Analog Science Fiction and Fact

Kindle Edition, 2016 © Penny Publications

We Side with the Free
Gray Rinehart | 18137 words

I. NEW ORDERS

By long habit, Mark Elliott floated into the bridge thirty minutes before his
shift began. Exactly eight minutes later, they received the message the crew
would come to call “the Signal” that changed every life aboard the ship—
because it threatened everything they held dear.
Elliott nodded to the skipper, wedged himself up into the space between
a stanchion and an overhead light, opened a viewroll, and prepared for his
rotation. The duty logs were unremarkable at this stage in the cruise, and he
was reviewing the ship’s status—puzzling over some temperature
fluctuations in one propellant tank; probably just a sensor issue, already
flagged for the engineers’ attention—when Spacer Second Class Reynolds
spoke up from the nav/comm station.
“Circitor, we have an intercept.”
Vindex Elliott, second in command of the Solar Guard Cutter Belmont,
looked down in time to catch the briefest hint of a smile on Circitor
Hellmer’s face. The skipper too had noticed the excitement in Reynolds’
voice.
The expression was gone by the time the circitor spoke. “Do we, now?”
His words were measured and precise, and matched exactly the virtues he
valued in his ship and on his crew.
“Yes, sir,” Reynolds said, and now Elliott allowed himself a grin at how
the circitor’s tone had not dampened the spacer’s. “Ephemeris is loading,
decrypting the message now.”
“What will it be, what will it be?” the circitor mused. “Rescue? Safety
inspection? Smuggling inspection?”
Elliott’s smile thinned. As if we’d find a smuggler out here.
“Unknown, sir,” Spacer Reynolds said, feverishly manipulating icons
on his screen.
 The circitor’s voice took on the dangerous edge that Elliott recognized.
“Unknown? Have you forgotten your decoding?”
“No, sir! Standard intercept header, priority one, but this message is
jittery....” Reynolds swept his fingers across the screen, tapped it twice, and
then half-turned toward the circitor. His voice took on a tone almost of awe.
“Sir, the bulk of this is command encrypted.”
Elliott raised his eyebrows, surprised to see Circitor Hellmer raise his as
well. “Very interesting,” the circitor said. “Transfer it to my vault drive, and
I’ll address it.” He looked up. “Vindex Elliott, I mark it as eleven minutes
before the hour. Are you up to date and ready to relieve me?”
Elliott pushed away from the ceiling, caught a floor strap with his right
foot, steadied himself, and came to the best approximation of attention that
zero-gee allowed. “Aye, Circitor. I’ve read the logs and reports, unless you
have something to add.”
“Only that we appear to have an intercept. Priority one. See to it that the
orbit is properly entered and begin evaluating the match possibilities.”
“Aye, sir. If that is all, then I relieve you.”
“I stand relieved of the watch,” the circitor said with an actual smile.
“Now to see what’s interesting about this intercept.” He unstrapped from
the command station and exited the Belmont’s tiny bridge.
With a feather touch, Elliott pushed off toward the command station.
The roughly hemispherical bridge was only three meters edge-to-edge, and
conduits, ducts, and equipment lockers intruded on the space, but he was
well used to maneuvering in it. Its light grey nonspecular bulkheads
diffused the harsh glare of the LED lights, so the bridge felt a bit like he
imagined it would inside an igloo.
He caught the back of the command station seat, now his for the
rotation, and said, “Reynolds, prep for changeover. I expect Servus
McAden to arrive in just a few minutes.”
“Aye, sir,” the spacer said, his voice strained as if he yearned to say
more. Elliott pushed off again and caught himself adjacent to Reynolds’
post. The young spacer stiffened at the XO’s approach.
“Something on your mind?”
Reynolds typed a bit on his screen, probably closing out his log, before
he turned to the XO. “First intercept this cruise, sir!”
“Aye,” Elliott said, “which means it’s your first intercept at all, right?”
 Reynolds glanced down, and his ears darkened though Elliott could see
his smiling reflection in the nav/comm screen. “Aye, sir.”
“Mine, too, on this ship, but we’ll be sure to make it a good one. Have
you started the orbit match yet?”
“Sir?”
Elliott dropped his smile. “Spacer, did my message need decoding?”
“Sir, I—no, sir. And no, sir, I have not started the orbit match.”
Elliott looked up as Spacer First Class Aloysius McAden floated into
the command center, pushing a caddy with two bulbs of hot coffee in it.
McAden cocked his head but remained silent at the scene that confronted
him. Elliott turned back to Reynolds. “By the time you take over your next
shift I expect you to have run orbit matches based on fuel efficiency, time,
and safety limits for ship and crew, and have a recommendation prepared
based on your assessment of the target’s orbital characteristics. Any
questions?”
To his credit, Reynolds did not hesitate. “No, sir!”
“Complete your changeover, then.”
Elliott returned to the command console. He logged Reynolds’
homework assignment and then began verifying the target’s orbital
elements himself. It was between Earth’s and Mars’ orbits, which in itself
was not too unusual—the Belmont herself was a bit outside Earth’s orbit—
but the planets’ positions were not optimum for a vessel to be in that region
of space, and the target did not match any known traffic. Its path was almost
comet-like...
McAden cleared his throat. “Sir?”
“Yes, Al?” Elliott allowed himself a bit of familiarity during his own
shift, when the circitor was not within earshot. He took the insulated
drinking bulb McAden offered; the coffee was hot, but a bit weak.
“I think you shook up Buster pretty bad.”
“Reynolds? He’s a good troop, he’ll get over it.”
“Aye, he will. I see you’re working on the same problem.”
Elliott smiled, but the comm chimed before he could respond. “Bridge,
this is the circitor. Vindex Elliott, report to my office at your earliest
convenience.”
Elliott racked the drinking bulb and keyed the console mic. “Aye,
Circitor. Bridge out.” He knew well what “earliest convenience” really
meant. He keyed in the wardroom. “Attention, all personnel. Senior
available officer report to the bridge immediately.” He did not wait for an
acknowledgement, but turned to McAden. “I anticipate Burgaw will bounce
in here in five minutes or less, and I’ll go see the circitor. While I’m gone,
set up the ephemeris problem yourself and see what you can get out of the
computer. I’ll take it up again when I get back, and we’ll compare our
solutions against each other. I want to have a solid answer for Buster’s to
orbit around.”
McAden waved a lazy salute. “Aye, boss.”

Efficiency trumped everything in the realm of space vessel architecture,

and the Belmont exemplified that principle. The circitor’s cabin and “office”
occupied a position near enough to the bridge that Elliott could almost have
conversed with him without the benefit of the intercom, but all walls have
ears, and some topics required at least the illusion of privacy. Usually those
topics involved personnel matters, but Elliott knew as he squeezed himself
into the remaining spare volume in the circitor’s office that this matter was
far more serious than any brawl, failed evaluation, or poor inspection.
Circitor Hellmer’s demeanor was different from any he had presented
during their past year together, or any time they had met during their time as
auxiliaries before Belmont was christened; Elliott’s first impression was that
the circitor looked wistful, and the thought made his guts cinch as if
someone had pulled a cable tie around them.
“Did you ever consider joining the navy, Mark?”
The circitor’s question only added to Elliott’s discomfort. Not the
familiarity: here in the skipper’s office, Vindex Elliott was always “Mark”
unless he himself was under scrutiny, and the circitor even used the other
officers’ first names in the wardroom at times. But the question itself,
apropos of nothing...
“Thought about it for a few microseconds, I’m sure, sir,” Elliott said,
trying to lighten his own mood if nothing else. “Not much of a swimmer,
though.”
Circitor Hellmer nodded, and passed over his Slate. Elliott took the
clunky tablet—despite the name, a throwback to the days of the oneroom
schoolhouse, it was the most secure portable device available, radiation-
hardened and nearly indestructible—and barely registered the circitor’s next
words.
“Well, you’re in the navy now. We all are.”
Elliott could not get his mouth to form the question for a moment. He
used the time to glance over the decrypted orders on the screen, but the
elements of the message seemed jumbled. Solar Guard Cutter Belmont,
Circitor Huston Hellmer commanding, transferred to operational control of
Inner Solar Navy Headquarters Annapolis, redesignated as Solar Navy
Vessel—
“What?” he asked.
Circitor Hellmer tilted his head. “Is something about this unclear?”
Elliott clamped his mouth shut and processed the data as quickly as his
suddenly fog-filled brain would. He read through the message again.
“We’re not just in the navy, are we, sir? We are the navy.”
“That’s it in a vacuum-sealed pouch.”
The implications careened through Elliott’s mind. The Solar Guard had
only been in place a little over a decade, primarily operating shortrange
vessels near the Moon and the asteroid outposts, as a rescue force with a
nod toward smuggling and a wink toward piracy—interplanetary commerce
in the Solar System might never be highly enough developed to attract
much in the way of piracy—but neither Earth nor Mars nor the farther-flung
outposts had yet determined that a full-fledged navy was needed. The
orders said, “Inner System Navy.” The phrase barely made sense.
Circitor Hellmer gave Elliott little time to consider the implications.
“Did you notice anything unusual about our intercept’s orbit?”
“The trajectory looked a bit flat, sir, but I haven’t studied all the
numbers.”
“Oh, it’s flat, all right, enough to look almost parabolic.”
Elliott squinted for a second as he tried to visualize the orbit. “Is it a
comet?”
“Worse.” Circitor Hellmer gestured for the Slate, took it, and pulled up
another page of information. “In addition to the command-encrypted orders,
a second encrypted message was interleaved in the first. The Trojan
outposts sued for their independence again, if you recall from the news, but
at the same time they sent secret dispatches... with a threat. It appears they
weren’t bluffing.”
 Elliott remembered the reports of the Trojans’ latest attempt to break
away from governance by the inner planets; the news was about a month
old, but neither Earth nor Mars had responded so far as he knew. The Trojan
Confederacy, as they called themselves, loosely bound the tiny settlements
in the Asteroid Belt and among the Trojan asteroids out in Jupiter’s orbit.
The news reports had seemed unimportant at the time, since the last two
independence requests had been quickly refused, and Elliott had dismissed
them. But now “Inner Solar” was organizing a defense against the Trojans?
Whatever the Belmont was tasked to intercept came from there.... He
squinted again as he visualized where Jupiter was in its orbit compared to
Mars and Earth, and therefore where the Trojans—Jupiter’s leading and
trailing orbital companions—were. Then he focused on the screen the
circitor was holding up and saw the answer.
“An asteroid?”
“Not just an asteroid. An asteroid with a mass driver. You would’ve
figured it out from the ephemeris once you looked at the history, because
the course changes, ever so slightly, every few hours. That thing isn’t,
strictly speaking, in orbit, heliocentric or otherwise. It’s in powered flight.”
“That’s crazy,” Elliott said. “Sounds like they’ve read too much
Heinlein. They have to know that if they drop something like that on Earth,
someone—maybe everyone—will retaliate.”
“Desperation can make people do crazy things. Their messages are
included in here, too, and the tone is pretty conciliatory. Reluctant, even.
They use phrases like ‘last resort’ right alongside the old classics: ‘when in
the course of human events’ and ‘dissolve the bonds,’ that sort of thing.
They seem to be hoping that the governments will grant their request, give
them a seat at the table as it were, at which point they can divert their
projectile”—the stress the circitor put on the word expressed an anger
Elliott rarely heard from him—“and say it was all a big misunderstanding.
And I get the impression that some factions on Earth are in favor, and not
just the ones that supported their independence previously.”
Elliott decided he’d rather think about the political implications later,
but asking the next question galled him almost as much. “So we’re a navy.
Does that make me a lieutenant?”
“And me a commander?” Hellmer asked. His voice took on a harder
edge. “Not on my ship. The volunteers set up our ranks to be unique, and
we’ll keep them that way.”
That was good enough for Elliott. “Vindex” meant “defender,” among
other things, and he rather liked the sound of it, but just asking the question
pained him. It reminded him that he was a vindex filling a defensor’s billet,
and would have been promoted a year ago except for... it was better not to
dwell on that. He returned to the main topic. “So we’re supposed to
intercept a rock and do what, exactly?”
“That’s the puzzle. Our orders don’t extend beyond the intercept itself
—”
“Which is going to be damned difficult.”
“—and I expect to get clarification as we get closer. We may be tasked
to observe and report—a scouting mission—or we may be tasked to...
intervene.” Circitor Hellmer paused to let that sink in. “One thing is certain:
we know something that most of the Solar System doesn’t know, but a
secret only lasts as long as everyone thinks it’s to their benefit to keep it.
“This will come out eventually, and it will become a news sensation.
They can’t hide the thing from every telescope, and the Trojan faction is
likely to release news about it whenever they think it will put the right
amount of pressure on the powers that are. But that’s not our problem.
“By now any of the crew who are paying attention will have noted the
odd ephemeris, at least, and they’ll extrapolate from there: They’re a smart
bunch, but don’t tell them I said so. I suspect we’ll have to clamp down on
all outgoing comm traffic.”
“They won’t like that,” Elliott said. And, truthfully, he didn’t much care
for the idea himself.
“Of course they won’t. I won’t either. But it’s not ours to like or dislike,
just to do our duty.”
Before he spoke again, the circitor’s gaze ranged around the tiny cabin,
as if he were gathering his thoughts from its curves and corners. “You said
the Trojans’ scheme was crazy, but I wonder. Something like this is a major
undertaking.... They had to make a lot of sacrifices out there, in the Belt and
beyond, in order to pull it off. The fact that they did it in secret and issued a
warning—again, in secret and only to people at the highest levels— seems
like cold calculation to me. They may not expect capitulation, but they
probably expect negotiation.”
 Elliott took up the thought. “And if they get something close to what
they’ve asked for, even with some concessions...”
“Like I said, they’ll probably adjust the trajectory, and the Earth can go
back to worrying about natural disasters instead of political ones.”
“‘Probably.’”
The circitor shrugged. “Probably, possibly, maybe. Who can say?” He
fixed Elliott with a gaze he usually reserved for junior officers at the mess,
when he had tossed out a topic and wanted to see how they would respond.
Elliott returned to his previous “do what” question. “So we burn for an
intercept, presuming they can’t deviate much from their course, match up
enough to be in the same vicinity for... wait, are the governments going to
try to stall until we can get close enough to reconnoiter?”
Circitor Hellmer smiled. “Well thought. If Earth answers while we’re on
approach, the Trojans might call off the whole thing—or at least shift their
rock into a different orbit—and evade a rendezvous. That much mass is
hard to move, but also provides them a lot to throw away on course
changes.”
“More than we could ever carry,” Elliott said. The Belmont was
effectively a collection of huge propellant tanks with the minimum of living
and working spaces; her excess propellant was for rescue maneuvers, which
thankfully were rare. She patrolled routinely between Earth and L4, the
orbit-leading Sun-Earth LaGrange point, and even though her engines could
generate sufficient delta-vee to get into different orbits, she was still bound
to long, fairly low-consumption routes. Her normal patrol was about 180
days out, about 120 days in. She carried a modicum of freight to offset
operating costs, mostly refined metals from the mining outposts on
asteroids orbiting near that gravitationally stable point. Whenever L5
developed, Belmont and her sister ship would have to patrol that part of
Earth’s orbit as well.
Elliott continued, “It’s one thing to kick an asteroid into a new orbit, but
something else to keep kicking it all the way along. I don’t recall anyone
ever doing that before. And anything large enough to be a threat would be
extremely hard to handle. Even so, I doubt we can match their powered
flight for long.”
“The Belters have done multiple kicks before, but not like this. And
from the specs we’ve got, it’s fast but not blazing fast. But you’re right: the
incident angle is all wrong for a good approach, and we can most assuredly
not come about and match their pace for any length of time.”
“And a flyby isn’t an intercept.”
“No, it isn’t,” Circitor Hellmer said, and his smile turned into a grimace.
“Noted,” Elliott said. “With your permission, sir, I’ll see what the
smiths can do to fab some extra grapples and cables.”
“Let me burn the grapevine first, or at least prune it back. Then talk to
the master smith, and inform the officers that from here on in we will have
status briefings and discuss tactical options at the close of every evening
meal.”
“Aye, Circitor.”
“And, Vindex...”
“Yes, sir?”
“You can never read too much Heinlein.”

