“One moment,” General Yao said. “What powers these engines?”
“A new kind of propulsion devised by Henry.”
“What kind of propulsion exactly? Fission, fusion, charged particles, antimatter as in
Star Trek,
what?”
“That is proprietary information, General Yao. I’m sorry.”
“What’s its top speed in space?”
“I’m sorry, General. I can’t tell you that.”
“What is its range?”
“Or that.”
Yao fairly quivered with indignation at having these doors slammed in his face.
“You are a citizen of China,” he said to Ng Fred. “You felt no duty to inform your country of what was going on here?”
“We’re not in China, General.”
The two Chinese were speaking to each other in English—General Yao, I think, because he wanted Henry to know how insulted he was, Ng Fred because speaking Mandarin would double the affront.
“You have not tested this ship in space,” Yao said.
“No,” Ng Fred answered. “But we plan to do so soon.”
“You
hope
to do so soon. How many have you built?”
“Seven. Two more are in production.”
“Each one costs approximately what?”
“Ten billion dollars.”
“So Henry has spent ninety billion on this ship?”
“So far, not counting development costs, yes.”
“Why build so many before you have tested even one? It’s not like Henry Peel to be so incautious.”
“We are confident the product will perform as designed.”
“I’m touched by your faith,” Yao said. “You have trained the necessary pilots?”
“It’s a drone.”
“The pilot flies it by remote control?”
“It is controlled by a computer.”
“From what location?”
“The Spaceplane can be controlled from any point on Earth, or in space.”
“Will it be controlled from China?”
Ng Fred did not answer the question. I found this puzzling, but not so puzzling as General Yao found it. He seemed to be positively bewildered. He had been a silent partner in the enterprise from the beginning. Why this sudden stonewalling? General Yao fairly quivered with resentment.
At this point, Henry spoke his first words of the day.
“Seen enough?” he asked.
“Actually, no,” General Yao said. “Nor heard enough.”
Henry said, “General Yao, I hope we can speak plainly to each other, and that you will speak plainly afterward to your government.”
“That is also my hope, Henry,” General Yao said. “Who asks the first question?”
“Go ahead.”
“Why have you not told us before about the existence of this Spaceplane?”
“It was and is a trade secret.”
“The People’s Republic of China is not a competitor. Far from it.”
Henry replied, “This assembly plant is not on Chinese soil.”
“It would not be on Mongolian soil in the absence of China’s good offices in your behalf.”
“That’s debatable,” Henry said.
Yao said, “When you deal with China, you must trust China as it trusts you. You are not a sovereign state even if you have more money than most countries.”
Henry said, “General Yao, what point are you making?”
General Yao said, “I will come straight to it. I have made the point once before. If you insist on testing this vehicle, or anything like it, without giving notice to the rest of the world, and especially to the Americans, who may very well regard your Spaceplane as a new Chinese weapons system, you will seriously embarrass the People’s Republic of China and endanger its national security. My government cannot permit this to happen.”
General Yao rose to his feet. “And now I must go,” he said with no hint of his usual urbane smile. “Do you need a ride home?”
“Thank you,” Henry replied. “We can manage.”
He wasn’t smiling, either. He had the look of a man whose thoughts are far, far away.
Yao left, striding purposely. Lately, everyone seemed to be doing this.
I said, “What was that all about?”
“I’m not sure what Yao wants,” Henry said.
“How about a couple of Spaceplanes?” I asked.
“What would they do with them?”
“Hijack the mother ship?”
“Why would they do that?”
“To load the party leaders on board. To make the escape from this planet an all-Chinese affair—nobody but the Han in the next world.”
Henry widened his eyes. He fought a smile and lost. He laughed— just a couple of half-smothered snorts, but a laugh just the same.
“No wonder I love you,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re the most creative paranoiac I’ve ever known.”
No wonder I love you?
Is that what he had just said? If so, he gave no sign of remembering it.
“What’s so paranoid about it?” I asked. “Henry, think about it. Are you not the Henry Peel who invented swarms of fighting hornets to repel boarders from Earth who might try to take over the mother ship?”
“Yes,” Henry said.
“Then what does this scenario change?” I asked. “A smart pirate—General Yao, for example—might reason that it would be a lot easier and cheaper to capture the Spaceplanes while they’re still on the ground. Or is
that
paranoid?”
Henry said, “I’m listening.”
“Suppose Chinese special forces decided to slip across the Mongolian border in the dark of the moon and take possession of this place and the underground factory? How would you stop them?”
“How could I?”
“What about the chaps? Aren’t they all former Delta Force and the British equivalent and whatever?”
