4.4
07 May
ESL1 Shade Station
Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1
Extracislunar Space
Apparently, Alice’s External Security team had disbanded. Isaiah was here in the office with her. Derek and Rose were dead, and Tim Ho was in squirrel hibernation, aboard an ion ferry back to Earth. On the video link there was only Bob Rojas, the CFO, who managed to look simultaneously outraged, harried, sympathetic, and firm.
“No,” he said, “our channels have not revealed any information about who the perpetrators might be. And Alice, I’m not sure it’s a thread we want to pull.”
He wasn’t sitting in a conference room. As near as Alice could tell, he was in a private cabin on an aircraft, or maybe a boat. His location tag was thirty-two characters of gibberish.
Alice was gritting her teeth so hard it felt like she might break them, but she managed for a moment to open her mouth and say, “Because anyone with nukes, suicide bombers, and trans-lunar spaceships is someone we don’t want to fuck with?”
Eleven seconds later, he said, “Bingo. And advanced stealth technology. That says we’re dealing with either a nation-state, a very well-capitalized corporate entity, or the mother of all NGOs.”
NGO stood for “non-governmental organization,” and it technically included everything from terrorists and drug empires on the one hand, to international charities, aid agencies, and professional societies on the other. And in between, a hazy menagerie of standards-setters and banking monopolies, political thug-ocracies and dark-web guilds and syndicates of dubious ownership and control.
Even the Cartels were NGOs of a sort, and their very lack of durable structure made them nightmare enemies for a nation-state like the USA. Headless and faceless, they swept in from God knows where with their guns and missiles and network spoofers, played hell with other people’s lives and money and infrastructure, and then melted away into jungles and slums and posh retirement communities. With bribes and threats and torture and murder, they kept civilians and local governments off their backs, while sucking colossal sums out of the first and third worlds.
To fight them, you needed reliable intel and lightning-fast strike capability, and the ability to treat your own wounded in ditches and bomb craters behind enemy lines. Down south in Coffee Patch, everywhere was behind enemy lines. And even when you got the drop on them and forced a stand-up fight, they would sometimes bust out EMP missiles and chemical agents and even the occasional dirty bomb. You could never take them alive, and they did not care how many innocent civilians they took with them.
Did they have their own space program? Did they want their own space program? Why? And where the fuck would they launch from?
But Bob was right; if it was the Cartels, or the Chinese, or even somebody like Orlov Petrochemical . . . Well, Renz Ventures could not afford a war. Not with anyone, and certainly not with entities with whom even the United States feared to tangle.
“So,” Alice said, “we just let them stomp all over us? Three of my favorite people are gone, and the bogeys could come back at any time.”
She was sitting behind a desk, facing the screen, with Isaiah standing in front like a loyal lackey. Behind her, the slowly whirling spacescape of Earth and Moon.
“We’re a target,” Isaiah said. “The Shade even looks like a bull’s-eye.”
He looked nervous and sounded nervous, because yeah, he’d come up here almost on a lark—a working vacation in what he probably imagined was outer space’s sexiest destination. And now people were dying.
Alice’s desk was of course a bit of corporate theater, pointless and absurd in the low gravity. But the Igbal Renz School of Leadership was full of stupid theater tricks that somehow worked, and she’d taken this one over from him when he left. She tried to project an air of tired wisdom, but it was (she thought) swamped out by barely controlled rage.
After another maddening pause, Bob Rojas said, “Look, the court of public opinion is where this battle needs to be fought. We’ve put out a series of statements, deploring the violence and emphasizing that we have no offensive capabilities.”
“Please don’t hurt us?” Alice said, trying hard not to curl her lip.
“The message isn’t directed at them, although, yes. That is what we want. But who we need to speak to right now is everyone else who might be targeted by this kind of iron-fisted espionage. We want everyone taking our side, and watching their own backs. Thinking about countermeasures, and gathering intel.”
“Make them pull the thread for us?”
After a pause, he nodded grimly. “Yes, exactly.”
“So, we do nothing?”
“Nothing? Alice, you just killed a spaceship that probably cost the bad guys ten billion dollars. Not to mention the crew, which had to have been at least two of their best people. You have notified them that ESL1 is a costly and dangerous target. I’d lay even odds they just cut their losses and retreat.”
“And I’ll lay even odds,” Alice said, “that they return to exact a terrible vengeance.”
