by Various
Rami made his way back around the belly of the satellite, emerging at the bend, when a sharp click erupted from his com.
A red needle trailed from the front of his visor like a long, bloody arrow. It angled down and to his right, exiting from somewhere near his jaw. As the blood trickled away, the droplets froze in vacuum.
A microscopic crumb of trash, likely a wanderer from the distant medium orbit debris below, had pierced through Rami Pasha’s skull.
Two meters away, Kalima saw it first. She floated still, clutching loosely to a rung.
Charlie called down from the junkship, questioning the delay, and stopped.
“Get back in the shuttle, Miss Pasha,” he warned. “Get back in the shuttle.” There could be other, unaccounted for, debris.
Silently, Kalima hooked into her mechanical arm. She maneuvered it to the junkship, watching Rami’s suit float toward the medium orbit debris.
Charlie detached the junkship from the Zombie and nudged the ancient telescope down. His jaw clenched. The tendons in his forearms pulled like steel cables as he managed the junkship’s passage with rigid, jerking movements.
Once a safe distance away, he set the shuttle in cruise and pushed down the ship tunnels swathed in tangled wires and mazelike pipes.
He met Kalima in the airlock, where she floated, balled up, tearless, by the window. Charlie looked away. He should have deployed safety foam before EVA, should have played it safer than he’d thought necessary.
She’d only managed to undo half her EMU. She stared as her brother’s suited body fell into medium orbit, where the debris began to tear him apart. He thrashed like a body drowned in the Amazon River, ripped to shreds as if by a swarm of crazy-eyed piranhas straight out of a B-grade horror movie.
By the time the body got out the other end in the debris-clouded distance, there wasn’t much of a body to speak of—only shreds of flesh and bits of EMU suit material, barely distinguishable amongst the haze. Just another indefinite swirl of debris obstructing Earth orbit.
Meanwhile, the Zombie was also pelted by the debris of medium orbit. It made it to the other side intact though tattered.
Charlie flicked a switch, and the tether spun from its belly toward the atmosphere, picking up ions. Lorentz forces tugged against the Zombie’s orbital motion, decreasing its velocity until, hours later, the decommissioned ESA telescope would bounce across Earth’s atmosphere, eventually skidding into a slow, fiery burn which in the following months would level the machine to ash.
• • •
On January 16, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia launched from Kennedy Space Center on mission STS-107. 82 seconds and 20 kilometers into the launch, a piece of thermal insulation foam the size of a suitcase fell off the shuttle and pierced its left wing at Mach 2.46.
Columbia completed 225 orbits and headed home February 1. Upon atmospheric reentry, the broken wing overheated and separated from the shuttle, which then disintegrated above Texas, leaving no survivors.
A puncture not more than 25 centimeters had destroyed $1.7 billion dollars worth of technology and seven lives.
• • •
Kalima is outside the junkship now. Above is the shuttle, and above that is the debris of medium orbit swirling gray and shining in its light-specked shroud. She’s strapped into the mechanical arm, and Charlie’s got the shuttle docked to the Zombie below. Kalima nudges the arm forward. It extends outward around itself, like a fire escape.
Charlie’s voice sputters into her ears. “Be careful, Kal. We’re out of safety foam.”
“Relax, big guy. I got this.” Kalima stretches forward inside her helmet and bites out of the Twix bar beneath her chin. She chews, swallows, then sips the Dr. Pepper from its tube. None of it is regulation.
Soon she’s almost at the Zombie’s electronics-mottled surface.
“Faster, Kal.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Our time frame is an hour.” His voice is tight.
Kalima reaches the surface, snaps on her safety tether, and unbuckles from the mechanical arm.
“Why d’you think?” she asks. “They’re giving us a crapload of cash, aren’t they?”
“What?”
“We never have a timeframe, Charlie. Not unless we’re about to get eaten up by a shit cloud.”
Breath hisses across the radio. “The Sartus Debris Cluster is around the bend.”
“Round the bend in an hour and forty,” Kalima says, chewing on her Twix bar. “Our timeframe is shorter.”
