The Tranquillity Alternative

by Allen Steele

  The only person who missed the send-off dinner was Paul Dooley. The lieutenant who had gone to summon the programmer had come back to report that Dooley was sound asleep in his cabin. Gene didn’t mind his absence; the less he had to put up with Dooley’s cynicism, the better. Although Ryer was still being bitchy and it was difficult to understand what the Germans were saying half the time, the pressure was off, at least a little bit, for the first time in several days. By the time he was polishing off dessert, Parnell was beginning to wonder if he actually might enjoy this mission after all.

  All this made him relaxed and ready for the TV interview which followed dinner. Bromleigh set up his equipment on Main-Ops’ main deck, where the big map made a perfect backdrop and his camera could be easily interfaced with the Wheel’s communications system. A couple of duty officers surrendered their seats to Parnell and Rhodes, and after the lapel mikes were tested and Laughlin raised the overhead ceiling lights to unaccustomed brightness, Rhodes conducted a six-minute live interview which was fitted into the second slot of the half-hour ATS Evening News broadcast.

  Much to Parnell’s relief, she avoided the sort of touchy-feely questions which had spoiled their earlier interview, focusing instead on specific technical aspects of the mission. Parnell had no trouble answering her questions; he crossed his legs and rattled off the usual facts and figures that any bright junior-high-school kid with an interest in space could have supplied. At the end, though, Rhodes threw him a hardball that caught him by surprise.

  “Commander,” she said, glancing up from her notes to look him straight in the eye, “doesn’t it seem ironic that the last American mission to the Moon is for the purpose of undoing one of the mistakes of the past … the placement of nuclear missiles at Tranquillity Base?”

  Parnell blinked and almost stammered when he heard that. She knew damned well that as commander of Luna Two it had been his assignment to bring those Minutemen to the Moon in the first place; now she wanted him to admit that it was all a terrible mistake and, in effect, recant his past sins. In other words, was he still beating his wife?

  “It may seem like a mistake now, Ms. Rhodes,” he replied, “but you have to remember that the world was a different place back in 1969. Right or wrong, many people thought the Teal Falcon missiles were a necessary deterrent to Soviet aggression.”

  She opened her mouth to interrupt, but he didn’t give her a chance. “Now, as commander of the second lunar expedition, it was my duty as a Space Force officer to follow a Presidential directive. It wasn’t my job to set policy … that role belonged to the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and at the time it seemed to be the right thing to do. However, I’m glad that times have changed and we’re going to finally destroy the missiles.”

  “And you don’t see any irony in this?” she asked.

  He allowed himself a faint smile. “Not really,” he said. “I know how those missiles can be fired, so it’s only appropriate that I launch them myself.” He shrugged. “I’m just happy that we’re going to aim them at the Sun, not Earth.”

  And that was that.

  When the interview was over, the camera shut down, and he was unclipping his lapel mike, she walked over to him. “Sorry if I made you nervous with that last question …” she began.

  “Nervous?” He gave her a blank stare. “No. Didn’t make me nervous at all.” You just tried to make me look like a jerk again, he added silently. “That was a good interview,” he said diplomatically, handing her the tiny mike.

  “Thanks. I thought it went well, too.” Rhodes glanced over her shoulder as she wound up the mike cable. The duty officers had already retaken their seats, and Bromleigh was dismantling his camera and tripod and returning them to their cases. “I heard there’s a rec room over in Section 14,” she said, favoring Parnell with a smile. “Perhaps we could go over there and continue this discussion over a couple of beers.”

  Jeez, did this lady ever turn it off? He had no problems about socializing with the press, so long as everyone understood that it was time to put away the notebooks and recorders. He had done so on many occasions, in fact, with journalists whom he trusted, either through past experience or by gut instinct. Rhodes didn’t meet those criteria; one look in her eyes told him that she was still on the job, and that having a beer with her was tantamount to submitting to an off-the-record interview.

