by Peter Damon
“There it is, there it is!” Leanne cried, grinning as she saw she was right on track to make a landing on the docks. It wouldn’t be a very soft landing, but it was a marvel all in itself that she’d land anywhere near the docks. She also had to admit that luck played a big part in the process.
There were still five hundred feet or more left when the video feed went black.
“Allan!” she cried, glancing away from her monitors to look for the reason for the sudden loss of feeds.
Allan saw it first and licked his lips.
“Mickey, hurry up mate,” he cautioned.
“Why, what’s up?” the Essex gypsy asked, hurriedly attaching the cables to the underside of the SUV.
“South Korea doesn’t like us anymore,” Allan murmured. A feed from the satellite showed military helicopters circling the wreck of the decoy SUV while, from either end of the access road, came a procession of green and grey military vehicles.
“Ok, I’m up and running,” Mickey told them, sitting nervously in his cab as he ordered the SUV to rise as quickly as it could through the cloud layer, unsure his stealth settings would mean anything while carrying a 30 metre length of carbon steel beneath him.
“Anything I should worry about?” Mickey asked, flicking through the feeds from his cameras.
“Doesn’t look like it. But it’s a good job we didn’t send you to Korea,” Allan told him. Soldiers had surrounded the wrecked decoy and a senior officer was on a phone, gesturing wildly with his arms, clearly upset that all he seemed to have captured was tissue paper over a chassis of bamboo and one canister of helium, now badly dented and scared.
“Best let Oliver and Michael know,” Leanne murmured. “And I was doing so well!” she complained.
“You were not! There’s no way you would have landed that!” Allan snorted, putting the call through.
“Would have too!” Leanne claimed.
+++++++++++++
Viktor took the call while walking along the Moskva, wrapped up in his heavy overcoat while taking the opportunity to smoke one cigarette after another.
“Yes?” he enquired, stopping to concentrate on the details from South Korea. “Yes, yes,” he muttered, anger and disappointment making his words harsh. “No, we pay by results. Go tell them to screw themselves,” he told his secretary, doubting the man would have the balls. “Arrange a meeting with ROSCOSMO. I will need to meet with them regularly now, until they finish their preparations,” he said. “And warn them; no more fuck-ups. They do this right, otherwise I will personally chop their balls off!”
+++++++++++++
The rain fell heavily outside the window of the West Room, and had done throughout the night, the dawn glinting greyly on the lawn beyond the outside path. The heavy, overcast gloom extended into the room as the President of the United States reviewed the report from the US representative to the United Nations.
Joanna Bradworth sat facing the president, her thoughts hidden behind a bland expression she had cultivated as early as university, two decades before.
The president sighed and removed her glasses to rub at her eyes. “What is it with these people?” she asked rhetorically.
Joanna shrugged. “They believe they can change the world,” she surmised. She had worked with people like that at Google, and they were invariably hard to get along with.
“They move into the communications market and we suffer, they move out of the market, and we suffer,” the president observed.
“Now’s the time to invest heavily in a new NASA space program, Ma’am,” Joanna told her.
“You think so?” the president asked, the glasses back on again, her blue eyes gazing at her from over their rim in a gesture that was typical of the woman.
“I do, Ma’am. Their departure is going to leave a void. ROSCOSMO is going to fill that void with a mass of new satellite launches using their existing launch technology. China will try to match them, but haven’t got the reliable rockets that the Russian’s have. Europe will do the same, but haven’t got the power to launch the really large satellites up into GEO, so they’re only going to get a small portion of the market.
“We could have a new and powerful rocket launching within two years, better than anything the others have, but it will mean a big investment now,” Joanna urged.
“And what if I were to invest in chemical research instead; find our own version of HYPORT?” she asked.
Joanna inwardly sighed and outwardly shrugged. “You know the odds, Madam President. You have three years left of your term in office. Find the chemical, and you’ll be hailed as the most incredible president since Lincoln. Fail to find it, and you will have squandered all of America’s resources on a pipe-dream. Whereas, if you were to invest in NASA, then you will have done well; you’ll have increased jobs in technology, kept USA at the forefront of space exploration, and generated a lot more wealth within America.”
“And if Russia find the chemical?” the president asked.
“Well, we’ll just have to take measures to ensure they don’t,” Joanna said.
“And what if the professors find it first?” she asked.
Joanna shook her head. The CIA had found nothing of Don Graves, the only one of the three to be on American soil. They suggested the professor had left of his own accord, somehow sidestepping his minder and probably holed up in a farmhouse somewhere out in the Blue Mountains, working feverishly to find the miraculous chemical, and take all the profit as a result.
“Don Graves is an old man,” Joanna pointed out, hating herself for it.
The president nodded. “Keep hunting for the SOB, but in the mean-time, let’s begin to line up the Hill for a new Space Bill, something to buoy up employment and the technology sectors, all at once.”
+++++++++++++
“That was quite a day,” Oliver remarked as he joined Heather and Michael in the lounge that evening.
“Well, I’m glad the ARC was able to give you a new reason to use your rhetoric on the mass media,” Heather chuckled, pleasantly surrounded by Michael’s arm.
