Analog SFF, June 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “I'm not sure this has anything to do with our drop,” the captain interrupted. “It's all interesting, but we can talk about all of this after the deployment.”

  “Listen!” I shouted. “With small changes to themselves the Greete could live in the Twilight Edge. They want to colonize here. And they exhale the oxygen. That's why we see the spike in free oxygen. Normally that would be no problem, the oxygen would blow away, and there is not much of it, but currents in the pole change frequently, and right now the atmosphere is eddying around in a circle. That could last centuries. Their oxygen is collecting like smog over Los Angeles. In a few decades, it could be a real problem.

  “So the Greete have started to collect their oxygen waste. And they are pumping it down into the deep atmosphere. Into the matryoshk. That's what the pipe dropping down into the matryoshk is. Not a mining rig.”

  A murmur went through Engineering. After a long pause, the captain swore. “If that's true, they're destroying the matryoshk!”

  “Yes. But they need to get rid of the oxygen. It will bind with the matryoshk and be sequestered down there.”

  “We need the matryoshk!”

  “Yes. And we need oxygen. But—”

  The captain's face turned red. “I'm glad we agree on something.”

  “Listen! Our air factories are going to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen. We'd breathe the oxygen and expel the hydrogen. But here, the hydrogen would bind with nitrogen and form ammonia. We would poison the atmosphere for the Greete!”

  Silence fell. Everyone looked at the captain, waiting.

  The captain nodded and pursed his lips. Then he called out, in a clear voice, without hesitation. “If that is true, it is important and we need to reconsider policy. But this doesn't mean we shouldn't follow our deployment schedule. The air factories are not scheduled to start for another seven e-days. We'll have a staff meeting after deployment. Then we can study this further. We can determine whether the factories need to be modified in some way.”

  “We can't drop! What if the Greete can tell what they are for? What will they think?”

  “You may be right about the chemistry, Dr. Virgil. But the politics, the diplomacy of this is a matter for the whole senior staff. I'll schedule a meeting for after deployment. We'll keep the air factories inactive until we review your ... hypotheses.”

  I groaned. “We know how that will go. We've been there before. My hypotheses will be difficult to confirm quickly so we'll start the air factories, and then since the factories will be running the issue will become how to reduce the hydrogen waste. On and on. Once we drop the factory ring and start mining, the pressure to continue will be overwhelming.”

  “Doctor, there are procedures to settle these matters. You lecturing us is not one of them. Now, everyone get back to work!”

  Slowly, crew turned away, whispering to each other as they drifted to their workstations. The captain floated next to me and opened his mouth to speak, but I interrupted him.

  “But I have an idea. A plan. We can exchange our CO2 for their oxygen. We can create a kind of ... industrial ecology with them. It may not balance exactly but it could solve both our problems.”

  After a long pause, the captain nodded. “Thank you, Doctor. That's very interesting. Thank you for that. I think you should work on that. Put together a plan and—”

  “But you must hold off the drop while I do it!”

  “No need for that.” He was smiling and nodding now. Again I felt that he did not even hear the words I was speaking. “Why don't you go to your quarters and prepare a presentation for the meeting? Outline some of these ideas?”

  “You need me on the drop.”

  “But you need to prepare as much evidence for your hypotheses as you can, before our meeting, don't you think?”

  “No one understands the weather in the polar edge better than I do. Same for the air factories.”

  “You said the weather is stable. The deployment will go fine without you. It's mostly a matter of piloting. We need you to—”

  I drew myself erect and spoke sharply. “I spoke my mind, but I've always gone along with the program. Haven't I? I've always ... cooperated.”

  He was silent a moment, and in that moment Kweupe called from across the room. “Dr. Virgil, I need you to look at this.”

  The captain hesitated. I pushed away and left him there, without looking back.

  * * * *

  Kweupe floated holding onto a free latch on the drop pod. “There is too much pressure in cell six,” she said.

