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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Thinking about hexes and how he might be about to have his entire blessed lifetime’s worth of luck recoil into a massive bout of ill chance, Chummy tried not let his dread show. You made your choice. If this fails, it’s on you, he reminded himself. It was hard work to get to the point where I could pay back Grandpere. And I did that. It was the right thing, really, he tried to reassure himself. The churn in his gut wasn’t easing any, so he tried for stoicism instead. It’ll be what it will be.

That wasn’t working either. He didn’t feel any calmer.

“Launch day! Launch day! Launch day!” DeeDee’s bat-winged avatar chittered and chattered at him from the rental car’s screen while he let the autodrive take him along a newly paved access road running up the side of Mount Fako.

Chummy forced his face back into a wide smile. DeeDee’s programming used the device’s facial recognition software to take the cue. The avatar did a backflip and muted.

Since he was taking this ill-considered side trip, Chummy reminded himself that he was in public and he had to fake confidence. Every other time in his career that things had gone sideways, it had been when he didn’t show up. So he was here. That meant the launch had to be a success, right?

The Sadous’ work had grown beyond his control and past his ability to positively influence it. But, he could, unfortunately, make bystanders believe he’d put a jinx on the whole launch.

No less than six strangers at the Yaoundé Nsimalen airport had recognized him. Chummy didn’t know whether to blame his occasional background appearance in newscasts about the elevator or his locally well-known connection to those Sadous. The ones who had spoken to him directly had wished him and the family luck for today’s launch. A lot more had watched him with oppressive interest. His faked confidence all the way through the public terminal had, hopefully, made its way back to the family and friends of all the team members out doing final checks. All those people inspecting the rail, the sled attachment, the A-HRV, and the payload need to be focused and not jumping at shadows because somebody texted them that I looked scared…

Stop thinking like that, fool, he told himself. None of that spirit nonsense is real. It’s just Aunt Mami’s gimmick to help people do what they could already do. Besides, she’s going to be here herself to grin and give everyone all the confidence they need.

The car beeped to announce his arrival at the programmed destination. Chummy craned his neck around to see if he’d missed a turn.

“Local news drone has you live, boss.” DeeDee’s avatar flapped bat wings and winked at him before vanishing from the screen again. The level rise had only one other vehicle parked between the scrawny bushes growing on the side of the road. But Chief Endeley Bouba himself opened the door of Chummy’s rental vehicle, and welcomed him into the icy morning air.

“Don’t worry,” Endeley said, “I won’t ask after everyone in your family, not in front of the drones. Though I had hoped…” He searched the back of Chummy’s vehicle and his smile faltered to find it empty.

“Where is everyone?” Chummy said.

Endeley’s head-turn followed his own to check the road beyond them. No one else was on their way to join them here on this turnoff. Endeley nudged Chummy’s shoulder and pointed with his chin at the news drone circling in the clear sky.

The chief stood very straight and grinned directly at that drone. Lifting his right hand high in a big wave to the onboard camera, he turned his head so his mouth was covered by his arm. “We’re live,” he said, “and yeah, it’s just us. My people actually listened to me and stayed away for once. I don’t care for risking anyone else.”

Chummy fixed his own smile firmly in place.

The view from the West African mountainside was clear on this bright blue–skyed day. Great launch weather. The launcher’s base station squatted in a former palm grove. The mass of new buildings lay on flat near-beachfront land before even the first rise of the foothills. Their crammed parking lots showed no movement at all outside the massive hangar.

Endeley followed his gaze. He tilted his head down to say, “The folks down there should be safe enough, no matter how it goes on the rail.”

“Come on.” Endeley Bouba motioned toward a line of three folding chairs. “Let’s look like we aren’t worried and expect this to be a picnic. The drone will circle around again soon, and the team ought to be almost ready now.”

“Really?” Chummy checked the sky. The drone was making a pass over the hangar parking lot. He couldn’t help also looking at the top of the mountain. He hoped to soon see the bright streak of a launch, and not some horrible twisted wreckage along the rail line or mountainside from a crash.

“Yes, everything’s almost done with the preflights,” Endeley said. “Launch vehicle. Sled. Maglev rail. That stuff. Almost finished with it.”

Chummy stuffed his comm into his suit-jacket pocket and followed the Bakweri chief.

