James P. Hogan
James P. Hogan (born 1941), with Robert L. Forward and Charles Sheffield, was a leader in the new generation of hard SF writers in the early 1980s. At the same moment when Gregory Benford (and slightly later, Greg Bear) raised the literary standards of hard SF with their novels and stories, Hogan entered the field as if it were 1939 or 1949 and he had just discovered Heinlein and Asimov, Campbell and Astounding. Generally uninterested in reading in the contemporary field, Hogan in particular set about reinventing it from the forties onward, in novels filled with ideas and technology—such as Inherit the Stars (1977), The Genesis Machine (1978), The Two Faces of Tomorrow (1979), Thrice in Time (1980), and Code of the Lifemaker (1983)—that made him one of the more popular writers of that decade.
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls him “a writer pugnaciously associated with the hard SF wing,” compares him to Eric Frank Russell, and comments:
His first novel (and first publication), Inherit the Stars (1977), aroused interest for the exhilarating sense it conveys of scientific minds at work on real problems and for the genuinely exciting scope of the SF imagination it deploys. The book turned out to be the first volume in the Minervan Experiment sequence, being followed by The Gentle Giants of Ganymede (1978) and Giants’ Star (1981) … . The sequence is in fact a hard SF fable of humanity’s origins—we are the direct descendants of the highly aggressive inhabitants of the destroyed fifth planet, who would have conquered the Galaxy had they not blown themselves up—and espouses a vision of the Universe in which other species must learn to cope with the knowledge that we will, some day, come into our inheritance.
Two of his novels won the Prometheus Award for Best Libertarian SF Novel: Voyage from Yesteryear (1982) and The Multiplex Man (1992). His new novel, Martian Knightlife (2001) is an SF mystery set on Mars.
“Madam Butterfly” was first published in Free Space, edited by Brad Linaweaver and Edward Kramer, the only politically-engaged Libertarian SF anthology of the decade. The book also included stories by Gregory Benford, Robert J. Sawyer, and John Barnes. It is a light-hearted Libertarian hard SF tale supposedly about “The Butterfly Effect,” or the sensitive dependence on initial conditions of chaotic systems.
Locally, in the valley far from Tokyo that she had left long ago, it was known as yamatsumi-sou, which means “flower of the mountain spirit.” It was like a small lily, with tapering, yellow petals warmed on the upper surface by a blush of violet.
According to legend, it was found only in those particular hills on the north side of Honshu—a visible expression of the deity that had dwelt around the village of Kimikaye-no-sato and protected its inhabitants since ancient times, whose name was Kyo. When the violet was strong and vivid, it meant that Kyo was cheerful and in good health, and the future was secure. When the violet waned pale and cloudy, troubled times lay ahead. Right at this moment, Kyo was looking very sorry for himself indeed.
The old woman’s name was Chifumi Shimoto. She hadn’t seen a yamatsumi-sou since those long-gone childhood days that everyone remembers as the time when life was simple and carefree—before Japan became just a province in some vaster scheme that she didn’t understand, and everyone found themselves affected to some degree or other by rules borrowed from foreigners with doubtful values and different ways. How it came to be growing in the yard enclosed by the gaunt, gray concrete cliffs forming the rear of the Nagomi Building was anybody’s guess.
She saw it when she came out with a bag of trash from the bins in the offices upstairs, where she cleaned after the day staff had gone home. It was clinging to life bravely in a patch of cracked asphalt behind the parked trucks, having barely escaped being crushed by a piece of steel pipe thrown down on one side, and smothered by a pile of rubble encroaching from the other. Although small, it looked already exhausted, grown to the limit that its meager niche could sustain. The yard trapped bad air and exhaust fumes, and at ground level was all but sunless. Leaking oil and grime hosed off the vehicles was turning what earth there was into sticky sludge. Kyo needed a better home if he was to survive.
Potted plants of various kinds adorned shelves and window ledges throughout the offices. When she had washed the cups and ashtrays from the desks and finished vacuuming between the blue-painted computer cabinets and consoles, Chifumi searched and found some empty pots beneath the sink in one of the kitchen areas. She filled one of the smaller pots with soil, using a spoon to take a little from each of many plants, then went back downstairs with it and outside to the yard. Kneeling on the rough ground, she carefully worked the flower and its roots loose from its precarious lodgement, transferred it to the pot that she had prepared, and carried it inside.
