4.2
28 April
ESL1 Shade Station
Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1
Extracislunar Space
Alice swung through the Cross, where the spokes of the spin-gee habitat came together. A pair of her colleagues were there, hunched together, holding a grab bar and looking at the screen of a rollup.
“Hi, Pelu. Hi, Sienna,” she said to them with a barely acknowledged nod.
She passed the hatches leading, in one direction, to the astronautics airlocks and, in the other, to the spaceship docking berths. She savored the brief sensation of total weightlessness, then flipped her feet around and shot down the crew tube of the “east” spoke, sliding her hands along the ladder as the sensation of weight started—first gradually and then quickly—to increase.
On the double-wheel of the new station, people (Alice included) tended to shortcut through the spokes, because they were in a hurry or just generally lazy. It didn’t save that much time or distance, but since the spin gravity right now was only one-tenth gee, it was easier to climb a ladder than to walk the long way around. Despite having only six more modules than the old station, the new place felt much larger. It was larger; one hundred meters in diameter, and a third of a kilometer in circumference, if you wanted to walk around the whole rim.
At the bottom of the tube, she dropped into the hallway of the eastern lab module—color-coded with yellow arrows along the floor and ceiling, pointing in the direction of spin. From there, she swim-walked two modules “north,” against the direction of spin, then “Earthward” into the corridor of the other ring, until she arrived at the special-built module that contained her office and quarters.
She found Maag there waiting for her.
“What is it?” Alice said impatiently.
It was 6:15 p.m., and Alice was trying to get into her apartment and close the door and be done with work for the day. But to do that, she had to slip through her office, which was a high-traffic area. At least it was only Maag waiting for her.
Sighing, Alice floated past her friend, reaching for the window controls. They were set to a translucent white “diffuse mode,” but she flicked it briefly transparent and looked out at the full circles of Earth and Moon (a billiard ball and a grape, respectively).
“You okay?” Maag asked.
“Stir-crazy,” Alice said, flicking the window diffuse again before the spinning view made her guts start churning.
“You and everyone else,” Maag said.
Yes, the spin-gee station was newer and cleaner and better thought-through than the old station floating behind it. Yes, the artificial gravity felt good. They had started very light—not even up to lunar gravity yet—just barely enough to walk in. If things went according to plan, they would gradually increase it to one-third gee over the course of a year, to let their bodies acclimate gradually. Maybe someday even up to a full gee—who knew?
But for more than half the crew, there was a motion sickness problem. The new doctor, Berka Feikey—the replacement for Rachael Lee, who had been the replacement for Pamela Rosenau—had warned Alice that even with such a large ring, centripetal accelerations could upset the inner ear. So far, that worry had been overblown—they were all intrepid spacers, men and women alike, and nobody got sick. As long as you didn’t open the window shades! If you did, then there was no escape from the slow whirling of the star field, and of the distant Earth and Moon, and of the enormous expanse of the Shade. Right now it was only 1.3 revolutions per minute. How much worse would it get if they spun up to higher gravity?
So “according to plan” was not how things were going right now. Despite its size, the new station felt vaguely claustrophobic with the windows always opaqued.
Maag hugged herself for a moment and said, “You ever think we’ve just traded bone loss for something worse?”
“Uh-huh,” Alice said. Adapting to zero-gee could take anywhere from no time at all to, in extreme cases, a few weeks. But it had been three weeks already since they’d finished moving all their shit into ESL1 Shade Station 2 and fully taken up residence. “I’m worried we might’ve wasted four billion dollars on this thing.”
But Maag said, “The more we blind these windows, the less chance we have of ever adjusting.”
“Hmm. Easy for you to say.”
Maag was among those unaffected.
Just then, the new station’s concierge broke in, with the brusque voice Alice had selected for it.
“Urgent call for you, Alice,” said Zeta.
“Answer. Hello?”
“We got one!” said the voice of Derek Haakens.
“A stealth ship?” said Alice, suddenly wide awake.
“Yep,” said Derek. “We picked him up on Ultra, about two klicks Earthward from here. He realized he was painted, and did a slow drift out of range.”
