The Quiet Pools

CHAPTER 10 —UGC— “… a few seconds of death…”

Flying into the Kasigau Launch Center, Mikhail Dryke could not fail to note how dramatically different the company’s Kenyan spaceport was from its Brazilian kin. Though both served the same function and embraced the same basic facilities, the facilities were counterparts, not twins.

The difference began with the setting. Kasigau had taken over not former rain forest, but the nyika, the wilderness of dry mountain highlands southeast of Tsavo National Park. This was land that for centuries had known drought and famine better than rain and plenty. Land that had been picked over but rarely fought over, for the prize was too meager. Allied had paved its runways and sprawled its structures across a landscape which had scarcely any ecology to disrupt. Taita’s elephants and rhinos were already long gone when the construction crews arrived.

At Prainha, the incredible guy-and-column mountain of the launch tower rose nearly four kilometers above the river plateau. The tower was the unchallenged centerpiece of the Para. At night, its fairy-castle lights were visible from Macapa and Belem, and even from ships in the Atlantic off the coast of the Ilha de Marajo. The nearest natural feature that could compare with it was half a continent away.

The aperture of Kasigau’s launch tower stood as far above sea level as Prainha’s, above as much energy-stealing atmosphere. But it stood not on river plateau, but atop Kasigau Rock, a small round-topped mountain. Consequently, the tower’s central beam tube was half the height, and the shrunken fairy castle clung to the contours of the mount like a great spindly-legged insect which had paused there in its wanderings.

And if that were not enough to diminish it, there was Kilimanjaro, its dramatic volcanic profile rising from the Masai Steppe to the west. Inbound to Kasigau, the Celestron slicing down through the high thin air, Dryke had been gifted with a long look at Kilimanjaro’s steep western face and rugged snowcapped summit. Against that memory, the Kasigau cannon looked like the unfinished skeleton of a mountain, a child’s backyard imitation of the real thing.

“That’s one heck of a scenic outlook you folks built for yourselves,” he said to the air controller.

“Only view of Kilimanjaro anywhere in the nyika,” came the answer. “Four thousand meters up and not a cloud in sight. Not that anyone ever gets to enjoy it, except the tube monkeys and mirror mechs.”

Dryke understood. For Kasigau was strictly freight, its ten-gigawatt compound laser array hurling a steady procession of pilotless T-3 capsules on one-way journeys into orbit. No pilots’ colony, no astronaut union or joybirds here. Kasigau belonged to the working class, to the high-energy laser techs and the mirror mechanics, the loaders and launch bosses of the self-named “HELcrews.” The complex mechanical ballet they performed, sending a fully loaded T-3 skyward every twenty-two minutes, day and night, was the only show in town.

One launch every twenty-two minutes. Almost three per hour. Sixty-five a day, lifting thirteen hundred tonnes of electrochemicals, microphysics, and human consumables from ground to orbit. But even at that pace, Kasigau was running at less than fifty percent of design capacity. Prainha was regularly topping ninety launches a day, with an amazing peak record of one hundred twenty-two.

Most of the difference was infrastructure. Prainha was thirty-five years old, mature, settled. Kasigau was just thirteen years old, gangly and growing. The airways, roadways, railways, and seaways which fed it were still unequal to the task of supporting Kasigau’s design capacity. Especially the seaways. Even with the recent upgrade of the railhead and freight handling, the port at Mombasa was overwhelmed.

The transshipment bottleneck was not, at heart, a security problem. But Site Director Yvonne Havens was looking to Dryke for a solution all the same. What Havens wanted was to stream-line the cargo security procedures enough to boost the schedule to eighty or more cycles a day. To Dryke’s annoyance, Sasaki had endorsed the request, obliging Dryke to come to Kenya and study the options.

“Most of the company’s reserve launch capacity is there, at Kasigau,” Sasaki had reminded him. “The long-term solution is here, with the new launcher proposed for Almeirim. But the company can’t justify the capital investment in a third spaceport under present conditions. So we must look at Kasigau. A single additional lift a day means another seven thousand metric tons a year. We can use the capacity, especially since the mix here must shift toward passengers when we begin ferrying colonists to Memphis.”

Havens was a plump fast-talking black woman who wore the wound-wire bracelets and patterned cheek scars of the Rendille, the most popular of Kenya’s revival tribalisms. Using her smile as a commentary, she underlined Sasaki’s point while she and Dryke toured the spaceport together.

