The Quiet Pools

bright sparks against the blue sky, already two hundred kilometers up and moving two thousand meters per second, racing for orbit.

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

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

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

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

“The Zodiac ready?”

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

“I have it. Easy as skeet-shooting.”

“I’ll make the call.”

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

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

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

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

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 The outdated and undersized berths of the Kilindini anchorage recalled the latter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s happening?” he demanded.

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

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

“I’m sorry, Mr. Dryke. I don’t know.”

“Is it Jeremiah?”

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

“Goddammit,” Dryke muttered. “Goddammit.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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