Rich Man's Sky

by Wil McCarthy

  1.2

  21 March

  ✧

  Paramaribo, Suriname

  Earth Surface

  “I can’t believe how sweet this is,” said Dona Obata.

  “Agreed,” Alice said. They had ordered coffee, and without asking any further questions the (human) waiter had brought it to them iced and black, with something like seventeen sugars mixed in.

  They were on the patio of a crumbling stucco café in Paramaribo, Suriname, South America, sweating in the steam-cooker heat. Alice was wearing a white straw hat and flip-flops and a sundress, partly because she was undercover, and partly because the sun was too brutal for anything else. Jesus, one hundred fifty million kilometers away and it was still too damn close for comfort. At Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1—the balancing point between the gravity of the Sun and Earth—the Sun would be 1.6 million kilometers closer still, and about two percent brighter and hotter. But of course they’d be hiding in a space station, in the shade of the Esley Shade, which was only one percent transparent to visible light. Like a really dark pair of sunglasses—which Alice was also wearing.

  Dona Obata—whose skin was the color of dark acorns—was wrapped in an African-print sarong, and wore wedge heels with leather wrappings halfway up to her knee. No hat or glasses for her, but she did pick a seat facing away from the midmorning glare, and was sweating profusely. Dona was also undercover, from someplace called le Commandement des Opérations Spéciales. The third member of their undercover party, First Sergeant Bethy Powell of the New Zealand Special Air Service, would be meeting them tomorrow night before the launch.

  “I hear sugar is practically free here,” Dona added. She was nominally French, though she’d grown up in the Republic of Congo, somewhere near Kinshasa, and still carried the accent. Her cover story was that she was a twenty-eight-year-old tax auditor, no kids, never married. Alice didn’t know much about her actual history, or where she’d learned to fight, but knew that she was lethal at zero-gee hand-to-hand combat.

  “Hmm,” Alice said, touching the cold glass to her forehead for a moment.

  They were staying in character, pretending they’d only just met, because Paramaribo was full of spies and reporters and space-industry professionals from all over the world, and the risk of being overheard and ratted out was substantial. The city was also full of scammers and hustlers of various kinds, and ethnically Dutch social climbers looking to get in the graces of whoever was in power. The street beside them was paved with bumpy rectangles of a material a bit like cobblestone and a bit like cinder block, and traveled by everything from autonomous trucks to noisily hovering delivery and surveillance drones and even the occasional donkey cart, and there were cameras on every corner, piped to God-knows-where. From this point forward, literally anyone could be listening.

  A woman in a tank top, short shorts, and flip-flops approached them from the street.

  “Hello?” she asked tentatively.

  “Jeanette? Jeanette Schmidt?” Dona Obata asked, having recognized one of the civilian colonists from her profile pictures.

  The woman looked relieved. “Yes. Are you Alice?”

  “She is.” Dona nodded toward Alice.

  “Oh. Right. Of course. Vietnamese?”

  “Korean American,” Alice answered. Some might consider it a rude question, but Alice didn’t, and anyway it was too damn hot to worry about anything but the cold beverage in her hand. In return she asked, “German American?”

  “Jawohl, by way of four generations in Texas. May I sit?” Jeanette looked flustered, or maybe just overheated. She then proceeded to pull up a chair without waiting for an answer. She was surprisingly heavy for a space colonist—almost two meters tall, and thickish through the limbs and middle. Alice couldn’t tell how much of it was fat and how much was muscle or skeleton, but right away she knew Jeanette Schmidt must have some skills in seriously short supply up on Esley Shade Station. In most countries on Earth, it was technically illegal to discriminate in hiring based on height or weight, but in the space business every kilogram of matter cost thirteen thousand U.S. dollars just to lift into orbit, so the value of the person herself had better exceed that, or she was most definitely staying on the ground. Alice herself was certainly a smaller-than-average person, and so was Dona Obata.

  To Alice, Jeanette said, “I like your hat. I’d buy one if we weren’t blasting off in two days. Hell, I still might.”

  “It’s critical life-support equipment,” Alice agreed.

