A Tower in Space-Time (The Stasis Stories #5)

by Laurence Dahners

  Then the man turned so she could see his face.

  Kaem! she thought, stunned.

  Suddenly she felt embarrassed, though she had no idea why. As if she were a peeper or voyeur. Turning quickly, she hustled to the changing room.

  Back in her work clothes, she went out the back door so Kaem wouldn’t see her exiting through the main room.

  But then she found herself wanting to see more. She walked around to the front of the dojo and, standing back out of the light, watched through the big window as Kaem and his class went through the rest of his lesson.

  He’s so graceful! she thought. He makes every kata look like a work of art.

  A woman exited the dojo and turned in Arya’s direction.

  Embarrassed to be standing outside watching the practice, Arya turned and looked at the street as if she were waiting for an Uber.

  The woman stopped a few feet from her. “He’s beautiful, isn’t he?” she asked. “And the supple flow of his movements are…” the woman shook her head and made a kissing sound, “bravissimo!”

  Arya looked at the woman. She was, as expected, watching Kaem. Arya said, “I don’t understand… he’s just a yellow belt, but…”

  “He looks so much better than that, doesn’t he? From what I’ve heard, he’s only been studying karate since last fall. Something like six to nine months. The instructors say he’s the best they’ve ever seen, though he won’t compete. You’re not the only one who likes to watch him as if he’s some kind of artistic masterpiece. Even the simplest katas look magnificent when he does them, and the more complex ones he’s learned,” she shook her head, “they’re just astonishing. The instructors say he learns each kata in one session… and once he’s learned them, he never forgets. He doesn’t come to the next session having to be re-taught some part of a kata, instead, he performs even better at the beginning of the next session than he did at the end of the previous one. My theory,” she lowered her voice as if divulging a secret, “is that he practices them all day, every day. That’s the only way someone could perform—and perform is the only word that fits—perform them with that kind of polish.” The woman sighed and turned toward Arya, “I’m Sarah. Who’re you?”

  Ashamed, Arya abruptly turned and walked away. I don’t think she got a good look at my face, she thought. It was in the shadows and she was mostly looking at Kaem… Kaem. The man who says he loves me but who I keep pushing away. Brilliant, beautiful, agile, lithe, flowing… Kaem. A shiver ran over her.

  When she got home there was a man fidgeting on her doorstep. She slowed and eyed him suspiciously, for a second thinking it might be Kaem—whom she didn’t think she could handle at the moment. Then she realized the man was wearing a uniform and holding something in his off-hand. A weapon? she wondered, lowering her center of gravity so she’d be able to move quickly.

  The man turned slightly.

  Flowers! she realized, wondering which of the men from the Select Singles dating site had decided to do something so embarrassing. Probably, Kalil, she decided. Kalil had been her last and one of her most unpleasant dates. She’d immediately ghosted him, not returning his copious messages and repeated calls.

  Still cautious, Arya hung her purse from her shoulder and took out her Mace as she approached with her hands freed up.

  When she was about ten feet away, the man noticed her and turned. He glanced down at a card in his hand, “Arya Vaii?”

  “Yes,” she said, stopping.

  “I have flowers for you,” he said, holding them out.

  “Who from?” she asked suspiciously. If it’s Kalil, I’ll keep ghosting him by telling the guy to report them as undeliverable.

  The guy looked at the card in his hand. “Um, Kaem Seba?”

  Arya felt as if her heart had stopped. After a moment, she stepped forward and held out her hand. “Thank you,” she said, voice trembling.

  There were six white rosebuds wrapped in crimson paper, and a card that said only, “Love, Kaem.”

  Oh my God… she thought, entranced by the understated elegance of it all.

  And yet, somehow, dismayed.

  ***

  Mahesh Prakant was down at Staze East for the “Big hookup” as they were calling it. The three legs of the space tower were being pulled together by Stade chains that had been strung when the legs were only up at 10,000 feet, short enough that the chains could be pulled from one to the other by Staze’s blimps. Now that the two shorter, secondary towers had reached the ten-mile (52,800 feet) altitude where the three were to be joined, the chains were being retracted. This was pulling the tops of the three towers together.

  To this point, the wind had been waving them about since the ball-and-socket joints at their bases had been left a little loose to avoid undue stress to their foundation screws. Dez and Lee had worked out an ingenious system that, as planned, guided pegs at the top of each of the smaller towers into sockets in the “coupler” which was attached to the main tower.

  Once they were securely locked together—as confirmed by cameras since the air up there was too thin and cold for anyone to be up there observing it—a little cheer went up and the two women pumped their fists in the air.

  Dez turned to look at her audience, “You guys ready for the test run?”

  Another cheer, this one of assent, and Dez said, “Just a minute while Wilson welds the chains down.”

  Prakant watched as Wilson Delbet used one of Gunnar’s welders to permanently fasten the chains—the ones that’d pulled the towers together—to the wall of the main tower. The chains had been tightened by winches at the base of the main tower and welding the chains at that location was much easier and more reversible than trying to bolt the towers together up at altitude.

