All he carried away with him were a few glimpses of the little island city as it might have been five hundred years ago, as the Portuguese were concluding their hundred-year conquest. And of the city as it was fifteen years ago, before it became the primary port for Kasigau. The massive masonry of Fort Jesus, the Portuguese stronghold, recalled the former epoch. The outdated and undersized berths of the Kilindini anchorage recalled the latter.
The spaceport at Kasigau had conquered Mombasa more thoroughly than any invader in its thousand-year history, more than the Shirazi, more than the Omani, more than the Turks, more than the British. Kasigau had transformed Mombasa’s focus. A pair of great white elephant tusks, too large to be real, still arched over Moi Avenue—a quaint and somewhat bittersweet anachronism. But the city that once controlled the trade routes to India was now a way station on the trade routes to space.
No, he corrected himself. A bottleneck. Neither Havens nor Sasaki had exaggerated. Dryke had seen container ships anchored offshore, awaiting an open berth at the quays. Between the backlog, the Allied inspectors, and the Kenyan tax and customs officials, the trip from ship’s hold off Mombasa to the belly of a T-3 atop the castle was the longest, slowest leg of the journey.
Returning to the spaceport, Dryke rebelled at finding himself entangled in questions of corporate finance and cargo logistics. Sure, they could move inspections from quayside to Kasigau. Sure, they could open the center’s runways to outside aircraft, to wide-bodied A-50s and Caravans from Al-Qahirah and Kiyev and the Ruhr.
But every instinct in Dryke screamed “No!” All it would take was one mistake. One robot kamikaze passing up its landing to crash into the operations center for the HEL complex. One pocket nuke concealed in a T-3 cask, one sloppy or hurried inspection, one little kiloton explosion at the top of the castle. One mistake could put Kasigau out of business for a year, or even forever.
Dryke left the highway at Mackinnon Road to enter the Kasigau compound at the Rukinga gate. He reached the gate just as the crackling thunder of a T-3 being ejected from the catapult rolled over the complex. The guard detail waved him through, which obliged him to stop and deliver a harangue on complacency.
He had just managed to inspire the desired degree of contrition when alarms began to scream from the gatehouse, the sentries’ pagers, and the skimmer’s radio. While the sentries raced to seal the gate, Dryke dove back into the skimmer.
“What’s happening?” he demanded.
“The center is under Code Black rules,” a curt voice answered. “Keep this channel clear.”
“This is Mikhail Dryke. Tell me what’s happening.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Dryke. I don’t know.”
“Is it Jeremiah?”
“Mr. Dryke, I don’t know. Please keep this channel clear.”
“Goddammit,” Dryke muttered. “Goddammit.”
Ten klicks from the gate to the castle, another three to the operations complex. He had covered less than half of it when a cold white flash which made the sun seem dim flooded the landscape from somewhere high in the sky. Half-blinded, Dryke was forced to slow his vehicle. He was still struggling to see when a deep-throated rolling thunderclap, dwarfing even the report of the castle’s catapult, shook the skimmer and filled its cabin with deafening black noise.
Jesus Christ, was that a nuke? Oh, please— Twisting his head, Dryke risked a squint through the side window to reassure himself that the castle was still standing. It was. Puzzled, he sped on, fearing he was too late. He was. By the time he reached operations, Freighter T-3/E49851 was falling toward the Indian Ocean, and in Formosa Bay off Ras Ngomeni, a small fishing boat was down by the stern and burning.
The ballet begins. They wait in the wings in the kilometer-long tunnel from the cargo assembly center, tapered fat-bodied gnomes five meters in diameter and nearly seven meters tall, inching forward to the head of the line. They wait for the clamps and the hook and the long ride to the top of the castle, climbing the outside of the central tower like aphids climbing a stem.
T-3/E49851 had been built three days ago, its shell cut and curved and welded by the CAM machines in the fabrication center. It had been delivered to the cargo assembly center twelve hours ago, filled, sealed, and cycled into the launch queue six hours later, mated with its thrust disk of reinforced ice barely twenty minutes ago.