  She racked her brain for details about Jeanette Schmidt. They were shipping out for Esley with six other women besides Bethy Powell—six innocent civilians who had no idea they were headed into trouble, alongside three undercover soldiers bent on mayhem. Six dossiers were not a lot to memorize, but Alice hadn’t done it. All she could dredge up was that Jeanette was the youngest of the group. Maybe twenty-five years old? She looked it, too.

  “You’re coming from a mining school in Colorado?” Dona asked her.

  She smiled. “School of Mines, yes. It’s more like a mathematical school, or an economics one, but my master’s degree is in Near Earth Asteroid Resource Utilization. So yes.”

  “Ah,” Alice said. That answered that. The Esley Shade and station were made of asteroidal material, and so was everything else they were building up there. Degrees like Jeanette’s were rare, and in high demand, so she could probably have carried the mass of four people and still gotten the job.

  As if sensing Alice’s thoughts, Jeanette looked sideways at her for a moment and then said in her light Texas drawl, “I also want kids, and not necessarily in the framework of a traditional relationship. And I rank very low in claustrophobia and agoraphobia, high in agreeability, and I meet the IQ requirement with room to spare.”

  It was a challenge of sorts. I meet the profile, lady. Why are you here?

  Dona intervened, saying to Alice, “Aren’t you also from Colorado?”

  To which Alice said, “Intermittently, yes.”

  “Ah, that’s right. You’re in the Air Force.”

  Alice made a dismissive gesture she hoped did not look calculated. “Not now, but I was, yes. A member of the Pararescuemen, which is an air-drop medical team.”

  They were far more than that, as Dona knew perfectly well. The Pararescuemen were the silent accompaniment to special forces of nearly every other branch of the U.S. military. When some shot-up Navy Seal screamed “Medical Evac!” into a walkie, from an exposed position on some godforsaken beach, it was someone like Alice Kyeong he was screaming it to. We couldn’t handle it here, so we need you to come get us.

  And of course the Special Tactics Rescue Squadrons were elite fighting units in their own right, and the 23rd was first among equals. Alice could pilot a glider, had been through Airborne School and Underwater Combat Training and EMT-paramedic training, and could eat Army Ranger School for breakfast. She’d gone in with a pre–GI Bill associate’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Colorado (C-minus average), and always figured when she got out, if she got out, she’d take a job with the Flight for Life air ambulance service or something. Some of the Maroon Berets chose medical school instead, but that was not the solid job guarantee it once had been, and anyway it seemed so dull. Alice actually had no clear idea what she wanted to do with her life, but prodding the diseased flesh of flabby civilians probably wasn’t it. On that basis, even Flight for Life would be a questionable choice.

  “I got out last August,” Alice said, “when I heard Renz Ventures was recruiting for long-term space colonists. I figured my qualifications would jump me to the front of the line, and I was right.”

  Of course, the Renz Ventures recruitment team had thought they were speaking with someone in Colorado Springs. Some of the time that was true—especially when they flew out to interview her in person—but most of the time she was up at the Marriott Stars, getting the shit kicked out of her by people like Dona Obata and Bethy Powell, and the U.S. Space Force combat in
structors. “Zedo” was the art of hand-to-hand combat in microgravity, and it had literally been pounded into Alice over a period of months. The “physical screening” RzVz had done was trivial by comparison. Ten pushups? Fifty sit-ups? A zero-gee multi-parabola flight totaling less than two minutes of weightlessness? The hardest thing they’d asked her to do was swim out the window of an airplane they’d slid down some cables, into a tank full of water that never even touched the rounded top of the fuselage’s ceiling. There wasn’t even any glass for her to break through, or parachute to fight her way out of. She’d completed the entire course in a single week, and then gone back “home” to the Marriott Stars.

  So the only real cover in Alice’s backstory was the fiction that she’d spent the winter living off savings, eating instant ramen in a duplex she’d bought back in the liquidity crunch of 2046. But it really was her house, and she really did spend some time there, living simply, and she really had sold it so she could move to outer space. All that was perfectly true, and it did not leave much for her to memorize or screw up. Which was good, because her life had not given her much reason to practice her acting skills, and she was constantly surprised by how stiff and wooden she appeared in photographs and videos other people had taken of her. Point a camera at her and she froze. So yeah, a deep, convincing cover was not something she was sure she could pull off.

