Orbital Burn

by K. A. Bedford

  Later, the captain said, “Impact in nine hours, Ms. Meagher. I can set up a display feed if you want to watch it.”

  In the wake of all that adrenaline, fear, frustration and anger, Lou only wanted to sleep. “Sure, put it through. Right now I need some Z’s. Bitch of a day.”

  Reynolds’ hologram vanished and all of the cabin lights dimmed. After a moment, a wall forward of Lou’s couch became a giant display window.

  There it was, she saw, the fist about to strike. Nine hours. She tried to imagine the velocity, the tidal shearing in Kestrel’s crust, tsunamis rolling across the oceans, the way the Bastard must fill the sky. She thought of Sheb’s Diner, some of her old haunts, and the Southside Markets, always good for a few coins from guilty tourists. She thought, too, about the Stalk. Unplugged from the counterweight asteroid, it would lash around the world’s equator like the whip of some ancient pagan goddess; the asteroid itself would shoot off on its own journey, and, in time, fall into a doomed solar orbit.

  Lou also thought about the cops. If her theory about their involvement in what happened to the kid was a bust, then what the hell were they doing that night?

  She stroked Dog’s fur and saw how his ears and battered snout bore scars from the dogfights the cops had arranged. The thought filled her with the kind of bitterness and anger that makes it impossible to sleep, that you dwell on and can’t get out of your head. She thought, too, of the way those bastards killed looters and troublesome refugees alike, knowing the government guys in Stalktown only cared, in the final days, about their own interests. They weren’t, with a week before the end of the world, going to mount a serious anticorruption inquiry or put cops through murder trials.

  She remembered the stark terror Dog felt at the mere sight of cops. She wanted to do something about it; it burned inside her that a dog should suffer like that, to say nothing of how he’d had all that equipment shoved into his head for the pleasure of his owners. But now Lou was here, caught up in all this other business, and there were forces involved that made the Stalktown cops look like plankton. There was no way she could ever hit back at those guys. Life was like that, she knew. Bad guys got away with all kinds of evilness. Innocent folks got screwed over.

  And worse, to disregard all this and take some measure of revenge anyway would likely be a good way to wind up in litigation for the rest of one’s life. Lou’s father told her, when she was an idealistic teenager beginning to find out about the awful things that happened in the world, that there was a fundamental law in the universe: the bad guys always have a bigger legal budget than the good guys. And the corollary to this: the badder the bad guys, the bigger their budget. You could feel like a winner during the few minutes after doing the deed, you could feel like you’d rectified some kind of Cosmic Order, scored one for the little guys, the helpless dogs and disposables of the world — but then the law would hit you back, plunging down from the sky like the Bastard itself. Revenge, her father said, was the stupidest idea in the universe.

  But that didn’t stop Lou from thinking about it.

  An alarm chime woke Lou at Impact Minus Thirty minutes. She had a headache and felt lousy. Hours of constant three-g acceleration, she figured, would do that. She was glad she didn’t have to worry about her heart and whether blood could make it back up her legs. Dog, she noticed, was still asleep. She moved his small body, worked his legs, and got him settled in a new position. He didn’t wake up, but made grumpy little noises; his eyes were half-open.

  Gia Reynolds’ face appeared over the table again. “Ms. Meagher, I didn’t think you’d want to miss this.”

  Lou looked up and saw the wall-display. It broke the coverage into thirty-six smaller panes, each displaying feeds from countless monitoring platforms, including orbiting satellites, media probes from over twenty different feed services stationed in the immediate area, and several landers both on the Bastard and on Kestrel.

  She stared, agog. The end of Kestrel was, for the tens of billions of people across human space, a diverting bit of news and entertainment. She saw sleek talking head presenters, a few of them actual people but most of them synthetic animated constructs, talking to analysts and experts about what the big collision was going to be like. There were reports from the disposables sitting in those ships, so close to the likely blast zone they were sure to get atomized. How did it feel to know you were reporting on your own death? Someone had cooked up special disposables programmed to have opinions about this kind of thing, she realized, feeling bitter again.

  Lou saw up to the moment forecasts and simulations of what it would look like, from every conceivable angle. There were estimates of the quantities of energy and matter involved, and in separate little windows, experts explained scientific notation and words like “teratons” for those not in the know.

  She watched the view from one of the landers at the expected Ground Zero point, a low mountain range near the Gray Lump Sea. Local time was about ten-thirty in the evening. The weather was bad, with high winds and storm fronts approaching. The curve of the Bastard was like a black inverted sky. Astronomers had seen luminous plumes of hot ionized gas rising from sites on the daylit side of the Bastard, creating a bluish vapor envelope over parts of the Bastard’s “face.” In two other panes Lou saw her world from the Bastard’s perspective: the surface of Kestrel rising, rising towards the viewer. She saw roads, farming settlements, immense rectilinear craters of mining projects, and luxury seaside resorts. Kestrel was not a beautiful world, she could see that. Never was. It had always been an opportunity for exploitation, a source of material to fuel the endless expansion of humans into the dark. Kestrel had never mattered as a world in itself. She wondered, too, what it had been like when Earth was killed, over one hundred years earlier. All records of Earth’s destruction had been sealed or embargoed by the old United Nations, in perpetuity.