“Shit. That’s excellent. Don’t do anything until I get there. Get Tim Ho and Rose Ketchum up there as well.”
“I know the protocol,” Derek said, sounding a little miffed.
“Right,” said Alice. “End call.”
“Gotta go,” she said to Maag, and was out the hatch just like that, retracing her steps back up to the Cross. In one-tenth gee, climbing a ladder was a lot like launching yourself up from the bottom of a deep pool, but of course spin-gee was not real gravity. If you didn’t actually put your hands on every fourth or fifth rung, the Coriolis force would knock you into the side of the tube. Or the tube, moving along with the rest of the station, would swing around and hit you, or whatever.
Still, it was short work, and once she was in the Cross she swung through a side hatch, through the spin decoupler, and into the non-rotating part of the station. On the other side, the sunward side, was the crazy 3D jumble of the old station, simply bolted to the stationary hub. Here though, on the Earthward side, was a chamber that included a shuttle dock, a spacesuit airlock, and about four tons of radar equipment mostly shipped up here from Earth.
ESL1 was probably more than capable of building most of this stuff, but Alice had been in a hurry, so she’d bought it off-the-shelf and had it shipped here on a chemical rocket. Along with Isaiah Pembroke, who presently hovered beside Derek. Both of them were peering at a radar display that clearly (if coarsely) showed both the station and the central portion of the Shade, illuminated by expanding rings of green.
“Where’s the bogey?” she asked.
Derek startled so badly he somehow managed to hit his head on the panel. “Ow! Jesus! How the hell did you get up here so quickly?”
“Ho, ho!” she said, rather startled herself. “I climbed a ladder, flyboy. People do that. Now where’s my bogey?”
“We think it’s here,” said Isaiah pointing to a blank spot on the screen, opposite the Shade. He sounded a bit smug, which he had a total right to be as far as Alice was concerned. First of all, he’d been here less than a week, and he’d already proven his worth by nabbing his first stealth ship detection. Also, he’d been here less than a week and had already been claimed, carnally, by Jeanette Schmidt, and possibly other crew members as well. This annoyed Alice more than it probably should, but she had to give the young man some credit, too. Jeanette was a nice catch.
“Get suited up,” Alice said now to Derek.
He nodded, but when she followed behind him into the locker room, he said, “Whoa, there. You can’t come with us.”
“Oh, why not?” she asked, too surprised in that moment to remember she was the one in charge. Then, more decisively: “I’m the only one on this station with space combat experience.”
“Exactly,” he said. “You need to hang back and guide the whole thing on video. You’re also the station commander. You need to coordinate station defenses, in case this is some sort of feint.”
Alice had never been one to lead from the rear, nor did she respect officers who behaved that way. But everything Derek had just said was true, and it was actually much worse than that, because as VP of Space Operations she also had shareholder value to worry about. Wasn’t that a kick in the pants.
In this case the shareholders were seventy-four percent Igbal and twenty-six percent who-gives-a-fuck, but if Igbal could see her now he would tell her to strap her ass down in a chair and do her actual job.
“Well, fuck,” she said.
Rose swung through the hatch then, looking grimly excited. She exchanged a cryptic look with Derek, neither of them saying anything.
A few seconds later, Tim floated in behind her, stopping himself with a light touch against a spacesuit locker.
“Are we doing this?” he said.
“We are,” Derek confirmed. “Get suited up. We start bleeding the airlock in five minutes, standard egress procedure.”
That meant fifteen minutes of depressurization time.
Alice said, “Derek has persuaded me to run the mission from here, but I’m still suiting up. In case you all need rescue.”
“If we need rescue,” Derek said, “you need to meet our mangled bodies down in the medical lab.”
And that was also true, because Alice was the only person on board with experience as a combat medic. She was, in fact, the only person on the station with any medical training whatsoever, aside from Doc Feikey.
But she was also the only person who’d ever actually done this kind of thing. She was trained in the martial art of Zedo by the U.S. Space Force, for crying out loud. She had popped the cork on Bethy Powell’s spacesuit, in a hardscrabble fight to the death.
Five years ago, said the voice of her inner critic.