  “Not unless they’ve changed the rules around here,” he said. “If there’s any beer in the rec room, then it’s the nonalcoholic variety. Booze and one-third gravity don’t mix.”

  She shrugged. “Fine with me. I’m not a heavy drinker anyway.”

  “Well …”

  “Gene, are you through here?”

  Unnoticed, Joe Laughlin had slipped up behind them to clap a hand on Parnell’s shoulder. “All done, Joe,” Gene said, looking around at his old friend. “Did you watch the interview?”

  “Caught it off the Comsat feed in the next room.” He looked at Berkley. “Nice job, Ms. Rhodes. You actually got Gene to tell the truth for once in his life.”

  Rhodes fixed him with a venomous gaze. “Thank you, Commodore,” she said stiffly, clearly irritated by his intrusion. “I was just about to …”

  “You’re welcome, ma’am,” Joe said before he turned a shoulder to her. “Gene, we need to review the pre-launch checklist before you retire. Can you give me a few minutes?”

  Parnell could have hugged Joe. He had already gone over the checklist earlier in the day; Laughlin knew it, because he had been in the room with him, Lewitt, and the three engineers in charge of making certain Conestoga was flightworthy. “Sure, Joe. Berkley wanted me to show her the rec room, but …”

  “That’s all right, Commander.” Rhodes’s smile was frigid; she had already figured things out. “I think I can find it myself.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. It’s down on Deck 2, about halfway around on the other side of the station, adjacent to the crew quarters. Just follow the noise.” The commodore pointed to the hatch leading to the Deck 2 corridor. “We’ll see you bright and early at 0600 tomorrow. Good night.”

  Before she could reply, Laughlin led Gene away by the arm, guiding him toward a hatch on the other side of Main-Ops. Parnell caught a last glimpse of Rhodes walking over to Bromleigh and saying something quietly to him; then Laughlin opened the hatch and guided him inside.

  They entered the lower deck of the observation center. Like the compartment above, its walls were lined with TV monitors, but these displayed close-up views from the ISPY. The room was empty, its round center table covered with maps and logbooks.

  “Thanks for rescuing me,” Parnell said, once Laughlin had slammed the hatch shut. “She had me cornered back there.”

  “So I noticed. Besides, if anyone gets to buy you a bon voyage drink on this relic, it’s me.” Old Joe walked over to a wall cabinet and unlocked it with one of the keys on a ring dangling from his belt. “Anyway, I sort of thought you might like to see something.”

  Parnell eyed the fifth of Maker’s Mark the station commander produced from the cabinet. “That? And I just got through telling Ms. Rhodes that booze was verboten up here.”

  “Oh, hell, Gene … I did away with that rule a year ago. So long as no one shows up drunk for duty, I don’t care if they get crocked once in a while.” He shook his head as he poured whiskey into two shot glasses and passed one to Parnell. “This isn’t the old days, brother. Cheers.”

  “Cheers.” It had been a while since Gene had knocked back a shot of good whiskey; it burned its way down his throat and made him hiss with pleasure. So much for the twelve-hours-from-bottle-to-throttle rule. Nevertheless, knowing he had to fly Conestoga tomorrow, one more drink was all he could have before hitting the sack. “So what is it you wanted to show me?”

  Old Joe glanced up at the chronometers above the wall, then walked to the control console beneath the screens. “Thought you might want to take a look at the future,” he said softly as he tapped instructions into
the keyboard and coaxed a couple of pots by a few millimeters. “You’re going to love this.”

  Studying the screens and chronometers, Parnell could see that the space telescope was at 129 degrees east, sweeping down across China on its way to the equator. It was already tomorrow in that part of the world; on the screens, he could see dawn shadows thrown by the mountains of Manchuria.

  “We’re coming up on the North Korean coast, just a few miles south of Pukchong. About 41 degrees north.” Joe’s voice was very soft as he continued to fine-tune ISPY’s tracking system. “Watch the screen on the left … look sharp, because you’re only going to see it for a couple of seconds.”

