Zero-G

by William Shatner

  “You’ll keep—”

  “It’s on,” he assured the EAD, pointing to his head as he eased into the corridor.

  Lord took the elevator to the bottom level of the Empyrean and followed the green line to the Agro center. This was quite literally the lifeblood of the station, where food was grown and water vapor and wastewater recycled. The Empyrean was not quite self-sufficient, but at seventy-six percent, that beat projections by over a year. Much of that progress was due to Dr. Lancaster Liba, whom the Bureau had code-named the Gardener. The short, stooped, pockmarked man wore the standard tan one-piece outfit of the agriculture department. He was ten years younger than Lord but looked ten years older. He had made Death Valley flower, ending the Southwest Water Rebellion of 2024. Before heading into space, Liba had turned portions of the Gobi Desert in China into fertile farmland, earning him a National Friendship Award in a ceremony in Beijing—along with friends in the Politburo. He was a longtime friend and confidant of Al-Kazaz, a red-blooded Tennessee-born patriot who had been recruited as an antirebellion spy during that war. He continued to conduct recon for Al-Kazaz. Since he didn’t have access to the LOO, whenever he had something to say he notified the prime director with a flame that burned briefly in the PD’s IC then immolated any trace of itself.

  As soon as he saw Lord enter, Liba straightened slightly from a clutch of cantaloupes—among the least cost-efficient fruits to import—then nodded and turned away. The director followed him toward the greenhouse nearest them. The greenhouses came in two varieties, each interspersed across the one-hundred-by-thirty-yard space—their own windows transparent solar panels that filled with the vastness of space and the sun. The first greenhouse design was large and rectangular, with a slightly curved roof and bulging, rounded sides. The second—and third and fourth, technically—were a trio of interconnected clear domes crammed with foliage. Both positioned their crops to take advantage of sunlight from two directions: from the sun itself, and from its reflection in the station’s giant solar sail.

  The door, made of shatterproof glass, recognized Liba’s encephalogram and cracked open. He pulled it wider and quickly followed Lord inside. The windows began to drip, clearing from the rush of cool air; as soon as Liba sealed the dome the warm, soggy vapor allowed them to resume their natural opacity. That made it perfect for clandestine meetings. It was, in fact, an adequate bio-version of the electronics in the LOO: the foggy windows obscured the occupants, in case anyone outside could read lips, with or without an assist from their IC; and the thrum of the reclamation machinery stymied vibrational sensors. The technical ability to turn the vibrations of glass into recognizable speech had long ago forced embassies and corporate headquarters around the world to replace their windows with brick, though it was two years before scientists linked an inexplicable spike in rickets to the ensuing vitamin D deficiency. As a final protection, Lord and Liba sat with IC-scrambling closeness to an electric-field water nanofiltration system.

  The Gardener’s eager eyes sought those of his companion. Lord’s gray eyes smiled.

  “What’ve you got in the vault, Lancaster?” the newcomer asked.

  “Not gonna say,” Liba replied. “Station business.”

  It sounded like passwords spoken by two old spies. In fact, it was a question Lord asked each of the few times he had talked to the man, a question Liba always answered the same way. There was a secret in the agricultural section, one that Liba would not discuss because it was the project of his employer of record—NASA—and not the FBI. The information was for Stanton only.

  “Speaking of things that are station business, I heard about your little adventure,” Liba remarked.

  “I told you last time, I hate parties,” Lord quipped.

  Liba chuckled. “I also heard we have a VIP en route to PriD1.”

  Lord gave him an impressed but questioning look. “The prime director didn’t tell you that.”

  “Nope. Colonel Franco did.”

  Lord stiffened. “Go on.”

  “Well, not in so many words, y’understand,” Liba said. “Y’know, gardeners, custodians, nurses—people don’t see us.”

  That was why the PD had hired the man for a handsome retainer: he was invisible. Unfortunately, the Gardener resolutely talked to people just as he did to plants, slow and meandering.

  “And you know me, naturally nosy,” Liba said.

