by Wil McCarthy
“I sold my soul, too,” she added, now, trying to sound more cheerful. “It’s the price of admission to outer space.”
“You’re talking about my eggs,” Jeanette corrected sweatily. “Yes, those are sold, along with the womb space to develop them. Although I hear Iggy’s pretty far along with his liquid-phase incubators.”
“No EMA slowing him down,” Dona said, in seeming approval.
Jeanette blinked. “EMA?”
“Uh, it’s like your Food and Drug Administration, I think. Nosy bureaucrats.”
“Ah. Well, yes. I imagine that helps, yes. Along with unlimited funding! Anyway, whatever. Thank you for letting me sit with you; you’re the only two team members I was able to track down. A lot of people are still in transit or something. Or lying low.”
“How long have you been here?” Dona asked.
“In Suriname? Two days. In Paramaribo specifically? Since this morning. I took the bus from Georgetown. I do not recommend it.”
Georgetown was across the border in Guyana, which was legally accessible via commercial flights from the United States.
“I flew in from Cuba,” Dona said, perhaps truthfully. “I do recommend that.”
Alice kept her trap shut, because she had personally taken an Air Force cargo jumper to the USS John Travolta, parked out past the continental shelf, and rode shotgun on a mismarked civilian helicopter to the outer suburb of Lelydorp, from which she’d used paper currency to hire a series of taxicabs. Chances were, the Surinamese authorities knew the U.S. had inserted somebody, but since that happened on a weekly basis, they wouldn’t find it particularly remarkable. Still, it had been dumb. American dumb: expensive and complicated and pretty much unnecessary. Immigration control here was a joke; you didn’t even need a passport from most ports of entry, and anyway Alice Kyeong was supposed to be here.
“It is nice to meet you out here in the sunshine,” Alice said, to change the subject, “but I think I can just meet everyone else in the Playa Blanca bar.”
Dona snorted at that. “Ah, yes. The beach.”
The Playa Blanca was a hotel owned by RzVz, and was where colonists and staffers checked in to await their ride to orbit. The name was a bit of a joke, as it meant “White Beach”—something Paramaribo definitely did not have. It was a town of white clapboard and red brick, with colorful metal roofs, and with grass and palm trees sprouting up from everyplace that wasn’t freshly paved. With its rusty, sun-faded charm, Paramaribo was the sort of place one might expect to find nice beaches. But no, the land seemed mostly to slope down into reeking mangrove swamps, and the occasional shoreline of muddy gravel that reminded Alice of a dozen rough HALO drops she’d made over the course of her six-year career. The hotel bar was nice, though. And cool. Perhaps the name Playa Blanca simply meant: This is where all the white people wash up. A White Beach indeed.
“Well, I wanted to get out and look at the place,” Jeanette said. “I was expecting something a bit more refined, but okay. With all the money flowing through here it should be nice in twenty years.”
“It’s not so bad here,” Alice said. “You want to see real chaos, go to Burning Man sometime. Money flows through there, too, and that hasn’t straightened it out.”
To which Jeanette replied, “Honey, I sure won’t. If things go according to plan, this town might be the last place on Earth any of us ever see. Isn’t that a strange thought?”
It was, yes. But Alice and Dona were here to make sure things didn’t go according to plan, at least in terms of Igbal Renz retaining steering control over the Esley Shade.
“There aren’t many left to meet,” Dona said. “Three of us are already in orbit.”
That surprised Alice and Jeanette both.
“Really?” Jeanette asked. “Which three?”
“Nonna Rostov of the Russian Federation, who is some sort of materials scientist; Saira Batra, who’s a mathematician; and then some Argentine engineer whose name I forget.”
“Is it Pelu Figueroa?”
“Yes, that’s her. The three of them caught a commercial cargo throw up to low Earth orbit yesterday, from Ascension Island, in the South Atlantic. I’m not sure why. Here at our launch site, we’re meeting Elizabeth Powell, Malagrite Aagesen, and Rachel Lee. That last one is a doctor, I believe.”
