War Surf (8 page)

“Shee-Shee-Sheeba,” Kat stuttered, wrestling the yoke and trying to catch her breath. “You did—that was—well-done!”

Sheeba’s stunts with the submersible saved us from mortifying public arrest and finally earned her full-fledged acceptance by the Agonists. But our
Lorelei
surf was still a debacle. This new failure cost us more precious status points—not to mention a tanker load of my hard cash. In fact, our crew slipped from second rank in the northern hemisphere to fourth. After that, we needed Heaven badly.

Heaven. The zone of zones. It was to be our proof of prowess, reprieve from shame, ticket back to glory. And it scared me to death.

“Don’t tell Shee that I, uh…that I’m connected with Heaven,” I discreetly asked my crewmates.

We’d just finished a cheesecake binge in my observatory, and Kat was downloading her cardio stats through her IBiS. “You mean Shee doesn’t know the cultured Mr. Deepra’s a warmonger?”

“Slippery Nass.” Win sucked his fork. “You want her to think your hands are clean.”

“I’m just saying”—I glanced in my travel mirror and flicked an errant crumb from my lip—“Sheeba has some dewy ideas about business. So keep it mute, okay?”

Grunze buckled electronic pec-flexers across his beefy chest. “We got it, sweet-piss. We’ll give your tart the snow job.”

Five days later, we met again in my condo to run our first virtual-reality scout. The orbiting factory called A13 was not a typical satellite. For one thing, it did not travel in the G Ring with other Com traffic. In that dense belt of geosynchronous satellites circling Earth’s waist, not only factories but also broadcast stations, resorts, private homes and science labs vied with each other for trajectory slots. Everyone wanted a site in the G Ring. By contrast. Heaven took its own strangely perturbed polar orbit, steering high and clear of shuttle lanes and distancing itself from neighbors.

Under my observatory dome, Win mixed the margaritas while Chad projected holographic images of A13, deviously lifted from a secure Provendia server. One way my firm controlled costs was by building its factories from the remains of old spaceships. They’d fashioned Heaven from an enormous, bullet-shaped fuel tank. Dented, corroded and weakened by radiation, the old fossil must have been drifting for over two centuries when Provendia resurrected it.

The bullet-shaped tower housed a complete five-story production line with two hundred live-aboard workers. Four lower decks held living quarters and support equipment, while the cavernous fifth deck occupied the tank’s upper height—all the way up to the tapering bullet point. This fifth deck housed the food-brewing vats.

Now picture the tank’s bullet point linked by a long, flexing tether to a colossal counterweight made from a rough-cut ball of asteroid. Can you see the tank and counterweight whirling around each other in space like a pair of figure skaters? That’s it. Three revolutions per minute created enough centrifugal force in the tank’s base to approximate Earth-normal gravity.

Verinne emailed us long boring descriptions of A13’s artificial gravity, including its weird Coriolis effects. Personally, I didn’t browse her text messages because we weren’t going to dock with Heaven. Our war zone would be strictly outside the satellite. On no account would we go aboard.

Why did this particular war break out? It had been running for nine months, but Verinne’s research uncovered no explanations. Provendia kept A13 confidential, and since I owned a majority share of the company, Grunze badgered me for inside dirt I put him off, claiming the nondisclosure clause. Finally, I hinted that the protes wanted more vacation time. Well, that was one way to express their grievance. I couldn’t tell Grunze the truth.

The first act of war had occurred when A13’s resident workers sabotaged their own docking port Since men, they’d been fighting off anyone who tried to board—a rather self-destructive act because that meant they couldn’t take on supplies. Provendia’s gunship was strafing the tank with small mass-to-target noisemaker missiles—irksome and debilitating but not powerful enough to rupture the hull. A13 represented, after all, a valuable piece of real estate. Still, one of those noisemakers could frappe a human body if it detonated close enough. That fire zone between the gunship and the factory, that would be our war surf. We planned to space-dive straight through the middle, wearing nothing but armored EVA suits. Vicious bold.

“Tell me again, what’s the weekly rental on an EVA suit?” I asked. My crewmates were scarfing snacks, and I was totaling expenses in my head. Lately, I’d been husbanding my pence and pesos with more care.

“Don’t go cheap,” Grunze said through a mouthful of Cheez Whiz. “We need the high-performance thruster packs and full armor.”

“Besides, we have to look sexy on our video. This is our big comeback, and we have the Agonist image to uphold.” Kat licked fudge icing from her arm.