  Then the man fell silent, as if he were whittling a stick. Perhaps he was, in his IC.

  “Liba,” Lord said, coaxing him along. “The VIP?”

  The Gardener nodded. “Anyway, I’m tending to the planters outside reception and I hear Colonel Franco yelling at you as he’s coming down the corridor, something about stealing his date. Did you?”

  “No.”

  “I thought not,” Liba said. “He struck me as a hothead. Then he gets a call, but I can’t hear that because Ziv walks by, all those thermal actuators and coiled polymer muscles hissing low, like I was just outside a snakepit. But I see the colonel end the call suddenly, madder now, and he goes running after the tea bag. Ziv stops and I do hear Franco invite him to go for a run—on Ziv’s own spacewings. So while you were busy hot-rocketing through the landing bay, I poked after them, watering this, watering that. I saw them board Ziv’s shuttle, just them and the pilot.”

  “They filed a single-orbit flight plan,” Lord confided. “Do you know why?”

  The younger old man nodded. “I heard Franco say it was pretty damn imperative they meet a shuttleplane from Earth,” he replied. “He said there was someone on board they had to talk to.”

  “Did he say anything, hint anything, about diverting the occupant?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you note the time?” Lord asked.

  “I did not,” Liba replied. “Damn IC interferes with my concentration and I wanted to be able to report what was important.”

  Lord put a hand on Liba’s arm. “Thank you. This is very useful.”

  “What’s it mean?” Liba asked.

  Lord grinned. “Sorry, Lancaster. FBI business.”

  SEVEN

  IT WAS A moment Sam Lord had hoped would not happen: when he was traversing these halls to deal with something old rather than something new; when it was about a potential conspiracy hatched on Earth rather than a unique challenge rooted in the unfamiliar expanse of outer space.

  Somehow, Franco or his DIA bosses had found out about Dr. May. Perhaps from someone on the moon when she departed suddenly. Perhaps she was recognized coming through the lunar decontamination walkway at the airport on Earth. And now Ziv knew, which meant the Mossad knew, which meant that whomever May had feared when she left Armstrong Air Force Base had grown exponentially.

  Space is clean and new, he thought again. It shouldn’t be contaminated by old rivalries.

  But the world didn’t work the way he wanted; why should the universe? He gave the cosmos a quick, challenging look through one of the windows as he left the Agro center. He shook an IC fist at the skies, like he used to do at what was supposed to be his flight ceiling.

  The devil will not drag you under! he promised the cosmos.

  Lord used his security clearance to do a quick check of flight manifests at National Air and Spaceport in D.C. He learned that rather than wait four hours for the lunar shuttle to return to Armstrong, May had booked a scheduled outgoing flight to meet the Empyrean solar kite—then accepted a ride to the Empyrean from Ziv Levy. She must have felt that a publicity seeker like the tea bag was too well known to do her harm.

  She was probably right. But Ziv wasn’t alone.

  Hopefully, she’ll be too careful to respond to Franco’s ham-fisted methods of questioning, Lord thought. The man did not have a reputation for subtlety.

  Lord also wondered how Ziv would get the commercial flight to stop for him. As he walked, Lord sent a brief message to Adsil
a.

  Chk E-shut recs, he typed in the air, opting to use his fingers rather than his eyes. Unless the CHAI had managed to scrub the Earth shuttle records, there might be useful data there.

  OK, she sent back.

  The Empyrean looked—and in many ways behaved—like a child’s toy top.

  The Agro center was located on the lowest floor of the massive tower that formed the pivotal center of the space station. This location enabled the plants to grow in gravity that most resembled Earth-normal. Above the tower—direction being relative to Earth—was a rotating, circular hub that was four levels deep and supported the station’s eight radial arms. Jutting from the hub, these single-story radial arms resembled some ancient hieroglyphic representation of the sun. Each outwardly tapering “ray” was configured for living quarters, recreation, science, recycling, the Zero-G comm, and other essential station functions.

