Zero-G

by William Shatner

  TWENTY-NINE

  LORD AND ADSILA hit the tower platform and bounced. The impact wasn’t hard but it was enough to knock Lord’s skull against the back of his helmet and drag him from his reflective semiconsciousness.

  “Sam, Adsila—are you all right?”

  It was Saranya May. Lord was still coming back into his head and didn’t immediately answer.

  “You did it!” she said. “You destroyed the module! Please respond!”

  “I’m here,” Lord said. “Somewhere—”

  “You’re circling the platform at the base of the truss,” Stanton cut in. “We think your number two has passed out—low air.”

  “I hear you,” Lord said, shaking off the last of his torpor. He was looking up at the top of the tower, spinning slowly with Adsila as the bounce carried them up. Adsila had directed them to the back of the tower, where they’d made their ascent. If he didn’t stop them, they’d drift away again.

  “Sam, use your heel when you come around,” Stanton said. “The magnet may not hold but it’ll slow you.”

  Lord kicked out with his artificial limb. The leg locked, hard, and the heel made contact with one of the fractal girders. It skidded several inches then held. Adsila swung around him, gently bumped the side of the tower, rebounded, then did the same on the other side. This time, however, Lord did not spin off with her. The CHAI leg held and Lord was able to bring his human leg and its magnetic heel to the surface of the tower. From his perspective he was standing on solid ground with Adsila turning above him like one of old Isaiah’s lariats. He pulled her in and, holding her like a helium-filled balloon, he walked to the base of the tower.

  “Dr. Carter?”

  “Already at the docking bay,” the medic replied.

  “I’m coming too,” Saranya said.

  “No, Saranya—”

  “Yes, Sam,” she insisted.

  “You managed not to break my station, but I still want to know how you’re breaking my SIC security,” Stanton added with annoyance.

  That was about to end with Saranya’s departure from the Drum; Lord hoped that Grainger had gotten what she needed, though he didn’t want to ask for specifics over an open IC.

  Holding Adsila’s tether so that she was bobbing right at his shoulder, Lord stopped at the base of the tower. He transferred carefully to the platform, taking the ninety-degree step with his CHAI leg, making certain it was firmly set, then stepped with his other leg. The tower now rose high at his back and the docked Earth shuttle loomed ahead, porcelain-white with its windows glowing from reflected sunlight. Though Adsila and her pack were weightless, if unwieldy, the chugging steps in magnetic boots kept Lord’s breathing fast, his bio-signs in the red.

  “This walk seemed a lot shorter when we left the hatch,” he said to no one in particular.

  “Blame it on General Relativity,” Dr. May said.

  “Can’t. He outranks me.”

  Saranya groaned at the joke.

  “Explain,” Lord said, wanting to understand and also to hear her voice.

  “Spacetime is impacted by the energy and momentum of matter and radiation,” she said. “You messed that up so the same path is less impacted by distance than by inertial momentum.”

  “You’re kidding,” Lord said breathlessly. “I didn’t know I had it in me.”

  “You do,” she said, laughing.

  “You’re just getting too old for eleventh-hour heroics,” Dr. Carter remarked.

  “Not true,” Lord said, shaking his head and causing Adsila to bob. He watched his movements but continued talking; it helped him feel less alone. “Dr. May just said I screwed up spacetime—I’ve still got what it takes. Never mind the eleventh hour. What I should have done was ration myself by skipping the challenges at midnight, four a.m., and six a.m.”

  A pinging alarm went off in his IC. It was from Adsila’s suit.

  “Cerebral hypoxia alert,” Dr. Carter said. “Sam, if you can speed it up—”

  “Moving,” he said. “Imagining down,” he added, and increased both his stride and speed. The yellow personnel hatch, used for engineers doing exterior work on the shuttle, was some forty feet away. He covered the distance quickly, his own brain starting to swim. The hatch opened as he neared and someone in a blue engineering space suit emerged. The nameplate said Mitchell.

  “Hand her over, sir,” he said.

