The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine

by Jonathan Strahan

  When he got back to the main lot, he rummaged in the glove compartment and came up with a flare gun. Wouldn’t do any good as a weapon, but from a distance it might fool somebody. He slipped it into the pocket of his nylon jacket and climbed out to retrieve a portable generator from the bed of the truck.

  Achille Marceau wanted to replace 4% of the world’s coal-powered generating plants with solar updraft towers. With no fuel requirements at all, these towers would produce electricity while simultaneously removing CO2 from the air. All together they’d suck a gigaton of carbon out of the atmosphere every year. Ignoring the electricity sales, at today’s prices the carbon sales alone would be worth $40 billion dollars a year. That was $24 million per year from this tower alone.

  Marceau had built this tower to prove the plan, by producing electricity for Northern China while simultaneously pulling down carbon and sequestering it underground. It was a brilliant plan, but he’d found himself underbid in the cutthroat post-carbon-bubble economy, and he couldn’t make ends meet on the electricity sales alone. He’d had to shut down.

  Now he was back – literally, a few kilometers back, waiting for his hazardous materials lackey to open the tower and give the rest of the trucks the all-clear signal.

  The plastic ceiling got higher the closer you got to the tower, and now it was a good sixty meters overhead. Under it, vast round windows broke the curve of the wall; they were closed by what looked like steel Venetian blinds. Some portable trailers huddled between two of the giant circles, but these were for management. Gennady trudged past them without a glance and climbed a set of metal steps to a steel door labeled Небезпеки – ‘HAZARD,’ but written in Ukrainian, not Russian. Marceau’s key let him in, and the door didn’t even squeak, which was encouraging.

  Before he stepped through, Gennady paused and looked back at the shrouded forest. It was eerily quiet, with no breeze to make the dead trees speak.

  Well, he would change that.

  The door opened into a kind of airlock; he could hear wind whistling around the edges of the inner portal. He closed the outer one and opened the inner, and was greeted by gray light and a sense of vast emptiness. Gennady stepped into the hollow core of the tower.

  The ground was just bare red stone covered with construction litter. A few heavy lifters and cranes dotted the stadium-sized circle. Here there was sound – a discordant whistling from overhead. Faint light filtered down.

  He spent a long hour inspecting the tower’s foundations from the inside, then carried the little generator to the bottom of another flight of metal steps. These ones zigzagged up the concrete wall. About thirty meters up, a ring of metal beams held a wide gallery that encircled the tower, and more portable trailers had been placed on that. The stairs went on past them into a zone of shifting silvery light. The stuff up there would need attending to, but not just yet.

  Hauling the generator up to the first level took him ten minutes; halfway up he took off the surgical mask, and he was panting when he finally reached the top. He caught his breath and then shouted, “Hello?” Nobody answered; if there was another visitor here, they were either hiding or very far away across – or up – the tower.

  The windows of the dust-covered control trailer were unbroken. The door was locked. He used the next key on that but didn’t go in. Instead, he set up the portable generator and connected it to the mains. But now he was in his element, and was humming as he pulled the generator’s cord.

  While it rattled and roared he took another cautious look around then went left along the gallery. The portable trailer sat next to one of the huge round apertures that perforated the base of the tower. Seated into this circle was the biggest wind turbine he’d ever seen. The gallery was right at the level of its axle and generator, so he was able to inspect it without having to climb anything. When Marceau’s men mothballed it five years ago, they’d wrapped everything vulnerable in plastic and taped it up. Consequently, the turbine’s systems were in surprisingly good shape. Once he’d pitched the plastic sheeting over the gallery rail he only had to punch the red button at the back of the trailer, and somewhere below, an electric motor strained to use all the power from his little generator. Lines of daylight began to separate the imposing Venetian blinds. With them came a quickening breeze.

  “Put your hands up!”

  Gennady reflexively put his hands in the air; but then he had to laugh.

  “What are you laughing at?”

  “Sorry. Is just that, last time I put my hands up like this was for a woman also. Kazakhstan, last summer.”

  There was a pause. Then: “Gennady?”

