For most complex, multicellular, terrestrial organisms, the process of assimilating energy from the sun started with green plants. The shoots and tendrils of newly sprouted appendages competed with their peers by groping through the cold shadows of their predecessors in hopes of finding a single tiny shaft of light trickling down through the otherwise nearly impenetrably dense forest canopy. one step removed from plants were the organisms that could not photosynthesize, and therefore spent the majority of their waking hours collecting the stored chemical energy of the sun by either grazing on those who could, or by foraging for related organic material such as fruits, roots, and nuts. And finally, animals who were not well adapted to consuming plant matter learned to access the energy from the sun by preying upon those who were. Even the energy that once breathed life into some of mankind’s earliest machines—fossil fuels formed through the anaerobic decomposition of billions upon billions of carbon-rich organisms—originally came from the sun.
Fundamentally, fossil fuels weren’t actually all that different from solar energy. Whereas solar technology generally referred to the conversation of solar radiation into energy in relative real-time, burning fossil fuels was simply a way of reaching back into Earth’s past and accessing that same resource, but from millions of years prior. Petroleum, coal, and natural gas were, in a way, nature’s batteries. In the eyes of capitalism, therefore, the most important distinction between fossil fuels and solar energy wasn’t so much sustainability or pollution, but pure efficiency. Ultimately, it wasn’t drought, rising sea levels, or increasingly prevalent cataclysmic weather that drove the worldwide shift toward thermal and photovoltaic solar technologies; rather, it was a force that, throughout the course of human history, has proven itself far more potent: basic economics.
Unlike fossil fuels, the energy from the sun could not be depleted within a time scale comprehendible to most humans (least of all, capitalists and lawmakers), and unlike energy derived from either nuclear fission or fusion, there were no expensive or dangerous by-products (other than those involved in the manufacturing of the solar collectors themselves, and the batteries in which energy was stored—both of which were easily managed). But there was something else unique about looking to the sun to energize the entire planet: a form of intrinsic democratization. Sunlight wasn’t a commodity that could be sold, traded, or artificially manipulated. Because population density and solar exposure were fairly closely correlated, most of Earth received more than enough sunlight to support local communities, and where that did not hold true, a combination of conveying light away from solar farms via long-distance fiber-optic lines, transmitting electricity using superconductive transoceanic power cables, supplementing energy production with hydroelectric, wind, geothermal, and tidal technologies, and even good old-fashioned conservation usually made up the difference.
Clean and infinitely renewable energy production even went a long way toward addressing another one of humanity’s major existential challenges: resource scarcity. Although the traditional concept of recycling had long since been popularized and accepted by the mainstream as basic civic responsibility, its benefits did not always hold up under close scrutiny since the amount of energy and other resources that went into the various processes—and all of the detrimental by-products that resulted—very legitimately called the entire theory into question. The reality of traditional consumer recycling was that it yielded a slender margin of benefit at best, and at worst, might have actually done a great deal of harm, representing little more than a psychological placebo designed to alleviate collective guilt over massive amounts of unfettered overconsumption, thereby accelerating the pace of global resource depletion.
But once the question of energy (and almost all associated pollution) was removed, the benefits of recycling were suddenly about as irrefutable as such politically and socially charged matters ever tended to get. In fact, it was no longer mandates and laws that promoted and sustained recycling efforts; rather, the reclamation renaissance was, once again, the result of forces far more prodigious and powerful: capitalism and profit. Once the variable of energy in the equation of reprocessing rapidly began approaching zero, sustainability suddenly became a hugely profitable and competitive enterprise instead of a widely begrudged, corporate-responsibility checkbox.
The result of decades of scientific, economic, and even political innovation was that approximately 80 percent of the planet’s population of just under thirteen billion people were almost never without all the power they wanted, and worldwide manufacturing, distribution, and consumption were at levels far more sustainable than at any point since the dawn of the industrial revolution. one of humanity’s greatest and most celebrated modern accomplishments was recognized the day environmental scientists around the world jointly reported the very first year of permanent polar ice cap expansion and sea level recession in almost a century.
