Earth Below, Sky Above

by John Scalzi

  He looked around and realized that they were at shuttle gate five.

  No shuttle here, Wilson thought. Then he thought of something else.

  “Come on,” he said to Lowen, grabbing her hand again. He went perpendicular to the crowd, toward the shuttle gate. Lowen followed bonelessly. Wilson checked the doorway at the shuttle gate and found it unlocked. He pulled it open, pushed Lowen through it and closed it, he hoped, before any of the mob could see him.

  The shuttle area was cold and empty. Wilson set down the bag he was carrying and began to dig through it. “Dani,” he said, and then looked up after he got no response. “Dani!” he said, more forcefully. She glanced over to him, a lost look in her eyes. “I need you to take off your clothes,” he said.

  This snapped her out of her shock. “Excuse me?” she said.

  Wilson smiled; his inappropriate remark had gotten the response he’d hoped for. “I need you to take off your clothes because I need you to get into this,” he said, holding up the CDF combat unitard.

  “Why?” Lowen said, and a second later her eyes widened. “No,” she began.

  “Yes,” Wilson said, forcefully. “The station is under attack, Dani. We’re sealed off. Whoever’s doing this has the ability to peel the skin off this station like an orange. We missed our ride. If we’re getting off this thing, there’s only one way to do it. We’re jumping off.”

  “I don’t know how,” Lowen said.

  “You don’t have to know how, because I do,” Wilson said, and held up the unitard. “All you have to do is get into this. And hurry, because I don’t think we have a whole lot of time.”

  Lowen nodded, took the unitard and started unbuttoning her blouse. Wilson turned away.

  “Harry,” Lowen said.

  Wilson turned his head back slightly. “Yeah?”

  “For the record, this was not really how I planned to get undressed with you,” Lowen said.

  “Really,” Wilson said. “Because this was how I planned it all along.”

  Lowen laughed a shaky, exhausted laugh. Wilson turned away, to let Lowen retain her modesty and so she couldn’t see the expression on his face as he tried to ping Hart Schmidt.

  Earth Station gave a shudder, sirens went off and that was enough for Jastine Goeth, the Clarke’s shuttle pilot. “Buttoning up now,” she said, and sealed the door to the shuttle.

  “I have two people left,” Abumwe said. “We wait for them.”

  “We’re leaving,” Goeth said.

  “I don’t think you heard me,” Abumwe said, using her coldest Don’t fuck with me voice.

  “I heard you,” Goeth said, as she worked her departure sequence. “You want to wait? I’ll unseal the door for you for five seconds so you can get out. But I am going, Ambassador. This place is blowing up around us. I don’t plan to be here when it breaks apart. Now leave or shut up. You can string me up later, but right now this is my ship. Sit down and let me work.”

  Abumwe stared at Goeth for several seconds in cold fury, which Goeth ignored. Then she turned, glared one of her staff out of a seat and sat.

  Goeth pushed the “Emergency Purge” option on her control panel, which overrode the station’s standard purge cycle. There was a bang as the shuttle bay’s outside portal irised open with the bay’s atmosphere still inside, sucking out through the dilating door. Goeth didn’t wait for it to open all the way. She jammed the shuttle through, damaging the door as she went. She did not believe at this point that it would matter.

  Schmidt saw the bulkheads go up, saw Harry yell something at him he couldn’t hear and then took off running again toward gate seven, which he could see at the far end of the section. Schmidt knew at this point that his time had likely expired, but he still had to get there to see for himself.

  Which was how Schmidt saw the shuttle leave, through the wide window of the seating area just as he came up to the gate.

  “So close,” Schmidt whispered, and could barely register the words over the screams of those trapped in the section with him. They were all going to die in here together.

  He wished they wouldn’t be so loud about it.

  Schmidt looked at the seating area, shrugged to himself and collapsed onto one of the benches, staring up at the ceiling of the gate area. He’d missed his ride by a matter of seconds. It was sort of appropriate, he supposed. At the end of the day, he was always a half a step behind.

