Emprise (13 page)

Mobuto scowled at that. “If that is so, what use for it have you?”

“We need it to provide the services your people will receive, to put the satellites in the sky that will educate your people about the world they live in. We need it to bring back to earth the riches of space,” said Rashuri. “You did not attend the conference last September in Geneva—”

Mobuto laughed, an unpleasant bleat. “No, but I have heard of the crazy Englishman and his tales.”

“The Englishman may indeed be crazy—so many of them are,” said Rashuri, smiling. “But his tales are true. The Consortium is in contact with the beings from space. It is to us that they have promised to give their knowledge and the power it will bring. And we will share it only with those who have proven themselves our friends.”

The scowl returned to Mobuto’s face. “And how would I explain this to my people? The matter is more than irrelevant—it is incomprehensible. Their world ends at the horizon. They have known no change for a thousand years.”

Rashuri did not challenge the exaggerations; if Mobuto chose to pretend he was president to sixteen million nomadic headers, so be it. “We will tell them—when the time is right, and they have been prepared to accept a larger world. In the meantime, you will have the means to make their lives more comfortable.”
Or your own
, he added silently.

Mobuto had apparently made his way at last to the same thought. “There would be expenses in arranging this, officials whose time would be consumed by this,” he said slowly.

“We would be glad to cover those expenses. May I suggest a fee of one percent of sales, paid directly to you in the currency or commodity of your choice? You could then distribute that fee on any basis you so choose.”

Mobuto paused for some mental arithmetic. “I will consider it,” he said finally. Rashuri rose and bowed formally. “If you will permit me the liberty of having documents prepared for your review—” Mobuto’s head bobbed in agreement. “This fee—if I agree—it should not appear in the documents.”

Rashuri smiled inwardly. He had priced his offer so that he could raise the fee to three percent if necessary. Thanks to Zambia and to Mobuto’s greed, it would not be. “Of course.”

Driscoll stood on the tarmac and gazed with incredulous eyes at the silver-gray column of metal which stood with him on the wasteland that was Shuang-ch’eng-tzu. Even new, the
Long March III
had been far from the pinnacle of rocket technology. With a first-stage thrust of just 280,000 kg and a payload into Clarke orbit of barely 1000 kg, it was not even a match for the old American workhorse Delta.

The addition of a solid-fuel kick stage had boosted the predicted payload somewhat, but its only tests had been static ones. October’s flight of Sun Rise A, the unmanned test on which Driscoll had insisted, had not lasted long enough for the fourth stage to make its debut.

Looking at the sleek cylindrical shape, it was hard for Driscoll to conceive of the terrible fury its bilious liquids contained. But he had seen the films of Sun Rise A, the yellow-black maelstrom of flame that had enveloped the tumbling vehicle when it was barely five hundred metres off the pad. There had been fire and more fire and only later smoke, a heavy pall out of which the small surviving fragments fell back to earth.

He knew that Tai Chen had been furious over the embarrassment. To meet her insistence on speed, the first rocket had been rescued from a missile storage area, given routine pressure tests, subjected to an electrical diagnostic, and brought to the pad essentially untried, as though it were someone’s car which had merely sat a week in winter without being used. The result had been pyrotechnic rather than ballistic.

Extreme measures had been taken to prevent a second, and this time deadly, failure. Tai Chen had ordered Sun Rise B disassembled down to basic components, each component fault-checked, every questionable part replaced or re machined, each subassembly tested during reassembly. The entire task had been accomplished in twenty-nine days, a feat possible only in a nation whose wealth lay in the hands of workers either dedicated to or made docile by their government.

Driscoll had come to China by way of Ghaziabad, where he had watched Schmidt and a team of fifty students direct a workforce of five hundred in the erection of a forest of gleaming metal trees. Indian iron, Chinese tungsten, and Greek aluminum had been brought together in the Ganges Valley to create a sight that perplexed the native inhabitants: an antenna array containing five thousand elements spaced over five square kilometres. When Driscoll was there, the last sections of the hollow waveguide conduit were being flushed with nitrogen to remove any moisture. If Sun Rise B were successful, soon an endless supply of free energy would course along those pristine waveguides.