Chief Engineer Derronen Robertson tried to read the expression on the

XO’s face. Not exactly worry... resignation, maybe? The XO was doing a
good job of hiding his real feelings.
But what Robertson had just heard sounded like a bad joke.
“You want to grapple the ship to what?” Robertson asked. He wondered
if he should express his opinion more respectfully, but only for an instant.
This called for directness. “Mark, that’s insane.”
Robertson—the Belmont’s “master smith” in the solar guard’s less
formal nomenclature— did not stand on ceremony, certainly not in his own
fabrication shop, especially when faced with a scheme no sober officer
should ever propose. Considering all the XO had told him, he felt as if his
entire career outlook had changed phase and become decidedly less solid.
Part of him regretted reacting the way he did, but he was not particularly
worried about reprisals; the XO never seemed to mind being addressed
informally or being challenged, at least when the younger spacers weren’t
around. Robertson would never go so far as to call the circitor by his first
name, of course, or to tell him quite so bluntly that a plan was crazy; as a
smith, Robertson might be a bit laid back, but he was not stupid.
The XO shrugged. “It’ll be a few months until we match up with it, and
then we won’t have much time. We don’t have the fuel to stay with it, so
that means grabbing it and hanging on.”
 “In-sane,” Robertson said. He was steady in the straps, so he let himself
gesture a bit as he spoke. “In-effing-sane. It’s dicey enough coming
alongside a ship that wants us there, as big as we are. Do we even know
how big this asteroid is?”
“Current estimate is about a kilometer long.” Robertson swallowed back a
long string of curses and repeated, “Insane.”
“I know,” the XO said, “and hopefully we can avoid taking this risk.
We’ll know more about what we’re facing as we get closer. For now, this is
all I’ve got.”
Robertson sighed. Crazy stupid Trojans throwing asteroids around, and
now we’re supposed to play navy? He wondered if early Phoenician sailors,
merchants and the like, felt ill-used or unequal to the task when they were
first pressed into service to defend their home ports.
What were the brass drinking? They were solar guard, dammit, though
that in itself was barely significant. The guard was only a few years
removed from the days of impromptu rescues by the community of spacers.
And we’re the first line of defense?
The Belmont was the first vessel specifically outfitted and tasked for
routine operations between Earth and the LaGrange points, and to date had
only conducted three full-up rescues and a handful more boardings and
inspections. Her sister ship, the Volunteer, was more empty shell than ship,
and a year or so from being completed; she would truly be a “sister” ship,
with an all-female crew, most of whom were presently busy with her
construction. But until she was ready, the Belmont was all the solar guard
had to offer.
Robertson studied the XO for a moment. This was Mark’s first cruise on
the Belmont; he’d signed on after Hauchi, the last XO, mustered out to take
care of his ailing parents back on Earth. Before gaining the XO billet,
Elliott had served as an Aux on a few commercial cruises and run a guard
station on one of the mined asteroids, but the guard was still too new to
worry much over who had served where, or even what ranks each other
wore. As far as that went, Elliott was overdue for promotion; he was
Robertson’s senior even though they wore the same formal rank—vindex,
one of the Latinate titles by which the guard had deliberately differentiated
itself from terrestrial services. Robertson did not know why exactly Elliott
was not yet a defensor.
 But what mattered now was that Elliott was an operator, not a smith,
and likely would not care about any technical objections Robertson would
raise. All he would care about was whether they got the job done.
The engineer sighed. “So what do you want? Harpoons for spearing the
great white whale?”
The XO did not laugh. “Just heavier cable than we usually carry, if
that’s possible, and extra grapples.”
“They’re grapnels.”
“What?”
“Grapple is a thing you do. Grapnel is a thing.”
Elliott tipped his head, and Robertson gave him as sly a smile as he
could muster.
“What are you, an English major?” the XO asked.
Robertson patted the engineering badge over his heart. “Yeah, I won this
in a raffle.”
“Sure you didn’t just grow it in a fab tank?”
Robertson grinned. “It’s highly technical, Vindex Elliott, sir. I’m not
sure you could follow the details.”
“You just don’t know how well I sleep at night knowing we’ve got you
to take care of the ‘highly technical.’”
The engineer spread his arms; his right hand touched the one-cubic-
meter 3D printer, and he patted it. “That’s what we’re here for,” he said.
Elliott nodded, and even smiled. He said, “That’s what I’m counting on,
Derr,” and pushed off toward the hatch.
Robertson hesitated a moment, then pushed off in the opposite direction
toward the microfab shop and the stores beyond. He was sure he would find
one of his junior engineers along the way and get him started on the task.
As he floated through the hatch, he sang a bit of the refrain of the
unofficial anthem adopted by the guard’s engineers. “So let’s hear it for the
smith, working at his forge alone/For he gave us tools and weapons, that are
better by far than stone....”
But would they be good enough?

The circitor’s announcement to the crew had been clean and clear, but
over the next few weeks it raised more questions than Elliott was able to
answer. He had expected complaints about the communications embargo,
along the lines of: “Why does my birthday message to my daughter need to
be reviewed?” Those he could handle, even if he could not voice his own
complaints and had to self-censor his own messages to his sister. And she
was cleared to know—Mira had worked like the Devil to earn her place as a
smith building the Volunteer—but at least she would understand. No, in
contrast, what Elliott got were a dozen variations on “what does this navy
thing mean for my pay and benefits,” and those made him want to take a
shower in liquid oxygen. But he answered the questions he could and did
his best to defer the others.
Their first maneuver came less than a week after they had been pressed
into service, when there was still some debate in the wardroom over
whether the term “shanghaied” could apply. Engine burns were always
exciting, in the “pucker your ass and hope” fashion, and they were in for
several more the closer they came to the intercept.
After they had settled into the new orbit that was their intercept course,
after they were committed to the task, mealtimes in the wardroom took on
greater urgency as tactical planning sessions. The officers were hampered
by having little in the way of observation, the first “O” in the venerable
OODA loop; the asteroid, while large enough to do some damage, was still
too small to resolve clearly from any telescope. They knew it was roughly a
kilometer long and about half that across, but very little yet about its actual
shape and composition.
It seemed most likely that it would be a nickel-iron asteroid as opposed
to a carbonaceous rock, as they presumed its mass driver would work best if
it could manufacture its own ferrous slugs that could be accelerated by
magnetic fields. That meant the asteroid itself would probably have some
magnetic field, though it could not be strong enough to interfere with their
equipment. It might be weaker even than the fields the Belmont herself
generated to protect the crew from charged particle radiation.
If it was a nickel-iron asteroid, that would also mean it was relatively
rare, especially so far out. A precious thing to turn into a weapon.
Several days after their course change, at the close of the evening meal,
Elliott listened as Custos First Class Hardy, the second engineer, mused
over the characteristics of the mass driver the Trojans had installed. Elliott
only half paid attention, worrying a piece of corn kernel from between his
teeth, as Hardy discussed whether it would be better to fire one-tonne slugs
at a fast rate, or hundred-tonne slugs at a slower rate, in terms of
maintaining stability and control; the truth was, Elliott was not sure it
mattered to their mission.
He interrupted Hardy’s speculations. “I’m sure we’d love to interview
their designers to explain their methods, but at present we’re having a hard
enough time recalculating its ‘orbit’ in every ‘coast’ phase that asteroid
goes through. We’ll be tweaking our vectors right up until our final
approach.”
Hardy used that to go on a new tangent. “They’ve got to be able to do
course correction, too, even though hanging ACS engines around an
asteroid seems problematic. The mass driver itself must have some vector
control, but who’s doing the controlling? Do we expect that the thing is
crewed? They don’t have any better AIs or expert systems than we do, do
they?”
The officers looked expectantly at Circitor Hellmer. Elliott himself “sat”
across from the circitor around the small table to which their trays were
clamped—his posture, like the others’, was more a relaxed squat with one
foot hooked in a strap. To his left were Hardy and Master Smith Robertson,
then the circitor, then Custos First Class Burgaw and Custos Second Class
Diouri from the support section. The only officer missing was Williamson,
the third engineer, who was on watch.
The circitor said, “What intel we have says it’s unlikely to have any
crew. They don’t think the Trojans would spring for life support on
something that is meant to be destroyed.”
Elliott added, “I haven’t heard of the Trojans making any cybernetic
advances, but it’s a good question for us to relay to the Intel folks. But
automated space probes have been around for nearly a century, and with a
lot less capable computers. Far better to program in the instructions and
parameters, even if they have to transmit new instructions from time to
time, than to risk a crew.”
Hardy said, “Aye, I get that. I just thought that life support wouldn’t
take too much power from the mass driver, and if something breaks it never
hurts to have a technician around. And at least the mass of the asteroid
would provide some radiation protection.”
“It would be a suicide attack, though,” said Diouri, who pulled double
duty as supply officer and medic.
 “Not necessarily,” Hardy said. “They could have a lifeboat and plan to
escape into Earth orbit.”
Diouri shook his head. “Don’t see what good that would do them. If
they drop that rock on the planet, no one’s going to give them safe harbor.”
Elliott decided to intervene before the two junior officers could spin
each other up on the matter. “Whether it’s run by expert systems or expert
people, that may remain a mystery until we actually catch the thing. For
now it doesn’t matter much to our mission, gentlemen.”
“The vindex is right,” said Circitor Hellmer. “But perhaps not for the
reason he thinks.”
All eyes turned to the circitor. He paused, as if giving Elliott an opening
to say something else, but Mark was experienced enough to be patient even
though he expected he was as curious as the others. The circitor’s eyes
twinkled as he continued, “How that contraption runs and who runs it is
secondary to the fact that it’s a threat to all we know and love, and it’s that
fact that drives our mission. So Vindex Elliott is correct that it doesn’t
matter much whether it’s a computer or a crew.
“But it doesn’t matter for another reason, a more fundamental reason:
Because no matter whether it’s run by robots or monkeys, it is, at the most
basic level, a rock. A dead thing. And not only a dead thing in itself, but a
dead thing with a deadly purpose.
“Contrast it with our own vessel. Theirs is raw rock, where ours is
refined metal and composites and volatiles. Theirs is dead, but deadly,
where ours is alive and purposed first and foremost for life... peopled with
volunteers, to rescue the stranded and aid the wounded. To bring hope to
those who might otherwise lose it.
“So while we might puzzle over how their rock flies, we should do so
only enough to understand better how to bring it down. We cannot lose
sight of our purpose, our mission, our reason for being—and what it may
cost if we fail. Let’s make the old volunteers proud.”

II. ORBITAL MECHANICS: HURRY UP AND WAIT

The days turned into weeks.

The crew of the Belmont was spared the worst of the political in-
fighting that standing up a so-called “navy” had generated. Custos Second
Class Emeraldo Williamson, third of the engineering officers behind
Robertson and Hardy, had at first suppressed a snicker whenever he heard
the word. They had all been “CHOP”ed—change of operational control—to
an organization that was still being organized; if vortices could traverse the
vacuum of space, he imagined the political spinning would reach so far as
to set Belmont gyrating like a toy. At least they hadn’t designated the ship
anything other than a “naval vessel”—hadn’t called it a “cruiser” or
something truly inappropriate like “destroyer.” After all, the ship’s largest
weapon was the exhaust from her main engines.
But gradually the idea of being in the navy, “Inner Solar” or otherwise,
and of being the first in such a navy, appealed to him more than he thought
possible. He flew through the ship’s spaces with a greater determination, a
stronger purpose; if the Belmont had gravity enough that he could walk the
corridors, there would be a spring in his step for sure.
Williamson looked forward to the officers’ wardroom discussions more
and more as their intelligence on the asteroid grew. He even swapped off
shifts when he could, so he could attend.
Remote observations from NEOWARN—the multi-national Near-Earth
Observation and Warning Command, situated alongside NORAD in
Cheyenne Mountain—gradually painted a clearer picture of their intercept
target: 1.2 kilometers long, slightly tapered, and on average some four
hundred sixty meters abeam. If it turned out to be mostly nickel-iron, it
would have been a good candidate for mining. With the circitor observing
and commenting like a king at a royal banquet, Williamson and the others
discussed how the mass driver was likely arranged; how the asteroid’s
center of mass would shift as material was mined from its surface or its
interior; how much thrust vectoring and attitude control would be required
for something so massive; and anything else they could think of. It was
guesswork, but educated guesswork, and he discovered that he loved it.
A month into their intercept course, Circitor Hellmer told the assembled
officers, “It appears the Trojans have given their rock a name.”
“How did we find that out, sir?” Williamson asked, before anyone else
could.
“We’ve apparently got some new intel from inside the Trojan camp, you
might say. Like, for instance, they set it on its course about a year before
they sent their warning message.”
 To Williamson’s right, the XO held up his hand. Williamson liked
Vindex Elliott, even if he wasn’t a smith. “We worked that out from the
changing ephemeris weeks ago, sir,” the XO said.
“True,” the skipper said, “but independent verification never hurts. And
consider what it means: To let it fly that long ago, the Trojans were
probably already working on it the very first time they tried for
independence.”
As quick as he had the thought, Williamson said, “Maybe we should
have let them have it.”
An uneasy silence descended on the wardroom, and he wondered if he
should have kept the thought to himself. It might be out of line to discuss
politics when their main concern was tactics, but surely someone else felt
the same way....
“Go on, Custos,” said the circitor. “I’m sure there’s more to that
thought.”
Williamson sipped some of his reconstituted mixed berry juice
—“mixed” to disguise the fact that it had very little “berry” in it—and
berated himself the way his mother used to: Engage brain before opening
mouth. He swallowed and said, “I suppose partly I think that ’cause my
uncle emigrated to the Trojans about ten or twelve years ago. He’s a miner,
nobody special, but I had this talk with my dad back when the Trojans first
wanted to break away.
“My dad said the main thing everybody wants is to be free, somehow. A
man in prison wants out, a woman in a bad marriage wants out”—he
elbowed Custos Diouri—“a spacer back from a long cruise wants out of the
ship! Everybody wants to be free, to decide for themselves what to do and
how to live, so why shouldn’t the Trojans be able to decide for
themselves?”
Circitor Hellmer glanced around the cabin and settled a steely gaze on
Williamson. “And you, do you want out? Want to decide for yourself, here
on my ship?”
One of the other officers snickered—probably Hardy—but the XO said,
“Stow it.” The circitor’s gaze never wavered, so far as Williamson could
tell.
Williamson gripped the drinking bulb and spread his other hand out on
the table, to keep from raising his hands in surrender. “No, sir, not like that.
I’m not talking about duty, about being under authority. I signed on freely,
and I’ll serve where and how I’m needed. I don’t expect to get a vote, and I
sure don’t expect to have a say.
“But it’s not as if the Trojans were posing any threat back then. They
wanted some autonomy, some power to negotiate on their own behalf.
Would that have been so hard to give them? If they had this planned that far
back, they must’ve known they would be denied. But what if they hadn’t
been? They could be mining that rock instead of wasting it like this.”
“So,” the circitor said, drawing his words out like a man sharpening a
knife on a whetstone, “you side with the revolutionaries.”
Vindex Robertson, the chief engineer, leaned forward, but the circitor
held up his hand. “Not yet, Master Smith. Let your man speak.”
Williamson glanced at the hatch, wishing he had a reason to go through
it: some menial duty to perform where he could think through what he had
to say. The hell with it.
“I side with the free, sir,” he said. “Those who want to be, and those
who already are.”
The circitor held Williamson’s gaze for a moment; Williamson fought
the torque that his muscles were producing, trying to get him to turn his
head away. Agonizing seconds bled past.
Circitor Hellmer nodded. “Aye, that’ll do. As long as I can count on you
to do your duty, that’ll do.
“Just bear in mind that we are all that stands between a few thousand
who want to be free and a few billion who want the same thing. You might
say that we side with the free, because if any of those billions are hurt by
that rock out there—that Liberator, as the Trojans call it—that will mean
that we failed.”
“Aye, sir,” said Williamson, turning his attention back to his juice.
“And, Custos,” the circitor said.
“Yes, sir?”
“In this room, if I ever ask you another question or you feel the need to
express another opinion...”
Williamson lowered his head almost involuntarily. “Yes, sir?”
“You do exactly what you just did. Your opinion may be ill considered,
your facts may be erroneous, your logic may be flawed, but you yourself
are worthless to me if you do not speak your mind.
 “Well done.”