  Somewhere in the section, he could hear someone sobbing, loudly, terrified of the moment. Schmidt registered it but didn’t feel the emotion himself. If this was the end, it wasn’t the worst end he could imagine. He wasn’t scared about it. He just wished it weren’t so soon.

  Schmidt’s PDA went off; the tone told him it was Wilson. The lucky bastard, Schmidt thought. He had no doubt that even now Harry was figuring out some way out of this. Schmidt loved his friend Harry, admired him and even looked up to him in his way. But right now, at what looked like the end of his days, he found the last thing he actually wanted to do was talk to him.

  “Two new missiles launched,” Lao said. “They’re heading for our shuttle.”

  “Of course they are,” Coloma said. Whoever was doing this wanted to make some sort of point about people leaving Earth Station.

  Fortunately, Coloma didn’t have to stand for it.

  She went to her personal display, marked the missiles heading toward the shuttle and marked the ship that had fired them. She pulled up a command panel on her display and pressed a button.

  The missiles vaporized and the ship that launched them blossomed into flame.

  “What was that?” Balla said.

  “Neva, tell the shuttle pilot to go to Earth,” Coloma said. “These ships are firing Melierax missiles. They’re not rated for atmosphere. They’ll burn up. Get that shuttle as deep into the atmosphere as it can go, as fast as it can go.”

  Balla passed on the order and then looked back at her captain.

  “I told you the CDF was expecting one ship. So they gave me one of their new toys: a drone that fires a beam of antimatter particles. It’s been floating alongside the Clarke since yesterday. I think they wanted it to have a field test.”

  “I think it works,” Balla said.

  “The problem is that it has about six shots to it,” Coloma said. “I put a beam to each of the missiles and three beams into that ship. I’ve got another shot left, if I’m lucky. If there was just one ship out there, that wouldn’t be an issue. But there are fifteen others. And I’ve just made the Clarke a target.”

  “What do you want to do?” Balla asked.

  “I want you to get the crew to the escape pods,” Coloma said. “They’re not firing at us now because they’re still trying to figure out what just happened. That’s not going to last long. Get everyone off the ship before it happens.”

  “And what are you going to do?” Balla asked.

  “I’m going to go down with the ship,” Coloma said. “And if I’m lucky, I’m going to take some of them with me.”

  VIII.

  The first volley of missiles aimed at Earth Station, six in all, destroyed the elevator car and irreparably damaged the beanstalk cable itself. The second volley of missiles, five times the number of the first, violently sheared Earth Station from the cable, severing the two just below their join.

  The station and beanstalk were previously under the thrall of impressively high-order physics that kept them where they were supposed to be, at an altitude they should not have possibly been at, constructed in a manner that should not have sufficed. This physical legerdemain was powered literally by the earth itself, from a deep well of geothermal energy punched into the skin of the planet, which took extra effort to reach from Nairobi, situated more than a mile above sea level.

  Without this nearly inexhaustible draw of power, the station reverted to life under conventional physics. This spelled doom for it, and for the beanstalk it fed on, a doom that was designed as minutely and purposefully as the station itself.

>   Its doom was designed to do two things. One, to protect the planet below (and, depending, space above) from falling chunks of a space station 1.8 kilometers in diameter, as well as several hundred kilometers of beanstalk. Two, to keep the secrets of the technology from falling into the hands of Earthlings. The two goals dovetailed into a single solution.

  The beanstalk did not fall. It was designed not to fall. The energy formerly devoted to keeping it whole and structurally sound was rapidly and irrevocably committed to another task entirely: tearing it apart. Hundreds of kilometers above the surface of the planet, the strands of the beanstalk began to unwind at the molecular level, becoming minute particles of metallic dust. The waste heat generated expanded gases released by the process, puffing the dust into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Air patterns and turbulence in the lower reaches of the atmosphere did the same task farther down. The people of Nairobi looked up to see the beanstalk smearing itself into the sky, pushed by prevailing winds like charcoals rubbed by a frenetic artist.