Rose and Tim were younger than she was. Derek was stronger, by a lot, and Tim was a better shot.
“I’m suiting up,” Alice said again, nailing the subject shut.
Soon they were all opening their lockers, wriggling and latching their way into their suits. These were combat models, special order from General Spacesuit corporation, who (at least officially) didn’t normally make such things. The armor was actually made here at ESL1—grown from layered crystals in zero gravity—but the suits were assembled in Florida and shipped back up here at great expense, because Alice had always known they would have to fight somebody sometime.
She was a nervous mother hen as her people climbed into the airlock and sealed the hatch behind them.
Then, as the pressure bled down, she tucked her helmet under her left arm and propelled herself back into the radar room.
“Are you actually ready for this?” she asked Isaiah Pembroke, as she stowed the helmet in a rack under his seat. The bulky spacesuit made her movements stiff, though tempered by the ease of long practice. “Shit’s about to get a lot less theoretical.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, his eyes fixed on the radar screen. “I’m actually ready.”
In his ordinary RzVz coveralls, he suddenly looked quite vulnerable. In a previous life, Alice had coached her share of noobs through their first airdrop into live fire. She knew all about the jitters and the uncertainty. Hell, she was feeling it herself.
She put a gauntleted hand on Isaiah’s shoulder and said, “If we do this by the numbers, everything is going to be fine.”
That was by no means a given, and it felt a bit like she was outright lying to him, so she added, “If we do this by the numbers and roll with any contingency.”
Reaching past Isaiah, she keyed in commands and flipped switches on the console that brought up the video and audio feeds from the three spacesuits. At the moment, this was just three different views of the cramped quarters inside the airlock. Tim and Rose were both carrying rifles, loaded with light armor-piercing rounds. The rifles were allegedly recoilless, but one shot could still tumble you. This was serious business.
“. . . oxygen levels, suit pressures, and tank pressures,” Derek was saying.
“Roger,” said Rose and Tim, almost at the same time. He was running them through a standard checklist. “Standard” in the sense that everyone knew it, though it was rarely recited out loud.
“Verify wrist seals fully locked.”
“Roger.”
“Verify waist seals fully locked.”
The full self-inspection procedure required a mirror, which was mounted on the back wrist of each suit’s left arm. Alice watched the three astronauts jostling with weightless bulk as they craned to view their seals.
Flipping another switch on the console, Alice activated her own suit audio and said, “Audio check. Falcon, this is Mockingbird. Do you copy?”
“Ah, copy that,” Derek said. “Mockingbird on the network.”
After that, she quieted down and let Derek finish his checklist. When it was done, he reported the airlock pressure at fifteen millibars, and the ETA to zero pressure at sixty seconds.
Alice asked: “Romper, are you good?”
Bit late for that question; Romper was Rose’s call sign. Rose had been down south to Coffee Patch, but as an Army mechanic. Other than some inaccurate mortars from Cartel shoot-and-scoot teams, she’d never taken hostile fire, nor aimed any weapon in the direction of a human being.
But what Rose said was, “I’m beautiful, ma’am. Thank you.”
“This could be over in five minutes,” Alice said.
“Or not,” Derek said, matter-of-factly. Then, after a pause: “Falcon reporting all-balls pressure, green lights on the door. Awaiting orders.”
“Mockingbird acknowledges. Hold, please.”
To the air, Alice said, “Zeta, give me a station-wide address please. All hands, this is Interim Commander Alice Kyeong.”
There were only forty-five people on the station, and they all knew Alice as “Alice,” but this was a military operation, and she wanted to do it by the numbers. Not so much to cover her ass as because there really wasn’t any other way—any better way—to conduct such things.
“Close all hatches and seal all modules, effective immediately and until further notice,” she said. “A stealth ship has intruded into our space. We are engaging, and expect a hostile response. That’s all.”
Everyone knew this day was coming. Now, everyone knew this day was here. Probably, sealing off every module from every other was huge overkill and would be the butt of jokes for weeks to come. Alice certainly hoped so. It would take the crew a while to complete the task, but that was okay. It would take a while for all this to unfold.
Putting both of her gloved hands on Isaiah’s shoulders, she said, “Jericho, go for power boost.”