That was also the moment in human history when something fascinating was learned that seemed to contradict not only decades of science-fiction canon, but also common sense: the ultimate inspiration for seeking out and exploring new worlds—and even attempting to permanently colonize them—did not come from the imminent destruction of the home planet, but rather from the triumph of restoration. With widespread access to virtually unlimited energy, with existing natural resources more renewable than they’d ever been, and with seemingly infinite virgin resources no farther away than the nearest asteroid, nothing seemed beyond humanity’s reach.
The next major step in the evolution of human innovation and exploration was to be the construction of what was by far the most ambitious engineering project ever undertaken: the space station known as Equinox, and the birthplace of the Coronians.
CHAPTER THREE
BLACK WIDOW
AYLA NOVIK USED TO TRY to pass herself off as a man. She wore her thick, onyx-black hair buzz-cut short, and her heavy drab boilersuits loose and baggy. She slouched to conceal her breasts, covered her wide blue eyes with a dark visor, and practiced a walk that kept her hips firmly in place. The sliver of smoothed tungsten carbide pipe—a keepsake that had once been an improvised wedding ring—was worn on a length of boot-lace paracord around her neck and concealed beneath her clothing rather than on her slender, delicate finger. Business was conducted nonverbally as much as possible—typically through terminals—and when face-to-face interactions could not be avoided, she used hand gestures and wrote on silicon paper hoping to communicate that she was mute, or excessively eccentric, or that she had her tongue cut out and cauterized with a plasma torch by raiders. When she felt herself being watched, she spat, grabbed at her crotch, and squirmed in a way that she imagined might rearrange pinched and bound genitals, then stared back intending to convey a psychotic disposition that all but the equally insane would rather avoid.
When the ruse worked, she was probably about as safe as anyone who made his living trading and transporting cargo between oases of commerce all over the globe—collecting finder’s fees, rewards, the occasional bounty, and skimming off the top when the opportunity presented itself. But whenever someone suspected what she actually was—when the air from a ventilation duct flattened her clothing in a way that gave her body momentary shape, or when she was stopped and patted down by port peacekeepers who turned out to be more interested in taking pleasure than bribes, or when a human trafficker’s pherometer picked her out of a crowd—there were sometimes attempts to make her pay not only for what she really was, but for the additional perceived offense of attempting to conceal it.
So Ayla eventually decided to take the opposite approach. Rather than hoping for the best and constantly fearing the worst, she resolved to give the world the metaphorical middle finger. Instead of hiding her curves beneath layers of heavy ballistic fabric, she accentuated them with a tight, black, shank-proof synthetic-fiber shocksuit with bright-red incandescent warning accents, the tungsten ring now worn on the outside suggesting an unquenchable vendetta. Passive defenses like shocksuits
were permissible in most ports, but Ayla had hers customized in a way that usually wasn’t. In the palm of her left-hand glove was a tiny optical laser that—in response to gestures conducted with her right-hand glove—could create an electrically conductive plasma channel in the air between her hand and whoever she didn’t like the looks of. In the absence of total compliance, a second gesture activated a series of step-up transformers in her belt that sent enough amps and joules through the filament woven into her suit, up into the glove, and across the conductive plasma channel to instantly incapacitate even the most robust, belligerent, and intoxicated sailor.
Ayla Novik had become a human black widow.
She arrived at MIS (the Maldive Islands Spaceport) at dawn with fifty-seven cryogenic crates of human organs that she had picked up in Perth exactly one week ago. Where the bundles of tissue came from and what they were to be used for, she did not care to contemplate. Ayla learned a long time ago that the less she knew about the cargo she transported—with the exception of fair market value, and the likelihood that a crate or two would be missed—the better she slept at night.
