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4.1

03 February 2057

ESL1 Shade Station

Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1

Extracislunar Space


Alice Kyeong wasn’t built for this shit.

Yuehai Ming, a physicist floating in front of Alice in the zero gravity of ESL1 Shade Station, had just said to Alice, “The spray-on bicolloidal layer has improved the conversion efficiency of the Shade to almost twenty-five percent, without raising any eyebrows down on Earth.”

And Alice’s first impulse was to say, “Why are you telling me this?” Except of course she couldn’t say that, because—through sheer bad luck—while Igbal Renz was off gallivanting around interstellar space, she was Interim Station Commander of ESL1, and Vice President of Space Operations for Renz Ventures, LLC. So it was her job, God help her, to listen to reports like this and give some kind of response.

“That’s fine,” she told Yuehai. “Keep up the good work.”

The two of them were floating in the station’s newest module, an office and quarters specially built for Alice, in her new capacity as Igbal’s goddamn replacement. Not running the whole company, thank you very much, but running the forty-five-person space station that sat at its apex and conducted its highest-value operations.

“I don’t trust anyone else,” Igbal had told her.

“You trust me?” Alice had asked, somewhat incredulously. Because she’d been a combat medic just five years earlier, and had since that time done her best to avoid any sort of administrative work, and focus instead on the safety of her astronauts and the security of the station as a whole.

“Not really,” Igbal had said. “But you’re the only one up here with any sense.” An honest reply, to which Alice couldn’t say much. Because it was true: this place was full of PhDs and flyboys, a few mechanics and construction workers of limited imagination.

“You should hire better people,” Alice told him.

“You should,” he said. “You should have been doing that for me.”

Well, shit. He had her there.

“At the same time,” Yuehai continued, “Igbal’s latest proton cascade sequence has improved the efficiency of antimatter production tenfold over what it was this time last year. That’s a hundredfold increase over where we started, and a thousand times better than the rest of the world combined.”

And that did catch Alice’s attention.

One thing Yuehai didn’t seem to realize was that Alice was the conduit by which eyebrows on Earth got raised. Or one of the conduits, anyway. She didn’t seem to realize that Alice was a spy.

And this read directly on Igbal’s “common sense” issue, because it wasn’t exactly a well-kept secret. Alice had been pulled from the elite ranks of the Air Force Pararescuemen, inserted here as a covert operative, and promoted once she’d secured Igbal’s surrender. She’d been forcibly installed into the Renz Ventures hierarchy, yes, but she was still technically a major in the U.S. Air Force, and for years she had reported directly to the President of the United States. If Yuehai didn’t know that, then Yuehai was not paying attention.

All that stuff had happened, of course, because the Shade was blocking 0.1 percent of the sunlight reaching Earth, and thus meaningfully affecting the climate. (Mainly for the better, but still.) Because the Shade generated more electricity than the entire United States, and that was a lot of (literal) power for one man to control. And yeah, because Igbal had been sitting on a kilogram of antimatter with zero security, or rather, only the security of sitting way out at Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1, which was 1.2 million kilometers beyond the orbit of the Moon.

Which, in this day and age, was not much protection at all. Not from serious actors. Not from nation-states, or the machinations of oligarchs and their multi-trillion-dollar corporations. Maybe not even from the Cartels, who stubbornly refused to die, despite being driven out of one country after another. The Cartels, who had hundreds of billions of dollars stashed where no one had ever been able to find it, and who kept managing to get their hands on hardware they had no business owning.

“I want you to roll back those changes,” Alice said to Yuehai.

Yuehai looked confused at that. “It’s actually drawing less power,” she said, “and our containment facility upgrades are—” To her credit, Yuehai clearly grasped she was not landing a winning argument. She paused for a moment, made a kind of announcey gesture with her hands, and said, “With all the power and cleverness at our disposal, it took us almost six years to make enough fuel for the Summit mission. If we want—”

“Roll it back,” Alice said. “That’s an order.”

Yuehai struggled visibly with that, trying to make sense of it.

“Igbal’s not going to like it,” she said finally.

“Let me worry about that,” Alice said, in her best don’t-fuck-with-me tone. Then, because she didn’t want to sound like more of an asshole than absolutely necessary, she added, “There are a lot of factors in play, Yuehai. Your people have done excellent work, but right now we’re walking five different tightropes, and we need to move very, very cautiously. This is why Igbal put me in charge, to worry about stuff like this. Someday, I promise, we’ll have more wiggle room, but right now I need you to trust me.”

