“Rosler. Flights. True launch—this is not a drill.”
I reached for the lever. God help us. I twisted it.
The rock shelf, sprinkled with its carpet of Marines in the early light, rose up toward the cameras like a child’s balloon inflating. It swept past the platforms and crushed them against the cliff, then a cloud of vapor followed and the rock and debris disintegrated. The pictures went out.
The ship shook once, then hummed. It moved.
“MIC status.”
“Um—” Elliot pulled himself closer to his console, dazed. “Seventy percent, all ships.”
Voices came through from the other ships.
“Sever ground links.”
“Separation and motion, all ships.”
“Spacing maneuver commencing.”
“We have insertion lock on all flights, Zero.”
The weight grew and the pitch of the humming increased.
It’s over, I thought. If nothing else, it’s over. I fought off the image of the Marines on the ballooning shelf, soldiers just like us, turning quietly to white dust. Twenty thousand of them.
“Eight-zero percent, all ships.”
“Five hundred feet.”
“Clear of gantries and housing.”
“Spacing attitude.”
“One thousand feet.”
“Roll-over.”
The new weight and the throb of the ship as it tipped toward the east were now a relief, a final release.
“Spacing complete.”
“Eddie—” A new voice.
“Stand by. Checkpoint, HE pressure.”
“Four thousand feet. Human environments go across the board.”
“Rotation complete.”
“Six thousand.”
Faster. Faster! A litany now in my mind. Harder!
“One-zero thousand.”
“NEO departure clock.”
“One-five thousand at ninety percent.”
“Eddie!” Charlie Peter’s voice.
“You’re on command channel, Charlie. Stand by.”
“Three-zero thousand.”
“Insertion spacing.”
It was everything I’d wanted for all those years: the speed, the power, the pace of it. The freedom. The ship surged and hummed, and pressed me harder into the seat.
“One-zero-six thousand: two-zero miles.”
“Power to five-five percent.”
“One-two thousand per.”
“Eddie, damn it—it’s Madhu!”
“What is it, Charlie?”
God Almighty, don’t let up now.
“He went down to warn them, Eddie! Down to the shelf! He took his platform and he was down there when it blew! Oh, Jesus, I didn’t think you’d do it.”
Madhu on the shelf? Madhu was in his quarters.
Pham’s eyes met mine, and in that moment we became frozen together. Neither of us moved.
The weight of the launch grew, then became unbearable.
No, I thought. Not again.
Rosler’s voice in the distance. “You’re on command, Peters. Clear off now.”
Madhu dead. Madhu a breath of dust on the white balloon, another puppet hanging from the wires.
“Checkpoint, re-entry option.”
“Re-entry option canceled. Checkpoint clear.”
I’ve killed him. I’ve killed him, and I can’t do this without him.
Kip sat with the music box in both hands, tears streaming from his eyes.
PART TWO
AN OCEAN OF
DISQUIET
TEN
The Second Messenger
T
hat information isn’t your private property, Polaski.”
He wiped blood from the corner of his mouth, then looked down at it on his hand. I moved sideways to keep him away from the lift.
“If you’ve learned anything about the programs Miller’s writing,” I said, “you give it up.”
“To just anyone?” he said.
“To me.”
“Oh, so it’s your private property.”
He sounded bored, as though the outcome of the confrontation was of no particular interest. “Not to be confused with the riffraff’s private property.”
“Forget it, Polaski. You can drive wedges between your private little armies and keep them off balance, but don’t try it between me and the crews. I’m the only one who keeps them off your back, remember?”
He’d done it too many times in the two years since we’d launched, taken the ambitious and the idle among the troops and turned them against their own ships’ captains. Then fanned their new-found loyalty with his visions of greatness and destiny. That the captains hadn’t turned against him altogether was testimony to the depth of his own conviction that everything he did was necessary for the mission, in what he believed to be an infinitely unforgiving universe.
In that way, with his vision and his seductive singleness of purpose, he had planted his roots firmly into the fleet’s gaping, self-inflicted wound of Madhu Patel’s death. That wound, that bottomless, sucking void of any remaining moral direction, had let loose upon the fleet an insidious air of distrust and recrimination. And in the stink of it, Polaski and his minions had thrived.
Then for two years he and I had circled each other and waited, just as the four great fleets now circled the sun and waited along with us, while Polaski and I played at our intrigues, bound together all the while by what was ultimately our common purpose.
On Earth, meanwhile, international tensions had boiled over disastrously as economic growth had ground to a halt. While we continued to transmit the power cells’ keep-alive signals from solar orbit, we were no longer there to manufacture the new ones needed to fuel growth; and until we were safety on our way into the tunnel we would not broadcast the plans. The price of oil surged once again, and with the rigid order once imposed on its distribution having frayed during the past six years, Central Asia erupted into flames as the Caucasus moved on Iranian-occupied Iraq, the tribal regions on the Caspian gas routes, and Pakistani loyalists on the Haryāna pipelines—and India and Iran, drowning in the turmoil, responded without hesitation with dirty and badly aimed nuclear weapons that achieved exactly nothing.
We hadn’t meant it to be like this, but we had been given no choice.