“They’d be outnumbered,” Henry said. “Besides, if we fought off the commando raid, they’d just bomb the factory.”
“What, and blow up their only chance for escape?”
This was not a direction in which Henry wanted to be taken. He held up a hand:
Enough.
“If that was the intention, why would Yao tell me about it?” he asked.
“Maybe he
was
trying to warn you.”
“Why?”
“Friendship?”
“Please.”
“All right, then. He wants something.”
“Are you saying he wants to go along on the voyage?” Henry asked.
“You said it first,” I said.
Ng Fred, who had been listening, joined in.
“She has a point,” he said. “Maybe Yao does want to go on the voyage. Maybe the party leadership wants to go along, too. But maybe they’re not quite that farsighted. Maybe Yao is telling us something else.”
“Which is?” Henry asked.
“The Spaceplane is a revolutionary weapons platform. What would the White House do if it found out such a thing existed and this factory was in Saskatchewan and belonged to a Chinese?”
We all knew the answer to that question.
Henry stared at each of us in turn, and then climbed into his shell and pulled it shut. Emerging from it after a very long minute, he asked Ng Fred questions about the Spaceplane. Except for the two that were still under construction, the ships were ready to fly.
Ng Fred was, of course, telling Henry things he already knew. Nevertheless, Henry listened attentively—as if, like a normal human being, he simply wanted reassurance.
But this was Henry. Why would he need reassurance?
~ * ~
NINE
~ * ~
1
AT ONE MINUTE AFTER MIDNIGHT
on New Year’s Day, the first of the Spaceplanes was launched. It positioned itself at the equator over Borneo, then climbed straight up to the edge of the atmosphere, broke free of Earth’s gravity, entered space, and settled into orbit. The launch was observed by American, Brazilian, Chinese, European, Indian, Japanese, and Russian satellites. It lacked the flaming exhaust that had been the signature of every other space vehicle ever launched by man; in fact it seemed to have no exhaust at all. Despite this peculiarity, it was treated as a commonplace event by the news media, which reported that China appeared to have launched a vehicle of some kind into high Earth orbit. The media’s nonchalance came as no surprise. Thousands of man-made objects already circled the planet. One more caused no excitement just because it didn’t have a flaming tail. The Chinese government maintained its customary silence. The following midnight, and for the next three midnights after that, another Spaceplane was launched, so that by the end of the week, five of the craft were in orbit.
This did create excitement. No nation had ever sent so many objects into space in such a short period of time. It suggested a new dimension of power. The cost alone boggled the minds of media pundits. What were the Chinese up to? Were these spacecraft manned? Were they headed for the other planets or perhaps for the stars? Or were the Chinese about to plunge the world into darkness and silence by destroying every communications and intelligence satellite in orbit except their own? Was this a prelude to war, or as many hoped even in America, the longed-for event that finally put an end to American supremacy on Earth and in space? The Chinese remained silent.
A week passed before a hitherto unknown public relations firm in Ulan Bator issued a press release in Khalkha Mongolian announcing that the launch of the Spaceplane fleet was the work of a Mongolian corporation whose name translated as CyberSci, Inc., which would soon launch a separate, larger spacecraft constructed from components carried into orbit by the Spaceplanes. No press conference was called. Neither Henry’s name nor that of any officer of the corporation was mentioned. Only the most rudimentary technical details were disclosed.
Media investigations uncovered no further information. CyberSci, Inc., had no office or telephone number or Internet address anywhere in the world. Neither the Spaceplane nor its propulsion system had been patented in the United States. It was possible that the system had been hidden in plain sight by patenting each of its thousands of parts in many different countries. Multinationalism had gone multiplanetary. CyberSci was holding its secrets close.
Meanwhile, the two remaining Spaceplanes were being loaded with components of the mother ship. By the end of the second week, they too launched themselves into orbit. The Spaceplanes they replaced returned to Mongolia, landed in darkness, and fifty young women filed aboard each of them. Within minutes, these workers were in orbit. A couple of days later, after they had had some experience of weightlessness, twenty-five women emerged from each Spaceplane. They wore bright red space suits. The space suits were much trimmer than the puffy Michelin Man costumes of earlier space walkers—so close-fitting, in fact, that the lithe figures of the nubile females who wore them could be discerned by the cameras. They immediately set to work. While one twenty-five-woman team unloaded the long strips that would form the outer shell of the spaceship, the other team fastened them together. All this was photographed and broadcast to Earth. After three hours of work, new teams replaced them. The women worked with choreographed precision, as if they were a synchronized swim team and space was a vast Olympic pool.