by Scott Rhine
“But of course,” she replied with a French accent. Mercy rolled her eyes as she grabbed a towel. The geeks who normally used the masseuse for typing injuries probably ate this stuff up. “Have you tried pills to reduce the inflammation?”
Walking hunched over toward the relaxation room, Mercy held up a blue medic-alert bracelet. “I’m allergic to Tylenol. I’d be coughing all day.” It was an odd side effect of the alien page her father had read—a page that she’d been born knowing. Given her normal mother, none of her sisters had inherited this trait. Whole sections of the human brain could be reformatted or retasked by the pages, not always with success. Everyone in Fortune Industries and assorted foreign space programs recognized the symbol on her wrist.
“Very well, have you been massaged before?”
Mercy whimpered, “Once,” as she placed her face in the padded hole on the table.
“Would you like music?”
“No. I always feel compelled to name the piece and composer like it’s a quiz show. When the piano’s out of tune, it grates in my ears like nails on a chalkboard.”
Yvette warmed up some lotion.
When strong hands glided over the cramped muscles, Mercy cried out.
“Be careful, mademoiselle; we don’t want your bodyguard running in here to shoot me.”
“S’okay. Mom took him back to Dad’s office.” Sharing this piece of information made the scientist a little nervous, but she knew she’d seen the masseuse somewhere before.
“Do you have other problems due to your pages?” Yvette asked.
“After I read a paragraph of my second page, I see blue as three different colors. Sometimes people’s outfits clash, and I just have to ignore it. Oh, right there. That’s the spot.”
“Alternating Gravity page?”
The color blue on the bracelet indicated the gravity primer family of pages. It was a mental page, so anyone treating Mercy had to be warned to watch for imbalances. “Yeah. Ooo. Harder.”
“Do you worry about Fortune syndrome?” The syndrome attacked the central nervous system like Parkinson’s disease and was common among those with mental talents who overextended themselves.
“Dad doesn’t have it.”
“He’s one of the weakest Actives known, and his contract limits him to fifty hours of work a week.”
“Mom wrote that contract herself. She put the same clause in mine, and she enforces it herself, even at home.”
“You still live with your parents?”
“I spent some time on my own. This is more convenient.” Mercy had lost her own apartment for carrying classified data home from work. She was, in the words of her employment contract, grounded for another two months.
“But you’re a multiple talent. Symptoms for those tend to manifest around forty-five. You’re a little over half that age now. How does that make you feel?”
Like I have nitroglycerin strapped to my back and any false move will kill me. Duh! What Mercy replied was more diplomatic and broached the stupid question people asked her most often. “Most Icarus talents go nuts before then.” The name Icarus was math shorthand for a unified physics theory obtained from alien documents. The proof of the formula was a nuke-proof force field that repelled radiation and hydrogen. Unfortunately, readers often went insane—obsessed with the belief that everything should be ordered and connected, but often unable to prove it. Mercy’s father had transformed the force field into a propulsion system for spacecraft.
“Do you think you will?”
“The worst cases are super-geniuses. Outside of gravity theory, I top out around 145. My youngest sister Melissa is smarter than that. So I’m a pretty normal workaholic, a bit less interesting than most.”
Yvette squirted more lotion, moved the towel aside, and worked outward down the shoulder blades. “Don’t you like men?”
Mercy’s eyes popped open, and she sat up, fumbling to put the towel back into place. “Um . . . is that some kind of offer?”
“Do you want it to be?”
“I haven’t had the time to date. I’m working long hours or under armed guard most times.”
“That didn’t stop your younger sister Mary.”
Mercy laughed. “You can’t keep Mary away from men with locked doors and a fire hose.” Then she blinked. Mary had never been photographed. Her current location in New York City was a secret even some board members couldn’t be trusted with. Speaking to the ceiling, she said, “Security to relaxation room—”
“Belay that,” said Yvette.
Rolling off of the table, and keeping it between her and the masseuse, Mercy said, “I’d like you to leave now.”
“Relax, Mercy, this isn’t an attack; it’s an interview. I apologize for the omission, but I never lied. Your father said you were expecting me.”
Could Yvette be the VIP her father mentioned? “I was told to show you the cool new toys, like the gecko patch the size of my palm that can hold 300 kilograms.”
“I’d rather continue this discussion,” Yvette said. “Do you think the attempted rape has turned you against men altogether?”
“There’s no attempted about it. We both know that when a man climbs on your back without permission and pushes your face into the carpet, it’s rape, whether or not he finishes. Has it changed my worldview? Hell, yes. But I still have high standards—I want what Mom and Dad have . . . someday.” Squinting for a moment, Mercy said, “I recognize you from the wedding photo.”
“What photo?”
“The one for she who must not be named,” Mercy said, dreading this topic. Miracle ‘Red’ Hollis was the majority stockholder in Fortune Aerospace. Mercy’s sister was the woman’s media shadow, drawing attention away while Red trained on the moon. Mentioning the name without a surveillance-blocking device could cause her to be fired or worse.