“That’s for Aunt Mami?” Chummy nodded to the third chair and kept his face pointed down. Aunt Mami’s chair was the only one with cushions, a folded lap blanket, and some discreet ties along the armrests and backrest for securing oxygen and saline-drip tubing.

Endeley bent his face down too, trying to appear as if he were looking down at the launch hangar instead of hiding from the drone’s cameras and studio lip-readers. “Yes, I’d hoped she’d change her mind and arrive with you.” Endeley grimaced. “Couldn’t make it. Her health. Would’ve been nice to have Aunt Mami herself on-site to bless this, as it were. But, eh, maybe for the best not to be riling Fako on his home turf. And also not something to try to explain to the foreign news services.”

“Ah, right.” Chummy fell into silence, watching. With Endeley Bouba at his elbow, and Aunt Mami a no-show, he tried to look hopeful. Endeley waited until the drone passed by and then moved the extra chair into the trunk of his sedan with the throw blanket tossed over it.

They sat on a clammy mountainside and faked smiles together when the drone came by again. Too far up the launch path to actually see anything at the beginning of the rail line but not far enough up to be endangered by the sonic boom if all went according to plan. By Chummy’s increasingly threadbare official claim that he had no strong connection to the Sadous, he shouldn’t have been here at all, but he couldn’t convince himself not to come.

Sounds in his earbud crackled with the babble of the primary day-shift crew verifying final details before the Sadous’ first live launch. Sweat trickled down his back.

His comm pinged. He pulled it out to look. “Aren’t they supposed to be sending up carbon pellets as the payload for Test Launch One? It should be impact resistant if it all goes splat,” DeeDee sent him.

What the hell, DeeDee? This was his actual second assistant texting and not the programmed avatar. She should still be back at the TCG Berlin office. She shouldn’t be involved! He’d taken this time as personal leave and paid for the trip to Douala himself and then accepted Bakweri help to get up the mountain to join Chief Endeley’s party for the launch.

“‘Goes splat,’” the chief read off Chummy’s comm. “Ha! It better not. It’s going to be a bunch of little sat-killers for this payload. They’d go boom instead, not that anything with the kinetic energy to reach orbit wouldn’t be a nice-sized bomb all on its lonesome…”

“The final coordination with overflight nations go okay?” Chummy asked. “I can put in a few last-minute calls if you think…” He pointed with his chin to indicate the whole of the continent on the other side of the mountain and lifted his eyebrows.

Endeley shook his head. “Sadou Moussa might be aging, but he remains tremendously well connected.”

“And the presidents of Tanzania and Kenya worked *together* to beat into submission any of those middle-of-the-continent countries—COUGH South Sudan COUGH—who wanted to be paid double what everyone else was getting and then also tried to put the tax squeeze on their own newly-employed-by-TCG citizens,” DeeDee’s avatar supplied in a scrawl of text across his screen.

“Your comm is listening to us, and you’re okay with that?” Endeley gave Chummy a lifted eyebrow that suggested strongly that he should not be okay with it.

“DeeDee has it as securely fire-walled as it could possibly be.” He also added, “And her little avatar is excellent at finding and sharing time-critical information.”

“Why waste a launch on DiamondWire’s carbon bits if your TCG orbit-side astrogeeks aren’t ready to use the material yet?” Endeley elbowed Chummy in the ribs. “You will make certain that Ethan takes all proper precautions when it comes to installing that tether, right?”

“Absolutely,” Chummy said. If I have any position in TCG at all after today, that is.

“Sat-killers?” DeeDee’s voice squeaked. “Excuse me, sir,” she said to someone out of camera view, “what’s the payload for this launch?”

“BOSS!!!” she typed. “No confirmation yet, but I’m not getting ANY denials. They’re saying debris removers, not sat-killer, but any devices that can maneuver enough after launch to align with different debris objects has to have onboard fuel systems. That means extra boomy-boom-BOOM stuff in the payload!1!!11”

Chief Endeley leaned over Chummy’s shoulder and snorted.

Chummy checked his contact list quickly to see if he had some non-obvious way to delay the launch while he found a polite way to get Grandpere to beat Maurie’s and Pascaline’s heads together for picking a tough payload for their first launch.