And that seemed to work, because everyone knew Alice had saved the station—and probably the Shade as well—from certain destruction on at least one occasion. Alice was prickly by nature, but in all the years they’d worked together, she had never given Yuehai, or anyone else, reason to doubt her commitment to her teammates.

“Okay,” Yuehai said, the tension going out of her.

“Let’s have a beer later,” Alice said. “Or not,” she added quickly, seeing the look on Yuehai’s face. Then, more gently, “Look, these are dangerous times. We’ve got to play smart.”

“Okay, I understand,” Yuehai said, nodding thoughtfully. “Thank you. I won’t take more of your time.”

As Yuehai was exiting the hatchway, Malagrite Aagasen—Maag to her friends—came in behind her. Because God forbid Alice should get a moment to herself.

“Tell me some good news,” Alice said.

“We’re . . . on schedule,” Maag said, in a caution-laden tone that suggested she had bad news to communicate, and feared Alice’s temper.

Well, shit. Alice and Maag were close enough that they’d shared a boyfriend for a while—sometimes simultaneously. If even she was tiptoeing around, then Alice had clearly better find a softer side. This was not a military situation—at least, not yet—and these people had no other leader.

For years, Igbal had guided ESL1 Shade Station by enthusiasm alone. He was not above bullying people to get what he wanted, and at times he could be prickly and petulant as well. But he’d also infused the station—really, the whole of Renz Ventures, across three continents and more—with an infectious, almost childlike energy for which Alice had no equivalent.

“What is it?” Alice asked Maag, as gently as her nature permitted.

“The coupling hubs don’t have their full range of motion. They’re a degree off.”

“Meaning what?”

“The safety margins are going to be tight. When we start spinning the ring, we’re just not going to be able to absorb a lot of error.”

“Oh,” Alice said. “What do we do about that?”

“Well, either we remake all sixteen couplers, which would cost us two weeks, or we spin the station up a lot more slowly. Which will also cost us two weeks.”

“How does that translate to ‘on schedule’?” Alice complained. Then, more practically: “On what date will we have a functioning spin-gee habitat?”

“Two months from now. April sixth, to be exact.”

“Okay,” Alice said, because what else was she supposed to say?

In theory, living in zero gravity wasn’t melting their bones. Everyone here took their bone pills and their muscle pills and their heart pills and their radiation pills, and most of the crew were pretty diligent about their daily exercise as well. But even on Earth, “fitness in a pill” had never really worked as well as actual fitness, and here in space the problems were multiplied. If they could simulate Mars gravity, or even Lunar gravity, they’d all have a much better chance of returning to Earth someday without a limp.

They had looked at simply disassembling the three-dimensional jumble of ESL1 Shade Station and putting the modules back together in a big, spinning ring, but there were two problems with that. First of all, it would idle production, and research, and even life support for an indeterminate period of at least several weeks. Unacceptable.

Second of all, the straight lines of the existing modules would mean that dust and other objects would roll toward the joints where the modules connected. The only gravitationally “flat” surface in a spinning habitat—the only surface where a ball could sit without rolling away—was actually a curved one. So they had built all-new modules, and an interface to join the spinning part of the station with the old, jumbled, non-spinning part.

The only thing holding them back now were the humble coupling hubs that would link the curved modules together in a double ring. Simple, right?

“Two months is not terrible,” Alice said, “although we’re going to have to delay our next crew transfer. That’s, what, five new people with nowhere to sleep?”

“I’m a chemist,” Maag reminded her. “I’m not in charge of crew transfers.”

It was a cheap shot, and drew a glare from Alice, who was in charge of crew transfers. But “job description” was a distinction that simply didn’t apply at ESL1 anymore, if it even ever had.

“You are now,” Alice said. Which drew a glare from Maag. They held it, eye to eye, for maybe four seconds before Maag cracked a smile, and then they were both laughing.


Alice’s next appointment was with the External Security team: a pilot, an astronaut, and a machinist here in the office with her, and a video link to a room full of people on Earth. Absolutely no one was laughing.

“Talk to me about the stealth ships,” she said.

No longer an urban myth, the stealth ships had been officially detected loitering near Transit Point Station, in low Earth orbit. Which had made a lot of astronauts sound a lot less crazy. Variously described as lenses, mirrors, distortions, haze, or rainbows, the stealth ships could be—just barely—detected by human eyeballs as they passed in front of other things. And now, officially, they could be detected by entangled ultrawideband pulse radar as well.