MIS was once the primary launch site for the largest provider of exclusive private space tours on the planet. Long ago, marketing departments composed soaring endorsements extolling the wonders and delights of losing oneself among almost two kilometers of submerged glass tubes threaded throughout the mountains of reefs; dining on the delectable and extremely rare indigenous hexapus (probably just mutated cephalopods); witnessing the optical spectacle of a synchronized underwater and overhead laser light show; and, of course, midafternoon jaunts into low-earth orbit.
From the air, the main structure of the spaceport gave the impression of a tremendous siliconcrete hex nut pounded flush into the white coral flats of one of the archipelago’s atolls. The cantilevered threads once served as hangars for various models of single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) spaceplanes that could be raised to the flight deck by a massive hydraulic platform in the center. From there, the vehicles combined the equatorial rotational velocity of the planet with air-breathing engines to reach the upper limits of the atmosphere, then ignited liquid oxygen boosters to achieve final orbital insertion, after which passengers could enjoy anywhere from a few minutes to several hours of weightlessness along with the breathtaking panorama of curved glowing azure transitioning into the purest black any of them had ever seen.
But the spaceplanes were now gone, the hydraulic lines long ago bled, and the platform seized by salt-water corrosion in its lowest position beneath close to two solid stories of refuse. The hex nut threads were cracked and broken, exposing an oxidized steel skeleton beneath like the wire frame of a papier-mâché model. Almost every form of commerce remaining on the planet was represented in some capacity somewhere within the four spiraling levels of marketplaces, shantytowns, and privacy cubicles beneath a tattered and patched Kevlar dome.
Although the former glory and elegance of MIS were no longer very much in evidence, the site continued to function as a spaceport. However, rather than supporting either SSTOs or more conventional multistage expendable vehicles, payloads were now boosted into orbit using a nearby servo-mounted Hypervelocity Mechanical Mass Acceleration Ring, or HMMAR (pronounced “hammer” in order to evoke the track-and-field event of similar Newtonian lineage). At first glance, the hammer looked a great deal like a tremendous radio telescope; however, rather than a parabolic dish intended to reflect radio signals to a focal point, the surface was a completely flat three-hundred-meter-diameter spiral steel track designed to gyrate at about sixty cycles per second and generate a centripetal acceleration of tens of thousands of Gs. Payloads of up to three hundred fifty pounds were released from the center of the spiral such that they were phase-locked with the dish’s hula-hoop-like motion and subsequently followed the spiral track outward, accelerating to a final velocity of approximately 7.6 kilometers per second—just fast enough to land comfortably in low-earth orbit. The only use of traditional propellant came after the payload cartridge had left the atmosphere, when small quantities of kerosene were burned in order to circularize the payload’s orbit and maneuver it into proper position for pickup.
Several times a day the hammer slung payloads of raw materials into orbit for the Coronians who, in return, provided the spaceport with electricity through their local skyhook power terminal. The current was fed into caps, or portable capacitors, which were the universal currency used to purchase more raw materials from whoever happened to be selling, and at the same time, fuel a massive secondary marketplace as boundless as it was exotic.
Ayla wasn’t especially pleased or impressed with today’s economic outlook. Rigorous inspection of her cargo prior to the buyer taking possession revealed that not all of the organs she delivered were laboratory-cultivated or 3D printed from sterile cartridges of living cells as had been specified in the purchase order. About 20 percent, it turned out, came from cadavers that had apparently been irradiated, diseased, and/or partially decomposed. Losing 20 percent of her rate would have been bad enough, but she was also docked an additional 5 percent for disposal fees. When she argued, she was told that the less expensive alternative was to have the worthless masses of tissue dumped on the deck of her freighter, after which she was free to dispose of it in any manner she saw fit, as long as it was in compliance with MIS biohazard regulation.
But Ayla was starting to feel a little bit better. She was at a café, such as it was, on the top deck of the hangar as close to the crumbling edge as she dared plant herself, enjoying the afternoon despite her economic misfortune. When out at sea, she mainly subsisted on nonperishable protein and supplement wafers, so a hot meal of real stemstock felt nothing less than indulgent to her. As she took a bite, the question of how many of the organs she delivered this morning would ultimately be consumed as food involuntarily surfaced, but was immediately and conveniently tamped back down, along with many other realities of the world of which she tried to keep herself blissfully ignorant.