“Then you cough up the change,” I said.

“Play nice.” Verinne wiped crumbs from her lips and printed out the price sheet. Now that her dying wish was about to come true, she made every move with edgy restraint, as if one wrong gesture might jinx the surf and cause another delay. Delay was one thing Verinne could not afford.

Near the south window wall, Winston and Sheeba erupted with peals of laughter. They were goofing around with my telescopes, pretending to hunt for stars through the heavy Norwegian smog. We all heard Win stage-whisper in Sheeba’s ear, “What does EVA stand for?”

Kat and Grunze rolled their eyes. I said, “Win, you need to check your plaque levels again. You’re getting that dementia glaze.”

Grunze added, “Yeah, Winny, your wetware needs a pressure wash.”

“I meant to install another upgrade last week,” Win said with a crooked grin.

“They’re just peeved because you’re so gorgeous.” Sheeba wrapped her arms around Win. When she kissed him on the mouth, I crushed a shrimp canape’ in my fist, and tiny bits of pseudo-seafood rained on the carpet.

Then Sheeba lowered her voice. “EVA stands for extra vehicular activity. That means spacewalking.”

I ground my fake molar implants and watched her blow a raspberry in his hair. She pities the old bugger. She’s always drawn to needy people, I rationalized. Way too tenderhearted, that girl. I joined them at the window and offered Shee a fried wonton.

“No thanks, beau. I’m not hungry.”

“You’ve hardly eaten anything.” I held her waist and pushed the snack playfully against her lips.

“But I don’t—” She laughed and tried to brush my hand away, but when I insisted, she finally opened her mouth and took the food from my hand. Afterward, there was an awkward silence.

“We’re leaving early tomorrow,” Verinne finally said. “Let’s go home and rest.”

“Sleep here,” I whispered to Shee, “in the small bedroom if you like.”

Sheeba loosened my arm from around her waist. “No, I’m too rattled to sleep.”

Her answer disappointed me, but I understood how she felt. Heaven rattled me, too, more than any of them could know. Nevertheless, I was committed. My surfer status was on the line.

Chad reserved suites for us at the Mira Club, an elegant resort hotel hovering in G-Ring orbit, thirty-six thousand kilometers above the Amazon delta. We checked into our rooms twenty hours before Mira’s path crossed under A13’s peculiar trajectory, and we used the hotel’s powerful telescopes to watch the Provendia gunship firing on the factory. Did I mention that, in the entire nine months since this war began, no one had penetrated Heaven’s zone? Did I mention why?

First, space-diving through hard vacuum is no evening at the opera. You need precise skills and very expensive equipment. Second, even the best pro-line body armor will not block a noisemaker missile. If anyone in our crew took a direct hit, no amount of nanocellular repair could reconstitute the gory chunks of flesh into a living person. But there was a third and more critical reason why this surf surpassed all other Class Tens ever recorded in surfdom archives.

Provendia’s management (i.e., myself and my board) had spread a warning that this zone was forbidden to surfers. We announced that violators would be prosecuted, fined, disenfranchised and possibly fired from their jobs. For an exec, getting fired was a catastrophe too dire to speak aloud. It meant demotion to the level of a prote.

Provendia’s warning was not an empty threat, either. I signed the order myself. All I could do was trust that my chairman emeritus position—and Chad’s draconian bribes—would protect us. More important, our surf route would not take us inside the factory. We would remain outside at all times. I thought that would keep us safe.

On June 6, 2253, local Mira time, we piled into Kat’s space shuttle and lifted off. I kept offering Shee little attentions to make her comfortable, and once when I was readjusting her thruster harness, she snapped at me. Pre-surf jitters. Everyone had them. Almost at once, her good humor returned, and she apologized. I gave her a special present I’d been saving, a gold wrist-watch with a pearly pink glow-screen, inscribed with her name, the date and the word “Heaven.” She slipped it on with a melancholy smile, and I couldn’t tell if she liked it or not. Choosing the right gift for Shee was always so difficult.

Despite our secrecy, news of our attempt had spread like a virus through the surfer underground, and some of our fans chartered a big Dolphin 88 to follow along and watch us dodge bare-assed through Provendia’s missile fire in nothing but our flimsy EVA suits. Fame. Huah! We waved our fists and preened for the crowd.

Five of us were making the run. Me, of course. Grunze, Kat, Verinne—and Sheeba. We made Win stay behind to drive the shuttle.