Chief Spacer Ashak Pelligree, engineering superintendent and the senior

noncommissioned officer on the Belmont, knocked on the bulkhead outside
the circitor’s cabin. The hatch was open, so before the circitor spoke
Pelligree said, “Got a minute, skipper?”
Circitor Hellmer stuck the Slate to his tiny desk and waved Pelligree in.
“Of course, Coelum, what can I do for you?”
Pelligree hoped his motion through the hatch hid his tiny headshake.
Officers and their damn titles. “Coelum” meant “heaven,” and was
supposed to express the lofty position at the top of the NCO ranks, but
Pelligree preferred “Chief” or even the informal “Primus.”
He screwed on a smile that should look benign enough. “Sir, I have a
report and a request.”
“This wouldn’t be about another lovers’ spat down in the ship’s stores,
would it?”
Pelligree shook his head. “No, sir.”
“Then I’ll take your report and request in whatever order you prefer.”
“They’re pretty much the same thing, sir. One leads into th’other. We’ve
had the vats running, growing some new cabling with the aim of cinching
up to that thing we’re approaching, but that’s the issue. We need to rethink
our approach.”
Circitor Hellmer nodded toward the hatch, a question in the way he
raised his eyebrows.
“Nah, that ain’t necessary, Skipper. No big secret, just a suggestion.”
The circitor smiled. “Is this an engineering suggestion?”
“No, sir. I talked with the smith about it, sure, but this is bigger than just
engineering.”
“Then please secure the hatch, and go on.”
Pelligree complied. The room, already tight as a torqued nut, seemed to
squeeze in upon him. It was a familiar feeling; unpleasant, but not
oppressive. “We need to rethink how we’re going to greet that rock,” he
said. “I’m no navigator, but—what’s so funny?”
The circitor’s chuckle grew into a guffaw. He leaned back, steadying
himself with one hand on the bulkhead, and waved the other hand at the
chief. “Coelum Pelligree, you can stow the false modesty and talk straight.
We’ve known each other too long for anything else, Asshole Ashak.”
Pelligree had always like Huston Hellmer, all the way back when they’d
been on rival mining crews and would meet down on Luna for drinks and...
other pursuits. They had signed on with the solar guard within a few weeks
of one another, after the loss of the Tiberius shook up the commercial
spacers. Hellmer had jetted up the officer ranks in the days when the guard
was primarily placing auxiliaries on commercial vessels, but he had been
Belmont’s XO before taking command three years ago. Pelligree’s career
had mirrored the circitor’s, just up the noncom side, and he was glad to find
a bit of the old familiarity still floating nearby.
Pelligree danced his fingers along a wiring conduit, and smiled. “Aye,
aye, sir. Yes, I’ve done the math, too. I agree that we probably could burn
our tanks dry and actually latch on to the Trojans’ horse, but I don’t relish
the thought of spending all eternity tied to that rock—or floating through
the ether if those lines get cut and we’re empty.”
“What do you propose, then?”
“I imagine you considered using the sleds and treating this like a
boarding operation.”
Circitor Hellmer nodded. “That was my first thought. I’d still prefer to
do it that way, but it seems we’d have to match orbits for longer than we’re
able.”
“I thought so, too, skip. But let me show you something, and see what
you think.”
Pelligree took a mini flashlight from his coveralls—every spacer was
required to keep one on their person at all times in case of power failure—
along with a length of wire. He balanced the flashlight in the air between
them and pointed at it with the wire.
“Our orbit will cross its orbit, and we can burn like hell to minimize the
angle and the delta-vee between us, but we won’t be parallel and still won’t
have a lot of time before it passes us by. And if we push too hard, then all
our parameters will be wrong for getting home. And we sure can’t chase the
thing. But I think we can conserve some fuel if we release the sleds off the
fore end of the asteroid, let them boost toward it. They’re more efficient,
not to mention more agile. They can grapple it, do what they need to do,
and then make their way off the thing’s stern where we pick them up.
 “The tolerances will still be tight, like lining up a vacuum weld, because
every meter we travel after the crossover point means we’re pulling away in
every direction... X, Y, and Z. The best part, though, since the thing is
rotating—” he twisted the wire into a helix and placed it around the
flashlight, “—it’ll be like we’re in a halo orbit that the thing cruises
through. We can image all of it, gather intel and perform some amount of
overwatch. Can’t do that if we hitch a ride on it.”
The circitor nodded, slowly. “You’ve run the numbers? They look
good?”
“I’ve run some numbers that I’d be happy to push up to you, yes, sir.”
“Very good. I’ll take it under advisement.” As Pelligree gathered the
floating flashlight and wire, the circitor continued, “Got a sec for another
topic?”
“Of course, sir.”
“What do you think of Custos Williamson?”
Pelligree kept his face neutral. “He’s a good smith, sir.”
“Anything else?”
“You mean about the little chat the two of you had last week?”
“Yes.”
Pelligree shook his head. “Isn’t this something you should talk to the
chief engineer about, sir?”
“Maybe. But he’s not here in my office at the moment.”
Pelligree tried a diplomatic tack. “Neither the master smith nor Custos
Williamson has said anything about it to me, skipper.”
“They don’t have to. You wouldn’t be much of a chief if you didn’t
know more than I do about what goes on on this boat. So drop the formality
for a minute, Primus, and tell me: should I be concerned?”
“About an officer with an opinion? You should be more concerned if he
keeps it to himself.”
“I already told him as much.”
“He’s a good smith, Skipper, and a good officer so far as I can tell. He’s
not afraid to think, and he’s not afraid to work, and I put as much stock in
the latter as in the former. He knows the score. He won’t disappoint.”
“Good. That’s my impression as well, but I appreciate an independent
view. Thanks, Ashak.”
 “Besides,” Pelligree added, “he reminds me of another headstrong
young officer I once knew. That one ended up commanding the first
dedicated SG ship. Lucky son-of-a-bitch.”
“Lucky?” The circitor’s smile thinned.
“Purely. If he wasn’t lucky, he wouldn’t have me as his smiths’
superintendent.”

“Have you gone over the latest observations, gentlemen?” the circitor
asked as the meal came to a close.
Elliott took the cue and called up a projection of their target. Wafts of
curry still meandered through the wardroom as the oblong asteroid rotated
in front of the assembled officers. At a distance, it looked much the same as
thousands of other rocks in the Solar System, but as details had emerged,
with closer and more intense observation, what set it apart were several
blocky structures, most only a couple of meters wide, scattered over its
surface. The analysts were not sure what the structures were, only that they
were squarish, straight-edged things that would not have formed in nature.
In addition, the asteroid featured one larger structure: a long, low building
oriented along what might be thought of either as the asteroid’s spine or its
keel.
Intel analysts had originally called the building the “longhouse,” but the
Belmont’s crew had taken to calling it the “dormitory.” It had been the first
structure detected on the asteroid, because of its sheer size: about eighty
meters long by ten wide, and about three meters high. As the smaller
buildings became detectable, the observers resolved a series of rectangular
shapes down the sides of the longhouse and in two rows down its roof,
distinguishable only by their outlines, like windows and skylights made of
the same material—assumed to be the typical moldable ceramic used in
lunar and other space construction since the ’30s—that formed the building
itself.
Custos Diouri said, “I’ve been curious about something that seems to be
missing: I don’t see anything that looks like a sensor array. They have to
have one, to tell them where they’re going, so they can adjust their course.”
The circitor looked at Elliott. “Vindex?” he said.
Elliott shook his head. “Their course plot doesn’t indicate any
significant changes so far, and adjusting course on something that big
would have to be a delicate operation. Nontrivial. It’s not really turning fast
enough to be truly spin-stabilized, and it wouldn’t take much to start it
tumbling.”
“What about making an end-of-course correction,” Diouri said, “to
make sure it hits what they want to hit?”
Elliott nodded. “Sure, just because it would be hard doesn’t mean they
won’t have to make some adjustments in the end game. We’ve projected
several different versions of their course, based on assumptions about the
mass driver pushing the thing. If it keeps firing at its current rate of once
every two to three hours, it will actually cross Earth’s orbit just ahead of the
planet—inside the Moon’s orbit, so way too close for comfort—but it won’t
impact. It wouldn’t take much of a correction to make that a collision
course.”
“And, really,” Custos Williamson put in, “any of those blockhouses
could have enough of a sensor array for that level of maneuvering. All it
needs are a couple of sun trackers and star trackers looking at points in the
sky. It might be sighting on something ahead or behind, correcting based on
the Sun each time it rotates. The rest is just computation.
“But I’m more interested in why its current course, as you said, Vindex,
misses Earth.”
Elliott caught sight of a slight quirk of the circitor’s lip, and allowed
himself to smile just a fraction more. “Why is that?” Elliott asked.
Williamson glanced back and forth between the XO and the circitor.
“Shot across the bow, so to speak, sir. A warning shot, at least for now, that
the Trojans can re-task if they don’t get what they want. Or if they do.”
Elliott glanced at Master Smith Robertson. Williamson’s supervisor
kept his face impassive, but Elliott imagined that inside he was cheering the
young officer. Elliott realized he was doing the same thing.
The circitor said, “What makes you say that, Emeraldo?”
Williamson, buoyed by the familiarity, said, “The inner worlds didn’t
launch an attack on Ceres or Vesta or any of the other Trojan outposts, sir.
So the Trojans don’t have the equivalent of a Lexington or Concord to
justify making an attack, especially one that would kill millions of people.
They bypassed Mars, maybe because of orbitology but more likely because
the power base is still on Earth, but they know they need some kind of good
relations with Earth—so this is a way of showing what they could do, not
necessarily what they will do.”
“You may be more right than you know,” the circitor said. “So if Earth
capitulates, do the Trojans leave the course unaltered, do they push their
rock farther out of the way, or do they present it to the Earth as a gift? All
those possibilities have been considered. But, more to the point, if Earth
refuses... or just delays making any decision... do they maneuver it into a
collision course?”
Williamson seemed reluctant to answer, but the circitor did not look at
anyone else. Presently the young engineer said, “I don’t know, sir.”
Now the circitor looked at each of the officers in turn. “Neither does
anyone else,” he said. “Analysts down below have been poring over
everything we have, and have lots of theories and suppositions, but
apparently our source of information among the Trojans themselves has
gone silent. Whether that itself is an indication of some jeopardy, no one
has shared with us, but the bald truth is that we don’t really know what the
Trojans mean to do with this. Vindex Elliott?”
Elliott pointed at the slowly rotating image. “Whatever their intent, they
have maneuvered it this far and can continue to do so. Its approach so far
has been steady, and even though no one has detected any significant signal
traffic we assume it’s sending data somewhere and has the capability to
receive instructions, even if most of its actions are preprogrammed. But we
wouldn’t just set a program for approach and docking and go to sleep, trust
the ship to execute it flawlessly with no human input or oversight. We
posed Custos Diouri’s question to headquarters, but they have not given us
any indication that the Trojans have made an AI breakthrough, so we are
operating on the assumption that their computers have no better judgment
than ours—which means they won’t do that either, not completely.
“So while this may be a feint, or it may be a lure, folks are thinking that
maybe it’s something else entirely. Not a gift, to tell by the Trojans’
rhetoric. But not intended to impact at all, not a decoy or a ‘shot across the
bow.’” He froze the image so the “dormitory” was nearly centered. “When
imagery first caught this, everyone assumed it was some sort of support
building for the mass driver. We don’t know what other intel the analysts
are working with at this point, but folks are telling us they think this is a
hangar.”
 After a moment to absorb that, Diouri used his own tabletop control to
superimpose a scale on the image. “Doesn’t seem big enough to be a
hangar.”
Elliott said, “The best guess is that it’s not a hangar for anything big, not
fighter ships or the like, not even for a lifeboat for any crew. The idea is that
it’s a barn full of little robots, satellite hunter-killers or the like. If so, as this
thing passes through the Earth-Moon system... well, there are a lot of
communication and power satellites in pretty lazy orbits at GEO. And if
they push through to medium or low orbit and start shredding spacecraft...
think of how long it would take to reestablish global navigation capabilities,
and to clear out the debris before anybody gets to orbit again.”
The wardroom fell silent as the officers considered the scenario. It had
been decades since smaller, less expensive atomic clocks had obviated the
need for the Global Positioning System’s precise timing signals to facilitate
worldwide communications and make electronic transactions possible
without their voice, video, and data signals getting lost in an electronic
morass, but as space-based capabilities grew, more and more people,
especially where other technologies still didn’t reach, came to depend on
them in ways they took for granted until, for some reason, they weren’t
there.
Custos Williamson spoke first. “That doesn’t change our mission, does
it, Circitor?”
Circitor Hellmer half-nodded, a little grimace on his face the only
indication that he was unhappy with the orders they had received. Elliott
knew how he felt.
The circitor said, “Actually, it gives us a specific target and task. Our
orders are to verify what’s in there.”
Williamson perked up. “Hardy and I could cobble together some
remotes. We’ve got cameras and we can rig up a guidance unit.”
Hardy nodded and seemed about to speak when the circitor said, “That
won’t be necessary.”
The tone of the circitor’s voice cast a greater pall over the wardroom.
He looked at each officer in turn and then continued, “Vindex Elliott and I
have considered how best to use the observations we have—and the ones
we will make on our approach—to Orient, Decide, and Act during our
intercept. But we have also studied our orders, where we have leeway... and
where we don’t.” He let that sink in for a moment. “To make the best of the
situation, we will be making use of a tactical approach suggested by one of
our own. We’ve still got a few details to work out, but we will be targeting
two objectives, not one: the longhouse there, and the mass driver itself.”
Elliott remained silent. He didn’t particularly like the plan, and
especially his part in it, but he didn’t have to. He’d expressed his reluctance
in private, as was proper.
“You mentioned a tactical approach, sir,” said Williamson.
The circitor glanced toward Vindex Robertson, the master smith, a tacit
acknowledgement that it was Robertson’s superintendent who had
presented the idea. “We don’t have any intel on what the Trojans expect us
to do, but hopefully we can confuse their systems by treating this like a
boarding operation: essentially, we’ll be sending down a ground assault.”
The junior officers glanced around at each other, and Custos Hardy said,
“First the navy, and now the marines?”
The circitor laughed, but the sound had all the merriment of a funeral.
“In a manner of speaking.
“We will equip and send down two teams. The XO will lead one squad
to disable the mass driver. One of you will lead the second—”
“I volunteer,” said Custos Williamson. He looked at the master smith.
“If Vindex Robertson doesn’t object.”
“Thank you. In fact, every department head agreed to release whoever
volunteered. Your squad, then, will investigate the ‘dormitory’ and
document what’s in there. The two of you will work out the details after this
meeting and start training simulations tomorrow. Any questions? Good.”
The circitor stood, and everyone else did as well. Like the others, Elliott
held on to the table awaiting their dismissal. The circitor turned slightly
toward the hatch, then turned back and fixed his gaze on the XO.
“We do have one other piece of business to perform. Custos Diouri, if
you would dial in the shipwide intercom so everyone on duty can attend
us?”
As the young officer opened the all-call channel, Elliott tipped his head
slightly to one side, but Circitor Hellmer held his gaze, his expression at its
most inscrutable.
Custos Diouri nodded to the circitor, who said, “Vindex Robertson?”
 “Aye, sir,” said the smith. He swept his fingers across the tabletop and
proceeded to read. “Attention to orders.” The words echoed slightly from a
speaker in the corridor and everyone in the wardroom, Elliott included,
straightened up against their foot straps.
Robertson continued, “All personnel, attention to orders. Effective this
date, Vindex Mark Elliott, Executive Officer of the Solar Guard Cutter cum
Solar Navy Vessel Belmont, is promoted to the rank of defensor, with all the
rights and privileges thereto. Signed, Huston Hellmer, Circitor,
commanding.” He finished with, “As you were,” and switched off the
intercom.
It took a beat for Elliott’s brain to make sense of what he had just heard.
He drew himself up even more and tried to think of something suitable to
say, but he kept quiet because the only thing that came to him was, About
damn time.
Circitor Hellmer saved him the trouble. “Normally we would conduct a
full ceremony,” he said, “and you would spring for a party, Defensor, but
you have more pressing matters to attend to. So, catch.” The circitor tossed
a small envelope to him. “I would have handed you down mine, but they’re
in storage in Vancouver, so the smith printed those out. Be careful with
them, I understand the gold may flake off.”
Elliott caught the envelope and removed a set of oak leaves made of
3D-printed plastic with a top layer of shiny Kapton tape. “Thank you, sir,”
he said.
The circitor shook his head. “Thanks are for gifts, and those are no gift.
You earned them, a long time ago in my book. Now you just have to stay
worthy of them.” He looked around at the other officers. “As do we all,
gentlemen. So let’s get back to work.”

