by Lee Correy
“Not exactly,” Ali put in. “The Chinese get about a hundred gigawatts of their electrical baseload from ten powersats whose output they’ve leased from the Nippon Taiyo Denki Kaisha…”
“…Whose financing is handled by the Tokyo Foreign Investment Bank,” The General finished, “whose President in turn is a member of the Tripartite Steering Council.”
“Puts the Chinese in a tough spot, doesn’t it?” I remarked.
“Will ComGlaser be able to divert enough output to pick up any of that baseload?” Ali wondered.
Vaivan shook her beautiful head. “No. Not even a significant percentage of it. We’ve picked up the primary baseloads of those rectennas that PowerSat and InSpaPow pulled the plug on. Now there’s no reserve, only the five gigawatts coming into the Commonwealth’s Oidak rectenna.”
“That’s a last ditch switch-over,” Ali reminded her.
“We can pick up most of Oidak’s power with additional capacity built into our coal plants,” Vaivan added.
“I’m concerned about what the Chinese may do if their rectennas lose their power beams,” I put in.
The General looked at me. “Sandy, what’s your evaluation of that situation?”
I shrugged. “My guess is the Chinese Revanche. It’s an American war college scenario. The Chinese have over two billion people to feed. To make maximum use of their resources, they use energy-intensive agriculture. Without space power, they can’t harvest, transport, store, and distribute enough agricultural product. They’ll have to resort to less energy-intensive agriculture which requires more land. They’ll move to get it, even though they won’t get a crop from it this year. They can pull through the coming winter with reserves on hand plus what they can purchase on the international market. To get agricultural land, they’ll go into the Amur Region and through the Irtyush Gap to Semipalatinsk or along the Tien Shan to Alma Ata.”
“A repeat of the Sino-Soviet Incident,” Vaivan observed. “The Soviets will use the same space beam weapon response.”
“No, Vaivan,” I told her. “RIO’s operating now. It wasn’t during the Sino-Soviet Incident.”
“What can RIO do? Otasek’s crews are unarmed.”
“Don’t sell RIO short,” I advised her. “Milan Otasek may be adverse to taking action, but Peter Rutledge has already gotten a strong message to PowerSat Corporation concerning One-Zero-Five-East. In any event, let me finish my scenario: The Chinese will buy time by armed conflict if they have to and if they can. We’ll build new powersats for them. The Chinese may capture some Soviet rectennas. These will help their baseload needs and after they string power transmission lines from them. When the dust settles, there’ll be a cease-fire, not a peace treaty, because there won’t be a declaration of war from either side. The ceasefire terms will probably include some new political borders, perhaps some internationally-policed border areas. If the Chinese win, we’ll see the emergence of a new power transmission network in east Asia.”
“Vaivan, my dear,” The General told his grand-daughter, “I believe you should bring this to the attention of the C-Cubed. We may find ourselves in the middle of a Sino-Soviet confrontation, and I’m not sure we want to be there.”
“Do you recommend we withdraw our powersat offer, Grandfather?”
“No, that would reflect poorly upon our integrity. I think it’s time for me to return to the Commonwealth. I’ll book passage for myself and my doctor aboard the Andoric which is due to stop here the day after tomorrow on return from a lunar cruise.”
“General, the Andoric isn’t one of our ships,” Vaivan observed. “Sandy and Omer can bring you back in the Tomahok or Tonolia.’”
“They’re needed here,” The General said.
“I don’t like it, Tsaya,” I confided privately to her afterward.
“I don’t either,” she admitted. “It means leaving you, moapa. I’d be much happier if youand Omer took us back. Then we might have some time together. I know a lovely place practically untouched and a long way from everyone on the slopes of the Amimontos.”
“I’m not that familiar with Commonwealth geography yet,” I admitted.
“They’re the twin volcanic peaks on the south end of the Dilkons that were once called ‘the breasts of the Earth.’ “
“I prefer two other breasts far more lovely and another mountain near them which is more exciting yet.”
