my life to figure this out.
***
Eight hours. Eight agonizing hours.
1.5 million kilometers from Earth, in an empty blackness, a metal bubble of pressurized air glided towards the vast structure on which the human ra
ce was pinning so many of its hopes. The spacecraft’s single human occupant was twice as far from his planet as any member of his species had ever voyaged. He wasn’t a trained explorer. He wasn’t even an astronaut. He was a nanoengineer from Beijing.
The main engine spat out a short burst of plasma.
‹Arrrgggh!› Jie shook his fist at the controls. ‹You dog-fucking turtle egg!›
The imprecision of the main engine bordered on randomness. A thrust that reduced his velocity by 5 meters per second one time, took 4 meters per second off the next. Once, he’d been just short of the shield control hub, perfectly aligned. Then his final docking maneuver had burned too strongly. It had taken him nearly an hour to get lined up with the shield again. And that was five tries ago.
The numbers on the console counted down the distance. 270 meters distance moving at 2 meters per second. Faster than I’d like, but the controls seem better at longer thrusts. 100 meters distance. 50 meters. 20 meters. He pressed the button, felt the momentary gravity as the main engine engaged.
Please. It doesn’t even have to be a full stop. Just enough so I can jump.
17 meters distance. 16 meters. 16 meters. 17 meters. 17 meters. 18 meters.
‹Oh, thank you!› Jie shouted aloud. He shot out of his seat and pulled on his gloves and helmet, racing against the drift that was already carrying him away. 20 meters. Safety line? He clipped it to his belt and then attached the other end to a fastener near the door. He checked his helmet and gloves again. 24 meters. At least I’ve had lots of practice putting on the space suit. But this time felt different. More vivid. Nobody would double check his gear today.
Jie pulled the switch to depressurize the capsule. The tubes in his suit swelled to familiar tightness. The GBOP logo unwrinkled. Hurry. He pulled at the hatch, fighting a slight resistance from the remaining air pressure, like pulling a suction cup off glass. The hatch puffed loose. Jie belted it to the couch. “Tether everything,” Sharon had warned. “Things wander in zero gravity.”
The doorway opened into starry night. Jie unreeled 2 meters of safety line and stuck his head through the hatch. Dog testicles! The closest he’d come to this sensation was when he’d swum past the headwall of the reef with Cheng and watched the sea floor plunge away beneath him. This was worse, as if the dropoff wrapped around 360 degrees. Jie clutched the door’s outside edge. I saved Rajit and fixed our power supply. I can do this.
Every nerve in his body jangled. The shield’s core loomed, huge and black, a 4-kilometer-wide disk of solar panels that blotted out the sun. The distant Earth cast case a dull blueish tint over the shadowed side, but other than that the dark was absolute.
Jie’s mind whispered weird impulses. Unclip the tether. Jump. That urge to leap off a tall building, just to experience those few seconds of flight. Float home. Or onward, the last 99% of the way to the sun. Until Earth becomes just one more tiny bright point in the sky.
Jie turned on his suit light. Shone it through the gloom at the dim shape looming just beyond ERV’s thruster. The shield’s control hub was made of four large pieces joined into a rough ring, like a donut flecked with metal hatches instead of chocolate flakes. A slowly widening gap, already 30 meters wide, separated it from the ERV.
“Yī bù zuò èr bù xiū.” The words sounded frightened. He said it again, more sternly: ‹I started it. I’ve got to finish it.›
Jie let out the line and monkeyed his way across the ERV’s skin. He dug his fingers into the tinfoil, pulling at the crinkly material, always maintaining a grip on some part of the spacecraft. The yawning void played tricks on his perceptions, oscillating between comfortable floating and terrifying free fall. He reached the curved heat shield, then the main engine mount.
“Don’t jump too hard,” Sharon had warned. “You don’t have to overcome gravity. Slow is more accurate, and it’ll be easier to reel yourself back if you miss.”
Jie felt like Cheng’s elf, lining up an arrow. He pushed, legs straightening in a single, smooth motion. Help! Help! Help! His brain sent meaningless panic signals, unable to reconcile the horrifying nightmares his senses were reporting. He swam in darkness, suspended above nothing, from nothing. No sense of motion. He was stationary. The control hub moved towards him. Then it was the other way around.
The safety line jerked, spinning him. ‹Tā māde!› In his excitement he’d unspooled it too fast and it had tangled. Idiot! He reeled himself back to the ERV. Precious moments wasted. The gap to the shield had widened further, a chasm now. I must be near the range of the safety line. The cord had worked itself into an ugly snarl, and his frenzied attempts to remove the knots with his bulky gloves ate more seconds.