Orbital mechanics being the heartless bitch they were, the Belmont took
her sweet time reaching the target.
The crew thought they had been busy before, but the next few weeks
taught them new and brutal meanings of the word. Every shift included
approach simulations, observation scenarios, grappling drills, and other
preparations that involved the majority of the crew, and the boarding parties
themselves added such zero-gee rehearsals as they could accomplish in the
Belmont’s tight spaces.
 Some limited boarding preparations were done in the open spaces
outside the living capsules, among the gridwork that connected the ship’s
propellant tanks, in particular when the grapnels and additional mooring
lines the smiths had fabricated were adapted to the boarding sleds; but those
extra-vehicular activities were kept to a minimum to conserve consumables
and propellant. The boarding parties themselves were assigned, then
shuffled and reassigned when Buster Reynolds wrenched his knee during
PT, and changed again when Master Spacer Morazan, the support section
superintendent, dislocated his shoulder during one of the maneuvering
drills.
When the Trojans finally lifted their silence and announced their
intentions to everyone in the Solar System, the only thing that saved the
Belmont’s crew from a deluge of calls from their frightened families was the
limited bandwidth available for personal messages. The one-way time lag,
now grown to over a halfminute and increasing marginally every day, was
less protection: it only meant that wives and children and parents and
siblings sent recordings instead of opting for expensive realtime exchanges.
As the de-facto medical authority on the ship, Custos Rene Diouri found
himself thrust into the role of counselor and psychologist for more of the
crew than usual, as spacers came to him with questions about how best to
respond to their families’ concerns or how to cope with the mounting strain.
For two days after the Trojans made their public pronouncement, he was so
inundated by crew concerns that he laid aside his supply officer duties.
What he found when he took them up again chilled him such that he
thought he could feel his blood congeal and turn sluggish.
Diouri tracked down the XO to give him the news. He found the
defensor near the smallarms locker, along with Servus Milliken.
“Defensor Elliott?” Diouri asked. “I have a report you need to see.”
“Wait one,” the XO said, his concentration still on the NCO.
Milliken nodded at Diouri and said, “I’m sure whatever the Custos has
is more important. As for this,” he motioned toward the weapons cache,
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Oh, I have no doubt about that, Lander,” the XO said. Milliken usually
preferred his goby name, “Spartan,” but he did not appear to take umbrage
at the XO using his first name. Defensor Elliott continued, “Who knows?
Maybe we’ll put you in for the first ever Space Navy Commendation
Medal.”
Milliken shook his head. “Well, that would be a glory, sir, but I’d just
settle on getting home.”
“Wouldn’t we all,” the XO said. Milliken waved a salute and pushed off
down the corridor. Defensor Elliott turned to Diouri. “What can I do for
you, Rene?”
“Sir, could I have a word in private?”
The XO raised his eyebrows. “Easier said than done, you know that.”
He looked around the corridor, for now empty except the two of them.
“Daniels is on the bridge,” he said, “so the circitor’s in his cabin, can’t use
his office. Let’s go this way.”
He led Diouri through a hatch and down toward the maintenance
spaces. They passed from one life sphere into another, at which point the
XO undogged an access panel and gestured Diouri into the space behind it.
He recognized it as adjacent to a pump station as well as an air handler. The
space was unlit; Diouri turned on his mini flashlight and was startled to see
a set of eyes peering back at him from the bulkhead. He pulled back a bit,
though the space was cramped, and shone the light up and down on the
drawing as the XO lightly replaced the access cover.
“Nice work, eh?” Defensor Elliott said.
“I didn’t know you were an artist, sir.”
“I’m not.”
The eyes belonged to a figure out of legend that dominated the small
compartment and wore a look of fierce determination. One massive hand
seemed to grasp two water lines that ran along the bulkhead; the other,
raised above its head, was poised to strike with a large hammer.
“Thor?” Diouri asked.
“No,” the XO said, and played his own flashlight’s beam back toward
the access panel where the artist had drawn an erupting volcano, with
streams of lava cascading down its side.
Diouri smiled at the realization. “Vulcan, then. One of the smiths is
quite an artist.”
“True,” said the XO, “and I don’t know whether to be annoyed that they
have enough spare time to do this or impressed that they were able to do it
without covering any of the systems labels.”
 “Does the circitor know?”
“It’s only gone up in the last three or four weeks, but probably. He’s
canny like that, apt to know whatever’s happening aboard his ship.”
“But you didn’t tell him, sir?”
“Not yet. I don’t think they’ve finished it.... Some of the bits behind you
are still in pencil. Still, I’m tempted to take a panoramic video and
broadcast it shipwide so they can be proud of it.”
“Well, it’s not exactly the Sistine Chapel. But... tiny little space like this,
kind of reminds me of the graffiti I used to see in the tunnels when I rode
the Metro. Always wondered about the art people like to put in hard-toreach
places.”
The defensor nodded, his attention on the anvil. “Yeah, well, people
blow off steam in different ways. I wonder if the Trojans put any graffiti
inside that asteroid before they sent it on its way.” The XO sounded
almost... sympathetic, and then his voice turned serious. “Anyway, you had
a report you wanted to talk to me about?”
Diouri glanced again at Vulcan’s eyes before he spun enough to look at
the defensor. “Aye, sir. I regret to report that I have been negligent in my
duty as supply and medical officer.”
“How so?”
Diouri glanced again at the Roman god on the wall. “In my assessment
of the ship’s stores, I missed—and therefore neglected to inform you and
the circitor of—a problem regarding our current mission.”
Defensor Elliott played his light along one of the air ducts. “If you mean
our air and water and food, Rene, we’re aware of what we have left, and the
limits of our recycling. We’ve looked at the orbitology, and how long even
the shortest possible trip home is likely to be. We know we’ll end up
rationing, and we’ll all be a lot thinner by the time we get back.”
“With all due respect, sir, that’s not what I mean.”
That got the XO’s attention. Diouri had seen in Defensor Elliott’s
posture the unspoken “if we get back,” but now he saw caution as well as a
fretful curiosity. He heard it in the XO’s voice as well.
“What do you mean, then?”
“We don’t have enough Quintrenoin.”
The XO looked up into the space where the curving bulkhead
disappeared into darkness. The fifth-generation retinoid compound
trademarked “Quintrenoin” was the most effective anti-radiation drug
available, and all crewmembers were given low doses since they could not
always stay within the Belmont’s mostshielded parts and the magnetic field
around the ship did nothing to stop gamma rays and other photon-based
ionizing radiation. The drug enabled the body to repair some radiation
damage and dispose of cells too damaged to repair and, more important, it
postponed the worst cognitive effects of long-term gamma radiation
exposure.
“Can’t we stretch out the dosage?” Defensor Elliott asked.
“Somewhat. But we were homeward-bound when we got this intercept,
and couldn’t stop to restock our supply. Since we kicked ourselves out into
open space, and are going to be here a good while longer, our total radiation
exposure will be much higher than a normal cruise. Depending on what
kind of return orbit we can fall into, by the time we get back we may be
pushing radiation levels upward of two or three Mars transits.” He let that
sink in for a few seconds, then said, “Add in that your boarding teams will
need additional good-sized doses, since you’re going to spend a lot of time
outside, and we’ll burn through our excess months before we get home.”
The XO turned to the mural, and played his flashlight over it. “It’s a
shame the smiths can’t manufacture drugs as easily as they can make spare
parts.”
Diouri chuckled, because it seemed appropriate. “That would make life
a lot simpler, though I’m sure it would never be easy.”
“No doubt,” the XO said. He sighed. “Not that we’ve got a lot of choice
in how we proceed, but it’s best to stay open-eyed to all the dangers. Push
me your report, Rene. I’ll look for a good time to break it to the circitor.”
“Aye, sir.” As the XO opened the access cover and began backing out of
the maintenance space, Diouri asked him, “Sir, what about my negligence
charge?”
Defensor Elliott’s lips thinned for a couple of seconds before he spoke.
“If you had discovered the shortage earlier, could you have done anything
about it?”
“No, sir.”
“Should it have made a difference in terms of us carrying out our
orders?”
Diouri hesitated, but only for a heartbeat. “No, sir.”
 “Then hold out your hand.”
Diouri obeyed, with the hand not holding the flashlight. The XO
reached out and flicked Diouri’s wrist. “Consider yourself flogged,” he said,
“and confined to the ship for the duration of the voyage.”
“Aye, sir,” Diouri said.
The XO floated through the access port, then looked back in and said, “I
hope the circitor will be so lenient.” Then he pushed off, leaving Diouri to
exit and re-secure the cover.
“So do I, sir,” Diouri said to the empty corridor. “So do I.”

III. INTERCEPT

Other people said how much they liked the feeling of freedom they got
during extra-vehicular activity, but Elliott always suspected them of lying.
For him, the openness of space was oppressive even when he wasn’t doing
something they’d never done before. The emptiness weighed upon him
more than his new rank did, and he appreciated that Spacer Third Class
Fleming was piloting the sled. Elliott’s helmetchrono told him he had a little
over thirty minutes before he would break free and have to fly on his own:
he pushed his usual EVA trepidation down into his gut, and squirmed a bit
in his harness.
Over the sled channel, Servus “Spartan” Milliken said, “I’ll tell you
again, sir, I didn’t sign up for this.” Fleming and Spacer Apprentice Bergen,
junior spacers to Milliken, laughed; Elliot did not. None of them had signed
up for this kind of mission.
Elliott doubted whether anyone thought, when they laid the keel for
Belmont eight years ago, that she would ever undertake such a mission. In a
perfect world, she would have been mothballed decades before anyone felt
the need to convert the Solar Guard into a space Navy. But, as they say, this
ain’t no perfect world.
“Alpha-One, this is Belmont. Defensor Elliott, report,” said Circitor
Hellmer over the common channel.
Elliott’s gut clenched a bit more at his new title, and he resisted the urge
to look at his shoulder. His new gold oak leaves were on his crew uniform,
in his locker back on the Belmont.
 “Crossing the fifty meter mark, skipper,” Elliott said. The asteroid’s
mottled, pockmarked surface flowed away gently below them. “Nominal.”
“Roger. Bravo-One, Belmont. Custos Williamson, your report?”
“Breaking the zero mark in three, two, one, now,” the young
engineering officer said.
“Roger. We’ll keep station as best we can, and pick you up when you’re
done.”
Elliott flexed his knees, his left hand tight on the rail of his EMU—EVA
Maneuvering Unit— even though the sled’s connectors and the EMU
harness kept him more secure than his muscles ever could. His sweat
smelled sour to him. He so preferred the close confines of the ship to the
open sled.
His right hand drifted down past the EMU’s other rail to the sidearm
strapped to his thigh. Oversized for its caliber in order to be held and fired
while wearing suit gloves, it was as much for intimidation during boardings
as for use. Elliott didn’t expect to hit much if it came to actual firing. If they
could stand on the surface it would be hard enough, because of the
difficulty of judging distance without decent size referents, but they
couldn’t: the asteroid’s spin, while gentle, was too much for its even gentler
gravity. If they had to shoot while flying? The EMUs had been designed for
repairs and inspections, not military assault. They had practiced as best they
could, but Elliot doubted that they would make one shot in ten and he
feared he would end up shooting himself.
Inside his helmet, Elliott shook his head. As solar guard, they were
supposed to be repairmen, cops, and EMTs—not marines. But Earth
expected them to be marines. Needed them to be marines.
The latest orders they had received had confirmed the plan the circitor
had already put in place. Elliott wondered if the skipper had written the
orders himself for headquarters to assign, or if the Princeps and the staff
back on Earth had finally caught up with Circitor Hellmer’s thought
process. The physical targets for their two teams had not changed, but his
team’s objective was now official: not reconnaissance, but search and
destroy.
It was so different, so foreign, to what he had wanted to accomplish in
his career. Like the circitor, he had been a volunteer, “the guard before the
guard” he said sometimes, happy to crew anything in any orbit and even
happier when he could help someone out of a jam. Even the dressing-down
he’d taken, after he disobeyed radioed orders and spidered his way across a
different asteroid to help an injured and panicked miner back to an airlock,
had done little to suppress his enthusiasm. Ground truth was the ultimate
truth; he had known better than anyone the conditions he faced, and he had
faced them without regret. That his superiors saw it differently... once it
flows past a check valve, you don’t get anything back.
Elliott blinked his eyes, hard, for two seconds, and brought himself back
to the present. The means might be different, but the soul of the mission
was still to protect, to rescue. He selected the sled channel. “Clock’s
humming, boys,” he said with a force intended to dispel his own
uncertainty. “Let’s kill this thing and go home.”

The Belmont held what appeared to be a gentle helical orbit around the
target, but that was an illusion. Really she flew as tight to the asteroid’s axis
as she could, while the Trojans’ gift—a dichotomy the crew had considered
countless times and no longer appreciated— rotated beneath them. For now
the ship was behind the boarding sleds, but she could not loiter and their
timing was precarious.
All available crew were at “battle stations,” which meant little in terms
of actual battle. Those who were not monitoring and operating ship’s
systems were at observation ports, watching designated areas of the asteroid
with eyeballs calibrated by hours of simulations, augmented by cameras
trained on the target and tied in to the computers.
“Status, Reynolds?” Circitor Hellmer asked.
“Nominal, sir,” Reynolds said, and Hellmer heard the sharp edge of
frustration in the young spacer’s voice. He was supposed to be on one of the
boarding sleds, and it chafed him that he was manning his usual position on
the bridge. But the brace on his knee may as well have been an anchor.
“Steady,” the circitor said. “I make it seventy to ninety minutes to the
next expected mass driver pulse. Do you agree?”
Reynolds sighed. “Aye, skipper, if they stick with the recycle times
we’ve seen. Or, now that we’re close, they could fire it off sooner, to scoot
out from under us. That’s what I would do.”
The spacer was right, of course, especially if the thing had a stockpile of
slugs for its mass driver. “Shout out if that beast so much as twitches,”
Hellmer said.
“Aye, sir.”
The circitor watched the screen, and the pair of tiny green icons
marking the progress of their boarding sleds. Lord, guard and guide the men
who fly, he thought.

Elliott forced himself not to worry about Williamson and the second
sled; he soon had troubles of his own.
His sled had traversed about half the length of the slow-turning asteroid
when—
“There’s one of those blockhouses,” Milliken said. “Starboard of us,
coming up.”
“Not on my chart,” said Fleming.
That mattered little. Despite all the observations they had made, their
intel on the Trojans’ weapon was thin to the point of transparency. All that
was left now was to Orient, Decide, and Act.
“Mark it, and keep moving,” Elliott said.
They had been reluctant to use active sensors on their approach, but
Elliott doubted that the Belmont’s collision-avoidance radar could have
given a clear picture of what was inside the little buildings. Some no doubt
hid sensors or communications equipment, but the master smith had laid
odds that many if not most of them hid seismometers and small blasting
charges like the ones asteroid miners used to characterize their finds: the
instruments would measure the shockwaves produced by the charges, in
order to pinpoint the asteroid’s center of gravity as material was excavated
to fuel the mass driver—the guidance system had to know the CG in order
to thrust through it and keep the thing from tumbling. But examining them
to find out was not the mission.
This particular building, for instance, had a slot on it like an
observatory: perhaps for a star tracker or other instrument. As Elliott
watched, a light flashed three times in the slot, then three more—
“Shit!” Fleming said as the sled bucked. A vibration ran through
Elliott’s hand and feet, then a shudder—
“Belmont! We are under fire!” Elliott said, doubly grateful for the
harness that held him fast but doubly cursing the designers who decided the
sleds needed no exterior structure.
 “Lost one thruster set, losing oxidizer pressure,” Fleming said, the strain
of fighting to control the sled evident in his voice. “This may be our stop.”
Elliott barely heard the Belmont’s acknowledgement as Fleming dove
toward the asteroid’s surface.