Alice had never personally seen one of these UFOs, but she’d first suspected their existence five years ago, when Bethy Powell had tried to sabotage the station and make off with that kilogram of antimatter. Bethy had had no obvious exit plan, so clearly she was expecting something to pick her up. Something hidden.

“Here’s a CAD model of what we think the ship looks like,” said one of the Earthbound engineers, an earnest young Black man whose name Alice could never remember, who spoke with a British accent. In a corner of the screen, a little winged rocket ship appeared, featureless yellow-white against a royal blue background.

“Ships,” Alice corrected. “Plural. There are sightings too close together in time and too far apart in space to be explained by a single bogey.”

But now she was back in urban legend territory again, and nobody had a response for her. Or maybe that was partly the speed of light delay, because Earth was 5.3 light-seconds away—10.6 seconds round-trip—so even if someone answered her immediately, it felt a lot like the people on the other side of that screen were ignoring her.

“They’re not aliens,” said the earnest young man, finally, after rather more than 10.6 seconds. “The shape looks a lot like a Lockheed Martin LMS-50. Not the same profile, or actually the same anything, but it’s clearly capable of reentering the Earth’s atmosphere and landing on a runway.”

“Nobody said they were aliens,” Alice said, striving for patience.

There were aliens out there—Igbal’s incorporeal Beings—but they sure didn’t drive little spaceships around. But that was such a closely guarded secret that even ninety percent of RzVz personnel had no inkling. The cover story was that Intercession was on a two-year shakedown cruise, with a hundred VIPs on board, purely for publicity reasons. That story couldn’t possibly hold up forever, but so far it had done remarkably well. Probably because the nutty truth sounded even more like an urban legend that no serious person would entertain.

But real conspiracies existed, too, and nutty ones.

“I’m just saying,” said the young man.

“I need schematics on that entangled ultrawideband,” Alice said. “And if it’s hard to build, I need someone up here who knows how to do it.”

Igbal had tried a couple of times to design a radar that could catch these bastards, but he’d been too distracted by the Summit mission to really give it much attention, or to explain what he knew to anyone else.

But God damn it, what were these stealth ships doing? Pointing missiles? Pointing IR lasers at the windows, to try and pick up vibrations they could decode into speech? Standing by to kidnap key personnel? All of the above?

One thing that unnerved Alice greatly was that she was still receiving paychecks from the U.S. Air Force, but was no longer receiving instructions from the President. Tina Tompkins was out of office, “Loud Wally” Mudrow was in, and the transition had seen such a rancorous purge that it seemed plausible no one was left in the U.S. government who even knew Alice was here. There were other governments that did know—France and New Zealand at the very least—but perhaps they were keeping that information to themselves.

Alice was a spy with much to report, and no one to report it to, and all she could think to do was gather more information. Which was also what the Chief Astronaut and Interim Commander and VP of Space Operations side of her wanted to do anyway, so . . . 

“I know exactly how to build it,” the young man said, now sounding a bit overeager.

“Keep your pants on,” Alice told him, with a glare that might not come through on the blocky video. It was probably an HR violation, but Jesus, she was sick of all the goddamn Earthmen wanting to treat this place like Pleasure Island. Yes, the crew of ESL1 was still more than seventy-five percent female, but what of it? It was a factory, not a hotel, and the women here had calluses on their hands.

(And yes, a lot of them would pounce on any fresh meat that arrived—especially for a short-term assignment—and Alice was sick of all the disruption that caused. And also, Alice hadn’t gotten her rocks off in months, and was pretty short-fused about the whole subject.)

“Well, I do,” the young man said.

“What’s your name?” Alice asked him. In a room full of people down there on Earth, he was the only one speaking.

“Pembroke,” he said, eleven seconds later. “Isaiah Pembroke. Senior Radar Systems Engineer, Weapon Targeting Systems.”

“I’ll take it under advisement. I don’t want to target any weapons, though. I mean, I do, if that’s our only option, but we don’t know who these people even are. We don’t know their motives or capabilities. I don’t want them hanging around, but going straight to a lethal response may give us a result we really don’t like. What I want to do is catch one of these ships.”

“Physically capture?” asked Derek Hakkens, sounding . . . surprised. He was hovering to the right of her, with his slippered foot hooked lazily on a grab bar.

“Yes. It’s the only way to find out who they are.”