  Atop the doughnut-like hub was the ring-like circular runway used for commercial flights. A circular platform was located at its center, anchored to the hub but not to the surrounding runway. Rising from this disc was an enclosed, Eiffel Tower–like construct that was effectively a continuation of the spire below. This was the “mast” for the station’s solar sail, more than 820,000 square meters of Mylar that spread from the base of the tower like the petals of a sunflower. It collected energy from the sun that not only helped to power the station but kept it aloft in its levitated orbit—above and beyond the deadly Van Allen radiation belts—and simultaneously spun the station to generate centripetal gravity. A meshwork of wires also enabled the array to serve as a high-gain antenna for all communications with Earth. No proud, full, forward-topgallant canvas, this: the gigantic sail was silent and eerily motionless.

  A series of elevator trips at vertical and horizontal right angles to one another brought Lord to the first of the station’s two private docking areas. These ports were located directly adjacent to but separate from the terminal at the spaceward side of the hub. They allowed individuals on sensitive government or industrial business to come and go without standard processing. Both the public and private terminals were athwart the station’s zero-g center, where gravity was effectively nonexistent. A series of waist-high rails, pylon-mounted handholds, and carefully spaced sandal-like foot restraints were available for newcomers who had not yet acclimated to the sustained leap and potential weightless tumble produced by every step.

  The contrast of the sunlit radial arms and fractal skyscraper with the deep-space side of the station was dramatic. Here, beneath the solar sail, it was not just a dark place; it was kaleidoscopic. Outside the large windows the golden Mylar of the sail reflected the stars back to the stars. The shroud of darkness caused inside by the sail required lighting arrays made of narrow phosphorescent glowstrips laid along the floor and ceiling—­though these were muted so that they too would not bounce back off the sails and create a confusion of false paths. Along with dull red spacecraft-warning flashers, they gave the whole place what Lord had always felt was a spooky waterfront feeling, like he used to experience walking along the Hudson River.

  Another quality that made the bays a special challenge was that they were decoupled from the station’s spin to make the docking maneuver less complicated for incoming pilots. They only had to find and contact the classic docking cone, not match it in a longitudinal roll. For occupants, these bays hovered at the fringe of the station like a hoop skirt, and elevators arriving there corkscrewed lazily from the station’s constantly turning central structure into the static frame of the bays. In an emergency—such as depressurization—a helical staircase provided quick egress as long as a veteran spacefarer was handy to pull new arrivals toward it, their weightlessness diminishing the farther they traveled along the stairs.

  Ordinarily, Lord enjoyed that transfer process. Many people found it a challenge, but they were not retired fighter pilots. The gradual freedom from gravity, the upward then sideward trip in the elevators—it all reminded Lord of the mildly disorienting, belly-tickling theme park rides he’d enjoyed as a kid and the test planes he’d pushed beyond their rated limits.

  But not now.

  Holding one of the matte-black aluminum handrails, Lord looked out the viewport some twenty feet away. He began humming the old tune “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay”; it was unavoidable, a programmed response to being in the docking bay, a response he had given up trying to resist. To the left of the viewport was the docking ring, five feet in diameter, which formed an airtight short-sleeve seal with the matching port on the top of the shuttle. Once the “all-secure” notice was given, the hatches opened automatically and, with the help of handholds, passengers could literally float in or out.

  They could, that is, if the sophisticated security systems let them, Lord thought.

  The first line of defense was the volumetric security scans—algorithms searching for the lines of a concealed sidearm or drug canister. Then there were the mass spectrometers secreted inside the air filtration vents, and the barely perceptible pulse from the non-contact ultrasonogram: both were looking for finer contraband like disease germs, both innocent and weaponized; fleas and other unwelcome insects; and—with the IC’s lithium niobate sensors—even EEG traces that might betray antipsychotic medication at work in the bloodstream. There had never been a homicide in space, and no one wanted to host the first.

  “Director Lord,” a voice broke the eerie calm.

  “Go ahead, Janet.”

  “Colonel Franco spoke with fifteen people at the reception, listened to at least seven others directly, and was within IC range of five more.”

