by Wil McCarthy
Sandy shrugged. “Okay, that’s fine.”
Lurch was the station’s administrative assistant program—one of those autonomous agents that was always listening and learning. Igbal didn’t need to “have it do” anything (this conversation alone was enough to get it going), but old habits died hard. Employees were prohibited from having their own personal digital assistants on RzVz off-world properties, and although Lurch was technically Igbal’s assistant, it was more than capable of doing the job for all twenty-three of the people currently on ESL1 Shade Station.
He still found it creepy that Lurch rarely spoke, but okay, that was how people liked it these days, and it did keep down the chatter.
Sandy put her hand on the small of Igbal’s back again and said, “Don’t worry. The gamma mirror is a good idea, and even if it doesn’t work as a fusion drive, there’s always the antimatter. If that works even a little bit, it could be enough to get us to Centauri.”
“Yeah. The antimatter.” He clicked his cheek a few times. “Okay, well, Pam, will you please meet Tweedledee and Tweedledipshit at the airlock, so we don’t get some sort of remote workplace safety lawsuit?”
Pam scowled at that—not at what Igbal was saying, but at the way Sandy was touching him—and Igbal knew he was in trouble there, too. Pam wasn’t officially a jealous or possessive person, but unofficially he was seeing more and more of that from her, now that her time among the living was growing short.
“I’ll see if Yuehai’s arm is broken,” Pam said, “or just her dignity. You two have fun while I’m gone.”
“Thank you,” Igbal said, and watched her leave.
Jesus. It seemed stupid now, but in all honesty, during all the planning it had never actually crossed his mind that a space station full of women was going to be this much trouble.
5.1
23 March
✧
H.S.F. Concordia
Moored to Transit Point Station
Low Earth Orbit
“Well, that sucks,” said Dan Beseman. “Did you try begging?”
“I actually tried prostitution,” said his assistant, Miyuki Ishibashi. It was a joke, of course, but it hinted at her frustration. She was a problem solver by nature, but some problems were harder than others, and she’d tried her best at this one before bringing it to Beseman’s attention. “No takers. Orlov had them over a barrel, and forced them to sign a four-year contract for their entire output. We won’t get one atom of tralphium from Harvest Moon until after this beast”—she pounded the bulkhead with her fist—“is on its merry way.”
“Well, shit.”
Beseman was a fit, handsome man—the youngest of the Horsemen, and arguably the most charismatic. But he was her boss, and like a lot of powerful people he sometimes lost his temper in the face of bad news. Which meant, as often as not, that Miyuki was the one who bore the brunt of it. Such was the life of a personal assistant! A thick skin was the first and most important qualification for the job. So far, Beseman seemed to be taking this news pretty well, but she had her guard up just the same.
The two of them were on the bridge of the H.S.F. Concordia—or rather its “operations coordination center” as the engineers insisted on calling it. (Why did engineers always insist on creating their own dense jargon to identify things that already had perfectly good names? Beseman had sent out companywide memos on the subject, even threatened to fire people over it, but the problem stubbornly persisted.) They were looking out and downward through the windshield (or “forward transparent hull panel”) at the spindly mass of Transit Point Station, reaching down and away toward the rolling landscape of Australia, far below. The view was nothing short of breathtaking, and the first few times Miyuki had seen it, it had made her feet and stomach tingle with vertigo, but after seeing it every day for months, she was adapting. Breathtaking was now the norm, which was probably good, because the endless unspoiled wilderness of Mars seemed capable of breaking her brain. Even glimpsing it through the eyes of a robot—one that wasn’t under her command, and was in fact separated by a speed-of-light round trip lag of fifteen minutes—sometimes brought tears to her eyes. That was the prize. Everything she did, everything she sacrificed, was in pursuit of that one simple goal. If she had to put her life on hold—for years—in loyal service to someone else (some trillionaire, specifically), she counted herself fortunate to be handcuffed to the one—the only one—who could take her to Mars. Or rather, who could greatly improve her chances of winning the competition for a berth on his ship.