In planning political, diplomatic, and military strategy, one must assume a “surprise-free” future. Such a thing doesn’t exist.
The suprise came two hours before The General and Tsaya were scheduled to go to the main docks to board the Andoric. A stranger some four billion years old paid us a visit. It was an irregular nickle-iron object with a maximum dimension of about 25 millimeters. As meteors go, it was large. It punched through the Comspat module’s double-wall meteor shield and produced an 18-centimeter hole in the transit corridor linking us to L-5. The auto-hatches slid shut when sensors detected a pressure drop. It isolated the ComSpat module from L-5 for three hours while repair crews plugged the hole.
General Vamori and Tsaya Stoak missed the ship. The captain of the Andoric declined to delay departure because he had more than two hundred passengers who expected to arrive at Woomera on schedule.
A lot of people waited in vain for loved ones and business associates scheduled to arrive at Woomera. The Andoric never got there.
The international board of inquiry eventually issued a report that satisfied no one. It will never be known why the Andoric and the Borgholm collided. Space is three-dimensional and there’s a lot of volume to maneuver in, even close to Earth and deep in its gravity well.
None of the 314 passengers and crew of the two ships survived, and the post-collision velocity vectors put both in escape trajectories where they might be found some day in the future if they don’t get ground to dust in the planetoid belt first. The STC traffic coordinators involved were useless in the inquiry. Two of them committed suicide before the inquiry convened, and three others including a supervisor suffered from shock or other psychiatric conditions because the guilt was far too much to live with. The tapes showed that separate clearances from Brisbane and Gran Bahia were not coordinated as they should have been.
Apparently the ships were cleared right into one another at a closing rate in excess of 15 kilometers per second. The sensors in both ships probably rejected their data as being absurd. But we’ll never know because the on-board recorders weren’t recovered.
I suspected foul play.
But I dismissed it as paranoid. After all, who’d deliberately set up an “accident” that claimed 314 lives just to get General Vamori? I couldn’t bring myself to believe the Tripartite or any other power group could possibly be that ruthless.
Tsaya permitted herself to appear only mildly shaken when we got the news. She trembled slightly, bit her lower lip, said nothing, and disappeared. I knew what had happened. I went to her compartment It isn’t a pleasant job to calm a hysterical person who won’t otherwise permit her normal emotions to reveal themselves because of professional pride as well as fear of the world. I discovered myself beginning to share Tsaya’s joys and griefs, her hopes and fears. I’d known and made love to many women, but I discovered I’d loved none before Tsaya. I had to include my mother because it came as a stunning surprise to me to discover in my growing relationship with Tsaya that I’d never loved my mother nor had my mother shown any love toward me. With Tsaya, I began to discover that love can be limitless and boundless.
But it took time. It didn’t happen overnight.
Within hours of receiving the news of the Andoric/Borgholm disaster, we held another council of war. The term was used deliberately because we knew this was a de facto state of war although there’d been only a series of disturbing, harassing, disconcerting, distracting, and apparently disconnected incidents against the Commonwealth, its facilities, and its people. We wanted to be ready for whatever happened next.
We met without be
nefit of video because it wasn’t deemed necessary. An audio-only teleconference required less bandwidth and wouldn’t be considered important by snoopers.
We also restricted participation to a few people so it would sound like an unimportant commercial business call. Ali handled our end at L-5 while his sister spoke for those in Vershatets. A tape loop of room background sounds was paralleled into the link so that when either Ali or Vaivan lifted the talk switch in order to speak to any of us, the background noise on the line sounded normal in spite of a dead transmitter.
I’ll report it here on the basis of who said what, not as what Ali or Vaivan relayed.
Sometimes they had to paraphrase or re-word.
The major matter was the AndoriclBorgholm disaster and its consequences and potential.
“I must consider it an accident,” The General said. “It’s not necessary to destroy two ships and hundreds of lives to assassinate me. In any event, I’m not necessary in order for the Commonwealth to win.”
