With barely any resources, Callisto’s colonists would have had to cobble together recycled components to build the probe. They had only one chance to reach the asteroid, so they not only set out to image the surface, they were ambitious enough to load a small penetrator to evaluate surface composition. With their limited
resources and technology it was an all-or-nothing gamble.
Unfortunately, communication with the probe was lost shortly after launch. The project ended in failure and was eventually forgotten. But even though the probe’s communication system had
failed, its other systems seemed to have worked perfectly.
The penetrator had a power source, but it would have failed after a few months or years. Still, the regolith had shielded its delicate circuits from Sol’s ion flux. A century later, induced current from an array built by a robot over its resting place prodded these circuits briefly to life. The penetrator awoke and dutifully took up where it had left off. The relay picked up the signal and sent it on to Callisto. And now, as long as
Dragonslayer
kept bathing it with microwaves, the penetrator would keep transmitting.
“So all we were doing was chasing a hundred-year-old piece of junk?” Barbara started to yank the penetrator out of the regolith. I
reached out and put my glove on hers. She peered at me warily.
“We can’t imagine what they went through to get this here. Now it’s doing what they intended it to do. Callisto’s been waiting for this signal for a century. We can wait a few minutes and let it do
its job.”
Barbara withdrew her hand, unclipped the booster antenna from her suit, and attached it to the penetrator. “There. That should give
it a little help.”
The signal sped via
Dragonslayer
toward the home of its makers in the Jovian system. In three more hours, it would finally be home. One hundred years and three hours. It had been a long mission.
TO UNCOVER THE TRUTH
, you have to delve deep. No investigation of history can approach the truth without probing beyond
immediate surface appearances.
For example: are humans genuinely rational?
Not an easy question to answer. It was humanity that forced a small black hole out of its orbit, chasing dreams of an energy
network that would span the solar system.
But judging humanity by the scale of its dreams would be a
mistake.
Not all of humanity was eager to see work proceed on an artificial accretion disk. Different forces were at work to prevent AADD
from realizing its plans. These forces were also human.
Why make a determined effort to bar the path of progress? Again, not an easy thing to explain. One would have to account
for the structure of human consciousness.
Consciousness is not a unified entity. Multiple awareness subsystems in the brain give rise to the socially determined composite phenomenon we call consciousness. The human species and its collective actions can never be understood without comprehending
the hidden workings of these independent subsystems.
At the level of the collective, human consciousness oscillates
between stability and chaos.
Faced with the challenges of survival in space, AADD created the device called the web and used it to forge a collective that was greater than the sum of its parts. But this new conception of what it meant to be human unleashed forces that were pushing humanity’s
collective consciousness toward chaos.
These were the forces stoking the conflicts between AADD and the people of Earth. Many of them manifested in the same way: as violence.
HYDRA’S ICE
A.D. 2145
Minus 38 Hours 30 Minutes
COOPERATE and we’ll guarantee your safety. Otherwise—
Gunfire. Breaking glass. A scream, abruptly cut off.
That’s what you’ll get. Are we clear?
The lift module was rising at a thousand kilometers per hour. No one in the circular lounge was inclined to take on the hijackers.
“I mean, are these guys shitheads or what? Discharging a firearm in the lounge?”
Shiran Kanda was listening to Mikal, her squad leader, reporting from orbit overhead. It was an open circuit. Everyone on the team could hear everyone else.
“You should be seeing them pretty soon, Mikal. We’ll only have the one chance, you know.”
“Yes, Professor, I’m aware of that.”
“They’ve been holed up for more than ten hours. Everyone will be hitting the wall pretty soon.” Shiran was six thousand kilometers above the surface of Mars, at Clarke Station on Tsutenkaku, the orbital elevator. Mikal and his squad were at least ten thousand kilometers higher.
“Once we’re in we’ll bag them in a few seconds. Are we still waiting on visuals?”
“No. The cameras are down. When they came in shooting, they decapitated the main server. The backup system doesn’t support
visuals, just control functions.”
“How are we getting audio?”
“Thank me for that,” said Samar, Shiran’s forensic team leader.
“We’re laser-painting the lift. Doppler vibrometer.”
“Good work,” said Mikal. “Are our bad boys all in the same
location?”
“All indications are affirmative,” said Shiran. “No one’s exited
the lounge.”
“All right. I just hope we don’t have to use these.” On her web’s retinal feed, Shiran saw Mikal raise his machine pistol. The compact weapon fired plastic rounds whose energy fell off rapidly with distance. Still, they could be set to deliver more than enough kinetic energy to terminate at close range. “I still don’t get it, Professor.
Why bother to assassinate someone, anyway?”
“Assassinations are one organization’s way of signaling another organization. Who, how, and where you kill—it all means something.
It’s a message, pure and simple.”
“Then they should save us the trouble. Every child in Sol System
knows Earth isn’t our friend.”
Mikal and Shiran reviewed the assault strategy. The lives of the squad members depended on successful completion of each step of the plan. “Professor, the module is approaching Clarke orbit.”
“All right, Mikal. Lock and load.”
The squad was suited up, ready to move. Shiran watched them finish prepping. On schedule, a cylinder the size of a multistory building flashed past the squad’s orbiting capsule at close to three hundred meters a second. The capsule’s guidance system maneuvered automatically, accelerating to close with the lift, then changing
course to move directly beneath it.
“How’re you holding up, Mikal?”
