Zero-G

by William Shatner

  Carter smiled back. “You’re welcome.”

  Lord took a long breath then slid from the low cot with an audible oof. He swayed slightly as he reacquired his space legs. Fortunately, the sturdiness of the cyber-limb allowed the rest of his body to rally around its stability.

  He took a step then braced himself on the small waist-high cabinet before proceeding.

  “On my own, you said?” Lord asked.

  Carter didn’t have to answer.

  Lord pushed off the cabinet and stood willfully, legs slightly apart.

  “The Colossus of Rhodes astride the harbor,” Carter said. He winked hard and a release appeared in Lord’s IC—along with the classic Larrinaga painting of the ancient Titan.

  With a quick shake of the medic’s hand, Lord left the medbay.

  The Zero-G facility was the smaller of the two sick bays, located forty floors below the FBI office. The other sick bay was near the Drum. Though, ironically, space was at a premium in space, the PEA’s insurance carrier had insisted that there be medical facilities on either side of the station in case of an emergency and Slammers that cut personnel off from one or the other.

  Lord would be able to make the trek back easily, but he did not want to wobble on his way in. That was not the impression a leader wanted to make up here, especially when many voices at HooverComm had loudly argued against a man of his age being up here at all.

  As he made his way, his head clearer now, Lord once again tried to figure out what Colonel Franco could possibly have in common with the “tea bag”—a disparaging epithet that had been coined for CHAIs and had arisen out of the widespread debate over the tipping point between robot and human. Ziv was a superstar, the most sophisticated cyborg on- or off-world. Apart from his likely being an agent of the Israeli intelligence service, he had global access to scientists, politicians, and media topliners. He was up here to make the case for more CHAIs in space. Lord understood what Franco would want with Ziv, but what could the colonel offer Ziv?

  Maybe there’s nothing more to this than a quick exit, Lord decided. He followed that thread. If Kristine had died, and Franco were off-station, he could only be interviewed on Earth, where the matter—clearly an accident—would get little coverage. If she lived, her employer would have been expected to visit the soft-eyed, hospitalized companion. The profession might be legal, but so was polyamorous marriage and public nudity: not everyone approved. And DIA agents were supposed to keep a very low profile.

  Either explanation made sense, but Lord didn’t feel them in his bones, the real ones. It was something else.

  He stopped at the FBI storage locker for a clean tunic and got changed in the impossibly small room. Not for modesty but for decorum and credibility; he felt it would be wrong to enter the command center wearing a uniform that had been knocked around in the cargo bay and elevator shaft.

  As Lord walked toward the command center, picking up speed and confidence, he passed a number of guests as well as members of the Empyrean crew. Those he knew he acknowledged with a careful nod; his head still wasn’t one hundred percent. But whoever they were, whether they were walking in pairs or talking into their ICs, Lord caught the same words over and over:

  Japan. Horrible. How?

  It was a subtle but pervasive zeitgeist. It revived the feelings he had experienced as a six-year-old when his first-grade teacher tried to explain the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. The entire class was watching as a civilian, a teacher, headed boldly into space—and perished, while expanding the boundaries of knowledge and human enterprise. He recalled the feelings of everyone at the air base when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked. It wasn’t just a communal feeling of helplessness and loss, there was a crushing sense of impotence: every man and woman in the wing wanted to be in the skies now—no, an hour ago, ready and watching for any other hostiles. He felt anger as his emotions returned to the sickness every human being felt in 2020 when, in a singular act of sadism, videos of five major world dams were posted on a terrorist website two minutes before they were blown up. There was just enough time for concealed cameras to capture workers running, residents beginning to panic, then all of them—hundreds of thousands of souls in all—drowning. Those videos were posted as well.

  Humankind was accustomed to barbarism, to accidents, and to staggering natural disaster. But rational beings were far from inured to them. Lord hoped they never were.

  Perhaps that’s the true tipping point between human and CHAI, he thought. Not the body parts, but how and why we react to the world around us. When you stop feeling, you become amotional—a term that had been coined for the way SimAIs mimicked an emotional response.