Back upstairs, she fed it with fresh water and cleaned off its leaves. Finally, she placed it in the window of an office high up in the building, facing the sun. Whoever worked in that office had been away for several days. With luck, the flower would remain undisturbed for a while longer and gain the strength to recover. Also, there were no other plants in the room. Perhaps, she thought to herself, that would make it all the more appreciated when the occupant returned.
She locked the cleaning materials and equipment back in the closet by the rear stairs, took the service elevator back down to the ground floor, and returned the keys to the security desk at the side entrance. The duty officer checked her pass and ID and the shopping bag containing groceries and some vegetables that she had bought on the way in, and then let her out to the lobby area, where the cleaners from other floors were assembling. Five minutes later, the bus that would run them back to their abodes around the city drew up outside the door.
The offices in the part of the Nagomi Building that Chifumi had been assigned to had something to do with taxes and accounting. That was what all the trouble was supposed to be about between the federal authorities and others in faraway places among the stars. She heard things about freedom and individualism, and people wanting to live as they chose to, away from the government—which the young seemed to imagine they were the first ever to have thought of. To her, it all sounded
very much like the same, age-old story of who created the wealth and how it should be shared out. She had never understood it, and did so even less now. Surely there were enough stars in the sky for everyone.
She had a son, Icoro, out there somewhere, whom she hadn’t seen for two years now; but messages from him reached her from time to time through friends. The last she had heard, he was well, but he hadn’t said exactly where he was or what he was doing—in other words, he didn’t want to risk the wrong people finding out. That alone told her that whatever he was up to was irregular at best, very likely outright illegal, and quite possibly worse. She knew that there was fighting and that people were getting killed—sometimes lots of them. She didn’t ask why or how, or want to hear the details. She worried as a mother would, tried not to dwell on such matters, and when she found that she did anyway, she kept them to herself.
But as she walked away after the bus dropped her off, she felt more reassured than she had for a long time. The flower, she had decided, was a sign that Kyo still lived in the mountains and did not want to be forgotten. Kyo was a just god who had come to Earth long ago, but he still talked with the other sky-spirits who sent the rain and made the stars above Kimikaye so much brighter. Chifumi had remembered Kyo and helped him. Now Kyo’s friends among the stars would watch over her son.
Suzi’s voice came from a console speaker on the bridge of the consolidator Turner Maddox, owned by Fast Forwarding Unincorporated, drifting 250 million miles from Earth in an outer region of the Asteroid Belt.
“Spider aligned at twelve hundred meters. Delta vee is fifteen meters per second, reducing.” Her voice maintained a note of professional detachment, but everyone had stopped what they were doing to follow the sequence unfolding on the image and status screens.
“No messing with this kid, man,” Fuigerado, the duty radar tech, muttered next to Cassell. “He’s going in fast.”
Cassell grunted, too preoccupied with gauging the lineup and closing rate to form an intelligible reply. The view from the spider’s nose camera showed the crate stem on, rotating slowly between the three foreshortened, forward-pointing docking appendages that gave the bulb-ended, remote-operated freight-retrieval module its name. Through the bridge observation port on Cassell’s other side, all that was discernible directly of the maneuver being executed over ten miles away were two smudges of light moving against the starfield, and the flashing blue and red of the spider’s visual beacon.
As navigational dynamics chief, Cassell had the decision on switching control to the regular pilot standing by if the run-in looked to go outside the envelope. Too slow meant an extended chase downrange to attach to the crate, followed by a long, circuitous recovery back. Faster was better, but impact from an overzealous failure to connect could kick a crate off on a rogue trajectory that would require even more time and energy to recover from. Time was money everywhere, while outside gravity wells, the cost of everything was measured not by the distance moved, but by the energy needed to move it there. A lot of hopeful recruits did just fine on the simulator only to flunk through nerves when it came to the real thing.
“Ten meters per second,” Suzi’s voice sang out.
The kid was bringing the crate’s speed down smoothly. The homing marker was dead center in the graticule, lock-on confirming to green even as Cassell watched. He decided to give it longer.
The Lunar surface was being transformed inside domed-over craters; greenhousing
by humidifying its atmosphere was thawing out the freeze-dried planet Mars; artificial space structures traced orbits from inside that of Venus to as far out as the asteroids. It all added up to an enormous demand for materials, which meant boom-time prices.