At five minutes after two, E49851 started its dizzying trip up out of the catacombs, bursting into the sunlight at the foot of the tower at a brisk fifty kilometers per hour. Even at that clip, the ride up the side of the tower took longer than the ride to space which was to follow.
At the top, a handler crane grabbed the spacecraft and lowered it gently into the catapult. In the launch operations center, a dozen stations ran a checklist of a hundred queries. The first clearance was from Laser Control, the last from Security; when it came through, the computers took over.
In a sudden convulsive moment, the T-ship was in motion, dragged upward by the accelerator ring, boosted from beneath by a giant’s breath. At the mouth of the tube, the accelerator ring split and fell away, and the capsule shot skyward, flying free.
The instant it cleared the launch tube, the T-ship began to slow, fighting drag and gravity, trading speed for altitude, tracing a trajectory familiar to every child who had ever hurled a stone at the sun.
Half a kilometer away, the HEL bank, twenty parallel half-gigawatt free-electron lasers under one sprawling roof, waited the call. When E49851 was five hundred meters above the castle, Unit 9 jumped to life, sending a five-hundred-watt pilot beam out through the bank lenses, along the nitrogen-filled beam tunnel, and up through the center of the castle to the mirrors. Guided by the tracking system, a single mirror directed the pilot beam against the broad base of the capsule.
Still the capsule climbed, still the capsule slowed. Two kilometers, three, three and a half. Any moment, it seemed, it would begin to fall back. And then the great bank of lasers came to life as one. The ten-gigawatt beam filled the full diameter of the beam tube, caught all twenty mirrors, and leaped across the sky to the broad base of the freighter.
The first pulse vaporized an almost invisibly thin layer from the ice disk, forming a vaporous sheet of pure, clear, superheated steam. A second pulse, a microsecond later and a hundred times stronger, shattered the molecules of water vapor into an atomic cloud of raw hydrogen, oxygen, and electrons, a plasma hotter than any chemical rocket flame, hotter even than the surface of the Sun. The plasma expanded savagely outward, kicking the spacecraft upward, as though it were the piston in a bizarre engine.
A thousand times a second, the lasers cycled through their double pulse. The awesome seamless roar of the closely spaced explosions was moderated only by distance, the pitch changing as the capsule accelerated, Doppler-shifting into the familiar falling, fading scream of a T-ship.
In the launch operations center, what little tension there could be in a routine repeated more than sixty times a day had evaporated when the thrust beam picked up the T-ship. The T-3 was riding the beam now, accelerating toward orbit, safely out of reach. Even the launch security officer, the man in the loop on Kasigau’s air defenses, sat back in his chair and reached for his drink.
The failure of the AI protocols in the Houston incident had led to the LSO being given unprecedented responsibility. Now, the AIPs could kill. The LSO had gone from being the only station that could call down the fire from the mountain to the only one that could stop it. Which meant that the LSO’s errors now would be errors of commission, not omission.
Yusuf Alli had not welcomed his newly elevated status. Kasigau was ringed by airports—the big one at Mombasa, the fields at Voi and Malindi, and fifteen rural airstrips within the primary air control area. The air traffic swarmed like bees around a hive. But every time a red light came up on the board, Alli had thirty seconds to call for a hold, and then one minute to make his decision. If he made a mistake, people would die.
Through the first three weeks under the
revised protocol, Alli had dealt with his anxiety in a straightforward way. He always called for a hold, and then always gave the target a green. He had yet to be wrong. He knew there was some risk, but if any air traffic managed to reach the threat envelope of a T-ship on the climb, the defense system would bring it down without getting a second opinion. It was, he thought, foolproof.
Then the contact alarm sounded, and Alli jerked forward in his chair, choking on his tea.
“Hold,” he sputtered. “Hold!”
“Tracking missile,” said the board. “Threat category three. Risk category: moderate. Time to intercept: twenty-one seconds.”
Alli wasted three seconds staring at the track of the streaking missile. “It’s a clean miss,” he protested. “It won’t get within fifty klicks of the can.”
“Risk category: high. Time to intercept: eleven seconds.”
Alli’s eyes danced frantically over the displays. “What’s the danger? What can they hit?”
“Possible beam occlusion. Time to intercept: five seconds.”
