Zero-G

by William Shatner

  “SLAT33045,” Jørgensen repeated.

  “That’s it.”

  “On my way,” she said.

  The request that Lord had made was not illegal—provided there was a court order to effectively hack their brain, since virtually everything a person knew, needed to know, and even didn’t care to know but knew anyway was stored in their IC. Absent a judge’s approval, it was up to the discretion of law enforcement to authorize a PEST—a Personal Electronic Sovereignty Transgression, an act made a Class A felony by the Technological Security Act of 2023. If the theft of data did not result in a conviction, if it were merely a fishing expedition, Lord could be held criminally liable. Jørgensen was impressed that the Zero-G director had taken that responsibility openly without leaving it for Tengan to do in the shadows.

  She crossed through the thinning clusters of lunar workers who were leaving the basement, headed to their posts or quarters. She went to the small officer’s closet, stepped in, and shut the door behind her. Lights and airflow turned on. It was here that she, Tengan, and other authorized personnel could receive eyes-only messages from NASA or any other groups that had access.

  “SLAT33045,” she said. “Pickpocket.”

  The IC copying program was created by Russian hackers to quickly grab data from passersby without their knowledge. The name Pickpocket stuck, even when governments adapted and refined it for national security. It appeared as a blind spot in the IC, but the program was like a whirlpool: it expanded down, as deep as necessary, finding every open spot of storage to retain stolen data.

  Loaded now, Jørgensen ordered the program to go dormant. Otherwise, she would accidentally steal data from anyone she passed on her way to medbay. She took a moment to rediscover her balance: enhanced storage capacity did not add physical weight, but it created a moment of neurological overload, causing a flourish of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and disorientation. Jørgensen adjusted her posture and refamiliarized herself with the lesser gravity. Law enforcement had used those external signs to profile potential Pickpockets on Earth, in much the same way that they had successfully ID’ed terrorists by their physiological traits.

  The officer left the closet and continued down the corridor. Here, the concrete floor and ceiling of the base had been welded to the rock of the moon itself, the flexible joints keeping the basement level airtight during tremors. They had performed heroically today. The ­charcoal-gray basalt with streaks of silvery-white nickel were visible along the walls. Most residents had a sense of being grounded down here; many described it as a spiritual experience to be able to run their hands along alien stone. Jørgensen was one of them. Like Tengan, she passionately loved her new home.

  Entering the small, brightly lit room, she quickly took in the white walls and big displays of data floating before them. There were two cots, with several more folded up like Murphy beds. There was one medic attending to both patients. One man was handcuffed with white bands to the sides of the bed. Looking at the unconscious men—IVs in their arms, sensor patches on their foreheads, bandages on their wounds—she felt like the American general George Patton, whom she had read about in one of her great-grandfather’s books. Those books had instilled in her the importance of discipline, pride, and duty. During World War II, Patton had slapped an able-bodied soldier who was suffering from psychological stress and sitting among the gravely wounded men in an infirmary. That slap, impulsive but honest, had effectively cost the general his career.

  But we remember it because of the values it represented. Her eyes settled on the figure lying beside the wounded Captain Kodera. Consider this my slap, Mr. Christie, she thought angrily. If what Sam Lord says is true, I’d do this without authorization.

  “Dr. Kelly, would you leave us?” she asked. “I’ll only be a minute.”

  The young man looked over, nodded, and without a word, the doctor left the room, closing the door behind him.

  Jørgensen stepped between the cots, laying a hand on the tightly bandaged wrist of the sedated Kodera. Then she turned, placed one hand on the side panel of Christie’s cot, and lowered her head toward the unconscious man. She moved a finger, initiating the Pickpocket program. The void in her own IC glowed hungrily. She bent lower, connected her IC with that of Christie.

  There was a flash in front of her eyes and behind them, like a solar flare whipping through the eyepiece of a telescope. Her head jerked back and her knees buckled. She fell to the floor slowly in the weak lunar gravity.