With Terran federal authorities controlling all Lunar extraction and regulating the authorized industries operating from the Belt, big profits were to be had from bootlegging primary asteroid materials direct into the Inner System. A lot of independent operators got themselves organized to go after a share. Many of these were small-scale affairs—a breakaway cult, minicorp, even a family group—who had pooled their assets to set up a minimum habitat and mining-extraction facility, typically equipped with a low-performance mass launcher. Powered by solar units operating at extreme range, such a launcher would be capable of sending payloads to nearby orbits in the Belt, but not of imparting the velocities needed to reach the Earth-Luna vicinity.
This was where ventures like Fast Forwarding Uninc. came into the picture. Equipped with high-capacity fusion-driven launchers, they consolidated incoming consignments from several small independents into a single payload and sent it inward on a fast-transit trajectory to a rendezvous agreed upon with the customer.
Consolidators moved around a lot and carried defenses. The federal agencies put a lot of effort into protecting their monopolies. As is generally the case when fabulous profits stand to be made, the game could get very nasty and rough. Risk is always proportional to the possible gain.
“Delta vee, two point five, reducing. Twenty-six seconds to contact.”
Smooth, smooth—everything under control. It had been all along. Cassell could sense the sureness of touch on the controls as he watched the screen. He even got the feeling that the new arrival might have rushed the early approach on purpose, just to make them all a little nervous. His face softened with the hint of a grin.
As a final flourish, the vessels rotated into alignment and closed in a single, neatly integrated motion. The three latching indicators came on virtually simultaneously.
“Docking completed.”
“Right on!” Fuigerado complimented.
Without wasting a moment, the spider fired its retros to begin slowing the crate down to matching velocity, and steered it into an arc that brought it around stern-wise behind the launcher, hanging half a mile off the Maddox’s starboard bow. It slid the crate into the next empty slot in the frame holding the load to be consolidated, hung on while the locks engaged, and then detached.
Cassell went through to the communications room behind the bridge, then down to the operations control deck, where the remote console that the spider had been controlled from was located. The kid was getting up and stretching, Suzi next to him, Hank Bissen, the reserve pilot who had been standing by, still at his console opposite.
“You did pretty good,” Cassell said.
“Thank you, sir.” He knew damn well that he had, and smiled. It was the kind of smile that Cassell liked—open and direct, conveying simple, unassuming confidence; not the cockiness that took needless risks and got you into trouble.
“Your name’s Shimoto. What is that, Japanese?”
“Yes.”
“So, what should we call you?”
“My first name is Icoro … . Does it mean I have a job, Mr. Cassell?”
“You’d better believe it. Welcome to the team.”
Nagai Horishagi leaned back wearily from the papers scattered across his desk in the Tariffs and Excise section of the Merylynch-Mubachi offices in the Tokyo Nagomi Building. It was his first day back after ten days in South America, and it looked as if he had been gone for a month. Even as he thought it, his secretary, Yosano, came through from the outer office with another wad. Nagai motioned in the direction of his In tray. He didn’t meet her eyes or speak. Her movements betraying an awkwardness equal to his own, she deposited the papers and withdrew. Nagai stared down at the desk until he heard the door close; then he sighed, rose abruptly, and turned to stare out the window at the city. That was when he noticed the plant on the ledge.
It had bright green leaves, and flowers of pale yellow with a touch of violet—one in full bloom, two more just opening. He stared at it, perplexed. Where on Earth had it come from? He had no mind for flowers, as the rest of the office readily testified. And yet, as he looked at it, he had to admit that it seemed a happy little fellow. He reached out and touched one of the leaves. It felt cool and smooth. Very well, he thought. If you can do something to cheer this awful place up, you’ve earned your keep. I guess we’ll let you stay.
All through the morning, he would pause intermittently and look back over his shoulder to gaze with a fresh surge of curiosity at the plant. And then, shortly before lunchtime, the answer came to him. Of course! Yosano had put it there. No wonder she had acted tensely. How could he have been so slow?
Before he went away, they had gotten involved in one of those affairs that a professional shouldn’t succumb to, but which can happen to the best. But in their case it had uncovered real affection and become quite romantic. After years of living in an emotional isolation ward he had celebrated and exuberated, unable to believe his luck … and then blown the whole thing in a single night, getting drunk and disgracing himself by insulting everybody at that stupid annual dinner—even if they had deserved every word of it. He had agonized over the situation all the time while he was away, but really there was no choice. No working relationship needed this kind of strain. He had decided that she would have to be transferred.