“Don’t suppose we know who planned the Korean heist?” Michael asked drowsily.
Oliver shook his head and sipped his tea. “People behind people,” he mused. “Just how political can we get, Michael?” he asked.
Michael shook his head, coming awake and taking his arm back. “No Oliver. Don’t even go down that road,” he cautioned, reaching for his own cup of tea, now semi-cold.
“Why not?”
“You know why not. You know what a rat does when cornered. Always leave your opponent a means to escape,” he quoted, trying to remember how many manuals that terse piece of advice had been embedded into.
“Seems a shame. They’re already rattled,” he pointed out.
“Been a long time since something came up that is totally outside of their control,” Michael judged.
“What are you two talking about?” Heather asked.
“Kingmakers,” Oliver told her, smiling at her confused expression.
“Warwick the Kingmaker,” Michael told her on seeing her frown.
“Referring of course to Richard Neville, the 16th Earl of Warwick who influenced the succession during the Wars of the Roses,” Heather agreed with a nod.
“But the term has been used ever since, unofficially most of the time, to describe a person or persons who silently influence the affairs of an organisation,” Michael went on.
“And you believe someone operates on a worldwide scale?” Heather asked, shocked at the idea.
“There have been suggestions over the last two decades or so, or so some in the media would have you believe. There again, elements of the media could be defined as kingmakers, so who’s to tell?” Michael asked, smiling as Oliver made a scoffing noise.
“It’s more than that though,” Oliver began, but Michael shook his head.
“We’re not going to do this. The last time we had this conversation we were at it till three, four in the morning
and you cleared me out of every spirit in the house,” Michael recalled.
Oliver shook his head. “Certainly roused the media,” he admitted, “And a host of would be statesmen.”
Michael nodded. The USA had made a lot of noise, voicing their disapproval of what South Korea had done. Of course, they might have sung a completely different tune had the strategy worked. But it did beg the question; what had stirred up so many American senators? They normally only became this aroused when lobbying obliged them too.
“Have Robert trawl through recent lobbying activity in Washington,” Michael asked, aware that lobbyists had to report all such activity to the federal government. With the information already available in the public domain, their enquiry wouldn’t be noted.
Oliver grinned, pleased that Michael had taken the bait.
November 14th.
The small group in the ARC’s control-room stood to applaud Freedom One as she glided smoothly to her place beside the ARC. The docking-bay doors were open on both vehicles, with SUV’s sliding between them as they ferried equipment and people back and forth, friends sometimes meeting face to face to stop for a few moments and shake hands in the age old greeting.
For 14 minutes out of twenty, they could use cameras on the hull to look out at the approaching asteroid, a bright pebble in the dark sky, larger and brighter than distant stars and planets, but dwarfed by the moon.
Michael sat at the back of the control-room and watched Allan control the comings and goings of people and material, coordinating with Samuel, whose choice it had been to remain at the docking bay and help ensure its smooth running.
Freedom One shared the area shaded from the earth by the ARC’s hull with the rapidly developing ice-cutter. Spacemen still swarmed over the lattice of steel beams that supported the platform onto which the ice would gather, having been cut from the asteroid by its newly installed plough blade.
Frankie wandered over to nod at Michael. “Good to see you out and about,” he told the older man, shaking his hand.
“I’m sorry there’s no feast to welcome you back,” Michael told him. “The hydroponics has caught up with our reduced population, but we’re just about out of animal products,” he admitted.
Frankie shrugged. “Juliet has just about made me a vegetarian anyway,” he admitted.
“I think we’ll all go that way in the coming weeks,” Michael agreed.
“So, what now?” Frankie asked. “Have you got a plan?”
“We sell that big piece of rock you’ve brought back with you,” Michael said, nodding his head towards the monitor where it was displayed, the five small silvery satellites still hovering around it, now giving direct video feed to the web site, allowing clients a direct view of what was on offer.
“We’re removing the ice first? How long will that take?” Frankie asked.
“Around 2 weeks, as long as we don’t meet with too many delays,” Michael told him. “That’s why we want to start as soon as possible.”
“So, where are you going to store it?”
“Out there, somewhere,” Michael explained, waving towards outer space. “We’ll put a transmitter on each ice-ball so we can recover them when we want, if we ever want to or need to. Those in the know are telling me that there’s so much water out there, I shouldn’t have to worry.”
“So why we bothering to scrape it all off, if we don’t need or want it?” Frankie asked.
“Good question. Truth is that earth is more worried about the microbes that water can hold suspended in it, than any risks with metals. Secondly, I want the earth to see us mine something from an asteroid while it’s still in space. I want them to know we could do it,” Michael explained.
+++++++++++++
Thomas and David Howard joined the others in the control-room to watch Mickey settle into the new control table and adjust the height of his chair. There were six monitors positioned in two tiers in front of him, some taking feeds from the cameras on the ice-cutter, the others showing the geology of the asteroid, the water-ice a brilliant white.
