The Sails of Tau Ceti (2 page)

Ben’s crack about “local yokels” irritated her. Like most Martians, Tory had a deep inferiority complex when it came to anything concerning Earth. She was especially aware that the University of Olympus was considered by some to be a cow college. Ben, on the other hand, was a terrestrial exchange student who never tired of telling everyone he could have gone to New Yale or Harvard. When asked why he had not, he always said something to the effect that he had wanted to improve the curve at Olympus U. instead.

Tory still remembered the hot flash of anger that had surged through her at Ben’s crack. “Well I’m
going
to interview with them and if the high and mighty corporations from Earth don’t like it, tough!”

She would have forgotten all about it if Ben had not decided to taunt her one final time.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

To her surprise, Tory found herself attracted to the idea of being part of humanity’s first attempt to reach the stars. The more she thought about it, the more attracted she became. Her interest, coupled with Ben’s clumsy attempts to dissuade her, drove her to accept the offer — at less than half the going pay scale for newly minted synergists. She told Ben of her decision a week before graduation. The resulting argument led to their breakup.

Two weeks later, they sat together in the lounge of Olympus spaceport, waiting for the ferry that would take Ben up to the interplanetary liner docked at Deimos. They made small talk and promised to write every week though both knew the promises were empty. Tory remembered how awkward it had been to kiss Ben goodbye and the feeling of relief as his lanky form disappeared into the embarkation tube.

That had been three years ago. Since then, Tory had held a variety of jobs with the interstellar project. Her latest made her responsible for the software that would fly the interstellar probe on its decades-long journey. Since software was at the heart of the any modern system, her position placed her in de facto command of construction on Phobos. There were others more senior, but no one with a clearer picture of the state of the project at any given moment.

She was startled out of her contemplative mood by a silent voice that suddenly emanated from her computer implant.

“Are you awake up there?”

The voice belonged to Vance Newburgh. Vance, like Tory, was a synergist hired directly out of college. His speech was marked by a strong Australasian accent, a hint of which made it through the implant.

“I’m awake,”
she thought.
“What’s up?”

Her custom of coming up to the surface once each week to view
Starhopper
’s progress was well known. It was, she told the curious, her way of keeping one foot planted firmly in reality. An occupational hazard for those who dealt with direct computer-to-mind interfaces was that they sometimes became unsure of what comprised reality. More than one had fallen to his death because he had forgotten that there is nothing theoretical about the concept of gravity.

“Message from the university. Professor Pierce requests your presence at an emergency meeting of the governing board.”

“When?”

“Tonight. Zero eight hundred hours, Conference Room 100, Lowell Hall.”

“I’ll attend via screen.”

“Negative. The message says ‘in person.’”

“But that’s silly. Doesn’t he know how much work we’ve got to do before next month’s launch?”

“I presume he’s been reading our progress reports.”

“Then he should know that software certification is a week behind schedule and still slipping.”

“No argument there, partner.”

Tory let her anger cool a moment.
“Does he say what this meeting is about?”

“No. Shall I tell him you can’t make it?”

Tory shook her head. The habit of a lifetime was hard to break though Vance was a kilometer distant and the conversation was taking place inside her skull.
“Negative. You know how fragile the coalition is. How long before the afternoon shuttle leaves for Olympus?”

“Twenty seven minutes.”

“Get me a seat. Tell them to hold until I get there.”

#

The ground steward who helped passengers aboard the Phobos-to-Olympus shuttle let his gaze linger on Tory Bronson as she made her way up the embarkation tube. He saw an attractive woman of some 25 standard years. Like many Martians she was tall and lithe, her alabaster skin unmarked by the sun. Her green eyes possessed a barely discernable slant and her hair was so black that it shown with a blue luster. She wore it in a hair net to keep it out of her face in Phobos’ minuscule gravity field. He noted her pert nose set above a wide mouth, the lines of which fell most naturally into a smile. She was not smiling now. She had that absentminded look common to people deep in thought or those actively accessing a computer implant.

