Ben Bova - Mercury

by Mercury(lit)

  "Are we slowing down?" Lara asked.

  "Should be."

  "I get no sensation of movement at all."

  "That's because we've kept the cab's acceleration down to a minimum. We could go a lot faster if we need to."

  "No," she said, with a slight shake of her head. "This is fine. I'm not complaining."

  As he sat next to Lara, Bracknell got a sudden urge to take her in his arms and kiss her. But there was Molina standing a few meters away, like a dour-faced duenna, his nose almost touching his handheld's screen.

  "Victor," he called, "come and sit down. You don't have to work all the time."

  "Yes, I do," Molina snapped.

  Turning back to Lara, "Tell him to put away that digital taskmaster of his and come over here and join us."

  To his surprise, Lara responded, "Leave Victor alone. He's doing what he feels he has to do."

  Feeling a little puzzled, Bracknell clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back against the cab's rear wall. It felt cool and very hard. We ought to put some cushioning along here, he thought, making a mental note to suggest it to the people who were handling interior design. And look into glassing in one of the outer tubes, he added silently.

  When the cab finally stopped, a chime sounded and a synthesized female voice announced, "Level one: Low Earth Orbit."

  And all three of them floated slowly upward toward the ceiling.

  "We're in orbit now," Bracknell said, pushing lightly against the wall to force himself down. "Zero-g. Weightless."

  Lara looked fine, but Molina was pale. Bracknell fished a pillbox out of his trousers pocket. "Here, Victor. Take one of these. It'll help get your stomach out of your throat."

  The elevator doors slid open and the din of work teams immediately assailed their ears as they floated out of the elevator cab. Bracknell hooked a floor loop with the toe of his boot and pulled Lara down to the floor, then Molina. Standing there anchored to the floor and weaving slightly like a sea anemone, Lara saw a wide expanse of bare decking topped by a dome that looked hazy in the dust-filled air. A drill was screeching annoyingly in the distance and the high-pitched whine of an electrical power generator made her teeth ache: Sparks from welding torches hissed off to her right. The dust-laden air smelled of burnt insulation and stranger odors she could not place. Men and women in coveralls were putting up partitions, most of them working in small groups and tethered to the deck, although she spotted several floating weightlessly along the scaffolding, high above. An electrically powered cart scurried past on a rail fastened to the deck plates, its cargo bed piled high with bouncing sheets of what looked like honeycomb metal. Everyone seemed to be yelling at everyone else:

  "Hold it there! That's it!"

  "I need more light up here; it's darker than a five-star restaurant, fer chrissakes!"

  "When the hell were you ever in a five-star restaurant, bozo?"

  "I've got it. Ease up on your line."

  Bracknell made a sweeping gesture and hollered over the din, "Welcome to level one."

  Molina scowled out at the noisy activity, his face still slightly green. Lara clapped her hands over her ears; the motion made her bob sideways in her floor loops.

  Pointing off to their left, Bracknell led them carefully, one set of loops to the next, past a gaggle of workers gathered around a small table that held a large stainless steel urn of coffee. At least, Lara assumed it was coffee. Several of the workers raised their covered plastic squeeze bulbs to Bracknell as he led them past. Mance nodded and grinned at them in return.

  "Sippy cups," Lara said, with a giggle. "Like babies use."

  "You need them in zero g," Bracknell said.

  There were curved partitions in place here, and the noise abated a little. As they walked onward, the partitions became roofed over like an arched tunnel and the din diminished considerably.

  "As you can see-and hear," Bracknell said, "level one is still very much under construction."

  "My ears are ringing," Lara said.

  "They're a noisy bunch, all right," Bracknell conceded. "But if they were quiet they wouldn't be getting any work done."

  Molina gave a half-hearted nod.

  Pointing to the curved metal overhead, Bracknell said with a hint of pride in his voice, "These partitions were scavenged from the heavy-lift boosters that brought most of the materials up here."

  Lara grinned at him. "Waste not, want not."

  "In spades. Nothing of the boosters was returned to Earth except their rocket engines."

  She pointed to the floor. "There aren't any floor loops set into the floor."

  With a nod that sent his whole body bobbing, Bracknell said, "The crew hasn't gotten this far yet. We swim the rest of the way."

  "Swim?"

  "Just push yourself along the wall with your fingertips. It's easy." Then Bracknell saw Molina's grim expression. "Victor, will you be okay?"

  "I think so," Molina said, without much conviction.

  As they floated along the bare decking of the corridor, brushing the curving metal wall with their fingers, Bracknell explained, "Back there where we came in, the biggest area will be a preparation center for launching satellites."

  Lara said, "You'll carry them up here on the elevators and then launch them at this altitude?"

  "It'll be a lot cheaper than launching them from the ground with rockets," Bracknell said. "All we need is a little kick booster to place the satellite in the orbit its owners want."