  I checked the gauge. “That's the differential from the higher pressure in the ship. The relative pressure monitor is on. We can turn it to ready and then vent the cell.”

  “Ah, I see!” Kweupe said ostentatiously. She put her hand on my arm, and spoke more softly. “Listen, if what you say is true, then many of us will oppose starting the factories.”

  “Why didn't anyone speak up, if that's the way we feel?”

  “Well, I guess because it was all so fast. We can't decide that quickly. And, well, you need to show...” she hesitated, looking for a word as she rubbed the crown of her head. “...some optimism.”

  I pulled back a little bit in surprise. “For captain Walters's schedule?”

  “No, no. For yourself. For us. For the mission. Offer an alternative once in a while. Don't just point out what's going wrong or what should be stopped. Point out what we can do.”

  Another engineer called her and she pushed off, before I could explain that I did have a plan. I looked behind me then and saw that the captain was gone.

  Kweupe was right. I had rushed the bad news first and had not made time to explain my alternative to the plan that had taken years of work. I had boxed Walters into a corner. And yet, it seemed too late now for alternatives. If we dropped the air factories, would he be willing to reconsider their use?

  Two engineers floated past me. One tossed a tool to the other as their paths crossed, and the other elegantly caught it with an imperceptible shift of the hand. An effortless ballet. All the motion in the room seemed nearly random until you focused on this or that act. Then you could see in all of it the inertia, the inevitability and incorrigibility, of human action. Nothing could put it at rest. I had spoken, I had registered my disagreement, I had told the captain my alternative plan, and now that was over and done with, and there was nothing I could do, everything would continue on its trajectory—

  I had drifted toward the converter cell that I had examined with Kweupe and bounced now against the ring where this air factory unit would attach to its lift zeppelin by a single buckycable. I stared at the connection, upon which everything depended. Then it hit me. Upon this link everything depended.

  Shaking, moving too quickly to reconsider, I chose the only option I could think of.

  “Where're you going?” Kweupe called as I floated out the door.

  “I left my virtching glasses in my room,” I lied. They were in my pocket. “I'll be back in time for the drop.”

  I headed for the medical center.

  * * * *

  The Greete transmitted no message and took no action as we came over the North Pole and dropped our pod. The pod tumbled when it hit the troposphere, scraping hot against the helium and methane. There were four of us on board. Erin, a Navy pilot and engineer, was out of sight in the control capsule below, where she steered our drop. She yelled through the harrowing scream of the atmosphere, in triumph and defiance and perhaps fear. In the main cabin, Ryan and I sat facing each other. Our seat-straps held, but I had forgotten to zip one of my pockets closed and my personal tablet computer slipped out and shattered on the ceiling, and then flung about the room. Ryan swore as it hit her near the eye, knocking at her virtching glasses.

  “Damn, sorry,” I called.

  She grunted and scowled, but was goodnatured enough to let it go at that. I tapped my breast pocket, checking that I had remembered to zip it closed over the syringe hidden there.

 
We clutched our seats and waited for the spinning and flipping to end as the pod rattled and threatened to rip apart. Then we were through the violent rages of the upper atmosphere. Our parachutes deployed and the pod straightened with a joint-snapping jerk. Outside, the atmosphere stopped hammering at us like a tumble of stones and simply roared with a fiery determination to beat at our intrusion. We waited, listening to the howl, as we slowed, sinking into the heavier gravity.

  “Deploying Jovian-balloon,” Erin called. The descent pod shuddered, and we settled into our maximum weight as the zeppelin of heated hydrogen began to expand above us and provide lift.

  It was time. I unlatched my belts and climbed over my seat, feeling as if I were made of lead. I spun open the hatch behind my seat.

  “Hey, that's dangerous!” Ryan shouted. “Stay in your seat!”

  I ignored her and climbed awkwardly through. Then, refusing to meet her eyes as she shouted at me again, I closed the hatch and locked it.