Jericho was Isaiah’s call sign, and since he was sitting right here, it wasn’t exactly ambiguous who she was talking to. But she wanted the fire team in the airlock to know exactly what was going on, and in case anything went wrong, she wanted the recordings to be as complete and factual as possible.
“Jericho acknowledges the order,” said Isaiah. He was an engineer who’d never been in any sort of military engagement whatsoever, but he spoke with such gusto Alice might almost have mistaken him for a Maroon Beret.
He keyed in some commands on the console. The expanding circles on the radar display now reached all the way to the edge of the screen—a radius of almost twenty kilometers.
“There!” Isaiah shouted. “We got him! You’re painted, fucker!”
“Calm down,” Alice said, “and fire.”
Without delay, Isaiah flipped up a switch cover, flipped the switch underneath it, and then brought the palm of his hand down on the big red button.
The lights dimmed for a moment, and then returned to normal brightness.
“He’s shot, ma’am. Direct hit.”
The entangled ultrawideband radar put out very short, very powerful pulses in all directions at once, but Isaiah had assured her that through something called a “beamformer” and something called a “phased array,” the pulse could be focused down to a tight beam, barely two-tenths of a degree wide, and aimed directly at a target. At a few kilometers’ range, the result should be a megajoule electromagnetic surge capable of frying even the most hardened military systems. It was why Isaiah was up here at ESL1, getting his dick wet at company expense.
“Report, Jericho,” Alice said, trying to keep the annoyance out of her voice.
“Target’s radar cross-section has increased,” he said. “A lot.”
“Go to normal radar,” she said.
He did so, and the expanding circles on the display were replaced by a glowing green line, sweeping around like the hand of a clock.
“Target remains visible. Looks like we killed his camo.”
“Fire team hold,” Alice said.
Curious, she pushed off from Jericho’s seat and floated toward the tiny porthole on the left side of the room. It was dark out there—they were in the Colorado-sized shadow of the Shade—but she thought perhaps the light reflecting off the Earth and Moon might reveal something. The ship was the size of a train car, and no longer hidden from view, so even from a couple of klicks away, it might look like something.
“Can you see anything?” Isaiah asked.
“Mockingbird here. Negative visual contact. Fire team, you’re going to have to let Jericho guide you in.”
“Falcon acknowledges. Are we go for egress?”
Alice’s heart was heavy and nervous. If she were in that airlock, she would know exactly what to do. If she were in that airlock, she could keep them safe.
She said: “Mockingbird here. Go for egress.”
“TicTac, open outer hatch, please,” said Derek to Tim Ho.
Alice could only watch on the video screens as the fire team exited the airlock and drifted, untethered, into the blackness of space.
Jericho called out directions to them, and presently they were activating their maneuvering thrusters and jetting in the direction of the unstealthed stealth ship.
“Still no visual contact,” Falcon reported.
“Mockingbird here. Keep those speeds down. Falcon, I read you at fifteen KPH.”
The ship was just over three kilometers away, and over distances like that, with no reference points in between, it was really easy to misjudge your speed and get going much too fast. If you then also misjudged how long it was going to take to bleed off all that velocity, you could easily overshoot the target or (worse) collide with it.
“Roger that.”
As combat ops tended to do, this one unfolded both too slowly and too quickly. At a certain point, TicTac reported that he had visual contact and was adjusting his course. Romper and Falcon adjusted to match him, and in another minute, Falcon reported that he had visual contact as well.
“I guess snipers’ eyes are better than pilots’ eyes,” Alice said.
To which Falcon replied, “Cut the chatter, Mockingbird.”
Then Romper could see the target, and in another minute, even Alice could see it, through the blocky and occasionally pixelated helmet-cam videos. It looked like a midsized transatmospheric crew shuttle, lit up along one edge by the light of stars and Earth.
“No signs of venting gas,” Falcon reported. Then: “TicTac, Romper, hang back at this range, please. I’m going to go have a word with these gentlemen. Or ladies.”
