The Raven High

by Yuri Hamaganov

“I won’t give you any false hope. I don’t have acquaintances at the Supernova Academy. Nor can I help you with money soon. As for forming a relationship with my brother, apply to headquarters. I don’t know what answer they will give you. I’m a secret project, after all, and contacts with me are restricted. Maybe you’ll succeed, maybe not. Is that all?”

  Her father nodded, and Olga got up and made as if to leave.

  “I’m glad that I came, and I’ll try to help my brother if I can. But that’s where our association will end. We’re much too different. Space is my home, and I’m not the only person up there. I’m happy in my way. Thank you and goodbye.”

  Olga approached the door, but at the very last moment she looked back at her parents. Her mother was crossing herself and whispering a prayer. Her father stared at her with burning eyes, his hands gripping the armrests of his wheelchair as if there was something he wished but dared not to say. Her mother’s whispering lips and father’s imploring eyes touched something within the girl, and for the first time during the encounter she smiled to them lightly before disappearing forever.

  * * *

  Two weeks later, Olga received the first personal parcel of her life—a large package sealed with a metallic cloth. Opening the package, Olga discovered her passport as a citizen of the Atlantic American States and a certificate of birth dated January 2, 2080. A separate envelope contained her contract. Olga carefully examined the document from all sides even though she had often seen its image. A solid official paper with a letterhead and stamps. She carefully read the text, comparing it against the electronic version. Everything seemed to be in order. Olga took a fountain pen with extra strong ink that was sent with the documents and signed her name in a bold hand. Then she put the document back into the envelope and handed it to Arina to be sent back to Earth.

  A month later, Olga received two messages at once. To be more precise, she received two refusals. In the first one, the Corporation disapproved of her further contacts with her parents and brother before termination of the contract. The second one refused her permission to buy out Arina. The refusals were final, expressly with no recourse to appeal.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: HAILSTORM

  September 2, 2090

  “Careful! It’s hot!”

  Olga put on heat-resistant gloves and extracted the steaming object from the forge, rotated it a few times, and set it down on the kitchen table.

  “It’s heavier than the original piece,” the girl concluded in a disgruntled critic’s tone.

  “It’s naturally heavier than the original mahogany. Where could I find tropical wood now? The ceramics are heavier and plastic didn’t suit you, so quit complaining.”

  Olga examined the soundboard once again. It was remarkably similar to the famous Gibson-SG model. What was left now was to make a neck, fit the electronics, manufacture strings, and apply the coating. Which would look sharper—black, or red with gold?

  “The sound won’t be any worse after I tune in the electronic components,” Arina continued. “I’ll make the strings from steel, braiding them with bronze. I know what I’m doing, so if you don’t play as well as Jimi Hendrix that’s entirely your fault.”

  “I’ll surely outplay Hendrix and Yngwie Malmsteen too, just give me time. Wait and see! Shall we paint it today?”

  “Better wait till tomorrow. Let it dry properly.”

  “Good. I’ll think of something to make it look unique.”

  Olga made for the living room where she leisurely examined three-dimensional models of famous guitarists’ instruments that she intended to base her unique design upon. She made some quick sketches and selected her colors, imagining that she was a rock star famous all over the solar system with a huge wardrobe and a extensive collection of costly guitars. After trying out several thousand designs, she selected her favorite, then closed the program.

  As she was finishing the study of the second volume of Marx’s Capital while simultaneously watching Enzo Matrix in his final battle against Megabyte, a siren howled out. The screens vanished into emptiness, and the standard evening lighting was replaced by red lights.

  “Olga, to the control room, now!”

  * * *

  “Where did that cursed mine come from?” Petrov sputtered. “All the minefields in near-Earth sectors are supposed to have been cleared.” Petrov exchanged a few phrases with someone on another line. “The corrective engines will activate in forty-five seconds. The clock is ticking!”