“So what is all this, Torres?” said Polaski. “What makes you think I suddenly know when the drones are coming back?”
“Six files were transferred out of Anne’s partition on FleetSys into yours on the seventeenth. The transfer was initiated by her. What was in them?”
He started to say something, then stopped. He hadn’t expected me to know. Not for the first time, he’d underestimated Chan’s grip on the fleet MI.
“They were probability studies,” he said. “Showing when we can expect the drones. I asked her for them.”
“That’s what she’s been working on?”
“That’s right.”
“For two whole years, Polaski?”
“That’s right,” he said, “for two years.”
It wasn’t true, of course. Even though for a full year before launch Anne Miller had done no work of any kind, within days of Patel’s death she had retired to her quarters and begun an all-consuming labor that had yet to end. Like the rest of us, she had found the need—or in her case, perhaps, the long-sought opportunity—to fill some part of Madhu Patel’s void in her own way. Precisely with what she was filling it, however, no one but Polaski seemed to know.
“So now that you’ve got your probability studies, Polaski, how long are we going to wait for a drone to come back? The troops need an answer.”
He shrugged, then motioned to the rag wrapped around my knuckles. I tossed it to him. He dabbed at the blood on his mouth with it.
“We wait forever,” he said finally. “That was the whole point of launching the way we did, wasn’t it? To get everyone’s butts off the dirt and piss the Americans off so bad the chicken-shits in the flee
t couldn’t whine about going home again? I don’t see you wanting to go back, Torres. And you let Pham worry about the troops. Just get her ass into gear, is all.”
Tuyet Pham, unlike Miller, had begun no work of any kind after Patel’s death. Instead, from that moment during the launch when she’d sat across from me and met my eyes, she’d said nothing at all, to anyone, on any subject, until fully a month later she’d seemed to come to some sort of decision and had begun a relentless, around-the-clock campaign of heaping abuse upon her most ardent supporter, Charlie Peters. Peters, for all we could tell, didn’t mind in the least, and had seemed to find it an entirely expected development in the strange course of her affairs.
Chan had wept. For days, for weeks, even now sometimes, she wept. Whether for Patel, or for what she believed would become of us without him, it was impossible to tell.
I, on the other hand, had felt nothing.
“That’s right,” I said to Polaski, “we wait.”
I
’m gonna be sick, Torres.”
“Close your eyes.”
I floated closer and looked in through Elliot’s face plate, but all I could see was a reflection of the sight that was making us dizzy.
The ships of the fleet stretched away into space behind me. They were paired up on mile-long cables, hanging by their noses at the ends, revolving about one another. They were like sixty-three pinwheels, white pencils on silver threads, all of them turning about the same invisible axis. Three ships, instead of two, formed the final pinwheel. Hull One-Eight had collapsed in Earth orbit.
“You okay, Tyrone?”
“Give me another minute. And remind me never to try that again, okay?”
“All right. Hold still.” I plugged a private communications fiber into his suit and killed the radios.
“I need to talk about Anne,” I said.
“You need to talk about anything, boy. Hang on, I’m trying not to puke.”
I looked cautiously back at the ships. They were on the cables because they needed to be under acceleration—whether through gravity, centrifugation, or thrust didn’t matter. When they were unaccelerated, the gardens had to be cooled down to force the insects to land, so that they wouldn’t bash themselves to pieces trying to fly in freefall, but the plants couldn’t handle the cold. So we spun the ships on the cables, instead.
The last time they’d been unaccelerated was when we’d reached solar orbit two years ago, when the fleet MI had begun the delicate dance that ended with the ships orbiting one other. The length of the cables had been set, on my instructions, to produce an uncomfortable 1.2 Gs at mid-decks. This was to begin training us for even higher thrusts later on. I’d taken Polaski’s war-minded cautions to heart, though I wasn’t certain why. I was sure only that with Madhu Patel’s death, my own outlook had changed.
To travel from one ship to another we had to exit through a nose hatch, then clamp a motorized climber onto the cable and start up toward the axis of rotation. While starting the climb, the cable and the ship we’d exited from seemed to stand perfectly still, hanging from the other ship six thousand feet above. All of the other ship-pairs looked stationary as well. The sun and the stars, however, swept around us in a complete circle once every minute.
As we climbed higher on the cable we became lighter, until at the coupling in the center there was no up or down at all. The center-points of all the cables had red beacons attached to them, so that from where Elliot and I floated along the axis, the beacons on all of the cables were lined up in a sixty-mile-long string of lights.
According to the original designers’ manuals, once we’d climbed a cable and reached the center point, but before we’d pushed off toward the beacon on the next cable, it was a good idea to discontinue our own cable-synchronous rotation and synchronize with the stars, instead. Otherwise, the moment we wandered at all away from the beacon-to-beacon axis, the cables’ rotation and our own rotation were suddenly on different axes. That left neither the ships nor the stars frozen in space, leading to a ferocious disorientation.
But Elliot and I had tried it the wrong way, anyway.
“Okay, Torres. But let’s keep going—I gotta get these soil samples to the lab.”
