Energized (21 page)

It felt great!

*   *   *

Thad went off to lend a hand to some Kendricks workers. Savannah settled down by one of the powersat's four primary computer complexes; its open access panel cast a faint shadow by earthlight. Olivia and Reuben meandered across the vast structure, taking measurements and capturing vids as they went.

Marcus waited to be called upon.

Every so often Reuben removed a solar panel and the transmitter panel beneath, sticking his head through the hole to study the powersat's other side. He and Olivia went on and off their own private channel, dictating their detailed findings, but once, while within an expanse of microwave antennas, with only his legs showing, Reuben forgot to switch channels. “Like God's own horn section,” he muttered.

For a while Marcus trailed after the pair. But that was silly; he could not lose them. Counterpressure suits used the same color-coding as flight suits. The green-suited figures together were Reuben and Olivia. The green suit by itself, other than Marcus's own, was Savvy. (Thad, in blue, having joined a crowd of Kendricks workers, could have been anyone.) If Marcus did manage to lose track of a colleague, the helmet-cam views relayed to his HUD still showed everything he could need to see. If he wanted to look from other angles, he had plenty of experience remotely accessing PS-1's onboard cameras.

He stopped following them.

To Savvy's tuneless humming he watched bots transfer concrete structural elements from a recently arrived pallet to a parts depot. Amazing stuff, that concrete: a blend of dust, carbon nanotubes, and glue, every ingredient mined and manufactured on Phoebe.

All around him bots scuttled about clutching instruments, tiny tools, and spare parts: measuring, adjusting, replacing. Many bots moved alone; others worked in teams to manipulate objects much larger than themselves. He played a game with himself, trying to guess which bots were guided by onboard programs and which obeyed the dictates of human operators. Logic said most bots had to be autonomous: one unit per ten thousand square feet did not seem like much, but across the vastness of PS-1, that came to more than ten thousand bots.

It was enough tiny pliers, screwdrivers, and whatnot for ten Santa's workshops. He tried to imagine little elfin hats and tiny, upturned slippers on all those bots.

He monitored the remote readouts of the inspection team's oh-two. He unplugged and removed a random solar panel (freakishly thin!) and the microwave-transmitter panel beneath, peeking through in an impromptu inspection of his own. Unlike the solar-cell side on which, for their own safety, everyone worked, the transmitter side was uncluttered: no shelters or depots or guide wires or
anything
that might scatter microwaves. He put the panels back in place, careful not to chip the strong-but-brittle Phoebecrete struts.

He glided hand over hand along one of the guide cables, just for the practice, to a catwalk far across PS-1. The powersat was too vast and thin to be mechanically rigid, and as Marcus flew along he sensed the immense structure bending and flexing. But that was impossible; the perception was—had to be—in his mind.

To form and focus power beams required knowing
exactly
the relative positions of all the many thousand microwave transmitters. Sensor arrays detected PS-1's every flexure and tremor. Electro-elastic fibers constantly tensed and relaxed under real-time software control, synchronized by any of PS-1's four atomic clocks, to maintain precise alignment by damping out any vibration. And just in case the anti-trembling system failed, transmitters turned themselves off—not that PS-1
was
transmitting—if independent accelerometers ever indicated that flexing had gone out of tight tolerance. It was another complex set of functions that Savvy would be testing another day.

Another day in which he would be on call, floating around and watching. He wondered if the workers might let him help … with
something
.

A robot labeled 3056 waited nearby, inert. Marcus tapped command codes into the wireless keypad strapped to his left forearm, but 3056 did not stir.

“Thad,” he radioed. “Why can't I get a construction bot to move? We're all supposed to have sysadmin privileges for our inspection. That authorization should be more than adequate.” Because there
isn't
any more privileged level.

“You'd think.” Thad sighed. “I created new accounts for your buddies, but you already had an account up here. I never got around to upgrading your authorization. Sorry. Give me two minutes. Once that's done, you'll need to jack into a local comm node.”

