“Mission profile?”
“Retrieval. Bring back the biggest piece of Thirteen they can find for inspection.”
“We’re in an unsecured combat zone. Marines’ll probably ask for combat air patrol to run cover for their bird.”
Susan considered this for a moment. “That’s fair. Scopes, launch another armed drone and hand it off to Flight Ops.”
“Launch CAP drone for the recovery bird, yes’m,” Mattu answered.
Satisfied, Miguel moved away to get on a com line to the small craft bay.
“Okay people, we’ve cut the hole in the ice and dropped our line in. Now it’s time to lean back and wait for a nibble.”
“I thought we were the fish,” CL Nesbit said dryly.
“Yeah.” Susan allowed him the point. “I guess I lost track of the metaphor.”
TWO
It was Tyson Abington’s favorite part of the day: when a hush came over the office tower as its occupants filed out from another day’s labors for a night of well-earned relaxation with their friends and loved ones.
For Tyson, it was one of the few moments of calm during the day when he could reflect and appreciate everything he and long generations of his family had built. His two-meter frame stood up against the transparent aluminum observation window of his penthouse office, close enough he almost left a nose print on the cool metal.
The transparent metal was ten centimeters thick, yet clear as a still pond. It was seamless, and required no structural bracing, being more than strong enough to carry unaided the weight of the dozen engineering floors and communications antennas above it. Both electrical power and data passed through it wirelessly. The optical clarity and lack of framing made the illusion that the ceiling was simply floating overhead incredibly convincing. It was easy to forget the “glass” was there at all. An expensive illusion to create, but on nights like this, Tyson knew the extravagance had been worth every nudollar.
The space took up the entire two hundred and eighty-eighth floor of the Immortal Tower in the heart of downtown Methuselah, capital of the entire planet of Lazarus. The nomenclature sounded ominous, but its history was quite innocent, bordering on cheeky. At the dawn of the company, Tyson’s forbearer, the legendary Reginald Abington, had been a brilliant engineer and savvy businessman. He’d been the first to perfect and patent an industrial-scale method to condense negative matter using overlapping gravity wave interference. The resulting company was named Abington Gravitonic Engineering, or AGE for short. Over the generations, AGE became Ageless Corp., and once Ageless set up shop on its very own colony world, well, the names sort of picked themselves.
For reasons of pride and exclusivity, the Immortal Tower was the tallest building in Methuselah. It would remain so in perpetuity, on account the Abington family owned all of the airspace above seven hundred and fifty meters inside the city limits, and anyone that wanted to build above that height had to pay a monthly licensing fee that increased logarithmically with each additional floor.
Technically, Ageless owned the airspace, as all the transtellars were publicly traded companies by law. But the Abingtons had managed to maintain a controlling interest over the centuries through clever maneuvering and more than one “incentivized” marriage proposal. Ageless wasn’t the largest transtellar, or the wealthiest, but it was one of the oldest, and the most stable. It had provided for its customers, shareholders, and employees in equal measure for centuries. Tyson took immense pride in his family legacy, and felt the weight of his responsibilities as its newest steward every day.
He inhaled deeply, the native air laced with the slight copper smell that somehow survived even the best HEPA filtration. Between the shield mountain ranges that protected Methuselah from the gale winds of the rest of the planet’s equatorial regions, the pulsing heart of the city spread out before him. It was electric with trains of transport pods, buzzing drones, and blinking pedestrian crossings. The lower commercial and residential districts mingled with green patches of parks, and blue rivers cut through the entertainment district both to provide recreation and cooler temperatures in the city’s hot summers. Thin, needlelike towers raced up to the seven-hundred-fifty-meter “ceiling,” many connected by a latticework of aerial walkways that let the people working inside save the trouble of going all the way down to street level and up again just to attend a meeting.
Stretching down Shensing Boulevard directly in front of him, “Embassy Row” played host to the Lazarus headquarters of the other major transtellars, as well as two towers jointly owned by half a dozen of the smaller consortiums. It also had the only two legitimate embassies on the entire planet: the UN embassy representing the interests of the governments of Earth, and the Xre embassy, which had stood empty since the day it had been built more than seventy years earlier. Tyson considered them both equally egregious wastes of high-value real estate, even if he never voiced the thought publicly.
Methuselah was a thriving company town of almost six million people and nearly as many AIs. A blooming city in the desert.
His city.
Tyson often fancied himself a gardener in concrete and steel, tending to a forest of commerce. Things grew tall on Lazarus. With only three-fifths of Earth’s gravity, everything from plants to people to buildings to rockets had an easier time reaching for the sky.
Which made it all the more surprising when things came crashing back down again. An alert in a search algorithm he’d programmed into the office during the first hour of his occupancy flashed in the window. The trading day was over, but overnight trades were projecting a sudden drop in Ageless’s stock price of sixty-three nudollars, well outside the typical background variation.
At that exact moment, a camera drone flying the colors and symbol of the Interstellar News Network dropped down from somewhere above his floor and hovered at eye level, recording his facial expression with its binocular cameras in gloriously unflattering UHD.
“Sir, there’s a problem,” the voice of his personal assistant, Paris, said almost simultaneously.
“Yes, there’s
