Ballistic

by Marko Kloos

  “You said this is your first visit to a different planet?” Gisbert asked. Her corporate chaperone was the vice president of operations, a tall man with a generic sort of handsomeness that went well with his generic personality. He was one of the old guard her father had hired and molded, people smart enough to be adequate and not adventurous enough to swim against the current.

  Solveig nodded, finding herself unable to tear her attention away from the large viewscreen on the forward bulkhead of the executive compartment. There was an almost hypnotic quality to the swirl patterns in the atmosphere. The planet stood out against the darkness of space like a semiprecious gemstone on a black velvet cushion.

  “I was fourteen when the war started,” she said. “And by the time I went off to university, we’d lost. First Papa said I was too young for trips, then it was too dangerous, then I was too busy with school.”

  “Sometimes I forget how young you are, Miss Ragnar. You carry yourself like you’ve been at this for a decade.”

  Solveig gave him the smile he’d expect for the compliment.

  So he’ll be using his face time with the Old Man’s daughter and heir for some career building, she thought.

  “It’s too bad that it has to be this one for your first,” Gisbert said. “It’s not a pretty planet. I mean, there really isn’t anything to see. You can’t even spot the surface. It’s all just noxious clouds. But I guess they’re all lacking compared to home.”

  “Well, then someone needs to explain the war to me again,” Solveig replied. “If none of the other planets measure up to what we had already, I mean.”

  She could tell that he was trying to figure out how to take her comment, and whether she really wanted an answer. He went the safe and easy route and smiled noncommittally, the way people smiled when they’d been told a joke they didn’t get. Solveig picked up her water bulb and took a long sip to have an excuse to look at the screen again, so Gisbert wouldn’t think she was trying to engage in deep conversation on the subject.

  Just noxious clouds, she thought. What insight. Those noxious clouds were the source of Acheron’s main export, the reason for its wealth and shipbuilding prowess. Graphene, extracted from atmospheric carbon, let the Acheroni build lightweight and resilient spaceships, corrosion-proof habitat modules for Oceana’s floating cities, and a thousand other things that had become indispensable to the system economy. The Acheroni corporations mined sulfur and metals from the surface of their planet, but their real riches came from the atmosphere in which their cities were suspended.

  Solveig’s assistant Anja came up the spiral staircase that connected all the decks and walked to the seating area. She was wearing her hair in the usual tight braid, and her face was always composed and business neutral whenever she was around any of the vice presidents, but Solveig thought she saw just a fleeting shade of dislike on it when Anja looked over at Gisbert before stopping next to Solveig’s seat.

  “We will be docking in twenty minutes, Miss Solveig,” Anja said. “The flight crew wanted me to remind you that Acheron Six is a spin station, so moving around will feel a little weird once you are off the ship. But we are docking on the outer ring, so it shouldn’t be too disorienting.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be able to manage, Anja. Tell the flight crew I thank them for the advice and their skill. It has been a very smooth ride.”

  “Yes, Miss Solveig. We will not be on the station for long. The Hanzo people are already waiting to take us down to Coriolis City.”

  Anja walked off again in her purposeful gait and ascended the staircase to the flight deck to deliver the compliment from the VIP. Solveig turned her attention to the viewscreen one more time.

  “Well, at least it’s only five days, right?” Gisbert said.

  She nodded and took another sip from her water bulb.

  Too bad it’s only five days, she thought. A million people on Coriolis City, and almost nobody knows the Ragnar name. I want to spend a month down there.

  Hanzo Industries had a team waiting to escort the Ragnar delegation all the way from the airlock. The head of the escort team was a fashionably dressed young man with high cheekbones that looked sharp enough to cut paper. He introduced himself as Kee in fluent Gretian, and he showed pleasant surprise when Solveig returned the greeting with the proper phrases in Acheroni.

  “Please forgive my mistakes,” she continued in the same language once she had reeled off the formal greeting, just so he wouldn’t think she had merely memorized the basics. “I am still learning.”

  Kee’s smile widened. “You honor us with the mere effort. Your pronunciation is very good. And nobody would be so impolite as to correct your mistakes.”

  “Your Gretian is much better than my Acheroni,” Solveig said and returned the smile. “Where did you learn it?”

  “It was my choice in business school. I’ve taken instruction ever since. Thank you for your very kind assessment.”

  If there was an ID pass check and a security screening here at the station, Solveig never saw it as they were whisked through the passageways to their atmospheric connection. Their little delegation was just six strong—Solveig, Gisbert, their two personal assistants, and two protection specialists from Marten’s corporate security division. Marten had put himself on the roster as her personal bodyguard, and only a considerable amount of gentle pleading and careful arguing had convinced him that there was no point in tying up the head of corporate security with an off-world assignment for a week and a half, and that one of his underlings could do the job just as well. Acheron was the most neutral of the planets when it came to attitudes toward Gretia. They hadn’t been invaded, and they’d had no major ground force to commit to the vicious land battles on Pallas. They’d contributed ships to the Alliance fleet and marines to the occupation forces on Gretia, but most Acheroni had been untouched by the war. If anything, the staggering hull loss rates had meant increased business for their fleet yards.