Chief Endeley patted Chummy on the shoulder. “The pelletized carbon we had failed initial launch tests. The stuff sloshes around, which messes with the center of mass mid-flight. Pascaline mumbled something about tweaking the simulations they were using to train the flight software with higher-fidelity payload density models, but Philip Chao got way too wide-eyed, so Maurie vetoed it…” He gave Chummy the knowing grin of a man who was far less naive about the launcher than he was pretending to be.

“No wobbles allowed,” Chummy agreed. “DeeDee, where are you?”

“Besides,” Endeley said, “you need the debris field cleared before you could drop down a tether anyway. The anti-satellite mini-rockets were ready. They’ll be used mostly to give some larger pieces of junk gentle taps to make their orbits easier for reclamation corps to grab them up. The reclaimers are paying for that assist, of course. And the companies that lost telemetry control of things up there are paying to no longer be responsible for any future collisions. Why send up something to be in-orbit-warehoused for five years, when you can instead send payload for immediate use and get paid triple?”

A snort from DeeDee came from Chummy’s comm.

Chief Endeley waved a hand. “Immediately useful in launch terms. So, likely about eleven hours after launch for the payload to get up that far and then more hours or days for the various trajectory shifts to match with their intended targets.”

“I’m at the Sadou hangar, boss,” DeeDee texted. “I took the same flight as you did. Samson was right that I’d fade into the background crowd better than he would. I just had to make sure my shoes matched.”

Chummy folded his hands with grim determination that if he couldn’t do anything to fix last-minute problems, at least he wouldn’t bother the people who would be handling the crisis should any emerging issues prove to be big ones. His gut roiled.

“Why the nerves?” Endeley Bouba couldn’t seem to resist needling him. “It’s a test. If it all goes wrong, they can just rebuild and do it better the next time.”

“Depends on how badly wrong and if it kills too many critical people,” DeeDee’s voice replied.

Chummy gave his assistant a sharp look through the screen.

She blinked back at him. “What? I really thought everyone knew that.”

“They do; we do.” Endeley nodded. “In fact, I’d go so far as to say, ‘my thoughts exactly.’”

“Boss,” Chummy’s comm sounded in Samson Young’s voice, “you aren’t standing right next to that experimental maglev launcher, are you?”

They were a long way from touching range with the closest part of the launch rail on the raised struts that allowed it to start near sea-level and continue in a straight, sharply angled line to the final lift point near Fako’s highest peak. The curving hillocks and valleys of the mountain’s slopes rose and fell beneath that bright line of railway.

They weren’t directly beneath the powerfully charged rail. Chief Endeley had selected a parallel rise on Fako’s broad slopes. But, neither were they in a bunker.

Chief Endeley laughed and leaned close to lift up Chummy’s comm and pan around with the camera. “Of course, he’s close! If this thing derails at supersonic speed and takes off part of the mountain with us down in Limbe or hiding halfway around the base of the mountain in Douala, how would any of us be able to look a bereaved mother in the eye to tell her we had no idea that would happen?”

“If it takes off part of the mountain, it could take you with it and then I might be the one talking to bereaved mothers,” Samson countered.

“Now you’ve got the idea, lad,” Chief Endeley said with a mischievous grin.

“Inaccurate statement!” DeeDee’s avatar objected with a flurry of wings. “If A-HRV leaves sled or A-HRV & sled leave rail before accumulated kinematic forces are sufficient to arc it over the peak, it will have INSUFFICIENT force to remove any significant portion of the bedrock. If somehow all onboard vehicle fuel and all fuel in the orbital debris repositioner devices currently in payload detonate simultaneously…click here for full calculation details…Final Assessment: The mountain would remain. Humans at the crash site would not. The fireball on impact would be equivalent to approximately 158 tons of TNT. Recommend new location.” The comm began blinking a bold red MOVE TO SAFETY warning.

Chummy didn’t click for details. He definitely did not want to know. He told the avatar program: “I’m on PTO.” It stopped blinking the warning. “That’s Paid Time Off,’” Chummy added with a glance at the chief.

Endeley made a sniff that seemed to convey equally a disdain for the concept of time off and amusement that Chummy had felt it necessary to spell out what PTO stood for.

“So,” Chummy said, “Samson and DeeDee, neither of you two need to be checking in on me. Don’t you both have other things to be doing?”

