The Effort

by Claire Holroyde

  After checking her watch, Amy knocked hard on their conference room door. Sounds of scuffling and murmurs came from inside. After a brief pause, Amy opened the door and walked right in. The space flight team was bringing their meeting to a close while griping about getting the shaft with resources because they were last in the line of defense. It was probably true. Without the success of all the other teams—HYCIV, nuclear, Ariane integration, security, logistics, and launch—nothing these astrodynamics experts said or did would make any difference.

  Take a back seat, fuckers, Amy thought.

  She was in no mood and would drag everyone out by the hair if it came to that. The space flight team got the message and scrambled with their laptops and papers. Amy dialed Ben. He was directly above them in the Janus meeting room, only a short elevator ride away. Minimal. Interruption.

  “We’re here,” she stated, and hung up.

  Troy connected his laptop to the flat panel mounted on the far wall. He opened a video file of footage captured by a security drone. Amy had seen them up in the skies. At first glance, without registering distance and scale, the military drones looked like small planes, nothing like the noisy commercial models that hovered like insects. The Effort’s Predator models circled silently in wide arcs like graceful California condors, recording with optical and infrared cameras.

  Video footage appeared on the flat panel with a paused time code in the lower corner. Amy saw an aerial view of tree cover like clumps of broccoli surrounding a long road leading to the airport on the edge of Cayenne. Troy advanced the footage, following the security drone as it flew south until an airfield came into view. Parked in the far corner was a very large, very wide plane—Zhen’s Xi’an Y-20 with the red flag of the People’s Republic of China painted on its dull metal tail. More than a hundred armed soldiers surrounded the plane in a staggered perimeter.

  Amy heard Ben’s voice in the hallway. He soon appeared dressed in his own military fatigues, pushing the Professor in a wheelchair. They were still discussing nuclear team business.

  “Thank you for your time,” Amy said the moment they crossed the threshold.

  The Professor sat up and regarded her with a small smile. She knew that his doctors were very liberal with his codeine and gave him several days’ worth of pills at a time, which the Professor could pop casually along with the mandatory Effort cocktail of antimalarial, antidepression, antianxiety, Ritalin, and (for those without heart conditions) amphetamines. He was now the most chipper scientist in any given room despite having the pallor of Death himself. Amy worried what his inevitable passing would do to morale.

  As for Ben, leaning on the wheelchair’s handles for support, he wasn’t looking much better. He had fallen asleep while talking to a room full of engineers a few days before. His words had slurred midsentence, and his expression went slack. Before anyone knew what was happening, Ben crashed to the floor. He kept trying to stand back up but only fell down again and again. It ripped Amy up inside, but she could do nothing but make him sleep, eat, and swallow those damn pills. Everyone had to help Ben sacrifice himself for the cause. It made her ill.

  She went to close the door and said that their discussion had to be confidential.

  As she passed, Ben stated at full volume, “We don’t have time for this shit, Amy.”

  He would never cut her off at the knees like this, never but for now. Amy cleared her throat and pointed up to the paused footage on the wall display. Troy addressed the Professor, avoiding looking at Ben as he eyed the growth of Troy’s beard.

  “It was one of our last arrivals from East Asia,” Troy said. “China was the Effort’s last signatory, if you recall. The plane landed in mid-November but remained parked to the side of the runways.”

  Amy saw the surprise on Ben’s face as he finally recognized Troy Andrews, one of the UN overlords who had been holed up in administrative headquarters since the start of September. Even in this protected bubble, many had become unrecognizable to each other and themselves. But not Amy. She had never been more tired and strung out, and yet she was her best self.

  “Why don’t we just talk to him?” the Professor interrupted. “Why all the secrecy and cloaks and daggers?”

  Light from fluorescent overheads bounced off his bald, liver-spotted pate. Amy could see beads of sweat despite the air-conditioning.

  “I don’t know why this has to be confidential,” Amy replied, shaking her head, “but Zhen said she has the solution.”