  It would take six hours for the beanstalk to evaporate. Its particulate matter treated East Africa to gorgeous sunsets for a week and the world to a year of temperatures one one-hundreth of degree Celsius cooler than they would have been otherwise.

  Earth Station, damaged and cut away from its power source, began the process of killing itself in an organized fashion before its rotational energy could do it chaotically. Resigned as it was to its own death, the station powered up its emergency energy sources, which would keep the now sealed-off segments of the station warm and breathable for approximately two hours, more than enough time to get the remaining people on the station to the escape pods, which now showed themselves by way of pathed lighting and an automated voice system, directing the trapped and desperate to them. On the outside of the station, panels blew off, exposing the hulls of the escape pods to space, making it easy for them to launch once they were filled.

  Once all the escape pods were away, the station would dismantle itself, not by the beanstalk method, which required massive, directed energies the station no longer possessed or could harness, but by a simpler, less elegant solution: detonating itself through the use of shaped, high-energy explosives. Nothing larger than thirty cubic centimeters would remain, and what did remain would either burn up in the atmosphere or be tossed into space.

  It was a good plan that did not take into account how an actively attacking force might affect an orderly self-destruction.

  Because Hart Schmidt was one of the few people in his section of the station not screaming or crying, he was one of the first to hear the automated voice informing the people trapped there that escape pods were now available on the shuttle deck of every gate. He blinked, listened again to confirm he’d heard what he thought he had heard and then gave himself a moment to think, Who the fuck tells people there are escape pods after they’re already trapped and think they’re going to die? Then he picked himself up and headed to the door of gate seven.

  Which was stuck, or appeared to be, at any rate; Schmidt’s attempts to pull it open were like those of a child attempting to yank open a door held shut by a professional athlete. Schmidt cursed and kicked the door. After he was done dealing with the pain of kicking a door, a thought registered with him: The door was so cold, Schmidt could feel the heat sucking out of his shoe even with just a kick. He put his hand on the door proper, close to the jamb; it was like ice. It also seemed to suck at his fingertips.

  Schmidt put his head close to the door, and over the din of people yelling and screaming, he heard another sound entirely: a high, urgent whisper of a whistle.

  “Are you going to open that door?” someone asked Schmidt.

  He turned, stepping away from the door, and rubbed his ear. He looked over.

  It was Kruger and his three buddies.

  “It’s you,” Kruger said. His neck was purple.

  “Hi,” Schmidt said.

  “Open that door,” Kruger said. By now a small group of people, who had heard the automated message, anxiously stood behind Kruger.

  “That’s a really bad idea,” Schmidt said.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Kruger said. “The station is blowing up around us, there are escape pods on the other side of that door and you’re telling me it’s a bad idea to open it?” He grabbed Schmidt before he could respond and tossed him out of the way, hurling him into a bench in the process. Then he grabbed the doorjamb and pulled. “Bastard’s stuck,” he said, after a second, and prepared to give it a mighty yank.

  “There’s a vacuum—,” Schmidt began.

  Krueger indeed yanked mightily, throwing the door open just enough that he might conceivably slide through, and was sucked through so quickly that when the door slammed shut on his hand, it left the tops of three of his fingers behind.

  For the first time since the crisis began, there was dead silence at gate seven.

  “What the fuck just happened?” bellowed Mothudi, breaking the silence.

  “There’s a vacuum on the other side of that door,” Schmidt said, and then saw the blank expression on Mothudi’s face. “There’s no air. If you try to go in there, you won’t be able to breathe. You’ll die before you get down the ramp to the escape pods.”

  “Kruger’s dead?” asked another of the soldiers, the one called Goosen.

  Unless he carries his own oxygen supply, you bet, Schmidt thought, but did not say. What he said was, “Yes, Kruger is dead.”