The bridge was basically Beseman’s office right now; he came here for hours every day to work or to think. From here he could monitor all of the ship’s systems as they slowly came together. He could call or email or vmail anyone in the world, and he could watch the fuel tanks slowly filling up with hydrogen and oxygen, shipped monthly from Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot. Being here seemed to comfort him, by providing a direct connection to that future on Mars, which he wanted every bit as much as she did. It was the biggest common denominator between them; they might come from different strata of different worlds, but they shared that goal. Of course, so did hundreds of other men and women who’d applied for the job of Beseman’s assistant. She’d gotten appallingly lucky, and she tried hard to never lose sight of that fact, when he was texting her at 3:00 a.m. or venting his frustrations, or whatever.
Ready for the cameras at all times, she wore the beige, close-fitting, two-piece uniform of Antilympus colony hopefuls, with her hair pulled back in a plastic claw. This was necessary, because of course she wasn’t guaranteed a berth. She was in the lead right now; of the thousands of semifinalists, she was currently ranked fifty-ninth. Since there were one hundred berths on the ship, that nominally implied she was making the cut, and would be making the trip, but the rankings were volatile, and her public image was critical to her success. Since cameras were literally everywhere, and since Concordia was the subject of great public interest and the particular, constant scrutiny of its sponsors, she left nothing to chance. But this also highlighted the status gap between her and Dan Beseman, because right now he was wearing a green velvet track suit, a pair of running sandals, a four-day growth of beard, and a look that said he did not give one shit what anyone thought about his appearance. Why should he?
“What are we supposed to do for power?” he asked her, mostly rhetorically.
“Solar?” she tried. It was a running joke between them, and not a very funny one. Mars got less than half the sunlight the Earth enjoyed, and it would take eight thousand square meters of high-end photovoltaics, coupled to high-end batteries and ultracapacitors, to supply even the initial power requirements of Antilympus Township. Right now what the empty, robot-haunted Mars colony had in place, at great cost, was about a tenth that much. Which was a problem, because if they stuck to plan, they were going to be smelting iron out of the Martian soil (or “regolith”) within three months of landing, and that kind of thing did not come energy-cheap. Of course, a Compact Rare Earth Fusion Tokamak, inefficient as it was, only needed a few grams of 3He and a few of deuterium to see them through that first Martian winter, so for years it had been Plan A for the colony. Basically, from the moment Beseman was sure that Lawrence Killian and Harvest Moon really were going to be selling 3He (or “tralphium”) on the open market. But apparently that wasn’t going to happen, because apparently Grigory Orlov had somehow bought all of it. All of it.
That didn’t leave a lot of options. Concordia presently had about half a gram in stock, which wasn’t enough to help. It wasn’t enough to justify dragging the mass of a tokamak reactor all the way to Mars.
“I’m serious, Miyuki. Did you ask NASA about a fission reactor permit?”
“I did, and they just laughed. They said even they can’t get a license to launch more than an RTG. These days, U.N. safety guidelines rule the roost.”
“Ugh.”
RTG stood for radioisotope thermoelectric generator—basically a five-kilogram block of plut
onium generating heat, that could be turned into electricity by thermoelectric panels. The plutonium core was encased in heavy, catastrophe-proof ceramic, and could not only survive the explosion of a launch vehicle, but could be recovered intact from the ocean floor and re-flown on another mission. RTGs were great for powering spy satellites and space probes to the outer planets, but they were useless if you needed more than a few hundred watts of electricity. Real nuclear reactors were a lot bigger; even a little two-hundred-kilowatt sealed fission reactor was the mass of a shipping container full of cinder blocks, and at least twenty kilograms of that was tightly controlled fissile material. To launch something like that into space involved a lot of risk, because if a rocket blew up or crashed, it could scatter those fissiles across a wide swath of land and sea or, even worse, land the reactor intact but supercritical, and melt a radioactive hole straight down to Hell. And two hundred kilowatts was barely enough to run the lights and toilets at Antilympus.
