METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire

by Jay Lake

  John Milton. Paradise Lost. Sort of, at least. Was some high school student upstairs running these fools?

  Never one to let his own eccentric education go to waste, Bashar answered with the rest of the passage. “With loss of Eden, till one greater Man restore us, and regain the blissful seat, sing heavenly muse.” His delivery was way better. And he knew all the words right.

  “You got the maps?” the corporal asked.

  Maps, thought Bashar. What maps? What the hell was he talking about? Time to bluff some more, on an empty hand. “In my head.” Bashar tapped his temple and grinned. “And none of this iSys or cloud server crap. Good old fashioned meat memory.” In other words, they needed him. Assuming they believed him in the first place.

  “You want to ride the ride with your meatware data?” asked the corporal mildly. A sharp focus burned in his eyes. This one might be playing a part, but he wasn’t as stupid as he looked. Or as his squadmates were.

  This was where the string led, but Bashar was getting an awfully long way from Seattle if he went with them.

  The corporal spoke again: “Drop’s in about thirty hours. A lift with us is your fastest way out of the kill zone.”

  A cold fear passed hard down Bashar’s spine, shivering from neck to hips. Seattle. “Lot of geography around here,” he said.

  The corporal answered with a shrug. “You’re the man with the maps. I don’t know from Elliott Bay. We’ve got the big rocks. You’ve got the big maps. That’s why we’re here.”

  “Your operational security sucks, son,” Bashar told him. Cairo must have been the dead man the androgynous kid on the bike had talked about. And this was a set-up that stunk higher than last week’s fish and chips.

  But … Seattle. This was about J. Appleseed and the darwin file. It had to be. He had no choice but to follow the string through.

  “Let’s go for a ride,” the corporal said.

  Lightbull had killed Cascadiopolis from orbit. He was heading for orbit. There were no coincidences in this life.

  * * *

  From greenwiki:

  Orbital Evolution, or OrbEv. The name given to forward planning for genetic drift and founder effect shifts to be expected in a permanent non-terrestrial human population.

  By the eighth decade of the twenty-first century, most observers were agreed that there was a sufficiently large human population in space to be self-perpetuating in the event of a collapse of surface-to-orbit travel. Even though at that time approximately eighty percent of permanent space residents were male, this was considered valid. Consensus has firmed in the intervening decades, especially given the growth rate in space-based births at the usual roughly even gender ratios prevailing in human populations.

  Even with this widening genetic base, there is still a pronounced island ecology aspect to human expansion off Earth. Crewed surface-to-orbit capabilities have dwindled, and are almost non-existent among surface-based populations, nation-states and non-state actors. Virtually all upward lift traffic is now a return trip, managed and sponsored by any of over a dozen orbital agencies and polities, Green Space Mining being the largest of those. This means Earth-to-space migration has slowed to almost a standstill, which in turns means the current non-terrestrial genetic reservoir is close to fixed.

  Geneticists and anthropologists both on Earth and in orbit (GSM Institute, University of Lagrange and Luna University) have seized on this natural experiment, with its attendant extensive medical records and close monitoring of the vast majority of subjects, to both study human microevolution in realtime and to develop increasingly higher degrees-of-confidence in longer scale projections. This study with its presumed eventual real world outcomes is known as orbital evolution.

  * * *

  v: The usual misdirections and innuendoes and plausible deniability

  Bashar had not packed for a trip to orbit. Wouldn’t be his first time to go commando. “Let’s hit it,” he told the corporal. “Time to fly.”

  They all stood up. Two chairs fell backward to slam loudly into the sawdust-strewn floor. Baldie-with-no-name finally caught Bashar’s eye from a distance in the shadows. Bashar nodded and began herding his newfound friends toward the front door. Baldie approached with his tray.

  “Your change, sir.” A thousand loonies, in the waiter’s hand.

  Bashar slacked his pace to exchange a quick word as he slipped the cash into his own pocket. “I’m taking the problem off your hands. Anyone else comes looking for Mr. Cairo’s friends, I’d appreciate it if they waited as long as possible for directions where to look next.”

  That earned him a surprised look from Baldie. “Better you than me.”