Jie lined himself up again. Push. This time he unspooled the line as he floated. Though it was covered with hatches and attachment points, he managed to hit a blank spot on the control hub. His fingers scrabbled on the smooth surface. He started to drift away.
‹No, please, no!› he shouted in frustration.
He spotted a ridge where two panels had been poorly welded together. He hooked his fingers on the seam’s edge. Careful. Don’t cut yourself. The drifting ERV slowly pulled out the last few meters of his safety line. He eased himself to an attachment hook and snapped in the carabiner his tether.
Jie clung to the cold metal hull, letting his nerves calm. He hadn’t even caught his breath when he felt the line go tight.
***
The access panel unclipped easily, exposing circuit boards and neat bundles of wires. As Jie had predicted, the computers were both Haier Extreme Environment Controllers. Jie found the blue wire that controlled the radio link to Earth. He disconnected it. Bye-bye. No sense allowing remote logins while he was trying to reset the system. He held down the button to restore the factory defaults.
Changing the passwords took less than five minutes. A trillion dollars of technology. And now only he and the lunar crew knew the new access codes.
His work completed, he unhooked his tether and reeled his way back to the ERV. When he reached the hatch he stopped. He spent several minutes scouring the sky, trying to get some sense of the magnificent machine he’d sacrificed so much for. Although only 2% completed, the shield’s hundreds of concentric rings already covered 250,000 square kilometers. A glass sky. But the soap-bubble-thin Nanoglass was invisible. The spokes radiating out of the control hub simply faded into the infinity of space. Jie couldn’t even make out the far edges of the massive solar array.
He turned towards Earth. His eyes filled with tears. We’ve done the right thing. Even if we lose this battle, we’ve done the right thing. We had to try. He stayed outside, gazing at the tiny blue disk hung in an endless sea of stars. Everything I have ever known. The only world we have.
Eventually, his oxygen light blinked red.
Where now? Wait, and let the radiation cook me? Or maybe Earthcon will help me reach Venus, just because I can. Wouldn’t that be ironic? After all Sharon’s years of preparing for Mars, I could be the first human to see another planet.
He climbed inside and restored the cabin air. Once settled, he set the engines to burn for just under a minute, nudging himself off his perch at the gravity well’s edge. There was never really a choice. Back into Earth’s arms. Back home. Even if it ends in fire.
Chapter 51
THE DARK-SUITED man closed in. Tania and Ruth shrunk into their seats, looking down, as if that simple act might render them invisible. Footsteps sounded. Tania stiffened in anticipation of a hand. Or a paingiver. Nowhere left to run. It’s over.
“Ruth! Tania! Thank goodness!”
“Frank?” Ruth gasped.
Frank? Witty’s investigator! The man at the door must be Bruno. Tania moaned with relief. She hadn’t recognized them, backlit against the LA sun, masked by EyeSistants. Or maybe it was the way they moved. A secret agent swagger that didn’t fade with retirement. These guys really do all look the same.
“We’ve got to go.” Frank glanced at the front door. “If we can
find you, so can Juarez’s people.”
Tania and Ruth scrambled up, jarred by the urgency of his words. They hadn’t taken two steps when Frank stiffened from some unseen prompt in his EyeSistant.
“Too late. They’re here.” He snatched Ruth’s coffee. “Out the back! Quickly!”
Frank rushed towards the front door, coffee in hand, barreling past customers. He took over Bruno’s spot at the doorway. Bruno intercepted Tania and Ruth and fell in behind them, herding them past the counter, guarding their rear.
“This is the part when we run,” he said calmly.
Tania accelerated down a hallway cluttered with boxed supplies. An elderly woman chose that moment to step out of the restroom. She stumbled back as Tania, Ruth and Bruno barged past. They flung open the back door as two men stepped through the front. Frank turned his head towards the counter, as if he were talking to one of the servers. He shouldered right into the lead agent. Ruth’s steaming coffee arced into the man’s face.
“Yaaahh!”
“Oh. Shit!” exclaimed Frank. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you. Let me help.”
“Get off me, asshole!”
The closing door cut off the rest of the exchange. They’d exited into a pedestrian lane, a treed greenspace with a bikepath down the middle. It skirted the edge of a converted parking lot, now a park with four apartment towers at its center.
“I don’t get it. I haven’t turned my omni on since Vegas.” Ruth flung it into a recycling container overflowing with disposable coffee cups. “We paid cash for our coffee. How could you have tracked us?”
Bruno strode towards the apartment buildings, putting trees and bushes between them and the coffee shop’s back door. “We’d made your omni by the time you hit Vegas last night, but lost you for the evening. Then you showed up this morning paying for a ten-night hotel stay. Obviously barter. We searched the hotel’s surroundings for vehicles heading west. Of the fourteen matches, this one stopped closest to Mr. W’s studio.”