Thinking that the astronaut’s final briefing should be nearly completed, Driscoll turned and reentered the plain concrete-block building which served as their launch center. He stood in the doorway of the briefing room—a pretentious name for a bare-walled room with a rickety table and five wooden chairs—as the flight director finished his questioning of Kevin Ulm. All five chairs were filled, and several other launch team members stood along the wall.

Ulm, the diminutive, sandy-haired volunteer from whom so much was expected, was animated and voluble. He acknowledged Driscoll’s arrival with a thumbs-up sign and a wink in the middle of one of his rapid-fire answers. The questions were detailed, since for reasons of mass the burden placed on the man in the loop was great. Time had permitted only navigation to be computerized.

“Okay,” the flight director said finally. “I’m satisfied.”

Ulm sprang to his feet. “Then let’s get going.”

“Just a moment,” said Driscoll, taking a step into the room. “I have a couple of questions of my own.” Ulm’s eyebrows made a peak. “Of course.”

“Where were you for Sun Rise
AT
He looked at the flight director, then at Driscoll. “In the control room. We did a full rehearsal, except for ingress.”

“Then you saw what happened.”

“Sure—just like everybody else within a hundred klicks.” Ulm laughed uneasily and pointed to a purple scar on his forearm. “I picked this up when the windows blew in.”

“I want to know that you’re riding that rocket of your own free will and for your reasons, not ours,” Driscoll said.

“What’s this all about?” asked the flight director.

Ulm waved him off. “Look, Doctor. I know what happened. I also know you’ve made this bird as safe you could.”

“No, we didn’t. You have no emergency escape tower. You have no reentry capability. You have no spacesuit. You have only a twenty-five percent maneuvering propellant margin and a thirty-day oxygen reserve. If you exhaust either one before we can reach you with a resupply ship, you’ll die a very ugly death.”

“Yes, sir. And I appreciate your frankness, sir,” said Ulm. “But if I understand correctly, those are all decisions that had to be made for the mission to be doable at all. I’m not ignorant of the risks. But I have a chance to do something that counts, and that’s worth ten times the risks.”

“Well said,” spoke a new voice. The voice was familiar to most in the room, and all turned toward its owner, Devaraja Rashuri. He eyed Driscoll meaningfully. “Are we finished here?”

“Yes, Chairman,” said the flight director. “Then let us enjoy the sunrise of a new day, a new day for all of us. Let it be done.”

And it was done. Outside the launch center and a half-kilometre farther from the pad, Rashuri and Driscoll joined a small group which had no responsibilities but to watch and remember. There were cheers, whistles, and applause at T-1 minute, and again at T-0:30. There was no clock, no loudspeaker, but one man who had set his watch from the master clock inside called out the time, and others picked up the chant down to zero.

A pale yellow light appeared at the base of the
Long March III
, and a halo of steam and dust erupted outward from its tail. “Go, go,” someone called out with earnest urgency as the exhaust grew to blinding brightness. For a long moment the rocket did not move, then, still in silence, it slowly began to rise. Only then did the sound finally reach the viewing area, a crackling, rambling bath of energy that made speech and even thought impossible.

Slowly rolling as it climbed, Sun Rise B arched eastward, slicing through two cloudlets and hurtling upward on a column of gray-white smoke. As the noise faded a hundred heads turned as one, following the rocket’s progress across the sky. The binoculars hung around Driscoll’s neck, forgotten, as he took his breath in fast, shallow gasps and blinked back tears.

“Do you see, now, that it is better that he can’t return,” Rashuri said at his elbow. “He will always be on our minds. He will keep us pointed in the right direction.”

Driscoll could only nod, not trusting his voice. As Sun Rise B disappeared into a high-hanging haze, he felt for a chair and relieved his unsteady legs of their burden. He closed his eyes and bit his lower lip. “Glorious,” he said finally. “Goddamn glorious.”

An hour later, Anofi’s team at Lord’s Bridge got the first confirmation that Ulm was safely in orbit. Using one of the Five-kilometre Telescope’s dishes, they tracked his orbital path and relayed that information directly to Shuang-ch’eng-tzu. But more important for them was to hear Ulm’s voice, broadcast on a shortwave ham frequency by the powerful transmitter on board Sun Rise. That frequency had been chosen in the hope that, given time for word to spread, millions might hear the voice from space.