“Okay, thanks. And I should have remembered about using the local terminal.” Because these are serious bots, doing serious work, not toys like Val and I use to stroll about Phoebe. The wireless links to
these
bots were heavily encrypted.

Marcus linked his forearm keypad to a nearby comm node with a fiber-optic cable from his tool kit. This time when he gave an order, 3056 scuttled away from him. He lined up four idle bots and sent them off onto a hundred-yard dash. Controlling them with codes was less natural than with the game-controller interface he and Val used with the Phoebe bots, but still easy enough. With his helmet camera he shot a vid of them scrambling, and mailed it to her.
Thinking of you,
the accompanying note read.

On his return trip across the powersat Marcus peeked into supply depots and counted oxygen tanks, water bottles, and charged batteries. He sampled the pap—both varieties were foul—from his helmet dispensers. He tried and failed to perceive the functioning of the attitude system, thrusters cooperating to keep PS-1's solar cells facing toward the sun. With a grin every time he looked overhead, he savored the ever-changing panorama that was Earth.

After a couple of hours, he was bored.

“Savvy,” he radioed. “Private channel three.” For no special reason, he waved at her. She waved back. “How's it going?”

“I'm still poking around, but so far, no surprises. As advertised, several critical functions for aiming the beam are hardware controlled. Beaming only works if the designated collection point radioed to PS-1 matches—in hardware—lat/long values preconfigured in a control-module port. And the powersat's failsafe handshake with an aiming beacon at the authorized downlink point is all done in hardware, too.”

“That's all good, isn't it?”

“Outstanding, if it holds up. I haven't yet emptied my bag of dirty tricks. Even though I've confirmed aiming is hardware controlled, there's still
some
access from the ground. There has to be. To choose from among the authorized downlink sites. To start and stop transmissions. To initiate and read out onboard diagnostics. To control thrusters for orbital station-keeping and the eventual boost to GEO. I need to make sure that when using—or misusing—those few ground-accessible functions, I can't get into anything else.”

“To do what?” he asked.

“Just let me do my job, okay?”

A priority alert started blinking on his HUD, but he figured he could finish the discussion. A comm emergency override took that decision from him.

*   *   *

Dillon's stomach gurgled and he thought maybe he would head to the gravity ring soon. Some guests spent their whole stay in freefall, but Dillon did not see the point in eating from a squeeze tube when minutes away there was a four-star restaurant at one-third gee.

Soon, but not yet. Except for Maria Portillo, one of the women who had been on his shuttle, he had the northern hemisphere to himself and that hardly ever happened. Arms and legs fluttering, expending more energy than he cared to, she did slow laps through the air. With flippers on her feet, her long black hair loose and flowing, she brought to mind a mermaid.

The only distractions were distant oofs and grunts. While the northern hemisphere was one wide-open expanse, nets and taut ropes ran every which way through the southern. Once you acclimated to zero gee, you could get a hell of a good gymnastic workout there; until then you could make your way through as though on monkey bars. Not coincidentally, arriving passengers disembarked their shuttles through the air lock at the hotel's south pole.

Earth shone through the wall. Dillon found it inexpressibly calming. If only everyone could experience Mother Earth this way, surely many more would fight the good fight to protect her.

Whenever air currents nudged him to face south, the polo game came into view beyond the clear, curved wall. Hoppers darting. Tethered onlookers maneuvering with gas pistols to keep out of the players' way. The strobing red balloon “ball” sailing hither and yon, now and again scoring through the illuminated goal loops sited at three points of the game triangle. Had another few people chosen to play, there would have been a fourth goal, defining a tetrahedron.

The stupid polo game would not last forever. With a sigh, Dillon reached for the small gas pistol clipped to his belt—and his hand bumped someone. Twisting around to see whom sent them drifting apart. “Sorry, Maria.”

“My fault.” Her English had a charming Latin accent. “I should watch where I am wafting.”

“Where's Adriana today? Outside?”

“What happens in The Space Place stays in The Space Place.” Maria gestured at the nearest private bubbles, some of them set opaque. “Your colleagues, too?”