  The atmospheric shuttle was sleek and narrow, and the interior was a study in elegant simplicity that would have pleased her father’s sense of aesthetics—white and silver, ceramics and polished steel, cleanliness and efficiency. As profoundly divergent as their cultures were in many respects, there was a surprising amount of overlap. Solveig supposed that Acheron’s population density made efficiency and adherence to rules a critical necessity. On Acheron, taking up more space for yourself and your things than absolutely necessary was a major social infraction. The constant need for moderation had resulted in a minimalism by necessity that Solveig found appealing.

  “Would you like to view the outside on the descent, or should we leave the screen off?” Kee asked when they were all strapped in. “Some like to see the clouds, but the winds are very fast here. It can be unsettling to have a visual reference on the final approach.”

  “I’d like to see it,” Solveig said quickly before Gisbert could open his mouth and ask for the blind descent option. “It’s my first time here. I want to see everything.”

  “Very well,” Kee said. He waved a screen into existence in front of him and tapped a few controls. The entire top half of the shuttle cabin seemingly turned translucent. Solveig had to suppress a gasp at the effectiveness of the illusion. It looked like someone had cut the roof off and replaced it with a giant seamless Alon cupola. Next to her, Gisbert’s complexion turned slightly green, but she knew he wouldn’t dare to contradict her request.

  As the shuttle undocked and began its descent into the atmosphere, she leaned back to take it all in. Overhead, the station ring receded swiftly. Gisbert let out a tiny groan and closed his eyes.

  The ride into the upper layers of the atmosphere was a spectacular light show. The superheated plasma streaming past the optical sensors made it look like they were inside a comet. It obscured her view of the planet and only left a sliver of star-dotted space at the very top of the cabin ceiling for a few minutes. Then the cocoon of fire around them started to recede. A few minutes later, the shuttle
leveled out its descent, and the view was clear again. The atmosphere looked like a roiling river of red and yellow and ochre shades, stretching out as far as she could see. It was amazing to think that people could not just survive places like this, but thrive and expand and shape their societies, maximizing the benefits of their new environments while minimizing the drawbacks.

  On the forward bulkhead, a new projection appeared, this one showing an informational display of their flight path to Coriolis City. Kee sat in front of her, facing the back of the cabin, and he smiled as he watched her gaze in awe at all the color and movement outside.

  “Beautiful,” Solveig said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “The clouds are sulfuric acid,” he said, pronouncing the words carefully. “The atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide.” His Acheroni accent was light, but it came out stronger with the scientific terms.

  “How did it feel to have blue skies and breathable air on Gretia?” she asked.

  “To be honest, it was unsettling. The sky looks all wrong. And not seeing a dome overhead was frightening at first. But it is nice once you get used to it. I liked the winds a lot.”

  “The winds?”

  Kee nodded and smiled in reminiscence.

  “Our cities have domes. There is no wind. The temperature is always the same. You can’t feel the wind on Acheron. It’s not possible to go outside the dome without a suit and helmet. I liked the winds on Gretia. Like the air is stroking my face with kindness.”

  “I like that analogy,” she said. “I guess you never really think about something you experience every day.”

  “It’s a little different for us.” He gestured at the swirling clouds outside. “This is our world every day. But we always have to think about everything. The air inside the dome. The clouds outside. One is good to breathe, the other is not.”

  Someone spoke into his earpiece, and he put a finger on it and sat up.

  “We are starting our landing approach,” he said.

  “Can we see the front sensor feed, too?” Solveig asked.

  “Certainly.” He swiveled his chair around and made a screen with his thumb and forefinger. A few taps later, the forward bulkhead disappeared, and Solveig let out a soft gasp.

  “Coriolis City,” Kee said. “It looks like we are close already, but we are almost a hundred kilometers away. It’s deceiving to the eye because the city is so big.”

  In front of them, a skyline was floating above the clouds. She had viewed images of the Acheroni sky cities on the Mnemosyne, but seeing one with her own eyes was something else entirely. Even from this distance, it looked enormous. The dome reflected the patterns in the surrounding cloud cover. The gas-filled double torus that kept everything afloat in the atmospheric current roped around the base of the dome like a well-fed snake snuggling its next meal. Solveig saw tendrils extending from the edges of the city’s base, some trailing off into the clouds below, some reaching higher toward the sun.

  “What are those?” she said and pointed at them in turn.

  “The ones that go below are collectors,” Kee said. “Sulfuric acid from the clouds, for turning into water. The ones that go up are collectors, too, but for solar energy.”

  As they got closer, Solveig’s sense of scale improved, but it didn’t help to get her mind around the immensity of the city. She couldn’t even gauge the size of the base or the height of the dome. Even the tallest buildings of that skyline didn’t reach farther up than a quarter of the distance to the peak of the dome above. It was almost the size of Sandvik, but it was floating in the atmosphere, not spread out on solid ground.

  “A million people,” she said in wonder.

