Back | Next
Contents

3.4
27 November

Business Center, Hotel Playa Blanca

Paramaribo, Suriname

Earth


“Another emergency?” Lawrence Killian said to Puya Hebbar.

The hotel’s business center had a gigantic video display on the back wall, currently showing her face so large Lawrence could count the pores. Lawrence was holding a sweaty hotel glass filled with ice water, and mopping his brow with a paper napkin. Gill Davis by his side, as nearly always.

“We have to get the hell out of Paramaribo,” Lawrence had said to him a few minutes ago. But a lot of things were moving quickly—flying bricks and grumbling workers, arrests and airlock blowouts. And a Lunar graben that the men at Malinkin Base seemed to feel was definitely suitable for a Marriott Hotel! Or, if Lawrence had his way, a jointly branded retirement community. There was all that, on top of the usual minutiae of any large multinational corporation, and it left him no time to escape.

He could, in theory, handle all of this work from anywhere, including his personal jet, but a solar coronal mass ejection—detected late and moving fast—was due to strike the Earth sometime today. The EOLS capsule, returning from Luna with the detective and his prisoner, had fortunately slipped ahead of the storm into the safe harbor of Earth’s magnetic field, so at least Lawrence did not have to worry about that. However, the ionosphere would be a mess for the next several days, endangering any signals passing from ground to orbit, or vice versa. With good equipment (and Lawrence of course had the best), this would merely limit bandwidth, but even that was intolerable. He dared not stray from the physical fiber optic lines linking device to device and continent to continent, and he dared not let too much distance fall between himself and the giant uplink antennae that could shout above the noise. He dared not leave Paramaribo, in other words, and so he flitted from site to site in this miserable city, attending to business in person where he could, and on video chat when he couldn’t. His cyborg heart ticking out an artificially steady rhythm, reminding him he was technically too frail for this kind of thing.

As if Gill would ever let him forget.

Puya shrugged enormously. “You said, find out what we could.”

“And?” Lawrence was already impatient with her—impatient with basically everything today. From the scene behind her he could see she was still on the Moon, having apparently declined to hop onboard that EOLS capsule, though it had had a seat reserved for her. But perhaps it was just as well. Perhaps she did not want to be in transit, onboard a spaceship with no privacy, while working on a problem they’d both agreed was urgent. But it annoyed him nonetheless, because Puya was easily distracted, and he wanted her back here on Earth, in her actual office, bombarded all day long by her actual duties.

“I’ve got good news, bad news, and strange news. And background information.”

“Let’s start with the background,” he said.

Gill pulled up a chair for him, silently urging him to sit. Which, after a moment of pointless resistance, Lawrence did.

On the screen, Puya said, “The object that struck us was a hydrogen-filled graphene aerogel.”

“I see.” He’d suspected something like this, because there really were very limited other things it could possibly be.

The video screen split in two, the left side holding Puya and the right side showing what appeared to be a browser page, for a company called SkyBric. It included, prominently, a photograph of a rectangular, brick-sized block of material, pressing upward against a human hand, with an out-of-focus chemistry lab in the background. The block was dark gray in color, and hazy-looking in a way Lawrence immediately associated with nanostructured materials. The hand that held it was Caucasian, probably male, and sharply in focus, so one could see that it was the brick itself, not the photograph, that was blurry. But the page was also full of dead links and unreachable images. And text, including (also prominently): CURRENTLY SEEKING INVESTORS.

“We pulled this off an archive site. The web page went up about two years ago, without fanfare, and was pulled down again within a couple of weeks.”

“So, they found their investor,” Lawrence said. Someone with deep pockets and a penchant for secrecy. “Do you know who?”

“Nobody we know,” Puya said. “It’s something called the Aphrodite Group, ostensibly operating out of the Cayman Islands, although we couldn’t find a physical address there, or anywhere else.”

“And what about the platform?” he asked.