“Maybe.” He changed the subject. Maria and Adriana had turned out to be high-ranking marketing execs at Bolivian National Lithium Company. He could handle getting some cartel money invested into Russo Venture Capital Partners. “I was about to head out for lunch on the ring. Care to join me?”

“That would be very nice.”

He offered a hand. With gentle puffs of his gas pistol he delivered them to the equator, to the webbing beside a door. She stowed her flippers in a mesh pouch. The inner ring was despun and they went, feet first, through the connecting tube onto an elevator car. They slipped their feet through loops on the car's back wall. He pressed the panel marked
OUTER RING
.

The inner door closed. Unseen circuits activated. Electromagnets in the elevator cars pressed against Earth's much larger magnetic field, and the inner ring began to spin. The wall to which they had attached themselves became the floor. A progress bar on a wall display tracked their gradual spin-up.

“After hours adrift, gravity feels odd,” she said.

And it was not even
much
gravity. At max, on the outer ring, the spin simulated one-third Earth's gravity. Spinning any faster, the Coriolis effect would have made many people ill.

“Ding,” he announced, in unison with the elevator, evoking a smile. A floor panel slid open, and they stepped down the ladder in the connecting tunnel to the outer ring. What had become a ceiling panel slid shut, and a door opened in their tunnel. They walked out onto the central aisle of the outer ring.

“Coming through,” a woman's voice called.

“Good day, Captain Aganga,” Dillon said, no matter that
captain
was a pretentious title for a hotelier. The long-term staff lived and, when they could, worked on the outer ring, where gravity helped maintain their bone mass. They still had to exercise, though.

Their hostess was jogging toward them, in an odd gliding pace adapted to the low gravity. She was very tall and very dark. Sweat soaked her hair band, ran down her neck and face, and glued her T-shirt to an admirable physique. She blotted her face with a towel as she went past. “Mr. Russo. Dr. Portillo.” And then she was past them.

“On to lunch,” Dillon said. He and Maria walked in the opposite direction to the captain, past machine shops, supply rooms, and engineering sections, toward the dining room. They encountered Jonas, wearing a sweatsuit, a towel draped over one shoulder, leaning against a doorjamb, phone in hand. Catching his breath, Dillon supposed.

“Hello, boss.” Jonas saluted. Mockingly? “Maria.”

“Hello,” they said.

Maria followed Dillon's lead and kept walking.

Farther down the hall, they found Felipe also standing, also dressed to jog and holding a phone. “That's two of you. Where's Lincoln?” Dillon asked.

Felipe made a crude gesture. “Occupied.”

“Show some manners,” Dillon snapped, appalled.

He and Maria came to the dining room. Chamber music played softly. Mozart, he thought. Something smelled wonderful. The maître d' came scuttling up—

And sirens began to wail.

*   *   *

In the tunnels of Phoebe and in the chambers, large and small, of The Space Place, loudspeakers came to life. Aboard every ship and within every spacesuit—around PS-1, too—every radio receiver flipped to its emergency channel. Everywhere, sirens wailed.

Then the recording began, identical in every location.

“Alert. Alert. This is not a drill. The Space Weather Prediction Center predicts a major solar event. Report at once to the nearest radiation shelter. Alert. Alert…”

 

Wednesday afternoon, September 27

Dillon and Maria swam from the elevator into the Grand Atrium—and chaos.

“First things first,” he told her. “Spacesuits.”

“Right.”

They pulled themselves along ropes to the southern row of rooms. In the bubble next to him, the wall rippled and vibrated, frantic rather than erotic. Dillon said, “The fastest way to change is with a partner.” He followed her to her room and helped her into her counterpressure suit. In his room, she returned the favor. Each stripped naked in the process, and there was nothing erotic about that, either.

The loudspeakers blared, and he recognized Captain Aganga's resonant voice. “All guests are to put on vacuum gear and proceed to the southern air lock. This is not a drill. The elevators will cease operation shortly, once supervisors confirm evacuation of the outer ring. Proceed as quickly as you safely can to the south-polar air lock. Staff there will check your suits. Once outside, other staff will guide you…”