Erebus (7 page)

We passed through the gate and stepped onto the tram that would take us to the center of the anchorage island. As the tram swept soundlessly into the sea air, I could see the elevator cables through the clear roof canopy, stretching upward to infinity in the sky above us.

The space elevators were considered the new wonders of the world. They ferried people and cargo far into orbit, opening up space travel for everyone who wanted it. It was actually cheaper to get into space than it was to hop on a flight to America these days.

It would be the second time I’d gone up in one. Me and an ex had gone on a holiday to Haven, the counterweight station for the Mediterranean elevator, a few years back. It didn’t end up being quite as romantic as we’d hoped. Three days stuck in an elevator car going up, five days on Haven, and three days back down again was enough to test any relationship to the breaking point. And break it did. This time, however, we wouldn’t be taking three days to get up into space. I’d already been forewarned about that.

As I looked at the elevator cables getting closer, that long-ago breakup receded from my mind. It looked amazing: the black cables stretching into the blue sky out of view, clean white capsules darting up and down them, shipping vast amounts of people into orbit. Around the towering structure, sea gulls squawked and circled. It was a far more civilized way to get into space than the big, loud rockets that used to do all the heavy lifting.

The tram finally slid to a halt inside the entry gate, and again we presented our arm implants, now uploaded with our boarding cards. We had to go through another security checkpoint. One of the guards gestured over to us, and we went into a side room where we filled out some paperwork. I had a lockbox in my luggage, which I’d checked on arrival, containing a sidearm and some ammunition, as did Cheng. I sorely doubted I would be using my weapon, but better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. Once we’d got past that bureaucracy, we walked through the entry corridor and into the elevator car proper.

To call it an elevator car was misleading; it had more the feel of an ocean liner but built vertically.

An avatar appeared in the form of a black-and-white-suited butler who even sported a waxed moustache.

“Welcome to the Mediterranean Space Elevator. We have received special dispensation for a high-speed ascent to Haven for which you are required to be seated at certain times. If you would kindly follow me.”

Cheng and I looked at each other before following the hologram of the host down the spiral staircase to a lower lounge.

The room was shaped like a doughnut, as all five decks were, with the elevator cable running through the center of the whole capsule. On this floor, all the windows were slanted downward. It was filled with people sitting in chairs, all strapped in. I was beginning to have the feeling this was going to be quite a ride.

I seated myself in the chair, and a harness wormed its way disconcertingly around me, pulling me back into the seat.

Over the next few minutes, the final stragglers took their seats and settled in. I idly flicked through the safety briefing and videos on my HUD display. I could feel that same feeling of anticipation as when I was waiting for a passenger aircraft to begin accelerating to take off.

“Please stand by for high-speed ascent. Five, four, three, two…” a voice rang out over the PA system, “…one.”

I was thrust down into my seat as the elevator car surged upward. It slid out of the anchorage, and sunlight washed through the windows. This was nothing like the sedate journey of my first trip on the elevators. They wanted to get us up into space quickly. I felt like I was on an amusement park drop tower in reverse.

As we accelerated, the anchorage’s true shape took form below us. An artificial island shaped like a starfish was lined with runways on its arms, loading decks for cargo ships lying between them. As I watched, it struck me as strangely sedate, yet bustling—contradictory, I know.

We climbed higher and higher, the anchorage shrinking below us into the clear blue Mediterranean Sea. Distant land masses came into view, all looking pure and clean, far removed from some of the places I’d ended up in. All in all, I could have picked a hell of a lot of a worse way to travel.

The elevator cable was thirty-six thousand kilometers long. Cars normally climbed it at an average of five hundred kilometers per hour into geostationary orbit, meaning it took around three days to get up to Haven. The cars going up and coming down would speed up and slow down, which helped control the oscillation of the cable, basically letting it swing back and forth to avoid hitting all the stuff that was flying around in orbit.