“No worries, Professor. Three Gs, at ease.” Shiran needn’t have worried. She was raised on Mars, so three Earth gravities of sudden acceleration would have made her feel close to ten times heavier. But every member of the assault squad was trained for the stress of acceleration. She was a Guardian, though it had been a while
since she’d been on an op like this.
The capsule was now moving slightly faster than the lift, closing the gap to less than a hundred meters, invisible from the lift
in the dead angle.
Why’d you have to use your weapon? How do we explain this to the
client?
You’d rather get caught?
By AADD? They can’t touch us. Deportation, sure. But hostage taking, that might even get us prosecuted on Earth. And you have to
make it worse!
The voices from the lounge were distinct over the laser pickup. “Mikal, you better get moving. It sounds like they’ll be at each
other’s throats soon.”
The lift was a twenty-meter cylinder moving up the side of the orbital elevator. From its base on Mt. Rokko to its orbital anchor on Deimos, the elevator stretched across twenty-two thousand kilometers. The lift contained a food counter and spartan rest facilities for the full-day ascent. To take advantage of the fantastic views of Mars, the two-thirds of the lift that faced away from the elevator were sheathed in transparent polycarbonate, carbon-reinforced for radiation shielding and structural strength. A utility corridor extended along the spine of the lift where it attached to the elevator. The guest rooms were on the other side of the corridor—windowless
for better protection from radiation.
In an emergency the capsule could dock with the lift to make repairs and evacuate passengers. At this altitude there was no atmospheric resistance, only the black shadows and stark sunlight of space. Above the day side there was enough photon scatter to give some visibility in the shadows. The squad had night-vision lenses
to cut through the darkness.
Mikal opened the hatch and climbed out. The elevator’s carbon nanotube cables seemed close enough to touch. Climbing out onto the moving capsule was not for the faint of heart. The cables were streaming past at almost three hundred meters a second. Anything brushing against them would instantly be torn to pieces.
Using hand signals in case the hijackers were monitoring their communications, Mikal guided the capsule closer to the lift. With twenty meters to go he motioned for a stop, then resumed the approach centimeter by centimeter. In the few minutes since their rendezvous with the lift had begun they had gained nearly a hundred kilometers of altitude.
Mars hung below them, hundreds of times larger than a full Moon seen from Earth. It seemed unbelievable that this bundle of cables led all the way down to that disk. As the capsule closed with its quarry, Mikal had a few moments to look out on his home planet. The view calmed him.
He held up his hand. The capsule was a meter from the lift. Docking would alert everyone inside. The only thing to do was hold a constant speed and jump the gap.
Mikal pushed off from the capsule and landed in the docking bay. In stationary orbit the lift would pass through a brief zone of true weightlessness, but they had not reached that altitude yet. Beyond Clarke—or stationary—orbit, centrifugal force would gradually take over. Normally the lift would stop and turn 180 degrees in preparation for the reverse gravitational pull of the rest of the trip to Deimos. But the hijackers were wasting no time. They were heading directly for the spaceport on Deimos.
Before Tsutenkaku had been built, the orbit of Deimos was adjusted to bring it closer to Mars. Now this irregular mass of rock was 22,386 kilometers above the surface. At this distance it acted as a counterweight for the elevator, its velocity nearly equal to escape velocity. It was ideal as a docking point for spacecraft and cargo transfers.
They were in luck: no watch had been posted in the corridor. The squad assembled. Mikal used a short-range laser transmitter for final instructions, then led them down the narrow passage toward Lift Level 3. He plunged straight downward, the rising centrifugal force giving him a slight boost. His squad followed close behind,
equipped with full combat packages.
The hijackers were oblivious to what was about to hit them. They were too busy watching the hostages, who had been herded
into the lounge.
Mikal reviewed the hostage roster on his web. All were AADD employees. One was even a Guardian. Mikal sent her a coded message and got a response in seconds: thirteen hijackers, masked, with strap-on webs that they were mostly ignoring. Terrans were known to dislike these devices; it was rare for them to wear webs,
even the smaller, restricted-capability models.
“Hit the deck!” the hostage Guardian yelled—not for the benefit of her fellow hostages, but to divert the attention of the hijackers. Stun grenades flew into the lounge from stairways above and below. The squad burst into the lounge, eyes shielded against the flashes. Strangely, the hijackers made little effort to resist. Half a dozen were handcuffed before they had even regained their eyesight. Others
began firing wildly but were quickly subdued.
“The leader!” The Guardian pointed to a masked figure hurrying toward the utility corridor. Mikal pushed off from the ceiling. A stream of tracer rounds swept over his head. The leader was firing wildly, and then Mikal saw why: she was using recoil to power herself toward the exit. Mikal was about to fire when he realized it would only slow him down. He tossed his weapon away, but his
target still made it to the exit first.
“The hatch! Close the hatch, she’s headed your way!” Mikal yelled. The leader was already reaching for the hatch of the capsule, docked
in the lift’s now pressurized bay, when Mikal caught up.
“Cut the crap, Rahmya. You know you can’t get away from us. Hijacking? You won’t be coming back to Mars for a long time. Hands on your head.”
For a moment the hijacker seemed startled. Instead of complying, she drew a heavy mil-spec pistol from the small of her back
and aimed it at Mikal’s head.
“You are so dumb, girl. Drop that before you hurt yourself.” Mikal reached for the pistol. The hijacker fingered the trigger. The recoil sent her into a strange-looking backward somersault.
The shot went wide.