  The collision forecast simulations were compelling, if also difficult to watch. The scientific community, who preferred to categorize the rock as a Type Three Herrington Object, were divided over what would happen to the Object. Some thought the Bastard would not easily break up during impact. It was often described as the “Cue Ball of Ultimate Doom,” by the more populist commentators, who enjoyed rerunning the simulations depicting the dense, exotic matter-rich Object plunging through Kestrel’s crust and vaporizing much of the mantle material. However, what would happen to Kestrel’s molten iron and heavy metal core? To Lou’s unscientific mind, it looked pretty obvious that if the Bastard was the Cue Ball of Ultimate Doom, then the core of Kestrel could be a semi-solid “Eight Ball of White-Hot Death” that would either shoot out the far side of the world’s remaining crust or perhaps, she thought, the impact of the fast-moving object with the core would cause the core to burst apart like an egg. Another scenario showed how the Object could be partially deflected off the core and keep moving, leaving Kestrel with a hemisphere-sized exit wound. Lou had to admit, these simulations were impressive. Taken at microsecond intervals, she saw a kind of wild magic in the swirling flight of the superheated magma chunks, in that apocalyptic splashdown, in the visceral rippling of the whole world’s surface. Never had she thought a world could be so fragile.

  The minutes ticked down. Synthetic presenters kept babbling in order to fill otherwise dead air; human presenters saw that there was, in the final moments, less and less to say that would add to the discussion. The synthetics dwelled on the tension of the moment, and told their viewers that “you could cut the air here in Collision Control with a knife!”

  Collision Control, huh? Lou thought, pissed off, wondering what focus group thought up that one. She didn’t feel any tension at all. She simply wanted the whole damn thing over with. It was ghoulish, all this attention, the endless use of technology to preview and study and forecast and simulate the event. When the thing finally happened, it would be a letdown. It would be messy and not quite like any particular simulatio
n, and not as spectacular.

  She sat watching the timers racing for zero. And felt a terrible aching sadness, a kind of numbness, for the loss of her home. The place where, after years of struggling to find a niche for herself, either trying to please her parents or Bloody Tom, she had found acceptance with the Stalktown Dead. She stroked Dog’s head, feeling his reassuring warmth against her cold skin.

  One pane, as the final minutes fell away, showed an elderly male poet, someone whose name she’d probably recognize if she’d stuck with her degree in Literature, reading from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Lou thought it sounded pretty bloody miserable. It fit her mood well.

  She looked at all those panes on the wall, thought about the billions of people watching, munching their snacks. She really hoped the ratings were good.

  There was silence at the end of the world.

  On pane twenty-four, showing the StellNet Feed — a long shot showing Kestrel and the Bastard — the picture suddenly changed. A female presenter’s voice: “Am I on? Am I on?” Then she was there, blonde and flustered. Her image was wavering and fuzzy; she came into focus, all business, trying for professional calm.

  Impact in two minutes.

  At Ground Zero, Lou saw on pane eight, storm and torment in the dark.

  The presenter blurted, “One of the astronomical observatories reports that the Object … the Object is shrinking. Repeat: the Herrington Object is shrinking.”

  Chapter 15

  It took three seconds for the other feed services to catch up and move on this inconceivable development. With eighty seconds left most display panes were running precise real-time measurements of the Bastard and the measurements showed that even as the Bastard plunged down Kestrel’s gravity well, it was losing diameter and mass. Moreover, the shrinkage rate was accelerating.

  Presenters, human and synthetic, babbled in near-panic to fill the air until analysts could be activated or brought back to explain this event. Perreira Group Media’s three panes showed a panel of famous scientists who could only sit and stare, dumbstruck.

  Pane twelve featured a synthetic presenter named Al Smooth talking to Dr. Elisa Nile of Ganymede’s Milson University. She said there was something intriguing happening with the Object’s surface features. Within a moment, most services switched their coverage to the Bastard’s surface, which showed that, although it appeared to be shrinking, it was in fact…

  “The Object is going somewhere,” Dr Nile said. “Or perhaps is being pulled somewhere.”

  It was already half gone. Real-time tracking of surface features showed that peculiar things were happening to the Bastard’s physical topography. Experts pronounced themselves either baffled, or they spouted ideas that were meaningless and silly. There was talk of the Object containing a black hole; there was talk of aliens; there was, perhaps inevitably, talk of God. If this wasn’t the Hand of God at work, sparing Kestrel, then what else could it be?

  Lou thought those guys might have a point. And what about a God that shows up at this particular moment to rescue an unremarkable world — but not rescue Earth when that planet needed help?

  Lou also could not help but wonder if the people behind the weird lady had anything to do with what was happening. Then there was this Otaru thing. Who — or what — the hell was that? It was one thing to have a name for “him,” but she still knew nothing about him. At this point, anything at all was possible.

  By the time the Bastard had been reduced to ten percent of its former mass and size, Collision Control estimated it would be reduced to nothing in less than forty-five seconds.

  Lou found it hard to breathe. While watching the Object dwindle, she had a sense of the whole damn thing disappearing down a drain.

