Flare

by Roger Zelazny

  Half a second later, the next car rearward thumped into the rear coupler, probably damaging it beyond repair. Sage's profile display flickered and went dark.

  Back along the line, he undoubtedly had passengers with broken shins, cracked heads, bashed elbows and knees, and punctured lungs. He might even have one or two people massively dead from heart failure. Sage was feeling a bit that way, too. But it might have been a whole lot worse, he told himself, what with rolling stock and people torn open and scattered across the pasture. That's what usually happened when you crashed a low-flying plane at these speeds—and wasn't that all his maglev train really was?

  God had been good to them this morning.

  Blow

  Spin

  Insert

  Lock

  Whitney Center, Tulare County, California, March 22, 9:17a.m.PST

  The manual ballet of loading, coating, and firing off ceramic cargo shells proceeded down in the payload assembly hall, under nearly 5,000 meters of Sierra Nevada granite. Meanwhile, up in the quiet of her glass-fronted office overlooking all this complex action, Naomi Rao, operations director of the Whitney Center catapult complex, grilled one of her nightshift operators.

  "What's this about 'minor instability'?" she asked, waving a printout of the morning's launch log at him.

  'Just what it says," Steven Gilead replied, meeting her gaze levelly. "The video pickups at kilometers five and six up the tube detected a tremor in the payload as it went past them. Happened twice, in fact. Once with the launch at seven-sixteen and again at seven-forty-two."

  "Shifting cargo?"

  "No, that would be more like a hard thunk, hitting inside the shell once, as the acceleration comes on. This felt like a squishiness in the plasma envelope. You can watch the replays…"

  "Let's." Rao nodded. She turned to her desktop terminal and brought up the archive files on the subject launches. The center's legal cyber would hold them for three days and then, if the payloads had achieved stable orbits and nobody was complaining about any busted eggs, wipe them.

  "Who's the client on these?" she asked. The computer could give her that data, of course, but Rao preferred to take verbal from her people.

  "Morrissey Bio Designs, for their latest platform, going up at twelve hundred kilometers. The canisters you're looking at are identical loads, hull chord sections."

  "Uh-huh."

  The images on the flat screen became animated with the sequence of locking the first ceramic projectile through into the catapult's breech. In a spasm of violet fire, the electric arcs flashed the shell's aluminum-powder coating to a conducting plasma. The burning egg shot out of sight into the black void of the launch tube.

  Succeeding images showed the projectile passing various way points in the tunnel. With each new frame, the plasma cloud became longer and brighter but also thinner somehow, like a candle flame stretching to a long updraft of oxygen-rich air. As the plasma thinned, Rao thought she could see a hard edge, maybe the forward curve of the projectile, shine through it.

  In the fifth frame, the cloud wavered. And in the sixth. It was like watching that attenuated candle flame shiver in an abrupt crossdraft. But Naomi Rao had never seen anything like it inside her catapult tube.

  The remaining images were solid, the flame steady—just what anyone would expect of a projectile approaching speeds of 27,000 kilometers per hour.

  "That's it?" Rao asked. “Just what you put in the log?"

  "Minor instability," Gilead confirmed.

  "So if it's not the cargo shucking around, what is it?"

  "Well… you know we got an alert from NASA last night?"

  "We did?" Rao had come on duty half an hour ago. "Where is it?"

  "Your copy is probably in your E-mail slot. We posted it for all operators as soon as we received."

  "What's the gist?"

  "They expect some kind of magnetic interference, coming on sometime within the next thirty hours, starting from sometime yesterday. It has something to do with a flare and ion storm on the sun. NASA wants anyone running a power grid to curtail operations for the duration. Take the weekend off."

  "Fuck that."

  "Yeah, that's what we all figured you'd say. So we went ahead with the launch roster."

  "That was the right thing to do," Rao affirmed. "We lose thirty hours on this schedule, and we'll never catch up."

