The Quiet Pools

As soon as they figure out a way to take a shot at Memphis, they will.”

Marshall’s cheek twitched, and his gaze narrowed. “Is the ship safe?”

Dryke placed his hands on his hips and cocked his head before he answered. “I could run out a long list of precautions that we’ve taken and send you away happy and reassured. But it’s not the doors we bar that we have to worry about. It’s the one we don’t. It’s the surprise. Is the ship safe? The truth is, I don’t really know.”

Well into the second century of the Space Age, it was no secret that the best way to destroy a space habitat was to throw things at it. The things did not need to be big, complicated, or explosive, so long as they were thrown hard enough. A few kilometers per second was just fine, as everyone who remembered the inglorious end of Freedom knew.

Just nine years after it was completed, the American space station’s main module was shattered—and three astronauts killed—by an in-falling bit of space flotsam. According to one reconstruction, a fifty-gram binding rivet lost during the construction of the first Japanese direct-broadcast platform was the probable culprit.

But it was very hard to throw things at Memphis—as hard as throwing a bowling ball out of the bottom of a well. Most of the major habitats, including all but two of the satlands, were part of the “Ring of Pearls,” only two thousand kilometers above the Earth. Memphis was riding along in tandem with one of the exceptions—just ten klicks west of Takara, in Clarke orbit, thirty-six thousand kilometers above the blue Pacific and the atolls of the Gilbert Islands. Nothing orbited higher save for a geophysical survey satellite or two and traffic bound for Mars or Heinlein City.

Being at the top of the well was a considerable advantage. The fastest operational missile—the Asteroid Watch’s nuclear-tipped Stonebreaker—would take nearly an hour to arrive from low orbit. The Peace Force’s aging “shotgun” battle-suppression satellites could not do much better—their hypervelocity railguns would bridge the gap in twenty-six minutes at closest approach.

But orbital mechanics was not Memphis’s only defense. The universe threw things, too, especially at starships traveling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Memphis had several layers of protection, including an ion deflector, the plasma bow cushion, and a particle defense system built around a pair of HEL free-electron lasers. Twenty-six minutes was more than enough time for the big gyros to turn the bell-shaped starship and bring the PDS to bear.

And against the one threat Memphis was not expecting to face in deep space— laser weapons—Reid had deployed around the starship several agile crane-trucks bearing huge square scatter plates in their construction grapples like shields. Dryke thought of them as the Knights Peculiar.

In that context, sabotage from within shaped up as a more likely prospect. But the memory of Javier Sola was strong, and putting a bomb aboard Memphis would be no mean feat.

The loyalty of the Takara workers, already securely anchored by community pride, was guaranteed by a simple expedient— the finishing crews were made up solely of those who had been selected to the mission. The small fleet of buses which ferried workers and materials across the ten-kilometer moat to the ship was owned by Transcon and operated by Diaspora pilots. And Governor Wian was allowing Matt Reid to supervise the screening procedures in the satland’s euphemistically named immigration and import office, Takara Welcome.

No possibility was too wild to take seriously—not even a pocket nuke smuggled into Takara and detonated there, turning the satland into a giant fragmentation grenade. Even the one scenario which most troubled Dryke, involving the hijacking of a Takara shuttle and its use as a 120-ton battering ram, had been covered nine ways to Sunday.

Secure without, secure within. The slogan was displayed in English and kanji throughout the Project quarter on Takara and Memphis. Seen so often, it had become a state of mind, a statement of reality. It would be unfair to say that Reid’s team was cocky, but they were confident.

Which is why the attack on Memphis, when it came, was every bit as much a surprise as Dryke had projected.

The black cylindrical satellite had been on station three and a half degrees east of Takara for nearly three months. It was listed in the Highstar registry as Slot 355, 177.5° East, Hughes TC-2000—a dedicated data communications satellite owned by RJR Financial Services, Wilmington, Delaware.

In adspeak, the TC-2000 was referred to as a mature technology—which in this case meant it was guaranteed to be slow, expected to be reliable, and presumed to be a bargain. In spacespeak, the TC-2000 was disparagingly referred to as a tin can. Compared to the huge Skylink 4 and Nikkei N-2 com platforms at 175° east and 5° west, the little satellite was a mouse among the lions.

But the mouse had a secret: It was not the satellite that RJR had ordered, that Hughes had built, that the United Parcel Service had accepted for delivery to a towing and retrieval company on Technica. It was, instead, a seven-year-old TC-2000 which had been originally built for the Royal Sultanate of Brunei, but was never placed in service. It had appeared on the secondary market in midsummer, offered by the People’s Revolutionary Government of Brunei during a budget crisis—a bargain Jeremiah could not resist.

When Taiwanese technicians were finished modifying it, the TC-2000 featured a high-thrust ascent engine concealed behind the antenna skirt, an extra guidance package wired to the satellite’s transponder 4 relay circuits, and five hundred kilos of enhanced chemical explosive. For all that, it weighed just eleven kilos more than the satellite it was to replace. The switch was made at the UPS depot outside Miami, at the price of a Corvette sport flyer for the depot chief and a joybird’s enthusiastic friendship for the driver.

Three days after Dryke and Marshall’s conversation, a man in a white turtleneck and brown duck pants walked into an RJR office in Hong Kong. He inquired about certain new stock offerings and applied for a modest life insurance policy. Both transactions were bounced to the home office on transponder 4 of the satellite in slot 355. A monitor program took note, a nanoswitch closed, and the mouse roared.

Trackers at Highstar saw the satellite start to move in its orbit within seconds. But Memphis, looking ahead in its orbit past the bulk of Takara and the clutter of Skylink 4, saw nothing, even after the Highstar alert was received.

It was well past midnight in Prainha, and Matt Reid’s call roused Mikhail Dryke from a light sleep. Barefoot, hair tousled, with only a pair of half-jeans hastily added to the briefs and T-shirt he slept in, he ran down the stairs and through the halls to the orbital operations center.

By the time Dryke reached it, the center staff had a plot up on the main window, and the danger was apparent. Relative to the starship, the satellite was already moving at nearly 1,500 kph, on a looping path that would hide it behind Skylink 4 or Takara for most of its journey. The orbital mechanics were tricky, but predictable. By the time the satellite skimmed over the top of Takara, it would be just a few short seconds from its target.

“Takara’s got nothing to knock it down with,” Reid was saying, his face grave. “We’re turning the ship now”—Dryke could hear the alarms sounding in the background—“but it looks like the only shot we’ll have will light up Takara as well.”

“How much can the skin take?”

“I don’t know. Probably not enough to take the spill. I’ve got someone on the line to Governor Wian’s office. Wait—I’ve got the PF on another channel.”

Reid did not mute the link to Prainha, and Dryke listened as he talked with the Peace Force monitors on Technica.

“Yes, that’s right. We’ve got a threat to Takara and Memphis. Can you help us? No, our angle is bad. A destruct on the Hughes? No, I don’t think so. Beth—are you on with RJR? Ask them if they’ve got reentry destruct on the satellite.”

“Range, five hundred ten kilometers,” said an AIP voice in the background.

“They say reentry destruct failed,” said a woman.

“Shit,” said Reid. “Look, RJR can’t control it and they can’t destroy it. Can you do anything from the line?” He was talking to the Peace Force again.

“Not enough time,” Dryke said to himself, studying the plot of the several satellites.

“What? Was that you, Mikhail?”

“Matt, there’s not enough time. We can’t burn Takara—”