  “Acknowledged!”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Olga surveyed watched the transmission recorded by the orbital telescope. She had watched the footage many times over the last fifteen minutes, sometimes accelerating the feed, sometimes slowing it down to watch it frame by frame. Again and again, she watched the death of the Texan Bill.

  The decrepit ten thousand–ton cargo ship Texan Bill had been carrying goods and two hundred passengers on the last leg of its forty-day voyage from Mars, drifting unhurriedly toward the Upper Terminal of the Lift. Two hours, thirty-five minutes, and twelve seconds ago the transport had hit a mine—one, perhaps, that had arced into the inner solar system like a comet after many decades in the Kuiper Belt. Olga caught just the barest hint a dark red flash, one that ejected a swarm of twenty-five thousand steel needles thrown out by the mine into the Texan Bill at a speed of twelve kilometers per second.

  The transport ship’s radar was not designed for detecting such small objects, and the shrapnel reached the target without any interference. Olga couldn’t see the hit itself, but she could clearly imagine the lethal swarm penetrating the thin hull, the air rushing through the punctures, the bulkhead hatches shutting and fuel is igniting into flames.

  The mine guidance system had chosen the transport engine room as the primary target. It destroyed the sustainer engines, severely damaging the reactor. However, this spared some of the passengers and several crewmembers who had been in the unaffected compartments. They had somehow managed to pass through several shattered compartments to reach the lifeboat deck.

  Olga saw the lifeboat capsules being shot, one after another, from the portside hull into space. Then several blasts in quick succession flashed on the bow. That was the maneuvering engines erupting. Then the Texan Bill vanished in the dazzling white flash of the detonated reactor. That flash took one hundred fifty-eight lives and now threatened to carry off two more, those of Olga Voronov and Arina. The debris was flying toward the Earth, and its trajectory intersected with the High House orbit.

  Olga had never participated nor been trained in rescue operations, which is why nobody warned the Mistress of the High House. Not until the House’s orbital telescopes detected several large fragments are moving in their direction did the alarm sound. Arina Rodionovna was receiving the information from some ten telescopes and radar posts in real-time mode. She was the first to calculate the inevitable impact with a large fragment of the dead transport. No less dangerous were the swarm of small fragments also on the path to intercept their orbit. While Olga was trying to make sense of the proceedings, Arina contacted the artificial intellect systems at headquarters. Together they had developed an operations plan.

  “What’s the decision, Arina?” Having changed into work overalls, Olga was sitting in the operator seat. The nanny stood nearby at the manual control board of the orbital correction engines.

  Arina switched to the radio channel, simultaneously introducing new data into the engine control system. “We’ll slow down the station by applying the corrective engines. They’re not designed for such a maneuver, but I think I can adjust them with the thrust vector control system. We’ll bring down the speed, and the big fragment will fly past in front of us. But the maneuver will expose us to an impact with a swarm of small fragments.”

  “Can we slow down further and miss the swarm?”

  “No, we have no time. The warning came too late. Even if the engines had the power, we would fall out of orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.”

  “
Those fragments in the swarm, how much momentum do they carry?”

  “I can’t say for certain. They’re too small to be detected by the radar. We wouldn’t have known about them at all if the telescopes hadn’t picked up their reflected the sunlight. I estimate three hundred fifty to a fifteen hundred fragments of a median mass of two to three hundred grams.”

  “They will make a sieve of us! Can we vaporize them with the short-range lasers?”

  Arina frowned at this useless question. The High House was outfitted with a defense system for protection against space debris and micrometeorites—twelve pulse lasers installed on the factory body and the axis. Those relatively weak lasers reliably protected the station against lone particles, but hundreds of fragments would overwhelm them.

  “It’s impossible to shoot down all of them for lack of time for guidance, battery recharge, and emitter cooling. I propose using the lasers for destroying the biggest and most dangerous fragments,” Arina added, trying to be helpful.

  “That’s clear. Arina, what should I do if the collision is unavoidable?”