“Greetings to the people of Earth from Commander Kevin Ulm of Sun Rise. I’m speaking to you from a spacecraft traveling higher than anyone’s been for thirty years and faster than anything you or I ever imagined.” Ulm’s voice was cheerful, friendly, and relaxed. “This is a beautiful planet we have, and I can see it all spread out beneath me, the blue of the ocean and the white of the clouds as pure as the blackness of space. I can pick out good green fields and forests and even some major roads. One thing I can’t see is borders and checkpoints and fences, and I like it that way. Makes me realize that we’re all in this together. Last night—and nights are just ninety minutes apart up here—I saw the lights of Mexico City and Los Angeles. I’ll be looking for your lights tonight, England.”

“Roger, Sun Rise, this is PANCONTRAC Lord’s Bridge, we’ve got a good plot on you and read you five by five. Hope you’ve got a big audience for your radio show. PANCONTRAC Hyderabad will give you the adjusted orbital inclination and target intercept on your next pass. Any problems to report, over.”

“No problems,” said Ulm. “I could ask for a bigger apartment but I couldn’t ask for a better view.”

Late that evening, China time, Ulm fired the kick stage to drive Sun Rise B up out of its orbit and toward its target: the disabled solar-power satellite resting at 90 degrees west in Clarke orbit. The only such structure ever completed, the satellite had once served the city of St. Louis, keeping its residents in relative luxury during the early years of the collapse.

But six years after the Fuel War, the attitude controls had become erratic, making the SPS unable to lock onto its rectenna farm target. Following the instructions programmed into it, SPS One had gone into standby mode. Orienting its thousands of square metres of panels so as to balance the thrust of the solar wind, it settled down to wait patiently on station for a repair mission that never came.

Now that repair mission was coming. The Sun Rise team had studied every bit of data available on the SPS project—thanks to NASA’s International program and Schmidt’s efforts to track down ESA files and personnel, there was a great deal—and narrowed the possible causes of the satellite’s failure to three. Aboard Sun Rise were the replacement parts, tools, and in the person of Ulm, knowledge needed to correct any of them. Or at least that was the hope; everyone knew but very few admitted that the reality could be quite different.

Even before firing the kick stage, Ulm had been able to spot the SPS as a brilliant star moving against the background of its dimmer cousins. By the second day of the mission be could see its rectangular shape clearly; by the morning of the third, he was close enough to discern its scale. Mankind had built many structures more massive, but none larger than SPS One. Its collector wings had an area of four square kilometres. The control and transmission station at the apex, actually larger than a three-bedroom house, appeared as only a speck.

High above the Galapagos Islands and the blue Pacific, out of touch with any of the Consortium’s few listening or tracking posts, Ulm fired the second stage of his kick motor to circularize his orbit and match velocities with the giant sunsat. Then he began to jockey his flealike ship toward the docking tubes on the +Z side of the control station.

To Ulm’s dismay, he found Sun Rise’s maneuvering thrusters both touchy and unbalanced, making his efforts to complete the rendezvous seem almost random. What Ulm intended to be a gentle nudge was frequently much stronger, turning what had been expected to be a challenge to his skills into a test of his luck. His own impatience aggravated the problem, and with half his reserve exhausted and the docking still not achieved, he forced himself to back away until he had caught a half dozen hours sleep in his tethered sac.

Morning brought him a calmer, surer touch and a new determination. He maneuvered Sun Rise in again, and this time with a minimum of miscues brought the Shuttle-era universal docking adapters together with a solid bump. The three-fingered hands interlocked with each other before Sun Rise could rebound, though his ship oscillated and vibrated for several minutes from the impact of the collision.

It took longer than that for Ulm to work up the courage to remove the barrier in the crawl tube and enter the command station. How many failures might have followed the first one sixteen years ago? How long might the station’s systems have been sitting cold and inert, just so much space junk waiting to be disposed of by a meteoroid collision some thousand or million years hence?

But the builders of SPS One had built well. Though the air inside the station was fuggy and the primary diagnostic computer refused to function, its backup responded to Ulm’s requests. Within twelve hours, SPS One began a slow drift westward to its new home above the Indian Ocean, powered only by the carefully managed pressure of light on its glass and aluminum sails and carrying in its bowels the progenitor of the Second Space Age.