We pushed off toward the next beacon, passing an adult towing a class of six-year-olds, faceless in their little suits.
“What’s Anne working on, Tyrone?” I said.
“Hell, Torres, I don’t know. Everyone says she’s getting ready to update the drones’ programs, if one ever comes back.”
“So why wasn’t she working on it in the year before we left? What changed?”
“You know what changed, Torres.”
“She wasn’t sorry to see Madhu go, was she?”
“Don’t pussyfoot around, boy. That woman looked like the weight of Hades came off her back when he died. Heads up, cable’s coming—we gotta unplug or snag. Anyway, why don’t you ask your buddy, Polaski? He’s got spooks and priests all over the place.”
“He says he doesn’t know.”
“You gotta do something about him, Torres. All these spooks and private guards and shit . . . he takes it serious, boy. Everyone else thinks it’s a game, except for him and Miller. And you, I don’t know about. Anyway, what about Pham? I heard she got one of her people in working for Miller.”
“Anne’s wise to him. Anne’s been feeding Pham fake programs—Pham showed them to Chan. All the man learned is that Miller cut some kind of deal with Polaski. He doesn’t know what.”
“Okay, here we go. Radios on.”
I unplugged while Elliot grabbed the pinwheeling cable and snapped his climber onto it. When he started down—or out, at this point—I clipped on behind him and felt the familiar tug as the cable caught me up and started me turning.
“Anyway, Tyrone, keep your ears open.”
“Yeah.”
“So what’s with the soil samples?”
“Soil samples, water samples, air samples, oil samples, coolant samples, you name it. I’ve even got a little bottle of live and kicking detrivores, here. Once a month I gotta do this.”
“What’s a detrivore?”
“Little crawly fella that eats bug shit and dead bug bits. Bottom of the food chain. Botany folks are always asking for them.”
“Okay, we’re down to a half G. Let’s see if we can get the Wizard of Oz to open the airlock this time. Keep you from having to slide down on your face again.”
We were half way down the cable to the ship. We would be entering through an airlock on the rounded slope of the nose, and it was easiest to have the airlock opened from the inside, rather than us having to slide down to the handle and open it manually.
“FleetSys,” I said.
The fleet MI answered promptly through our radios.
“Yes, Mr. Torres.”
“Open airlock Six-One West on hull One-Fox.”
“It is open already.”
I looked down past Elliot. “No, it’s not.”
“Your words are not clear, Mr. Torres. ‘Note snot?’ ”
“The airlock is not open.”
“Yes.”
I stopped to think. “ ‘Yes,’ you agree, or ‘yes,’ it’s open?”
“Your question is not clear, Mr. Torres.”
Elliot snorted. “You fucked that up pretty quick, Torres. Stuck sensor on the airlock.”
“FleetSys, reset conversation.”
“Yes, Mr. Torres.”
“Reset all sensors on airlock Six-One West on hull One-Fox.”
“Done.”
“Open the airlock.”
“It is open already.”
“God damn it, who are you going to believe, me or your sensor?”
Elliot made a noise.
“Your question is not clear, Mr. Torres.”
“FleetSys, terminate conversation. Jesus. All right, Tyrone, I guess you get to belly down and open it yourself.”
“Did you ever notice, Torres, how none of the priests ever trie
s talking to that thing? They always find a terminal.”
“Yeah. Okay, you’re almost down. Start braking.”
We slowed near the rounded nose of One-Fox, and vertigo set back in. It was like landing on the sloping roof of a sky-scraper, with nothing but space hanging beneath its base.
Elliot got his boots onto the hull next to the cable port, then backed up gingerly, trying to remain vertical as he let out the tether from the climber. As he backed further down the slope toward the airlock, it was harder and harder for him remain upright.
“Lean back against the tether, Tyrone.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“You’ve never done this with Pham around, have you? First time I got where you are, she kicked my feet out from under me. Sent me over the edge.”
“That girl really hates you, doesn’t she, Torres?”
“She does it to everyone. Makes you trust your tether.”
“Uh-huh. Doesn’t sound to me like you minded, much.”
He made it to the airlock and pushed apart the locking lugs. The door sank inward and a slender ladder slid up over the lip. Elliot grabbed it and it slid back in, then a moment later I followed.
While the lock was named after 61-deck, there was really no such deck. There was just a cramped space under the ship’s nose with the locks, cable housing, forward-looking instruments, and a suiting-up area near the top of the lift, where the lift platforms flipped over from up to down. We unsuited and started down.
There was nothing to be seen from the lift while dropping past the gardens. There were, in fact, no lift-stops at all in the gardens; one had to enter at the bottom. There were also no cameras, machines, or—except for emergencies—paging speakers in the gardens. Privacy ethics had built up since launch, and the gardens were sacrosanct.
The industrial decks, however, were brightly lit and noisy. Some ships used that group of decks for entomology labs, like this one, while others contained suit manufacturing, infirmaries, electronics, fiber extrusion, bakeries, and so on.
I stepped from the lift and bumped into Elliot as he made his way around a madly spinning device that nearly filled the deck. It was a screened-in cage at the end of a moving arm, which a bearded man and two stocky children watched intently.
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