Tory swarmed through the embarkation tube by pulling herself hand over hand, ignoring the small moon’s two-tenths-percent of a standard gee. She found an empty seat near a port and strapped down. Tory failed to notice the stares of the other passengers as the steward went immediately into his pre-launch briefing. She stared at her own dull reflection in the viewport and considered what could possibly have triggered an emergency meeting of the project governing board. Whatever had happened, one thing was certain. It could not be good news.

Almost as complex as the design of
Starhopper
were the politics that went to sustain it. The University of Olympus managed the project for a consortium of institutions of higher learning. Funding was provided by several private foundations and the governments of Mars, Lagrange 3 and four, and several asteroid colonies. Several Earth megacorps had contributed to the project in the hope of being chosen to provide materials and services. Some had, some had not.

It was an arrangement guaranteed to spark arguments. The prime function of the governing board was to arbitrate disputes and to apportion costs equitably. They also delved too much into decisions that, in Tory’s opinion, at least, should have been left to the engineers.

Tory hoped she could divine the reason for the unexpected summons by reviewing the minutes of the last several board meetings. She had hurriedly run through them all the way to the spaceport. Her haste was necessitated by the fact that her implant would not work once the ferry departed Phobos. The broadband communications link would lose synchronization once the ferry passed beyond effective transmitter range. Tory had gone through loss-of-sync once in training. It was an experience she did not care to repeat.

She had often tried to describe what it was like to wear an implant to people who lacked the experience. It was like trying to explain sex to a six-year-old. Besides an eidetic memory, implants gave their users an extra set of eyes with which to see. When Tory gazed at the
Starhopper
booster, she saw more than its physical form. In her mind, she could visualize the vehicle’s complex plumbing as it snaked through the first stage booster. She could visualize the temperature variations that would play across the vehicle during launch. To her
Starhopper
was less a machine than a living creature straining to enter its natural environment, the cold black of interstellar space.

Tory was none the wiser when she finished her review of the meeting minutes. Satisfied that there was nothing she herself had done (or failed to do) to trigger a crisis, she willed her implant into silence, leaned back, and resolved to enjoy the flight.

The shuttle lifted away from Phobosport with a burst of attitude control jets. Once clear of Phobos’s inner traffic zone, the pilot turned the ship until its nose pointed back along the orbit it shared with the moon. Seconds later, the engines came alight and Tory felt a gentle hand pressing against her. When the initial burst of retrofire was finished, the pilot turned the ship to give his passengers a panoramic view of Mars.

Despite being only half Earth’s diameter, the red planet was huge. Phobos had once been a free flying asteroid. Following its capture by Mars — an event the astronomers still argued about — the small moon had stabilized in an orbit 6000 kilometers above the rust colored sands.

It had been nearly two centuries since the first humans had set foot on Mars and died there, a century-and-a-half since the establishment of the first Martian colony. Humankind still had a considerable way to go before the planet would begin to grow crowded. For despite its diminutive size, Mars’s lack of an ocean gave it a land area nearly as great as Earth’s. The red planet supported 250 million souls, compared to the 10 billion who inhabited Earth.

Twenty minutes after leaving Phobos, Tory noticed a circular shadow detach itself from the sunrise terminator and strike out across the Tharsis highlands. She frowned. Phobos was close enough to cast a shadow on Mars, but in the wrong position. Deimos, on the other hand, was too small and distant to have any hope of shading the Martian landscape.

Having eliminated the only two possibilities, Tory felt the thrill that comes from a suddenly recognized mystery. She watched the shadow for several seconds before a spark of reflected sunlight caught her attention. Understanding burst upon her like the static discharges that illuminate the Martian sky during summer dust storms. The reflection had come from sunlight bouncing off a light sail in a lower orbit than the ferry. It had been the sail’s shadow that she had been watching cross the Martian desert.