  “Deus ex machina,” the Professor scoffed.

  Amy startled as a bolt of excitement ran through her body and tingled her extremities. How many times had Amy asked herself, Is this comet real? How can this all be real when it feels so much like my sci-fi books and TV series? There was something uncanny about it all—not déjà vu, but more like walking the familiar path of destiny.

  “It’s a term,” Ben snapped into the silence.

  Of course Amy knew it was a term. She and Ben had discussed the plot device countless times.

  “Meaning…” said the Professor, who paused to look at Troy but still continued, “that unless your engineer can deliver a god, the likelihood of him having a solution for a successful HYCIV build within our ridiculous launch window is near impossible—”

  “But not impossible,” Amy said, finally regaining her senses.

  She knew how loath scientists were to make that claim. The universe had proven them wrong too many times. The Professor sighed and nodded, conceding that all was supposedly possible if it wasn’t impossible.

  “But it’s more likely that he is either wrong or lying,” said the Professor sadly.

  “She,” Amy finally corrected him. “If Zhen is wrong or lying, then what are those soldiers guarding on that plane?”

  The Professor’s underbite quickly snapped shut.

  Amy turned to Troy, but he was losing control of his faculties. The Professor had just admitted that the Effort’s success was near impossible, a lost cause.

  “Troy?”

  His mouth gaped with the realization of doom. Everyone and everything will die…

  “Troy!” Amy yelled at the top of her lungs.

  He didn’t even blink. The Effort doctors had labeled the condition UD3 catatonia. Amy rushed to Troy’s laptop and scanned the crowded desktop. She opened another video file Troy had pulled from the drone security logs. The time code had advanced by just under two months.

  “This footage was recorded days ago,” Amy said to Ben and the Professor.

  There were less than half as many Chinese soldiers standing attention in a sparse perimeter around the plane.

  “Look at the wing,” she urged Ben.

  A series of plastic tarps spanned the edge of the plane’s left wing and funneled down to containers on the ground.

  “They’re collecting rain because they’re probably out of drinking water. Troy spoke to the security team still out there. They said the Chinese soldiers have been leaving one by one because they’re starving as they run out of rations. They limp out of the security zone with just their guns, and they don’t come back. The rest stay to guard that plane. Why?”

  Neither man ventured a guess, but they weren’t dismissing the question, either. The Professor tapped the length of the cane resting in his lap. With all ten arthritic fingers, he absently played a piano concerto while his eyes and thoughts remained fixed on the plane. Suddenly, his index finger lifted to point at Ben’s head.

  “Fortune-teller?” he mused. “In all those one hundred twenty-two impact scenarios, did any account for a deus ex machina?”

  Ben shook his head. The Planetary Defense Conference scenarios all attempted to simulate plausible situations and outcomes. But here, in reality, they were approached with the implausible—and it was exactly what they needed. Truth could be stranger than the fiction Amy lived and breathed.

  Ben nodded and said, “Let’s hear what this Zhen has to say.”

  * * *

  DEUS EX MACHINA tra
nslated from the Latin is “God from the machine.”

  Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary offers two definitions:

  A god introduced by means of a crane…in ancient Greek and Roman drama to decide the final outcome.

  A person or thing (as in fiction or drama) that appears or is introduced suddenly and unexpectedly and provides a contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Zhen

  Kourou, French Guiana

  January 12

  T-minus 20 days to launch

  ZHEN STARTLED WHEN she saw a large cricket with waving antennae on the bottom of a solar array panel. She jumped back and looked up at all the black silicon cells that stretched to the ceiling—infested with crickets!

  It couldn’t be real. Zhen closed her eyes but had to open them before she lost her balance. The floor of the cleanroom felt tilted suddenly, but at least the crickets had vanished. She reached out to the engineer next to her and held on to his shoulder until her spatial orientation leveled. When Zhen turned to her neighbor, she saw light brown eyes above his mask with no epicanthic folds, a few freckles, and a mole above the right eyebrow. It was Albert, a member of the Guiana Space Centre staff. Zhen could have thanked him in French as she let go, but there was no need. They all steadied one another.