One little mistake in the AI controlling the swinging of the elevator cable and it would smash into one of the big space cities that orbited near it. It was a scary thought for a police officer who had cut his teeth on the Bohemian streets of London, Islington. It had never happened in the fifteen years the elevator had been running, but still, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near the equator if the cable was cut—or, for that matter, in a car ascending or coming down.

I was no rocket scientist, but even I knew that the elevator hadn’t yet made it out far enough from Earth to reach what was effectively zero gravity. There was a hell of a difference between zero-g and being in free fall. The stuff maintaining orbit below us was subject to free fall because of Earth’s gravity but maintained enough velocity to not crash into it. Basically, anything in orbit was falling around the curve of the Earth. If we were to somehow fall out of the car, we wouldn’t have any horizontal velocity and gravity would carry us straight down—a long drop to a very messy end. The only consolation was that the vacuum outside would kill us in seconds. All in all, a pretty morbid thought.

That normally sedate experience of ascending the cable had been completely thrown out of the airlock this time. The elevator car had special exemption to get us up to Haven fast. That meant it was subject to a series of surges of acceleration and deceleration far in excess of those it normally performed. It felt as if we were on a high speed lift, constantly speeding up and slowing down. It wasn’t too harsh, just unsettling. The result was that the three days it normally took to ascend was reduced to less than a day, making it by far the quickest way to get into geostationary orbit, quicker even than going on one of the few space planes that still launched from the surface.

Once the first, vicious acceleration had subsided into a cruising velocity, more or less, Cheng and I went our separate ways. The avatar guided me to a cabin, a compact affair with a single bed and en suite facilities. It would ordinarily provide sleeping accommodations for the duration of the three-day trip up to Haven. With the rapid ascent reducing that to a day, I doubted I would get the chance to use it for sleeping, but I felt the overwhelming need to shower the travel weariness off. I checked the timer to see how long I would have before the next speed change and grabbed a quick shower before my rumbling stomach reminded me that my lunch had been interrupted.

Leaving my cabin, I headed down the spiral staircase to the lower lounge where I saw Cheng and a few others seated around a table. They had definitely picked the best one, right by a downward-slanting picture window. Night had fallen over the Mediterranean, and far below, the twinkling spiderweb lights of cities were the only things visible on the distant surface. It was odd to think we had already climbed far beyond the low-Earth-orbit satellites and space cities. Some of the bigger ones could even be seen as bright lights, creeping along in their orbits far below us.

Cheng smiled and waved me over. I grabbed a coffee from the bar and headed across to them. As I got closer I could hear that their speech was subtly distorted. He must have put up another privacy field. As soon as I was within a few feet, their voices cleared up.

“Layton, take a load off.” Cheng smiled, gesturing at me to take an empty seat.

“Thanks,” I replied, sitting down.

“Let me make some introductions. Folks, this is Layton Trent from The Hague.” Cheng said, before gesturing to each of the four men and two women in turn. “Joan Vance, Combined Intelligence Service, and Doctor Dexter Frampton, her technical guy.” I shook hands with the intense-looking, fortyish redhead and the young, earnest-looking Frampton. Both of them were Americans, obviously. “Group Captain Chemmel Sihota, Indian Air-Space Force, and this is Pavel Agapov, Federation Intelligence.” Sihota looked far too young to be a group captain, either a sign of extreme competence, lots of connections, or maybe just a vanity streak and lots of cosmetic work. “And last, but not least, Sonia Drayton from Red Star.” That didn’t surprise me; the corporations were more powerful than most nations these days. They had as much right as anyone to be in on the gig. “There’re a few other folks wandering around, but they’re too uptight to sit down and have a drink with the competition.”

“We’re competing now, are we?” I asked with a smile.

“Poor choice of words, Zao,” Vance grinned, smoothly cutting in. “We’re all heading up into the big black to figure out what the hell’s going on together.”

Cheng winked. “My apologies. Old habits and all that.”

“I take it you’ve all been attached to this task force?” I asked before taking a sip of my coffee.