  A short tunnel led back to the engineering core. Kweupe sat at a broad array of monitors, managing the release of the heat shields. She did not notice as I climbed behind her.

  “Drop processor chain,” Erin's voice called.

  “Dropping processor chain,” Kweupe responded. I waited while she tapped away a series of confirmation instructions.

  A metallic clanking confirmed that we were releasing the long line of armed atmosphere converter cells, each with its own zeppelin, but linked together with a buckyball cable that would hold them in a loose ring thirty kilometers in circumference. The pod bounced up and swayed as we lost the weight.

  “Latitudinal jets firing,” Kweupe said. “The chain is opening ... diameter at five hundred meters. Six hundred meters.”

  I took the syringe out and stuck it in her arm and shot her with two ccs of hibernation prep. She looked up at the reflection of me in a dark monitor above her chair, eyes surprised and hurt and questioning.

  “Sorry,” I told her.

  She slumped forward.

  I slipped Kweupe out of her straps and dragged her behind the chair, and then sat. There had been a tiny chance that the buckyball cable could tangle with the pod. Explosive links bound the atmosphere processors to the cable and to their zeppelins. As the chief scientist, I knew their secret firing codes. I sent the messages, all the messages, and their tethers exploded. Thirteen water converters, prickling with weapons to defend them should that prove necessary, dropped towards the metal core of Purgatorio. The zeppelins, bearing only the weight of the buckyball cable, shot for the high sky.

  Shaking with fear now that it was over, I watched on the monitors as the air factories plummeted.

  In the main cabin, Ryan figured out what had happened.

  “Virgil!” She screamed, a howl of rage and despair. “Bloody hell! Virgil, what have you done? You—You—” She choked on her anger and confusion.

  “Something,” I said to myself alone. “I finally did something.”

  * * * *

  “Doctor, I think you'd best open the hatch!” The captain was on the ship, but they radioed his voice down to the pod's comm system, and the small comm speaker crackled with overloaded volume as he shouted.

  “In a while,” I said. I was trying hard to cling to some shred of courage and dignity. I knew that I should open the door immediately, but I hesitated, hands over my mouth, afraid of what I'd done. “I want everyone to calm down first.”

  “I'm bloody going to...” Ryan sputtered, loud enough for the comm on her side of the door to pick it up. “A million years in the brig! I...”

  This was oddly reassuring, that she could speak of my act as a disciplinary matter. I rose, climbed down the access tunnel, and opened the main hatch. Ryan reached straight in and, in a moment of impetuous anger, grabbed my shirt collar and dragged me out, into the main cabin.

  We both misjudged the heavy gravity. I could not turn my body in time as she tugged at me, and I fell forward over my chair. I held out my hands but failed to catch the seat, and my head clipped the hard edge of the armrest just over my left eye, before I dove, face first, onto the metal floor.

  All went dark.

  * * * *

  “All right, clear the room,” the Captain said, after they got me back into the ship and they woke me and I asked to be alone with him.

  “Sir, perhaps—” Ryan began.

  “I'll tell ... everything,” I whispered through my broken teeth. “But only alone ... with the captain. No recording.”

  “I'm not sure that's advisable,” Ryan said.

  That was enough for the captain. He wanted to be in charge of this disaster. “Thank you, Commander, but I'd like you and the doc to wait right outside. I'll see what he has to say. I'll fill you in afterward, Commander.”

  Ryan glanced at me, her mouth open, but then said nothing and left with the doctor, closing the door behind. The captain told the ship's computer to stop recording.

  “Why?” he asked.

  I looked him in the eye and gathered my breath. “You can still fix this.”

  The room swayed and I closed my eye.

  “Hey,” the captain shouted. “Wake up! You ... wake up!”

  I opened my eye again. His face was close to mine now. Red with anger.