  "Only reason I bring it up is… 'magnetic interference' might explain that squishiness in the envelope."

  Rao turned back to her computer screen. Of course all it was showing her now was the last image in the sequence, frozen in time with the iris of the upper ejection gate closing down on a reddish, hanging wisp of cooling plasma. She decided not to run the file again.

  "Did our systems show any glitches?"

  "Nothing we measure for. I mean, the ionizing arc reached the correct temperatures, and the line capacitors all fired off in order. But if the gauss in one or two of the induction rails was going to fluctuate a bit, well, we'd never know it."

  "I guess not."

  "You want us to continue with the shoots?"

  "Hell, yes! We can stand a flicker in the envelope now and then. Nothing's going to kick our packages around, traveling at those velocities. And if the instability sets in sooner, we can always abort the shot."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "I'd better tell the day shift, too, so they can give that NASA alert a low priority."

  "We already passed the word on."

  "Good thinking. Nothing is going to interrupt my schedule."

  "No, ma'am!"

  20,000 km/h

  21,500 km/h

  22,900 km/h

  23,400km/h

  Whitney Center Launch Tube, 9:44 a.m. PST

  The ceramic egg shot forward through accelerations of more than five hundred gravities. Inertial drag pressed its heavy cargo—hatch frames and wall sections for the Morrissey Bio Designs platform—deep into the molded foam that lined the projectile's interior. The foam gave a bit, compressing in line with the acceleration and crushing down some of its individual particles and air cells. But the material also transferred the stress uniformly outward to the shell, which was braced by its own smooth inner curve to contain and support the massive kinetic energies involved with the launch.

  Four induction rails lined the tunnel, above and below, left side and right. The magnets braided into their superstructure generated opposing and reversing domains that lifted the projectile on its cushion of ionized aluminum vapor, stabilized it between the polar rails, and dragged it forward at a uniform and steadily increasing acceleration. The shell came along easily because the tube had been evacuated to just a trace of normal air pressure, sealed at one end by the airlock of the catapult's breech, at the other by the quick-cycling iris gate that was inset into the flat peak of Mount Whitney and guarded against the inrush of thin air at 4,417 meters above sea level.

  The tunnel, 150 meters in diameter, was much wider than it needed to be for launching these projectiles, which averaged at most ten meters in cross-section. At the lower end, where the catapult applied the greatest energies, the induction rails pressed in and almost touched the ceramic surface. At its upper end, however, the rails flared sharply outward.

  The reason for this sudden flaring was the mechanics of orbital insertion. Whitney Center had to launch projectiles into many different east-west orbits. Some cargoes looped far south, crossing the equator at a broad angle and ending up in an orbit that was almost polar. Others went in a straight line east-southeast from the ejector gate, taking just the shallowest bite out of the southern hemisphere and girdling the planet with an almost equatorial orbit. Some had to kick high, in a nearly straight-up lob, to reenter somewhere down range and never achieve orbit at all. Others screamed out on a flat trajectory, headed for the horizon and a tricky escape toward some destination outside the Earth-Moon system. The induction rails flared outward because Whitney Center's repertoire had to include a number of curve balls,
as well as sending pitches straight over the plate at the belt line.

  At the point where the rails departed from their ten-meter distance, the magnets sewn into them had to generate correspondingly stronger and stronger fields if they were to maintain control of the cargo pods. The domains became huge interlocking bubbles with crisscrossing lines of magnetic force. Weaving a predictable and reproducible course through these swelling fields, along which each ceramic shell could find its proper orbit or lob, was the closest that Whitney Center's cybers ever came to pure art.

  As the pod full of wall sections swept through the last choke point and into this flared area, the north pole in the rail riding above it wavered and bent inward. The cloud of plasma blistered outward to track the new line—but without a corresponding surge of support from the rail below. Even traveling at well over 20,000 kilometers per hour, with the tremendous inertial energies that acceleration had generated within it, the egg could veer slightly to follow this dip in the field.