But now this was her way of telling him that it didn’t have to be that way. He was forgiven. Everything could be OK. And so it came about that he was able to summon up the courage to confront her just before she left for lunch and say, “Could we give it another try?”
She nodded eagerly. Nagai didn’t think that he had ever seen her look so delighted. He smiled, too. But he didn’t mention the plant. The game was to pretend that the plant had nothing to do with it. “Can I apologize for being such an ass?” he asked instead.
Yosano giggled. “There’s no need. I thought you were magnificent”
“Then how about dinner tonight?” he suggested.
“Of course.”
Yosano remembered only later in the afternoon that she had agreed to meet the American that night. Well, too bad. The American would have to find somebody else. She would have to call him and tell him, of course—but not from the office, she decided. She would call his hotel as soon as she got home.
Steve Bryant hung up the phone in his room at the Shinjuku Prince and stared at it moodily.
“Well, goddamn!” he declared.
Weren’t they the same the whole world over. He had already shaved, showered, and put on his pastel blue suit, fresh from the hotel cleaner’s. His first night to himself since he arrived in Japan, and he wasn’t going to hit the town with that cute local number that he’d thought he had all lined up, after all. He poured himself another Scotch, lit a cigarette, and leaned back against the wall at the head of the bed to consider his options.
OK, then he’d just take off and scout the action in this town on his own, and see what showed up, he decided. And if nothing of any note did, he was going to get very drunk. Wasn’t life just the same kind of bitch, too, the whole world over.
The bar was brightly lit and glittery, and starting to fill up for the evening. There was a low stage with a couple of dancers and a singer in a dress that was more suggestion than actuality. It was later than Alan Quentin had wanted stay, and he could feel the drink going to his head. He had stopped by intending to have just one, maybe two, to unwind on his way back to the garage-size apartment that came with his yearlong stint in Tokyo. Then he’d gotten talking to the salesman from Phoenix, here on his first visit, who had been stood up by his date.
On the stool next to him, Steve Bryant went on, “Can you imagine, Al, five thousand dollars for a box of old horseshoes and cooking pots that you could pick up in a yard sale back home? Can you beat that?” American-frontier nostalgia was the current rage in Japan.
“That’s incredible,” Al agreed.
“You could retire on what you’d get for a genuine Civil War Colt repeater.”
“I’ll remember to check the attic when I get back.”
“You’re from Mobile, right?”
“Montgomery.”
“Oh, right. But that’s still Alabama.”
“Right.”
Steve’s attention was wandering. He let his gaze drift around the place, then leaned closer and touched Al lightly on the sleeve. “Fancy livening up the company? There’s a couple of honeys at the other end that we could check out.”
Al glanced away. “They’re hostesses. Work here. Keep you buying them lemonades all night at ten dollars a shot. See the guy out back there who’d make a sumo wrestler look anorexic? He’ll tell you politely that it’s time to leave if you don’t like it. I’ll pass, anyhow. I’ve had a rough day.”
Steve sat back, tossed down the last of his drink, and stubbed his cigarette. His face wrinkled. “Suddenly this place doesn’t grab me so much anymore. What d’you say we move on somewhere else?”
“Really, no. I only stopped by for a quick one. There’s some urgent stuff that I have to get done by tomorrow, and—”
“Aw, come on. What kind of a welcome to someone from home is this? It’s all on me. I’ve had a great day.”
The next bar around the corner was smaller, darker, just as busy. The music was from a real fifties jukebox. They found a table squeezed into a corner below the stairs. “So what do you do?” Steve asked.
“I’m an engineer—spacecraft hydraulic systems. We use a lot of Japanese components. I liaise with the parent companies here on testing and maintenance procedures.”
“Sorry, but I don’t have an intelligent question to ask about that.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Steve fell quiet for a few seconds and contemplated his drink. Suddenly he looked up. “Does that mean you’re mathematical?”
Al frowned. “Some. Why?”
“Oh, just something I was reading on the plane over. It said that a butterfly flapping its wings in China can change the weather next week in Texas. Sounds kinda crazy. Does it make sense to you?”
Al nodded. “The Butterfly Effect. It’s a bit of an extreme example, but what it’s supposed to illustrate is the highly nonlinear dynamics of chaotic systems. Tiny changes in initial conditions can make the world of difference to the consequences.” He took in Steve’s glassy stare and regarded him dubiously. “Do you really want me to go into it?”