  He looked over his shoulder and recognized the face behind the pistol. “Nadine, does your brother know you’re here?”

  Nadine Marceau tilted her head to one side and shifted her stance to a hipshot, exasperated pose as she lowered the pistol. “What the Hell, Gennady. I could ask you the same question.”

  With vast dignity he lowered his hands and turned around. “I,” he said, “am working. You, on the other hand, are trespassing.”

  She gaped at him. “You’re working? For that bastard?”

  So, then it wasn’t just a rumor that Achille and Nadine Marceau hated each other. Gennady shrugged; it wasn’t his business. “Cushy jobs for the IAEA are hard to come by, Nadine, you know that. I’m a freelancer, I have to get by.”

  “Yeah, but –” She was looking down, fumbling with her holster, as widening light unveiled behind her the industrial underworld of the solar uplift tower. Warm outside air was pouring in through the opening shutters now, and, slowly, the giant vanes of the windmill fixed in its round window began to turn.

  Nadine cursed. “You’ve started it! Gennady, I thought you had more integrity! I never thought you’d end up being part of the problem.”

  “Part of the problem? God, Nadine, is just a windmill.”

  “No, it’s not –” He’d turned to admire the turning blades, but looking back saw that she had frozen in a listening posture. “Shit!

  “Don’t tell him I’m here!” she shouted as she turned and started running along the gallery. “Not a word, Gennady. You hear?”

  NADINE MARCEAU, U.N. arms inspector and disowned child of one of the wealthiest families in Europe, disappeared into the shadows. Gennady could hear the approaching trucks himself now; still, he spread his hands and shouted, “Don’t you even want a cup of coffee?”

  The metal venetian blinds clicked into their fully open configuration, and now enough outside light was coming in to reveal the cyclopean vastness of the tower’s interior. Gennady looked up at the little circle of sky a kilometerand-a-half overhead, and shook his head ruefully. “Is not even radioactive.”

  Why was Nadine here? Some vendetta with her brother, no doubt, though Gennady preferred to think it was work-related. The last time he’d seen her was in Azerbaijan, two years ago; that time, they’d been working together to find some stolen nukes. A nightmare job, but totally in line with both their professional backgrounds. This place, though, it was just an elaborate windmill. It couldn’t explode or melt down or spill oil all over the sensitive arboreal landscape. No, this had to be a family thing.

  There were little windows in the reinforced concrete wall. Through one of these he could see three big trucks, mirror to his own, approaching the tower. Nadine’s brother Achille had gotten impatient, apparently. He must have seen the blinds opening, and the first of the twenty wind turbines that ringed the tower’s base starting to move. A legendary micro-manager, he just couldn’t stay away.

  By the time the boss clambered out of the second truck, unsteady in his bright-red hazmat suit, Gennady had opened the office trailer, started a hepafilter whirring, and booted up the tower’s control system. He leaned in the trailer’s doorway and watched as first two bodyguards, then Marceau himself, then his three engineers, reached the top of the stairs.

  “Come inside,” Gennady said. “You can take that off.”

  The hazma
t suit waved its arms and made a garbled sound that Gennady eventually translated as, “You’re not wearing your mask.”

  “Ah, no. Too hard to work in. But that’s why you hired me, Mr. Marceau.

  To take your chances.”

  “Call me Achille! Everybody else does.” The hazmat suit made a lunging motion; Gennady realized that Nadine’s brother was trying to clap him on the shoulder. He pretended it had worked, smiled, then backed into the trailer. It took ten minutes for them to coax Marceau out of his shell, and while they did Gennady debated with himself whether to tell Achille that his sister was here too. The moments dragged on, and eventually Gennady realized that the engineers were happily chattering on about the status of the tower’s various systems, and the bodyguards were visibly bored, and he hadn’t said anything. It was going to look awkward if he brought it up now… so he put it off some more.

  Finally, the young billionaire removed the hazmat’s headpiece, revealing a lean, high-cheekboned face currently plastered with sweat. “Thanks, Gennady,” he gasped. “It was brave of you to come in here alone.” “Yeah, I risked an epic allergy attack,” said Gennady with a shrug.