“Kasigau is insurance—leverage,” she said as they walked through the cargo assembly center. “We’re what keeps the Brazilians from jacking the transshipment taxes on Prainha. We’re what helps keep the can drivers in line. We could fly T-2s out of here with no one at the stick, and they know it. But it’s all a bluff if we can’t run at capacity.”

“If you compromise security and have to close down for a few months because of a hit, you won’t even have a bluff.”

“I don’t want our security compromised,” she said, smiling. “I want it factored out of the traffic stream.”

The conversation continued in the skimmer. “I looked at your incident log before I came here,” Dryke said. “The cargo inspectors stopped a half dozen bombs and booby traps in the last six months. Your perimeter defense smothered a shoulder SAM and two planes so far this year.”

“I’m very proud of our security team. Homeworld hasn’t touched us.”

“Homeworld hasn’t tried. All you’ve seen so far are amateurs. Shiftas. Bandits.”

“Amateurs do not own shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles,” she said stiffly.

“Anyone can own one, if they’ve got a hundred thousand dollars and a contact in Chile or South Africa,” Dryke said. “And besides, only an amateur would try to use a shoulder SAM against a T-ship. You’ve got ten gigawatts of laser energy to play with and a mirror system up in the castle that can split a dozen secondary beams off the main beam. Anything that gets within a thousand meters of a capsule on the beam is going to be fried. I’m not worried about someone shooting down a T-ship. It’s a surprise package in the cargo that worries me.”

They had reached the operations center entrance, but Havens made no move to leave the skimmer. “It’s a trade-off, Mr. Dryke,” she said, smiling. “I need another hundred tonnes a day. I could use another four hundred. Balance that against a slightly greater risk of an accident—”

“Not an accident. A terrorist hit.”

The smile widened. “You’re not the only one who’s been reading, Mr. Dryke. I’ve looked at your report on Jeremiah and the Homeworld. They’re not terrorists. They’re protesters. They’re playing a public opinion game. They’ve never killed anyone. They’re not going to strike blindly at Kasigau. And you’ve already said they can’t knock down a can. So why are you tying my handlers up in knots?”

“To make sure that Jeremiah isn’t tempted by opportunity.”

“There are no guarantees, Mr. Dryke. Make it difficult for him. That will be enough.”

Dryke frowned. “I won’t know if I can agree with that until I’ve seen more.”

“What do you want to see next?”

“I think Mombasa.”

“We can go there now, if you like.”

“Now is fine,” Dryke said. “But I’ll go by myself, thank you.”

“As you prefer,” she said, cracking the skimmer’s door open. She climbed out, then turned and squatted to peer back inside at Dryke. “Please try to remember, Mr. Dryke—it’s not that we’re reckless. We’re desperate. And that changes the rules sometimes.”

Dryke nodded. “For Jeremiah, too,” he said.

In the choppy waters of Formosa Bay, two hundred kilometers from the fences of Kasigau, a small fishing boat flying the flag of the East African Union rode a sea anchor against a gentle breeze. The nameless craft had made its way up the coast from Zanzibar over the last sixteen hours, running the Pemba Channel under a blazing midday sun and passing Mombasa in the night.

It was rigged and outfitted for anchovy fishing, with fine-mesh purse seines, brails, and buoys. But none of the five men aboard were fishermen.

Throughout the morning, one of the five had stood on the bow, scanner raised to his eyes, watching the freighters from Kasigau tear across the sky. The launch trajectory for the T-ships carried them nearly overhead, bright sparks against the blue sky, already two hundred kilometers up and moving two thousand meters per second, racing for orbit.

The column of light on which the freighters climbed was invisible. Only at its base, where the beam shattered stray dust particles into clouds of ions, could it be seen, a pale glowing needle anchored to the top of the launch tower, barely visible on the far horizon, and pointed unerringly at the streaking spark of the spacecraft.

While one watched, the others removed the nets which had concealed the massive sea-green canister lashed against the stern gunwale. The canister was as long as the boat was wide and half a meter in diameter. It was heavy enough to take the concentrated efforts of all four men, aided by the boat’s net winch, to raise it off the deck and carefully lower it into the water off the stern.

There it turned end-up and bobbed like a half-filled bottle, a bare thirty cents showing above the gentle waves. A wire-rope tether stopped it from floating away with the light current.

A second man joined the first on the bow. “Everything’s ready.”

“The Zodiac ready?”

“It’ll take five minutes. Do you have the mark?”

