by M. J. Locke
Another team veered into their nets as they rose, and Geoff got yanked off his bike. He spun wry—the stars, the flares of the other bikers’ rockets, Phocaea’s surface, all tumbled past. He had no idea where his bike was, or where Amaya was. He feared he’d plow into Phocaea’s surface, but after a moment he realized he’d been thrown upward, out of Phocaea orbit. His breath slowed. Numb calm fell over him. He breathed in and out. Dots of fog appeared and vanished on his faceplate.
Amaya was back there, somewhere, circling back around for him. He was sure of it. But for a moment he thought it might be good if nobody had noticed, and he could just float away, off into the Big Empty.
Then she radioed him that she was approaching. She shot a net that snared him. Geoff grabbed at it, climbed along it to her bike, and mounted behind her. She fired her rockets and took him back around to his own bike. Neither spoke a word.
As he mounted his bike, she finally asked, “You OK?”
“Yeah.”
It was hard to believe that only a half hour ago he had been so excited about his bug-turd art project. He had thought he was such hot shit. Now it all felt like a waste of time. He shook it off. Don’t think. Just do.
* * *
Half an hour after they started, Shelley gave the all-clear. By the time the reporters and their cameras had started showing up, most of the bikers were down, gathering near their hangar, checking their equipment. Geoff coasted to a stop and launched himself off his bike. He ached. He could smell his own sour stink, and though slimed in sweat, he was shivering. Dully, he wondered if his climate controls were malfunctioning. He shuffled clumsily over to the crater lip, near where he and Carl had been standing less than an hour before, and leaned over, hands on his thighs.
When he straightened, the mist in the crater was clearing. The pale sun rose low over the horizon in the southwest, and cast long shadows across the still steaming wreckage. The stars faded from view. The crater floor was covered in a graphite slick, with neatly spaced blocks on top in yellow, red, and an assortment of metallic hues. In the crater’s middle was a lump of dirty ice about half the size of what they had had before the delivery. A couple weeks’ worth, maybe. No more.
Amaya came up next to him; he recognized the stickers on her suit sleeve. He could not see her face well. But he knew what she was thinking. “There’s always other shipments coming Down,” he said. “My mom says Commissioner Navio is a genius at making the ice last. We’ll get more in soon. It’ll be OK.”
“Yeah,” she said.
Shelley alighted next to them, and slapped Geoff and Amaya on the back. “You all saved us. Good work.” She bounded off toward the warehouses. By then, Kamal and Ian had found them.
“Aren’t you going to talk to the reporters?” Kamal asked, and Ian said, “You should get over there. This was your idea. You deserve the credit. Not those clowns.”
Geoff shook his head. “Nah. Gotta bounce.”
Kamal and Ian protested, but Amaya said, “Lay off.” And to Geoff: “We’ll talk to the reporters. Catch you later.”
“Yeah. Later.”
No point in delaying the inevitable. It was time to face his parents, and their disappointment that it was not Carl, but he, who had survived.
3
Back in Zekeston, Jane and her team got to work on inventories, damage reports, alerts, rationing plans. Hours passed in a blur. Marty Graham, her aide, followed her into her office, holding out two pills and a bulb of water.
“What are those for? I feel fine.”
Marty Graham, barely twenty-eight, was a recent transplant from Ceres. He had just gotten engaged. He had not been with Jane long, but had quickly made himself indispensable with his ability to fend people off without angering them, and to anticipate what she would need next in order to do her job. On the other hand, he could be rather a pest, and when she saw the pills and vial in his hands, she waved them away. “I’m fine.”
“Honestly, Chief, don’t be a baby. You’re exhausted. You need to be at your best.” He held up one capsule. “Clears out the cobwebs.” He held up the second. “Stimulant. Medic’s orders. None of us are going to get any sleep for a while. May as well enjoy it.”
He pressed them into her hands. She eyed them sourly. “All right, all right.” She swallowed them. “Has the prime minister gotten my initial report yet? When does he want his briefing?”