  “Nothing after camping in Chernobyl.”

  Achille grinned. “Forget the mold, we just weren’t sure whether opening the door would make the whole tower keel over. I’m glad it’s structurally sound.” “Down here, maybe,” Gennady pointed out. “There’s a lot up there that could still fall on us.” He jerked a thumb at the ceiling.

  “You were with us yesterday.” They’d done a visual inspection from the helicopters on their way to the plateau. But Gennady wasn’t about to trust that.

  Achille turned to his engineers. “The wind’s not cooperating. Now they’re saying it’ll shift the right way by 2:00 tomorrow afternoon. How long is it going to take to establish a full updraft?”

  “There’s inertia in the air inside the tower,” said one. “Four hours, granted the thermal difference...?”

  “I don’t think we’ll be ready tomorrow,” Gennady pointed out. He was puzzled by Achille’s impatience. “We haven’t had time to inspect all the turbines, much less the scrubbers on Level Two.”

  The engineers should be backing him up on this one, but they stayed silent.

  Achille waved a hand impatiently. “We’ll leave the turbines parked for now.

  As to the scrubbers...”

  “There might be loose pieces and material that could get damaged when the air currents pick up.”

  “Dah! You’re right, of course.” Achille rubbed his chin for a second, staring into space. “We’d better test the doors now... might as well do it in pairs. Gennady, you’ve got an hour of good light. If you’re so worried about them, go check out the scrubbers.”

  Gennady stared at him. “What’s the hurry?”

  “Time is money. You’re not afraid of the updraft while we’re testing the doors, are you? It’s not like a hurricane or anything. We walk all the time up there when the unit’s running full bore.” Achille relented. “Oh, take somebody with you if you’re worried. Octav, you go.”

  Octav was one of Achille’s bodyguards. He was a blocky Lithuanian who favored chewing tobacco and expensive suits. The look he shot Gennady said, This is all your fault.

  Gennady glanced askance at Octav, then said to Achille, “Listen, is there some reason why somebody would think that starting this thing up would be wrong?”

  The boss stared at him. “Wrong?”

  “I don’t mean this company you’re competing with – GreenCore. I mean, you know, the general public.”

  “Don’t bug the boss,” said Octav.

  Achille waved a hand at him. “It’s okay. A few crazy adaptationists think reversing climate change will cause as many extinctions as the temperature rise did in the first place. If you ask me, they’re just worried about losing their funding. But really, Malianov – this tower sucks CO2 right out of the air. It doesn’t matter where that CO2 came from, which means we’re equally good at offsetting emissions from the airline industry as we are from, say, coal. We’re good for everybody.”

  Gennady nodded, puzzled, and quickly followed Octav out of the trailer.

  He didn’t want the bodyguard wandering off on his own – or maybe spotting something in the distance that he shouldn’t see.

  Octav was staring – standing in the middle of the gallery, mouth open.

  “Christ,” he said. “It’s like a fucking cathedral.” With light breaking in from the opening louvers, the full scale of the place was becoming clear, and even jaded Gennady was impressed. The tower was a kilometer and a half tall, and over a hundred meters across, its base ringed with round wind turbine windows. “But I was expecting some kinda machinery in here. Is that gonna be installed later?”

  Gennady shook his head, pointing at the round windows. “That’s all there is to it. When those windows are open, warm air from the greenhouse comes in and rises. The wind turbines turn, and make electricity.”

  Gennady began the long climb up the steps to the next gallery. His gaze kept roving across the tower’s interior; he was looking for Nadine. Was Octav going to spot her? He didn’t want that. Even though he knew Nadine was level-headed in tight situations, Octav was another matter. And then there was the whole question of why she was out here to begin with, seemingly on her own, and carrying a gun.

  Octav followed on his heels. “Well sure, I get the whole ‘heat rises’ thing, but why’d he build it here? In the middle of fucking Siberia? If it’s solarpowered, wouldn’t you want to put it at the equator?”