  Lord leaned forward and passed the tether to the man. Adsila was pulled into the airlock headfirst. When Lord had a magnetic sole on the ladder, he released the tether and followed her down. The hatch shut and the compartment was pressurized. When the internal door was opened, the near-weightless EAD was pulled through.

  Lord wobbled after her in the uneven gravity. And then his human leg gave out. He fell to one knee while helping hands removed his helmet, unsnapped his suit, and asked him questions he couldn’t quite ­process.

  “—lie down, sir?”

  “—hurt anywhere?”

  “—a drink?”

  Lord let the people asking the questions make the decisions. He felt a straw pressed between his lips and sipped. He saw Dr. Carter turn toward him and say he was leaving with Adsila but that she would be fine. He smiled, slightly, as lips were pressed to his cheek, as he smelled Dr. May, saw her eyes flash before he closed his.

  Lord knelt there a moment, marveling as he had so many times at both the camaraderie and generosity of his fellow creatures—and also at the reckless, stupid swagger of individuals and groups and nations that tested those souls.

  And then he recalled the other matter. The one that was not yet done.

  “Janet,” he said into his IC, “do you have anything?”

  “I do, sir,” she said. “I very much do.”

  “Be there in five,” he replied.

  Saranya overheard that. “What did you just say?” she demanded.

  “Nothing.” Lord sucked down air and pushed off from the tiles.

  Saranya’s hands shot out to steady him. “Stay where you are.”

  “No . . . please help me out of this,” Lord said, pulling at the suit. The smart fabric came away cooperatively.

  “Sam, you must go to sick bay,” the scientist said.

  “Not yet,” he told her. “The job’s not finished.”

  “It can wait—”

  “It can’t,” Lord said, jerking his head toward the hatch.

  She looked at him, puzzled; then she understood. He had something to do before the shuttles were allowed to depart.

  Lord put on his tunic then stepped from the magnetic boots and pulled his own from the locker. They felt so light he was convinced he could—and would—fly to the comm. With renewed energy and fresh purpose, he walked swiftly toward the comm.

  Lord entered the Zero-G command center and was greeted by three sets of admiring eyes—beyond that, no one demonstrated more than quiet respect. One of their members was in sick bay, which precluded any kind of big, exuberant welcome . . . and Lord had, it appeared, some urgent business to conclude.

  He switched his IC to team-only.

  “What do you have?” he asked Grainger as he approached her station.

  “I found four months of communiqués to Don Christie before we were shut out,” she said, shifting the data over.

  The SIC had recorded more than forty thousand messages from the Earth to the moon, and three hundred from the Empyrean to the moon.

  “Here they are isolated by point of origin,” she said, swiping over a file.

  There were 113 separate locations that talked to Armstrong Base.

  “Here are the sites that spoke to Christie,” Grainger said, winking them in Lord’s direction.

  There were 1,963 messages from nineteen sites. Five of them were family, six were private citizens—friends or former colleagues, most likely—and se
ven were places at NASA.

  One stood out. Fifty-one messages from this sender. Forty-nine of them from Earth. Two from Empyrean. One was today . . . unanswered.

  “Abernathy, grab your Gauntlet and come with me,” Lord said as he turned back toward the door.

  The agent leapt from his chair. He hurried to the armory chest beside the LOO and pulled out a black glove.

  The Gauntlet was a thick, FBI-issue glove that reached to the elbow. Activated by palm pressure, it fired two stun-level arcs of electricity from the back of the wrist. The wearer’s IC controlled the voltage based on threat assessment. Each agent kept one at his post for emergency response. This was certainly an emergency.

  There was a knock at Jack Franco’s door. “Colonel?”

  Franco jumped from the bed. “Kristine?”

  “Yes—”

  “You’ve recovered,” Franco said distractedly as he touched his IC to unlock the door. He sounded like a man who hadn’t thought about her since his one perfunctory visit to the medbay.