  Every pane now was full of detailed live images; there were experts and analysts, pundits and speculators, all babbling at once. Lou had to yell at the wall to control the sound from each one. Increasingly, the voices talking about a manifestation of God were starting to make the most noise, and getting the most attention. Problem was, they couldn’t agree on which God it might be.

  There was another quieter chorus of opinion coming from elsewhere. These voices belonged to people more cautious, more thoughtful and less given to easy assumptions. Lou tuned out the God guys and listened to these others. They were academics, philosophers and cultural theorists rather than professional scientists. Where the presenters, human or synthetic were sleek and attractive, these academics were intense, thoughtful, not exactly mediagenic, and looked uncomfortable at being seen by so many billions. They also refused to get pinned down on sweeping, simple statements. One young man named Yakov was trying to explain his theory that the Object was being “pulled out of our three-dimensional universe into a higher dimensional manifold.”

  When the presenter next to him could not suppress a smirk and a glance to the audience, Yakov, a hunched figure with dark eyes, insisted, “We know higher dimensions exist. We use so-called hypertubes all the time, and hypertubes are nothing more than a particular class of naturally occurring drifting wormholes, links through higher dimensions to get us from one point in space to another.”

  The presenter was about to ask Yakov a silly question when someone out of capture range alerted her. She looked at her imager. “We now cross back to Collision Control…”

  All panes showed the final moments of the once-terrifying, unstoppable Bloody Bastard. It dwindled ever smaller, now shrinking fast enough that the unaided eye watching this coverage could see it going away. It retained its original velocity. By the time it hit Kestrel’s atmosphere, it was less than the size of a small hov. The imager on the lander at Ground Zero could not make out the Object overhead at all, until it became a meteor, blazing across the night sky, leaving a trail of hot smoke and dust.

  The feed services replayed the event on every pane, from every angle, at every conceivable level of detail and speed. Analysts, recovered from the initial shock, regrouped their resources, started getting their own feeds going from their think tanks and universities, and watched it all happen again, and again. Attention was drawn to particular salient details. Lou noticed that, with upwards of fifty experts on hand, at some point everything about “The Event” was a salient detail to someone. Mediababble filled Kestrel Space. A hunk of heavy exotic matter the size of Mars going smack into Kestrel was big news. But said Mars-sized Object disappearing off into the great unknown, moments before impact — that was news! Lou knew that within three days this entire solar system would be humming with ships from every university, research institute, church and media feed there was. Everyone would want their own spin on this, their own piece of history. There would be relays of ships: every day an uncrewed ship would leave at extreme velocities, taking the latest data back through the tubes, to the rest of human space, while another ship stayed behind gathering more data. In time, all humanity would learn what had happened here.

  Which left Louise Meagher where exactly?

  She dismissed the display; it turned back into a wall.

  The cabin was almost silent again. She felt the power of the engines pushing this ferry, still accelerating at three-g and didn’t want to think about what the velocity might be by now. Probably huge, taking her on a tight hyperbolic orbit to the Orbital. And where was the Orbital? It must still be maneuvering, preparing to accelerate towards the biggest tube entry point it could locate.

  The Stalk would have fallen, wrapping itself around Kestrel like so much polydiamond string. When stalks had fallen on other worlds, during the early days of the technology, they had been monster media events. But she had not seen anything on the coverage just now. The lack of easy access between surface and orbit was going to present problems. She imagined Stalktown had been levelled, if not by the white-hot plunge of the elevator itself, then by the seismic disturbances generated by that much weight hitting the surface.

  She rath
er hoped Tom had been crushed like a bug.

  “Captain?” she called.

  Reynolds appeared over the table. She looked pale and seemed uneasy. “Ms. Meagher. Yes?”

  Lou looked at the hologram before her. “That was … quite a show, huh?”

  “Traffic’s gonna be a bitch out here next week, I reckon,” Reynolds said.

  “Hmm. Listen. I guess now we don’t have to get out to the Orbital in such a rush.”

  The pilot nodded. “You have a point.” Within moments, Lou felt the powerplant throttling back, the crushing weight on her chest easing. Reynolds said, “I’ll keep her at one-g the rest of the way. By the way, we’ll reach turnover in eighteen hours, ma’am. ETA at the Orbital is thirty hours.”

  “What’s happening at the Orbital?”

  Reynolds grinned. “Braking. Could be braking for several days, weeks maybe, before they start pushing back to the Kestrel L-point.”

  Wow, Lou thought. She shook her head, thinking about the scale of the Orbital, and the idea of it moving on its own.

  And, if that crazy woman was at all credible, Dog’s Kid was involved in all this somehow.

  Which surely proved beyond doubt that whatever she was, she wasn’t credible!

  Thirty hours until arrival. What to do?

  She grinned. If she were still a student bumming and partying her way through university, the thing to do, after an experience like this, would be to get utterly wasted. She suspected that seeing a Type Three Herrington Object get sucked into another dimension qualified as something that only the best hallucinoids could help her understand.

  Which was the old Lou talking. One thing the new Lou understood, even if she understood not much else, was that she was in the midst of weird, heavy juju.