  "You'll launch geostationary satellites from the platform up at that level, right?" Lara asked.

  "Right. Again, with a little maneuvering thrust to place them in their proper slots."

  "Masterson Aerospace and the other rocket companies aren't going to like you," she said.

  "I guess not. The buggywhip makers must have hated Henry Ford."

  Lara laughed.

  The noise was far behind them now, still discernable, but down to a background level. They came to a heavy-looking hatch set into a wall. Bracknell tapped out the proper code on the keypad set into the wall and the hatch sighed open. Lara felt a slight whisper of air brush past her from behind.

  "You wanted a window?" Bracknell said to her. "Here's a window for you."

  They stepped through and Lara's breath caught in her throat. They were in a narrow darkened compartment. One entire wall was transparent. Beyond it curved the gigantic bulk of Earth, sparkling blue oceans gleaming in the sunlight, brilliant white clouds hugging the surface, wrinkles of brown mountains.

  "Oh my god," Lara gasped, gliding to the long window.

  Molina hung back.

  Bracknell rapped his knuckles against the window. "Glassteel," he said. "Imported from Selene."

  "It's so beautiful!" Lara exclaimed. "Look! I think I can see the Panama Canal."

  "That's Central America, all right," Bracknell said. Pointing to a wide swirl of clouds, "And that looks like a tropical storm off in the Pacific."

  Molina pushed up behind him and peered at the curling swath of clouds. "Will it affect the tower?"

  "Not likely. Tropical storms don't come down to the equator, and we're well away from the coast anyway."

  "But still..."

  "The tower can take winds of a thousand kilometers per hour, Victor. More than three times the most powerful hurricane on record."

  "I can't see straight down," Lara said, almost like a disappointed child. "I can't see the base of the tower."

  "Look out to the horizon," said Bracknell. "That's the Yucatan peninsula, where the ancient Mayas built their temples."

  "And those mountains to our right, they must be the Andes," she said. The peaks were bare, gray granite, snowless since the greenhouse warming had struck.

  "Mance," said Lara, "you could use glassteel to build a transparent elevator tube."

  He snorted. "Not at the prices Selene charges for the stuff."

  Molina glided back toward the open hatch. "This door is an airtight seal, isn't it?"

>   "That's right," Bracknell answered. "If the outside wall of this compartment is punctured and there's a loss of air pressure, that hatch automatically closes and seals off the leak."

  "And traps anybody in this compartment," Molina said.

  "That's right," Bracknell replied gravely.

  Lara said, "But you have spacesuits in here so they can save themselves. Don't you?"

  Bracknell shook his head. "It would take too long to get into the suits. Even the new nanofiber soft suits would take too long."

  "What you're telling us," Molina said, "is that we're in danger in here."

  "Only if the outer shell is penetrated."

  "How likely is that?" said Lara.

  Smiling tightly, Bracknell said, "The tower's been dinged by micrometeorites thousands of times. Mostly up at higher altitudes. No penetrations, though."

  "Wasn't there a satellite collision?" Molina asked.

  "Every satellite launch is planned so that the bird's orbit doesn't come closer than a hundred kilometers of the tower. The IAA's been very strict about that."

  "But a satellite actually hit the tower?" Lara looked more curious than afraid.

  With a nod, Bracknell replied, "Some damnfool paramilitary outfit launched a spy satellite without clearing it with the IAA. It smacked into the tower on its second orbit."

  "And?"

  "Hardly scratched the buckyball cables, but it wrecked the spysat completely. Most of the junk fell down and burned up in the atmosphere. We had to send a team outside to clean off the remaining debris and inspect the area where it hit. The damage was very superficial."

  "When you stop to think about it," Lara said, "the impact of even a big satellite hitting this tower would be like a mosquito ramming an elephant."

  Bracknell laughed as he turned back toward the open hatch.

  "The only way to hurt this beanstalk," said Molina, "would be to somehow disconnect it up at the geostationary level."

  Bracknell looked over his shoulder at the biologist. "That's right, Victor. Do that, and the lower half of the tower collapses to the ground, while the upper half goes spinning off into deep space."

  "The tower would collapse?" Lara asked. "It would fall down to the ground?"

  Bracknell nodded. "Only if it's disconnected from the geostationary platform."

  "That would destroy everything?" Lara asked.

  "Quite completely," said Bracknell. "But don't worry, we've built that section with a two-hundred-percent overload capacity. It can't happen."

  YAMAGATA ESTATE

  Nobuhiko Yamagata's knees ached as he sat on the tatami mat facing this, this... fanatic. There was no other way to describe the leader of the Flower Dragon movement. Like a ninja of old, he thought, this man is a fanatic.

  Yoshijiro Umetzu was named after a shamed ancestor, a general who had surrendered his army rather than fight to the death. From earliest childhood his stern father and uncles had drilled into him their expectation that he would grow up to erase this century-old stain on the family's honor. While upstarts like Saito Yamagata made vast fortunes in business and Japanese scientists earned world recognition for their research work, Umetzu knew that only blood could bring true respect. Respect is based on fear, he was told endlessly. Nothing less.

