War World X: Takeover

by John F. Carr

  Nearly pure deuterium started rushing in the vents, blasting through tubes into the cryogenic reduction and storage tanks. However, in the portside transfer tube, the tiny, high-velocity hydrogen atoms found thinner spots in the copper-lined conduit. Overdue for removal because of the constant “resettings” of its replacement date, the tube’s one flexure had become partially brittlized: the passive but persistent assault of the mono-atomic gas at pressure had turned its once seamless molecular structure into the equivalent of cheesecloth. Slowly but steadily, small quantities of the hydrogen leaked into the surrounding safety sleeve.

  The sleeve—a vacuum evacuation system—had a safety measure designed to purge any leaked H2 out of the craft before it could come into chance contact with oxygen. However, this day, the left scoop’s under-maintained primary intake compressor stuttered and slipped, unable to achieve more than marginal performance. Normally, this would have put a red light on Avram’s system board, and would therefore have compelled him to immediately abort the mission.

  But some weeks ago, during a software update of the shuttles’ automated safety system, this cautious protocol had been replaced by a more fiscally prudent subroutine. Now, in the event of vacuum under-performance in the scoops, the system diverted a portion of the safety sleeve’s own compression to the all-important task of sucking in more H2—at the expense of timely evacuation of any leakage. And to keep the pilot from worrying too much, such a failure had now been re-designated as a notable, rather than critical, hazard. This change, along with hundreds of others—all coded with non-descriptive labels—had been part of the pilots’ indecipherable, and thus, ignored, weekly update.

  Avram saw a new orange light flicker into existence on his OpSys monitor board. The safety sleeve on the H2 intake tube was acting up—or had exceeded its maximum service interval: either condition would trigger an orange light.

  Which was nothing special: Avram stared sourly at the board, which was almost half covered by dull amber lights. He checked the H2 inflow rate: nice and steady. Good. With a possible polar-side storm brewing, he wanted a short, clean run. To assure that it remained as short as possible, he edged the throttle forward slightly, attaining maximum safe airspeed, and increasing the slipstream back-suction under the shuttle, thus accelerating the speed at which the H2 was entering his scoops.

  The increase in thrust sent a slight shudder through the aft section of Cloud Scraper II, and a coupling in the safety sleeve gapped two millimeters. The traces of H2 which had not been purged by the underpowered pumps rushed out into the fuel tankage compartment, where miniscule seal failures on the O2 tank had allowed a small amount of that reactant to diffuse into the interstitial spaces of the craft.

  The slight unevenness in Avram’s acceleration further stressed the sleeve coupling. Which, brushing tight against one of the part-steel replacement struts, struck a single spark.

  Avram felt no pain—indeed was not even aware—when Cloud Scraper II exploded in a bright yellow ball of incendiary plasma. Caught by the ferocious winds, the luminous sphere quickly elongated into a flickering amber smudge veiled in a growing swath of steam.

  Klaus Vebler’s quick pulse of panic manifested as a fleeting coronary twinge: the delta icon denoting Cloud Scraper II had flickered and then disappeared from his radar plot.

  Suppressing an emotional wave that was one part horror and two parts grief, he flipped the toggle switch that would retract his cockpit canopy’s weathered shields. Always a by-the-numbers pilot, Klaus was now in the one situation that demanded he no longer fly strictly by instruments: he had to make a visual confirmation of the catastrophe that his sensors insisted had befallen his flight leader. However, having flown Luft Fresser close against Cloud Scraper II’s air stream, Vebler was now at the outer peripheries of the debris cloud which had been Avram’s shuttle.

  A razor-sharp shard of Cloud Scraper II’s wing tip came corkscrewing out of the mists and punched a glancing hole in Luft Fresser’s blunt, shark-like nose. Riven upon impact, the wing tip shattered into a spray of fragments. One of the slenderest—resembling a spearhead but traveling many times faster than any spearhead had ever traveled—jabbed point-first into the front screen of Klaus Vebler’s reinforced cockpit canopy and dug a divot out of the glass before tumbling away.