  Albert continued to direct the engineers and technicians folding and packing up the completed solar arrays. Over the next couple of days, the arrays would be transported by rail to the Final Assembly Building, where they would fold on hinges like origami and stow within the Ariane rocket.

  Zhen pressed a button on her watch and switched the digital display from the launch countdown to twenty-four-hour military time. It had been thirty-nine hours and thirty-eight minutes since Zhen had last slept. A quiet alarm would sound in twenty-two minutes as a warning that her faculties would begin to fail with increasing consistency; she would have more hallucinations, more disorientation, more fits of temper, more paranoia, and more impaired concentration. That is what Zhen had learned in the span of her mature lifetime, although she had never rationed sleep for this long a duration.

  Her hallucinations at the payload prep facilities had been meaningless so far: bulging walls, human faces popping out of inanimate objects, or blobs moving in the corners of her vision. But crickets were lucky. Maybe it was a sign, beyond sleep deprivation, that the luck of the Effort was about to change for the better. Zhen lifted her hand to signal to Albert and three of her fellow engineers. They nodded quickly when she pointed to her watch. Zhen’s forty-hour rest schedule was well known; only her supervisor, Quon, ever judged her for it. He had ordered the rest of the Chinese engineers to work until they dropped and had to be carried outside.

  Zhen maneuvered to the wall of the large cleanroom, away from the mass of engineers and interpreters clustered below the remaining solar array panels. As she hurried along the wall, Zhen thought about the adjoining cleanroom on the other side where Dr. Jin-soo Lee and the rest of the HYCIV team would be toiling away on their impossible mission. Even with all the subassemblies procured at the Effort’s conception, there were still too many complex parts that had to be built from scratch and tested within their launch window. The Effort was doomed—unless Zhen acted alone.

  She checked her watch and quickened her pace, but it wasn’t fast enough. Quon intercepted her and blocked her path to the exit. His eyes looked to her mouth, like they always did. He grimaced as he spoke because he knew about her scars under the mask’s papery fabric, and he didn’t like the deception of Zhen looking like a perfectly formed woman—pretty, even.

  “We had another collapse,” he reported. “Wang this time.”

  Zhen said nothing. She had already argued for scheduled intervals of rest for her team, but personal sacrifice was honored among the Chinese, even in the extreme, despite its sad waste. Quon’s eyes darted furtively. They spoke in Mandarin, but there were several interpreters standing around or playing the wallflower until needed.

  “I’ve heard rumors that you’ve met with their leadership,” Quon said in a low voice, “in secret.”

  Zhen could feel her accelerating pulse in her ears and neck. She held her breath and waited for him to mention Amy and their meeting on the road.

  “I am your superior. Not them. Not Dr. Lee,” Quon said, nodding to the wall that separated them from the HYCIV team.

  “You are not to speak with him alone.”

  Zhen felt immediate relief that he didn’t know the extent of her actions—but she also felt anger. In working for the China National Space Administration, Zhen had always fallen in line. That was then; this was the time of extinction-event-class comet UD3. Zhen had to find strength and break out of the hard, form-fitting mold of obedience, like a weak chick breaking out of an eggshell.

  “We are out of time,” she said. “All of us,” she added, daring to wave her hand around to circle every nationality represented in the cleanroom, the whole human family.

  “Our orders were to wait,” Quon hissed.

  It was November when the Chinese engineers boarded a Xi’an Y-20 cargo plane and took off for South America. Leadership in Beijing had agreed to participate in the international effort…officially. Unofficially, the decision was split. There was a minority faction in talks with Moscow, agitating for China to join the Russian effort.