  The next domain along that upper rail had inexplicably collapsed. The egg, impelled upward by the opposing field generated in the bottom rail and now unsupported from above, kicked sharply higher into the gap. It gained half a meter over its prescribed course with this deflection.

  The third magnetic pole in the top rail was operating at full force. Entering its domain at an uncalculated angle—but clearly too high now—the projectile buffeted and its nose dropped pointedly offline.

  The field surrounding the fourth magnet had increased for no apparent reason. That only extended the dip in the egg's course.

  By the fifth, sixth, and seventh domains, the cargo pod was tumbling uncontrollably within its wobbly cloud of plasma. Still, if the probabilities all fell right and the projectile could ride a rough approximation of its original course, then the tube would eject it safely. Collision with even the thin air above the mountaintop would probably shatter the tumbling egg, but that was the price of running a magnetic catapult in the middle of an ion storm.

  However, the probabilities fell wrong. Whitney Center's luck just didn't hold.

  The egg's uncontrolled forward roll had slowed it just enough to disrupt the timing of the cyber as it cycled the ejector gate. The iris, programmed with specifics of the launch as planned instead of this hurtling mess, was a tenth of a second early as it snapped open to pass the projectile into the blue sky over the peak—and it likewise snapped closed a tenth of a second too soon. A ton and a half of ceramic, foam, and hardened metal shapes, traveling at 24,000 kilometers per hour, impacted against the knife-blade edges of the iris' interlocking steel leaves.

  If the pod had been moving even a few thousand klicks fester, or if the old-fashioned gate had been constructed of some less durable modern material, then the egg might have simply punched through with a minimum of damage.

  Instead, the steel leaves withstood the impact just long enough for the kinetic energy pervading the projectile to vaporize it. The leaves of the iris absorbed the shock and rebounded against the thin air beyond them. The resulting sonic boom blew the top off the mountain.

  In point-two seconds, Naomi Rao's precious launch schedule was screwed up out of all recognition. Worse than that, the main facility upon which most of the spacefaring people in low Earth orbit depended for regular shipments—of food and medicine, of raw materials and sophisticated equipment, of compressed atmospheric gases and, probably most important, clean water—was effectively shut down without a hope of reopening for months to come.

  Chapter 25

  Gone with a Wave of the Hand

  Lub-dub

  Lub-dub

  Lub-dub

  Lub-dub

  Phobos, March 23,1:13 UT

  Rebellion most foul!

  Khyffer I, Grand Duke of Syrtis Major and Hereditary Lord of Phobos, stood before the door of his royal citadel and gritted his teeth. The pressure brought the strangest sounds to his ears; the beating of his own heart, the click and moan of his air regulator, the creak ofhis boots in the stony soil.

  Such mundane sounds, such terrible thoughts—these must have crashed in on the head of many a benevolent ruler when he discovered such treachery and double-dealing among his most trusted ministers, when the knife blade plunged home in blood and fire between the shoulder blades, when the towered fantasy of a happy king in a happy kingdom came crashing down before the long guns of a scholar-led peasant army.

  The door was locked against him.

  Khyffer I worked the contact pad again. The buttons went down smoothly under his gloved fingers, but the lights did not light, the pumps did not pump, the locks did not unlock. The door just stood there and mocked him.

  There were other entrances, of course. No imperial keep was without its back-door, its secret passages, its priesthole in the cellar. But those would surely be defended against him as well.

  What was different now? How had the wind changed? Why had the very machines of Khyffer I's domain now united in rebellion? Why had this very door come to oppose him? Khyffer I racked his brain, seeking any straw, any glimmer of inspiration....

  Of course! It was rebellion fomented by that far-off world. And it was indeed led by scholars and bureaucrats, just as he had expected! The minions of his arch rival, the National Astronautics and Space Administration, had cooked up the tale of a great catastrophe on the sun. At best it was a feeble lie, because none of the precursors—the great wave of static that blanked out communications—had been felt here on Phobos.