  “Dr. Kelly!” she heard herself shouting repeatedly, her voice sounding distant, hollow. “Dr. Kelly!”

  The medic ran back into the room, where he found her on the floor, curled in a fetal position, blood running from her ears and nose.

  Lord didn’t need any more bad news. Unfortunately, reality didn’t care.

  The Zero-G director was sitting across the aisle from Saranya and Diego as the shuttle closed in on the Empyrean. The scientists huddled close on facing chairs, sharing IC data—for the first time since they’d met—reviewing numbers from the aurora and trying to find a weakness in the device. They had managed to reach one of their colleagues, an atmospheric specialist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who had been studying the situation nonstop since the first attack in Japan.

  Lord was working on his own set of data, using his old navigational software to try to determine whether there was any vector pattern to the attacks or whether they were entirely random.

  On the station, the comm was relatively quiet after Adsila returned, the conversation limited to the sudden, steady shrinking of the aurora and the slow return of some electronics on Earth.

  “So the hardware systems weren’t destroyed?” Adsila asked.

  “Just blocked,” McClure said.

  “Look at this,” Grainger said. “Weaportunity knocks.”

  Lord glanced briefly at the window Grainger sent to all their ICs, though he knew exactly what he would see. The FBI Counterterrorism and Forensic Science Research Unit had noted the short-term impact of the large-scale event and was already initiating a crash program to “study the phenomenon with a goal of replicating and localizing the effects.” One of Al-Kazaz’s predecessors had coined the term weaportunity for this fast-start process after a 2032 outbreak of tuberculosis struck only Melanesians living on the island nation of Tonga. The search for mutated bacteria began at once, ostensibly to find cures, but in truth to harvest them and create additional weaponized variations.

  Don’t judge, Lord told himself. All those sexy planes you flew came from military R&D.

  He returned to the problems at hand, only to be interrupted by a secure message from Commander Tengan.

  “Sam, Don Christie is in a coma—fundamentally brain dead,” the lunar commander reported. “Lieutenant Commander Jørgensen suffered a seizure when she tried to copy his IC.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that,” he said, then asked incredulously, “A NASA Pickpocket malfunctioned?”

  Tengan’s face became grimmer. “Our computer tech says no. She’s looking at him now, believes there was a kill switch.”

  “Installed in his IC? I thought—”

  “Exactly,” Tengan said. “Pickpocket safeguards should have seen it and quarantined it before proceeding. But they wouldn’t have been looking for something planted in the subject’s brain.”

  “His brain? Hardware or software?” Lord asked.

  “We’re looking into that now,” Tengan replied, casting a thumb behind herself. “Tough forensic challenge, since the self-destruction is what apparently caused Christie’s coma.”

  Lord cursed the situation and himself. This was the equivalent of the old-school cyanide capsules spies used to take if they were captured. He should have anticipated something like this, given the clear sophistication of the buggy program used to spy on the lunar lab. He wondered if Christie had even known he h
ad something buried in his skull. Was the former marine a high-level operative or just a flunky wooed by power, ideals, or cash that a search had not yet uncovered?

  The larger question, of course, was who would have technology that sophisticated? The Chinese? Possibly. But Adsila’s quick look at Don Christie’s service file, from the marines and from NASA, showed no connection with China or even the hint of any suspicious activity from NASA intelligence. There had to be an intermediary.

  “Thank you, Commander, and once again I’m sorry,” Lord said as he prepared to turn back to his own challenge. “I appreciate everything—”

  “Wait a minute,” Tengan said suddenly.

  Lord saw her turn away, obviously conversing with someone else. Tengan switched his IC to point-of-view mode, so Lord could now see Jørgensen and Kodera lying on their cots as a med-tech bent over Christie’s motionless body. A handheld scanner pulsed red as the med-tech held it over Christie’s forehead. Numbers and neural maps filled the air above. Dr. Kelly was standing beside her. He had been studying the data before turning to Tengan.