Looking back, I ask myself many questions. Why did we violate common sense and bring a beginner to the riskiest Class Ten in the solar system? Well, it was Kat who stirred Sheeba up with wild rumors about the place, and Grunze who showed her the schematics, and Verinne who took her to practice space-diving in a simulation tank. Winston bought her a smartskin longjohn to keep her snuggly warm. And me, what can I say? I let her eagerness cloud my judgment.

In a matter of weeks, Sheeba had moved from outsider newbie to become the warm magnetic core of our crew. For so many years, it had been just us five. Then subtly, all our positions shifted to align with Sheeba’s fresh new field of energy. At least, I think so. Nothing I remember is firm, except how lovely Shee looked in her new EVA suit. It was white with black piping, the same as mine.

“Nasir, thank you.” That day, she was all peachy blond, and her nervous fidgeting made her seem more vulnerable than ever. “This is the darkest thing I’ve ever done.”

She wasn’t wearing contact lenses, and I remember falling under the spell of her naked eyes. Streaks of gray, green and gold rayed out from her pupils like reflections on water. Why did she ever cover those amazing eyes?

“You can still stay behind. It’s not too late.” I’d taken every precaution I could think of to keep her safe, yet my neck still knotted.

Sheeba leaned against me and let me feel the weight of her robust young body. “Beau, there’s a force building around this trip. We’re meant to be here now.”

How strangely her words ring in my memory as I wait through this acid fluorescent flicker. The four steel walls of this anteroom are not thick enough to hold my contrition. My remorse leaks through the vents and filters into the corridor. But the end hasn’t come. I have still more time to wait, and to remember.

I want to tell you about Sheeba. I want to stick her to this page with words as sharp as diamonds. But every time I try, she vaporizes into waves of frothy, unfixed conjecture. I can’t even describe the shade of her skin. I used to believe she was too young to be anyone in particular. All that wide-eyed bliss about seeking the dark—just a Net fad. Junior execs blogged “endarkment” the same way my friends and I used to blog transhumanism when we were kids. Sheeba was still growing. She hadn’t finished becoming herself.

Or maybe it was me. Maybe I just couldn’t see her.

At the time, I saw only that she needed looking after. There she was, virgin spacer, circling way outside the G Ring toward a mega-serious, legally proscribed war zone, thousands of kilometers from easy rescue, because of me. For the fortieth time, I rechecked her settings, really just an excuse to touch her.

“We’ll dive through the fire zone, but you’ll lurk at the edge, Shee. Understand? No one expects you to take the hero route.”

“Yeah, I got it the first time.” The briefest hint of annoyance twisted her lips. Then she beamed like the sun. “Silly beau, you stress too much.” She grabbed my trembling hands and stooped to kiss me. Right then, I promised myself that after this surf was over, I would get another spine extension.

The gawky Dolphin 88 slowed us down—we felt obliged to wait for our fans—so it was past midnight, local Mira, when we intercepted Heaven’s orbit. At first, we watched the action from about five hundred kilometers. While the fans in the Dolphin tried repeatedly to hack our conference call, I chugged cola through a low-gravity straw and squinted through the shuttle’s small round window. Chad kept breaking my train of thought with last-minute questions about stock trades and wall-fabric choices. Grunze hovered weightless beside me, clinging to a grab-loop. His purple EVA suit scintillated with the silver and red paisleys. He looked like a carnival performer.

A13 and its rock chunk spun around each other like two balls on a chain, whirligigging their way across the familiar smoggy wad we called Mother Earth. Though the schematics showed A13 as a bullet-shaped tower, it actually lay parallel to Earth’s surface, so that one side always faced “down” toward the planet while the other faced “up” toward the sun. And since the factory’s strange polar orbit kept it in sunlight most of the time, the “up” side blazed almost constantly white while the “down” side hung in near perpetual shade. For only three hours in every twenty-four did Heaven dip through Earth’s shadow and lose the light.

Provendia’s gunship moved in unison with A13, keeping station half a kilometer off the tank’s base and closely tracking its spin. A thin glossy ovoid, the ship looked like a drop of oil that had leaked from the bottom of the tank. Tracers of missile fire arced from the gunship to a cluster of solar panels mounted on the tank’s sunny side, near the base. That was our war zone. We followed and waited. When Heaven moved out of the light, behind Earth’s protective shield, then we would go.