  “Who did it look like he was eavesdropping on?” Lord asked. Franco was too skilled an intelligence officer to bring up anything sensitive there. But that didn’t mean others were as smart.

  “Definitely Commander Stanton,” she informed him.

  “That’s nothing,” Lord said. Stanton was only interested in station operations, not off-Earth intrigue. The commander might have discussed the new, mysterious Chinese Jade Star satellite or the Russian space station, but not much more that would interest Franco. “Go on.”

  “Another definite was Hiromi Tsuburaya of CBA.”

  “Was that after I left?” Lord asked.

  “About a minute, yes,” Grainger replied.

  Tsuburaya was the Japanese chief operating officer of Consolidated Bandwidth of Asia, one of the largest news organizations in the world. Lord had noticed her, but that was before the news from Japan broke and she had seemed her usual, austere self. After that, he lost sight of her.

  “Next,” he said.

  “The other three were Sheik Maalik Kattan, Fraas Dircks, and Wallace Brown-Card, all very briefly.”

  Grainger sent their profiles but Lord knew them all. Franco did not like to gamble—being in debt was not a good idea for intelligence officers—so he was probably asking Kattan which potential foreign sources were in debt; Dircks was the pornography billionaire from Holland, whom every operative wanted to know for the same reason; Brown-Card was the CFO of Orbital Banking, which had a branch on the station that was used—HooverComm suspected—for money sterilization, electronic laundering via systems that were not just dedicated but were hidden in an office the size of the LOO. Only the CFO’s DNA plus a mystery odor that changed daily could open the door. Lord would have to wait for Dr. Carter’s nanites to be field-ready in order to get inside.

  “Thank you, Agent,” Lord said.

  “Action order?”

  “Has Tsuburaya filed a departure plan?”

  “No, sir,” Grainger replied. “In fact, she went to see Commander Stanton’s medic for a sedative then went to her cabin.”

  “Understandable,” Lord said. “Okay, watch her. She may come up with something.”

  Hiromi Tsuburaya had come up through the ranks as a war correspondent; she knew how to dig for news. More important, she k
new how to swap influence for news. The fifty-two-year-old could turn an unknown into a celebrity in an hour or less, and that kind of power loosened lips. Even Franco might open up to her, swap information, to learn whatever she might know about the other two space stations.

  Lord watched the countdown clock in his IC, which had automatically plugged into the PriD database upon his arrival. Then, as the timer announced two minutes, he saw it.

  The arrival of a shuttle, public or private, never failed to impress. Gleaming white or silver—this one was silver—the ships rose into the viewport from below, like old cruise ships appearing through a morning mist or around a waterfront tower in New York harbor. It was a seamless, sunlit pyramid growing until it filled the window—now the nose, then the cockpit window, and finally the delta wing, seen from above. It was following an invisible guidance beam, fully autonomous, once it came to within a thousand meters of the Empyrean. Lord saw the probe on the top of the fuselage find the drogue on the PriD, heard the reassuring ripple-bang of the latches, and then the ship was still.

  The whir of gears, the rush of air, and then the seals were secure. The hatches pulled back with a faint, mechanical whisper and then Lord was looking down into the shuttle. A moment later a figure appeared, the top of her head toward him. A thin white pole extended up and down from the side of the docking sleeve—at least, relative to the passengers. The pole was pointing directly at Lord. Grips dropped down on both sides and the occupant partly pulled, partly floated through the hatch. She tucked her knees to her chest, emerged through the Empyrean ring, and with the grace of a seasoned space veteran, Dr. Saranya May completed the transfer.

  Holding one of the rails while her vision adjusted to the relative darkness, she spotted Lord at once. She met his eyes with recognition and relief and started toward him, eschewing the foot restraints and pulling herself along using the grips atop the pylons. Lord noticed that she was unable to avoid glancing behind her. From where he stood, Lord could not see either Franco or Ziv Levy in the hatchway. They must still be strapped into their seats, either conferring, avoiding him, or more likely both.