Despite appearances, Miyuki was no secretary; she had a physics degree and had worked in energy startups for twelve years before coming here. Her work with Beseman—now six years and counting—had forced her to learn five college degrees’ worth of engineering, finance, logistics, government regulation, and conflict management. At this point, if she wanted to, she could step into a CEO job almost anywhere. But instead she kept Beseman’s schedule, and sent out email and made phone calls for him, basically letting him be in two places at once. Which meant she needed to be his equal, or nearly so, and also be a good secretary. She sometimes wondered if he knew what a demanding role it was, and how much it took out of her, but she wasn’t about to utter anything that smacked of complaint. No sir!
All things considered, Miyuki would rather be working for somebody like NASA or ESA or the short-lived U.N. Space Agency. She’d’ve had to eat shit there, too, but in a more egalitarian way. But alas, with the exception of the Chinese and, to a much lesser extent, the Russians, there were no public space programs anymore. Through some combination of deficit spending, warped priorities, and desperately short-term thinking, the governments of the world had starved themselves right out of the civilian space business. The last gasp of American adventurism—NASA’s Mars program—had just been handed over to Beseman’s control, because yes, the Horsemen had expanded into that power vacuum very nicely. And then they kept right on expanding, because people needed things the Earth could no longer provide—not just frontiers like Mars, but simple things like rare earth metals and tralphium.
She supposed she might also have preferred to work for a Horsewoman, if such a thing existed, but there were no female trillionaires and, quite frankly, not even really any female billionaires who’d made their fortunes from scratch. Why? Miyuki didn’t know. But she didn’t suppose it would change the dynamic very much if there were; if you wanted to gather resources on that kind of scale, you couldn’t also be a kindly and generous person. Even Sir Lawrence (or “Saint Lawrence,” as Beseman sometimes mockingly called him) had built Harvest Moon Industries on the backs of eighty thousand underpaid, overworked creatives. And with his blimps and parachute jumps and motorcycle races (right into his eightieth birthday and beyond!), he wasn’t exactly the most grounded business leader. Other nicknames Beseman had for him included “dare geezer” and “floaty the butterfly.”
Miyuki could do a lot worse, and she knew it. Beseman was the second-kindest Horseman, who’d made his money selling appliances and consumer electronics that were designed and built by other companies. It was the oldest business model in the world, but to do it—to crush all competitors at it—he’d developed quantum-AI logistical systems unlike anything the world had ever seen before. At the age of twenty-three he was running warehouses full of entangled data servers, and the small army of people required to maintain them, and the gambit was so successful he’d pretty much single-handedly revived the bricks-and-mortar retail sector by the time he was thirty. By forty, he’d already purchased three of the multinationals whose wares he peddled. Enterprise City was where you went to buy stuff. Period. And thanks to “creepy” predictive traffic analysis they nearly always had what you were looking for, and ten other things you didn’t know you needed. Who didn’t spend money at Enterprise City?
So yeah, Beseman wasn’t a bad guy by any means. But he was very focused, and tended to divide the world into (a) what helped him, (b) what thwarted him and needed to be battled or smothered, and (c) what didn’t matter and deserved no attention. Most things, on or off the Earth, were “c,” but now Miyuki could see that both Harvest Moon and Orlov Petrochemical had moved themselves to column “b,” and were going to be high on her radar for the foreseeable future. Well, fine.
“Shit,” Beseman said to her now. “They can’t get a license for their own use? Is that literally what they said to you?”
“It’s literally what they said,” she confirmed. “Do you know Ewin Stoycos? The nuclear guy from Johnson Space Center? I talked to him for about half an hour, and that’s literally what he told me.”
“Did you . . . did he, you know, have any suggestions for what we can do?”
She nodded. “Actually, yes. He did.”
“And?”