“So?”
“It’s something secret.” She snickers. “They don’t want anyone to know.”
Charlie’s breath makes the radio crackle again. “Kal, you’re crazy.”
She smiles. “I know.”
• • •
They fell in love at her brother’s memorial service banquet. It was a strange sort of love, if anything.
They waited in a buffet line in New York City. An international gathering. Dark suits everywhere, and black dresses like the one Kalima wore.
Adorned in green neckties and dark brown suits, Pakistani officials dotted the crowd, offering condolences to Kalima as ambassadors from the country of her birth. Pentagon military men exchanged awkward, sometimes friendly glances with these brown-skinned men and women who had only two decades ago been allies; the Central Asian pipeline through Afghanistan had changed that. The US Secretary of Defense, who had shaken hands with many of these officials twenty years ago, had insisted security allow them into the country just this one time. The Vice President of Kradys, Inc. watched from his seat as his analysts and business managers talked shop.
Charlie and Kalima were behind one another in the buffet when Kalima tapped him on the shoulder.
“Hey, mister,” she said.
“Mr. Monnagan,” Charlie corrected, turning.
“Big guy.” She grinned.
“Charlie is fine, Miss Pasha.” He smiled, wavering.
“Big guy,” she said again. She sipped her can of Dr. Pepper. “Wanna see a trick?”
“A… trick?”
“Yeah. A trick.” She grabbed his wrist. “I’ll show you.” She put down her soda and snatched a knife from the table. “Ever seen the movie Aliens?”
“No?” Charlie squinted. “Miss, I don’t think—”
“Don’t think, big guy. That’s right.” She splayed his fingers on the white tablecloth. “Don’t move an inch.”
Without giving Charlie time to react, she stabbed the knife between his fingers, down and over and down. It was flashing metal, fingers too shocked to tremble, and eyes staring from all around.
“That’s dangerous, Miss Pasha,” Charlie warned. “Miss Pasha—”
Charlie bit his tongue and reached with his free hand to seize Kalima’s wrist. She stopped, smiling, looking at him, as he slipped the knife from her fingers and placed it further down the table.
Her hands were cold and dry. His were slippery with perspiration.
The crowd murmured, then hushed. A crooked grin worked its way into Kalima’s lips. “That’s dangerous,” Charlie repeated.
She giggled.
The line shifted forward. The crowd whispered, shuffled, and returned to its somber undertones.
Charlie’s mouth opened, closed, opened. “So.”
She looked at him.
“It’s been a while.”
She narrowed her eyes.
“How’s it been, since… you know.”
Kalima cocked her head to the side. She reached around him to grab a plate. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” she said.
She brought the soda can to her mouth, swallowed the Dr. Pepper that dripped to her tongue, and licked her lips.
• • •
On January 11, 2007, the Chinese executed the first successful anti-satellite missile test since the United States in 1985. The Chinese military sent a kinetic kill vehicle at eight kilometers per second into one of its own weather satellites 865 kilometer
s above Earth. The result was 2,317 pieces of orbital debris the size of a golf ball or larger—the greatest production of debris for any incident ever recorded up to that time.
• • •
Half an hour later, Charlie gets a call. It’s Chinese. He doesn’t need to read the frequency—he can tell by the muffled English, as if it’s coming out a grater.
The transmission floods his headset.
“Junkship 0577. Junkship 0577.What is your authorization? Junkship 0577. Junkship 0577. What is your authorization?”
Charlie eyes Kalima, who is climbing over the satellite’s surface. She’s hooked the archives cable into the system, which is, surprisingly, running smoothly for a Zombie.
“Kal.”
“Huh?”
“There’s a problem.”
“Well figure it out, right?” Her voice comes out flush—happy even. “I’m busy.” Her EMU hovers over the manual control panels set along the Zombie’s hull. She’s working, but at a leisurely pace.
“I think this is military,” Charlie says.
