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3.3
24 November

Spaceport Paramaribo, Eastern

Made Peninsula Paramaribo, Suriname

Earth


“What you’re saying is incredible,” Lawrence Killian told his Director of Launch Services, Puya Hebbar.

“It’s quite true, though,” Puya told him, a bit breathlessly. And he supposed it was. Puya spent perhaps too much time worrying about things other than her job, but she was brilliant, and Lawrence trusted her.

She was on a monitor screen, because she was still up on the Moon at the moment, and Lawrence envied her that. He couldn’t help touching the aching incisions on his chest.

“Are you all right, sir?” Gill Davis murmured into his ear. Gill was Lawrence’s assistant—what in older days might have been called a steward or valet or butler, though his duties ran also into the technical and administrative.

Lawrence and Gill were in an air-conditioned trailer with beige everything, that reeked of burnt coffee and thic-nic vape. They were surrounded by young men Lawrence didn’t know, who all seemed quite busy at their tasks, pretending not to be awestruck that the owner of the company—the trillionaire, the Horseman—had dropped by unannounced. Because Puya had said she had an emergency, and needed to talk to him ASAP on a screen larger than his rollup.

“Fine, fine,” Lawrence murmured back to Gill, although he wasn’t. Four days ago, in secret, he’d visited with the best heart surgery team in the United Kingdom to have a “flexible piezoelectric film” implanted. The surgery had been manual rather than robotic, but the instruments were cunning, the incisions surprisingly small. The whole procedure had been done in an examination room rather than a hospital, and they hadn’t even needed a general anesthetic beyond dental-grade laughing gas. “You’ll be on your feet tomorrow morning,” the surgeons had assured him several times—a prediction that had proven accurate. He’d had no trouble flying back to Paramaribo, where he found himself now.

Those pinprick incisions ran deep, though, and touched him literally to his core, all the way to his heart, which, at the age of seventy-nine, had somehow lost its ability to keep a steady pace on its own. Because Lawrence was “too old for foolishness, now, and too old for pride,” as the lead surgeon had unceremoniously put it. The pride of insisting that he was as stout and strong as ever. The foolishness of seeking an adrenaline high, whether in a freefall jump or on a motor track or running with the bulls in Pamplona. “Your life’s far from over,” they’d told him, “If you follow a few simple precautions.” Which amounted to giving up everything he’d ever held dear. Eleven years ago he’d lost his beloved Rosalyn, and never sought the company of another woman. And since then he’d lost his lock on the tralphium market, and with it his lighter-than-helium airship. And now it seemed he must lose everything else. Except perhaps the Moon itself.

The irony that he’d never actually been to space was something he’d always meant to correct, and never quite got around to. And now perhaps he was too late, for anything but a one-way trip. But not to Shackleton, not to Saint Joe’s. Another irony: he spent most of his time trying to convince people to live in habitats exactly like those. To build communities of them—to live on the Moon. And yet the truth was, Lawrence himself didn’t want to live that way. If he were going to retire on the Moon, he must first build a place there, that he would actually want to inhabit. A posh retirement community, spacious and well lit, where withering bodies could breathe free at last, unburdened by Earthly gravity. And he needed to do it quickly, lest he be too old for even that terminal venture!

This is what he wanted to talk about—not with Puya Hebbar, but with her peers up at Shackleton, and down here on Earth, who could begin making that community a reality. But Commander Harb only wanted to talk about labor issues, and only reluctantly turned her attention toward Lawrence’s latest project, which she seemed to regard as a distraction. The first real civilian settlement on the Moon, a distraction! But he needed to present Marriott with so refined a design and business plan that they would immediately hand over everything they knew, and the project could get started, and for that he needed her help.

“Give the workers whatever you think is fair,” he’d told her. “Leave me out of it, put this issue behind you, and then bring me your undivided attention.” But she still hadn’t, and this annoyed him greatly, because she was the person he most needed to talk to. Right now, truthfully, he didn’t want to talk to Puya at all.

He knew what Puya wanted to talk about, too. She’d been pestering him for days, something about a thorium-powered rocket engine. To her credit she had developed, before coming to him, both a clear description of the technology and a clear business case for deploying it. Which was all well and good, but he was quite busy enough with other things, and her project didn’t mesh with HMI priorities, and she didn’t like that and clearly wanted to invest a lot of energy into changing his mind.

So neither of them wanted to be talking about this. And yet, cycling on the screen next to Puya’s face was the looped, grainy telescope video of a Harvest Moon booster, wobbling suddenly as it rose up through Earth’s atmosphere. Wobbling and recovering.

“It’s a very close call,” Puya said, “from something directly in our flight path.”

“So this could happen again?” he asked her.

“It could,” she said.