  Hearing the whispered voices in the corridors, seeing eyes seek his for a human connection, Lord was reminded of the importance of his position. On Earth, he was part of a vast machine that served as a buffer between order and chaos. Out here, he was the machine. He didn’t have the luxury of steeping in an event, of getting into the emotional pool slowly.

  Or dealing with ego-bruised bureaucrats like Stanton, he thought.

  Feeling fully himself now, Lord punched Grainger’s avatar.

  “Sir?”

  “Has anyone other than Ziv Levy and Colonel Franco left the station?”

  “No, sir. Only the one departure.”

  “Collect the movements of other guests from the security scans, see who else interacted with Franco,” Lord said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He was particularly interested in five people whom he had also seen with Franco and Ziv at the reception: the Indian doctor, the Pan-­Persian guru, the Mexican general, the gambling sheik, and especially Yegor Golovanov, whom the FBI believed to be an officer of the Red Giant, a collective of black marketers and Russian mobsters who hid behind legitimate businesses. The Bureau was particularly interested in one powerful Red Giant faction, Cnymhuk, “The Satellite,” based on the International Space Station—which Moscow had purchased in 2047. By that time, its orbit had decayed precipitously. But they found a way, using old Vostok rocket upper-stages, to blast the station back into a viable orbit. The aggressive new Russian presence was, in fact, the act that prompted the United States Congress to authorize and fund an FBI outpost in the high frontier.

  Just like the dawn of the space age when we raced the Soviets to the moon, Lord mused. As much as things changed, they didn’t.

  SIX

  LORD REACHED THE command center in full stride. Adsila was at the director’s post and Lord motioned for her to stay there as he maneuvered through the workstations to a narrow door in the back. His IC encephalogram opened the pocket door and admitted him to the aptly named LOO—the Lord Only Office—his tiny private space in the rear. It was literally the size of the airliner lavatories he remembered from his youth, with a chair, a low hoverlight that popped on when he entered (he nudged it, in the microgravity, up into a corner, like a disobedient pup), and, most important, full privacy. Not only was there no noise from personnel, air vents, or plumbing: the soundproofed walls were lined with an electronic scrambler—nothing clever, just a primitive thicket of Faraday-cage metal. The LOO was the only spot on the Empyrean where communications were not only secure but could survive an electromagnetic pulse or solar flare. Even Empyrean command did not have that full capacity.

  Lord remembered to switch off his personal IC as an extra precaution, beyond even the Faraday barrier. There was an infamous trial on Earth three years earlier, when an FBI officer at HooverComm conducted a high-security meeting with his IC dormant but not off. It stored every word spoken by his confidential informant and posted the conversation to a hundred correspondents his SimAI thought might find it interesting. The officer’s mistake resulted in the CI’s death, and the officer got seven years for involuntary manslaughter.

  Inhaling slowly—the walk had been more strenuous than he’d anticipated or l
et on—Lord scrolled through his private channels via an old hardwired touchscreen in this shielded room until he found a bright white dot pulsing insistently. He punched it, hooking into the LOO’s communications system. An array of glowing avatars appeared, ranging from senators to experts in various fields of science and history to international ministers. He selected the Al-Kazaz icon and touched it. After a brief pause Lord finally connected to the HooverComm conversation.

  “Hello, Pete,” Lord began. “Sorry for—”

  “Did it have anything to do with Bureau business?” Al-Kazaz asked, his round face pinched with genuine displeasure. “That is, after all, why you are up there.”

  Lord smiled disarmingly. “It’s very good PR when we save lives,” he replied, having expected the question and discarded all but two unassailable answers. He decided to add the second one for insurance: “It’s also good for the hearts and minds of everyone up here, a good morale booster for my team.”

  “Thank good God puppies aren’t allowed up there or you’d go chasing them!” Al-Kazaz snapped.

  “Not cats, though,” Lord said. “Maybe kittens.”