  Parnell moved to the screen Laughlin indicated, the one displaying the telescope’s highest resolution. At 1,500 feet, it was nothing compared to what a KH-11, let alone one of the new radar-mapping Lacrosse spysats, could view from orbit. Nonetheless the view looked much as it would if he were flying over the North Korean countryside in his Beechcraft, if such a feat were possible.

  Mountains, rivers, small villages connected by meandering roads … then suddenly, as ISPY began to approach the coast of the Sea of Japan, a small cluster of off-white buildings surrounding a wide concrete circle. From the middle of the circle rose a tower; from one side of the tower there was a short, dark line … a cement roadway. Close to it were a couple of small ponds, their still waters reflecting sunlight like an oasis; nearby was a row of squat, cylindrical tanks. The entire area was encompassed by a circular roadway.

  At first glance, Parnell thought it was a factory, but the layout was much too familiar. In fact, it looked like …

  “I’ll be damned,” he murmured. “It’s a launch complex.”

  “Yep. That it is.” Laughlin walked over to stand beside him. With the hand holding the shot glass, he pointed at the screen. “There’s the vehicle assembly building … there’s the gantry tower, with the access ramp below it … there’s the acoustic suppression pools, and here’s the fuel tanks. Everything’s there.”

  Parnell stared as the satellite view crept from the top of the screen to the bottom. “I don’t see a rocket,” he said after a moment, “but it’s not an ICBM silo. Everything would be underground in that case …”

  “Oh, no. It’s nothing like that.” Laughlin took a sip of his whiskey. “They’d put it further inland if it was an ICBM site. Coastal location like this … it’s gotta be a polar launch site. And, no, we haven’t see the rocket yet.” He pointed to the largest structure on the screen. “Whatever it is, my guess is that they’ve got it hangared in the VAB, but they still haven’t rolled it out yet. Could be anything, I suppose … but it sure as hell isn’t an ICBM.”

  Parnell nodded. An ICBM would have been hidden in an underground silo, which in turn could have been concealed with a camouflage tent. A facility of this size indicated a much larger rocket. “A satellite launcher?”

  Laughlin shrugged. “Probably … but it could be anything. Even a spaceplane, for that matter.”

  Parnell opened his mouth to object, then thought better of it. Space technology was no longer the private domain of the superpowers. In fact, it was probably easier to build a man-rated rocket than it was to construct an atomic bomb. Even before the Soviet Union had collapsed, their rocket scientists had been quietly defecting both East and West, following the demise of the Russian space program after the Ares expedition. If the European Space Agency could benefit from the influx of disgruntled Russians, why not North Korea?

  “I take it our guys know about this already,” he said.

  “CIA? Sure. How could they miss it?” Laughlin had already picked up the whiskey bottle and poured himself another shot; he silently offered it to his friend, but Parnell shook his head. “We’ve been watching this day after day for five months now,” he continued, carrying his glass back to the screen. “At first we thought we had stumbled upon something, so we opened a secure line to McLean and blew the whistle. Pretty soon, someone from NPIC phoned back and told us to put a zipper on it. Turns out they’d known about it a month before we did.”

  Parnell nodded. NPIC was the National Photographic Interpretation Center, the section of the CIA’s Science and Technology Directorate responsible for analyzing data received from the agency’s reconnaissance satellites. “But, of course, they wouldn’t tell you exactly what it is,” he surmised.

  “Of course not.” Laughlin leaned against the console. “And nobody else is going to know, I reckon, until the State Department figures out exactly how to handle this mess.”

  The image was already drifting off the top edge of the screen, disappearing from sight as the telescope passed over the Sea of Japan. Laughlin continued to gaze thoughtfully at the screen. “Remember the Treaty of Versailles, and how the Germans got out from under it by starting the V-2 program, and later the Amerika Bomber? Well, it looks like history’s repeating itself. We finally got Kim Jong to agree to U.N. inspections of his nuclear facilities, but we forgot to rule out the possibility of—quote unquote—peaceful space research. So now North Korea’s in the process of launching their own weather satellite, or whatever the hell they want to call it.”