  The atmosphere roared into the nose gash—friction heating and widening the hole like a blowtorch—while the same high-pressure atmospheric friction attacked the wounded canopy as Klaus fought to keep the mortally wounded Luft Fresser’s nose level. Relentless, the supersonic gust drilled further into the wounded glass, which crackled sharply, a star-shatter pattern instantly coursing outward from the failure point. A half second later, it blasted inwards, becoming a sleet-storm of supersonic glass needles and knives. Riddled, Klaus Vebler was dead before his flight helmet slammed back into the now-bloody headrest.

  The gash in the Luft Fresser’s nose yawned wider: the fuselage started splitting apart there, and the shuttle’s nose dropped, pulling the craft into a rapid series of end-over-end tumbles that carried it down into the crushing depths of Cat’s Eye.

  Nadine reached out a slow finger to close the comm channel. She stared at the blinking cursor on her computer: What now? H2GAS’s original refueling fleet of six shuttles was down to two, and one of those had been in the maintenance bay for three weeks and showed no sign of emerging any time soon. Replacement shuttles were neither available nor affordable. And pilot insurance was now sure to be unattainable at any cost.

  Nadine’s determined focus on the material losses of the disaster was selfish, she conceded, but necessary for now. She had had a brief, very energetic fling with Avram Meissen when he had first arrived on Haven about two and a half years ago. It had been a great lust, made easy by the big Sabra’s companionable bon homie. The end had been as predictable as it had been emotionally effortless.

  But that also had meant a complete lack of animus. So Nadine’s memory of him was one of fond recollection. And on Haven—where the stuff that made happy memories was in short supply, any loss at all cut deeply. And so Nadine focused on the lost shuttles, not the film of mild but very desolate grief that seemed to settle on the world like a layer of fine gray dust.

  So. Her heart was injured but not broken. However, the same could not be said for H2GAS’s fuel collection contract or the company’s fiscal viability. She did not have to wait for the actuarial analysis or legal announcement: H2GAS was irremediably bankrupt. And unless she was very wrong in her guess, the company would become the target of innumerable and well-deserved “culpable negligence” and “due diligence” investigations. Meaning, of course, that every H2GAS executive who could afford a ticket would be on the first outbound ship.

  Prompt departure was not merely a way to flee prosecution but to stymie it; with almost all the principals out of range and out of reach, the nascent proceedings would die, stillborn for want of sufficient depositions and clear accountability. Yes, the rats would all jump ship together—and all survive, as a consequence of the simultaneity of their flight.

  And realistically, their guilt and flight would quickly be eclipsed by the more pressing sequelae of today’s disaster. The next CoDo ship to jump out of the Byers System would do so bearing news of the complete collapse of fuel production there. Word would spread: corporate shipping lines would become skittish; independent operators, reasonably concerned with becoming stranded in the system, would avoid it like the plague. Nadine could hardly blame them: located at the ass-end of nowhere, Haven was a backwater with only two noteworthy resources: shimmer stones and an almost infinite capacity to absorb a steady stream of refugees, rebels, and ruffians.

  But the developed worlds could live without shimmer stones, which were simply a luxury—as was the cost of exiling, rather than exterminating, “social undesirables.” Without a robust deuterium production facility, Haven’s future would follow a course as clear and ineluctable as its own orbit: isolation, decline, die-off, extinction. As t
hings stood now, nothing less than a miracle could save it—

  —Or maybe, thought Nadine, Haven didn’t need a miracle: just simple common sense. Her index finger wandered to touch the top of Paul Nkomu’s proposal for a refueling station on Cat’s Eyes’ sixth—and second largest moon, Ayesha.

  Comprised of rock and ice, its surface was ninety percent shallow, frozen seas. Extraction would be simple enough, and the byproduct of the electrolytic separation—oxygen—would not only provide the majority of the station’s life support, but become a secondary revenue stream from passing freighters: without one-hundred percent self-sustaining bio-loops, ships needed to top off their O2 and H2O supplies, too.