“What kind of doctor?” Jeanette asked.
Dona shrugged. “No specialty listed, so I’m going to guess tube monitor.”
That was another joke, kind of. Over the past decade or so, telerobotic medicine and nanorobotic medicine and AI diagnostics had sort of converged, and now there were more and more things treated in “the tubes” or “the barrels” or “the coffins” by, basically, fully autonomous robotic jellyfish. The economic fallout was hitting certain kinds of doctors very hard, and some of them responded by filling the on-site physician quota at a tube farm. Others met the challenge by quitting or changing careers or committing suicide. Or, perhaps, fleeing to outer space.
“There’s a spaceport on Ascension Island?” Alice asked.
“Horizontal takeoff only, but yes. Since July.”
“Where are you two getting all this information?” Alice demanded suddenly. “Was there an informatic I was supposed to download or something?”
“You’re supposed to be monitoring the online crew manifest,” Jeanette told her, not unkindly. “How do you know you’re still scheduled to fly?”
“What do you . . . They can remove me from the flight? For what?”
“Of course they can. Somebody higher priority can bump you at any time. Or they could shift the weight allowance. How much stuff are you bringing?”
“Just e-books and personal effects. About six kilograms altogether.”
Some rather interesting personal effects, courtesy of the Space Force and the Central Intelligence Agency, but all of it could pass through an AI luggage scanner without so much as a blip.
“Really? No candy or booze? What are you going to trade? What are you going to do?”
“Hmm. Look stupid?” Alice didn’t know if this conversation was helping or hurting her cover, so she shut up again.
“You still have time to buy some of that,” Jeanette said. “I’ll help you.”
“Hmm.”
“Really, I think you should.”
“Okay.” Alice relented, partly because she didn’t want to arouse suspicion, partly because Jeanette seemed like a genuinely nice person, partly because there were still thirty hours to kill, and partly because it actually did sound like a good idea. Funny that she hadn’t really thought about the personal, practical side of all this: actually leaving Earth. Actually living on a space colony. Actually blending in by way of actually doing real work up there, and sharing living space with real people, until she and Dona and Bethy figured out when and how they were going to strike.
“This isn’t something we want you to rush,” President Tompkins had told the three of them in the Oval Office, over mugs of Kona coffee laced hard with Kentucky bourbon. “And it certainly isn’t something we want you to botch.”
Laurent Patenaude, the mustachioed president of France, had added, “Get them to trust you before you slip in the knife. It’s the only way, really.”
Something changed in Jeanette’s face as Alice thought these thoughts, and Alice worried again that she might just possibly be the worst spy the human race had ever seen. No poker face! None!
But fortunately, Jeanette read something altogether different into Alice’s features. She asked: “Honey, are you scared? I know I am.”
“I’m not scared,” Alice said truthfully. Very little in this world truly frightened her, and some spoiled, sex-crazed trillionaire certainly didn’t.
But Jeanette drew a deep breath of the city’s stifling air and repeated, “I sure am. You know, when I was twelve years old, my father took me on an amusement park ride called the Slingshot. You had to wait in line for, like, three hours. They strapped you into this ball and cranked it back on giant
bungee cords and just shot you up in the air, as high as the tallest buildings in Dallas. You could look down at the giant air conditioners on their roofs! But you know what the worst part was? Waiting in that line. Watching that ball go up in the air, over and over again, trailing screams of terror behind it. Dad and I nearly chickened out a dozen times, but we were also egging each other on, and even then I knew I wanted to be an astronaut. I’d always wanted to be an astronaut, and I figured, how am I ever going to strap myself in a rocket ship if I can’t ride a damn amusement park ride? That’s what settled it for me. That’s what kept me in that line, and ultimately I think it’s what kept my Dad there as well. The ride itself was really short. Just two seconds of gee force, two seconds of weightlessness, and then several minutes of pointless bouncing and spinning while they cranked the thing back down again. It was anticlimactic. It’s the waiting that’ll kill you.”