“I just got confirmation from his office a moment ago. He’ll see you in half an hour.”
“Good. Call Sean, Aaron, and Tania in.”
“In person?”
“Yes. I’ll want a meatspace meeting for this one.”
“Will do.” He left, and her office door closed behind him. Jane’s three direct reports entered—Sean of Shipping, Stores and Disassembly; Aaron of Utilities and Assembly; and Tania of Computer Support Systems.
“Come in,” she said, and entered the privacy code to her waveware. The tailored drugs did their work: a chemical wave of well-being and strength moved through her, and her thoughts cleared. OK, Marty; you were right, she thought, but she was still scowling. She did not like to depend on a pharmacy to function.
They waited while dead “Stroiders” spy glitter drifted toward the vents, and the “Stroiders” broadcast signal in her heads-up display went out. Gravity was light enough here that the room had no official ceiling; as with all the low-gee parts of the city, they bobbed gently in various shifting orientations around the conference room, twirling slowly and touching surfaces to guide themselves back toward the center. All but Sean, that is, who clung to a handhold: as a Downsider, he was uncomfortable with the tumbling indifference to which end was up that native Upsiders had.
“This will be a quick meeting,” she promised once the mote dust had cleared, “and then I’ll let you get back to work.”
As resource commissioner, she had a budget of twelve offline hours per workweek. During a crisis, as commissioner, she could invoke emergency privilege and take more. The fees were high—and she had no doubt that Upside-Down would bring pressure to bear to keep access open to her department, where the core of this drama was playing out. So be it.
“Sean, how many did we lose, up top?”
He twisted to look at her, and the banked fury in his face told her the news was bad. Hazel-eyed, black-skinned, gray-haired, and tall, Sean Moriarty sported broad, military-stiff shoulders. Deep lines engraved his forehead. He was at the edge of old age, pushing the century mark. “Besides Agre and Kovak? Eight.” His voice was hoarse.
Eight. She had killed eight. She released a slow breath, but did not allow herself to think about it. Not just yet. “I’m very sorry.”
He gave a sharp nod of acquiescence. “Send me their names,” she said. “I’ll notify their families.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” He made a gesture inwave, and her waveface acknowledged receipt of the file. “Fourteen warehouse workers were injured, in all, most of them minor. The list is also attached.”
“I’ll contact them as well, then.” She’d have to do it after her emergency meeting with the PM. She shot the files off to Marty, with a note to fit the notifications into her schedule.
Aaron Nabors was still young, around forty, with blond hair, freckles, and pale skin. His brown eyes were shadowed with fatigue and worry. You would think he had spent the night in half a gee, the way his shoulders slumped and his face muscles sagged.
“What are we down?” Jane asked him.
“Let’s see.” Squinting, tumbling slowly, he ran his finger across invisible icons. Graphics and figures sprang up in their shared waveface, in response to his words. “The city infrastructure assemblers took a hit during the initial disaster, when nutrient flow was disrupted, but we’ve got that back online now, and the bugs are regaining their base numbers, feeding on enriched bug juice as well as their own dead. We’ll be fine there.
“Materials and parts. We’re OK as long as the assemblers don’t hit their reproductive limit for another few days
. We have an emergency shipment of parts and equipment scheduled to arrive a couple months from now. We can probably limp along till the bugs are back up to full capacity.
“Food. The food assemblers weren’t touched and we still have plenty of raw stock. So starvation isn’t an immediate threat, praise God.”
He paused to wipe at the sweat beaded on his upper lip. Jane raised her eyebrows. “Air, water, and power?”
He gestured. Images played in the small group’s center, showing the impending collapse of Phocaea’s resources. He played it through, tweaking the inputs to show them three or four simulations in succession, and froze them in a patterned layout. He pressed his lips together and let Jane and the others study the readouts.
“This one can’t be right,” Sean said, pointing at the temperature display. “The temperature levels off at minus ten C or so, and only drifts down a little after that. I thought the big risk was freezing.”