“You ready?” Allan asked while Tony Wood, the other mathematician on board the ARC, sat crouched at his side, waiting expectantly.
“Oh, yes,” Mickey nodded.
He pressed the app on his control board and watched his monitors as the un-manned ice-scraper moved the last few metres to the surface of the asteroid, and powered by the HYPORT placed across all its spars, began cutting into the ice with its 30 metre-long plough.
“Jesus, will you look at that?” Matt gasped, watching from the back of the room as a mass of ice was broken free to slide gracefully back from the plough blade onto the large bed behind the plough, where the shaped floor helped the continually arriving ice to form an ever-growing ball.
“That must be using a lot of power,” Frankie murmured, his eyes darting between the monitors as he looked for the power source. “What’s that?” he asked, seeing something at the back of the vehicle that looked like a car motor, but given its exposure to space, could not have been functioning.
The twins shook their head. “It’s a new form of turbine,” they agreed, grinning at this surprise.
“Turbine, working in space?” he asked, his attention divided between the smiling Howard twins, and the ice-scraper as it continued to eat into the ice and slide it back to produce yet another ball.
“It can’t be HYPORT,” Frankie murmured to himself as he tried fathoming out how the turbine could be generating electricity while sitting in outer-space.
“It isn’t. It’s working on dark energy, only Don told us not to call it that, because no-one knows what dark energy is,” they chuckled.
“But you do; you must do to be using it,” Frankie concluded.
The twins shook their head, clearly enjoying the ambiguity. “Until we determine the mass of the particles that we’re using to generate power, we won’t know if they’re what everyone has been calling Dark Energy and Dark Matter,” they explained. “So, for the moment, call it WIMPS.”
“And what are WIMPS?” Frankie wanted to know.
“Weakly Interacting Massive Particles,” the twins told him.
“Have you just made this up?” Frankie asked, his face set in stone as he considered the possibility that the twins were making him the butt of a joke.
“No, no, seriously. WIMPS have been around for decades. They’re everywhere, and we simply found a means of translating them into electricity,” one of the twins told him.
“We call it a turbine, because it looks like one. But it’s really a generator of electricity, although it’s doesn’t function like generators on earth. Really, you should call it a ‘Convertor’. Yes, that would be a better term, wouldn’t it?” he asked his brother, glancing toward him to share a few nods, a grin, and a pleased look as they turned back to Frankie.
“Just how much electricity is that thing generating, or converting, or whatever?” Frankie asked, seeing only the one unit on the ice-scraper.
“That one is generating just over 600 kilowatts.”
Frankie licked his lips. “So we don’t need the existing diesel generators on Freedom One,” he pointed out.
The twins were grinning. “We’re planning on fitting four of those onto the hull of Freedom One over the next few weeks,” they agreed. Their reliance on fossil fuels was gone and in its place, something that used a substance that made up most of outer-space, even if it could only be perceived from the affect it had on mass.
“We getting the loads we anticipated?” Michael asked, strolling over with his eyes on the monitor.
Allan began to run calculations and nodded. “We’re a little higher than our calculated average, but we anticipate a 5 minute stop in each hour to cover for breakdowns,” he explained. “Still too early to tell though. Ask me again in an hour, or a day,” he smiled.
Michael nodded. Two weeks of constant ice-cutting to remove the 20 million tonnes of ice from the asteroid. The machine continued, its silent operation giving
it a grace it would not have displayed had it been down on earth.
The ball of ice had grown and seemed ready to crush the ice-cutter beneath it, when all of a sudden, it propelled the ball off of its back to send it spinning, out into space.
“Where’s it going?” Frankie asked.
“Towards the Asteroid Belt,” the twins told him, grinning mischievously. “We’ll be there before them, of course, but they have a transmitter on them so we can always find them, if we ever need them.”
Mickey settled in for the first shift, sipping his tea and watching the monitors.
November 18th.
The management team mingled with the familiarly born of having worked together in close proximity for long periods. They chatted amicably as they got drinks from the drink station before moving to the large table to take their seats, only a few of them still preferring to sit facing the glass wall and the dim control-room beyond it.
Michael followed Heather into the room, the worry of where she was going to get baby clothes furrowing her brow.
“We’re all here?” Michael asked, looking about the table while Heather settled in next to Gail.
“Oliver. How’s things on the media, as if we didn’t know?” he asked of the journalist.
“Well, as you’ve seen, there’s now a continual tirade of anti-ARC propaganda, from the resources we leach from the earth, giving nothing of any long-term value in return, to the extraordinary fees we are asking for the metals on the asteroid, all the while refusing earth the technology that allow competition to drive down the price. There are also those who refute our right to capture or sell the asteroid.”
“Yes, that’s a fair assessment,” Michael agreed.
“On the plus side are the growing tensions visible within the United Nations community. The Secretary-General has come in for particular criticism from both Russia and USA for his handling of the situation, and China’s silence on the subject just infuriates the others all the more.
“Of course, China has several African, East European and South American countries under its influence, financially, so neither of the others particularly wants to drive the issue towards a vote,” Oliver finished explaining. “They know they would lose.”