Alice could see a hint of fear—more than a hint—in Jeanette’s eyes. Now she wasn’t thinking about her sweaty bus ride across Suriname and into Paramaribo. She wasn’t thinking about the margarita in her hand or the night she was going to spend on clean hotel sheets. She was thinking about sitting in a thin tube of, basically, fiberglass, with a million pounds of thrust behind her, flaring out in a three-thousand-degrees-Celsius tower of flame and smoke, and absolute nothingness on the other side of that wall.
And although Alice had made that trip three separate times already, along with the fiery reentries to bring her back down, and fancied she had already mostly gotten over any nervousness and was solidly professional about the whole thing, she realized that attitude wasn’t going to sit well with Jeanette Schmidt. To keep up appearances, Alice was going to have to show some (fake) vulnerability here.
“Okay, maybe I’m a little bit scared,” she said, dredging up some of her feelings from that first trip to the Marriott Stars. Her first HALO jump was actually a lot scarier, so she thought about that, too. Ten-thousand-meter exit, nine-thousand-meter freefall, a thousand-meter arresting glide on a minimal parafoil chute, and then buckles-off and a ten-meter drop into water. That was broad daylight and clear skies, with a glassy-flat reservoir as the landing target; every step measured and monitored and the drop coach speaking calmly through her headset the whole time. And yet, the fatality rate for first-timers was well north of one percent, and the rate of serious injuries was closer to twenty percent. It was like stepping calmly into a car accident.
“Yes, yes, we’re all properly afraid,” Dona said dismissively. “But I’m thinking about something else. It occurs to me to wonder why colonists Batra, Figueroa, and Rostov were taken up ahead of schedule, and on a cargo flight. What’s the hurry? Unless RizzVizz are shifting things around on the manifest.”
“What’s your point?” Alice asked, with genuine annoyance. Here she was, trying to shore up her cover story, and here Dona was just walking right on over it. Talking way too close to the troubling facts.
“My point is, I don’t like it,” Dona said. “It smells bad. It gives me cause to worry how secure our own seats really are, or how professionally this project is being run.”
And then Alice realized that Dona was actually trying to share operational insights with her. They were undercover, yes, and could not speak freely, so Dona had to make herself sound like an annoyed tourist rather than a hired assassin. But the distinction was surprisingly moot: What if our flight is canceled? What if we don’t get to go? Could months of planning go down in flames because an entry in a spreadsheet cell had changed? Esley Shade Station supposedly had enough emergency transports parked in LEO to get everyone back to Earth (though probably hungry and thirsty and bored and stinking to high heaven), but there was only one regular crew ferry, and it held twelve people and came to Earth every ten weeks. So what would happen if, for example, Alice and Dona got bumped to the next mission, and Bethy Powell got to Esley two and a half months ahead of them?
Too much opportunity for someone to screw up, or for someone to get smart and figure out that not all of their colonists were legit. If this mission were an outright assault, the Space Force would be handling it. This was something slower and quieter. But no, that didn’t mean they had all spring and summer to get it wrapped up. And it opened up an even more serious possibility: that Bethy might secure the Esley Shade on her own, leaving the government of New Zealand in charge of things, with France and the USA forced to deal at arm’s length, along with the other four Coalition nations. From the point of view of the President, the Department of Defense and the CIA, that would be nearly as bad as leaving the Shade in Igbal’s hands.
“Suriname is noted for its stability and high ethical standards,” Jeanette offered wryly.
“Mmm.” Dona was not amused by that.
“Well, is there anything we can actually do?” Alice asked.
Dona shrugged. “Probably not. But until we’re actually on that crew shuttle, spiraling out and away, we’re not really secure.”
“Hmm. Great.”
Changing the subject again, Jeanette asked Alice, “So you’ve been to Burning Man, huh? Was that the festival or the town?”
“Both, actually,” Alice answered. “My mother dragged me to the last three festivals, when I was in grade school. But I was talking about the town, where she’s a founding resident.”
“Oh. Well, that’s kind of neat. Are you and your mother close?”
Alice snorted. “Ah, no. She’s crazy.”