“Okay. Difficult,” he said.

Derek was a pilot—mostly ion tugs and maintenance pods, but he swore he could fly anything. He was also Alice’s ex-boyfriend, and a maddening son of a bitch, but she valued his opinion.

“What would we need?” she asked—not just him, but the whole team.

“Better radar than what Transit Point is using,” said Isaiah Pembroke. “Their range is limited to about a kilometer, and already it looks like the bogey is just moving a little farther out to compensate. But we’ve got a lot more power at our disposal. A lot more.”

“Okay, that’s good. What else?”

“A way to disable their drive motor without decompressing the ship,” said Rose Ketchum. Rose—one of the station’s best astronauts, presently hovering to Alice’s left—was the External Security team’s latest addition. She had some of that common sense people were always talking about, and Alice figured it was time to put it to use on something other than zero-gee welding.

“And how would we do that?”

“With a bullet,” said Tim Ho. He was the machinist, hovering over by the video display, currently overlaid on the Earth-facing picture window of Alice’s office. He pointed to a spot on the 3D model, and said “Fuel tanks are going to be here.”

“You’ll blow it up,” said Derek. “Unless you get lucky, you’ll puncture the fuel and oxidizer tanks both, and then you’re going to get a vigorous exothermic reaction. It would take days, and lots of our own fuel, to sweep up all the pieces. What you want to do first is defeat the camouflage.”

He’d talked about that before, and it sounded good to Alice, but with no way to localize the stealth ship, it hadn’t done much good.

“Aluminum chaff, covered in tack resin?” she said, mainly for everyone else’s benefit.

“Right. Once we have a clear detection, we fire canisters of chaff at the ship’s last known location and along any probable thrust vectors. You stick even a couple of pieces to their hull, they’re going to reflect in every wavelength. Then we can do whatever we like. Shove a glue bomb up their tailpipe, et cetera. But they could still maneuver with attitude control thrusters. And even if they couldn’t, there’s a big difference between disabling a ship and physically extricating its crew. We don’t have space marines. They might.”

“Well, we’d be in a much stronger negotiating position,” Alice said.

“Not if they’re armed. We’re pretty vulnerable, Alice.”

Not as vulnerable as they were five years ago, but Derek’s point was valid: there was no amount of airlock deadbolting or reflective armor plating that could protect the station from a determined military assault. ESL1 had weapons—lasers and missiles and radar-controlled slug throwers. They even had a couple of sniper rifles, which was what Tim Ho had meant. He’d been an Army sniper down in Coffee Patch, and had recently proven that, with a 1 MOA rifle in the absence of wind and gravity, he could reliably put a round through a spacesuit glove at five hundred meters.

But space battles had never made any sense to Alice, because they didn’t make sense, period. If two soap bubbles start shooting at each other, the likeliest outcome was two popped bubbles. Renz Ventures needed to be a lot more nuanced than that.

“EMP attack?” she asked. Electromagnetic pulse—the bane of electronics everywhere.

It was Isaiah Pembroke who answered that one: “We certainly have the power to knock out even hardened military systems, and it would disable most armaments, along with mobility.”

“Also a lot of spacesuit functions,” said Tim Ho.

“Wouldn’t some of that blow back toward the station?” asked Derek.

“Almost certainly,” said someone else in the time-lagged video display. “And our own systems weren’t designed with EMP warfare in mind.”

“Some are,” Alice said. Once it became Alice’s job to harden this place, she had seen to it that new hardware at least took the idea into account. But the legacy systems—most systems—were designed by Igbal, with no thought to security. And it had nearly killed them all. Retrofitting them was difficult, expensive, time-consuming work. The new station would be a fortress by comparison, but right now that wasn’t much help.

“Other ideas?” Alice asked, because she had learned that that was an important question to ask. Even with two rooms full of people charged with sharing ideas, there was a surprising reticence to actually do so.

No one said anything, so she flashed a glare around and said, “Look, we’ve got the high ground, literally. We’re at the edge of cislunar space, and anyone Earthward of us has to look into the Sun to get here. We have energy superiority. We have two hundred kilograms of fucking antimatter. We have the fastest spaceship drive anyone has ever seen. When I say, ‘I want to capture a stealth ship,’ I don’t mean sit around thinking about it for six months. Derek, you’re in charge of this. If we don’t have people who can make it happen, get with Maag and hire some people who do.”


Alice’s final meeting of the morning was with the finance team.

