Mother of Storms (54 page)
Authors: John Barnes
Thus on the morning of July 21, Jesse and Mary Ann are hardly surprised at all to find that they are part of the convoy. They’ve both been declared fit for walking—the great convoys will transport the old, sick, and young in buses, others in trucks based on a daily lottery, and most on bicycle, foot, or the occasional burro. There are to be twenty such convoys, each with some thousands of people, from all over the Pacific shore of Chiapas.
The first day is to be deliberately slow of pace; this allows time for motorcycle couriers to scoot back to Tapachula as people suddenly remember things, and it helps everyone get used to the idea. The heat is pretty appalling, but there’s very little dust and the government water trucks seem to be on the job, and with the frequent rests Jesse finds he’s no more than uncomfortable. And the evening camp is fun, in its way, especially since after the announcements around the fire and a great deal of visiting among neighbors, he and Mary Ann have a tent that is small but all theirs—the advantage of adequate cash for
mordida.
It’s occurring to Jesse that with the tastes he’s developing, if this thing with Mary Ann ends he’s going to have a lot of incentive to get back on the fast track in realization engineering. Once you understand what money can do it gets harder to live without it.
mordida.
It’s occurring to Jesse that with the tastes he’s developing, if this thing with Mary Ann ends he’s going to have a lot of incentive to get back on the fast track in realization engineering. Once you understand what money can do it gets harder to live without it.
The second day of the trip, on a Saturday, they get a warm morning rainstorm, which makes the road slick and doesn’t seem to cool it off at all. The government people are pushing them a little harder, and the hills are beginning to roll and rise. Jesse’s a little sore in the thighs and calves that night, and Mary Ann has to spread a couple more small bribes around to get pads from the traveling hospital for her blistered feet.
The last few miles were extremely hilly, hot, and humid, and they aren’t exactly looking forward to the next day. It’s too hot and sticky to make love, or even to hold each other, so they fall asleep holding hands across the tent. Dawn comes entirely too early, and the morning thunderstorm holds off just long enough so that everyone is on the road before it drenches them.
The ion rockets that move the
Constitution
out of low Earth orbit are not the conventional electric thrusters they used for the Mars mission; instead, the power from the moon is used to convert “straight” matter into antimatter, and the antimatter is then reacted with helium-3-II—helium-3 cooled to the point where it becomes superconducting—to create a near-lightspeed exhaust of He-3 nuclei. The tiny pulse of antimatter through the center of
a Ping-Pong-ball-sized blob of helium-3-II creates a highly charged plasma and a very brief burst of radio energy; the superconducting coil surrounding the blob acts as an antenna to capture the radio burst and uses the current to induce a magnetic field to compress and accelerate the plasma so much that thermonuclear fusion is still happening thirty meters beyond the nozzle.
Constitution
out of low Earth orbit are not the conventional electric thrusters they used for the Mars mission; instead, the power from the moon is used to convert “straight” matter into antimatter, and the antimatter is then reacted with helium-3-II—helium-3 cooled to the point where it becomes superconducting—to create a near-lightspeed exhaust of He-3 nuclei. The tiny pulse of antimatter through the center of
a Ping-Pong-ball-sized blob of helium-3-II creates a highly charged plasma and a very brief burst of radio energy; the superconducting coil surrounding the blob acts as an antenna to capture the radio burst and uses the current to induce a magnetic field to compress and accelerate the plasma so much that thermonuclear fusion is still happening thirty meters beyond the nozzle.
From the ground, if there were enough clear sky, they could see that the white, glowing jet out the back of the platform to which
Constitution
is tied is about two hundred kilometers long; it’s also thinner than the aurora borealis.
Constitution
is tied is about two hundred kilometers long; it’s also thinner than the aurora borealis.
It’s not fuel-efficient-but the temperature of the exhaust is half a billion degrees Fahrenheit, and high exhaust temperature means the ship will be
fast
.
fast
.
But though it’s the best engine ever devised, and many gigawatts from the power stations on the moon drive it, it will not be enough. On those engines alone, the journey out to 2026RU would take four and a half years. And besides, after about five AU, power transmission from the moon will get problematic. The real travel time, if he used only the engines, would be six or seven years. Rivera, Hardshaw, and their staff don’t think Earth has those years; with thousands of times their processing ability, neither does Louie Tynan.
Really, it was all a question of getting the materials to do what needs doing. To effectively block sunlight from space, the shield that casts the shadow must be
low
. To use materials at all effectively the shield should be wide and thin. To get the maximum effect, the shield should move slowly enough to cast its shadow on the strategic area of the Pacific for the maximum time.
low
. To use materials at all effectively the shield should be wide and thin. To get the maximum effect, the shield should move slowly enough to cast its shadow on the strategic area of the Pacific for the maximum time.