“We have,” Sihota said in a deep voice. “Apparently our respective commands don’t have a clue what’s been happening and believe that we can all create a greater whole than the sum of our parts.”

“Fair enough. I’m guessing everyone onboard now has been dispatched by one of the powers that be, hence the override of the elevator’s usual climb rate,” I said with a grimace. “I must admit it’s a little different than the last time I was on one of these things. It felt like we were barely moving then.”

“Yeah. And to add to our woes, the rest going up with us are mostly media,” Sihota said. We all gave looks of distaste at that.

We spent a while getting to know each other. To say the situation was bizarre was an understatement. The major powers hadn’t had a hot war between them since that particularly nasty proxy conflict in Siberia, which had finally ended a decade ago. That didn’t mean that they got on well with each other, though. The nations and corporations pumped a hell of a lot of time, effort, and money trying to get one over on each other. These guys were all professionals, though. It wasn’t anything personal between them. They were all quite happy to have a companionable drink with one another. Undoubtedly, they were hoping to pick up some snippet of useful information, but at the moment, they were content to just get a feel for each other. After all, we were all here for the same purpose.

Cheng, Vance, Sihota, Agapov, and Drayton were all clearly alpha types, something that I imagined would get pretty tiresome. Metaphors about too many chefs and not enough cooks sprang to mind. I quickly got the impression they were all go-getters. Definitely no connections had got them here. These folks had all earned their rank, despite Sihota’s apparent youth. I sent Giselle a request for information by HUDmail as we were chatting. It would be nice to know a little more about them.

Frampton was different from the others. I found him the most fascinating to talk to, and I was relieved when the others, one at a time, excused themselves for one reason or another and left us to chat over my second attempt at lunch.

He was, in his own way, as chest-beatingly patriotic as his boss Vance, but it occurred to me that out of us all, he was the only one who had some serious idea of the sheer destructive energy that
Magellan
would have unleashed when it struck Io.

“Basically,” Frampton said as we were eating burgers in our seats by the picture window, stars twinkling by the millions outside, “it’s relatively simple math that describes what actually occurred. A mass damn near two hundred thousand tons struck the moon at half the speed of light. The side with all the damage of the moon is essentially the exit wound.
Magellan
created a relatively small hole where it entered on the other side. The ship drove through the core of Io, and the sheer bow shock of its passage blasted a massive chunk of the opposite surface of Io away.”

“I get that. It’s not dissimilar to a regular, conventional bullet hitting a body. The entry wound is normally tiny. All the damage is on the other side.” I nodded.

“Yeah.” Frampton spoke around his mouthful of burger. “Although the majority of the moon is actually intact, internally it’s all churned up. Again, to take our bullet and body example, it’s the same as the hydrostatic shockwave that does the majority of the damage in the body.”

I remembered this from my firearms courses. Shooting a person normally killed someone in one or a combination of four ways: hitting something vital, which actually rarely happens; infection from the gunshot wound; blood loss from the injury; or, finally, hydrostatic shock. The bullet’s passage would create a shockwave that propagated throughout the body, pummeling the major organs. If I got what Frampton was telling me, it was the two last ways that had caused all the damage to the moon. Except instead of blood leaking out, it was the mantle material of Io, and instead of hydrostatic shock, it was moonquakes ripping through it.

“Anyway, it’ll be pretty interesting to see what the end result is. As Io continues in its orbit, it’s going to be pumping out all of its insides, its core of iron, the mantle of iron sulfide, everything. Eventually it may completely disintegrate. Jupiter’s got a small ring at the moment, but a body the size of Io tuning into debris? I think it’s going to make a ring more impressive than Saturn’s.”

“Yeah, very interesting,” I murmured. Clearly his idea of an intriguing curiosity was different from mine, which was that Io’s demise was a pretty major disaster. “The million-dollar question is why would someone do it?”

He leaned back as he chewed, pondering. I looked out of the window, letting him have a think. We were so far above Earth that I had to lean forward to see what was now a sphere with the moon rising above the curve of the Earth.