Bob Rojas laughed. “That’s not how vengeance works, my dear. If someone bloodies your nose, you don’t go back for seconds. No, you shoot his dog, you blow up his mailbox, you spike the battery in his car. Our ground assets are at much higher risk, is what I’m saying. Which is not your fault and not your problem, but it’s yet another drain on our resources.”
Alice sighed through gritted teeth, and when that didn’t do the trick, she sighed again, with her jaw relaxed. “So we’re on our own up here?”
“I wouldn’t put it like that. I’m happy to ship materiel if you can tell me what you need. But no more large infrastructure investments. You need to move out of growth mode and into more of a raw production mode. ESL1 needs to be a profit center, for the foreseeable future.”
Alice didn’t like that answer, because “foreseeable future” meant “until Igbal gets back,” at which point all bets were off. Because Igbal was a wild card even in his own company; whatever weird magic he brought to the table, his staff seemed unable to reproduce. And they were struggling without it.
“Fine,” Alice said. “We’ll start building flutter-drive cargo ships.”
“Excellent,” Bob said. “Now, believe it or not, you are not my highest priority today, so I need to excuse myself. Good luck, Alice.”
The video feed winked off.
“Well,” Isaiah said. Nothing more.
“We need a lethal response that’s fully automated,” Alice told him. “A couple of antimatter-tipped missiles, fired automatically at any target that shows up on ultrawideband but not normal radar.”
Isaiah scratched at his hair. “You’d need to increase the range of the ultrawideband, ma’am, or you’d just be bombing yourself. Very similar to a nuke going off. You’d also want to fry their circuits first, so they don’t see the missiles coming, and so they can’t deploy countermeasures.”
“Sounds good,” Alice said. “Make it happen.”
He looked alarmed at that. “Ma’am, all due respect, I only came here to install the radar. Next ferry home, I’m on it.”
Alice snorted. “All due respect, but shipping berths are corporate property, and I am not your concierge.”
Then, based on the look on Isaiah’s face, she softened and said, “Look, I get it. You didn’t sign up for a war. Sometimes people don’t. Sometimes they just suddenly find themselves in the middle of one, and yes, it sucks. But we just sent out our only ferry yesterday, so, sorry, even in your best possible case, you’re here for another two months. Unless you hijack a lifeboat, I suppose, which would be an act of piracy.”
“I’m not hijacking any lifeboat.”
“Exactly. So building up the station’s defenses is building up your own defenses. After the ferry gets back . . . well, I can force you to stay. It’s in the contract rider you signed to get your flight status. I’m not going to do that, okay? You are free to leave. But if you choose to sign on here as a full-time employee, I can offer you a pay raise out of my miscellaneous expenses budget. I think you’ll be a lot more use to the company up here than back on Earth. And there’s . . . more going on up here than you’re aware of.”
“Well, that sounds very mysterious,” he said, looking as though he was trying not to look sullen. He’d been standing in the low gravity, but presently he jumped and brushed his hand against the ceiling. Then, because the station was spinning, he came down a few centimeters to the left of where he’d started, and a few degrees off vertical. He flailed for a moment, then caught his balance and looked Alice in the eye. “I’ve heard some pretty crazy rumors.”
She nodded. “Yeah, some of those are true.”
The truth—that Igbal and Hobie and a couple of other experimental deep-hibernation subjects had (probably) been contacted by an alien intelligence—was impossible to hide. Too many people knew it, or knew people who knew it. But since it sounded bugfuck crazy, the best defense was to circulate a few equally bugfuck rumors that weren’t true. Like, there was a wormhole to another dimension out there in interstellar space. Or a gold nugget the size of a football field. Or that Igbal was secretly five different people all surgically altered to look and sound alike. Or that he was an alien, or a robot—all that kind of stuff. ESL1 attracted crazy tabloid headlines anyway, so it wasn’t that hard to throw more bullshit on the pile.
Now looking not just worried but also intrigued, Isaiah said, “Is this why the Cartels are spying on us?”
“We don’t know who’s spying on us. But yes, that’s probably part of it.”
Alice found it meaningful that he had switched from saying “you” to saying “us.” She watched the gears turn inside his skull: more pay, more excitement, a bit of intrigue, and of course a space station full of genetically fit colonists who mostly happened to be lonely women. Versus a quite serious chance of being irradiated to death or blown out into cold vacuum.
“Can I think about it?” he asked.
Alice nodded. “Yeah, take all the time you need. While you do that, though, you’re going to be getting your hands dirty, building exciting new weapons systems. Report to Maag when you’re done here; she’ll see you get fitted for a spacesuit.”
His eyes lit up at that, and Alice knew she had him.