Steve considered the proposition. “Nah, forget it.” He caught the bartender’s eye and signaled for two more. “How much do you think you’d get here for a genuine Stetson? Have a guess.”
Al lost count of the places they visited after that, and had no idea what time he finally got back to his apartment. He woke up halfway through the morning feeling like death, and called in sick. He was no better by lunchtime, and so decided to make a day of it.
It so happened that among the items on Alan Quentin’s desk that morning was a technical memorandum concerning structural bolts made from the alloy CYA-173 /B. Tests had revealed that prolonged cyclic stressing at low temperatures could induce metal crystallization, resulting in a loss of shear-strength. These bolts should be replaced after ten thousand hours in space environments, not thirty thousand as stipulated previously. Since CYA-173/B had been in use less than eighteen months, relatively few instances of its use would be yet affected. However, any fittings that had been in place for more than a year—and particularly where exposed to vibrational stress—should be resecured with new bolts immediately.
Because Al wasn’t there to do it, the information didn’t get forwarded to his company in California that day. Hence, it was not included in that week’s compendium of updates that the Engineering Support Group beamed out to its list of service centers, repair shops, maintenance-and-supply bases, and other users of the company’s products, scattered across the solar system.
Forty-eight hours after the updates that did get sent were received at GYO-3, a Federal Space Command base orbiting permanently above Ganymede, the largest satellite of Jupiter, the robot freighter Hermit departed on a nine-day haul to Callisto. In its main propulsion section, the Hermit carried four high-pressure centrifugal pumps, fastened to their mountings by CYA-173/B bolts. The Hermit had been ferrying assorted loads between the Jovian moons for over six months now, after trudging its way outward from the Belt for even longer before that. The bolts still holding the pumps were among the first of that type to have been used anywhere.
Fully loaded, the Maddox’s cargo cage combined the consignments from over fifty independents, averaging a thousand tons of asteroid material each, and stretched the length of an old-time naval cruiser. The loads included concentrations of iron, nickel, magnesium, manganese, and other metals for which there would never be a shortage of customers eager to avoid federal taxes and tariffs. A good month’s work for a team of ten working one of the nickel-iron asteroids would earn them a quarter million dollars. True, the costs tended to be high, too, but the offworld banks offered generous extended credit with the rock pledged as collateral. This was another source of friction with the federal authorities, who claimed to own everything and
didn’t recognize titles that they hadn’t issued themselves. But ten billion asteroids, each over a hundred meters in diameter, was a lot to try to police. And the torroidal volume formed by the Belt contained two trillion times more space than the sphere bounded by the Moon’s orbit.
Better money still could be made for hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and other light elements essential for biological processes and the manufacture of such things as plastics, which are not found on the Moon but occur in the carbonaceous chondrites. This type of asteroid contains typically up to five percent kerogen, a tarry hydrocarbon found in terrestrial oil shales, “condensed primordial soup”—a virtually perfect mix of all the basic substances necessary to support life. At near-Earth market rates, kerogen was practically priceless. And there was over a hundred million billion tons of it out there, even at five percent.
The driver, consisting of a triple-chamber fusion rocket and its fuel tanks, attached at the tail end when the cage was ready to go. Now flight-readied, the assembled launcher hung fifty miles off the Turner Maddox’s beam. The search radars were sweeping long range, and the defenses standing to at full alert. There’s no way to hide the flash when a two-hundred-gigawatt fusion thruster fires—the perfect beacon to invite attention from a prowling federal strike force.
“We’re clean,” Fuigerado reported from his position on one side of the bridge. He didn’t mean just within their own approach perimeter. The Maddox’s warning system was networked with other defense grids in surrounding localities of the Belt. Against common threats, the independents worked together.
Cassell checked his screens to verify that the Maddox’s complement of spiders, shuttles, maintenance pods, and other mobiles were all docked and accounted for, out of the blast zone. “Uprange clear,” he confirmed.
Liam Doyle tipped his cap to the back of a head of red, tousled Irish hair and ran a final eye over the field- and ignition-status indicators. A lot more was at stake here than with just the routine retrieval of an incoming crate. The skipper liked to supervise outbound launches in person.
“Sequencing on-count at minus ten seconds,” the controller’s voice said from the operations deck below.
“Send her off,” Doyle pronounced.
“Slaving to auto … . Guidance on … . Plasma ignition.”