  “We don't need the air factories,” I continued. My mouth hurt horribly, but slowly my head began to clear as the stimulants took. “We need oxygen, and the Greete need to get rid of oxygen. Like I said before: we can form an—” I coughed and spit out blood. The captain shifted aside and let the spherical red drops drift past, swinging end over end. “We can make ... a simple trade. They pump their oxygen to us. We release our CO2 into the polar atmosphere. It will be easier to manage ... than the atmospheric factories. It was going to take a lot of work to find the water we needed. We can focus on the mining.”

  “I told you I would consider your plan, Doctor. We could have pursued that with the factories in place.”

  “It was all predictable.”

  “What?”

  “The mission was already laid out for us, and your job is to see it gets done. Deploy, start the factories, and keep alive an endless debate while we slowly poison the Twilight Edge.”

  He shook his head. “So this is it. You wouldn't trust me. So you threw away the whole human race's project. Doctor, I'm going to have to lock you up till we can get you back to Earth, where you will stand trial and go to prison for what is likely to be the rest of your life.”

  “Maybe. But it's not over. We can mine matryoshk, if we form an alliance.”

  “Well, Doctor, what makes you think the Greete will deal?”

  “We have some things in common. Few other species are so poor as to be unable to lease a more hospitable world, and so ambitious as to challenge this one.”

  He shook his head and sighed.

  I spit some more. “You have to try. There is no other option.”

  “I suppose you think you will do the negotiations.”

  “You send Tarkos. And me. We're by far the best speakers of Galactic you have. The translation programs aren't dependable. And it has to be an atmospheric chemist that makes the deal.” I tried to smirk. “You can say you forced the terrorist to help fix his wrong before shipping him to Earth for trial.”

  “And prison.”

  He glared at me. I stared back. Neither of us blinked.

  The captain finally sighed. He turned away and opened the door. “But you're wrong,” he said, pausing in the doorway. “You could have trusted me.”

  He pulled the door closed behind him. I said to the blank panel, “But now, I don't have to.”

  * * * *

  The day I left for the spaceship, Jean and Christina took me to the airport. Christina, now fifteen and as tall as her mother, hung back as we walked through the airport, grunting in answer to our questions, making it obvious that she resented being quietly forced by her mother to tag along. I pretended cheer, as I reminded my wife that eighteen months would pass quic
kly.

  “Remember that time your father was sick, when I was in graduate school, and you had to go home for six months?”

  “Yeah,” she said, smiling sadly. “That wasn't so bad.”

  “On the other hand,” I added quickly, “don't get too comfortable without me.”

  “And don't run off with some Kirtpau woman.”

  “Hmm. They're scheduled for only one rendezvous with us. Besides, unfortunately for me, with the three genders, I'm not sure which count as women.”

  Christina rolled her eyes.

  We had come to the security checkpoint. A loose line of people stood unhappily bound behind a meandering maze of strap partitions. It was not crowded—airports were detritus from a past age, and the new electric planes were too few and expensive for most people. If the government were not paying, I would have taken a train like anyone else.

  But I stepped to the side and hugged Jean. Our eyes glistened with first tears. I reached for Christina. As she saw her parents’ tears, her stoical teenage impatience melted. She hugged me and held on.

  “It's a long time, honey,” I whispered. “I'll miss you. Be good. Work hard at school. Try...” I fell silent. It was useless to continue with such platitudes. After a moment, she stood back and looked at me. I reached out and pulled a strand of hair behind her ear, and she let me do it.

  “Bye, Dad,” she whispered.

  “I'll try to make you...” I began. Then I started again. “I mean, I'll try to do better than—than we've done in the past.”

  She nodded.

  I had broken eight teeth, fractured my skull, and sprained my neck, but after a few days I was patched up well enough to travel. Under escort they took me to the glider. Kweupe stood outside the airlock, making a show of checking over the prelaunch.

  It took a terrible effort, but I stopped and looked her in the eye. “Sorry.”

  “That was not what I meant by optimism.”

  I nodded and dropped through the hatch.

  Ryan was in the glider.