But it didn’t matter. I did this to myself, he thought. I wanted to be here. I labored to get myself here. Because of what we learned, as the years unraveled: that the Gaijin would be followed by a great wave of visitors, and that the Gaijin were
Slowly, as they began to travel the stars, humans learnedto fear the universe, and the creatures who lived in it. Livedand died.
Chapter 8
Madeleine Meacher barely got out of N’Djamena alive.
Nigerian and Cameroon troops were pushing into the airstrip just as the Sanger’s undercarriage trolley jets kicked in. She heard the distant crackle of automatic fire, saw vehicles converging on the runway. Somewhere behind her was a clatter, distant and small; it sounded as if a stray round had hit the Sanger.
Then the space plane threw itself down the runway, pressing her back into her seat, its leap forward sudden, gazellelike. The Sanger tipped up on its trolley, and the big RB545 engines kicked in, burning liquid hydrogen. The plane rose almost vertically. The gunfire rattle faded immediately.
She shot into cloud and was through in a second, emerging into bright, clear sunshine.
She glanced down: The land was already lost, remote, a curving dome of dull desert-brown, punctuated with the sprawling gray of urban development. Fighters — probably Nigerian, or maybe Israeli — were little points of silver light in the huge sky around her, with contrails looping through the air. They couldn’t get close to Madeleine unless she was seriously unlucky.
She lit up the scramjets and was kicked in the back, hard, and the fighters disappeared.
The sky faded down to a deep purple. The turbulence smoothed out as she went supersonic. At thirty thousand meters, still climbing, she pushed the RB545 throttle to maximum thrust. Her acceleration was a Mach a minute; on this suborbital hop to Senegal she’d reach Mach 15 before falling back to Earth.
She was already so high she could see stars. Soon the reaction-control thrusters would kick in, and she’d be flying like a spacecraft.
It was the nearest she’d ever get to space, anyhow.
For the first time since arriving in Chad with her cargo of light artillery shells, she had time to relax. The Sanger was showing no evidence of harm from the gunfire.
The Sanger was a good, solid German design, built by Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Blohm. It was designed to operate in war zones, but Madeleine was not; safe now in her high-tech cocoon, she gave way to the tension for a couple of minutes.
While she was still shaking, the Sanger logged into the nets and downloaded her mail. Life went on.
That was when she found the message from Sally Brind.
Brind didn’t tell Madeleine who she represented, or what she wanted. Madeleine was to meet her at Kennedy Space Center. Just like that; she was given no choice.
Over the years Madeleine had received a lot of blunt messages like this. They were usually either from lucrative would-be employers, or some variant of cop or taxman. Either way it was wise to turn up.
She acknowledged the message and instructed her data miners to find out who Brind was.
She pressed a switch, and the RB545s shut down with a bang. As the acceleration cut out she was thrust forward against the straps. Now she had gone ballistic, like a hurled stone. Coasting over the roof of her trajectory in near silence, she lost all sensation of speed, of motion.
And, at her highest point, she saw a distant glimmer of light, complex and serene: it was a Gaijin flower-ship, complacently orbiting Earth.
When she got back to the States, Madeleine flew out to Orlando. To get to KSC she drove north along U.S. 3, the length of Merritt Island. There used to be security gates; now there was nothing but a rusting fence, with a new smart-concrete road surface cut right through it.
She parked at the Vehicle Assembly Building. It was early morning. The place was deserted. Sand drifted across the empty parking lot, gathering in miniature dunes.
She walked out to the old press stand, a wooden frame like a baseball bleacher. She sat down, looking east. The Sun was in her eyes, and already hot; she could feel it draw her face tight as a drum. To the right, stretching off to the south, there were rocket gantries. In the mist they were two-dimensional, colorless. Most of them were disused, part-dismantled, museum pieces. The sense of desolation, abandonment, was heavy in the air.
Sally Brind had turned out to work for Bootstrap, the rump of the corporation that had sent a spacecraft to the Gaijin base in the asteroid belt three decades earlier.
Madeleine was not especially interested in the Gaijin. She had been born a few years after their arrival in the Solar System; they were just a part of her life, and not a very exciting part. But she knew that four decades after the first detection of the Gaijin — and a full nineteen years after they had first come sailing in from the belt, apparently prompted by Reid Malenfant’s quixotic journey — the Gaijin had established something resembling a system of trade with humanity.