This in turn dictates that it’s no good just putting a big mirror up in geosynchronous orbit; the shield would have to hold together and stay in place, and no known material is strong enough to permit a shield that big, subject to such tidal stresses as the moon and sun will provide, to hold together. So the shield needs to be at lower altitude … but then it will move too fast, if it orbits, to accomplish anything. Besides, it won’t stay in any orbit at all. The tenuous outer wisps of the Earth’s atmosphere plus the solar wind will be more than enough to bring the shields down in short order.
Thus both Klieg’s balloons, and the scheme Louie is carrying out, depend on using not a single orbited satellite, but many thousands of projectiles. They are planning to take Klieg’s deal—and promise him whatever he insists upon—because there’s at least a decent chance of damping out some of the hurricanes, and because they know that he won’t hold the whip hand forever. Louie will have all the advantages—he doesn’t have to
lift anything off the Earth, only to bring it in. And once he has the right materials on hand, that should be easy.
lift anything off the Earth, only to bring it in. And once he has the right materials on hand, that should be easy.
Which brings up the reason for using 2026RU. It is coming in rapidly, by cometary standards, and might have been one of the more spectacular comets of the twenty-first century, in 2047, if it were not needed sooner. It already has a substantial velocity toward the inner solar system, and electromagnetic catapults upon its yet-unmelted surface will have the benefit of the added velocity in sending their packages of ice down to the Earth-moon system. Each package, roughly two million tons of ice in the shape of a Frisbee a mile across and a yard thick, its ice woven in an elaborate internal braid for strength, covered with a millimeter-thick sprayed-on mirroring to keep it from melting, will carry a propulsion and guidance system, and as each approaches Earth, Louie—returned home by then—will take over the guidance system and direct it into a “grazing” approach over the Pacific, so that it will come in almost parallel to the Earth’s surface, descending to a height of less than twenty miles before the braking shockwave trapped in the hollow underside blows the melting ice apart and the fragments boil off.
Each Frisbee will be more than a mile across, and will cast a corresponding shadow, but it won’t be those shadows that defeat Clem, all by themselves. As the giant ice disks whirl down into the stratosphere and evaporate explosively, the water released, in the cold thin air, will be instantly frozen into clouds of ice crystals like the familiar cirrus (or mare’s tail) clouds that often appear on the forward edge of a storm. But these will be two to three times as high up, and there will be many more of them; the layer of ice crystals will be enough to make it dark at the surface, so that over a quite short time, the surface waters of the Pacific will cool enough to stop supporting Clem and Clem’s spawn.
There are of course many sources of ice nearer than the comet—but none that are already moving at such a high velocity in nearly the exact right direction. Moreover, of the other possible sources, Charon and Pluto will be on the wrong side of the sun, from the viewpoint of the Earth, for half of every year, forcing a longer and less efficient orbit, and all the others are deep in the gravity wells of the giant gas planets. Though energy itself is not a problem-the self-replicating industrial plants Louie is building insure that there will be plenty—acceleration is; to escape from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune’s gravitational grip as quickly as necessary would require accelerations at which the ice Frisbees would flow like water, distort, and become unsuited for their entry to Earth’s atmosphere.
But to get to 2026RU will take a long time no matter what, and since exactly what will turn up there and exactly what will need to be done are
not at all clear at the incoming comet’s current distance (something over 56 AU), Louie will have to go there himself and improvise. It took Louie some time to invent a scheme that would permit doing it in any reasonable amount of time; even at the best pace he can come up with, he will still not be back until June of 2029, and god only knows what shape the Earth will be in by then.
not at all clear at the incoming comet’s current distance (something over 56 AU), Louie will have to go there himself and improvise. It took Louie some time to invent a scheme that would permit doing it in any reasonable amount of time; even at the best pace he can come up with, he will still not be back until June of 2029, and god only knows what shape the Earth will be in by then.
For once Berlina Jameson is feeling well rested, and given the size of the story she’s putting out, this isn’t much short of a miracle. When Harris Diem and Diogenes Callare offered her their help—even though the first part of the process was bound to trigger some uproar about the U.S. government and Colonel Tynan’s extremely cavalier use of foreign property—she had just figured them for nice, dedicated public servants.
Maybe that
was
their whole motivation. They might only have known that Klieg
was
acquiring undue influence both in the UN General Assembly and in the executive offices in Washington. Maybe Rivera and Hardshaw just wanted him ambushed and taken down a few notches.
was
their whole motivation. They might only have known that Klieg
was
acquiring undue influence both in the UN General Assembly and in the executive offices in Washington. Maybe Rivera and Hardshaw just wanted him ambushed and taken down a few notches.