“Toooold ya.” Kalima’s suit twists around. Her visor gleams into the junkship’s cockpit, where Charlie’s hands tremble over the dashboard.
“Shut up.”
“Will do.” She waves and turns back to the satellite’s manual control panel.
The receiver crackles. “Junkship 0577. Junkship 0577.What is your authorization? Junkship 0577. Junkship 0577. What is your authorization? Respond immediately.”
“Oh, hell,” Charlie says.
“Respond immediately. Junkship 0577. Junksh—”
He hits the receiver.
“This is Junkship 0577.” His voice cracks like a high school freshman verging on adolescence. “We are under international Kessler Initiative authorization. The UN Security Council has set this satellite for decommission.”
“Decommission denied. Which country do you serve?”
Charlie scratches at his thin fuzz of hair. He’s sweating.
“Sir—” He falters. “We’re international.”
There’s a pause at the other end. Kal types away below, trying to access the Zombie’s archives for the data they’ve been commissioned to save before trashing the satellite.
“That’s weird,” she says. “I can’t get the data we need, even with the passwords Kradys provided us. I mean, it looks like they could’ve just radioed down whatever data they wanted. This Zombie’s running pretty well, you know—”
The Chinese signal gurgles into Charlie’s receiver, and he lets it override Kal’s transmission. The voice dribbles into his ears.
“Which corporation do you serve?”
He hesitates. “We are not corporate.”
“These are international transmissions, Junkship 0577.”
And thus, Charlie knows, is the implied threat—that fraud is liable to international litigation. Or worse.
“We’re international, unincorporated,” he replies. “If you would excuse me one moment, we must continue our business.” Charlie puts the receiver on hold and tunes in to Kalima.
She’s still talking away.
“Hey, Charlie? Hey! This won’t do shit, not like Kradys said it would. I think there’s been a recent program override, via radio—”
“We’re under contract, right?” Charlie interrupts. “Can’t even acknowledge?”
“Um. Yeah.”
“It’s international, secure, no issue. Solid moral ground, solid legal ground. Just incorporated is all, right? Just can’t say it. Right, Kal? Right?”
“We’re in deep shit, aren’t we?”
Charlie nods, even though she can’t see him.
“Beautiful,” Kal says. “I’ve always wanted to be in deep shit, you know? Not like we aren’t always in deep shit, hanging here in the trash heap of this orbital abyss.” She laughs. “It’s the most beautiful thing…”
Charlie shakes his head, severs the connection, and opens to the Chinese transmission. It’s still chattering to the junkship’s receiver.
“Junkship 0577. Junkship 0577—”
“Yes?” Charlie’s voice is small.
“That satellite has not been authorized for decommission. On this breach of international code of conduct, we would like to make it clear that our operations have a right to take any action we deem necessary unless your operations comply with our demands. Is this understood?”
The junkship roars its life systems’ pressure mods and air filters into Charlie’s ears. He slams the receiver. He doesn’t want to talk.
This satellite is no Zombie.
He knows they have weapons monitoring his junkship’s movements. Fail to follow demands, and China will consider it an act of aggression, destroy Charlie’s vessel, and, if necessary, declare war against the nation or corporation—corporation, of course—which has sponsored their assignment. But if Charlie and Kalima don’t complete their assignment once they’ve gotten this far, Kradys will fire them, lock them in prison. Might kill to eliminate witnesses to whatever is going on here.
“Shoot.” He unlocks Kalima’s frequency. “Kal.”
“What?” she screams, half charged with fury, half charged with some dark, excited, nerve-wracking energy. “You cut me off. Something’s up, ain’t it, big guy? Something’s up.”
• • •
Forty-five minutes after reaching the satellite, Kalima has finally hacked into its control system. It’s military, Charlie tells her. It’s military, and that means it’s political.
“Damn political,” he says. “I hate politics. Hate it to hell.”
“Good for you.” She laughs.
There’s crackling silence on the other end.
“Remember 2007?” Charlie says at length. “Chinese blew a weather satellite in orbit. Remember? That was over thirty-five years ago.”