Slung across Derek’s back was a marker board, with black and red grease pencils clipped to it. The astronauts used it, sometimes, to keep track of tasks during a long EVA. Even in vacuum, even in the cold shadow of the ESL1 Shade, it worked well enough. The plan was simply to hold a sign up in the stealth ship’s windshield, offering assistance.
“Romper here. All due respect, sir, I can’t hit anything from this range.”
“Falcon here. Are you telling me you can’t hit that?” He pointed at the ship, which was admittedly a large target.
“I can’t hit a person, sir. I can’t keep you safe.”
“Hmm. TicTac, are you good here?”
“TicTac here. Yes, sir, very good.”
Alice fought the urge to bark orders at them. She was watching their blips on the radar, as well as the video from their cameras, and feeling generally helpless. The astronauts were now less than half a kilometer away from the ship, and if TicTac could hit one of the enemy astronauts with a clean shot, it was a safe bet that one of the enemy astronauts could hit all three of her people at any moment.
“Mockingbird here. Stay vigilant,” she allowed herself to say.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Falcon said back. Then: “TicTac, hold position. Romper, you’re with me.”
Over the next five excruciating minutes, Falcon and Romper approached the stealth ship, which gradually grew larger and brighter and less pixelated in their camera displays. When they were fifty meters out, Falcon said, “Romper, can you hit a target from here on the first shot?”
Because yes, that first shot would tumble her, and it would be a while before she could line up a second one.
Romper said, “Yes, sir, I believe I can.”
“All right, then. Hit your stop jets and hold position. I’m heading for the cockpit windows.”
“Roger that.”
“Mockingbird, are you seeing this?”
“I am,” Alice said. The ship was close enough now to be illuminated by Derek’s suit lamps, and it cast back a million little sparkles, as though it were covered with bits of glass. As Derek drew closer, these resolved into banks of glossy gray-white hexagonal plates, each the size of a pinkie nail and surrounded by a black border.
Isaiah said, “Jericho here. If those little beehive things are glass and metal, or contain them, the ship ought to have a huge radar cross section. Which it currently does not. I think we’re looking at a passive beam-deflection metamaterial. Coupled probably with a light-emitting capability, which is standard in active camouflage.”
Alice, who had on a few occasions worn an active camouflage suit during combat drops, could confirm: it was like being wrapped in a video screen.
“Thank you,” Derek replied, a bit absentmindedly. In his camera view, the nose of the ship was drawing even with him and rotating into the center of the screen. “The windows are—”
A brief, blue-white flash lit up the radar room. Like a very bright camera flash emanating from the porthole to Alice’s left, leaving pink and green blobs all up and down the left side of her vision.
A loud chirping sound from the control panel had matched the flash. Derek’s voice had cut off, and the display from his suit camera had gone black, with only the letters ev1 cam1 in green across the top of the screen.
“Falcon, please report,” Alice said, too surprised to feel any fear.
But Derek did not report, and the view from Rose’s own camera was not very informative, showing only blackness, and a few paper-white specks that looked like burned-out pixels. The cameras weren’t sensitive enough to pick up starlight, so all this told Alice was that Romper was not presently pointed at anything brighter, like the Earth or Moon, or the lights of Derek’s suit. Alice said, “Romper, this is Mockingbird. Can I get a report, please? What are you seeing?”
Calmly, Romper replied, “Ma’am, I think I’ve got a malfunction in my welding visor. I saw a bright flash, and then the photochromic kicked in and dimmed it out. I think it’s stuck now; I can’t see out of it.”
Isaiah said, “Ma’am, I have no echo from the ship.”
“Fuck,” Alice said, thinking the damn thing had somehow dropped back into stealth mode. “Go to ultrawideband.”
Isaiah did so, and the radar display switched back from a sweeping line to a pond-ripple of expanding circles.
“Still no echo,” he said.
Then, looking at the display with the first inklings of horror, she said, “Where is Falcon?”
To which he replied, “Ma’am, I have two echoes.” He pointed at the screen, green on black. She could see parts of the station. She could see the Shade and the Hub. She could see two dots, which Isaiah tapped one after the other. “This is TicTac, and this is Romper. There’s nothing else out there. Doppler indicates Romper is moving in our direction, about one-half meter per second.”