On the video, the rocket was thundering along, minding its business, more or less centered in the frame of the tracking telescope, when a blurry gray object struck it from above, fast and hard, and then spun away out of view. Or rather, the rocket struck the blurry gray object, which had—Puya said—been vertically motionless at the time. Coasting along horizontally with the equatorial Hadley cell winds at perhaps thirty kilometers per hour, but vertically motionless. Then the rocket lurched, wobbled, and recovered. Barely.

“No one was hurt?” he asked her.

“No, sir. Unmanned cargo launch. But the launch vehicle is worth half a billion dollars, and the payload very nearly as much. We’re going to have to replace that fairing as it is.”

“And that object definitely wasn’t a balloon?” he asked her, for the second time.

“No, sir. As you can see in the video, it’s quite solid when struck. A little bendy, perhaps, but it springs back into shape after the collision, like a block of very strong rubber.”

Her words came out quick as birdsong, or the gasps of a drowning woman. When Puya Hebbar had something to say, the actual saying of it seemed a great inconvenience to her, best gotten over with as quickly as possible. She also sounded, most of the time, as though she were, in confidence, relaying secrets of a sensitive nature. Which might in this case be true, but was wearying nonetheless. She’d’ve been happier, he thought, whispering to him in a corner, her lips safely behind the barrier of a hand held vertically at her cheek.

“Is it disc-shaped?” he asked her.

“We believe it’s hexagonal, actually, but it’s flat, yes. And its electromagnetic cross-section is so minimal that it literally didn’t show up on our tracking radar at all.”

And that was, as he’d said, incredible. A solid block of radar-invisible material just floating around in the air? Getting struck by rocket ships on ascent? It couldn’t be held up by antigravity, because that was impossible, and also why would it be vertically motionless at that particular altitude? That implied something buoyant, like a balloon. Except it was solid, and apparently quite robust. When struck, it didn’t explode or swirl or flutter; it bounced away, hard.

“Where did it come from?” he demanded. He wasn’t in the habit of demanding things, not anymore, but these were extraordinary circumstances. “Heads will roll for this, I assure you.”

“We knew you’d ask that,” she said. “The video is actually quite good—two hundred fifty-six frames per second—which is how we were able to determine the initial vector of the object. The impact was over the Atlantic, most of the way to Africa, and if we trace that trajectory back along the equatorial winds, there are no land masses. This object did not originate from South America.”

“A ship in the mid-Atlantic?” he asked.

“Not quite,” she said. The rocket video was replaced with a map, showing the edges of Africa and South America, and in between them a little island chain called Cape Verde. The path of the rocket was shown as a dotted line, and a very familiar one, because it was the path traced out by most everything launching out of Paramaribo. Southwest of the islands and north of the dotted line, by what looked like several hundred kilometers, was a flashing red circle.

“At this location we found a floating platform, about a hundred meters across. It really wasn’t easy to find, sir—it looks like it might be deliberately camouflaged. It also appears to be anchored in place.”

The image changed again, zooming and zooming toward that circled location, until Lawrence could see a vessel or platform of some kind, set against the ocean’s gray-blue with a slightly darker gray. The shape of it didn’t make immediate sense, perhaps because the satellite image had been captured at a poor angle, from a long way off, and through quite a bit of atmospheric haze. It was basically a grainy smudge, neither circular nor rectangular nor streamlined like a ship.

“What is it? An offshore facility of some sort?”

“Not in the sense you mean,” Puya said. A cursor appeared on the screen, tracing invisible circles around an even fainter smudge. “This is its shadow.”

“How’s that possible?” he asked her. It didn’t make sense, because the shadow of any object at sea should be attached to the object itself. Unless . . . 

“The platform,” Puya said, “is floating midair, a full kilometer above the ocean’s surface. It also appears like a flattened hexagon, which would not make sense for an inflatable structure this large. Colorimetry indicates it’s the same material as the block that struck our rocket. Apparently, a solid piece of this solid object just . . . broke off and floated away, like it weighed less than nothing.”

Lawrence’s mind set to work right away. If this had happened, then they could put aside any question about whether it was possible, and start focusing on how it was done. And by whom. And for God’s sake, why? Where was the gain in such a thing, and why had he never heard so much as a whisper about it?

“Find out everything you can,” he told her.

“We will, sir. We are. But we’re at a loss for leads to follow, if you see what I mean.”

“Sir,” said Gill, handing him one of the cold packs the surgeons had given him, “Will you please sit down?”

Lawrence waved him off. To Puya he said, “Get IT involved. Tell them to train a deep belief network on these images, and pay SearchNet for a full scour of anything similar that’s been posted, anywhere, ever. Show it to R&D. Show it to everyone. Collect guesses about what this might be, and then train a deep belief network on that, and scour SearchNet again.”

“Sounds expensive,” Puya hedged.

“Cheaper than losing a launch vehicle,” he said. “And possibly a lot cheaper than being the last one to know what’s going on here.”


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