  “Sam, any rogue action like that is fuel for the flame simmering under my ass.”

  “This was a human life, sir. We are here to protect those.”

  “And a good-looking, very young woman, which fuels talk about where your attention is focused.”

  “It seems like just yesterday when those same voices were arguing that I was too geriatric for the post. This should balance that.”

  “It doesn’t, Sam. It absolutely does not.”

  Lord didn’t bother to repeat the argument that hadn’t worked on Dr. Carter. “How are the condemnations and the commendations tracking?” he asked. “And which of those is leading? I haven’t had time to check.”

  “No, you’ve been too busy with—what, being smitten again?” Al-Kazaz snapped. “How did you boys used to put it? ‘Air picket, target acquired’?”

  Lord didn’t bother to address that either. He just sat there waiting, as innocent and open-faced as the moon.

  Al-Kazaz softened. His eyes flicked to the side to check the GoVerse stats. The Government Universe was a fast, harsh forum for high-level decision makers. It took the place of old-style polling, letting officials know where they stood at any given moment.

  “Opinion’s at fifty-fifty,” the PD said.

  Lord nodded approvingly. “Not bad. That’s better than the sixty-six percent who didn’t want me up here.”

  “Granted, but it distracts me, distracts us when we have urgent business.” Al-Kazaz shook his head. “And Christ, Sam. Think. A dead ­Zero-G director does no one any good.”

  “Not true,” Lord replied. “It’d make my critics cackle.”

  “It would make my job hell. It’d be a month, at least, before we could get a replacement approved and qualified for space. Until then it would be Adsila Waters’s command. Can she run that office if something happens to you?”

  “She seems very capable.”

  “What she is is 3-D,” the PD replied, referring to the unwritten “diversity scale.” “Young, an ethnic minority, and pan-gender, my concession to the diversity cops here to get my 1-D old-man choice approved. Do you understand my position here?”

  “Fully—”

  “Then again, if she were Deputy Director, my Priority One message would already have been delivered! This is a time-sensitive matter.”

  “Understood,” Lord said humbly. “But there’s Priority One and there’s Priority Zero. I knew we had a little breathing room.”

  The prime director snickered. “Good sweet god. I am responsible for this, you know.”

  “Peter?”

  “I wanted a veteran and I got him.”

  Lord knew the storm was at an end. “So what is this about?” he asked. “Japan?”

  “Sam, right now everything is about Japan,” Al-Kazaz answered. It wasn’t a complaint, it was a fact with a fist behind it. “You’ve got major ports devastated and air control that can’t handle outgoing citizens and incoming relief. They’re scooping up bodies with tuna nets, for Christ’s sake. The stock markets are going to hell on top of politics as usual: the Chinese are trying to play a major hand in clearing the waterways. They’re massing a flotilla powerful enough to punch through twenty nautical miles of debris—including airstrikes on flotsam and jetsam. The president is worried they’ll invade.”

  “Will they?” Lord asked.

  The rivalry between the nations was ancient, with swaths of territory like the Senkaku Islands eternally in dispute. In Tokyo, the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors were still locked in bitter debate over the fact that Japan lacked a presence in space while Beijing had a fast-growing space station.

  “I don’t know what China will do,” Al-Kazaz admitted. “No one here is sure. And when people are starving or cold or dying, they don’t care who brings help.” Al-Kazaz glanced at an update. “Look, Sam. Everyone down here is scrambling for explanations. I just got a notice that Mexico plans to oil-and-burn the bodies headed in their direction. Here’s another,” he said, his eyes moving toward a new update. “People are afraid because there isn’t radiation on the bodies, meaning there wasn’t some kind of nuclear accident. That means this is something new.” The PD took a moment to compose himself. “Sam, listen. The event was awful enough but people are terrified that it might be a new kind of weapon. It wasn’t natural. That much we know. An ocean doesn’t do things like that on its own.”

  “What can I do?” Lord asked.