  He had been lying there for over an hour, waiting for the travel embargo to be lifted while he contemplated the madness of space. The universe was supposed to be ordered, but from the moment he’d arrived very little had functioned correctly up here—not even his companion, though her soft voice and gentle knock were a welcome diversion.

  Franco opened the door. He saw the woman, looking healthy and—slightly defiant? He watched as she stepped deftly to one side, then felt the hot punch of fifty thousand volts hitting his chest. The shot momentarily crippled his central nervous system and dropped him to the floor, though minor variations in the centripetal gravity caused him to fall like a reed undulating in the wind.

  Agent Abernathy walked in, followed by Sam Lord, who squeezed Kristine’s hand as he passed. She remained in the corridor, the guest room filling quickly with the three men. Lord shut the door then glared down at Franco. He looked like a crushed flower, his body flat, limbs akimbo. The man’s eyes were open and he was panting; otherwise, he was quite still.

  Lord squatted beside him. “I’m recording this arrest,” Lord quietly informed him. “Anything you say or IC will become part of the evidence submitted in any future prosecution.”

  Franco turned his eyes toward the Zero-G commander. They were hard and unrepentant.

  “Are you carrying a kill switch, Colonel Franco?”

  Franco did not reply.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” Lord said. “An implant. Like the one that blew out Don Christie’s brain?”

  “Wh . . . who?”

  Lord shook his head. “We may not like each other, Colonel, but neither of us is stupid. Why did you do it?”

  Franco pressed his lips shut. They were trembling, residual effects of the hit he’d taken.

  “We tracked your communications to Christie,” Lord said. “I also found the jumper in the buggy. Clever. I’m sure forensics will tell us where you got it and those guys will sell you out to save themselves. You’re probably going to die for this, but you may want to try to shine up your legacy, and Christie’s, by telling me it wasn’t for money or power in the service of a foreign government.”

  Franco shut his eyes.

  “Hiding from me or what you did?” Lord asked.

  “Y-you don’t understand.”

  “Teach me, you bastard,” Lord said.

  Franco maintained his silence.

  Lord came closer. “Colonel, Christie didn’t serve with you. You sought him out. How did you corrupt a good kid?”

  Franco’s eyes snapped open. “I didn’t . . . corrupt . . . anyone,” he said with effort. “Don Christie was a good marine . . . a good American.”

  “Your definition of ‘good’ truly eludes me,” Lord said through his teeth. “You killed tens, hundreds of thousands of people. You nearly killed me!”

  “It . . . it wasn’t supposed to happen . . . that way,” he said.

  “What wasn’t?”

  “The . . . the scenario.”

  Lord waited. He felt that if he said anything, if he moved at all, he would kill the man lying before him.

  “Beijing wants the high frontier . . . as a way to control . . . to kill . . . humankind,” Franco said. “We must do . . . the same.”

  “‘We’—who?”

  “America,” he said.

  “You mean the Department of Defense,” Lord said.

  “We are America.”

  Lord shook his head with disgust. “I was military.” He thumped his chest with a finger. “I wouldn’t have done what you did. You gave the Chinese a megaweapon to start an arms race in space!”

  “There wouldn’t have been . . . a race,” Franco said. “Just knowing they had it . . . funds would have been allocated for the Space Weapons . . . Arsenal Program. Military research . . . would have . . . my God . . . it would have been vigorous, not just two scientists in a lunar lab! We would have pushed beyond them . . . ended the threat forever.”

  “We would have become tyrants, not them.”

  “Not tyrants . . . peacekeepers! We didn’t know Dr. May’s data was faulty . . . incomplete. We thought Beijing would test it . . . out here . . . just to demonstrate that it worked.”

  Lord nodded. “Guess what. It did.” He pushed off his knees and stood. “You didn’t even have the conviction to wire your own head to explode. Otherwise, you couldn’t have traded information for safety if you were ever found out.”

  “Not . . . safety,” he said, almost spitting the word. “Education. People must know. I’ll fall on my sword,” he said with a little laugh. “Proudly.”