White starfire lanced across twenty miles of space. The launcher kicked forward at five gs, moved ahead, its speed seeming deceptively slow for a few moments; then it pulled away and shrunk rapidly among the stars. On the bridge’s main screen, the image jumped as the tracking camera upped magnification, showing the plume already foreshortened under the fearsome buildup of velocity. Nineteen minutes later and twenty thousand miles downrange, the driver would detach and fire a retro burn, separating the two modules. The cage would remain on course for the Inner System, while the driver turned in a decelerating curve that would eventually bring it back to rendezvous with the Maddox.
“We’ve got a good one,” the controller’s voice informed everybody. Hoots and applause sounded through the open door from the communications room behind.
“Mr. Cassell, a bottle of the Bushmill’s, if you please,” Doyle instructed.
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Doyle turned to face the other chiefs who were present on the bridge. “And I’ve some more news for you to pass on; this is as good a time as any to mention it,” he told them. “This will be our last operation for a while. This can feels as if it’s getting a bit creaky to me. You can tell your people that we’ll be putting in for an overhaul
and systems refit shortly, so they’ll have a couple of months to unwind and blow some of their ill-gotten gains on whatever pleasures they can find that are to be had this side of Mars. Details will be posted in a couple of days.” Approving murmurs greeted the announcement, which they toasted with one small shot of Irish mellow each.
Later, however, alone in his private cabin with Cassell, Doyle was less sanguine. “I didn’t want to mention it in front of everybody, but I’ve been getting ominous messages from around the manor,” he confided. “The Bandit has been very quiet lately.”
Cassell took in the unsmiling set of the boss’s face. The Beltway Bandit was another consolidator like the Turner Maddox: same business, same clients, same modus operandi. “How quiet?” he asked.
Doyle made a tossing-away motion. “Nothing.” And that was very odd, for although accidents happened, and every now and again an unlucky or careless outfit was tracked down by federal patrols, disaster was never so quick and so total as to prevent some kind of distress message from being sent out.
“Are you saying it was the feds—they took it out?” Cassell asked.
“We don’t know. If it was, they did it in a way that nobody’s heard of before. That’s the real reason why I’m standing us down for a while.” He paused, looking at Cassell pointedly. “Some of the operators are saying that they’re using insiders.”
Cassell caught the implication. “You think Shimoto’s one?” he asked. “Could we be next?”
“What do you think? He’s with your section.”
Cassell shrugged. “He’s good at the job, mixes in well. Everybody likes him. We’re operating standard security. It hasn’t shown up anything.”
“His kind of ability could come from a federal pilots’ school,” Doyle pointed out. “And a pilot would be able to get himself away in something once the strike was set up.”
Cassell couldn’t argue. “I’ll make sure we keep a special eye on him during the R and R,” he said.
“Yes, do that, why don’t you?” Doyle agreed. “I want to be absolutely sure that we’re clean when we resume operating.”
Water.
With its unique molecular attributes and peculiar property of becoming lighter as it freezes, it could have been designed as the ideal solvent, catalyst, cleanser, as well as the midwife and cradle of life. Besides forming ninety percent of offworlders’ bodies, it provided culture for the algae in their food farms, grew their plants and nurtured their animals, cooled their habitats, and shielded them from radiation. The demand for water across the inner parts of the solar system outstripped that for all other resources.
Callisto, second largest of the moons of Jupiter and almost the size of Mercury, is half ice—equivalent to forty times all the water that exists on Earth. Mining the ice crust of Callisto was a major activity that the Terran authorities operated exclusively to supply the official space-expansion program. One of the reasons for the Space Command’s permanent presence out at the Jovian moons was to protect the investment.
Enormous lasers carved skyscraper-size blocks from the ice field, which were then catapulted off the moon by a fusion-powered electromagnetic launcher. Skimming around the rim of Jupiter’s gravity well, they then used the giant planet as a slingshot
to hurl themselves on their way downhill into the Inner System. As each block left the launch track on Callisto, high-power surface lasers directed from an array of sites downrange provided final course correction by ablating the block’s tail surface to create thrust. A crude way of improvising a rocket—but it worked just fine.
Or it had all the time up until now, that is.
The robot freighter Hermit, arriving from Ganymede, was on its final, stern-first approach into the surface base serving the launch installation as the next block out was starting to roll. One of the CYA-173/B bolts securing the Hermit’s high-pressure pumps sheared under the increased load as power was increased to maximum to slow down the ship. The bolt head came off like a rifle bullet, disabling an actuator, which shut down engine number two. Impelled by the unbalanced thrust of the other two engines, the Hermit skewed off course, overshot the base area completely, and demolished one of the towers housing the course-correction lasers for the mass launcher just as the block lifted up above the horizon twenty miles away.