  “So it goes.”

  He caught up with the orbital troopies at the exit. All Bashar had time for now was a quick, coded message to Charity to let her know he would be even more off the grid than usual, and that he didn’t expect to be safe or check in for a while.

  People who went up to orbit didn’t tend to come back down.

  “What’s it like out there?” Bashar asked the corporal.

  “No dirt.” The young man scuffed his boot in the gravel of the parking apron. “Not much to hide behind. You see everyone coming, good and bad, from thousands of klicks away.”

  “Makes securing your perimeter a whole different proposition, I guess,” Bashar replied.

  “You people have plants.” The corporal sounded disgusted.

  In front of them, the helicopter unfolded with a faint whine. It swelled, left and right, puffing out like one of those Japanese fish, while the rotors extended and stiffened.

  “I’d been wondering,” Bashar said. “It looked a little small for five.”

  “Rated to six butts and seven hundred kilos of passenger,” said one of the other troopies.

  “Which one of you is an atmosphere-rated rotary wing pilot?”

  All four orbital troops laughed as they climbed in through a strangely soft and rounded access hatch. Oddly tiny for such an aircraft. Bashar wondered exactly who they worked for, whose hands he was putting himself in.

  This had to be one of the stupidest stunts he’d ever pulled.

  * * *

  No one flew.

  It couldn’t be remotely operated, not with the transmission lag from orbit. No, the helicopter had an onboard AI smart enough to cope with a combat-grade take off that scrambled Bashar’s internal organs, but was also probably pretty good at outrunning anything shoulder-launched.

  Not that anybody was shooting at them just now. Mirable dictu.

  The blades whirred in a buzzsaw whine like Bashar had never heard from a helicopter. Not stealthed. Something else. Hypersonic, maybe? Schaadt’s Shack dropped away fast below them, tilted hard as they banked through their steep, juking climb.

  He was stuck in the back between the belching drunk and the silent one. Booze and boys, a familiar set of smells. The corporal sat right seat, up front, but didn’t touch anything. His other troopie stared out the windscreen as they hit turbulence.

  “Atmosphere sucks,” shouted the corporal over the racket of their rough ascent. “How do you people live down here?”

  “At least I can step outside for a walk,” Bashar shouted back. Half-wit banter with morons wasn’t his thing, but he was trying to work at their level.

  A drop on Elliott Bay. Seattle. Somebody was going to make a big, hard splash, and kill about a million people doing it.

  The orbital troops laughed. “Who’d want to?” asked the drunk to his left, before, improbably, he fell asleep.

  To Bashar’s surprise, they were still climbing hard. The little helicopter clawed for altitude. No one but him seemed worried—the interior smelled of plastic and that strange, musty scent of nanotech, but not the reek of fear. No flop sweat here.

  “Where’s our pick up?” he asked. Truth be told, he wasn’t sure how people in orbit got down to the surface any more. Well, fall bags. Everybody knew about those low-tech nightmares. But how they got down when they
also planned to climb back out of the gravity well again.

  Not in helicopters, he was fairly certain of that at least.

  “High dive,” said the corporal, as if that actually explained anything.

  Bashar decided that ignorance was the better part of valor. He didn’t think he’d like the answer anyway.

  They still climbed. Time passed with a frantic unspooling only he could hear. The drunk snored. The silent one stared out the window. Up front, the corporal hummed. Mount Rainier loomed below them off to the starboard. To the north he could see Glacier Peak and Mount Baker. How high were they?

  The buzz saw whine trailed off, to be followed by a whipping noise as the helicopter tossed once, twice, then settled into a silent, slinging arc.

  “Blades folding,” shouted the corporal helpfully.

  So far as Bashar could tell, they were in ballistic flight now. An aerodynamic rock, fifteen or twenty thousand meters up.

  Something aft kicked in, and they weren’t ballistic any more. The horizon swiftly acquired a distinctly multi-toned look, not to mention a pronounced curvature. He was seeing the top of the sky. For the first time in his life, Bashar found himself at the edge of motion sickness.

  Higher still they went. He thought he could spot the Great Plains.