“We’d have difficulty winning without you, Grandfather,” was Vaivan’s response. “You’re still the guiding light of the Commonwealth.”
“I will not permit myself the luxury of self-importance,” General Vamori replied flatly. “An inflated belief in self importance has brought down far too many leaders throughout history. The combination of such a belief and continual fear for one’s life is a sure and certain pathway to the paranoia that’s plagued national leaders and turned them into irresponsible conquering despots since the Alexander The Great fell to its siren song.”
The General put his finger on the reason I detested and refused to use my given first name, that of a warrior who was one of the greatest conquerors of all time, who left his mark across most of the known world, and who lives on in the names of dozens of cities in Asia and Africa.
“Believe what you want, General, but we’re going to protect you,” was the reply from his son, Rayo Vamori of ComSpat.
“Very well,” General Vamori said stubbornly. “But my enemies know where I am. If I travel in obvious fashion in an independent vessel, it will act as a deterrent against ‘accidents’ because that ship will be well-marked on every control display. If anything happens, people can be sure they’ll be called to task for it. The telenews has made a big story of the fact that I happened to miss boarding the Andoric. Even if someone had managed to plan the Andoric accident, they wouldn’t resort to such a thing a second time. Book me in a free trader registered under the Commonwealth flag.”
“Don’t you want Omer and me to pilot you home?” I asked.
The General looked pensive and replied to me, “No, Sandy, we need you and others here because what happens on the ground will depend upon what’s done in space. That’s our reserve of strength and power. It may well be that we’re entering the last great world crisis in a period of great transition. And perhaps we alone embrace the new philosophy of a world of abundance gained by opening the skies above our planet. If so, we must marshal our strength to preserve that. Even if, which I do not for a moment believe, our Commonwealth were somehow subjugated and starving, as long as we have our people beyond the skies they will in good time with all their new power and might step forth to the rescue and liberation of the world itself.”
I’d heard something like that before in a very old recording in a history class.
Regardless of whether or not General Vamori was consciously paraphrasing those powerful words of the past, they still held enormous motivational power.
Jeri Hospah had a tape running in the room. The General’s words have been heard many times since. But I heard them there in L-5 when they were first uttered.
A person doesn’t have to be a politician, a military commander, or a diplomat to change the course of the world. But a person does have to be a leader, and leaders come in all varieties, including those who continue to lead if only quietly from the sidelines.
The General left within hours on the Free Trader Arthur M. Dula. Tsaya went with him. I didn’t have time for a private goodbye. As a result, it was a cool, calm, professional farewell because Doctor Tsaya Stoak still resolutely maintained her strong defenses against a world she understood well enough to fear.
I didn’t have time to mope about it.
Three hours after the Dula undocked and broke orbit for the Commonwealth, I was with Ursila and Ali in his compartment where they were keeping me from drowning my sorrows alone. Omer had gone out to do some proficiency training in the skalavans, and I was feeling blue over Tsaya’s departure and worried about Powersat One-Zero-Five-East.
We hadn’t gotten any word on One-Zero-Five-East for a long time, and a ten gigawatt powersat off-line for anything other than maintenance or repair is something to worry about.
We were counting on RIO to let us know if something changed.
Which they did.
A priority scramble telecom came through from GEO Base Zero.
It was RIO Inspector Peter Rutledge.
“Happy hour, eh?” Rutledge began. “I say, Ali, your scrambler is out of synch.”
Ali shook his head. “Afraid not. Locked right in. Given the current state of affairs, somebody is tapping or jamming, or both.”
“Won’t make a bit of difference in the long haul,” Rutledge went on. “But I hoped to pass the word to you on the Q-T. RIO has already notified InPowSat and PowerSat in scramble. We’re proceeding according to operational priorities, and if InPowSat and PowerSat do not rectify matters bloody soon, we’ll broadcast in the clear.”
“Powersat One-Zero-Five-East?” I asked.