Aaron replied, “No, not at all. We’ve dumped too much heat into this rock over the decades. It insulates us. It would take a year or more for the city to cool down to a truly dangerous level. It’ll get cold in here, but not deadly cold.”
“Not deadly to humans at least,” Jane said, thinking of the arboretum. “The real risk is the toxins. Contamination in air, water, and food supplies, as our assemblers and disassemblers die off.”
“Slow suffocation, poisoning, and famine,” Tania said, with a gallows grin. “We’ll steep in a stew of our own excretions. Mmmm!”
Jane gave Tania a sharp look. Tania had the decency to look sheepish. Jane pulled the calculations and graphs over, reorganized them, and examined the parameters Aaron had put in. “Your simulations are saying that if we preserve hydrogen fuel for the power plant we can’t begin to rebuild the disassembler base.”
“Correct. If we don’t leave enough for Sean to build up his disassembler population fast, even if we do get an ice shipment in time, we won’t be able to convert enough oxygen to support our people.”
“Give me a date. How long do we have?”
“With strict rationing of fuel, water, and air, and optimal balancing: twenty-six days. That’s the best I can do.”
Jane heard Sean or Tania inhale. She had known, though. “Several dozen families will be falling off the ends of the treeway before then,” Aaron said, “and will either need to be restocked or brought in. That will have to be your call.”
“Bring them in. Standard protocol.” Standard protocol: they were welcome to refuse the official invitation to camp out in Zekeston or one of the other two towns till the supply crisis eased, but did so at their own peril.
Stroiders were a frontier-minded lot. If some fool fell off the treeway insufficiently stocked, and many years later on the other side of the sun ran out of supplies or had no way back, well, too bad, so sad.
Of course, the reality wasn’t quite that harsh. If Phocaea could do something for its citizens beyond the edges of the treeways, it did. Especially if there were children, or if they had racked up a lot of good-sammies. A fleet of craft cruising retrograde in Phocaea’s orbit performed antipiracy and search-and-rescue operations.
But troubles were many, space was vast, and rescue craft were few. Those who had chosen to fall off the treeways not fully stocked were given a lower priority than those who had simply gotten caught in a crisis not of their own making. And this meant that children frequently ended up as victims of their parents’ pigheadedness and poor planning. Reading reports of the frozen bodies found on faraway stroids always pained her. But in a wilderness society where there wasn’t always enough fuel and air and water to go around, people fell out of touch all the time, they had little choice.
“Will do,” Aaron said.
“What about odor management?”
“I’ve cut the control system back by thirty percent,” he replied. “It’ll gradually get more pungent, but won’t be really bad for a week or so.”
“Well, but we are going to have an extra twenty or thirty thousand people coming in from the burbs,” Tania said.
Aaron shrugged. “I accounted for that. I checked the actuarial stats for significant violence and suicide impacts, and kept us below that line.“
“OK, is that it?” Jane asked. Aaron nodded. “Resource accounting,” she said. “Any good prospects from the citizenry?”
Aaron said, “The banks report a small but steady trickle of ice claims coming in. A few sugar-rock reports, but none have panned out. I do not expect them to alter our numbers appreciably.”
“Sugar rocks?” Sean looked confused. He was a fairly recent Downsider émigré.
Tania explained, “The First Wave miners used to hoard methane and water ice inside their claims, as they tapped them out.”
Aaron said, “It’s usually a waste of time to bring them in—a large amount of effort for only a little ice—but once, forty or fifty years ago, a sugar rock made a big difference for the Eros cluster. The university is pairing up with the banks to investigate the claims.”
“Every little bit helps. But we can’t count on sugar rocks to save us. Could you send me your resource balancing calculations?” Jane asked Aaron. “I want to run through them myself, see if I can squeeze anything more out of the system.”
“Of course.” He pulled up his waveface and sent her some files.
“So,” Jane said, “other ice sources. Perhaps from one of the other clusters?”