They had provided some technological advances: robotics, vacuum industries, a few nanotech tricks like their asteroid mining blankets — enough to revolutionize a dozen industries and make a hundred fortunes. They had also flown human scientists on exploratory missions to other planets: Mars, Mercury, even the moons of Jupiter. Not Venus, though, oddly, despite repeated requests. And the Gaijin had started to provide a significant proportion of Earth’s resources from space: raw materials from the asteroids, including precious metals, and even energy, beamed down as microwaves from great collectors in the sky.
Humans — or rather, the governments and corporations who dealt with the Gaijin — had to “pay” for all this with resources common on Earth but scarce elsewhere, notably heavy metals and some complex organics. The Gaijin had also been allowed to land on Earth and had been offered cultural contact. The Gaijin had, strangely, shown interest in some human ideas, and a succession of writers, philosophers, theologians, and even a few discreditable science fiction authors had been summoned to converse with the alien “ambassadors.”
The government authorities, and the corporations who were profiting, seemed to regard the whole arrangement as a good deal. With the removal of the great dirt-making industries from the surface of the Earth — power, mining — there was a good chance that eco recovery could, belatedly, become a serious proposition.
Not everybody agreed. All those shut-down mines and decommissioned power plants were creating economic and environmental refugees. And there were plenty of literal refugees too — for instance, all the poor souls who had been moved out of the great swathes of equatorial land that had been given over to the microwave receiving stations.
Thus the Gaijin upheaval had, predictably, caused poverty, even famine and war.
It was thanks to that last that Madeleine made her living, of course. But everybody had to survive.
“I wonder if you know what you’re looking at, here.” The voice had come from behind her.
A woman sat in the stand, in the row behind Madeleine. Her bony wrists stuck out of an environment-screening biocomp bodysuit. She must have been sixty. There was a man with her, at least as old, short, dark, and heavyset.
“You’re Brind.”
“And you’re Madeleine Meacher. So we meet. This is Frank Paulis. He’s the head of Bootstrap.”
“I remember your name.”
He grinned, his eyes hard.
“What am I doing here, Brind?”
For answer, Brind pointed east, to the tree line beyond the Banana River. “I used to work for NASA. Back when there was a NASA. Over there used to be the site of the two great launch complexes: Thirty-nine-B to the left, Thirty-nine-A to the right. Thirty-nine-A was the old Apollo gantry. Later they adapted it for the shuttle.” The sunlight blasted into her face, making it look flat, younger. “Well, the pads are gone now, pulled down for scrap. The base of Thirty-nine-A is still there, if you want to see it. There’s a sign the pad rats stuck there for the last launch:
“What do you
“Do you know what a burster is?”
Madeleine frowned. “No kind of weapon I’ve ever heard of.”
“It’s not a weapon, Meacher. It’s a
Madeleine was, briefly, electrified.
“Look, Meacher, we have a proposal for you.”
“What makes you think I’ll be interested?”
Brind’s voice was gravelly and full of menace. “I know a great deal about you.”
“How come?”
“If you must know, through the tax bureau. You have operated your—” She waved a hand dismissively. “ —
“Never broken a law.”
Brind eyed Madeleine as if she had said something utterly naive. “The law is a weapon of government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.”
Madeleine tried to figure out Brind. Her biocomposite suit looked efficient, not expensive. Brind was a wage slave, not an entrepreneur. “You’re from the government?” she guessed.
Brind’s face hardened. “When I was young, we used to call what you do gunrunning. Although I don’t suppose that’s how you think of it yourself.”
The remark caught Madeleine off guard. “No,” she said. “I’m a pilot. All I ever wanted to do is fly; this is the best job I could get. In a different universe, I’d be—”
“An astronaut,” Frank Paulis said.
The foolish, archaic word got to Madeleine.
“We know about you, you see,” Sally Brind said, almost regretfully. “All about you.”
“There are no astronauts anymore.”
“That isn’t true, Meacher,” Paulis said. “Come with us. Let us show you what we’re planning.”
Brind and Paulis took her out to Launch Complex 41, the old USASF Titan pad at the northern end of ICBM Row. Here, Brind’s people had refurbished an antique Soviet-era Proton launcher.
The booster was a slim black cylinder, fifty-three meters tall. Six flaring strap-on boosters clustered around the first stage, and Madeleine could pick out the smaller stages above. A passenger capsule and hab module would be fixed to the top, shrouded by a cone of metal.
“Our capsule isn’t much more sophisticated than an Apollo,” Brind said. “It only has to get you to orbit and keep you alive for a couple of hours, until the Gaijin come to pick you up.”
“Me?”