  “Olga, you are the Mistress of the House; it’s up to you to decide. I can only recommend. You have a choice—evacuate to Earth or stay here and try to save the High House. This facility costs quite a lot, but your life isn’t any cheaper and you are fully entitled to quitting the station in case of emergency. I will stay here and try to rectify the damage.”

  Olga surveyed the dark interior of the control room and then raised her stare to the ceiling portholes with the dark mass of the factory looming behind.

  “I’ll stay. We’ll save the House together!”

  “Yes, Captain! Put on your spacesuit. We may sustain depressurization.”

  The reverse count launched by Mikhail had ended. Olga sat in the operator armchair, strapped in by the safety belts. She felt awkward in her spacesuit inside the manned compartment. Arina Rodionovna had put on her orange suit and sat down next to her on the black floor.

  “Three, two, one, zero. Ignition!”

  Twenty orbit correction engines switched on simultaneously, giving off short and tight flames of blue fire. Olga didn’t hear but felt a low vibration with all her body. The force softly pressed her into the seat and unfastened objects in the House began to shiver. The orbiter was losing speed, slowing down in its eternal loop around the planet. The red digits on the speedometer started to ebb: 7950 meters per second, 7944, 7939, 7934, 7928, 7923, 7920 … The engines stopped. There was almost no fuel left in the tanks. Gravity returned to normal.

  “It’s confirmed that now you will avoid a collision with the largest fragments,” Petrov said. “The main swarm of splinters will make contact in three minutes and fifty seconds. Some particles may strike you fifteen to twenty seconds sooner. The defense system will destroy the biggest fragments. The factory body will take in the brunt of the impact. Possibly, there won’t be any direct hits to the manned compartment at all. Still, you’d better come out to the axial mast in the dead zone. Stay there, wait out the collision and then proceed as the situation requires. A rescue team is already on the way. They’ll be with you in eighty minutes. Understood?”

  “Acknowledged. Out we go, Olga!”

  A minute later, the lift delivered Arina and Olga to the axial mast. Both were heavily laden with various tools.

  “The conveyor is loaded and still in operation,” Olga said. “It’s impossible to stop it in such a short time. Simultaneous depressurization in multiple parts of the hull could ignite the working reagent, which is flammable at this stage of production. But we’ll what we can!”

  Panic reigned far below at headquarters. Contradictory commands fought for dominance in Olga’s helmet, baffling her in this critical situation. No one seemed willing to assume control and risk the consequences of the pending disaster. By his volition, Petrov disconnected the High House from this useless chorus of panic-stricken voices, leaving only a communications line for one of the Corporation’s AI that took the management of repair robots inside the factory.

  In the meantime, Olga joined the factory Matrix via the portable neuro-interface. She couldn’t control the conveyor fully, but the emergency systems remained under her control. She gave a series of short commands. First, she gave the full power of the reactor to the laser guns. She also engaged the firefighting equipment in the ready-to-operate condition. Simultaneously, she contacted the AI that had come to aid her, showing it the safest places to brace the repair robots for the depressurization. She couldn’t afford to lose any one of them.

  “Fifteen seconds,” the computer sounded.

  Olga visualized a hailstorm of debris. Small splinters from the Texan Bill’s bow, metal and lunar ceramics measuring from a pinhead to the span of her palm. They were not heavy, but they moved at a velocity to pierce a tank’s armor plate.

  “We’re in the effective fire zone!” Arina shouted.

  A series of silent flashes in emptiness ensued. The High House’s first volley found its targets, evaporating a dozen of the biggest fragments. The short pause for a new target acquisition, recharging, and cooling seemed an eternity to Olga. The second volley took out another twelve fragments. The third volley was followed by a fourth and fifth. Lasers fired point blank, and powderized fragments plumed almost directly beside the ship.