  Another bulletin from the front seat: “Hang on, it’s gonna get weird.”

  The drunk stirred, the silent troopie turned to Bashar with a sickly, tense grin.

  “Have you ever done this before?” Bashar asked him.

  “Hell no,” whispered the troopie. Kid, in fact. Bashar had whipped hundreds like him into line over the decades.

  The kid went on: “We train, a lot. High gravity gym, drop-and-lift simulations. Got to build up bone density and muscle tone for one-gee operations. But even high rez VR ain’t the same.” He sounded ready to panic.

  “Just nerves,” Bashar said with the tough unsympathy of a drill sergeant. “Keep your mission in mind and close your eyes if you think you need to. Too late to walk home now.”

  That cracked the kid up with the edged laughter of hysteria. It also kept him focused on Bashar instead of the increasingly curved horizon outside.

  No wonder the drunk was sleeping. And now he understood the tiny hatch. Air pressure differential was a real issue for this craft.

  Then the boost cut out, and they were ballistic once more. High up. Very high up. Bashar felt lightweight and ill in his seat. He strained against the straps and wondered quite seriously if this were a rather baroque assassination plot.

  Something big and dark moved above them, barely visible at first from his seat. He saw a pointed nose ahead of theirs.

  “Mommy’s come to gather us up, boys,” said the corporal with a tone of relieved and nervous satisfaction.

  They slammed upward, hard. Everything went dark outside and in, except the control panel lights, which painted the corporal’s face with a sickly orange underglow just shy of demonic.

  * * *

  About ninety uncomfortable minutes later the lights came back on outside. Two figures in pressure suits crowded into a tiny bay that was barely larger than the helicopter itself. Or whatever this machine was— ‘helicopter’ was a grossly insufficient description. One pointed an instrument at them while the other rather incongruously waved, as if saying hello to friends in a boat.

  Bashar had no particular urge to wave back, but the corporal was apparently happy to do so.

  After a minute or two of whatever sweep was being performed, their little round hatch opened. Unstrapping, Bashar found himself on the loose in microgravity for the first time in his life. His gut flopped twice, then settled. That was a small mercy, as he didn’t want to barf cheese tempura and elk salami all over the interior. He was third through, after the corporal and his front seat passenger, being boosted from the back by the scared kid. Bashar tried to avoid windmilling his arms or otherwise making a touristic hazard of himself.

  One of the pressure-suited types propelled him out of the tiny bay and through another hatch. That opened onto a corridor with all four surfaces padded and grab rails running along them. The air here smelled weirdly clean, like glass would if it had an odor.

  “No gravity ever?” Bashar asked.

  “Not here.” The woman in front of him was dark-skinned, grey-eyed, shaven-headed and deeply suspicious. “Who the hell are you?”

  “The map man,” he said pointedly.

  “Ah, Mr. Biòu. The other one, whom we were not expecting.”

  Biòu? Who the hell was Biòu? “I, well, took over the franchise. Decided it was better to come in person.”

  “Mr. Franchise, I hope you like it here in orbit. You’re going to be a permanent resident. However long it is you wind up staying.”

  A woman after his own heart. Time to act like he belonged in this place. “I need a briefing.”

  “Everybody needs something,” she said unsympathetically. “A lucky few even get it.”

  She turned and swarmed along the corridor, which curved upward. Bashar started after the woman, trying to mimic her hand-over-hand grip on the rails. He got himself moving in the right direction but slipped loose to bounce twice off the padding before he could get a firm grasp. Someone behind him laughed.

  We’re all new once, son, he thought. You try this for the first time at my age.

  At least he was inside the perimeter. Bashar followed the woman, attempting to figure out why anyone had thought those four clowns were good security at the entry point. Life in orbit had to be the ultimate in know-your-neighbor security. Maybe these people just didn’t have procedures for infiltrators.

  Was that degree of laxness even possible?

  * * *

  He wound up seated—with a strap to keep him there against microgravity—on one of a semicircle of chairs facing a large virteo monitor in a small and otherwise featureless room. The woman who’d met him was present, along with a hard-bitten, whipcord thin Asian man who could almost have been Bashar’s age, and a much younger and doughier man—another kid, in truth—with pink eyes and brittle hair who seemed to be suffering from a metabolic disorder. He smelled like it, too.