“More than that, old chap.” The veddy British mannerisms of Rutledge were now clipped and almost emotionless. “PowerSat has apparently developed an advanced computer program capable of altering the phasing of their new transmitter arrays in very short order. The resident team on One-Zero-Five-East has reported tests of quick beam redirection. I have one of my spot check teams on the way over for a look right now. It doesn’t appear that there’s been any power redirected, but from the way the beam’s slewing we suspect it may be tracking some satellite in an inclined geosynchronous orbit. Sandy, would they be pointing at one of those American laser stations out there?”
“Probably, and it scares me, Peter. Now I’m going to scare you, too. I’ve told you there are Aerospace Force hell beamers in inclined geosynch. There are three big laser stations there in three 60-degree inclined geosynch three equatorial zero points around the world for full global coverage. Each has an output of five gigawatts.”
“Five gigawatts! I say!” Rutledge breathed. “Rather powerful, what? Why didn’t you tell me how big they were before this?”
“You implied you knew.”
“Perhaps I’d better start being less implicit and more explicit,” the RIO Inspector said sotto voce then observed, “Areospace Force must have some stealth measures I don’t know about because those must be rather large facilities for that energy level…and we haven’t spotted anything big.”
“They’re small because they’ll get their energy from ten-gig powersats.”
“We should be able to spot any satellite receiving antenna large enough to accept ten gigawatts,” Rutledge said.
“Not necessarily.” It was Ursila Peri who replied. The Canadian knew what she was talking about; she had her Ph. D. in high energy physics, a fact she kept hidden. “Powersat energy beams are limited in energy density for space-to-earth uses because of potential biological effects on the flora and fauna around the rectennas. This restraint doesn’t exist for unmanned hell-beamers in space. So a powersat beam can have an energy density several orders of magnitude greater than the maximum allowed for space-to-earth power transmission. This permits the satellite receiving antenna to be small. I suspect a check would show that the beam transmitting antenna phasing at One-Zero-Five-East not only redirected the beam but narrowed it as well.”
“The big hell beamers mount small deployable receiving antennas that don’t even show themselves
until moments before the hell beams are triggered,” I added.
“So that’s why all of them in inclined geosynch look like innocuous recce or surveillance snoopers,” Rutledge mused. “But what anyone want with a hell beamer that powerful?”
“Selective targeting space-to-space and space-to-earth applications,” I explained.
“But a hell beamer doesn’t need that much power to be effective!”
“In space-to-earth mode, it does.”
“Sandy, it won’t work space-to-earth,” Ursila pointed out. “The beam is spread too much to use against ground targets from geosynch.”
“You’ve heard of adaptive optics?”
“Yes.”
“And you already know the low I-R absorption qualities of some of the special alloys we’re making out here for domestic use. Don’t you think that the technology can be stretched for military hell-beamer use?”
“Probably.”
“It has been. Don’t ask me how; I wasn’t privvy to that data. I was just an Aerospace Force officer who had to know about the presence of such hell beamers so I could stay out of their way if things went toes-up. But those five-gig hell beamers can put a ten meter diameter beam on the Earth’s surface.”
“But five billion watts! That’s an absurd power level! It goes far beyond anything that would be required…”
“And it’s quite contrary to the application of the law of armed conflict requiring economy of force, too,” I pointed out. “Nonetheless, three of them exist. They’re the modern equivalents of columbiads, block busters, and hundred megaton thermonukes. They’re blackmail weapons and considered as such.”
“My God, why?” Ursila breathed.
“Because the Soviets have three big inclined-GEO hell beamers for the same purpose,” I told him. “The Americans weren’t about to be blackmailed if trumps were played in any future confrontation.”
“I feel ashamed of Canada if it was involved,” Ursila muttered.
“How about me? I used to work for the United States Aerospace Force!” I retorted. “It didn’t bother me to know they were there to provide counterpieces in the American-Soviet chess game, but I never thought my former comrades-in-arms would stoop to using them against a nation like the Commonwealth.”