As a result, two million tons of ice hove off toward Jupiter on a trajectory that wasn’t quite what the computers said it ought to be. The error was actually quite slight. But it would be amplified in the whirl around Jupiter, and by the time the block reached the Asteroid Belt, would have grown to a misplacement in the order of tens of millions of miles.
If the cause of the accident were ever tracked down, Al Quentin wouldn’t be around to be fired over it. He had started a small business of his own in Tokyo, importing Old West memorabilia from home.
The Turner Maddox was back on station and accumulating crates for the first of a new series of consignments. Its drives had been overhauled, its computers upgraded, and an improved plasma-stabilization system fitted to the launch driver. But there was a strain in the atmosphere that had not been present in earlier times. Five more consolidators had disappeared, everyone without a trace.
It had to be the feds, but nobody knew how they were locating the collection points, or managing to attack so fast that nobody ever got a warning off. All the consolidators had adopted a stringent policy of moving and changing their operating locales constantly. They were deploying more sophisticated defenses and warning systems. They pooled information on suspected inside informers and undercover feds. They gave dispatch data for incoming consignments as separately encrypted instructions to each subscriber to avoid revealing where the trajectories would converge. Yet they were still missing something.
Cassell looked around the familiar confines of the operations deck. The retrieval crew were at their stations, with a crate from a new subscriber called Farlode Holdings on its way in. Icoro had graduated now and was standby pilot this time—he was OK, Doyle had decided after having him tailed for a period and commissioning a background check. A new newcomer, Ibrahim Ahmel, born in an off-world colony—he said—was about to try his first live retrieval. Not everyone had come back after the break, and taking on more new faces was another of the risks that they were having to live with. Hank Bissen had quit, which was surprising. Cassell hadn’t judged him as the kind who would let the feds drive him out. And then again, maybe he’d simply banked more money from the last few trips than Cassell had thought.
The other major change was the outer screen of six autodrones toting the needlebeams and railguns that Doyle had invested in, currently in position two thousand miles out, transforming the Maddox operation into a miniature flotilla.
It brought home just how much this whole business was escalating. Cassell liked the old days better. What did that tell him about age creeping up? he asked himself.
Ibrahim was nervous. He had done OK on the simulator, but had an ultra-high self-image sensitivity that tended to wind him up. This was going to be a tense one. Cassell was glad to have Icoro there as standby, cool and relaxed behind a big, wide grin as always.
“Remember what you found on the sim; don’t cut the turn too sharp as you run in,” Suzi said from Ibrahim’s far side. “It makes it easy to overshoot on the lineup, and you end up losing more time straightening it out downrange than you save.”
Ibrahim nodded and looked across instinctively to Icoro for confirmation.
“She talks too much,” Icoro said. “Just don’t overworry. You’re not going to lose anything. I’ll cut right in if it starts to drift.”
“How did you make out on your first time?” Ibrahim asked.
“I goofed most miserably,” Icoro lied. Ibrahim looked reassured. Suzi caught Cassell’s gaze and turned her eyes upward momentarily. Cassell just shrugged. A screen on each console showed a telescopic view of the crate, still over fifteen minutes away, being sent from one of the drones. The colors of the containers that it was carrying showed one to be holding metals, one light elements, a third silicates, and two kerogen.
“It’s coming in nice and easy, rotation slow,” Icoro commented. “Should be a piece of cake.”
Suddenly the raucous hooting of the all-stations alert sounded. Doyle’s voice blasted from Suzi’s console—he had taken to being present through all operations on this trip.
“We’ve got intruders coming in fast. Cassell to the bridge immediately!”
Ibrahim froze. Suzi and Icoro plunged into a frenzy of activity at their consoles. Cassell had no time to register anything more as he threw himself at the communications rail and hauled up to the next level. As he passed through the communications room, he heard one of the duty crew talking rapidly into a mike: “Emergency! Emergency! This is Turner Maddox. We have unidentified incoming objects, believed to be attacking. Location is …”
Seconds later, Cassell was beside Doyle on the bridge. Displays flashed and beeped everywhere. Fuigerado was calling numbers from the sector-control report screen.
“How many of them?” Cassell asked, breathless.