“That’s the strange news,” she said. The video screen now divided into quarters, one of which was blank, and one of which showed an image of what Lawrence could only think of as a flying island. This time the resolution was good, and even included a short, three-frame video loop as the observation satellite overflew this object. It was roughly hexagonal in shape, and made up of smaller hexagons in a pattern that seemed incomplete, as though the island were still under construction. A sense of scale was provided by a helicopter parked near the center of the large hexagon, on what looked for all the world like a painted helipad, surrounded by gray buildings made, apparently, of the same stuff as the “ground.” There were people down there—three of them that Lawrence could make out—and near the uncompleted edge stood a sort of crane or robot arm, white and orange against the gray.

Puya circled her cursor around the robot arm and said, “From the coloration we believe this is a Printech architectural 3D printer, or made to look like one. If so, it’s heavily modified, as you can see from these tanks and hoses here, here, and here.”

“What’s it doing?” he asked. The answer had already popped into his head, or half an answer at any rate, but he wanted to hear her say it, with the full weight of the IT and R&D departments behind her.

“It appears to be additively manufacturing the base of the platform. In other words, printing out the aerogel directly, filling it with hydrogen, and extruding it onto the platform’s edge. It appears to be drawing the mass directly out of the atmosphere, through these intakes here and here, and powered by this quite ordinary-looking solar array over here. This . . . well, this is probably a gas compression and sorting assembly so they can separate out CO2 and water vapor, and then crack off just the carbon and hydrogen. The whole platform may be nothing but carbon and hydrogen, cleverly arranged.”

Lawrence grunted and paused a moment, thinking about that. Aerogels simply weren’t that easy to make, much less to join together like that, so the technology involved was impressive in its own right. There had to be twenty or thirty distinct chemical steps taking place inside that machinery, all in real time. It was all kinds of clever, and Lawrence admired it at once. But . . . why? What was the purpose of a flying island that could make itself larger, like a lily pad slowly growing on the surface of a pond? What end required such elaborate means?

“That’s, uh, remarkable,” he said, temporarily at a loss for words. Then: “What’s the bad news?”

Puya cleared her throat, looked uncomfortable, and said, “The Aphrodite Group purchased a black-box heavy-lift rocket launch, paying extra to provide only the dimensions and mass properties of their payload. Departed last week, while we were busy thinking about the mass driver and the monastery.”

A black-box launch, by itself, wasn’t particularly unusual. The government of Suriname didn’t give a hoot what people launched, as long as it was headed away from their country when it left the ground, and companies like HMI, RzVz, Orlov Petrochemical and even Enterprise City were happy to oblige if the money was good. Which it always was, when keeping secrets was important to someone.

“What’s bad about that?” Lawrence asked, suddenly not so sure he actually wanted to know.

“Well, sir, from those dimensions it’s clear the payload included an interplanetary booster stage, apparently manufactured by Good Luck Industries Shenzhen. That appears to be the only link between Aphrodite and the Chinese, but I thought I should mention it.”

“So it’s a probe, then?”

“Not exactly, sir.”

“My dear,” Lawrence said, as patiently as he could, “let’s not do this all day. Bad news. Out with it.”

“We went back through our radar logs, and found this:”

A fourth image appeared on the teleconference screen. An object. Not blurry or grainy this time, but a gray-white computer-animated blob, against a blue-gray arc representing the horizon of Earth, and a darker background representing the vacuum of outer space. Clearly, an AI’s attempt to reconstruct an object’s shape from radar echoes alone. The object, already in orbit, separated itself from the stout cylinder of its second-stage booster. For a moment, it looked like pretty much any interplanetary probe in launch configuration, until a measurement ruler appeared beside it, showing its overall length, including the third-stage interplanetary booster, at just over twenty meters. Quite large for a probe. Too large!

On the screen, the object began to unfold itself, which was not unusual for a satellite of any type. Gray blobs that looked like antennae and solar panels began to unfold, bringing the object to life. But then other shapes began to appear: a conical nose shield of some sort; a trio of inflatable bubbles around the object’s middle.

“What am I looking at?”

“I’ll jump the video ahead,” Puya said. The time codes at the bottom of the screen skipped ahead by eighty minutes. Presently, a little cartoon flame appeared at the tail end of the booster stage. The view pulled back, now showing the Earth as a full, shaded blue sphere, with stylized cartoon continents. A dotted line appeared, showing the object’s trajectory. “Here the object is headed out of cislunar space entirely. Toward Venus. In fact, as of today it may already be out of Earth’s gravitational sphere of influence and into interplanetary space.”