  “Fairchild found a hot spot,” the doctor said. “Lingering elevated electrical activity situated in the arcuate fasciculus.” Lord’s IC told him that was a bundle of axons, the part of a neuron that transmits impulses from the cell.

  “Is the location significant?” Tengan asked.

  “Possibly,” Kelly replied. “No other nonhuman primates have that or anything similar. Any research in this area would have to have been done on humans, meaning it had to be sanctioned . . . or illegal. Illegal would have been far less costly than a bullet in the brain.”

  “Meaning there’s no incentive from a criminal organization to invest in it,” Tengan said.

  “Correct again,” Kelly told him.

  “Was there an implant?” Tengan asked.

  “No scarring at all, anywhere,” Kelly said.

  “So, software in the IC.”

  “Negative,” Fairchild replied. “Commander, this was programmed into the brain. Verbal pathways were also affected.”

  “You mean, Christie would’ve died if he’d tried to confess his sins,” Tengan said.

  “My guess is any string of keywords would’ve triggered the same result,” Fairchild replied. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  Hearing this, Dr. Kelly seemed to shiver. “Someone very big, very legal, and very well funded did something very sophisticated and very illegal here.”

  “Thank you,” Tengan said, then returned to her face-to-face view of Lord. She took a moment for a breath. “Any ideas?”

  “About who may have become ‘thought police’ for real?” he said. “Yes, I do, and I don’t like what I’m thinking. Let me get back to you on that.”

  “Please do,” Tengan said. “This could be bigger than we know.”

  Lord signed off. He shut his eyes for a much-needed power nap. Fifteen minutes later, he took the tube device from his pocket, the one Christie had tried to remove from the buggy. It was frighteningly simple: what the techs called a jumper, an illegal device that allowed disparate, unaffiliated systems to talk with one another. Jumpers had been outlawed by the International Intellectual Property Act of 2029, when software giants and content providers fought for stricter controls against piracy. The software program in the buggy would have self-­destroyed after the program was stolen. This would be the only evidence.

  Lord returned the device to his pocket then sat back. He looked out at the Empyrean as it grew larger in his viewport. It took a lot to shake the commander, but he was nearly as rattled as Dr. Kelly as he considered the implications of what they’d discovered. The blind, brute danger of the Jade Star’s weapon seemed to fade in menace beside the careful, insidious evil of some human beings.

  “Sam,” Saranya said cautiously, “we may have something . . . a code we believe will shut down the SAMI.”

  “You don’t sound excited,” Lord said.

  “There’s a problem,” she said, reviewing her calculations.

  “What kind?” Lord pressed.

  “We’ve looked at our options . . .” she began, then her voice trailed away as she returned to her calculations.

  Lord shot a look at Ras Diego.

  “It’s the delivery system,” the scientist finished for her. “That’s going to be a real challenge.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  HAVING ZERO GRAVITY in the Drum means one thing above all: that my team is always on its toes.”

  After the disaster that had befallen the security team, Stanton’s words, always meant somewhat in jest, were gravely true. Rest time was canceled and brief meal breaks were taken in the Drum. With all the sector chiefs dead, Stanton was forced to increase electronic surveillance rather than deploy human patrols to oversee security and safety measures on the station. Using Station Hazard Authority, Stanton also suspended privacy rules. Rooms and belongings were immediately scanned for weapons and other contraband as the Empyrean went into threat-prevention mode. He also gave his SIC team permission to e-bug all private storage systems onboard. This would not reveal content of secure communications, only destinations. The upside, for paying customers like the CIA, DIA, and NSA, were that these connections could be analyzed later to see how guests like Ziv Levy, Jack Franco, Sheik Kattan, and others routed their clandestine messages. It would be useful in the event that the SIC ever needed to target a satellite to shut someone down.