  Al-Kazaz regarded his old friend for a moment, then drew a long breath. “Thanks for that.”

  “For what?”

  “Calm,” Al-Kazaz replied. “It’s a madhouse on top of business as usual. There isn’t an agency on the planet that doesn’t want to be the one to pin this down.”

  Lord nodded knowingly.

  “Why I called,” Al-Kazaz went on, “an astrophysicist is on her way up. Dr. Saranya May. She’s five months into a yearlong hitch on the moon.”

  “What did she do there, experiment with the tides?”

  “That was my first question to Director Warren at NASA, and the answer is no,” Al-Kazaz said. “She contacted us, in person, for protection. Came in on a supply run.”

  “Protection relating to this?”

  “So she says.”

  “NASA has its own security personnel,” Lord said. “So does Armstrong Base. Did she go to them?”

  “That’s a big, ugly no,” Al-Kazaz replied. “I had Warren and his DC SecDirec Mohalley gnawing on my ankles, wanting to know why she came to us. All they know is that she took personal leave for an Earth visit.”

  “But she’s going back up to Armstrong?”

  Al-Kazaz nodded. “Says she has to.”

  Lord’s brow scrunched. “Math isn’t my thing, Pete, but the numbers on the clock say this Dr. May would have left the moon before this happened.”

  “Exactly,” Al-Kazaz said.

  “Seriously, what was she doing up there?”

  “Seriously, Sam, I don’t know. Not a clue. Mohalley wouldn’t say and I checked with JHAGS. They don’t know, though I was told that we are to listen very carefully to what she says and answer yes to whatever she asks.”

  “So she’s been on the drop-down of Joint Homeland and Global Security,” Lord said.

  “Her name shows up as ‘eyes on’ but the rest is ‘eyes only,’” Al-Kazaz said.

  He was referring to the tip sheet JHAGS shared with other intelligence services around the world. In theory, if anyone knew anything about a person on the list they were supposed to add it. That was “eyes on.” Privacy groups hated the practice—they described it as social media meets the old Gestapo—so only high-ranking JHAGS personnel were allowed to view it. Now and then, actionable intellige
nce did show up. Then it became “eyes only.”

  “Which brings me to you,” Al-Kazaz continued. “Dr. May will be arriving in forty-seven minutes. Help her, but work her, Sam.”

  The irony of that request—after the way he was reamed over Kristine Cavanaugh—was not lost on either man.

  “Is that all you’ve got?” Lord asked. “Those are my instructions?”

  “Yeah, that’s all,” Al-Kazaz said. “We’ve been crunching this ever since she dropped in. The timing is scary, her fear was scary, but her reluctance to talk was scarier still. She asked for protection and I told her to see you.”

  “Pete, you know the Empyrean isn’t a safe house—”

  “Wasn’t,” Al-Kazaz replied bluntly.

  Lord understood: it was now. This would be an opportunity to justify Al-Kazaz’s faith in him and to have his old friend’s back. It also gave him another clue as to what Ziv Levy and Colonel Franco might have been discussing. One or the other of them could have heard of the scientist’s request.

  “Also, I want you to go see the Gardener,” the PD went on. “He sent up a flash twenty-one minutes ago. See what he’s heard and have him available for additional work. And, Sam?”

  “Yes, Pete?”

  “If you’re going to die on me, be considerate enough to get murdered in the line of duty on an open investigation.”

  “With both boots firmly on, sir,” Lord assured him.

  “Good luck,” Al-Kazaz said and signed off—with a virtual slap that landed, symbolically, on the side of Lord’s head. Lord hadn’t gotten used to those either, the “fingles,” virtual IC digits for high-fives, back pats, salutes, and other gestures.

  Lord took a moment to savor the silence and solitude, qualities that, up here, were scarce, bordering on nonexistent. Then, slapping still-swollen hands on his knees to push himself from the saddle-like seat—straddling it helped keep the occupant stabilized—Lord went back to the command center. He motioned to Adsila that she was still in charge but did not tell her where he was going.