  When Zhen’s plane landed at the Cayenne airport, its human cargo of engineers disembarked and headed to the space center, but the soldiers and pilots remained to guard the plane and wait. Leadership in Beijing would either decide to join the Russian effort and recall all its engineers and resources, or it would fully back the international effort—and disclose the state secret that was the other cargo, a secret that could tip the balance between survival and extinction.

  “The UN must be blocking communication from Beijing,” Quon whispered, looking around him.

  It was possible. Zhen had befriended many of the engineers on other teams using her fluency in English and French. Some whispered rumors that NASA calculated the comet’s impact site in China. Zhen’s government may have decided to join the neighboring Russians once they made their own calculations. The Effort would have blocked this information and ignored their demands. But there were other possibilities as well. An engineer named Cheung was the last of the Chinese to reach the Effort. He was a substitute for another engineer who died from a heart attack. With him came horrific news.

  “Cheung said—”

  “I know what he said,” Quon interrupted her.

  Zhen’s jaw shut, but her glaring eyes spoke for her: Now! Now is the time for you to lead us.

  Zhen was a forty-six-year-old woman with no hard power. Quon was her elder and a senior-ranked Communist Party member. He didn’t have half of Zhen’s intellectual capabilities or experience, but he shared the classified knowledge of what was packed and stored on their Y-20 plane. It was knowledge that could either save the Effort or continue to burn holes in their sanity while time ran out. But Quon made no move to act as they stood in silence. He was chosen to be a leader because he was a follower. Zhen stepped around him and didn’t look back when he called her name.

  After disrobing from her cleanroom suit, Zhen exited to the back parking lot of the payload prep facilities. Crushed cigarette filters squished under the soles of her shoes. A ring of guilty smokers stood by the door, sharing puffs from the last of the Effort’s cigarettes. Two of the smokers were Chinese. They immediately averted their eyes in shame as she passed, but Zhen could appreciate the normalcy of their habit. Even more touching was the way they closed their eyes to savor a nicotine-laced inhale and then wordlessly passed the precious smoke to their neighbor.

  On the outer edge of the parking lot was a makeshift food bank and clinic. Zhen stood in a short line to receive a paper bag meal that she tucked into her lab coat pocket. To continue on, she had to step over sleeping engineers lying on the ground and others being spoon-fed like children. Most of the fat
had been starved off their bodies through neglect. Zhen probably looked just as gaunt. Her clothes hung loose, and she missed her monthly bleeding.

  Medics had hooked IV drips into some of the sicker engineers. If they couldn’t be repaired on the spot, they were taken to an infirmary. Some returned, but most didn’t. Zhen saw Cheung among them in his white lab coat. His hands shook violently, but his haunted eyes stared off into a distance no one else could see. Zhen stopped to whisper his name and shake his shoulder. Exhibiting symptoms of UD3 catatonia was dangerous, as it was rumored to be contagious.

  “Cheung,” she whispered. “Come back.”

  Zhen shook him harder, remembering what he reported when he first arrived: that Red China was once again a silent bloodbath. Cheung’s parents and elderly aunt said the mass starvation that came with news of the comet was just like the midcentury Great Leap Forward. People ate grass and bark in the daylight, while babies and children disappeared in the night.

  Cheung suddenly startled and blinked.

  “It will get worse,” he said, soon as his eyes could focus on Zhen.

  “Home?”

  “Everything,” he replied, and looked away.

  The world was falling into chaos and ruin. There was a strong possibility that no decisions came from the People’s Republic of China because it no longer existed.

  * * *

  A DENSE, WOODED area surrounded the fenced perimeter of the payload prep facilities. To reach it, one had to first cross the parking lot at the back of the complex and hop a chain-link fence. When Zhen first ventured out into these woods, seeking a close and quiet place to sleep, she tied the end of a spool of coated wire to the chain-link fence. Quickly turning her wrists to let out more wire, Zhen walked backward into the trees. At seventy steps, she could no longer see the floodlights of the parking lot or hear humans above the ruckus of insects. At 132 steps, she found a cluster of strange trees: the first landmark she could recognize and remember.