“And it isn’t a probe?” Lawrence asked, unsure why Puya was showing this to him.

“No, sir. It’s, we believe, a colony ship, carrying equipment like this.” She circled her cursor again around the hardware setup of the floating island. “Set to arrive in a hundred and twenty days.”

“To colonize Venus?” he said. “Impossible.”

Even the highest point on the surface of Venus—the top of Maxwell Montes—had an air pressure of forty-five atmospheres and a temperature of, what, four hundred centigrade? Hot enough to melt at least a dozen different metals. Fancy aerogels weren’t going to change any of that . . . 

He figured it out at the same time she said it:

“Not the surface, sir. The upper atmosphere, above the cloud tops. At fifty-five kilometers’ altitude, it’s quite Earthlike, except for the composition of the atmosphere. If you can keep yourself from falling, I mean.”

Lawrence could picture it: Earthlike temperature, Earthlike pressure, a sun hanging brightly in an azure-blue sky. The planet itself rotated on a scale of months rather than hours, but the trade winds zipped right along, circling the planet’s equator in just a few Earth days. So one could have a day-night cycle, too, sailing from the light side to the dark side and back again, as fast or as slowly as one preferred. And if one lived on a floating platform made from the atmosphere itself, why, there was no real limit to how much “ground” one could choose to occupy. For free, basically. They’d need to crack their hydrogen from H2SO4 rather than H2O, but that was quite a minor problem compared to all the others they’d already solved. Perhaps one could also fashion diamond scoops, and lower them to the ground, far below, to scrape up farmable dirt and refinable ore as the hills and valleys of Venus whizzed by. Also for free—easier than asteroid mining! He could imagine whole cities made of clear, hard diamond and dark, spongy graphene gel, inhabited by millions. Self-sustaining, dependent on no one.

“Oh,” he said quietly, suddenly glad he was sitting down.

This was serious.

Harvest Moon Industries already had quite enough competition from Danny Beseman, thank you very much. The lure of Mars—however distant, however unreachable—always somehow made the Moon seem shabby by comparison. Just a few days away from any beach or jungle or city one cared to visit, and yet shabby. Even Lawrence thought so! But how much more difficult would it be, to convince space-bound people to live like the monks of Saint Joe, if they could live under a blue sky instead? Walking outside with just an oxygen mask?

“I’m sorry, sir,” Puya said, with apparent sincerity. She’d apparently figured it all out, too, she and her team. “A fifth Horseman has entered the fray. On quite a tiny budget, I might add. We estimate the Aphrodite Group could settle a hundred people in the Venusian atmosphere for less than one percent of the cost of the Antilympus Project. And sooner.”

“I see.”

“The flight package wasn’t human-rated,” Puya said, “so presumably it’s just going to set up some sort of minimal habitat that the actual settlers can land on later. But that could happen before the end of next year.”

For a moment, Lawrence simply felt stupid. For another moment, he felt angry. Why this? Why now, at this moment, with his pacemaker scars still aching? All the resources at his disposal, all the geniuses in his employ—how had he been blindsided like this? He permitted his failing heart a moment of self-pity. Just a moment, and then his mind set to work.

So did Gill Davis’, for he said, “We have quite a head start on them, Sir Lawrence. And a number of other advantages, besides. A luxury dome just two days from Earth? If we move quickly, there’s no reason Aphrodite’s plans should have any impact on our own.”

“If we move quickly,” Lawrence agreed. To Gill he said, “Get Fernanda Harb on the phone, immediately. Tell her we break ground on a new project in thirty days, or she’s fired, and I do mean that.”

“Understood, sir.”

“I can get her for you,” Puya said. “She’s in her office right now; I can just walk over there.”

“Please do so,” Lawrence said.

“Is this about your hotel?”

“Not a hotel. A retirement community. But it’s about the survival of the company, Puya. Let’s focus on that, shall we?” Then: “You never told me the good news.”

“Oh,” Puya said. “Well, the Aphrodite Group seems to have bought most of their equipment, including the launch, from us. So we’ve made some pocket change, at any rate.”


Back | Next
Framed