At the same time, someone was screaming at him, “Burn it! Burn it! They’re going for the beam!”
Ashen-faced, Alli brought his palm down on the fire mushroom. One of the twenty lasers abandoned the synchrony of the launch rhythm, as atop the castle an auxiliary mirror rotated a few degrees. A defensive beam locked on the hurtling missile, and an instant later the missile exploded.
“Got it!” exulted Alli.
But the alarm kept sounding, and the displays continued to track something—now a cloud of a hundred smaller objects, still climbing as they fanned out. Then each of the smaller objects seemed to explode, and the missile was now a scatter of marble-sized projectiles. Moving nearly as fast as the missile itself had been, the chemical buckshot intersected the beam.
The first pulse heated the binder holding the projectiles together, and they blossomed into a dense cloud of aluminum dust. The next pulse, striking the fine particles, lit a myriad of tiny plasmas that quickly merged into a huge, sun-hot flare, dissipating the beam’s energy as light and heat. Only a tiny fraction of that pulse got through to the T-ship. The echo, used for tracking and guidance, was smothered completely. The next cycle was completely choked off.
At full power, the launch cannon could have burned through the cloud in a matter of seconds. But with no positive track on the target, no reflection back from the T-3, the laser controller declared a scrub and shut the HEL array down.
Three hundred kilometers away, the freighter began to fall, as though the string holding it aloft had been cut. Before long, it reappeared on the radar displays, no longer eclipsed by the dissipating cloud.
“Can we get it back?” the launch boss asked, little hope in his voice.
“She’s tumbling from the drag,” reported one station. “There’s no target.”
“Can we burn it?”
“No. Too much atmospheric absorption, and we’re losing the angle.”
“Jesus Christ,” the launch boss said. “Where’s it coming down? Indian Ocean? God, just drop it in the ocean—”
The answer was slow in coming. “South China Sea.”
Relieved expressions blossomed throughout the room.
Then the tracking officer added, “Maybe landfall in Malaysia. Singapore. I can’t be sure.”
“Damn,” breathed the launch boss.
“Can’t we warn them?” a sweaty and pale Yusuf Alli burst out.
Silently, his mouth tight with anger, the launch boss shook his head. “And tell them what?” he asked. “To put up their umbrellas? It’s coming down hard. There’s no place to hide.”
The freighter was a hurtling meteor of ice and steel, thirty-two tons of inert mass tracing the arc dictated by the forces which had acted on it. Its fall through the afternoon sky went mostly unnoticed across the eastern third of the Indian Ocean, except by a navigational satellite in high orbit, the commercial radars at Colombo and Djakarta, and a Chinese warship in the Gulf of Thailand.
As air friction tore at the tumbling spacecraft, the great disk of reinforced ice shattered, jagged chunks of it spinning away as it passed over the island of Sumatera. One piece smashed into a tree-covered hillside near Siabu, scattering a family of civet cats. Another buried itself dramatically in a rice paddy on the flats near Dumai, scattering a family of farmers.
But the freighter itself remained whole, its dive becoming steeper as it neared the surface. Sumatera slid away beneath, then the islands of the Strait of Malacca and the tip of the Malay Peninsula.
By now the spacecraft was lighting up the radar screens at Paya Lebar Airport in Singapore. Controllers there watched in astonishment as it dove toward the Singapore Strait at more than four thousand klicks per hour.
The pilot of a Boeing 350 which had just taken off from the airport saw it as a fiery streak which bisected the sky less than a kilometer in front of his plane.
A million people heard the thunder from a cloudless sky, the death-rattle shattering windows all across the city. A hailstorm of glittery razor-edged fragments rained down to the streets from the jagged wall of high rises facing the harbor.
Thousands on the Singapore waterfront witnessed with amazement the spectacular fountain and plume of steam that erupted as the T-ship plunged into the waters of the strait.
But then it seemed to be over. There was much pointing, many voices raised in excitement, a few raised in hysteria. Those who had missed the moment rushed to hear the story from those who had witnessed it. The waterfront was a carnival of questions.