  “They built it on a south-facing slope, so it’s 85% as efficient as it would be at the equator. And the thermal inertia of the soil means the updraft will operate 24 hours a day.”

  “But in winter –”

  “Even in a Siberian winter, because it’s not about the absolute temperature, it’s about the difference between the temperatures inside and outside.” Octav pointed up. “Those pull the CO2 out of the air, right?” “If this were a cigarette of the gods, that would be the filter, yes.” Just above, thousands of gray plastic sheets were stretched across the shaft of the tower. They were stacked just centimeters apart so that the air flowed freely between them.

  “It’s called polyaziridine. When the gods suck on the cigarette, this stuff traps the CO2.”

  They’d come to one of the little windows. Gennady pried it open and dry summer air poured in. They were above the greenhouse roof, and from here you could see the whole sweep of the valley where Achille had built his experiment. “Look at that.”

  Above the giant tower, the forested slope kept on rising, and rising, becoming bare tanned rock and then vertical cliff. “Pretty mountains,” admitted Octav.

  “Except they’re not mountains.” Yes, the slopes rose like mountainsides, culminating in those daunting cliffs. The trouble was, at the very top the usual jagged, irregular skyline of rocky peaks was missing. Instead, the clifftops ended in a perfectly flat, perfectly horizontal line – a knife-cut across the sky – signaling that there was no crest and fall down a north-facing slope up there. Miles up, under a regime of harsh UV light and whipping high altitude winds, clouds scudded low and fast along a nearly endless plain of red rock. Looking down from up there, the outflung arms of the Putorana Plateau absolutely dwarfed Achille’s little tower.

  “I walked on it yesterday when we flew up to prime the wells,” said Gennady. Octav hadn’t been along on that flight; he hadn’t seen what lay beyond that ruler-straight crest. “That plateau covers an area the size of Western Europe, and it’s so high nothing can grow up there. This whole valley is just an erosion ditch in it.”

  Octav nodded, reluctantly intrigued. “Kinda strange place to build a power plant.”

  “Achille built here because the plateau’s made of basalt. When you pump hot carbonated water into basalt it makes limestone, which permanently sequesters the carbon. All Achille has to do is keep fracking up top there and he’s got a continent-size
d sponge to soak up all the excess CO2 on the planet. You could build a thousand towers like this all around the Putorana.

  It’s perfect for –” But Octav had clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Shht,” whispered the bodyguard. “Heard something.”

  Before Gennady could react, Octav was creeping up the steps with his gun drawn. “What do you think you’re doing?” Gennady hissed at the Lithuanian. “Put that thing away!”

  Octav waved at him to stay where he was. “Could be bears,” he called down in a hoarse – and not at all quiet – stage whisper. The word bears

  seemed to hang in the air for a second, like an echo that couldn’t find a wall to bounce off.

  Gennady started up after him, deliberately making as much noise as he could on the metal steps. “Bears are not arboreal, much less likely will they be foraging up in the scrubbers –” Octav reached the top of the steps and disappeared. Here, the hanging sheets of plastic made a bizarre drapery that completely filled the tower. Except for this little catwalk, the entire space was given over to them. It was kind of like being backstage in a large theater, except the curtains were white. Octav was hunched over, gun drawn, stepping slowly forward around the slow curve of the catwalk. This would have been a comical sight except that, about eight meters ahead of him, the curtains were swaying.

  “Octav, don’t –” The bodyguard lunged into the gloom.

  Gennady heard a scuffle and ran forward himself. Then, terribly, two gunshots like slaps echoed out and up and down.

  “No, what have you –!” Gennady staggered to a stop and had to grab the railing for support; it creaked and gave a bit, and he suddenly realized how high up they were. Octav knelt just ahead, panting. He was reaching slowly out to prod a crumpled gray and brown shape.

  “Jssht!” said the walkie-talkie on Octav’s belt. More garbled vocal sounds spilled out of it, until Octav suddenly seemed to realize it was there, and holstered his pistol with one hand while taking it out with the other. “Octav,” he said. The walkie-talkie spat incoherent staticky noise into his ear. He nodded.