“Bravo Team! Custos Williamson, Alpha Team has taken fire. Do you
copy?”
Williamson acknowledged, “Roger, sir. We have not, as of yet. We’re
grappled onto our objective, assessing our entry options.”
“Understood. Keep the vigil, young man.”
“Aye, Skipper.” The engineer turned his attention back to their target.
He had maneuvered them inside five meters of the “dormitory.” Servus
Cooper had fired one of the self-burrowing grapnels at the corner of the
structure, and Williamson tried watching both the grappling line and his
helmet readout as Cooper activated the sled’s inertia reel winch. After a
moment, he gave up on the readout and just watched the line, his hands
light on the sled’s control in case the grapnel failed or the line fouled or,
worse, snapped. Since the asteroid’s spin induced a centripetal acceleration
that was trying to throw them off into space, the sled now formed one end
of a tether. The reel compensated for the sled’s motions and maintained the
proper tension on the line, and gradually—too slowly for Williamson’s taste
—brought them closer to the objective. Each of their EMUs had a similar
system but much smaller, though they had never used them in a situation
this extreme.
“I don’t see anything like a personnel hatch, or an equipment hatch,”
Williamson said over the sled circuit. “So do we try one of those windows,
or use breaching web to make our own hole in the end wall?”
Spacer Second Class Arselano said, “Why not both? Two around each
way, meet on the inside?”
Williamson shook his head. “No, I think we’ve already divided our
forces enough.”

Elliott thanked Christ and all his saints that his team was alive. Their
dive had been shallow and long, and Fleming had maintained enough thrust
and attitude control to keep them from rebounding off the surface. Elliott
had fired the grapnel himself, and Alpha’s sled now hung tethered from the
base of a four-meter high ridge of rock about seventy meters downrange
from the... pillbox, he supposed... that had fired at them. Fleming had shut
down the propulsion systems—those parts that had not shut themselves
down—and the damaged sections of tankage and tubing, now isolated from
the rest of the system, had bled out.
The seconds flashed by on Elliott’s helmet display.
“So far, not so good,” Elliott said to the others. “Richie, can the sled fly
at all?”
Fleming reached forward and waved his gloved hands over the controls.
“Trying to figure that out, sir. Still have pressurant, and we didn’t lose all of
the oxidizer. What we lost, though, shifted the CG pretty bad.”
Elliott frowned. Controlling the center of gravity—center of mass,
really—was as vital to the sled’s performance as it was to any other
spacecraft, though the sled’s attitude control thrusters and reaction wheels
could compensate for most changes as long as its computer was working.
Tumbling would be worse, and harder to recover from, than a “flat spin” in
an aircraft because vacuum offered no resistance, nothing for a control
surface or even an outstretched arm to work against, and their propellant
would not last through a few rotations of trying to right themselves.
“Won’t be able to boost with the mains,” Fleming said, “but might be
able to pulse along with the ACS engines.”
“Sir,” Servus Milliken said, “I’m pushing you an image. What if I
detach and grapple myself where I marked, to balance us out better?”
Elliott opened the wireframe image of the sled and noted where the
spacer had placed an icon. With no hard-point connector there, Milliken’s
EMU could probably hold him in place, though the spot was a bit close to
one thruster set.... Elliott decided against it. The CG would continue to shift
as the sled used propellant, so one of them moving to a new position would
not matter for long.
“We don’t have time to worry with it; we’re behind already. No,
Spartan, you and I are going to detach and proceed to our objective. It’s
farther than we thought we’d have to go, so we need to leave now. And
we’ll be close to zero on our own prop tanks when we get there, so Bergen
and Fleming: get this thing moving and come pick us up. Any questions?”
Fleming said, “Sir,” and paused, as if unsure what to say next.
“Let’s go, then,” Elliott said.
 Williamson looked inside the “dormitory.” It was a deep tunnel of black
beyond the broken wall.
Spacer Apprentice Phillips had set the breaching web—flexible, linear
shaped charges meant to cut through the outer hull of a disabled ship for
quick extraction of injured crewmembers—and created an opening
sufficient for them to fly through with their EMUs. Spacer Second Class
Arselano was the first one through, complaining that he wished he had a
million-lumen light and asking if they could walk on the ceiling. Servus
Cooper, an engineering technician known as “Barrelman” to the smiths,
followed Arselano and vetoed the ceiling-walking idea. When Williamson
went in, he agreed; from the way the breaching web had obliterated the
wall, the structure appeared far too fragile to support much of anything.
Apparently it was built only to conceal what was beneath it.
The space beneath the structure was larger than expected, extending
downward from the mean surface level of the asteroid, but they still had
precious little maneuvering room with their EMUs. The “windows” and
“skylights” all turned out to be hinged like doors or shutters, and it was
obvious to all of them what they were intended to hide.
Under each opaque “skylight,” just as the Intel analysts had predicted,
was a rocket launcher. Williamson silently congratulated them as he
examined one. Beneath the launcher was a curved ablative trough aimed at
the accompanying “window.” They continued, two by two, down the length
of the building as far as his lights shone.
“Take pictures of everything,” Williamson said. He keyed his own
camera as he edged around the first launcher. “The rockets, the launch
cradles, the flame buckets, everything. As soon as you can get an uplink,
send them.”

Maneuvering in the EMUs was always challenging, but flying nap-of-

an-asteroid in one had been exciting in the same ass-puckering fashion as
major course-changing burns on the Belmont. Elliott wondered if his butt
would ever unclench.
He considered the towering structure in front of him. “Trailing” was
more accurate, but from where he held station, “towering” was more
descriptive.
 The mass driver was not that substantial, really: only enough columns,
girders, and rings to support its electromagnets and transmit forces into the
asteroid. The structure appeared thin and wispy from a distance, though it
was more robust up close. The tower’s top was invisible as the structure
tapered into the blackness above him. Its base continued into the asteroid,
where unseen machinery must mine and prepare the thrust elements. One
mystery solved. They had wondered whether the slugs would be prepared
on the surface or below it, though the asteroid’s low gravity had argued for
the latter.
Elliott shook his head to dislodge the image that came to him as he
looked down at that dark crevice, and checked his chrono: down to only
about twenty minutes before the next expected pulse. Elliott fed the flight
profile he wanted into the EMU’s computer and noted how close it would
bring him to running the unit dry. He engaged the program and started
matching the asteroid’s rotation as closely as possible, while drawing
incrementally closer.
“Sticky grapnel selected and prepped,” Elliott said to anyone who might
hear, with a wry grin at their overly literate engineer. He would have to
remember to tell Robertson just how well his equipment had functioned so
far. “Firing... now.” The grapnel—not itself sticky, but loaded with
ampoules of quick-setting epoxy—hit the wide vertical support and stuck.
Elliott counted off fifteen seconds until he engaged the EMU’s inertia reel
winch. It took up the slack and he stiffened, expecting the adhesive to
detach despite the fact that the centripetal acceleration was much lower
here, closer to the asteroid’s axis of rotation. His body shook with a sudden
tremor as he thought of tumbling through space... but the grapnel held.
Elliott forced himself to breathe again. The EMU reeled him closer to
the structure. He checked the time.
“Damn, that took too long. Okay, Milliken, your turn.”
“Aye, sir. On approach.”
Elliott’s EMU continued to pull him closer to the mass driver structure,
so he could not see Milliken coming in below him, nearer to the asteroid.
While the Servus approached, Elliott beamed a preprogrammed hailing
signal toward what appeared to be an antenna array about a hundred meters
toward the asteroid’s edge. His helmet display counted up through attempts
on each of the standard spacers’ frequencies, but no one replied; he guessed
the Intel was right and there was no one home.
The first indication of a problem was mere seconds after Elliott shut
down his communication attempt.
“Shit-fire,” Milliken muttered.
“What’s the matter, Spartan?”
“Missed... went past the column.”
“Cut it loose and back away,” Elliott said.
“I ought to be able to retrieve it.”
“No, don’t—”
“Aw, hell, it got stuck on something. Come on, baby, settle down... this
thing’s rougher than my wife! Okay, sir, I’m latched on. Just not quite the
way I’d intended.”

The rockets were about three meters long, payload to nozzle.

Williamson first thought tip to tail, but that did not apply since these needed
no payload fairings to cut through an atmosphere. He nudged his EMU up
the length of the rocket to get a look at the exposed payload: two half-
meter-diameter spheres stacked one atop the other, each studded with
multiple maneuvering nozzles and what appeared to be sensor arrays spaced
all around the body. He backed off, tilted, and shone his light down the
length of the vehicle: his initial size estimate was correct. The booster itself
was only about two meters long, and appeared to be a single stage solid
rocket motor... at least, he did not see any fill and drain ports for liquid
propellants nor anything that looked like an interstage between smaller
motors. That size rocket was probably overkill, though, since the asteroid’s
gravity was practically negligible.
Williamson shrugged. He would look more closely in a moment; for
now, the payload seemed more important. He tipped back up and swung
around by the launch tower, taking image after image and noting, offhand,
that his system had gotten a fix on the Belmont and started to transmit.
The payload spheres were connected by slender umbilicals to the tower.
If they had the right equipment, he or Barrelman might be able to connect to
the payload or to the ground system and query it for its targeting data,
maybe even hack into its programming—
 The launch vehicle trembled and began to spin around its vertical axis.
The umbilicals detached as it moved through the first thirty degrees of
rotation.
Williamson looked down as the rocket spun faster. The support rings,
having imparted that stabilizing spin, retracted.
“Get out of here!” Williamson yelled, and then his world turned to fire.

“I have heat plumes, sir. Small flares. I make it... eight.”

“Missiles?” the circitor asked.
“Possibly, sir,” Reynolds said. “They all came out of the top of the
‘dormitory,’ at the fore.”
Circitor Hellmer pounded his console. “Bravo Team, Bravo Team, this
is Belmont, come in.”
He caught Reynolds looking at him, and kept his emotions inside. Five
seconds flashed by.
He pulled up Bravo Team’s most recent telemetry.
Ten seconds.
He repeated the call.
All four of them had transmitted video signals, about four or five
minute’s worth—
“Tell me about the heat plumes, Buster,” he said, sure in the depths of
his heart that he knew the answer.
“Just flashes, sir. A few seconds each. They’re gone now.”
“Dumb projectiles, then,” he hoped. If they had gyros and restartable
engines they could turn and vector in from anywhere.... “Observation,
Conn: Anything?”
Chief Spacer Pelligree said, “I’m doing a sweep, IR to vis to UV.”
“Make that sweep upward, Coelum, toward our orbit,” the circitor said.
It gave him a better feeling of control—and some small manner of relief—
to use the spacer’s official honorific.
Reynolds asked, “Think they’re leading us?”
“Bingo, sir,” Pelligree reported. “Caught multiple reflections. Not much,
maybe not enough for a plot. Barely caught a bit of the asteroid’s surface in
the view, so no good reference points.”
Circitor Hellmer studied the display, now showing a growing cone of
probability. “No size estimate, then,” he said.
 “No, Skipper.”
“Then we have to assume they’re big enough to hurt us. Impact?”
“Five minutes, earliest. Seven minutes, best guess. If they’re
unpowered.”
“If they’re not, we’ll know it soon. In that case... either they don’t have
anything better, or they’re holding the good stuff until they have to use it.”
The circitor examined the plot, and spoke as much to himself as anyone
else. “No time for a real maneuver. Not enough juice, even if we had time.
We’ll turn ourselves into them as best we can. Reynolds, pitch thirty
degrees down, yaw sixty degrees starboard.”
The servus repeated the command and started entering the values. The
circitor alerted the smiths to be prepared for damage control.
The ship was far too massive for even its huge reaction wheels to make
anything other than fine adjustments for docking; gross motions like these
required attitude jets, which meant any systems observing from the surface
would know what the Belmont was trying to do. But it couldn’t be helped;
they could never maneuver any large distance away and hope to reengage
the asteroid and pick up their shipmates. As it was, this change in attitude
would affect when and how they did their next stationkeeping burn... and
their return orbit choices.
The automated maneuver warning, derived from the previous century’s
submarines, sounded. The camera view shifted, and Hellmer grit his teeth
as if that would help the big ship turn.
He made a fist, relaxed it, then repeated the effort. Turn, baby. The
ship’s micrometeoroid shield was their best defense even though it was only
a light ceramic. If this maneuver worked, and they came out unscathed, he
would have to plot out whether turning like this had wrecked the return-trip
rendezvous he had arranged. He had not yet told the crew about them, or
even the XO—no reason to get their hopes up, he thought at the time. Now,
waiting for impacts from whatever had been launched, he wondered if he
should have told them, and if he would get to.
“Conn, Observation.”
Pelligree’s voice was a balm, and Hellmer smiled to hear it. “Go ahead,
Primus.”
“If those were rockets, how much delta-vee would they impart to the
side of that thing? Think it’s able to compensate?”
 “They must have thought of that.”
“It would sure make our jobs easier if they didn’t.”
The circitor wiped his brow. “Aye, it would.”
“At any rate, sir, so far as I can tell, this confirms two things.”
“And those things are?”
“Someone knows we’re here,” the chief said, “and they’re not happy
about it.”

Elliott was about to chastise Servus Milliken for his foolhardy approach
maneuver when a slight shiver translated through the column. “What was
that?” he asked.
“You felt it, too, sir? No idea. Are we clear to cut down this thing?”
He checked his chrono. The Belmont would still be behind the mass of
the asteroid, so there was no point in trying to signal them. But their orders
were clear.
“Affirmative,” he said. “Their next pulse could come any time now, so
we need to work quick. I’ll string the web, you set your charges. I suggest
around the edge of that... tunnel.”
Milliken laughed. “Giving it to ’em right up the ass, aye, sir.”
Elliott’s breath rasped as he ranged up and down the columns. The
breaching webs were easy enough to put in place, but the maneuvering from
one column to the next was harder than he anticipated. He stayed above
Milliken’s position so as not to interfere with his operation.
Milliken counted off each shot he took with the improvised grenade
launcher he had constructed. It fired stickyballs with radio-detonated
charges embedded in them; hopefully they would collapse the edges of the
tunnel at the base of the mass driver.
The intent of Elliott’s charges, in contrast, was to try to twist the
structure in on itself, so that if the tunnel charges failed or were only partly
effective, the asteroid’s “engine” would still misfire and destroy itself. They
estimated that any single charge should be enough to throw the structure out
of true and render it inoperative. But when the alternative was that the six-
hundred-billion-plus-kilogram rock could still be maneuvered into a
collision with the Earth, Elliott figured they could never use too much
explosive.
“Almost done, Spartan, how say you?”
 Milliken did not reply. Elliott finished placing his last breaching web
and called again. “Time to go, Milliken. Detach and let’s synch back up
with the others.”
“Slight problem here, sir.”
Elliott rotated his EMU so he faced the asteroid, and his first thought
was that Milliken was about to get eaten by a giant spider.
When his brain finally caught up with itself, he realized that some sort
of maintenance robot—the “body” of the thing was about a half meter in
diameter, and it had six, not eight, legs—had grasped Milliken’s EMU with
two of its claws. The thing’s processor might see Milliken as an actual
threat or just a piece of flotsam to be removed from the mass driver
equipment, but it was clearly trying to dislodge him. Silent puffs of exhaust
jetted from the EMU and reflected Elliott’s lights as Milliken tried to break
the thing’s grasp.
Ten meters: Elliott figured even he could make that shot. He drew his
sidearm and shifted it from “safe” to “fire.”
“Settle down, Servus,” Elliott said. He lined up the shot and squeezed
the trigger.
He thought he could feel his EMU’s gyros fighting the torque imparted
by the recoil. He imagined he heard them whining in protest.
The shot appeared to do no damage. Elliott was unsure he had even hit
it, so he fired again; this time the thing’s claws retracted, and small
components glinted as they flew away from the impact. Elliott centered on
the target a third time. More sparkling debris, and the robot retreated back
down the column.
Elliott ensured there were no more robots nearby. Another might
emerge at any time, though, depending on whether their programming put a
higher priority on repairing a damaged robot than clearing away an
obstruction.
“Okay, Milliken, let’s go.” Elliott holstered his sidearm so he could fly
the EMU.
“Sorry, sir. I don’t think I’m going to make that rendezvous.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m empty, sir. Trying to back away from that thing drained me. My
tanks are all ullage.”
 Elliott turned off his microphone and swore, several times and with
gusto. Then he considered the situation. His own EMU was close to empty
itself. They needed a sled to retrieve them.
“Roger all,” he finally said, his voice firmer than his resolve. “Standby,
then. Draw your weapon in case another robot comes along. Fleming and
Bergen should fly over the edge soon—”
“Sir, I doubt that sled has fine-enough control to pick me up.”
“Maybe not, but we’ll call the Belmont and have them send Williamson
this way. We can wait to blow the charges until we recover you.”
After a few seconds’ silence, Milliken said, “Seeing as we have a
limited supply of air, too, sir, may I suggest that you jet up to the edge to get
line of sight and make that call now?”
Elliott smiled, and began checking his EMU’s status and selecting a
new flight profile. “Leave it to a good NCO to point out the obvious that his
officer missed,” he said. “Good call. Detaching... now.”