“I have it. Easy as skeet-shooting.”

“I’ll make the call.”

In a tiny belowdeck cabin, he hunched over a small military comlink, addressed its output at a private satellite in synchronous orbit over Sumatera, and sent a sixty-character code burst. He had no idea where the message went from there, only that some ten seconds later he had his answer.

He shut down the comlink and stowed it, then rejoined the man on the bow. “Jeremiah says the 2:20 and 3:05 launches are the best targets of opportunity, if we can wait.”

The man with the scanner swept the shoreline, the sea. “Six months to get this far,” he said at last. “We can wait. We can wait at least that long to do it right.”

Mikhail Dryke’s initial tour of Mombasa had yielded little of value.

All he carried away with him were a few glimpses of the little island city as it might have been five hundred years ago, as the Portuguese were concluding their hundred-year conquest. And of the city as it was fifteen years ago, before it became the primary port for Kasigau. The massive masonry of Fort Jesus, the Portuguese stronghold, recalled the former epoch. The outdated and undersized berths of the Kilindini anchorage recalled the latter.

The spaceport at Kasigau had conquered Mombasa more thoroughly than any invader in its thousand-year history, more than the Shirazi, more than the Omani, more than the Turks, more than the British. Kasigau had transformed Mombasa’s focus. A pair of great white elephant tusks, too large to be real, still arched over Moi Avenue—a quaint and somewhat bittersweet anachronism. But the city that once controlled the trade routes to India was now a way station on the trade routes to space.

No, he corrected himself. A bottleneck. Neither Havens nor Sasaki had exaggerated. Dryke had seen container ships anchored offshore, awaiting an open berth at the quays. Between the backlog, the Allied inspectors, and the Kenyan tax and customs officials, the trip from ship’s hold off Mombasa to the belly of a T-3 atop the castle was the longest, slowest leg of the journey.

Returning to the spaceport, Dryke rebelled at finding himself entangled in questions of corporate finance and cargo logistics. Sure, they could move inspections from quayside to Kasigau. Sure, they could open the center’s runways to outside aircraft, to wide-bodied A-50s and Caravans from Al-Qahirah and Kiyev and the Ruhr.

But every instinct in Dryke screamed “No!” All it would take was one mistake. One robot kamikaze passing up its landing to crash into the operations center for the HEL complex. One pocket nuke concealed in a T-3 cask, one sloppy or hurried inspection, one little kiloton explosion at the top of the castle. One mistake could put Kasigau out of business for a year, or even forever.

Dryke left the highway at Mackinnon Road to enter the Kasigau compound at the Rukinga gate. He reached the gate just as the crackling thunder of a T-3 being ejected from the catapult rolled over the complex. The guard detail waved him through, which obliged him to stop and deliver a harangue on complacency.

He had just managed to inspire the desired degree of contrition when alarms began to scream from the gatehouse, the sentries’ pagers, and the skimmer’s radio. While the sentries raced to seal the gate, Dryke dove back into the skimmer.

“What’s happening?” he demanded.

“The center is under Code Black rules,” a curt voice answered. “Keep this channel clear.”

“This is Mikhail Dryke. Tell me what’s happening.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Dryke. I don’t know.”

“Is it Jeremiah?”

“Mr. Dryke, I don’t know. Please keep this channel clear.”

“Goddammit,” Dryke muttered. “Goddammit.”

Ten klicks from the gate to the castle, another three to the operations complex. He had covered less than half of it when a cold white flash which made the sun seem dim flooded the landscape from somewhere high in the sky. Half-blinded, Dryke was forced to slow his vehicle. He was still struggling to see when a deep-throated rolling thunderclap, dwarfing even the report of the castle’s catapult, shook the skimmer and filled its cabin with deafening black noise.

Jesus Christ, was that a nuke? Oh, please— Twisting his head, Dryke risked a squint through the side window to reassure himself that the castle was still standing. It was. Puzzled, he sped on, fearing he was too late. He was. By the time he reached operations, Freighter T-3/E49851 was falling toward the Indian Ocean, and in Formosa Bay off Ras Ngomeni, a small fishing boat was down by the stern and burning.

The ballet begins. They wait in the wings in the kilometer-long tunnel from the cargo assembly center, tapered fat-bodied gnomes five meters in diameter and nearly seven meters tall, inching forward to the head of the line. They wait for the clamps and the hook and the long ride to the top of the castle, climbing the outside of the central tower like aphids climbing a stem.