Yvette smiled. “She’s not an evil wizard or demon. Is that how you view her?” The woman handed Mercy an encryption-verified ‘cooperation’ card, the equivalent of a company-internal subpoena.
“You’re a transparency officer—ethics enforcement.” Every organization handling the alien pages had to have this moral police force to prevent abuse of the new abilities and technology they granted.
“As you signed the accords, you are obligated to answer my questions honestly. My empathic training will tell me if you’re dissembling. You’re permitted to have a lawyer present.”
“I need my clothes, and then I’ll tell you anything you want.” Mercy slipped her smart badge out of the locker to contact Dad in secret.
“Your father will tell you to talk to me,” Yvette predicted.
When Mercy reached him, Dad gave no hints, apologies, or explanations, only the words, “Answer her.”
A few minutes later, they were seated in the secure conference room near Mercy’s office. The scientist whispered, “Is this about me halting production? Any engineer in the company can do that for safety concerns.”
“Is it for safety?” countered Yvette.
“Why else?”
“You have a history of rivalry with Mira.”
“Bullshit.”
Yvette pulled a thumb-sized device out of her pocket and ordered, “Play.”
Mercy’s enraged voice ranted from the player. “She needs to take a damn physics class.”
Blanching with anger, Mercy squeezed the player’s off button. “That was a private conversation. Has enforcement been recording me long?”
“Since you returned from space.”
Jaw set, Mercy breathed rhythmically for ten seconds. Her father and two other judges must have signed the warrant. She wanted to scream at the betrayal. Worse, she wanted to cry. Instead, she defended her reasoning. “You need to take the statement on that recording in context. By my second year at MIT—age seventeen—world-renowned scientists were taking my intuitions seriously. I adopted the NASA safety standard at age five and confiscated my mother’s phone for reading a text while driving. If something can go wrong,
I plan a way to prevent it.”
“But Red’s smarter.”
It was the truth. In an idle moment, her sister’s friend could whip off an idea to revolutionize an industry. “Building foundations under her castle in the sky took me and a team of scientists a year of all-nighters and the GNP of Guyana to prove.”
“And she was right.”
“Always right. But no matter how advanced they are, people make mistakes. Given enough time and resources, we can implement just about anything. But it takes far more time and money to ‘tweak’ something after it’s been put into production. Doing it her way after the fact is dangerous because it’s not in the original design spec—that is the number-one cause of fatal incidents.”
“So you don’t like her personally?” the ethics officer asked.
“Her dad, Ambassador Hollis, gave me my first pony ride. He’s a saint around my house. He could ask for anything. Her mom, Jezebel, gave my dad his company. For God’s sake, the two of them paid for the Caribbean cruise where I was conceived. To say I owe them is an understatement.”
“But?”
“Do you know how exacting standards have been for this project? Nuclear weapons don’t have this tight a tolerance. It’s not like the LHC where you just have to replace a few magnets when something goes wrong. I could destroy the world, and no one else would see it coming.”
“Do you want to destroy the world some days?”
Mercy ignored the question. “About three-quarters of unmanned space missions blew up on the pad. In 2003, we lost every mission. Even more can go wrong now. Do you agree?”
“I’m not a technician.”
Mercy glared at the other woman. “I thought you Ethics-page people had to tell the truth.”
Yvette sighed. “You’re correct on all accounts, but you’ve made adjustments. Why not proceed?”
Clenching a fist, Mercy said, “The test is tricky because we can’t remote-control it. The larger Icarus force field blocks signals.”
“What about a preprogrammed burst for the engines?”
“If the direction is off, the drive could graze the L1 shipyard.”
“That’s a very slim chance.”
Mercy leaned over the desk and hissed, “When you combine all of the miniscule chances that could hit some populated target, or the field igniting water in the Earth’s atmosphere, the odds rise to about 5 percent.”
“Only 4 percent of people sent into space have ever died, and those are horror stories. One chance in twenty for global destruction is, I admit, uncomfortably high.”
Mercy’s face lit up. Finally, someone understood. “I can’t throw those dice. A human has to be at the stick.”
“That’s what we wanted in three months.”
“It’s not safe enough for humans. The calibration on those drive pods drifts after a few hours. To get even that close, I had to design firmware to check the bug a hundred times a second.”
“So you have a workaround.”
“Money is not time. The hardware that we rushed to the prototype is nothing like the final product; whole layers of safety have been disabled. It would be like trusting your bank account to that Intel chip that did division wrong.”
“But you could keep it under control for the duration of the test?”
“Maybe,” Mercy said, spinning her MIT class ring.
“With your special senses?”
“How do you know about that?”
“I know blue isn’t the only thing you see more of. Could you detect the field drift early?” Yvette asked.
“Yes . . . that’s how I’ve caught the problems so far.”
“And if you’re not there, the test won’t happen?”
“Pretty much.”
“Then you’re going. You can match Commander Zeiss for safe science and stand up to Red when it’s important. We need both to succeed. The others entrusted me to make the final decision—you’re on the team for Ascension.”
“Wh-o-a! I didn’t ask to join. You only have to wait six months for a hardware respin.”