  “The hell with this,” said the third soldier, the one named Pandit. “I’m going to gate six.” He bolted toward the gate at the end of the section, where people had queued to make their way to the escape pods. Mothudi and Goosen joined him a second later, followed by a yelling mass of humanity from gate seven who finally got it through their heads that there might not be enough spaces on the escape pods for all of them. A riot had begun.

  Schmidt knew that for survival purposes he should be in the fray at gate six, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He decided he’d rather die as a fundamentally decent human being than live as the sort of asshole who’d tear out someone’s liver to get into an escape pod.

  The thought brought him inner peace, for about five seconds. Then the fact that he was going to die bubbled up again and scared him shitless. He leaned his head back against the bench Krueger had thrown him into and closed his eyes. Then he opened them again and looked forward. Into the back of the gate attendant’s lectern. Which among other things had a large first-aid box slotted into it.

  Schmidt looked over at Kruger’s fingertips for a second, snerked and reached over to the box. He pulled it out and opened it up.

  Inside, among many other things, were a foil blanket and a very small oxygen kit.

  Hey, look, your very own oxygen supply, Schmidt’s brain said to him.

  “Yeah, well, don’t get too excited,” he said, out loud, to his brain. “You still can’t get that door open without losing your hand.”

  Gate six exploded.

  In the immediate aftermath, Schmidt wasn’t sure if he’d been deafened by the pressure blast blowing out his eardrums or all the air in the section that contained gate six and gate seven being sucked out into space, along with Goosen, Pandit and Mothudi and everyone else who had been raging at gate six. Then he felt the air in his lungs seeping out through his lips and nose and decided it just didn’t matter. He grabbed at the first-aid box, wrapped the blanket over the top half of his body as tightly as he could with one hand and with the other covered his face and mouth with the mask of the oxygen kit.

  The mask immediately fogged. Schmidt gave himself a quick hit of oxygen and tried not to panic.

  In another minute, the section was completely silent and Schmidt felt himself start to freeze. He got up from the bench he’d crouched under and went to the gate seven door. It opened with only the slightest resistance.

  On the other side of the door was Kruger: cyanotic, fingerless, frozen and looking, in death, extraordinarily pissed. S
chmidt sidestepped Kruger’s corpsicle and ran as quickly as he could down the ramp, blue fingers clutching the space blanket and the oxygen.

  The shuttle deck of gate seven had sprouted what looked like several doors leading to subterranean alcoves: the escape pods. Schmidt picked the closest one and with shivering hands cycled the portal shut. Sealed, the escape pod sensed the vacuum and freezing cold and blasted both oxygen and warmth into the pod. Schmidt cried and shook.

  “Pod launch in fifteen seconds,” a computerized voice said. “Secure yourself, please.”

  Schmidt, still shivering violently, reached up and pulled down the padded seat restraint as the escape pod counted off the seconds. He passed out before the voice got to three and missed his launch entirely.

  Lowen cried with relief when the automated announcement about the escape pods fired up and then started going for one of them when their egress doors on the deck floor opened. Wilson reached out and held her back.

  “What are you doing?” she yelled at him, clawing at his hand.

  “We have a way off this station,” Wilson said to her. “Other people don’t.”

  Lowen pointed to the escape pods opening up around her. “I’d rather go this way,” she said. “I’d rather have something around me when I launch myself into space.”

  “Dani,” Wilson said, “it’s going to be okay. Trust me.”

  Lowen stopped going for the escape pods but didn’t look the least bit happy about it.

  “When they start launching these things, they’re probably going to cycle out the air,” Wilson said. “Let’s go ahead and cover up.” He attached his oxygen apparatus and then covered his head with his cowl.

  “How do you see?” Lowen asked, looking at the blankness of the cowl.

  “The suit nanobots are photosensitive and send a feed to my BrainPal, which allows me to see,” Wilson said. He reached over to help her with her oxygen and to seal her cowl.

  “Great,” Lowen said. “How am I going to see?”