T-3/E49851 had been built three days ago, its shell cut and curved and welded by the CAM machines in the fabrication center. It had been delivered to the cargo assembly center twelve hours ago, filled, sealed, and cycled into the launch queue six hours later, mated with its thrust disk of reinforced ice barely twenty minutes ago.

At five minutes after two, E49851 started its dizzying trip up out of the catacombs, bursting into the sunlight at the foot of the tower at a brisk fifty kilometers per hour. Even at that clip, the ride up the side of the tower took longer than the ride to space which was to follow.

At the top, a handler crane grabbed the spacecraft and lowered it gently into the catapult. In the launch operations center, a dozen stations ran a checklist of a hundred queries. The first clearance was from Laser Control, the last from Security; when it came through, the computers took over.

In a sudden convulsive moment, the T-ship was in motion, dragged upward by the accelerator ring, boosted from beneath by a giant’s breath. At the mouth of the tube, the accelerator ring split and fell away, and the capsule shot skyward, flying free.

The instant it cleared the launch tube, the T-ship began to slow, fighting drag and gravity, trading speed for altitude, tracing a trajectory familiar to every child who had ever hurled a stone at the sun.

Half a kilometer away, the HEL bank, twenty parallel half-gigawatt free-electron lasers under one sprawling roof, waited the call. When E49851 was five hundred meters above the castle, Unit 9 jumped to life, sending a five-hundred-watt pilot beam out through the bank lenses, along the nitrogen-filled beam tunnel, and up through the center of the castle to the mirrors. Guided by the tracking system, a single mirror directed the pilot beam against the broad base of the capsule.

Still the capsule climbed, still the capsule slowed. Two kilometers, three, three and a half. Any moment, it seemed, it would begin to fall back. And then the great bank of lasers came to life as one. The ten-gigawatt beam filled the full diameter of the beam tube, caught all twenty mirrors, and leaped across the sky to the broad base of the freighter.

The first pulse vaporized an almost invisibly thin layer from the ice disk, forming a vaporous sheet of pure, clear, superheated steam. A second pulse, a microsecond later and a hundred times stronger, shattered the molecules of water vapor into an atomic cloud of raw hydrogen, oxygen, and electrons, a plasma hotter than any chemical rocket flame, hotter even than the surface of the Sun. The plasma expanded savagely outward, kicking the spacecraft upward, as though it were the piston in a bizarre engine.

A thousand times a second, the lasers cycled through their double pulse. The awesome seamless roar of the closely spaced explosions was moderated only by distance, the pitch changing as the capsule accelerated, Doppler-shifting into the familiar falling, fading scream of a T-ship.

In the launch operations center, what little tension there could be in a routine repeated more than sixty times a day had evaporated when the thrust beam picked up the T-ship. The T-3 was riding the beam now, accelerating toward orbit, safely out of reach. Even the launch security officer, the man in the loop on Kasigau’s air defenses, sat back in his chair and reached for his drink.

The failure of the AI protocols in the Houston incident had led to the LSO being given unprecedented responsibility. Now, the AIPs could kill. The LSO had gone from being the only station that could call down the fire from the mountain to the only one that could stop it. Which meant that the LSO’s errors now would be errors of commission, not omission.

Yusuf Alli had not welcomed his newly elevated status. Kasigau was ringed by airports—the big one at Mombasa, the fields at Voi and Malindi, and fifteen rural airstrips within the primary air control area. The air traffic swarmed like bees around a hive. But every time a red light came up on the board, Alli had thirty seconds to call for a hold, and then one minute to make his decision. If he made a mistake, people would die.

Through the first three weeks under the revised protocol, Alli had dealt with his anxiety in a straightforward way. He always called for a hold, and then always gave the target a green. He had yet to be wrong. He knew there was some risk, but if any air traffic managed to reach the threat envelope of a T-ship on the climb, the defense system would bring it down without getting a second opinion. It was, he thought, foolproof.

Then the contact alarm sounded, and Alli jerked forward in his chair, choking on his tea.

“Hold,” he sputtered. “Hold!”

“Tracking missile,” said the board. “Threat category three. Risk category: moderate. Time to intercept: twenty-one seconds.”

Alli wasted three seconds staring at the track of the streaking missile. “It’s a clean miss,” he protested. “It won’t get within fifty klicks of the can.”

“Risk category: high. Time to intercept: eleven seconds.”