  And so, as her own self, she was a little piqued with the chip on Jeanette Schmidt’s shoulder. Agreeable? Really? Try a High Altitude Low Opening parachute jump into choppy coastal waters, with cartel bullets rat-a-tat-tatting from the shoreline. But here and now it was too hot to argue—too hot even to maintain her annoyance, so Alice simply, belatedly stuck out her hand and said, “It’s nice to meet you.”

  It was weird, the contrast of this moment with her months in orbital combat training. She remembered Dona Obata landing a roundhouse kick on the side of her head four weeks ago. Even though Dona had been taking it slow, and wearing padded kickboxing boots, Alice had spun away on a trail of blood droplets and hit the Bubble hard, and spent the rest of the shift with an icepack clutched to her temple. How did Dona know how to move like that? A lifetime in gravity, a billion years evolving in gravity, and Dona somehow took to space like a ballerina. And Bethy! Jesus. Bethy Powell had grown up on a cattle ranch with four brothers, and it showed on the way she could wrestle and punch and knee and gouge and twist.

  “Go!” the instructor would shout, and even if Alice and Bethy were twenty meters apart, Bethy would launch herself like a ball of pure aggression, and before Alice knew it she’d be snugged against the hotel’s smooth, white Bubble wall in a submission hold, struggling for breath. Every goddamn time. Against the instructors she felt a bit more competent, because they were skilled at fighting down to her level, but even so she was not a large woman, nor a particularly strong or agile one. Just very, very determined.

  Two of the five initial mission candidates had been weeded out as hopeless, but Alice had been retained for training and then finally selected for the mission, either because she was still the best they had (a distant third place was still better than a distant fourth or fifth), or simply because she’d never complained. Got the shit kicked out of her every day for months and never complained, because she was a goddamn Maroon Beret and they didn’t. Not an Army Maroon Beret, but a Pararescueman—elitest of the elite.

  And surely she’d learned something in the process?

  “Sorry, Alice,” Bethy would say, with her slow down-under twang, then let go and drift away.

  The lights in the Bubble were bright, and the windows were small, and the final three candidates spent most of every day shift in that sphere of off-white blankness, enduring bone-strengthening gravity-replacement exercises to supplement the anti-wasting drugs, and learning various zero-gravity skills. Not just zedo, but how to field-strip an XREP stunner dart pistol, how to locate the Sun and Earth when there were no visual references, how to slither silently through inflatable obstacles covered in wind chimes, and of course Alice’s favorite: how to tie back your coverall sleeves so they weren’t in the fucking way all the time. The one time she’d nearly won a fight against Dona was because Dona’s hair got caught in her zipper sleeve and she couldn’t bring her arm down to block. She’d brought her knee up instead, trapping Alice’s arm and spinning her hard against the Bubble, but not before Alice had landed a solid “practice punch” to the solar plexus. Take that, French Congo.

  So many days like that. Ninety of them? It seemed impossible; when she thought back, she could only really account for maybe eighteen or twenty of those. Even harder to remember were the “nights” in the hab modules attached to the Bubble—in what would soon become the luxury suites of the Marriott Stars. From low Earth orbit the actual Sun provided fifty minutes of daylight and forty-six of darkness, over and over until you couldn’t stand it anymore, but the hotel simulated a summertime routine of fourteen-hour “days” when the interior lights were at maximum the whole time, and nine-hour “nights” when the shades were closed and the lights were dimmed. Half an hour of twilight in between, when bland, nutritious meals were served.

  By convention, the night shift was private in-your-cabin time, and although most people didn’t sleep much in space, Alice sure did. And the rest of the time she was trying (and failing) to meditate, or reading books on a ruggedized tablet she’d dragged through hell and back with the Pararescuemen. But those were just trashy romance novels, not memorable, either. Buxom women getting kidnapped by suspiciously polite pirates, or falling in love with suspiciously intelligent handymen or business moguls with more free time than any real person ever had. Sometimes women falling in love with other women, not because Alice had any leanings in that direction, but just for variety’s sake in that monotonous place. Say what you like; she had expected living in outer fucking space to be a lot more exciting.