“This is sort of like the Secret Service—we ask you to sign on, not the other way around. Your father approved the bugging because he thought you were the most qualified candidate in your field. Having met the others, I concur. We can’t wait any longer. Global situations are becoming more difficult to manage. We need this experiment now. Admit it: you’ll learn more in the first minute of live testing than we have in thirty years of ground simulation.”
“That’s a quote from one of my memos. Not fair.”
“Astronauts don’t whine,” Yvette said, mimicking Mercy’s mother. “What’s your answer?”
“If I have to be there to prevent Red from killing herself, I will. I should be there for final assembly anyway. No one will raise an eyebrow if I have to slip aboard the test flight due to some last-minute quirk.”
Yvette sent a one-word text to PJ Smith, ‘In.’ Then she opened her briefcase and pulled out a stack of nondisclosure documents the size of a phone book.
While Mercy was signing, PJ sent his daughter’s badge the text message, ‘I’m so proud. Your mother is crying already.’
“Why would my mother be crying?”
When Yvette hit a button on her briefcase, Mercy’s badge and phone made a bloop sound as they went offline. This was a heavy-duty media scrambler, used for discussing matters of the highest secrecy. Dad had an older model on his desk.
The psychological evaluator asked, “How long could you stay on moon base in an emergency?”
Mercy shrugged. “After the prototype test, they might need a report from me, but this has been the only project on my schedule since Ambassador Hollis’ funeral. Technically, my schedule is wide open after this.” She paused, letting the ramifications sink in. “Tell me Red isn’t going to make a run for the artifact.”
“I can’t lie.”
Sitting on the desk, Mercy swore. “You’re okay with her breaking a UN edict?”
“When compared to saving the lives of billions of people? Yes.”
“We’ll all be arrested.”
“Probably, but not before we achieve our goals. Z has this timed to the second.”
Her mother had known about this possibility for months, and she had probably arranged things to spend as much time as possible with her oldest daughter. “If we don’t succeed, I won’t make it back. That’s why Mom is crying.”
“We might be gone for several years even if we do reach the alien artifact. Are you still in?”
This landing would unlock untold technological marvels. More importantly, her father had recommended her, and she didn’t want to disappoint him. “Yes.”
“Good.” Then Yvette told her things about the artifact that only a handful of humans had ever heard. After that, there was no going back.
That afternoon, Mercy put her affairs in order. As with each member of the conspiracy, she wrote a letter claiming full responsibility for her own actions, asserting that her friends and family knew nothing of her plans.
Chapter 3 – Guardian Angels on the Moon
At lunar Mission Control, while most scientists were toasting the success of the four-engine test, the media spokesperson, Professor Nena Horvath, took over. The platinum blonde with her soft, Dutch accent was Red’s aunt and surrogate mother. Her sole goal had been for the Ascension team to reach the artifact without anyone noticing or interfering. What the former beauty queen couldn’t accomplish with charm, she managed with a loyal cadre of armed personnel from the now-defunct Sirius Academy. With help from the security teams on the orbiting construction platform that had launched Ascension on its maiden voyage, that part turned out to be trivial.
Stopping the fallout afterward would be difficult.
“Deploy defensive-missile batteries. Bring up the Blasteroids tracking program,” Horvath ordered. Alarms sounded throughout the base.
The moment she saw the prototype disappear from radar, Professor Horvath reset the mission cloc
k. She’d seen the Iranian contingency plan, wherein a single push of a button triggered five days of automated bombardment. They weren’t the only players. NASA’s database had held a catalogue of over twenty thousand space objects to avoid. Sirius Academy had added to the list and filtered it. The program on her screen tracked every known satellite and piece of space debris large enough to launch a weapon of mass destruction—over six thousand potential threats.
They were in the hands of the angels now, the three Fortune Aerospace shuttles. Their positions after the test were no accident. “Cherub, you support the L1 platform. Ophan, fly cover on our moon base. Seraph, stand by to rescue survivors from Ascension.”
Over Academy channels her right-arm man at L1, Lieutenant Alistair, asked, “I’m watching on the telescopes. Where’s your fourth antimissile battery?”
“Hydraulics are frozen,” Horvath replied calmly.
“Sabotage?”
“No eyes or ears yet.”
“You’ll need every missile. Should I send you Cherub?”
“Negative. That would take hours. I just dispatched a repair crew. How are your defenses?”
“I’ve already sent the civilians to the life pods. The rest of us have on vac suits, but that’s just a precaution. All of our industrial cutting lasers have been upgraded to military strength. We can take out any missile that gets within twenty klicks. Outside that range, we have the zap guns.”
High-speed processor chips manufactured by Mori Electronics in the last seven years had an intentional defect. A chip that received a certain signal would melt itself down. Cameras, beam weapons, launchers, and even missiles could be disabled by a sustained burst. The L1 platform was now home to a small army of video gamers, each armed with a long-barreled ‘zap’ gun tied to the Blasteroids tracking program.
Nena watched a countdown on her screen. “Argos Observation Net reboot complete in three . . . two . . . one.”
Everyone in the control room held their breath.
Launch flares appeared on every screen, too numerous for a human to count.