Sean replied, “Our fellow stroiders—the ones inclined to help, anyway—are all too close to depleted themselves. Saturn, Mars, and Earth are all near opposition—too far away to do us any good. Jovespace is our best bet. I’ve already authorized an emergency expedition. They are outfitting a tug and barge, and will leave tomorrow—I mean, this afternoon.”
“How soon can they get us ice?”
“Eight weeks, earliest. More likely nine.”
A five-week gap. Not soon enough!
Aaron said, “I have received word from Ilion on an interesting lead. A three-million-ton shipment of methane ice is coming Down from the Kuiper belt, destined for a construction project on the moon. That’s the only major ice shipment within four months’ travel of us.”
“What? But that’s all we need! No way anyone would refuse us a reasonable deal. Why didn’t you tell me before?”
Aaron looked apprehensive. “Well, there’s a complication. The ice is owned by Ogilvie & Sons.”
Ogilvie & Sons. The Martian mob. Shit. She pinched her brow. “Where is it now?”
“Hitting a parking orbit near Ilion, late today.”
Most of the ice that sustained the space colonies came from the Kuiper belt. It took a really long time to ship ice from out there. The Kuiper belt was much farther out than people realized—at least thirty times as far from the sun as Earth; nearly ten times as far out as the Phocaean cluster. This left little margin for error. Still, it was much cheaper to ship ice from the outer system than it was to try to lift it from the outer moons’ gravity wells.
With Kuiper objects, all you had to do was give the ice a nudge, and down into the sun’s gravitational well it came, faster and faster, like a big dirty ball of ice rolling down a hill. The real problem was stopping it once it started. Quite understandably, Earth was paranoid about Upsider rocks screaming into the inner system at high speeds. Earth had had enough impact extinction events to last it, thank you very much. By interplanetary treaty, if an Upsider shipment crossed Mars orbit at greater than twenty thousand meters per second, it was confiscated or shot out of the sky with Earth’s high-energy beam gaxasers. So shippers usually aimed their shipments at Saturn or Jupiter, using the gas giants as gravitational brakes. They settled the shipments into orbits between Saturn and Jupiter, and when they were ready to ship them farther Downward, strapped engines on and sent them to their final destination at safer speeds.
“The ice could be here in about three weeks,” Aaron finished.
“About?”
“Twenty-two days, soones
t, according to my calculations.”
“Right in the very nick of time,” Sean said.
“What a strange and remarkable coincidence,” Jane said archly.
Tania said, “I can’t see Ogilvie & Sons giving us a trillion troy’s worth of ice out of the goodness of their hearts.”
“No,” Aaron agreed.
Jane said, “Very well. Thank you. Sean, what about the warehouses?”
“Repairs of the housing structures and storage tanks will start soon,” he replied. “Our biggest problem right now is the disassembler circulatory system. We don’t have all of the parts we need to actuate the manifolds, and the codes for reassembling them were damaged during the incident. But my people are jury-rigging a bypass we can use till the parts come Up from Mars in six months. It’ll be crude, but we can make it work. I expect it to be operational by next Tuesday or Wednesday.”
“Make it Tuesday.”
“You got it.”
“So what about stores? Give me the numbers.”
“At least one hundred forty million troy’s worth of pressure-sensitive goods in our warehouses were destroyed. The rest is inaccessible till our crews and equipment are freed up. The owners are screaming bloody murder. Several critical undamaged shipments are being held up due to the ship confiscations. I’m getting complaints out my ass. Shipping’s clients are screaming. The insurers have their investigators breathing down my neck.”
“Who would have thought it.”
“We’ll lose business. Pallas, Vesta, and Ceres are vying to cut us out.”
“I know. Can’t be helped. Until we have a source of fuel on its way, we have to be conservative. “
“Yes, ma’am.”
She grinned at his reflexive use of the military honorific. “I’ll set aside some time tomorrow to make a few calls and smooth things over with your customers and talk to the insurers. Ask Marty to set up a couple of calls.”