  Olga perceived the first strike at the factory as a light prickling in her backbone. She both saw and felt a fragment the size of a coin strike through a dozen pipes. In a split second, the girl’s brain issued the relevant order to cut off the damaged compartment’s valves, disconnect the cables, switch off the power supply and order the repair robots to stand down for further instructions. She knew there were many more strikes ahead.

  “Here they come!”

  The debris swarm crashed into the High House at a speed of twelve kilometers per second. They crashed through the outside columns, clearing their way through an endless network of pipes and cables before gradually slowing down and deviating from the straight path. The strikes in the vacuum were perfectly soundless. You could only see sparks soar up from the impacts before flickering to nothing in the void. But Olga felt every impact via the neuro-interface. Arina watched Olga twitch as if struck by a violent spasm.

  “What happened?”

  “That fragment weighed a kilo!” the girl answered. “How did the lasers miss it?”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “It’s not pain. Just an unpleasant sensation, like the shock of cold water.”

  “How many contacts have you registered?”

  “One hundred seventeen. They keep coming.”

  “What’s the damage?”

  “Better not ask!”

  Answering Arina’s questions didn’t distract Olga from her work. She continued to seal up the damaged sectors of the conveyor, cutting them off from unaffected areas, sealing broken pipes before the reagent could leak out, and de-energizing the places where leaks had already occurred. She realized that these entire sectors were beyond repair and would have to be replaced. That would put the factory out of operation for at least a month. Much more concerning was the damage to several dozen of valves, destroying hundreds of meters of wiring.

  “Just another second and a half and we’ll come out of the swarm,” Arina said.

  The last seven fragments struck the station, bringing the final total to two hundred and two impacts. The plant continued in its orbit. But it was no longer the ideally tuned tool it had been five minutes before. Now it was a heavily damaged machine in peril of becoming a heap of space junk unless Olga Voronov quickly amended the situation.

  “What’s the condition the reactor?” Arina asked.

  Drifting before Olga’s eyes were three-dimensional models of the thermonuclear reactor in the very center of the High House. She meticulously scanned hundreds of parameters of the power plant.

  “The reactor is undamaged. I put it in the idle mode, nine percent of the maximum power.”

  “The Central Post?”


  “What could be wrong with it? It’s an armored structure.”

  Olga could see semitransparent oily fluid oozing from the broken valves. In weightlessness the reagent jelly rose into the emptiness between the columns, forming ideally shaped drops that began, under the influence of mutual attraction, to gather into huge bubbles. These fat bubbles started to slowly move toward the factory center, flowing past the pipes and broken transformers pregnant with ungrounded electrostatic charge. Olga tried to switch off the power supply, failed, and immediately sent the repair robots into action.

  The AI computer hurled in all the available robots to the areas that Olga pointed out. The metallic six-legged rats rushed forward along the narrow service tunnels, divided themselves into small teams, and scattered toward the indicated areas. Olga tried to form a general repair plan, but she was seriously impeded by her blindness to several parts of the plant. In eighteen minutes their orbit would take them to sunrise, and any ungathered reagent would ignite.

  The first teams of rats reached their destination and started the emergency repair. They disassembled broken valves. Using the cold welding, they filled in the cracks and crevices in the pipes. Having removed the broken mechanisms, they immediately began to assemble new substitutes in their place. Several teams were gathering the drops of the reagent hovering in the emptiness, putting them away into sealed containers.

  But most of the escaped reagent had coalesced into a two-meter bubble that was steadily moving to the center of the plant’s gravity, where a disfigured transformer station emitted sparks in all directions.

  Olga abruptly bent over as if struck in the solar plexus. The neuro-interface had sent her a part of a powerful explosion.

  A soundless shockwave shattered a dozen external sections. A flame broke out in a gas torch from the building; the liquid fire spread in all directions like burning oil. The burning drops of reagent stuck to the structural elements, threatening to burn through and ignite new fires. The repair rats hurled themselves with suicidal bravery against the fire, trying to extinguish it.