By all rights, MIS should have been a crime-ridden cesspool, and in many ways, that was not an entirely unfair characterization. However, the spaceport was also not without its charm. For the most part, residents and shopkeepers took pride in their merchandise and crafts, and they did their best to maintain their humble allotments of territory. They kept clean that which was not entirely futile, and usually shared the responsibility of keeping common areas relatively free of filth. Although the pit in the middle that once raised and lowered sleek, blended-wing spaceplanes was full of trash probably at least ten meters deep, it was now illegal to dispose of anything in any manner other than through municipal refuse chutes. The debris that had already accumulated in the center of the structure had been partially sterilized and sealed to try to contain the smell, though one’s best defense against the stench was still to breathe through one’s mouth, and ultimately, to simply acclimate oneself to it. From where Ayla was sitting, she could see hundreds of people on the decks across and below her, more or less getting along and, she liked to believe, living the very best lives they could. When she looked up, she could see the dozen or so airships that occupied the space just beneath the dome—dirigibles, zeppelins, and blimps of various shapes, configurations, and colors like a selection of piñatas suspended from the roof of a tent. Although they occasionally descended so that personnel or supplies could be exchanged over anchored gangplanks, they were primarily tended to by swarms of autonomous multicopter drones. The fleet of airships served as offices and living quarters for those too good to mingle with the general population on the ground, but not too good to relieve them of the burden of their caps.
As she did every single day since Costa’s death, Ayla thought of him; conjured him up and placed him right there with her; carried on a conversation with him in her head. And as was almost always the case, the first thing he wanted to know was whether or not she’d been taking good care of his ship.
I’m doing the best I can, Ayla told him. Today I stopped a pil
e of guts from getting dumped on her deck.
I guess that’s something, Costa said. What are you going to do now?
Finish my lunch.
Ayla. You know what I mean.
I don’t know. Find another job, I guess.
You can’t stay here. It isn’t safe.
I know.
I’ll never understand why you like this place so much. It looks like a giant toilet.
I just like being around people and not feeling afraid.
You should be afraid.
I know I should, but I’m tired of it.
This place will all be gone someday. You know that, don’t you?
Yes.
one day there will be an earthquake, or a tsunami, or it will just collapse for no good reason at all and everyone inside will be swallowed up inside a giant litter-filled hole.
But that day won’t be today, so today I’m going to enjoy it.
Have a drink for me. The only thing good about that place is the cask ale they sell down below.
Costa. I can’t forget about you.
You don’t have to forget about me. You just have to move on.
I can’t.
You have to meet someone.
I don’t want to.
You need someone to take care of you.
I can take care of myself.
Are you sure about that?
There was a tremendous crack overhead as the Kevlar dome rippled from the shock wave of another payload being launched by the hammer outside. The airships were slightly perturbed, like birthday balloons in air-conditioning. Ayla looked back down, but the specter of Costa was gone. She knew that he was right—or that she was right, rather. She couldn’t stay here. Despite her attempts to make the Accipiter Hawk look run-down and barely seaworthy, it was almost always one of the nicest multipurpose cargo vessels in just about any port. And by now, way too many people knew that she sailed it completely alone. When Costa was still alive, it was pirates and raiders that she feared, and the ports that made her feel safe. Now, the only time she felt safe was when she was out at sea and both radar and sonar corroborated that her bubble of solitude was real, reporting nothing around her at all but open water and empty horizon. Even though the shocksuit had worked well for her so far—extending her personal space by at least a meter in every direction—she knew it was only a matter of time before someone decided to test it. Ayla believed that just about all men, at some point in their lives, were unafraid to die, and tangling with a girl like her was as good a way to go as any, and much better than most.
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