Alli’s eyes danced frantically over the displays. “What’s the danger? What can they hit?”

“Possible beam occlusion. Time to intercept: five seconds.”

At the same time, someone was screaming at him, “Burn it! Burn it! They’re going for the beam!”

Ashen-faced, Alli brought his palm down on the fire mushroom. One of the twenty lasers abandoned the synchrony of the launch rhythm, as atop the castle an auxiliary mirror rotated a few degrees. A defensive beam locked on the hurtling missile, and an instant later the missile exploded.

“Got it!” exulted Alli.

But the alarm kept sounding, and the displays continued to track something—now a cloud of a hundred smaller objects, still climbing as they fanned out. Then each of the smaller objects seemed to explode, and the missile was now a scatter of marble-sized projectiles. Moving nearly as fast as the missile itself had been, the chemical buckshot intersected the beam.

The first pulse heated the binder holding the projectiles together, and they blossomed into a dense cloud of aluminum dust. The next pulse, striking the fine particles, lit a myriad of tiny plasmas that quickly merged into a huge, sun-hot flare, dissipating the beam’s energy as light and heat. Only a tiny fraction of that pulse got through to the T-ship. The echo, used for tracking and guidance, was smothered completely. The next cycle was completely choked off.

At full power, the launch cannon could have burned through the cloud in a matter of seconds. But with no positive track on the target, no reflection back from the T-3, the laser controller declared a scrub and shut the HEL array down.

Three hundred kilometers away, the freighter began to fall, as though the string holding it aloft had been cut. Before long, it reappeared on the radar displays, no longer eclipsed by the dissipating cloud.

“Can we get it back?” the launch boss asked, little hope in his voice.

“She’s tumbling from the drag,” reported one station. “There’s no target.”

“Can we burn it?”

“No. Too much atmospheric absorption, and we’re losing the angle.”

“Jesus Christ,” the launch boss said. “Where’s it coming down? Indian Ocean? God, just drop it in the ocean—”

The answer was slow in coming. “South China Sea.”

Relieved expressions blossomed throughout the room.

Then the tracking officer added, “Maybe landfall in Malaysia. Singapore. I can’t be sure.”

“Damn,” breathed the launch boss.

“Can’t we warn them?” a sweaty and pale Yusuf Alli burst out.

Silently, his mouth tight with anger, the launch boss shook his head. “And tell them what?” he asked. “To put up their umbrellas? It’s coming down hard. There’s no place to hide.”

The freighter was a hurtling meteor of ice and steel, thirty-two tons of inert mass tracing the arc dictated by the forces which had acted on it. Its fall through the afternoon sky went mostly unnoticed across the eastern third of the Indian Ocean, except by a navigational satellite in high orbit, the commercial radars at Colombo and Djakarta, and a Chinese warship in the Gulf of Thailand.

As air friction tore at the tumbling spacecraft, the great disk of reinforced ice shattered, jagged chunks of it spinning away as it passed over the island of Sumatera. One piece smashed into a tree-covered hillside near Siabu, scattering a family of civet cats. Another buried itself dramatically in a rice paddy on the flats near Dumai, scattering a family of farmers.

But the freighter itself remained whole, its dive becoming steeper as it neared the surface. Sumatera slid away beneath, then the islands of the Strait of Malacca and the tip of the Malay Peninsula.

By now the spacecraft was lighting up the radar screens at Paya Lebar Airport in Singapore. Controllers there watched in astonishment as it dove toward the Singapore Strait at more than four thousand klicks per hour.

The pilot of a Boeing 350 which had just taken off from the airport saw it as a fiery streak which bisected the sky less than a kilometer in front of his plane.

A million people heard the thunder from a cloudless sky, the death-rattle shattering windows all across the city. A hailstorm of glittery razor-edged fragments rained down to the streets from the jagged wall of high rises facing the harbor.

Thousands on the Singapore waterfront witnessed with amazement the spectacular fountain and plume of steam that erupted as the T-ship plunged into the waters of the strait.

But then it seemed to be over. There was much pointing, many voices raised in excitement, a few raised in hysteria. Those who had missed the moment rushed to hear the story from those who had witnessed it. The waterfront was a carnival of questions.

And then the waters of the strait rose up in a sudden rolling, roiling surge. Like a miniature tsunami, the concussion wave smashed small boats against each other and swept onlookers from floating piers and sea walls.

By the time the surge drained back into the strait, E49851 had become a killer many times over.