And then the waters of the strait rose up in a sudden rolling, roiling surge. Like a miniature tsunami, the concussion wave smashed small boats against each other and swept onlookers from floating piers and sea walls.
By the time the surge drained back into the strait, E49851 had become a killer many times over.
CHAPTER 11
—CGC—
“We accept this judgment…”
Night is the winter of the Amazon, and dawn its spring. Shortly after 5 a.m. each day, Hiroko Sasaki left the Director’s Residence to make the twenty-minute walk in the clammy-warm tropical air to the headquarters tower. The walk was her morning tea, awakening her mind, and daily constitutional, unlimbering her body.
On reaching her office, she would hide behind a Privacy One cocoon to read the active files, compose policy drafts, and update her own logs. Unlike the time she spent at the Director’s Residence, this was a working hermitism.
Word of the Singapore disaster found Sasaki there reviewing the October dispatch from Ur. The first report, from Prainha’s operations monitor, was annoyingly sparse—a launch anomaly in Kenya, a T-ship down.
She tried to call Havens at Kasigau, but was told that the center was under Code Black.
“Search all sources,” she told her com system.
Moments later, a single window came up on the display wall. The Current Events stack of DIANA, the Asian information net, had a report of a plane crash in the Singapore Strait. By the time Sasaki reached Havens and Dryke at Kasigau, DIANA was calling it a meteor strike, and Panasian television was offering the first pictures of capsized boats, broken windows, and the anguish of shaken and grieving survivors.
Havens looked chastened, guilt-haunted, and confused. Dryke seemed more under control, though he was tight-lipped, his body coiled anger.
“Mr. Dryke, is the port under assault?” she asked.
“No. It’s over. We—”
“Are the facilities intact?”
“Kasigau wasn’t touched.”
Sasaki allowed herself a moment of relief. “What can you tell me?”
“There was a missile launched against a T-ship. Against the thrust beam, I mean. An occlusion trick. They had salvage fusing, beat the castle defenses. The moment our burn beam lit it up, it blew like a fireworks rocket. Everything we did after that just made it worse. Like judo. They went after our weakness and used our strength against us.”
“M
ore facts and fewer metaphors, please, Mr. Dryke. Site Director Havens,” Sasaki said.
Havens raised her eyes toward the camera.
“Have you suspended operations?”
“Yes. We shut down immediately.”
“Please resume launch operations at the first opportunity.”
Her face wrinkled in puzzlement. “Resume—”
“At first opportunity. Priority is to be given to Memphis cargoes.”
In helpless confusion, Havens looked to Dryke for support. But Dryke understood, as Sasaki expected he would. “Yeah, I agree,” he said, nodding slowly. “If we shut down we’re doing them a favor. If they try to hit us again now they’ll be doing us a favor. Fire up the lasers.”
Havens’s face twisted unhappily. “I have some very shaky people in flight operations—”
“Then rotate a new shift in,” said Sasaki. “But get the freighters flying again. Refer all outside inquiries here. All statements are to come from me.”
“Yes, Director.”
“I will expect a more complete report from both of you in thirty minutes.”
“We’re on it,” Dryke said.
There were six windows on the display wall now. Arms crossed over her chest, Sasaki stood before the wall and surveyed them. DIANA had corrected its story once more; the falling object was now a satellite. Orbital flight controllers on Highstar had provided Allied with a flight track confirming the aborted launch from Kasigau. Nikkei Telemedia had joined Panasian at the scene. The Kenyan commerce minister was demanding a conference. Panasian was demanding a statement. But of Jeremiah, there was no word.
Sasaki was able to placate the Kenyan commerce minister with five minutes of earnest concern and a promise of more. That duty discharged, she composed a brief statement for the media:
“Reports reaching me indicate that at approximately eleven twenty-five Greenwich Mean Time this morning, an Allied Transcon T-3 freight capsule launched from Kasigau Launch Center in Kenya crashed into the Singapore Strait. Allied has begun an immediate investigation into the circumstances surrounding this most unfortunate event. We are deeply concerned by reports of damage and loss of life in Singapore harbor. Allied will extend every possible assistance to the government of Singapore and to those touched by this incident.”
The Quiet Pools Page 11