  By the time he was a teenager, the world was racked with terrorism. The poor peoples of the world struck almost blindly against the rich, attempting to destroy the wealth that they themselves could never attain. Japan was the target of many terrorist attacks: poison gas killed thousands in Tokyo; biological weapons slaughtered tens of thousands in Osaka. The nanomachine plague that nearly destroyed the entire island of Kyushu, killing millions, led directly to the international treaty banning nanotechnology everywhere on Earth.

  When the greenhouse cliff toppled the world's climate, coastal cities everywhere were drowned by the suddenly rising seas. But an even worse fate befell Japan: in addition to the devastating floods, earthquakes demolished the home islands.

  Out of the ashes, though, rose a new Japan. The century-long experiment in democracy was swept aside and a new government, strong and unyielding, came to power. The true strength of that government was the Flower Dragon movement, a strange mix of religion and zeal, of Buddhist acceptance and disciplined political action. Like other fundamentalist movements elsewhere in the world, the Flower Dragon movement spread beyond its place of origin: Korea, China, Thailand, Indochina. On the vast and miserable Indian subcontinent, decimated by biowar and decades-long droughts brought on by the collapse of the monsoons, followers of the Flower Dragon clashed bloodily with the Sword of Islam.

  Now the leader of the Flower Dragon movement sat on the other side of the exquisite tea set from Nobuhiko. Umetzu wore a modern business suit, as did Yamagata. The leader of the Flower Dragon movement had the lean, parched face of an ascetic, his head shaved bald, a thin dark moustache drooping down the corners of his mouth almost to his jawline. The expression on his face was severe, disapproving. Nobuhiko felt distinctly uneasy in his presence, almost ashamed of his well-fed girth.

  Yet Nobu understood that Umetzu had come to him. I called and he came, Yamagata told himself. I'm not without power here. The fact that Umetzu was apparently a few years younger than he should have made Nobu feel even more in command of this meeting. But it didn't.

  Umetzu had arrived at the Yamagata family estate in an unmarked helicopter, accompanied by four younger men. Nobu had chosen his family's home for this meeting so that they would be safe from the prying eyes and news media snoops that were unavoidable in the corporate offices in New Kyoto. Here, on his spacious estate up in the hills, surrounded by servants who had been with the family for generations, he could have airtight security.

  They sat in a small room paneled in polished oak, the tea set between them. The wall to Nobu's right was a sliding shoji screen; to his left a window looked out on a small, enclosed courtyard and raked stone garden. The kimono-clad women who had served the tea had left the room. Umetzu's aides were being fed in another room, far enough away so that they could not overhear their master's discussion with Yamagata, close enough so that they could reach him quickly if they had to. Nobu understood without being told that those young men were bodyguards.

  "What do you want of me?" Umetzu asked, dropping all pretense of polite conversation. He had not touched the lacquered cup before him.

  Nobu took a sip of the hot, soothing tea before answering. "There is a task that must be done in complete secrecy."

  Umetzu said nothing.

  "I had thought of negotiating with one of the Islamic groups," Nobu went on. "They are accustomed to the concept of martyrdom."

  "Yet you have asked to speak with me. In private."

  "It is a very delicate matter."

  Umetzu took in a long, slow breath. "A matter that involves death."

  "Many deaths, most likely."

  "The followers of the Flower Dragon's way do not fear death. Many of them believe in reincarnation."

  "You do not?" Nobuhiko asked.

  "My beliefs are not the subject of this meeting."

  Nobu bowed his head a centimeter or so.

  "Just what is it that you require?" asked Umetzu.

  Now Nobuhiko hesitated, trying to fathom what lay behind his guest's hooded eyes. Can I trust him? Is this the best way for me to go? He wished he had his father here to advise him, but the elder Yamagata was still locked away in the Himalayas, playing at being a lama.

  "What I require," Nobu said at last, "must never be traced back to me or to Yamagata Corporation. Is that clear? Never."

  Umetzu almost smiled. "It must be truly horrible, for you to be so afraid."

  "Horrible enough," said Nobu. "Horrible enough."

  "Then what is it?"

  "The skytower. It must be destroyed."

  Umetzu drew in a breath. "I have been informed that the skytower is being built by nanomachines."

  Surprised, Nobuhiko blurted, "Where did you hear that?"<
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  Allowing himself a thin smile, Umetzu replied, "Flower Dragon has contacts in many places, including the New Morality."

  "I did not realize that they are using nanomachines."

  "Of a sort. They are within the law, apparently, but just barely."

  "Perhaps we could stop them legally, through the international courts."

  Umetzu shook his head the barest fraction of a centimeter. "Do not put your faith in the courts. Direct action is better."