  A fusion plant would be the best way to power the operation, but cheaper stand-off solar satellites could, in the early phases, beam power to ground-based rectennae. After a few months of operation, revenues would make it possible to buy a brand new fusion plant, if Nkomu’s decidedly conservative profit estimates bore any resemblance to reality.

  Ayesha’s gravity, while low, met the threshold that eliminated eighty percent of the physiological degradation caused by zero-gee. The rest of the effects could be offset by adding two compensatory technologies: a centrifugal exercise complex—a so-called “spin gym”—to the ground station; and habitation modules that would rotate around the tethered fuel head, which the crew would inhabit in two-week shifts.

  The tethered fuel head was the new feature that Nkomu had added to his design. Responding to Nadine’s initial criticism regarding the need for fuel shuttles to transport the deuterium from ground tanks to the waiting ships, Nkomu had put the tanks in low orbit, linked to the ground by a tether. The refinery output conduits now simply followed that cosmic leash up to a free-floating tank farm. The calling ships could now take on hydrogen directly, simultaneously reducing refueling costs and time.

  So maybe, Nadine admitted as she reached out to put the hardcopy proposal directly before her in what felt like a gesture of commitment, a sane, sustainable energy plan might actually be able to transcend the tangled morass of Haven’s otherwise corrupt and dysfunctional commercial politics. In this benighted junkheap of a system, it was often easier to believe that salvation required a fortuitous miracle, rather than basic common sense. But today it looked very much like common sense—which was anything but common—was finally in a position to triumph. Nkomu’s ingenuity, insight, and skill would prevail after all.

  But not without the timely intercession of the two co-dominators that truly ruled Haven: chance and blind-luck. Fortune had indeed smiled upon Paul Nkomu’s brainchild—but only because it had turned its face away from Avram Meissen, Klaus Vebler, and the H2GAS consortium which had perched on their brave shoulders like a pitiless vulture.

  Nadine sighed and pulled up the admin screen for initiating new project funding. Fingers poised above the keyboard, she reflected that while such perverse and ironic twists of fate could happen anywhere, they seemed oddly commonplace on Haven.

  And as she did so, she typed; “re: commencement of funding for Mr. P. Nkomu’s design for a deuterium harvesting station on satellite six, colloquially known as Ayesha….”

  2078 A.D., Earth

  The lights in the viewing room dimmed, and the officers from the Bureau of Relocation shared final satisfied looks with the executives of the advertising agency.

  This screening was being held for their very special guest; seated in the center of the auditorium was Edgar Paulsen, the representative from the CoDominium Information Council. Paulsen was a pensive, ferret-faced bureaucrat who frowned a lot without ever telling anyone what was bothering him. Most people who dealt with him considered Paulsen an easily distracted, even absent-minded man, which was a very grave mistake. In fact, he was certifiably brilliant, and if his moods and expressions changed rapidly, it was because he routinely summoned up complex problems he needed to deal with, brooded a moment, solved the problem in his head and moved on to the next one.

  Paulsen was here today to review the latest effort from the public relations department of BuReloc. Flanking him were Brian Callan, the junior BuReloc executive who had commissioned the ad spot, and Scott Saintz, senior partner of the Saintz-Raddison agency, which had produced it.

  Neither man took the ad too seriously; BuReloc was not a public enterprise. As a CoDominium entity, its powers exceeded the constitutional authority of any nation where it operated, and it operated everywhere. Still, public resistance to BuReloc “excesses” was on the rise, and something needed to be done.

  The result was the thirty second holo-spot being premiered today in its final form. The project had been arduous, since Paulsen’s office had insisted on location shooting and complete physical accuracy. Over the past year, Saintz-Raddison’s people had worked closely with BuReloc execs, traveling throughout the CoDominium for locations, and the two offices had developed good working relations. Today’s screening was as much a wrap party for them as it was a presentation for Paulsen, and they were all looking forward to the celebration that would follow.

  Paulsen blinked slowly and nodded to Callan, a signal that he was ready for the film to begin.