“Honey, everyone’s mother is crazy. Mine was a full-time homemaker with a PhD and a whole shelf of psychiatric medicines. How about you, Dona?”
Still unamused, Dona said, “A seamstress, back when that was still a human job. My father was her postman. Is it crazy that they put three children through college in Europe? I don’t know what they were thinking. My mother’s a saint. I’m sorry yours isn’t.”
“Oh, now don’t be a buzzkill,” Jeanette said, again not unkindly. “We’re just making conversation, here. Nothing serious intended.”
“They’re still in Africa, with no children to look after them. I could get them admitted into France, but they refuse to budge.”
“I’m sure they’re lovely people.”
“Thank you. They are.”
“And now you’re leaving the planet,” Jeanette said, her face lighting up with sympathy. “From space, you really can’t help them. And here I am making jokes.”
Alice didn’t know how much of what Dona was saying was true and how much was bullshit cover story, and for the moment, she didn’t care, because it was, again, treading too close to operationally sensitive areas. Dona wasn’t really moving to outer space, and chances were her parents didn’t even know she was visiting there at all. Did she have fake parents she could make a show of contacting? If not, then this whole subject was problematic, and offhand the only way Alice could think of to derail it was to throw some shade on it.
“Oh, boo-hoo,” she said. “We’re all leaving people behind.”
“Well, that wasn’t very nice,” Jeanette said after a pause. To Alice’s surprise, the look on Jeanette’s face actually did make her feel bad. Question: Why you gotta be like that? Answer: Because I’m a hired assassin, not a hired friend. And like a good assassin she doubled down and pressed onward.
“I’m serious. We’re leaving a whole planet behind, all of us, with the intention of not coming back. With the contractual obligation of bearing that pervert’s children. Or somebody’s. It’s a big step, yes, and now is not the time to start crying about it.”
“He’s not a pervert,” Dona said, snapping out of it. Getting back into character, where she belonged. “He’s a great man.”
To which Jeanette replied, “Oh, I think he might be a bit of a pervert.”
And then somehow they were laughing, all three of them.
After that they shut up for a while and just drank their cool drinks, and watched the pedestrians and drones and robots and trucks and cars and bicycles go by.
“
Such a busy place,” Dona said finally.
And that was true: Suriname had started with one tiny spaceport, and then it was three, and then the three had merged into a whole city of airfields and launch pads and offshore platforms, and as of last year this little country was handling forty percent of all the off-Earth traffic. Forty percent! Next year it might be fifty, with the bulk of the growth coming directly out of the hides of the U.S. and Australian and French aerospace industries. That was the amount of traffic that skirted ITAR rules, and every other sort of rule except the rule of money. And the Four Horsemen—Igbal Renz, Dan Beseman, Grigory Orlov, and Lawrence Edgar Killian—controlled the vast majority of that.
The idea made Alice shudder. Even reckless, heedless, emotionally stunted Alice, yes, because that was way too much power in way too few hands, and there was no telling where it might lead. If absolute power corrupts absolutely, and perverts could buy whole shiploads of willing brides and blot out the fucking sun, then yes, Alice was proud to be a part of the governmental response.
Ostensibly, the Esley Shade was about solar energy. ESL1 Shade Station was a giant factory and research laboratory, turning asteroidal material (basically, rocks) into habitat modules and spaceship parts, and that took tremendous amounts of power. Esley Shade Station was also constantly making more material for the Esley Shade, too. The larger it got, the more material it took to add another meter to its diameter, and also the more susceptible it was to getting holes and tears from micrometeroroids, which needed to be patched with additional material. So people seemed to think it was growing more slowly these days, but as the Space Force dudes had explained to her over and over, it was the diameter that was growing more slowly. The area was growing faster than ever.
All that would be scary enough if it were just out in empty space, but of course Bigballs had put the shade squarely between the Earth and Sun. To help cool the planet, he said. As a gift to the people of Earth, he said. But the fact was, by tipping the shade this way and that way, he could steer it with light pressure from the Sun, and decide which portions of Earth would have their sunlight reduced.