“And?” Kalima fiddles with the control system. She begins feeding the satellite’s data to the junkship archives.
“They’re going to do that to us. Missiles—lasers probably, a little cleaner that way. They’ll kill us.”
She sips her Dr. Pepper. “No they won’t. The debris would ruin their own satellite, and the way it looks, they don’t want that, do they? No.”
She pops out two bubbles of soda and uses her tongue to pull them back to her mouth before they collide with the inside of her visor. Like frog and fly.
“No,” she repeats. “They’re going to send an actual ship. One of those barges, the huge Chinese shuttles they only tell you about, with the private Chinese tech they won’t disclose for all the Saudi oil they can get. Which is why we have an hour. That’s how long it takes one of those to go from the dark side of the moon to low Earth orbit. Damn fast, eh?”
Charlie is silent on the other end.
“You haven’t checked the location of the transmission, have you, Charlie?” She grins.
His voice simmers into her ears. “It’s moving.”
“No shit.”
• • •
At 16:56 UTC February 10, 2009, Iridium 33, a functioning Iridium Communications, Inc. satellite, and Kosmos-2251, a Russian Zombie defunct since 1995, collided at 11.7 kilometers per second 789 kilometers above Siberia. The first major accidental collision between two artificial satellites, it produced 1,740 pieces of debris.
• • •
Charlie is shaking.
He reaches up. He opens the overhead window shutter.
Beyond, the cloud of medium orbit debris rushes passed, contained there—though weakly—by synthetic B-fields, nanosweapers, trashprobes, and the daily work of the occasional junkship like this one. Far away along the curve of Earth’s atmosphere, a space station glows red as it feeds in energy from the ionosphere and inducts currents into its kinetic-magnetic reservoirs.
Behind medium orbit are stars, almost indistinguishable from the glittering trash. Between the stars and the trash, the Moon bobs in vacuum, pale like the skin of a drowned sailor washed ashore. And between the moon and medium orbit a
light screams forward like a shooting star.
“I’m gonna die,” he tells himself. “I’m gonna die…”
Kalima is saying something to him, calling in a wandering, dancing voice across the radio. He looks below.
She’s spinning, spinning, spinning through vacuum like a preschooler at recess.
• • •
The sun is almost up, if that makes sense in outer space. The debris illuminates itself in orange flares until the whole of the starry sky above her glows in a warm, engulfing flame. The sun vomits a reddish-yellow brow over Earth’s blue arm.
“Chaaarrrlllliiiieeee…” Kalima calls. “Chaaarrrrllieeee…”
She snatches her safety tether and spins herself around it, around and around.
“Hello up there…. Helllloooooo….” She laughs to herself.
She bites her Twix bar; it crunches between her teeth. She watches the debris above her and smiles.
“Weeeeeeee….” She spins through vacuum, like a loop of wire set perpendicular to a magnetic field, rotating on its long axis—a motor running like always on the three dimensional effects of magnetic flux.
“Weeeeeee…”
There’s a shooting star above. A great, big shooting star, and it’s coming to meet her and Charlie and Rami, somewhere lost in the fiery medium orbit debris. It’s coming. It’s coming. It’s coming.
• • •
Congressman Dennis Kucinich first introduced to the US House of Representatives the Space Preservation Act, prohibiting the use of space weapons, on October 2, 2001, following international bids for a Space Preservation Treaty. Kucinich brought the bill four times to the House floor until May 18, 2005, but the Space Preservation Act never passed into law.
• • •
Inside, something snaps. Charlie yells through the radio. It’s forty-five minutes already, and he can’t call NASA. He can’t call the UN. He can’t call Kradys. No communications, it said in the contract. That way no one can track the source.
Something has cracked, burst, kicked.
“Kal!” he screams. “Kal, are you out of your damn mind?”
“Precisely.”
“Really? Really?”
Charlie can hear the labor in his own breath, even over the junkship’s engines and the headphones in his ears. The dashboard beeps, telling him Kalima’s download from the satellite’s systems is complete.