Light sails used the pressure of reflected sunlight to propel their nonperishable cargoes across the Solar System. They were slow, but less expensive than even a ship in a Hohmann transfer orbit. This sail was probably towing a load of ice from Saturn’s rings and using Mars’s gravity to shape its approach to the inner moon. The Phobos distillery was the main reason they were building
Starhopper
there. The hydrogen cracking facility was to be the source of the interstellar probe’s reaction mass.

As the shuttle dropped, the light sail grew larger beyond the viewport. The sail, Tory knew, was a large circular sheet of metalized plastic only a few angstroms thick. It and its brethren were the largest constructs every built by man, and the flimsiest. The largest sail ever constructed measured a full 100 kilometers across, yet massed only a few hundred tons.

Tory searched for the cargo pod, but could not see it. Within a few minutes, the giant apparition floated across her field of view and was gone. She noted with approval that the shuttle’s pilot was giving the sail a wide berth. While the monomolecular “sail cloth” was as light as the scientists could make it, it could do serious damage to even a warship if encountered at velocity differentials of several kilometers per second.

The shuttle dropped lower. Minutes later their destination came into view over the sharply defined horizon line. Olympus Mons was the largest volcano in the Solar System; so large that it could be seen as a speck in Earth based telescopes. It was one of the dots that Percival Lowell’s subconscious had strung together to produce the most famous optical illusion in the history of science, the famous canals of Mars.

Most Earth dwellers expressed surprise when they learned that the capital of Mars was located in the caldera of a volcano. Olympus had been a spectacular volcano in its day. Luckily, its day was several billion years in the past. The modern Olympus Mons spewed forth nothing more lethal than water vapor saturated with carbon dioxide. These milder eruptions were the reason the Olympus colony had been founded in the first place. For nothing is more precious on dry Mars than water. Olympus Mons was a primary source of water on the planet.

The ferry dropped precipitously toward the spaceport tail first, oblivious to the tug of the rarified atmosphere against its non-aerodynamic shape. A thousand meters above the spaceport, the ferry’s engines came alive. Seconds later, it grounded on a tail of plasma fire without a bump.

CHAPTER 2

Tory emerged from the airlock into a transparent debarkation tube that ran a hundred meters across the fused sand of Olympus Spaceport. Beyond the tube, the Martian night was lit by million-candle-power polyarcs. Another ferry lay near the Phobos craft. Passengers and luggage streamed through that ship’s connecting tube and into the subterranean passage that led to the main terminal. Tory grimaced at the sight. It meant that the weekly liner from Earth was in orbit and that the spaceport would be more than its usual madhouse.

As she entered the terminal, Tory willed her implant to synchronize with the Olympus city computer. Once she received the connect signal, she sent a call to Dardan Pierce.

“Hello, Tory,”
came back the immediate answer.
“Where are you?”

“Spaceport.”

“Good, get over here as soon as you can. The others will have gathered by the time you arrive.”

“What’s up, Dard?”

“You’ll have to ask Hunsacker,”
came the curt answer.
“He called the meeting.”

“But he’s on Earth.”

“Not since noon, he isn’t. He showed up in my office and asked me to gather up everyone within reach.”

“All right, I’m on my way,”

“One more thing,”
Pierce’s silent voice said.
“Hunsacker brought some people with him.”

“Who?”

“Praesert Sadibayan, the Underminister for Science in the Hoffenzoller Administration, and his assistant. I want everyone to be on his or her best behavior. Pierce out.”

“Bronson out,”
Tory replied absentmindedly.

A tube car deposited her at University Station half an hour later. Like most Martian structures, the University of Olympus was mostly underground. It was topped at ground level by a large surface dome anchored by cables woven from the monomolecular filaments used in the construction of light sails. The most direct route from the tube station to Pierce’s office was through a series of underground corridors. After nearly a year on Phobos, Tory decided to take a few minutes longer and stroll through the dome.