But with what she’s found since, she doubts they could have been completely unaware of what she was going to find. It took her many hours and not much sleep just to look at all the relevant videotape, listen to all the relevant voice, and search through the relevant records. By the time she had the picture assembled, she at least had the sense to realize that she was too exhausted and would look like hell if she presented it right away, so she took a day off to edit, put fine touches on things, eat, sleep, and indulge herself.
Now, her hair newly done, feeling fresh and scrubbed, she stands in front of the white wall in a hotel room in Richmond (having bribed hell out of everyone to make sure no one comes thumping along the corridor in the next few minutes) and narrates her wrap:
“And so that’s it for this edition of
Sniffings
. The pattern of power that spreads out from John Klieg and GateTech like the tentacles of an octopus is laid bare for your examination. Influence that penetrates the highest levels of both national and international bodies; ambassadors to the UN who take their orders from Klieg and their salaries from their home countries; Klieg’s deliberate scheme for a monopoly on global launch, and his maneuvering, at a time when the world desperately needs launch facilities, to secure not just his own rightful rewards for providing one, but a complete monopoly by preventing anyone else from doing so.
Sniffings
. The pattern of power that spreads out from John Klieg and GateTech like the tentacles of an octopus is laid bare for your examination. Influence that penetrates the highest levels of both national and international bodies; ambassadors to the UN who take their orders from Klieg and their salaries from their home countries; Klieg’s deliberate scheme for a monopoly on global launch, and his maneuvering, at a time when the world desperately needs launch facilities, to secure not just his own rightful rewards for providing one, but a complete monopoly by preventing anyone else from doing so.
“And yet this is just the tip of the iceberg. What, we might reasonably ask, is the connection between Klieg and the Siberian government? Just how many connections are there between Klieg’s operation, the notorious Hassan drug-and-mercenary cartel, and elements of the Siberian armed forces
that remain close to outlawed and arrested dictator Omar Abdulkashim? Is it not clear that while Klieg milks the UN with one hand, he aids its enemies with the other—and paralyzes his home government to keep it from investigating his activities?
that remain close to outlawed and arrested dictator Omar Abdulkashim? Is it not clear that while Klieg milks the UN with one hand, he aids its enemies with the other—and paralyzes his home government to keep it from investigating his activities?
“And if we are facing a global Klieg dictatorship, or Klieg as the gray eminence behind the UN and the big powers … what sort of a program does he have, other than sheer aggrandizement? We have shown you a dozen clips of Klieg talking privately, off the record, in which it becomes clear that he thinks the problem with the great bulk of the world is that it’s not ‘normal,’ or ‘regular,’ or any of a dozen other words that he apparently uses to mean ‘like white middle-class Wisconsin.’ I could show you fifty more. This is a man of limited imagination and tolerance—and of all but unlimited power.”
She signs off, rechecks everything once more, patches in the end piece, and uploads. Time to head south out of the Wy—she has a lot of great quotes from the First Wave refugees, as they call themselves, the people from the Gulf Coast who decided to get out early and are at this point mostly working in construction in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. Everyone who can seems to be buying land and putting crisis housing on it for the expected waves of refugees; the First Wave seems remarkably cheerful for refugees.
Some of the Clem 200 series of hurricanes are beginning to pound their way up the coast, and there are rumors about evacuating the Duc. Once she’s headed down to Denver, she phones Di Callare, and he patches her into a three-way conference with Harris Diem. Diem, in particular, seems very pleased.
“I don’t think you know what you’ve done, Ms. Jameson,” he says. “And I have to admit I wasn’t happy about it when you started out. I had always figured that if anything useful was going to get done, it would be because the people who could have gotten in the way didn’t hear about it first. But what you’ve done is created a whole constituency for an intelligent global perspective—and you’ve done such a good job of it that I’m betting on you against Klieg.”
“It’s not really me against Klieg—” she protests, a little feebly because it certainly feels that way, but she doesn’t want to feel that she’s been out to “get” anyone or that she’s on anyone’s side.
“I understand. You think you’re being purely objective. Perhaps from your standpoint you are. Nonetheless, you got him and you got him good, as the boss and I used to say in Idaho. Things like GateTech depend on people respecting the rules even when it’s not to their advantage to do so—which is usually desirable, since it maintains public order. But when somebody is making his entire career out of using the rules to tie every
productive project up in knots—well, all I can say is, he chose very intelligently in his location. I very much doubt he will be able to come back to the United States for a while, or to operate anything very effectively by proxy. He’s out of the game—though he’ll still get rich launching his balloons. But in terms of serious power, he’s gone.”
productive project up in knots—well, all I can say is, he chose very intelligently in his location. I very much doubt he will be able to come back to the United States for a while, or to operate anything very effectively by proxy. He’s out of the game—though he’ll still get rich launching his balloons. But in terms of serious power, he’s gone.”
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