“It doesn’t look good,” said Bob Rojas, the Chief Financial Officer of RzVz, through another time-lagged video link.

Alice had asked about getting a few tons of rare gas shipped up.

“Why exactly not?” she demanded, although Rojas outranked her in the corporate hierarchy.

Rojas looked annoyed at that. Annoyed and impatient. “I keep telling you, Kyeong, we’re going to be cash poor for at least the next twelve months. We sunk everything we had into that starship, and no one is particularly anxious to extend credit.”

“Why?”

“Do I really have to spell it out?”

“Would you, please?” she asked sweetly. “I’m just a dumb astronaut.”

He looked even more annoyed at that. Because yeah, Alice was not dumb. Just stubborn.

“People think we’re crazy,” he said. “We’ve moved all our ground operations to third-world Embargo States to get around the ITAR restrictions. We built a starship. Our founder has flown the coop. We’re hemorrhaging money and staff like a company about to go out of business.”

“Oh,” Alice said. She hadn’t heard anyone put it that way before, but a moment’s reflection told her it was true. “And are we? About to go out of business?”

“Not if you do your job,” he said. “Orders are up again for disposable landing bodies. Keep that revenue flowing.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” Alice said. “There’s no way ESL1 is keeping this company afloat all by itself. Not unless we start selling flutter drives to the highest bidder.”

“Yeah,” Rojas said, “About that. We’ve gotten a strongly worded decree from the U.N. Security Council, warning us not to even think about doing that. Sale of antimatter in any capacity will be regarded as an act of war. As far as operating our own flutter-drive ships—interstellar or otherwise—they say no part of the drive beam can intersect any portion of cislunar space, or again it’s an act of war. A war crime, actually, if even one photon of it intersects a human body. A few hours later, we got almost the same warning from the U.S.A., who I gather would be the enforcer of said decree.”

“U.S.A., huh?” Alice said. She hadn’t heard anything about any of this, so clearly it would not be herself doing the enforcing, or even the spying. Which meant she had indeed been forgotten by her Earthly masters. Which was not good news, insofar as it read on the stability of the U.S. government.

She was silent for several seconds, processing all of that. Finally she said, “Can we sell transportation services? The drive clearly works, and it can go to Jupiter as easily as it can go wherever the fuck Igbal is right now.”

“It’s real Buck Rogers stuff,” Rojas agreed. “And no, there’s nothing in the decree to prevent that. The U.N. probably recognizes that that particular horse has left the barn.”

“Will you authorize construction of another flutter drive?”

Rojas frowned. “What size of ship are we talking about? What’s the use case?”

“TBD,” Alice said. “But people always want to move things around. People are always in a hurry.”

Now it was Rojas’s turn to not say anything. Finally: “That’s intriguing. It doesn’t sound crazy, which means I might actually be able to shake loose some credit from our bankers. Enough to keep us airtight for a while.”

“Things are that bad?” Alice said.

“Not if you do your job.”


When she was done with all of that, Alice had an email waiting from Igbal.

Alice, for a woman of few words, you use up a surprising amount of bandwidth. Can you kindly make your reports a bit punchier? Can you fit it all into five kilobytes?

Say yes to the China thing, and no to Clementine. We’re not helping those jerks. I haven’t heard much about those Shade modifications, or upgrades to the particle accelerator. Please prioritize that in your next transmission. It’s very dark out here, and creepy quiet if I’m going to be honest. Please don’t take it the wrong way if I say I miss you.


Alice sighed. She missed Igbal, too. Definitely not in any kind of romantic way, but she missed his energy. Spy or no, she had been co-opted almost immediately by the sheer enthusiasm and scope of his ambitions. Solar shade the size of Colorado? Why not. Starship? Try and stop me. If she’d ever received an order to terminate him, she would have shot the radio instead.

She didn’t really know how long a message she could fit into five kilobytes, and although it would have been easy enough to figure out, she just didn’t feel like it. Although she had much to report, she didn’t feel like that, either. What she typed instead was:


There is more to running this station than I realized. You did a shit job of it, and left me a fucking mess, but I do wish you could offer more help than a daily fortune cookie.

Don’t take it wrong to say I miss you, too. Why didn’t you tell me we were having money troubles?


She looked it over a few times, and hit Send. And then, tired as she was, she’d’ve been happy to end her day right there, if not for the mocking of her wristwatch. Damn thing said it was only 1:15 p.m.


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