Doyle, concentrating on taking in the updates unfolding around him, didn’t answer at once. He seemed less alarmed than his voice had conveyed a few moments before—if anything, he looked puzzled now. Finally he said, “I’m not so sure it is ‘them.’ It looks more like only one … .”
Cassell followed his eyes, scanned the numbers, and frowned. “One what? What the hell is it?”
“I’m damned if I know. The signature isn’t like any ship or structure that I’ve ever seen.”
“Range is twenty-five hundred miles,” the ordnance officer advised. “Defenses are tracking. It’s coming in at thirty miles a second.”
“I’ve got an optical lock from Drone Three,” Fuigerado called out. “You’re not gonna believe it.” Doyle and Cassell moved over to him. “Have you ever seen an asteroid with corners?” Fuigerado asked, gesturing.
It was long, rectangular, and white, like a gigantic shoe box, tumbling end over end as it approached. Cassell’s first fleeting thought was of a tombstone.
“Fifteen seconds from the perimeter,” the OO called. “I need the order now.”
“We have a spectral prelim,” another voice said. “It’s ice. Solid ice.”
Cassell’s first officer turned from the nav station. “Trajectory is on a dead intercept with the inbound Farlode crate. It’s going to cream it.”
“Do I shoot?” the OO entreated.
Doyle looked at him with a mixture of puzzlement and surprise. “Ah, to be sure, you can if you want to, Mike, but there’s precious little difference it’ll make. A rail-gun would be like bouncing popcorn off a tank to that thing. Your lasers might make a hole in a tin can, but that’s solid ice.”
They watched, mesmerized. On one screen, the miniature mountain hurtling in like a white wolf. On the other, the crate trotting on its way, an unsuspecting lamb. Maybe because of their inability to do anything, the impending calamity seemed mockingly brutal—obscene, somehow.
“That’s somebody’s millions about to be vaporized out there,” Cassell said, more to relieve the air with something.
“And a percentage of it ours, too,” Doyle added. Ever the pragmatist.
“Dead on for impact. It’s less than ten seconds,” the nav officer confirmed.
Those who could crowded around the starboard forequarter port. There wouldn’t be more than a fraction of a second to see it unaided. Eyes scanned the starfield tensely. Then Cassell nudged Doyle’s arm and pointed, at the same time announcing for the others’ benefit, “Two o’clock, coming in high.” Then there was a glimpse of something bright and pulsating—too brief and moving too fast for any shape to be discerned—streaking in like a star detached from the background coming out of nowhere … .
And all of a sudden half the sky lit up in a flash that would have blinded them permanently if the ports hadn’t been made of armored glass with a shortwave cutoff. Even so, all Cassell could see for the next ten minutes was after-image etched into his retina.
But even while he waited for his vision to recover, his mind reeled under the realization of what it meant. He had never heard of Farlode Holdings before. That inbound crate had been carrying something a lot more potent than ordinary metals, light elements, and kerogen. And a half hour from now, it would have been inside the cargo cage, just a short hop away from them.
So that was how the feds had been doing it!
The plant was a riot of bright green and yellow now, and the veins of violet were very bright. Chifumi nipped off a couple of wilted leaves with her fingers and watered the soil from the jar that she had brought from the kitchen behind the elevators. The accountant whose office it was seemed to be taking care of it, she was pleased to see. She would have to keep an eye on it for a while though, because he had not been in for several days. From the cards by his desk and the message of well-wishing that somebody had pinned on his wall, it seemed he was getting married. A framed picture had appeared next to the plant some time ago, of the accountant and the pretty girl that Chifumi had seen once or twice, who worked in the outer office. It seemed, then, that he was marrying his secretary.
Chifumi didn’t know if that was a good thing or not, but such things were accepted these days. Very likely the new wife would give up her job and have a family now, so she would no longer be his secretary, and the question wouldn’t arise. Chifumi wondered if they would take yamatsumi-sou to their new home. It would be better for Kyo than being stuck alone in an office every night, she thought.
She finished her evening’s work and went down to the lobby to wait for the
arrival of the bus. While she sat on one of the seats, she took from her purse the letter that had come in from Icoro, which one of his friends from the university had printed out and delivered to her just as she was leaving.
My dearest and most-loved mother,
I hope that everything is well with you. I am doing very well myself, and have just wired off a sum to keep you comfortable for a while, which you should be hearing about shortly.
Life out here where I am continues to be wonderfully interesting and exciting. I must tell you about the most amazing thing that happened just a couple of days ago … .