  “Our biggest city,” Kee said. “There will never be another one this big. All the others are smaller, and all the future ones will be, too. Coriolis City is ten kilometers across. But we found that the ideal size is seven kilometers, five hundred thousand people. Some of the newer ones are only five kilometers. Much easier to keep in equilibrium, only two hundred fifty thousand people. A million is a little too much.”

  Solveig watched the projection on the forward bulkhead all the way through the approach. The base of the city took up more of her field of view with every passing kilometer. The speed readout on the screen showed they were traveling at three hundred fifty kilometers per hour, but the city was floating on the same atmospheric rapids at the same speed, so the rate of closure was almost leisurely. She had expected the ride to be bumpy, but the shuttle hardly moved in the current. She had taken gyrofoil rides on Gretia that had been more unpleasant. It did not feel like they were traveling through the fastest-moving atmosphere in the system. She concluded that the shuttles had exceptionally capable AI to compensate for the movement of the currents, supremely gifted pilots, or a combination of both.

  They came in low over the lip of the city base. The spaceport was in a wide, trough-shaped depression on the surface of the base. The torus of the city extended downward in her field of view, an immense silvery-white ring of flexible composite, inflated with ludicrous amounts of helium and hydrogen. Solveig knew the basics of the physics—in this dense atmosphere, even the breathable air under the dome was a lifting gas—but the book knowledge didn’t make the sight of a floating city any more believable. It was as if the Acheroni had tricked gravity somehow.

  The shuttle touched down on its designated landing pad. A minute later, a large airlock door opened in the station wall in front of them, and the entire pad moved into the lock. Behind the ship, the door closed again to keep out the atmosphere. Then Solveig’s view blurred as several dispenser frames passed over the shuttle in rapid succession and doused it in foamy liquid.

  “Decontamination,” Kee explained. “To neutralize the sulfuric acid on the hull. Not as friendly as air.”

  An attendant appeared and offered refreshments while they were waiting for the decon process to finish. Solveig accepted some water and a small bowl of almonds.

  “It must be annoying to have to wait this out every time you land,” she said. “Just when you’re ready to get off the shuttle.”

  Kee smiled.

  “Not at all. I want to think it’s like taking a shower when I get home from work. It cleans the outside world off. And it gets me in the mood to relax.”

  Finally, the sensors seemed to be satisfied that the shuttle was clean. The inner airlock door opened, and the shuttle moved into the spaceport’s arrival ring. The attendants helped them out of the safety harnesses. It felt good to be able to stand up again. When the main door of the shuttle opened to let them deplane, the Acheroni attendants deferred to Solveig, gesturing for her to go first and nodding their heads respectfully. She thanked them in Acheroni, which got her more smiles. Then she walked across into the docking collar.

  Here we go, she thought. My first steps on a different world.

  The welcoming committee waiting for them in the arrivals lounge was several times larger than the little Ragnar delegation. Hanzo Industries seemed to be determined to make sure that Solveig didn’t feel slighted by a lack of people to greet her. As far as she knew, there hadn’t been a Ragnar family member on Acheron since the war began, and the attention she was receiving made it look like they feared it would be another ten years until the next one stopped by. She accepted a bouquet of beautiful Acheroni orchids and exchanged greetings and nods with a line of Hanzo representatives that seemed to renew itself constantly. Gisbert and the rest of the Ragnar delegation had their translator buds in their ears, but Solveig was determined to get a return on all those years of Acheroni, and she exchanged greetings in the local language, knowing that Kee was nearby to iron out any bumps in the discourse. Her efforts were far better received than she knew the quality of her Acheroni warranted, but it gave her a sense of accomplishment nonetheless.

  Finally, the welcome parade came to a close. Solveig handed her orchid bouquet to Anja and let Kee and one of the senior Hanzo people take her into their middle for the walk out to what
she presumed was their transportation into the city.

  The spaceport had a main atrium, but calling it by that noun seemed hopelessly inadequate as a descriptor. Solveig let slip her second amazed gasp of the day. The side of the spaceport facing into the city was a massive viewport without any visible seams, at least two hundred meters from one side to the other and fifty meters tall. It gave an unobstructed view of the bustle beyond. Coriolis City was like the busiest part of Sandvik, but cloned and then stacked on top of itself three or four times, countless rows of tall, gleaming buildings competing for air and sunlight, crisscrossed by streets that looked like canyons carved through mountains. Gyrofoils were flitting down those canyons on many different flight levels in streams that seemed to diverge and converge hundreds of times from her vantage point at ground level. There were advertising projections everywhere on building walls and above storefronts, flashing and pulsing and cycling through slogans. Through the massive viewport, it was a sudden and overwhelming visual onslaught, Acheron introducing itself to visitors with a handful of fireworks to the face. Solveig had lived in and near Sandvik, biggest city of the biggest and oldest planet in the system, for most of her life. But seeing just this slice of Acheron’s largest city through the viewport of the station made her feel like a backwater colonist. There was no doubt in her mind that the Acheroni had designed this in-your-face presentation with the purpose to impress and awe, and she had to concede that it excelled at that.