  Lord shook his head. “I wish I could say I felt sorry for you, or understood. I don’t. You’re going back to Earth to stand trial for mass murder. What you did shames everyone in uniform, everyone who is up here to discover and explore—everyone who has ever believed in the better angels of humankind.”

  “Sanctimony,” Franco charged.

  “No,” the Zero-G leader said. “Experience. Agent Abernathy?”

  “Sir?”

  Lord looked down at the colonel one last time, then turned away. “Gauntlet on stun.”

  THIRTY

  THE CHINESE SPACECRAFT Sun Wukong reached orbit twenty-six minutes after the Dragon’s Eye closed for good.

  Sheng had managed to stay awake, if not always alert, in the crippled Jade Star. At first, he thought the three figures who entered the module were a hallucination caused by a mixture of gases in the corrupted atmosphere of the station. But then they touched him, and spoke.

  “Chairman Sheng,” he had heard. It was a young male voice.

  “Yes?”

  “We have come to relieve you,” said a young female voice.

  “Who are you?”

  “Taikonaut Cheung Zhang, sir, 2040 class of the China National Space Administration, accompanying Senior Taikonaut Wong Fu-Wing.”

  Sheng raised his hands to hold them off. “No, no, I must remain. You do not have the authority—”

  “Chairman Sheng,” he had heard the third person say. It was an older, more authoritarian male voice. “I am Lin Go.”

  To Sheng’s shock, it was one of the vice administrators of the CNSA, and therefore one of the few he could not legitimately supersede.

  “Please accompany me.”

  Feeling a swift cloud of shame that he was sure he shared with every leader who had ever been relieved of a command, Sheng continued to hover in place. He was surprised when Lin gripped his arm reassuringly.

  “Chairman,” Lin said in his ear, “this relief comes without censure, with no shame attached to your duties as commander of this post.”

  Sheng understood the words but not the thinking behind them. He stiffly but quietly accompanied the vice administrator and Cheung, while Wong stayed behind to keep watch on the bl
inded Dragon’s Eye. The plasma cloud was continuing to dissipate, with very few traces of the original device remaining. It had simply ceased to exist.

  Neither of the taikonauts who accompanied Sheng had mentioned any other station survivors, nor had Sheng inquired. He wondered at the fate of his devoted assistant, Tse Hung, but it would have demonstrated weakness to ask after him. Either the young man had survived to serve again, or he hadn’t. Either he would be evacuated to Earth, or he wouldn’t. In any case, these eventualities were beyond Sheng’s control.

  The chairman saw several fresh new faces floating through the corridors, imagined they had grouped the survivors together for evaluation. Those who could serve would remain. Beijing did not acknowledge psychological trauma.

  The two brought Sheng to the bay where the Sun Wukong was docked. The chairman had never before flown on this new shuttle, which was conceived as a means for top political and military figures to go to space, to broadcast their elevated status to the people of China. As he entered the clean, delicately designed interior, he saw graphic depictions of the legendary figure for whom the shuttle was named: the Monkey King, the hero of an epic about a journey to Heaven to battle celestial warriors.

  Once the airlock was sealed, Sheng followed Lin, floating weightlessly to a small but private cabin. Lin removed his helmet and stowed it above his plush, cushioned seat, then motioned for Sheng to do the same at the seat opposite.

  Like an automaton, Sheng did as he was bidden. He noticed how Lin had tellingly relaxed in his seat, even crossing his legs, to put himself on a lower level than Sheng—a quiet acknowledgment of the man’s enduring status.

  “We will depart shortly,” Lin said. “Beijing wishes to gather data before the Russians or Americans seek to offer—‘aid,’ they would call it. In the meantime, I am sure you are hungry, thirsty—what would you like?”

  Sheng shook his head once. His body was numb, desired nothing. He remained rigidly upright. “Vice Administrator, I officially request that you contact Beijing to rescind my recall. My work is not yet finished. I would be of far greater service if I stayed to supervise and rebuild.”