“Nothing more important than this, boss,” Samson said. “I’m here at Kilimanjaro sitting next to our buddy, Jax.” Through the comm screen, Samson gave the Bakweri chief a grin and said to him, “Jax is Mr. Ethan Schmidt-Li’s right-hand man—”

“Assistant,” Jax said.

“—but we don’t hold that against him,” Samson continued smoothly. “He’s the one who found us the dive we’ve taken over as our local TCG watering hole.”

Jax leaned into the comm’s camera view and lifted a full mug of beer. “Hello, Mr. Chummy! We’ve all got glasses charged and ready to toast!”

“Don’t you dare steal a sip, Jax! We’re watching you,” voices yelled over the background bar chatter. “Nobody better jinx this by drinking early!”

“But, of course, Western scientists aren’t superstitious at all,” Chief Endeley murmured in Chummy’s ear and winked.

“Yup! Keeping toes and fingers crossed over here.” Samson’s grinning face returned. “We’re all waiting to find out if Sadou Corp is getting that early completion bonus or not. There might be some friendly betting going on.” He winked broadly. “I’m not digging for early intel or anything sneaky like that, of course not, boss.” A chorus of laughter from the crowd glimpsed behind Samson’s motor chair included calls for revoking Samson’s bets.

“I’m taking paid time off too,” DeeDee sent.

Chief Endeley bumped Chummy’s shoulder to turn his attention back to the mountainside. A multitude of camera views appeared on Chummy’s comm sent by both assistants.

Close-ups of the maglev track at various points appeared. On the thickly forested lower slopes a tube enclosed the track. In the middle stretch, the track rose on high struts over the rolls of the mountain terrain. Beyond the peak, the track continued for the sled alone to decelerate. It was as if an enormous pale serpent had stretched out to sun itself on the side of the mountain, and the very land had cleared a path for it to slide gently down the other side, if it proved that even ghost snakes weren’t meant to fly.

One of the cameras caught movement. In the slice of track cutting through the palm groves, a riot of natural brush had grown up. A blue lizard with a red head skittered up the concrete between the rail. Its tongue flicked out at the massive tube wall surrounding the track. Louder rustling in the brush announced other creatures reacting to the thrumming noise coming from the charged rail.

“Ha! The wildlife wants to see too!” Jax chortled over Samson’s shoulder. “Good thing they’ve got a barrier installed. That’d be a very flat lizard if it could reach the track.”

Chummy and Endeley both leaned closer and watched the thicket where the planted palms gave way to natural forest. A ninety-kilogram-plus red river hog pushed his warted nose against one of the launcher struts and gave a testing shove. The structure stood as unmoving as any jungle trunk supporting the top of a triple canopy.

“Ha!” DeeDee sent, “Nice try, piggy. They planned for that.”

“What’s an alignment error autocorrection?” someone called from Samson’s crowd.

“Actually we planned for volcanic microtremors,” Endeley said, and took a sip from a hip flask. “This is called getting lucky.”

He punched a call into his own comm. “Yeah, I saw it. What are we going to do if something bigger decides to head-butt a support while a vehicle-loaded sled is on the rail?”

“What could they possibly have out there bigger than that?” someone from Samson’s side called out. A flurry of suggestions followed. “Ocean sea monsters!” “Salt water hippos?” “Ooo, maybe they’ve got train-sized snakes; I saw a Congo documentary once where—” Samson gave an apologetic grin and muted the sound from his end.

“That was weird,” DeeDee sent. “Another of the struts jiggled a tiny bit all by itself, but it looks like… Huh. Well, it’s fine now.”

Chummy had visions of a derailed sled with vehicle attached spiraling off the middle slope track to crash into one of the meadows and maybe hit one of those wild hogs in return.

“Yes,” Endeley said into his comm, “Call every animal warden you can reach and make sure none of the elephant herd comes wandering over this way. No, I don’t care. Yes, I know they are wild. Make it happen. If you expect another centime of Bakweri funding for ecosystem restoration… Good. Good. Pascaline? Good. Do everything she said. You better make sure you do.” He ended his comm call.

“Huh,” DeeDee typed. “Look what my avatar found.” Batwing avatar DeeDee reappeared on Chummy’s screen. “A herd of around 150 African forest elephants live in the meadows and foothills around—”

“Not now, DeeDee,” Chummy said.