“He’s really into thorium these days. He said we should look at something called a LIFTR, which stands for liquid fluoride thorium reactor. He says we can get a megawatt of throttleable power for about two hundred million dollars. It burns unrefined thorium metal, straight out of the ground, which isn’t even radioactive until you hit it with neutrons. But that’s also the bad news, because we’d still need an RTG as a neutron source, which invokes ITAR and the nonproliferation treaty.”
“So we’d have to launch out of the United States?”
She shrugged. “Unless we want them to throw us in jail, yes. But it’s worse than that. Even though thorium’s not radioactive, it’s still categorized for some reason as a fissile material. We need three hundred kilograms of it, and we might need to spread that over as many as twenty launches.”
“Seriously? From the United States? That would take years. Oh, my God. That would take years. We can’t get an exemption?”
This wasn’t good. He was getting really angry now, and that could go badly for her if she didn’t tread carefully. In measured tones she said, “Stoycos asserts that it’s possible to get one. There’s a mechanism for requesting it, but we’d have to go through Congress and the United Nations Security Council. Given the high profile and popularity of our project, he says we’d probably prevail, but . . .”
“But that would also take years.”
“Exactly.”
He sighed. “Damn it. Damn it. If we miss this launch window, Miyuki, it’ll be two years before the next one. Given our burn rate, we’d need a hundred billion dollars to bridge the gap.”
Miyuki had already done the math on this, and he was right, so all she could say was, “Yup.”
“Do we even have that much cash?”
“Cash? No. You’d have to liquidate some substantial holdings. So, I mean, yes, in principle we can afford it, but it would be painful.”
“Jesus. This can’t be the reason we miss our launch window. That’s just too stupid. Orlov seriously won’t sell us five grams of tralphium? At name-your-fucking-price?”
“Nope. I asked every possible way. I offered every possible thing including, seriously, going on a date with him. His people just laughed.”
“Wow,” he said. “Huh.”
She really had done that. It was way above and beyond the call of any reasonable duty, but Beseman’s lack of praise or even acknowledgment of it didn’t surprise her. She knew better than to expect that from him, and if Beseman knew her at all, he’d know she’d done it as much for herself as for him or anyone else. She wanted her shot at Mars that badly, yes!
“Wow,” Beseman said again. “Is Orlov trying to make us fail? Is that why he bought up every single atom?”
She shrugged. “Maybe? If you see life as a zero-sum game,
it means somebody’s got to lose. Somebody else, specifically. Dan, I don’t honestly know why a pig like Orlov is in space at all. What’s his vision? Colonizing the bank? Exploring the balance sheet? It’s just numbers to him. I think, honestly, we’re all just numbers to him.”
She shuddered to think what would have happened if she had actually gone on a date with Orlov. Even being in the same room with him sounded nauseating; the thought of actually making dinner conversation, while he pretended not to leer at her body, was almost more than she could bear. Almost.
“Oh, he’s not that stupid,” Beseman snarled, making a tight, angry gesture in the air. “It’s not zero sum. Any idiot can see the growth up here. It’s highly, highly positive. It’s an exponential sum! Even if he slows everything down, even if he stands between us and Mars, how is that a win for him? It’s not a race; he’s not competing with us. I think that bastard just likes watching people lose. We’re not numbers, we’re enemies. You want an explanation that fits the data? It’s malice, pure and simple.”
But as satisfying as it was to hear Beseman say that, Miyuki knew it was wrong. It was like that old New Yorker cartoon, where Olrov was saying “PAY ME TO EXIST.” Yes, there was enough truth there to make it funny, but people weren’t caricatures, and their hopes and dreams weren’t cardboard signs. Even very stupid people were complex creatures, and lord knew Grigory Orlov was not stupid. Not even a little tiny bit. It had been foolish to think, even for a moment, that he’d be influenced by anything as ordinary and commodified as a female body. But okay, if pure greed and pure malice were insufficient explanations for what made Orlov tick, they were still definitely useful models. Any physicist could tell you that a simple model, even if technically incorrect, often got you close enough to the right answer that the wrongness didn’t matter. So if it worked— modeling Orlov as an engine of pure greed or pure malice—then did the deeper truth really matter?