  Instead of looking for extraterrestrial life, the station’s deep space sensors were repurposed toward the Jade Star, watching for any indication that an antimatter pulse might be headed in their direction. Stanton knew that the team could handle the crisis until replacements could be sent from Vandenberg or Canaveral, probably within forty-eight hours. Newly energized, holding himself at attention, Stanton floated through the Drum, not directing his drift but moving randomly from station to station, providing a rigid command presence and an experienced eye to the team. Some among the crew were veterans of space travel who had served tenures on the ISS before it was turned over to Russia; others were relatively new and clearly struggling with the tendency to overreact in an emergency. Stanton steadied all of them by asking for specific updates that required focus and a careful, thoughtful response. Fear and distraction among the staff—for their own lives and loved ones on Earth—were not qualities he could afford.

  What concerned him were the surveillance activities and another attack from the Jade Star module. Depending on where a theoretical strike took place on the Empyrean, decompression might not be instantaneous. There would be time to evacuate to the public shuttle and Ziv Levy’s private spacecraft—which had been commandeered under the SHA. Stanton had the Slammers placed on autodeploy: no human signal was required to seal the corridors if decompression were detected anywhere on the station. He had hoped a third shuttle would be added to the possible escape fleet: the John Young, which had just docked from Armstrong Base. Unfortunately, he did not have jurisdiction over the craft and, with the shuttle Grissom incapacitated, he had no choice but to accede to Blake Tengan’s insistence that the lunar colonists not be left without a transport. Stanton had been caught off-guard by the commander’s attitude: in their few meetings in Houston, Tengan had struck him as a person who would welcome the opportunity to prove the independent capabilities of the base. But, like any good commander, Tengan put the well-being of her crew above personal ideology.

  Of course, that’s the challenge of command, Stanton thought as he approved the immediate turnaround requested by the John Young pilot. To determine when a project becomes a mission, and the objective is more important than the people serving it.

  Stanton did not get the shuttle. But the Drum did get something that even his drill-and-ceremony approach hadn’t anticipated.

  It got Sam Lord.

  Upon docking, Lord and Drs. May and Diego headed directly for the Drum.


  “Permission to enter,” Lord said as he entered through the door in the upper section, pausing to seek out Stanton.

  “State cause,” Stanton replied sharply, indicating that permission had not yet been granted.

  The stoic Empyrean commander was floating a few feet from the floor, just beside the communications section. Stanton turned in place and hovered there, stiff and vigilant, as Lord floated toward him.

  “This is Dr. Saranya May and Dr. Ras Diego,” Lord said, indicating the other two standing in the doorway.

  “The research scientists stationed on the moon,” Stanton said.

  “Yes. It was Dr. May whose work was stolen to create the Chinese weapon.”

  “I’ve heard.” Stanton’s eyes shifted from Lord to Saranya then back. “What do you need from me?”

  “Drs. May and Diego have written a command they hope will shut the device down,” Lord said. “In order to deliver it, they have to get the signal past the plasma cloud.”

  “You had the lunar shuttle at your disposal, Director Lord. Couldn’t you have used that?”

  Lord punched up his IC data. “The plasma frequency of the cloud exceeds the maximum frequency of the shuttle’s transmitter,” he said, before swooshing the information away. “I don’t know what that means, exactly, except that it’s not good enough to do the job. And we obviously can’t move into the cloud.”

  Stanton winced imperceptibly at Lord’s remark. The thought of his dead fleet was a kick in the gut.

  “We need to borrow the antenna the Empyrean uses to blast signals to other galaxies,” Lord told him. “It’s the strongest one starside.”

  Stanton looked again at Saranya. He moved a finger. “Can she give the data to my people?”

  “It would be faster if she could plug it in herself—”

  “She has 2B security clearance on Armstrong Base,” Stanton said. “That has no traction here. I repeat: can she do that?”

  “Commander—Curtis—we’re wasting time.”