  Before them, the screen shifted spectra from neutral blue to a star-field dappled black, onto which came the bulk of a sleek CoDominium cruiser. The narration began, just as the main thrusters of the CoDo ship came into view, and the camera angle swiveled around the gleaming ship.

  “The new frontier.”

  Callan leaned over and whispered to Paulsen: “The narrating voice is performed by a computer-generated combination of three actors of the late nineteen-nineties; each voice was chosen for its qualities of recognition, sincerity and strength.”

  Paulsen nodded slightly and answered, as if speaking to himself. “It’s like listening to the cloned child of Mister Rogers, James Bond and Darth Vader.” Without knowing it, he was two-thirds correct.

  “This is the challenge that awaits humanity here, today, at the dawn of this new age,” the inhuman voice assured its audience. The sincerity aspect was important for the public, but it was wasted on the BuReloc and Saintz-Raddison people; they knew what was being sold here.

  “Centuries of strife have ended, to bring this golden era of peace on Earth.”

  “Hasn’t seen the tapes of the food riots in Tokyo this morning, has he?” another dark figure in the darker room asked. His companion chuckled.

  On the screen, the camera’s point of view had pierced the hull of the cruiser, and now moved down spacious corridors where people in coveralls moved purposely about undefined tasks, passing one another on opposite sides with crisp waves and cheerfully determined smiles.

  A BuReloc woman in the audience snorted. “If this was shot on a CoDo ship, they used dwarves for actors.”

  “It was.” The Saintz-Raddison beside her finished lighting two ganjarettes and handed her one. “And they did.” Their laughter sparkled, their smiles in the darkness reflecting tiny red pinpoints of light from the smoldering tips held carelessly before them.

  “And these are the people who will shape this golden era, the people who will make this age-old dream a reality.”

  “If they can ever learn to wake up without screaming,” a Saintz-Raddison man said, and the room erupted into laughter.

  Drowned out by the mirth, the narration continued: “These are the men and women of the new frontier, whose bold spirit of adventure and dedication to the future will literally win worlds for them and their children.”

  The camera’s point of view had moved onto the cruiser’s bridge now, and looked out a viewscreen that would make the one on which it was projected look like a postage stamp, had it ever existed. But it was pure fiction; the bridges of CoDominium cruisers were not built for the view. In the mythical viewscreen, a blue-green sphere loomed, graphic enhancements (and probably subliminal encoding) making it a hundred times more appealing than any tiresomely familiar snapshots of the blue-white old maid that was Earth.

  “For this frontier
is a place where all the old freedoms are alive and well.” The voice paused, which was a mistake.

  “Freedom to bleed, freedom to starve, freedom to die in childbirth, freedom to sell your daughters for scotch.” The BuReloc woman was giggling as she counted off the points on perfectly manicured nails. Eventually she lost her composure, and her friend hugged her to stifle gales of laughter.

  The camera pulled back to show a farmwork-hardened colonist straighten up over his hoe to stretch luxuriantly, and regard with pride the open fields, evidently his, that stretched on for miles.

  “And where a man can have all the land he will ever need.”

  The entire audience, pushed to the brink by the past few minutes’ comments, erupted into guffaws and howls of amusement.

  “Yeah, a six-foot plot!” Callan couldn’t help himself, the film was a huge success, and the party had apparently started early.

  The camera panned up, into a starlit, indigo sky, and the Great Seal of the CoDominium faded into view, with the narrator’s tag line:

  “The CoDominium’s Bureau of Colonization. Renewing the dreams of our forefathers, every day.”

  The lights came up as the laughter died down, the audience composing itself as its constituent members tapped out notes on datapads, chuckling to the person next to them.

  “Oh, boy, that’s great stuff.” Callan pushed his glasses up on his nose as he entered figures for minimum police strengths required for the next days’ round-up in London’s Trafalgar Square. A rally to protest Britain’s acceptance of Bureau of Relocation aid in various social programs would allow a vast number of English speaking colonists to be gathered and send a clear signal to the rest of the United Kingdom. The police would be CoDo, of course; had to keep it non-partisan. And best to draw them from the Russian half. It would do everybody good to remind the world that the old bear still had teeth.