  “I’m Moselle,” said his host. “That’s Lu,” she pointed at the Asian man. Then a negligent wave toward the albino. “Bibendum.”

  “I’m Credence,” Bashar said. It was the name he’d wound up using at Schaadt’s Shack, and thus, at least in a sense, a verifiable identity. These people might be strangely naïve about physical security, but he’d bet every Euro he’d ever possessed that they were at the razor’s edge on data security.

  “Credence today, Mr. Biòu. Where’s Feeney?”

  That was the recently deceased, presumably. “Dead.” Killed by trees, he had become fairly certain. The other possibility was the mysterious and possibly non-existent Mr. Cairo. His voice freighted with the conviction of a truly bald-faced lie, Bashar went on. “Caught in a dope grower’s cross-fire two days ago. I knew he had the meet up at Schaadt’s Shack. So I went to keep it. Sorry, I’m a little short on countersigns and secret plans.”

  “Hmm.” She glanced at Lu and Bibendum, then back at Bashar. “I trust you have the maps?”

  “Depends,” said Bashar. “Which maps do you need?”

  “We can handle the blast distribution and hydrological calculations from geophysical survey data. We need the locations. Those AIs are not to be trusted with telling us everything.”

  J. Appleseed’s AIs, he thought, she had to mean them. What he said was: “Maps of how far Elliott Bay will splash? I’m not playing stupid, Ms. Moselle. Remember, I’m filling in here for Feeney, who never told me your objectives. Just that you needed confidential Seattle location data that wasn’t available in the cloud.”

  That was his best approximation of what they were seeking. Based on the slight relaxation from both Moselle and Lu, he figured he’d guessed close enough to right. Bibendum kept staring not quite at him with unblinking pale-pink eyes. Bashar wondered if the ki
d was blind.

  “Our friends at Appleseed want to appear to have been wiped out,” Lu said. Bashar could have shouted for the confirmation of the connection. Lu went on: “We need to ensure that enough force gets applied to crack the foundation’s deep vaults, down in the bedrock. That’s in our contract with them. But we strongly suspect them of hiding additional resources, with the intention of surviving the blast and emerging to shift blame to us.”

  Bashar’s mind raced ahead. Blame? For the island plagues? Making the orbital Greens into history’s greatest villains instead of J. Appleseed. When you were bent on wiping out the human race anyway, who cared about getting the credit? “Not that this is any of my business,” he said, “but aren’t there better ways to take out a small cluster of known sites than nuking an entire metropolitan area?”

  “You’re right,” said Moselle. “It’s not any of your business, Mr. Biòu. But as it happens, we aren’t nuking anybody.”

  “Just a rock,” said Bibendum in an unexpectedly gravelly voice. Somehow, Bashar had figured on a piping squeak.

  Then he put it all together. “You’re about to drop a mining package on them. It’s the biggest orbital kinetic strike in history.” This would be the destruction of Cascadiopolis all over again, but writ oh so very large.

  “Biggest human-targeted orbital kinetic strike in history,” Moselle corrected. “Now, let us speak of the offices of J. Appleseed.”

  * * *

  From greenwiki:

  Green Space. Refers to the privately funded Earth-to-orbit heavy lift initiative that placed almost two hundred launches into orbit over a four-decade period between 2077 and 2115. Each launch series is referred to by the code GSO, for Green Space Operations, followed by a number signifying the program year. Individual missions are numbered within their launch year, so the very first launch was GSO-01-01, while the final launch was GSO-28-09.

  The entire project was defined as a closed-ended solution dedicated to placing sufficient heavy manufacturing capacity into orbit to allow boot strapping of long term, self-sustaining, space-based industrialization with minimal further launch requirements from the Earth’s surface. All spacecraft were controlled by a combination of onboard automation and remote command, and the vast majority of the launches were uncrewed. However, a limited number of crew capsules were boosted to orbit as part of the cargo payload. Green Space never experienced a catastrophic failure during any operational launches.