  Delbet made a much bigger deal out of the welding operation than other people Prakant had seen using one. Rather than leaving the extra-small stazer that performed the welding operation on its strap over his shoulder as most did, he set it down, took great care plugging it in, and used pliers to hold the small hinged Stade wire that bridged from the chain to the tower. This wasn’t necessary since the stazing process that created the ‘weld’ wasn’t dangerous. After putting the welder’s fitting on the wire and welding it to the chain, he used his pliers to hold the other end against the wall of the tower and stazed a weld there. At least he didn’t use the pliers when he used the welder to lock the little hinge in the wire.

  For a moment Prakant fretted over the way Dez had mentioned months ago that Delbet didn’t seem as competent as she would’ve expected from his grades and resume. She’d seemed to be attributing it to having hired an engineer with more book learning than common sense and who, unfortunately, simply lacked any capability for innovation.

  However, Prakant had run across inflated resumes in his time. He’d had HR check Delbet’s grades and resume against original records and they’d found everything to be correct, But records have been hacked, he thought.

  In this case, Delbet handled the welder capably enough, if slowly.

  Soon enough, everyone was loading up in vehicles and moving downrange beneath the tower. Prakant went to the far end of Staze’s farmland, almost four kilometers from the base of the tower. At that location, the tower was two kilometers or 6,562 feet high. He and Lee were there to hear for themselves how loud a launch would be. There was also an instrument station that would record sound volumes accurately, but each of them wanted to gain their own impression.

  The first thing that happened was that the chain itself was accelerated to a speed of six kilometers per second—close to the 6.9kps needed to maintain a low earth orbit.

  The smooth chain, frictionless passage, and acoustic muffling must be working pretty damn well, Prakant thought. He thought he might be hearing a hum, but this far below the tower it was so faint he couldn’t be sure.

  Lee had been aiming a cannon microphone up at the tower in order to separate the sound coming from the chain from the sounds of nature all around them. She said,
“About ten decibels. Not bad at all.”

  Sure as hell, though, we’re going to have someone sue us for the noise, Prakant thought. Even though it’s quieter than a whisper. Way quieter than your neighbor blowing leaves. His thoughts paused a moment, Of course, at this point, it’s two kilometers high. He looked west toward the origin of the tower, It’s got to be louder there but that land belongs to Staze.

  Lee said, “Okay, they’re slowing the chain and loading the dummy capsule.”

  The dummy capsule was an air Stade formed in the mold for the exterior of Lee’s spaceplane. At air-density, it didn’t have much mass, which meant it would take a lot less power to accelerate it than the eventual 100 metric ton capsules would be. But it would rip through the air similarly to a capsule and generate similar amounts of noise.

  Prakant took advantage of the half-hour it took to get the capsule loaded up, talking to Lee to get her impressions of how things were going.

  Once the capsule was ready, they would accelerate it at 0.2 gravities to keep it under the speed of sound until it reached the coast at an altitude of ten kilometers. There, at an altitude and distance where they hoped that breaking the sound barrier wouldn’t bother anyone, they’d accelerate it at fifteen gravities. They hoped to accelerate capsules earlier than that if the baffles they’d designed to deflect the sonic boom upward worked as well as they hoped.

  Of course, accelerating at fifteen gravities with people aboard was something that could only be done if they Stazed the interior of the capsule—and thereby the people. Barring such stazings, the capsule would have to be accelerated at three or four gravities while on the track and, once off the track, further accelerated to orbital speeds with an “upper stage” type of rocket engine after it had reached space. Carrying all the fuel for that further acceleration would markedly diminish the final payload, so they would certainly staze the interior for robo-launches when there weren’t people aboard.

  Lee interrupted their conversation to say, “Here it comes.”

  They both looked up, though they shouldn’t see anything when it went over.

  When the capsule passed over their heads with a whoosh Lee let out a cheer and pumped her fist again. “That didn’t sound bad at all. A lot quieter than a jet going over… which is what you’d expect since there’s no jet engine powering it.” She turned excitedly to Prakant as she started for the car, “Let’s get back to the main building so we can see what the dB (decibel) readings were down at the coast and out at sea.”

  Back at the center, they learned that the passage of the capsule overhead had been almost imperceptible as it went over the Great Dismal Swamp and—as expected because of its ten-mile altitude—had been inaudible at the coast.

  The sonic boom out at sea was certainly audible, but was significantly less energetic than expected, suggesting that the baffles were more effective than they’d hoped.

  A lot of well-deserved high fiving ensued.

  Prakant made a point of congratulating Dez and Lee on their triumph. While talking to them he asked what was going to happen to the capsule they’d just launched.

  Lee blinked at him. “You remember that the launching leg of the tower’s only eighty kilometers long so far, right?”

  “Oh, yeah… so you didn’t get the capsule up to orbital velocity?”

  She shook her head. “It went off the end of the tower at about 4.5 kps and an altitude of forty kilometers, so there was still some air resistance and this capsule was only air density so it didn’t have much momentum. It slowed down in a hurry like when you throw a balloon. Radar showed that rapid slowing, then tracked it slowly descending to the sea.”

  He frowned, “Are you going to retrieve it?”