Alice said, “TicTac, this is Mockingbird. Do you have a visual on Romper?”
“Affirmative,” TicTac said. “She appears to have picked up a slight tumble.”
That made sense; in TicTac’s camera view, Alice could see a tiny white line that was probably the edge of Romper’s suit, lit up by Earthlight. But it was slowly changing size and shape, and presently, a brighter spot appeared on it that might have been one of her suit lamps rotating into view.
“Roger that,” Alice said. Then, in frustration, “Can I get a sit rep, please?” Situation report. Tell me what the hell is going on.
“I can report, ma’am, I saw the flash as well, and my welding visor kicked in. It’s not stuck, however.”
“Do you have a visual on Falcon?”
“Negative, Mockingbird. I have lost visual on Falcon and the bogey. I have afterimages from the flash, though; it’s possible my vision is obscured.”
“There’s nothing on your camera,” Alice said.
“There’s nothing on the radar,” Isaiah said. “Ma’am, I have no debris. That ship is gone. I think . . . ma’am, I think they detonated a nuke.”
“Ah, negative,” TicTac said to that. “I saw no fireball or, you know, mushroom cloud.”
“Romper here. I am less than one hundred meters from the ship, and I did not feel a blast wave.”
“No blast wave in space,” Isaiah said. “No fireball. No EMP. No debris. No cloud. Just a blast of pure . . . radiation. Ma’am, I’m reading elevated levels of background gamma and beta radiation. The history graph shows a big spike about thirty seconds ago. That’s the time of the flash, ma’am.”
But Romper said, “All due respect, Jericho, there’s no way I was a hundred meters from a nuclear explosion. I didn’t feel a thing.”
To which Isaiah replied, “All due respect, Romper, but how are you feeling now?”
“A little motion sickness,” Romper said. “Because I can’t see anything.”
Alice’s heart lurched and sank. Isaiah was here because he was a weapon targeting systems expert. Isaiah sounded like he knew what he was talking about.
She said, “TicTac, I need you to retrieve Romper, right now. Treat as injured. Bring her back to the airlock ASAP.”
“Roger that,” TicTac said. Then: “What about Falcon?”
“Still figuring that out,” Alice said, and then muted her mic. Leveraging from the back of Isaiah’s chair, she leaned over him and flipped a switch on the panel, killing his mic as well.
“How big a nuke are we talking about?” she demanded.
“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging so hard it was almost a wince. “Small, maybe point-one kilotons, I don’t know. Probably a suitcase tac-nuke, very illegal. But ma’am, Rose was way too close to that thing. The radiation dose . . .”
“We’ll get her inside,” Alice said.
“There’s no way, ma’am. We need to get TicTac inside. I’m sorry, do I—don’t know TicTac’s name. We need to get him into treatment right away, or he could die. Rose is . . . I’m sorry, ma’am, but Rose is dead already. Or, I mean, she will be, almost certainly, within a few hours. I don’t think her visor’s malfunctioning. I think her optic nerves are. Her body’s shutting down.”
“We’ll treat Romper and TicTac, both,” she said, not leaving it open for discussion.
But Isaiah kept pressing. “It’s going to take him an hour to get back here as it is. If he goes and gets Rose, it’s going to slow him down. She might not even survive long enough to make it back to the airlock.”
“We’ll treat them both,” she said. She didn’t need to tell herself not to grieve right now. Not while the mission was still ongoing.
“Are you going out there?” he asked.
She thought about it for half a second and asked, “What are the chances TicTac is going to be disabled before he gets back?”
“I don’t know. Not zero.”
“Then yes, I’m going out there.” She was Air Force Pararescue, for fuck’s sake. She rotated her body, head-down, arms-down, like a swimmer diving for the bottom of a pool, and retrieved her space helmet from the rack under Isaiah’s chair.
“What about Derek Hakkens?” she asked, as she lowered the helmet over her head. My ex. My coworker. My close friend of five-plus years. “Falcon. Is he vaporized?”
“Yes, ma’am, I think he must be. I’m very sorry. He’s certainly not alive.”
“Well, fuck,” she said, and closed the helmet latches.