  “And nobody can touch them.”

  Laughlin smiled grimly and nodded his head. “I don’t think anyone wants to go public with this. A launch site seven hundred miles from Japan … no, we’re going to keep this quiet for a while longer. At least until someone finds out what the weather satellite looks like.”

  Parnell continued to gaze at the screen long after the telescope began to pass over South Korea. The Russians might be long out of the space race and the Americans quickly following suit, but this wasn’t preventing the rest of the world from edging into the game. It was bad enough that the Europeans were taking the lead in space, with the Japanese not far behind; at least they were trading partners and military allies, and as such, their objectives could be anticipated as genuinely benign, although hardly beneficial to America’s technological and economic future. Germany wasn’t going to restart World War II because it was purchasing Tranquillity Base. In ten to fifteen years, Koenig Selenen GmbH stood to make billions by selling electrical power to the United States, generated by the solar power satellites it intended to construct in high orbit from lunar materials, just as France had already captured more than half of the commercial launch-services market by sending communications satellites into orbit less expensively than NASA.

  But even if North Korea’s first orbital rocket contained nothing more sinister than a cheap knockoff of an obsolete American weather sat, it would have proved they were capable of lofting a payload into low orbit. And if North Korea had their hands on space technology, South Korea would have to get it, too. In turn, China would accelerate development of their Long March missiles; when that happened, the Middle East nations would get into the game.

  Libya, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel … and so on down the line, until the night sky was filled with real or bogus weather and communications satellites.

  And meanwhile the United States—one-time world leader now suffering from premature senescence, mumbling to itself as it played one endless Sega game after another while pretending that its undisputed position as the numero uno global exporter of exercise videos actually meant something—fell headlong toward the inevitable rude awakening.

  Whether or not this was the future Laughlin had intended to show him, the glimpse Parnell had caught was enough to chill him to the bone.

  He picked up his glass and turned to Old Joe. “I think I need that drink now,” he said.

  Uwe Aachener and Markus Talsbach sat next to each other on the bunk in Aachener’s cabin, assembling the tools of their trade.

  When they returned to the VIP section after dinner, Talsbach had gone straight to his cabin and retrieved his equipment from its hiding place inside his duffel bag. Tucking it inside a folded towel, he had undressed, pulled on a robe from the locker, gathered his toiletry kit and waited exactly five minutes by the door, carefully liste
ning for sounds from the corridor. When he was certain the corridor was empty, he switched off the light, slipped out the door, and quickly walked the seven paces it took to reach Aachener’s cabin. If anyone had seen him, he would have once again pretended not to understand English quite as well as he actually did, and claimed that he was taking a late-night bath.

  No one had observed him, though, and Aachener was waiting for him. Once Markus was safely inside the cabin, Uwe had thrust a pillow against the bottom of the door to block the light; then, without saying more than was absolutely necessary, the two men went to work.

  The guns they had smuggled aboard the Dornberger were both lightweight Glock 17s, all-plastic automatics which had been purchased on the European black market and shipped to French Guiana through a series of cutouts supplied by one of the South American drug cartels. The guns had been taken into space disassembled, the parts hidden within various articles of clothing in the astronauts’ duffel bags so that they were not likely to be discovered in a casual search; even so, they had not been required to pass through either a metal detector or fluoroscope at the Kourou spaceport. After all, the Sanger spaceplanes weren’t airliners; no one had ever given much credence to the idea that someone might actually try to hijack a shuttle. Still, the organization for which the two men were working didn’t want to take any unnecessary chances.

  Now they sat, side by side, methodically cleaning, assembling, and inspecting the two Glocks. Between them lay two cans of shaving cream from their kit bags; their false bottoms had been unscrewed, revealing the 9mm Teflon-nosed rounds stored within. The bullets were perfectly suited for their assignment; although they could stop a man cold, they would fragment if they hit something less yielding than flesh and bone.