“Of course,” she said with a squeal of excitement, “here we go!” A tight close-up view showed the vehicle-loaded sled elevating a dozen-some millimeters above the charged maglev rail. “Whoa!”

Chummy tilted his head to the side and glanced at Endeley.

“She’s not seen a maglev before?” the chief asked.

Chummy’s mouth fell open when DeeDee sent another view. He’d only seen the vehicle and sled before in photographs and diagrams. The many-kilometer-long rail going up the side of the mountain was a narrow line shrunk by distance. The aerodynamic reusable vehicle stretched over ten meters wide from wingtip to wingtip and held a center core of payload filled with a half ton of tiny debris catchers.

DeeDee sent a graphic with the spots along the launch path where the vehicle would be scattering its payload in waves before dropping back down to Earth. In the image, the smaller devices would starburst out in dozens of new trajectories to impact with space debris in orbits fouling the tether’s eventual line.

“That’s a lot of orbits,” Chummy said.

“Yeah,” Endeley agreed. “Almost like some of the smartest people on the planet worked together to take out the unwanted shell of trash around our planet, created by a couple centuries of executives ignoring their smartest people.”

Chummy twitched at the implied insult to TCG and its predecessors. The wide tube around the lower rail frosted with dew as the dropping internal pressure lowered the temperature.

“They just sealed the tube and depressurized the whole thing to match the air pressure at the outlet altitude,” Endeley said, “You know my boy, Adamou? He said something complicated about reduced drag on the vehicle lowering the total power needs, but Fako gives us all the power we could want. Say, can I interest TCG in a tour of our geothermal plants, there are some new—”

“Excuse me,” Chummy said, and he leaned to the side to vomit.

“Maybe later,” Chief Endeley patted him on the back. “After the launch at least.” He took another sip from his flask.

Chummy’s comm kept working while he tried to get his stomach to stop heaving.

“Hey DeeDee,” Samson said, “are they calling it Dabare One or Black Mamba One? Who buys the first round is depending on this. What’s the final call?”

“Oh, that’s what they were saying! This one’s the ‘dabare mamba noir’ or the DMN. I thought they were pranking me,” DeeDee said. “It seems like they are working down the list of scary local wildlife starting with all the snakes and also tacking ‘dabare’ onto the beginning, which, I guess, means machine or something like that?”

“Um—” Chummy said.

“Something like that,” Chief Endeley agreed.

“It’s short for ‘machine that works really well, we hope,’” Samson said.

“So it’s a dabare snake launcher, then?” DeeDee said. She added in text, “We better make sure the press releases say ‘space launcher’ and probably skip the ‘I hope’ part of the definition when the European and North American press corps want to know what ‘dabare’ means, yeah?”

DeeDee sent camera views from inside the tunnel.

A ten-meter wingspan A-HRV clamped onto the launch sled lifted just over a dozen millimeters above the track by the force of the electrical current. The charged coils lining the full length of the ground path discharged one after another as the vehicle shot forward with increasing acceleration until a rumble emanated from the entire tube.

The brilliant streak exploded out of the very end of the tunnel and roared over the remaining stretch of open rail and into the sky.

“Yes! Yes! Yes!” DeeDee sent another camera view from a few moments earlier with a time counter at the bottom showing the slow-motion video. At liftoff, sled clamps released and pure kinetic motion hurled the already supersonic vehicle into the sky. The fuel injectors just below the knife-thin nose pumped hydrogen into the air compressed beneath the vehicle by the shape of its fuselage. The air-fuel mix ignited and, ducted through the engines on its belly, flames shot the vehicle upwards.

“Microquake compensators worked,” Chief Endeley said, and he leaned over to vomit blood next to Chummy. “Ulcers,” he said and grimaced.

They looked up at the sky, and Fako’s ever-present steam cloud allowed only a glimpse of red streaking upwards.

“Fako is getting to erupt all the way into orbit,” Chief Endeley said.

“Maybe we don’t mention that in the press releases either,” DeeDee texted. “But doesn’t that launch trail look a lot like shedding snake skin?”

Samson provided a wide-angle view taken from an aerial remote. The A-HRV, free of the sled assembly, and with the full geothermal power charge of the volcano’s warmed earth behind it, soared.