  The most memorable thing about the Bubble was its smell: a weirdly antiseptic blend of air conditioners, new-car plastic, gymnasium sweat and Fresh Mountain Pine. The hab modules were the same, minus the sweat—a small mercy for which Marriott was presumably thankful, since they would probably never be able to fully clean that reek out of the Bubble.

  Paramaribo also smelled of sweat, but other than that its aroma couldn’t be more different—a mélange of rotting salt marshes, food on the edge of spoiling, old-fashioned asphalt and diesel smog, and a million different flowers calling out to the hummingbirds.

  Having joined Alice and Dona at the little iron-mesh table, Jeanette Schmidt ordered a margarita (which Alice hadn’t even realized was an option), and produced a little paper fan.

  “I’d sell my soul if I lived here,” she said, with sweat trickling off every part of her. “For a little sphere of cool air to follow me around.”

  “No buyers,” Dona answered. “Trade sanctions.”

  “Ah, bullshit,” Jeanette said. “There are twelve countries under ITAR sanction, doing just fine. Somebody’s buying souls, and refining them into rocket fuel.”

  “You’ve sold it already,” Alice told her. “To the sperm of Igbal Renz.”

  That came out sounding darker than she’d intended, and she immediately realized she was going to have to watch that shit, because she was supposed to be just another eager colonist lining up to have space babies of her own. But Jesus, ITAR stood for International Traffic in Arms Regulations, and it meant the little nation of Suriname was illegally importing and assembling rocket parts that could be used to drop a warhead anywhere on Earth. They really could. And those parts were coming from illegal 3D printers in Mauritania and Sudan and rogue bits of the former North Korea, fed by engineering talent parked in international waters, and raw materials coming from all over Africa and South Asia.

  Renz Ventures spent a lot of money in places like this. Some would say they laundered a lot of money in places like this, but the distinction hardly mattered, because you couldn’t extradite a global supply chain and put it on trial, and you coul
dn’t declare war on the economic renaissance these countries were enjoying. Hell, America couldn’t even declare war on the drug cartels, not really. Just shoot them up when they really, really, really crossed the line on human rights, and wait for the power vacuum to fill again next week. But the Embargo States were different: better organized, less autocratic, with a rising middle class who did not like their shit being meddled with.

  And RzVz was only the most public face of the industry. Dan Beseman was up there quietly building his robotic Mars base, and that Orlov guy was . . . running an orbital fuel factory or something? Alice was embarrassingly vague on the details, except that the U.S. government had its eye on him as well, and the people in charge of Alice’s recruitment and training had made some veiled references to “additional strategic interventions” in outer space, sometime in the nearish future. And of course there was Lawrence Edgar Killian, who traveled the world in a shiny orange blimp, and controlled assets on the Moon’s south pole. The New Yorker had once run a cartoon of the Horsemen: caricatures floating in spacesuits and holding up cardboard signs. Dan Beseman’s said MARS OR BUST!!!, beneath a face that looked at once vapid and obsessive. Lawrence Killian floated beside him with an overly serene expression, a monk’s robe over his spacesuit, and a sort of steel halo riveted to the top of his space helmet. He held a sign that said GOD PUT THE MOON CLOSER. The most insulting caricature was of Igbal Renz, who was drooling, had a hypodermic needle sticking out of his arm, and somehow had an unzipped fly at the crotch of his spacesuit. His sloppily painted message said HEH. SPACE. Upside down from the three of them, a scowling Grigory Orlov, with braided epaulets on his shoulders, held a (right-side-up) sign that said PAY ME TO EXIST. The caption beneath all of them: Relax. The future is in good hands. It had gone viral on various data networks, but even after all the briefings Alice had sat through, that one little cartoon was about eighty percent of what she knew about where she was headed.