“Belmont, this is Alpha-One, over.”

“Talk to him, Reynolds, and give him the status,” Circitor Hellmer said.
He returned his attention to Vindex Robertson’s damage report.
Fourteen explosive charges had hit the barely substantial ablative shield
that was the Belmont’s leading edge—or leading curve, as it were. They had
blown bits of the shield apart, and several had taken out some of the cargo
as well, but what was causing the master smith the most trouble were
additional charges that exploded off the edge of the shield: they appeared to
have been proximity charges, and the shrapnel they produced had hit critical
structures. One had knocked out a longand short-range communications
array, plus the phased-array radar the Belmont used for collision avoidance
and docking. That would make operations difficult, but was not critical.
One had damaged a fuel tank—thankfully almost empty—and, more the
problem, one damaged a propellant manifold that handled flow from several
other tanks.
“Sir,” the engineer said in conclusion, “what I get from sensors and
cameras is bad enough. I’ve got Hardy and Lucama suiting up to really
assess the damage, but there’s only so much they can do with EMUs. If we
have to move anything big, I need one of the sleds back.”
 “Understood, Smith. Do what you can for now.” To Reynolds, the
circitor said, “What’s Alpha’s status?”
Reynolds relayed Defensor Elliott’s report: charges placed, propellant
low, Servus Milliken in a predicament. “I was able to raise Spacer Fleming,
sir, but he reported that it’s all he can do to keep that sled moving a few
meters at a time without it spinning or starting to tumble.”
“How long until he can reach my XO?”
“Between ten and twenty minutes, sir. He couldn’t be any more specific
than that.”
“You have fixes on them?”
“Aye, sir.” Reynolds pushed his display to the circitor’s.
Circitor Hellmer noted their positions, considered the Defensor’s EMU
status, and added a waypoint icon not quite a third of the way from Elliott
to Fleming. He compared their current positions to Belmont’s position and
the asteroid’s rotation, and when they were almost around again, he called
up the communication channel. “Alpha-One, Belmont.”
“Alpha-One here.”
“Proceed to the waypoint I am transmitting, or as close to it as you can
get. Alpha-Three— Spacer Fleming—you proceed there with all haste and
retrieve Alpha-One.” He paused, but only for an instant. “You will then
return to Belmont. Copy?”
Two seconds dragged by. “Understood, skipper,” Elliott said. “Request
you task Bravo’s sled to retrieve Servus Milliken—”
Circitor Hellmer pressed “transmit,” his heart hammering with urgency
and regret.
“Defensor! Belmont has sustained damage that we must repair soonest.
Bravo Team is missing and presumed lost. We will... we will make such
arrangements as we can for Servus Milliken.”

Elliott barely registered the display in front of him, but he kept his gaze
fixed on it rather than risk the temptation to look back at Milliken, still
tethered to the mass driver tower. He considered the margin on his EMU,
and whether he could risk trying to retrieve the servus. Was this another
order he would have to disobey? He tried to think of alternatives, tried to
determine the ground truth, but it seemed his mind was a wasteland and he
was wandering—
 An impulse translated up the grappling line, as if the whole asteroid had
quaked.
“Holy shit!” Milliken called. “That was too close.”
It took Elliott an additional second to realize what had happened. “You
saw it?” he asked.
“Hell-shit-yes,” Milliken said. “Sir. Sorry, but... God in Heaven, I
wasn’t expecting it. Flashed by in my lights... cut through my first line like
it was nothing. Good thing I was tied with another one. Don’t tell anybody,
but I think I shat myself.”
Elliott caught himself practically growling. Every time that mass driver
fired, the asteroid pushed itself faster and faster toward Earth. They had to
cripple it.
“Sit tight, Servus,” Elliott said, and began to detach from the asteroid to
proceed to his rendezvous. “It has to recycle. I’ll be back before it fires
again.”
Milliken laughed, but it was a joyless chuckle. “No need for that, sir. I
heard the relay from your suit, I know the score. Get back to the ship and
just blow this thing. I’ll record my wife a note and transmit it when the ship
is in sight.”
Elliott was trying to think of something profound or memorable to say
when a new voice came over the channel. “Quit trying to be a hero, Spartan,
you worthless waste of skin. I’ll come pick up your sorry ass myself.”
Elliott looked at his helmet indicator: BravoTwo?
The circitor was quicker and spoke before Elliott could. “Servus
Cooper, report!”
“Sorry we’re late, skipper. I’ve got Phillips here, sedated but alive. I...
regret to report that Custos Williamson and Spacer Arselano... I’m sorry, sir,
they were too close....”
Elliott wondered what they were too close to, but the circitor did not
ask. When he spoke, his voice was soft, almost soothing. “Understood,
Gavin. Pick up that wayward spacer and report back here, double quick.”
Elliott hesitated only a moment before he detached and started toward
his own rendezvous.

The Trojans’ deadly asteroid moved silently ahead, and Elliott outpaced
it until he met up with Fleming and Bergen. He breathed a sigh of relief
once he was aboard: his EMU tanks were almost completely spent. Fleming
nursed the stricken sled past two of the mystery blockhouses before tipping
the nose up toward where the Belmont would be.
The Alpha sled cleared the asteroid’s trailing edge just minutes after
Cooper, Phillips, and Milliken made it back to the ship with Bravo.
“Call it, Defensor Elliott,” Circitor Hellmer said.
“Say again, sir?”
“You are clear of the asteroid. Blow the charges.”
Elliott held his breath for a second, then said, “Aye, Skipper. All clear.
Fire in the hole.”
He turned carefully to the side to avoid throwing off the sled too much,
dialed his helmet camera up to full resolution, and focused on the base of
the mass driver. He blinked to open a new window, selected the ignition
sequence—Williamson had adapted it from the Belmont’s standard
maneuvering thruster programming—and watched the counter descend
from four seconds to zero.
He had imagined he might see a spectacle, but his camera caught barely
a flare at the base of the tower. They were already far enough away that he
could not tell how many of the charges had blown, or which ones. He
wondered if the Trojans’ robots might have disabled or removed some of
the charges; if so, he could only hope that they had been close enough to be
blown up themselves. From this vantage point he could not estimate the
damage; he hoped another view, perhaps a multispectral view, would
confirm more than the tiny flash he saw on the miniature projection in front
of his eye.
“That’s it,” Fleming said.
“Yep,” Elliott said. He started playing back the explosion to look for
added detail. “Seems as if there should have been more.”
“Well, getting shot down will do that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We’re dry, sir. No, don’t turn sudden, we don’t have ACS either. We’re
down to reaction wheels, and I’m tapping the wheels in all our EMUs to
help keep us stable.”
From the third seat, Bergen said, “So now we drift?”
Fleming said, “Now we coast. Just relax, Apprentice, and learn from the
master.”
 “You’re only third class, Richie!”
“Stow it,” Elliott said, silently cursing his initial misunderstanding as
much as the situation. “Spacer Fleming, report our course and status.”
Fleming cleared his throat. “Sorry, sir. I aimed us as best we could, on a
trajectory that will darn near overlap the ship’s. We will, though, need the
ship to catch us before we pass by.”
“Push me that course layout, and I’ll relay it to the ship. But if you’re
wrong, I’ll bust you back down to spacer apprentice.”
“If I’m wrong, sir, we’re all busted. Forever and ever, amen.”

Fleming was not wrong. Defensor Elliott thought he had never seen a
more beautiful sight than the approaching Belmont. The ship seemed to
hover like a crazy multistage, multilevel dirigible, all tankage and piping
and framework, as the Bravo sled towed them in and settled them in the
docking clamps.
Elliott was almost afraid to move. It had taken the better part of an hour
for their course to bring them close enough that Belmont could send out the
master smith to pick them up, and during that time they each tried to move
as little as possible. He had watched the realtime video feed from the ship to
see if any robots were making repairs on the mass driver. He could not
distinguish any, but he felt sure they were there, racing against time. He
wondered if the Trojans’ decision-makers—whether in the Belt or all the
way out in the Trojan groups—would let the asteroid continue unpowered,
or if perhaps they were unsure yet of exactly what the Belmont had done.
Bergen and Fleming dismounted first and entered the airlock; Elliott
relaxed against the bulk of the ship until he could cycle through. He thought
about Williamson, so eager to support the cause of freedom and to do his
duty. He thought about Arselano, an unobtrusive but competent spacer, so
quiet among the support staff that Elliott had trouble for a moment recalling
his first name. Les... Lester? No, Leslie; that was it.
One thing at a time, the XO decided. He unstrapped and climbed away
from the crippled sled.
He was in the airlock when the mass driver fired again. He had his eyes
closed, waiting for the pressure to come up, when someone—he didn’t even
recognize the voice—said, “Hot damn! Check that, IR camera four.”
 Elliott dialed his helmet display into the right camera and asked for
playback. The eerie infrared display showed an almost uniform grey across
the entire screen, then a single flash lit in one quadrant that spawned several
bright specks that each faded almost as quickly as they formed, the way
sparks from a campfire fade as they float. Elliott hoped that meant the
kinetic energy of one of the slugs had given up that energy in dismantling
its own driver. Maybe the analysts could figure it out, but it was too late for
the Belmont to do any more. With every minute now the distance between
the ship and the asteroid grew. And they needed to burn their way into a
return course very soon.
Circitor Hellmer was waiting on the other side of the airlock. Elliott
hooked his foot in a strap, removed his helmet, and saluted.
“Vinde—... Defensor Elliott, reporting, sir. Permission to come
aboard?”
“Granted. Welcome home, Mark.”
After he shook hands with the skipper, Elliott reached out and touched
the bulkhead. He breathed deep and caught the faint odor of warm plastic
with the ever-present undertone of a locker room, but the air smelled far
cleaner than his suit’s supply. He soaked in the comfortable feeling of
having the ship wrapped around him like a cocoon. “It’s good to be back.”
The circitor allowed himself a small smile. “Good to have you back.”
Elliott frowned and turned his attention to a viewroll someone had
affixed to a locker. It showed a natural light image of the asteroid, already a
dim shape in the distance. “Costly mission,” he said.
“Aye,” said the circitor. “It was that. But watch here.”
Elliott focused more closely on the screen. The low albedo of the
asteroid and the unsuitable sun angle made it difficult to see; but, as he
watched, the thing appeared to change shape. It contracted, just a little,
from a fuzzy ellipse to a fuzzy circle, then a fraction of it brightened as it
expanded again. Elliott found it hard to concentrate on the view, and harder
to make sense of it.
The circitor saved him the trouble. “It was clearer on the earlier view,
but it’s tumbling. Out of control.”
Elliott wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. He pushed himself over to
an empty suit station and racked his helmet. As he took off his gloves, he
said, “Which way?”
 “Too early to tell, but it looks as if where the last pulse hit in its rotation
may have changed its inclination—probably only on the order of
picoradians, since we’re nowhere near wherever its ascending node was—
but hopefully enough for a mission kill.”
“I’d hate to think we might have made things worse.”
“Aye, true enough. But without the mass driver thrust, it’ll settle into a
heliocentric orbit for sure, and a highly elliptical one: it’s a comet now.
NEOWARN will track it, because someone may need to drop in on it again.
I think we should continue to consider it ‘armed and dangerous.’”
Elliott did not laugh. “So now we just need to find a path to get us
home.”
“I’ve got Daniels and Gilchrist working that, along with Chief Pelligree.
But the good news is that it may be easier than we thought.”
Elliott spun halfway around and locked the suit into the station frame.
He paused, relaxing, and studied the circitor’s expression. Expectant,
thoughtful...
“Sir, with all due respect. My brain is not up to figuring out a puzzle
right now.”
The circitor frowned, but only for a moment. “Not a puzzle, really. A
pledge.
“Several pledges, in fact. I haven’t told the crew yet, but our ‘ISN’
headquarters has secured pledges from two commercial vessels to plot
orbits to meet us on our way back in. The first will lay in stores, including
radiation meds. The second will take on enough extra propellant so we can
shorten our return trip by a few weeks. The ISN will pay for consumables,
including the refinery costs for the propellant. The companies have agreed
to pick up their own refit costs and crew payments for them to come out to
meet us.”
Elliott thought about that as he wriggled free of his suit’s torso section.
His sweaty insulayer seemed to freeze to his skin, so he shivered a little as
he said, “Seems a little ironic, for us to need rescuing. We’re supposed to be
the rescuers.”
The circitor smiled. “I suppose. But that’s not how I see it. Sounds to
me like the way it was in the old days: All hands ready to help, because we
never knew when we’d need help ourselves. I’m glad to hear that we’re not
the only ones willing to live up to it.
 “But that’s not all. INS has also informed me that the shakedown cruise
of the Volunteer will, in effect, be its first rescue mission. They will meet us
and escort us in.”
That news buoyed Elliott, and he smiled to think he would see his sister
sooner than he had expected.
The circitor pushed off toward the hatch, somersaulted, and grabbed a
handhold. “Get yourself cleaned up, eat, and stand down until your next
rotation,” he said. “We’ve got a long way to go, and it’s still not going to be
easy. The smiths have repairs to make, I have condolences to send, we have
funerals to conduct. But we’ll make it. And when we do get home, you owe
the rest of us a promotion party.”
“I’ll make it a good one, sir,” Elliott said, still smiling, but then he
frowned as he wondered which Custos he would hand down his rank to,
now that Williamson was gone. “I just hope the powers get their act
together and grant the Trojans their independence—and soon.”
The circitor’s eyes seemed to solidify. “Why do you say that?”
“Because I’ve begun to think that maybe Emeraldo was right. They
ought to be free.” Elliott shook his head. “But mostly because next time,
they might not be friendly enough to warn us.”