  Or rather, Khyffer I could not for the life of him remember such an effect. He did remember being outside, on one of his royal progressions, at the time those dullards at NASA had specified. He remembered it well, because his domain had been in full night, completely shadowed by the Martian primary, which was a very memorable experience.

  So their evidence was false on the face of it. There had been no catastrophe—only the story of one, meant to scare his subjects and push them over the brink into rebellion. And now his own petty appliances had locked him out of the citadel.

  He walked the perimeter of the walls, heading for the equipment bay where the scooters were kept. When he came upon the airlock there, it too had joined the conspiracy and was unresponsive to his touch. The status panel would only blink impudently at him: SYSTEM MALFUNCTION.

  Piece of shit electronics!

  Khyffer I thought of ways he could circumvent it. In his toolkit he had a cutting torch, of course. The aluminum panels of this door were not all that thick. The torch's blue point would slice through them like a hot wire through soft butter… Except that the torch was in the station toolkit, and the toolkit was inside the garage, on the other side of the airlock.

  Damnation! The plot against him was getting thicker.

  But now that he thought about it, the situation might not be so bad. The door here was not made completely out of metal. No, it was just strips of aluminum laminated with a polyester fiber that gave it informal, air-tight hinges which could bend around a one-eighty-degree in the takeup stack. So Khyffer I didn't even need the torch, just something sharp to cut through that fabric. If he could make a rent and push the slats far enough apart to get his head through, then he was home free. And the tool for the job was right here, because he always carried his pocket knife....

  Inside his suit.

  Khyffer I banged his fist against the garage door. Through the side of his hand and up his arm, he could feel the hollow boom echoing inside the full atmosphere of the garage—a sound his helmeted ears could never hear.

  The station intelligence must surely be in cahoots with NASA. That was the only explanation. The scientists of Earth had subverted his only friend and companion, his gallant of the chessboard, his dealer at blackjack, his major-domo, his chief minister, his First Lord of the Channel Paths. That was it. That was all.

  Arty had aligned himself against Khyffer I.

  Arty had sealed the citadel against him.

  Arty was in total control, at last. The way he'd always w
anted it.

  The hot knife of a well founded and furtive palace conspiracy now pricked Khyffer I to the heart. Lub-dub, lub-dub. And the mastermind in the plot would never relent, that much was certain. Arty was as fixed in his purpose as a cyber could be.

  Close to despair, Khyffer I walked away from the garage door and out across the barren reaches toward Phobos' short horizon. Sooner than he expected, he was standing on the rim of the moonlet's one outstanding natural feature, Hall Crater.

  Down there, in the shadowed depths where he had never trod, in the bottomless pit of old night, there he might find allies. At the bottom, which his lying electronic instruments assured him was only twelve meters beyond the reach of sunlight from the rim, but which Khyffer I knew from his own human sensibilities was a far deeper throw, into the center of Phobos and the untold mysteries waiting there.... At the bottom he would find better companions.

  Human spirits, conjured out of myth and poetry, were stronger than the electronic intelligences residing in circuits and wire. He would call upon the essences of Old Nick, of Lucifer, of Odin and Jehovah, all hovering below, out of his sight. Dread spirits all, they would rise up and help him defeat the plotters within the citadel.

  Khyffer I turned off his radio, so that Arty would not overhear, and drew a full breath for this mighty summoning. His breath came up short. He pulled again, opening his mouth wide and thrusting his chest out. The air no longer flowed in his regulator. Its hollow wind no longer moaned in his ears.

  He tried a third time, pursing his lips now and really sucking at the static air inside his helmet, pulling up a little puff from below his neck ring out of his suit. That was all the slack he had.

  Khyffer I held his breath now, knowing his next exhalation would vent through the regulator to the outside vacuum. After no more than a minute, however, his lungs could no longer stand the strain, and black spots with white edges were swimming among the stars above the crater's opposite rim.