  “Oh, no,” Lee said. “It’s only a three-day Stade. It’ll destaze and disappear midday tomorrow.”

  Prakant couldn’t help laughing at himself. He might be CTO but still sometimes had a hard time thinking of how temporary Stades affected the way things could be done. “Great,” he said. “How much longer until you’ve got the entire two-hundred kilometers of the launch tower up?”

  Dez said, “Tower extrusion’s going faster than expected, but building our flywheels and connecting them to the main sprocket with the magnetic couplings is probably going to delay things.”

  “Oh,” Prakant frowned. “What are the problems? We could use the income from some launches.”

  Dez waved him after her and turned for the stairs down into the base of the launcher. “Let me show you the system we’re building. Maybe you’ll have some ideas.”

  They’d converted the magnetic couplings from big flat plates covered with magnets that pulled on one another more and more as they got closer together, into magnet covered drums where one drum slid just inside the other. As they overlapped more and more, the magnetic coupling increased in a much smoother and more extended fashion than disks approaching one another where the transfer of power occurred over a very short distance.

  “This seems obvious,” Prakant said. “Why haven’t couplings always been made this way?”

  “They didn’t have Stade,” Dez answered with a shrug. “Working with normal materials, once one side of the inner drum gets a little closer to the outer drum, the magnets on that side are trying to pull them the rest of the way into contact. At the same time, the magnets on the other side are getting weaker because the distance has increased. Pretty quick, as the drums are working at long distances from their bearings, normal materials deform enough that you have impacts and magnets start to shatter.” She smiled, “Stade, on the other hand, is so rigid that once you have the bearing aligned, nothing can move it off-center.”

  Prakant shrugged, “Same reason a solid ring can’t hold an orbit. So, what is the problem?”

  She shrugged again and held up a finger. “Getting them aligned. Once they’re aligned, we can weld them and they stay, but getting them there’s a high precision job.” She lifted another finger, “Buying enough magnets because they’re in demand.” Another finger and she said, “Designing the software and the hydraulic systems to slide the couplings together and apart at the right speeds and timing to achieve the smooth accelerations we’re shooting for.”

  Prakant spent a couple of hours looking over what he thought of as their “sprocket and chain transmission” without thinking of anything Dez Lanis wasn’t either doing or had already proven wouldn’t work. This left him frustrated but even more impressed with her than he had been before. Finally, he sighed, “Sorry I couldn’t be more help. Much as it pains me to admit this, I’ve found when I’m having trouble, talking to Kaem can be a big help. He’s… beyond smart. His ability to see practical solutions is…” Prakant sighed, “It’s embarrassing because his ideas usually seem obvious in retrospect. It’s hard to believe he’s only in his mid-twenties.”

  Dez snorted, “Yeah, he’s not even as old as I am… by a couple of weeks.”

  Shaking his head, Prakant laughed, “Sorry, I forgot he was your classmate back in grade school.”

  “I don’t like asking him for help either,” Dez said. “It’s so damned embarrassing when he says, ‘have you tried this?’ As soon as he says it I wonder why I didn’t think of it.” She sighed and gave Prakant a little grin, “But, for the good of the company, I’ll bury my pride and do it.” She winked, “I’ll tell myself it must all be Mr. X, behind him and pulling the strings.”

  Bringing up a sore subject, Prakant asked, “Isn’t this the project Wilson Delbet’s supposed to be helping with? Perhaps managing?”

  Dez nodded slowly. “Originally I thought he was about as useful as tits on a truck. That, um, turned out to be overly optimistic. He’s more like an enormous udder that keeps the truck from getting over little bumps in the road.”

  Prakant snorted, “Haven’t heard that description before.”

  “Haven’t had anyone deserve it before. He hasn’t had an original thought since he got here. He can perform a day’s work, but only if you tell him exactly
what to do and check up on him regularly to be sure he’s keeping after it. Someone left out Wilson Delbet’s self-starter. To be honest, my foreman and most of my workers, none of whom have been to college, are a lot more useful than he is.”

  “How do you think he came to look so good on paper?”

  “Manufactured data,” Dez said grimly.

  “We backtracked and checked the information with his school and a few previous employers.”

  “Yeah, but I called a friend who worked with him on his last job. He said any good reports from previous employers were either written because getting him another job was the easiest way to get him painlessly off their payroll, or because he paid some high-end hacker to slip them in there. It’s sure as hell Wilson couldn’t do that kind of hacking himself.”

  Prakant sighed, “You think we should let him go?”

  “Absolutely. I should’ve asked you to do it weeks ago. I just kept thinking I was failing to manage him properly.”

  “I’ll get rid of him. Do you need him to finish something before he goes?”

  Dez snorted, “No! That’d be more work than doing it myself.”

  “Any idea where I might find him?”

  Dez sighed and shook her head. “In a crevice somewhere, hiding from the possibility that I might ask him to do some work.”

  Prakant thought of calling Wilson on his phone but wanted to know where the guy actually was. So, instead, he called HR (Human Resources) and asked them for the link to track Delbet’s laptop. If the man had it with him that’d be a plus. Even if he didn’t, the tracking would tell Prakant where the man had been spending his time.