Lyrics to “The Smith” by Tim Griffon, copyright 2010, used by

permission.
One Man’s Dignity
Mark Niemann-Ross | 7906 words

The abandoned transport pod floated outside Captain Theresa Jerwin’s

window, square in the middle of the Milky Way. She issued orders to
everyone and anything on or around this space station. Everything, except
that damnable piece of junk. It obeyed laws she didn’t control and resisted
her wishes to have it scuttled. She squinted at it, wishing she had the
superpower to shoot laser beams from her eyes and destroy it in a cinematic
ball of fire.
“Captain” was a new title for Theresa Jerwin, but it wasn’t a promotion.
The title simply codified her accomplishments and demeanor. Without the
title, she would still command the same respect. Her peers and reports
believed the real promotion had happened years ago.
But her title wouldn’t move the pod. It was stubborn. Inert.
About twice the length and width of a school bus, it had no wheels and
one round window in the airlock. Shaped like an extruded hexagon and
painted white with a blue corporate logo, this one had a slight tumble that
irritated Jerwin all the more.
It had arrived on a shuttle one year prior, carrying engineers, scientists,
and support personnel to the partly finished station. The contractor
responsible for its arrival had left it behind in favor of higher value cargo—
then went bankrupt. The transport had no clear owner and no way home.
Worse, it was a traffic hazard. Adjusting its position away from critical
operations was a daily waste of valuable tug fuel and time.
Jerwin had recommended it be knocked out of orbit and sent back to
Earth in a fiery reentry, but the bankruptcy court wouldn’t allow it. Since
the corporation she worked for didn’t have ownership, they couldn’t
authorize disposal. The bankruptcy proceeded with no sense of urgency; the
myriad claims would take years to verify.
“Nope.” Jerwin spoke to the junk outside her window. “Nothing else to
do with my life except fuss about your potential to cause damage. I have a
space station to run. We’re behind schedule on construction. And I don’t
appreciate you cluttering up my view of the cosmos.”
“Excuse me, Captain?” asked a voice from behind her.
Jerwin turned to face the man hovering at her door: Jacob Ullesvern, a
popular oldtimer. He wore a scruffy beard short enough to avoid getting
caught in the seal of a space helmet, a beard that accented his less than
healthy weight. In spite of his withered appearance, his jumpsuit was clean,
with a slight smell of well-worn cotton. A frayed baseball cap sported a
patch from the second supply mission to the station. Regardless of his
clothes, he always grinned and helped where he could.
Jacob had been on the station since it had just been a collection of life-
support modules. In a nod to his seniority, he handled orientation for station
newbies; he knew everything and everyone, plus he was just so darn
personable. Jerwin herself had been onboarded by Jacob. Besides being an
allaround nice guy, Jacob was a reliable worker with a wide range of skills.
Most important, he was a good welder, and Jerwin desperately needed
welders at this point in station construction.
“Hello old man,” said Captain Jerwin. “What dire emergency do you
bring this time?”
Jacob looked down and nervously smiled. He didn’t use this mannerism
often, which made it all the more difficult for Jerwin to refuse him
anything.
“Captain,” said Jacob. “I’m wondering about your plans for that
transport pod out there.”
Jerwin replied at once. “If I had my way, I’d duct tape a rocket booster
to that thing and launch it on a slow orbit to the Sun.” She slowed. “But I
can’t dispose of it. Why do you ask?”
“Some of the youngsters would like to learn to weld. I could use that
container for welding practice. It still holds pressure, and it’s separate from
station life support. We can fill it with atmosphere then poke a hole in it and
simulate a meteor puncture or seam failure. Then we patch it up.” He
smiled, looking hopeful.
Jerwin thought for a moment. Poking holes in the transport was an act
of vandalism. As captain, she handled the continued respect of law on the
station. If anyone destroyed that pod, some legal department would send a
threatening memo regarding protection of assets. But it wasn’t her asset,
and rules became pliable at a distance of forty-two thousand kilometers.
She was responsible for respect of law, but she was also responsible for
interpretation of law. Her daily command danced along the edge of rules
like this. She had learned to make informed decisions, then move on to the
next issue.
Jerwin tapped her desk and regarded Jacob.
“Okay. I’ll give you permission to abuse the transport. In exchange, you
give me welders. I’m assigning you to the role of senior welding
instructor.”
Jacob beamed and stood tall.
Jerwin studied him for another moment. “Jacob, you’ve been in orbit for
the better part of twenty years, three of them on this station. Have you
planned for your retirement on Earth?”
“I don’t have much reason to go back,” he said. “No family to speak of.
I’ve lost bone mass. Besides, I’m happier up here. Figure I’ll stay as long as
I can.” Jacob abruptly turned toward the door. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll get
some things done.”
Captain Jerwin watched him leave. He was right. If he returned to
Nebraska, his atrophied muscles would require a walker. Even with
physical therapy, his weakened heart wouldn’t last long under the strain of
full gravity. But the corporation had safety policies. He had reached the
maximum space-worthy age, yet still remained on the station because he
never left orbit.
Jerwin also suspected he had no place to live. His parents had died
several years ago, and there had been a falling out with his sister over
inheritance of the farm. He had arrived on the station soon after, probably
avoiding a family conflict. Jerwin hadn’t read Jacob’s email, but she knew
he used less than his allotment for earthward communication. He wasn’t in
touch with anyone at home.
For Jacob, retirement and the trip back to Earth would be a death
sentence.

Human bodies work best with gravity. ZeroG acrobatics are graceful
and amusing but only for a brief while. Long hair gets in the way; eating
requires special tools and practice. Many body functions work better when
there is “up” and “down”. Human bodies crave gravity almost as much as
oxygen or water.
Until artificial gravity is invented, space stations will rely on the physics
of centrifugal and centripetal forces, which makes constructing a station all
the more difficult. Building structures whipping around in circles results in
nuts, bolts, and tools gaining unexpected and irretrievable orbits. It’s better
to build as much as possible before spinning things up.
Jacob embraced welder education with enthusiasm. The first class
suffered a few speed bumps: lack of supplies, shuttles to the pod, squeezing
training into already tight schedules among others. As an instructor, Jacob
was stern about getting it right. This wasn’t a knitting class; he impressed
on his students the danger of tools capable of burning holes in metal under a
full vacuum. Small burns in a space suit would be quick and deadly. Three
of the original five students failed the class because they were fooling
around. Jacob did not want injuries, and he didn’t want the program scuttled
because of safety violations.
Jacob and Captain Jerwin sponsored a graduation ceremony for the two
graduates, complete with a small but noticeable bump in pay. The ceremony
wasn’t really for the graduates. It promoted Jacob’s welding class, and it
worked. Jacob’s next session had twenty-three applicants. He enrolled eight
and started a waiting list for the rest.
The new welders showed their value, shortening the forecasted
construction schedule by 10 percent. Logistics managers were ecstatic; they
could launch supplies sooner. An earlier launch meant equipment spent less
time in storage. Less time in storage meant cost savings, which meant
previously impossible projects came back into the plan. The benefits of
Jacob’s welders cascaded throughout multiple departments.
Captain Jerwin communicated daily with the team responsible for the
physics, mechanics, and logistics of spinning the station. When construction
finished on the superstructure and pressure containment walls, the slow and
delicate process of pushing the ring around and around would begin.
Before her arrival on the station, she had faced down the finance
department over construction delays. She explained how it was like twirling
a rock at the end of a string. Only the rock was the size of a skyscraper. And
while twirling the skyscraper, it was important to keep all its office chairs
from moving one millimeter in any direction. The finance department
suggested omitting some tests to speed things up. In response, Jerwin
shared a video simulation of a construction failure.
That presentation was one reason for her promotion to captain, but she
had prepared for command since her first year at college. Facing down the
finance department was akin to stating an unsupported opinion to her
mother and father. Before college, her parents had tolerated her emotional
diatribes. After her first semester at the university, that tolerance
disappeared like an LED bridged across 240 volts DC. Returning home was
all fun and smiles and backgammon until she discussed events of the world.
Her parents shared mannerisms. She would state an opinion, and as one,
their eyebrows would move to thirty-two-and-one-half degrees from
horizontal. Theresa learned this was a lead indicator to examination of her
premise and hypothesis. Her parents guided her through the snake fight
once or twice, then expected her to survive unassisted. When she failed,
they responded with a patronizing “how interesting,” then changed the
topic. Humiliation. As she improved, they responded with approval and
agreed that her point of view had value.
After presenting the animated graphic (complete with bodies erupting
from the simulated hull breach), the finance department agreed that her
point of view had value.

Attaching rocket engines to the hull kept Jacob and his growing band of
welders busy. Angle of rotation was important and a faulty weld would be
problematic. Once the station spun at two rotations per minute, the engines
would be detached. Until then, the delta-v applied to the station
superstructure required competency and attention.
Jerwin begin noticing a new mood on the station since Jacob first taught
welding. His courses had been full of enthusiastic volunteers looking for a
way to occupy free time and advance their careers. It was also a social club
—the “in-crowd.” They would return from the transport pod, smelling like
sweat and urine, but they were the cool kids.
She also noticed a more subtle conversation throughout the crew. Career
discussions often mentioned Jacob. “If Jacob is still up here, policies must
be changing. Maybe I can be here when I’m his age.” Part of Jerwin’s
responsibilities was to encourage continued enlistment in the space
program. Jacob showed that space could be a long-term career.
 Jacob and his welding classes meant gravity. Anything to hurry normal
showers was a good thing. If that meant welding lessons, then so be it.
Everyone wanted the station spinning— the sooner, the better.
In spite of everyone’s enthusiasm, spin-up was proceeding safely and
therefore slowly. The station spun up to ninety degrees per minute and soon
had a noticeable force. The Earth and stars rotated outside their windows.
Jerwin no longer had the transport pod blocking her view. She saw its
blinking marker light, but it hung stationary in space. Her mood had
improved, but her frustration toward the pod had not softened, despite the
critical part it played in training welders.

Jerwin was pleased she could place things on her desk and looked
forward to a normal, open-top mug for her coffee. For now, she drank out of
a sippy cup. She put it down before beginning her first teleconference of the
day. She didn’t want to look like a toddler with corporation representatives.
The conference was already in session when she joined, with an argument
already in process.
“I am completely behind maintaining shareholder value on the station,”
said Anthony Swenson. His video feed appeared on the lower left of the
screen with the title of “ANTHONY SWENSON. HUMAN RESOURCES
MANAGER.” Newly hired himself, Anthony didn’t yet know when to flex
the rules.
Anthony continued, “But Mr. Ullesvern is violating right-to-work laws
by occupying a job that should be rightfully held by someone younger.
Marsha, your assertion that he is essential personnel and needs to stay on
station is violation of policy.”
The second face belonged to a middle-aged woman with short blonde
hair, labeled “MARSHA KOONES. STATION SPIN-UP PROJECT
MANAGER.” She stared at her screen, waiting for Swenson to run out of
steam. Jerwin and Koones had worked together for years, and Koones
handled much of the paperwork and schedules. She had never been in space
but appreciated a dependable flow of supplies. Spin-up manager had been a
promotion, and Jerwin knew she wanted to do well. They discussed details
daily, and Koones agreed on Jacob’s importance to the station and
producing new welders.
 Swenson didn’t give her a chance to respond, instead turning his
attention to Captain Jerwin.
“Captain, thanks for attending,” he said. “This is completely out of
bounds. He’s got to be sent back.”
“I understand your concern about laws,” said Captain Jerwin. “But he
does have medical issues related to bone loss. Doesn’t that provide
exception to policy?”
“Rehabilitation shouldn’t be an issue,” said Swenson. “We’ve got health
care, he has full access to physical therapy. With time and treatment, he’ll
be fine.”
Koones cut in. “Anthony, you know he can’t return until after we’ve
finished this phase. All transports must be optimized for equipment and
resources. We don’t have extra oxygen to pressurize a pod for one person,
nor extra space on the trip back home. All flights are full and spoken for.
It’s simply the law of physics.”
“Look, you two just don’t get it,” said Swenson, interrupting Koones.
“This is United States law, and that trumps the laws of physics.”
“Anthony,” said Captain Jerwin, switching to her “command voice”:
lower pitch, careful enunciation and eye-to-eye contact. “You’ll have to
work this out on your end. This station needs welders. You can’t get me
replacements in time. We don’t have a way to return Jacob, and you don’t
have a solution for that. Forward whatever paperwork is necessary to delay
his retirement, and I’ll be happy to sign it. But we can’t send him back right
now.”
“When?” asked Swenson. “When can I expect Jacob will be
nonessential?”
“He’s essential to station spin-up,” replied Marsha. “After that, it’s up to
Captain Jerwin.”
Swenson paused. “I’m not happy with that, but I can’t fly up there and
get him myself. So I guess I’m stuck with it. I’ll need a formal statement
from you regarding Ullesvern’s delayed retirement.”
Swenson disconnected, leaving Koones and Jerwin still in conference.
“Well, that went well,” said Koones.
“Yes,” said Jerwin, sarcasm coloring her voice. “Until next time.”
Jerwin and Koones discussed the impact of a scheduled launch delayed
by weather, then closed the meeting. Captain Jerwin picked up the coffee
and held it under her nose, pretending she was at the sidewalk cafe near her
home—The Hazel Cafe. The faint smell of roasted beans helped her picture
the older couples spending their afternoons, playing games, and greeting
friends. She imagined they would like Jacob if they ever met him.

Jacob’s nephews could see the space station with binoculars they found
in their grandfather’s attic. Last Christmas, Santa Claus brought them a
telescope. When they set it up in the cornfield, they saw jets on the tugs
firing and twinkling. The view through the eyepiece reminded them of
fireflies hovering around a large flower. Around their knees, the field filled
with real fireflies. The horizon separating sky from landscape seemed to
fade, and it took little imagination to place themselves on an asteroid in
deep space, watching over Uncle Jacob. Jacob’s sister watched her boys
from the farm porch with sadness, hoping someday they would spend time
with him.
The transport pod soon looked like a street sign on a rural road, shot full
of holes as if a flying saucer had used it for target practice before invading
Grover’s Mill. The holes had been patched, giving it a quilted appearance.
Fewer holes appeared as students graduated, but trips to the pod only
diminished, not stopped. It became a clubhouse for the welding graduates;
if you completed training, you were part of the welder’s club.
Jacob’s nephews spotted tugs taking occasional trips a short distance
from the station with an almost immediate return. The hobbyist community
designated these trips as “JJs,” short for “Jacob Journeys.” They were
nothing more than tugs bringing welding students to the transport pod for
another lesson, but an entire website speculated about these trips and their
purposes. There were rumors of trysts among the space station workers,
although none of the station personnel would admit to anything as
scandalous as sneaking off the main station for a romantic, secluded
evening.
Under the guise of keeping skills fresh, additional equipment became
attached to the pod. Two obsolete oxygen and water tanks increased life
support. Updated communication equipment increased the bandwidth
available for gaming and recreational videos. Welders retrofitted a zero-g
toilet and shower to the clubhouse plumbing. Derelict satellites provided
solar power arrays to recharge battery packs. The transport pod became less
symmetrical and more like a hillbilly jalopy. Someone had cut out crude
letters from scrap metal, then welded them to the side, identifying the
improved pod as “S c R A P P Y”. The kerning was haphazard, but
corporate marketing didn’t offer much in the way of logo design, so the
letters remained.
To keep away from traffic, Scrappy inherited a reaction control system,
including a navigational computer and thrusters. These arrived on a freight
launch courtesy of Marsha Koones, who had discovered them as surplus
parts from the earlier shuttle program. Their arrival was a testament to
Koones’ masterful juggling of inventory, coupled with some clever cost
analysis related to tug schedules. They prevented Scrappy from tumbling
and kept it in a safe place.
Inside the pod, the austere acceleration seats became makeshift couches
and shelving. Lighting was altered to a cozier level and an inevitable bar
appeared. Best of all, a small food heater popped clandestine popcorn.
The welders debated how much Captain Jerwin knew about the pod.
Jerwin never acknowledged the pod as anything other than a training
platform. Don’t ask. Don’t tell. Captain Jerwin seemed to trust Jacob to
keep Scrappy a safe place with no surprises.
Jacob was happiest in the pod. He perched near the bar, beating
everyone at cards. The bar had no gravity, so stools were unnecessary.
Three sets of straps were available for feet, and the cards were magnetic.
Jacob would anchor himself at a spot furthest from the airlock, his opponent
“stood” next to him, and a heckler occupied the last set of straps. Captain
Jerwin had never been to the pod, but it would have reminded her of the
Hazel Cafe back on Earth.