Between one blink and the next the crystalizing mists in the jet trail flared out into a cobra’s hood and then folded back into disturbed water vapor.

“Shit! Shit! Sh—” Chummy’s comm squealed with DeeDee’s high-pitched curses, and Chief Endeley tried to wrestle it out of his hands to silence it.

“No foul language on the mountain!” he said.

Chummy kept hold of the comm. Ignoring the returning buzz of the news drone, he asked urgently, “DeeDee! What happened! We didn’t see anything up here?”

Chummy could see nothing at all alarming. The rail line had emptied with the sled somewhere on the slowdown tracks. From the videos, the A-HRV seemed on course at the top of a red heaven-bound streak.

“All fine, boss,” Samson sent. He shared a new twinned video feed. LIVE blinked in a red banner beneath the left-side panel which showed the sky and a tiny upwards-streaking speck. The other video read “5 minutes time-delayed feed” and showed a digital remastered view of the underside of the vehicle. The combusting fuel in a wave of fire beneath the fuselage lifted the vehicle ever upwards.

“What’s failed?” Chummy asked.

Endeley glanced up at the drone and threw his arm over Chummy’s shoulder. He was short, a lot shorter, but the chief had the muscle to tilt Chummy’s head down.

“All the shows have lip-readers, dolt,” Endeley muttered in his ear. “Pretend you have a little sense. There’s no signs of any trouble. All my people are reporting a flawless launch so far. And it’ll be at least a good ten more hours before we will find out if the payload release works out right. Don’t be caught panicking on international news, man!”

Chummy closed his eyes.

“International?” Samson said.

DeeDee’s voice came back on. “Yeah, boss. You and the chief are on all the local coverage, and turns out this is today’s global interest news story. They’re all talking about you for the in-depth background.”

Fuck. It’s over. Chummy lifted up the comm and typed out a response choosing his words carefully: “Has there been an official acknowledgement from Kilimanjaro?”

“Begin the toast!” Jax’s voice roared. “Mr. Schmidt-Li confirms launch success!”

Chief Endeley threw back his head and cheered. No less than three news drones turned and hovered in a swarm, clearly angling to capture a close-up of the Bakweri chieftain’s face with the still rising streak of the launch beyond Fako’s peak.

“Cheer. Or at least smile,” Endeley said without moving his lips.

Chummy gave up. If Jeffy wasn’t watching this live, he would be told within a day or two anyway. Chummy gave a fist bump to the air in the direction of the mountain’s peak, another toward the sea and the launch hangar crew, and then wrapped Endeley in a bearhug lifting him off his feet.

Endeley grunted and patted him back with enough vigor that Chummy was laughing too by the time the hug was over. Laughing with pain, with exhaustion, and looking at what his people had built: with pride.


The drones did a few more circles and left to go capture the crowds converging on the launch hangar. The crews were pouring out of the building and Samson sent video clips of the streets in Buea, Limbe, Yaoundé and Douala. The president of Cameroon had a live press announcement with Sadou Moussa smiling at his side, and the newscasters covered congratulatory messages from Tanzanian and Kenyan politicians without even pausing to include a continental map to mark who was who for viewers from other continents. The elevator’s primary supply and debris clearance spaceport was ready for full operation. That was what mattered now.

He said into Endeley’s ear, “I need to get off this mountain to some place where I can do a lot of swearing without offending anybody who can call up lava on a whim, and go get thoroughly drunk.”

“What? It worked,” the Bakweri chief said. “So what if the reporters all know you have ulcers now. Everyone gets stress injuries at some point.”

Chummy searched the sky. The drones were all circling the hangar now. He couldn’t make out the tiny figures down there but a feed supplied by Samson showed Maurie giving a thank-you speech outside the hangar doors while all the cameras tried to catch a close-up of Pascaline and Adamou. Ah, they noticed the reporters and moved their celebratory embrace back out of sight of the cameras.

Endeley Bouba offered his friend the flask.

Chummy took a big gulp. Fire blended with a thick chalky aftertaste. He choked it down.

“Sugarcane rum mixed with prescription-strength ulcer meds. An acquired taste,” Endeley said. “Your Aunt Mami gave me a case of the stuff.”

“I just got fired,” Chummy said.


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