Captain Jerwin had mixed feelings about the station cafeteria. The
crowded, noisy room allowed people to interact without neighbors
eavesdropping. This was an unspoken rule of the cafe: participatory privacy.
Jerwin longed for friendly conversation, and this was the only place she
could satisfy that need.
However, Jerwin knew her role on the station, and her dampening effect
on small talk. She represented the corporation and enforced safety and
discipline. Discussions of clandestine behavior were squelched in her
presence, sometimes causing a sudden and awkward silence.
 This time, she entered the cafe without hesitation. It was one of the rare
pizza nights, a miracle of food preparation made possible by the new station
gravity. For hours, yeast had been venting gasses, perfuming the sterile
cleanroom air with the warm smell of rising dough. The smell of chopped
basil evoked memories of cooking, parents, siblings, homework, dogs
barking, laughter, and home. It wasn’t perfect: powdered tomato sauce,
synthesized cheese, and textured vegetable protein instead of pepperoni.
Someday, those ingredients would improve. But right now, the station
smelled like everything good in the world.
Jerwin wasn’t missing pizza night. The aroma triggered a vision of her
father in an apron, chopping vegetables and making an unholy mess in the
kitchen. Her mother sat in the next room, reading a book within earshot. It
was the last time she had spoken with her father; their conversation started
her journey to the station.
She stepped up to the counter, accepted a slice of the warm bread,
sauce, and “pepperoni,” grabbed a napkin, and sat down next to Jacob. She
bit and chewed without stopping to wipe the corner of her mouth.
“Jacob, you and I are apparently in a competition,” she said with a
friendly smile. “You’ve got yourself a working space station out there, long
before we’ve completed this one.”
Jacob smiled back but gasped for each breath. The mess hall meant
ring-side gravity, and he was clearly uncomfortable.
“Doing my best to make you look bad.” He joked. The welders sitting
next to him relaxed and swallowed. If Jacob was comfortable with Captain
Jerwin, then perhaps Scrappy was safe from decommissioning.
“All you need is an engine, and you’d be the first manned mission to
Mars,” she said.
“Yep. I figure to lay in a supply of granola bars, and I’ll be off by next
week.”
“Of course, that can’t happen until you clean up your room.” Jerwin
smiled again. “Security tells me it’s getting smelly out there in the hub. I’m
not paying to have that space fumigated.”
Jerwin made an inside joke. Jacob spent an increasing amount of time in
the center of the station, away from gravity. With spin-up, everyone but
Jacob moved to new quarters on the ring. As they moved, the former living
spaces in the hub were converted to storage, laboratories, and workshops.
Jacob still had a bunk, but it was surrounded by racks and equipment. It
wouldn’t be long before he would have to make room for the chemistry lab
build-out.
“It’d probably be easier just to open that area to vacuum,” he said.
“Rather than moving to the hub, how about I just launch for Mars next
week? I’ll file a flight plan tomorrow. You’ll have to move the station out of
the way so I get a clear window.”
“I’ll miss you, but I certainly won’t miss that floating hazard,” said
Captain Jerwin.
“Actually, that could work,” said Jacob. He paused; the welders took
notice, but tried to hide their interest. “Scrappy is habitable. Would you
mind if I freed up my bunk and spent more time out there?”
Captain Jerwin savored the last bite of pizza. For a moment she stared
into space, quite literally, through the lone porthole in the cafeteria. Jacob’s
request, simple though it seemed, was not in line with corporate policy and
his impending return to Earth. She again remembered her last conversation
with her father, him with an apron, her with an attitude.
“I’m sure there’s some regulation against it,” she said at last. “In this
case, it might be better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.” She
glanced at Jacob, “In fact, I think I’ve already forgotten all about this entire
thing.” Jerwin felt a mix of dread and triumph as she decided in favor of her
own ethics. Her father had warned her about the consequences that would
follow.
Jacob flashed a grin to the welder community, cementing their approval
of the captain. “I’ll let the space arrangers know when I’ve vacated that
bunk.”
“Jacob, this doesn’t change your retirement issues,” Jerwin said.
He smiled and gave her a mock salute.
Just before dinner, she had almost signed the transfer paperwork
arranging for his return to Earth. It wasn’t a decision she was happy about,
but her job wasn’t about her happiness. She faced a complicated mix of
legal issues, shareholder concerns, safety, and morale. Jacob had innocently
stepped into the intersection, leaving her to make a tough call.
Instead of signing, she’d asked Anthony Swenson to send notes on what
Jacob could expect when he returned. The information Swenson returned
was sketchy but included a flyer from a physical therapy facility with
experience in bone loss from prolonged space flight. The facility housed
some famous names from various NASA missions, shown smiling and
engaged in energetic activities. Swenson included a run-down of the
corporation’s contribution to the cost of staying at the facility; Jacob
qualified for three years at no cost, after which his coverage slipped to 25
percent of the annual fee. Unless Jacob did extremely well on his
investments, he would move back to live with his family after four years.
She forwarded the package to Jacob.
Jacob wanted to stay on the station. Corporate policy wanted him back
on Earth. He was only one man, so he would eventually lose. The welders
couldn’t stop that.

One week later, Jerwin looked at her schedule to find two competing
appointments: the first from Corporate Legal, the second from Human
Resources. Anthony with HR had been helpful, but he continued to insist on
Jacob’s return and was probably calling about the paperwork she hadn’t
completed. The call from Legal was unexpected and intriguing. She
connected to Legal.
A well-dressed young man appeared on her screen. His title read
“JOHN LAGARDE. ASSOCIATE LEGAL COUNSEL.” Behind him, a
bookshelf contained leather-bound books and antique sailing ships.
Obviously, a designer built the respectable backdrop for his teleconferences.
The perfect lighting accented his hair, and he sported a healthy tan.
Overcompensating, thought Jerwin.
“Captain Jerwin, I’ve been hearing quite a bit about you lately,” said
LaGarde. “I’ve been asked to follow up on two topics that are surprisingly
related.”
“Glad to help,” said Jerwin, puzzled. Topic one was obviously Jacob.
But what else could this be about? “What are we discussing?”
“Let’s start with Jacob Ullesvern,” said LaGarde.
“Right. I understand we’re well past the date I said I would send him
home,” She wondered if there was any way to stall this conversation.
“Send him home?” said LaGarde. He sounded surprised. “You’re
sending him back to Earth?”
“Yes. Once the station is spun up, we’ve agreed to send Jacob back.”
She was annoyed at having to repeat this.
 “Who authorized that? We need him up there,” said LaGarde. “He needs
to stay resident in the transport pod for at least another three months.”
“Okay—color me confused,” said Jerwin. “First, why do you think he is
resident in a shipping container? Second, why three months? Third, why do
you care?”
“Oh, we were under the impression you moved him to the personnel
transport— which is the second topic,” said LaGarde. “A risky decision, but
pure genius. It came up as a side note in some asset transfer papers we were
reviewing. We called Marsha Koones, and she mentioned Jacob Ullesvern
was living in the transport. Is this not true?”
Captain Jerwin paused, considering her response. Was this leading to a
disciplinary hearing? Should she defend Jacob? Dammit—it was the same
conversation she had with her father. What choice would she make this
time?
“True,” she confessed at last. “He is living on the personnel transport. I
deemed it a medical necessity. He’s not well-suited to gravity, but he is
critical personnel.”
“Like I said, genius,” said LaGarde. “Can you keep him there for three
more months?”
“There’s those three months again,” said Jerwin. “Why is three months
in the abandoned transport important?”
“Ownership of that transport has been a nightmare,” said LaGarde.
“Nobody’s willing to claim it, and nobody’s willing to release their claim.
Whoever owns it, subsequently has to move it, and that’s expensive.
Ullesvern can claim squatter’s rights, which sidesteps the argument. He’s
installed oxygen tanks and other long-term habitat enhancements—the
equivalent of paying for utilities—which is proof of occupancy. We’re
posting notice of occupancy by a representative of our corporation, and if
nobody flies up there and moves him out, he gains ownership by implicit
consent.”
“Then we own the transport?” asked Jerwin.
“If nobody raises an effective challenge, we own it. Actually, Jacob
owns it, but then we buy it from him for a token amount.”
“Then we can do what we want with it?” asked Jerwin.
“Yes, absolutely,” said LaGarde.
 “There may be an issue with Human Resources. You’ll need to have a
chat with them about Jacob’s retirement.”
“I’d be glad to look into it,” said LaGarde. “In the meantime, buy some
nice curtains for his windows.”
“Gladly,” answered Jerwin.
LaGarde signed off. Captain Jerwin looked at the invite from Anthony
Swenson with Human Resources. She pushed the “decline” button and
leaned back with a smile. Jacob’s retirement was deferred for at least
another three months.

Captain Jerwin met Jacob in the hub while he transferred supplies to

Scrappy. Jacob pushed gas tanks and welding rods from a shuttle to a tug.
On Earth, Jacob would have required a forklift to move the massive boxes.
In the zero-g at the hub, he handled the pallets with ease and grace. After
years of pulling himself weightlessly from one handhold to another, he’d
gained a finesse other station workers tried to emulate.
Jerwin watched him for a minute before entering the hub. Jacob grabbed
a handrail with one hand, a pallet with another, and pulled them together
with just the right touch of force. While the pallet drifted toward the wall,
Jacob launched off the floor and swung around the package, using the
shipping fixtures to leverage the pallet toward the tug. He let go at precisely
the right moment to drift to the other wall and be in place to push it
squarely into the airlock. Fred Astaire dancing with a coat rack had nothing
on Jacob’s moves with this awkward box.
“Jacob, when you’re done fooling around, I have news about your
retirement.”
“I haven’t signed those papers yet, Captain,” Jacob said, not looking at
her.
“Good, because that would be premature.”
Jacob fumbled the pallet, his rhythm broken.
“I don’t have to retire?”
“That’s overreaching. But no, not right now. Not for three months.”
“Three months? That’s all?”
“Let me explain,” said Jerwin. She told him about her conversation with
John LaGarde. As she explained, Jacob’s smile expanded. He took off his
hat and scratched his gray hair. Jacob looked more like a Nebraska farmer
every day.
“So I live there for three months and it’s mine.”
“Yes, that seems to be the case. We’ll name it after you, buy it for a
small sum, then salute it as we shoot it off to the Sun.”
“I’ll see what I can do about that,” Jacob said. He smiled mischievously
then turned his attention back to the next pallet.
One of the welders appeared in the airlock to the tug. Jacob turned to
him and smiled.
“Dmitry, guess what? I’ve decided to retire!”
Jacob’s impending retirement had not been general knowledge, and
Jerwin respected his quiescence. It was his announcement to make, even if
it wasn’t his decision. His radio silence changed after hearing of the
threemonth timeline. He discussed it with the welders, who spread the word
to everyone else. Jacob was oddly upbeat about the topic.

Paperwork was the meditative part of Captain Jerwin’s job. Much of her
job involved the irritation of placating corporate representatives back on
Earth. Everyone wanted something: HR—when they weren’t following
policies—wanted technicians happy and pursuing their optimal career path,
accountants bitched about excessive use of fuel, and the Board of Directors
worried about governance.
John LaGarde, Associate Legal Counsel, worried about Scrappy.
Jacob’s bid to establish ownership was seventy-five days along. LaGarde
kept Jerwin informed, but there was little for her to do. She focused on
other concerns.
The concerns were unending and often conflicting. Paperwork was the
one task where she made measurable progress. Review the document, sign
the document, send the document on to the next recipient. Sip of coffee.
Repeat. Meditative.
The emergency klaxon went off with a volume she felt in the back of
her head, shattering the calm. Jerwin startled so hard she sent her coffee
rocketing off the opposite wall; she was out the door before it bounced a
second time. She arrived in the station control room, huffing from the three-
second sprint.
“Situation!”
 “Explosion at the welding lab,” said Stan Johnson, the current
watchman. “Scrappy is tumbling but moving away from the station. Traffic
is advised, and we’re diverting a tug to bring it back.”
“Is anyone hurt? Do we know where Jacob is working?”
Johnson called up the roster and studied it for a minute. “No reports of
any injuries. Ullesvern is currently off duty.”
“So he’s in the pod,” said Jerwin. “Try to contact him. Put out an all-call
to see if he’s anywhere on station. Tell the tug to prep for an emergency
evacuation and the medical bay to expect a decompression victim.”
Stan spent two minutes in communication. While she waited, Jerwin
studied monitors showing the lab tumbling away to open space with a tug in
pursuit. The reaction control system must be offline. She changed to the
event recording and rewound to the moment just prior to the explosion.
In the recording, the lab floated against the stars until a flash of light
blinded the camera. When the camera adjusted, the lab was moving away,
head over heels. Jerwin rewound again, but before replaying, adjusted the
brightness. This time, the video was black until the explosion. The flash of
light illuminated the pod for a fraction of a second. Oddly, the center of the
explosion appeared off one end, rather than next to the oxygen tanks as
she’d expected.
“No response from Jacob,” said Johnson. “Nobody has reported he’s on
the station, so we can assume he’s out there and incapacitated.”
Captain Jerwin switched to the video feed coming from the tug. It had
moved to a safe range and was struggling to match vector and velocity with
the lab airlock. On Scrappy’s space side was a previously unseen structure
supporting a bulky, two-meter-long tube. It was hidden from view of the
station, only visible if a tug circled around Scrappy’s back side.
“Stan, what is that?” Jerwin asked, pointing to the mystery structure.
“Sorry, Captain. I have no idea. New things are getting welded on every
day. I assume it’s part of some lesson.”
“Let me know when they get that thing secured,” said Jerwin. “And call
me as soon as we have status on Jacob. I’ll be in my quarters, staying out of
your way.”
Jerwin walked back to her room, replaced the coffee cup on the desk
and replayed the video of the explosion. It was clear the flash came from
the structure she had seen from the tug video.
 She looked at the puddle of coffee on the floor.
It was nice having gravity. Spilled liquids didn’t float around in the air.
Gravity.
Jerwin recalled that as the rockets completed their job of spinning up
the station, they were detached from the station.
Jacob had obtained a rocket engine and welded it to the transport pod.
What had he been thinking? It wasn’t like Jacob to take a risk; he had
never been careless with his welders. His resistance to retirement would
result in his death. She hated the decision being forced on her, and for a
moment she again hated her father. She wished she could return to the
kitchen and this time, not storm out. At least not slam the door.

The cramped medical bay forced Captain Jerwin to stand uncomfortably

close to Jacob’s bed. She watched his vital signs, trying not to look at him.
His pulse hovered just below one hundred beats per minute; the doctor
diagnosed this as normal for a man accustomed to zero-g who was now
exposed to one-g. Jacob had bandages over the stitches in his forehead and
his arm was in a sling. IVs dripped saline, courtesy of gravity in the ring of
the station. For a day, he had been slipping in and out of consciousness.
The explosion had spun the pod end-forend, tumbling Jacob like dice in
a shaker cup. He had rebounded at least three times before his momentum
matched that of the pod and he settled to “the floor,” unconscious and
bleeding. The video feed stopped, so nobody saw the blood spattered in
every direction and his inert body thrown awkwardly in a corner.
Capturing the pod before extracting Jacob required three tugs fifty-
seven minutes of valuable fuel. If Jacob hadn’t been aboard, Jerwin would
have ordered the tugs to back away and let it escape with good riddance.
Jacob’s rescue meant risking a collision between pod and tug to stop the
tumble. Once inside, the tug crews worked around broken furniture and
floating trash. They found Jacob in a corner, still breathing but in shock.
The extraction crew fashioned a backboard from one of the re-purposed
acceleration seats, then strapped him down with electrical wire pulled from
the walls. Between the blood and the wire he looked like a prop from a
slasher movie.
Accidents on the station, until now, had been pinched fingers and small
cuts. Jacob had experienced the equivalent of a minor car crash, but without
airbags or seat belts. He was not pretty. To get him to the medical room
required awkwardly parading him down a spoke and then around the rim.
Everyone on the station knew about the explosion, everyone knew it
involved Jacob, and everyone wanted to help. Nobody was prepared for the
sight; he was bloody, strapped down, and unconscious. Safety procedures
had become boring, and everyone’s awareness of the danger of space had
become muted. The sight of Jacob on a stretcher was a brutal safety
reminder.
Jerwin took her eyes off the display and looked down as Jacob woke up,
blinked, then closed his eyes again. With a grimace, he opened his eyes a
second time and made an effort to look around the room. In a moment, he
became aware of Captain Jerwin. He turned his head, winced, then
straightened his neck, electing instead to look cautiously at her from the
corner of his eye. He had the appearance of a black lab caught chewing up a
new rug.
“Jacob,” said Captain Jerwin. “Why did you attach a thruster to the
lab?”
He shifted his gaze to the ceiling. “Needed an engine so I can get to
Mars.” He squinted and took a deep breath. “Didn’t expect it to fire up
when I connected it to the navigation computer. It’s supposed to be more
complicated than that.”
Captain Jerwin gently placed her hand on Jacob’s undamaged right arm.
“Are you going to Mars? That seems a little crazy.”
“Crazy is retiring on Earth. Can’t stand the gravity. Up here, I’m useful.
If I go down there, I’ll just be a burden. You know that. Be honest with both
of us.”

“Be honest with both of us.”

Jacob had no idea he had summoned the ghost of her father. The phrase
hit Jerwin like a slap, wrenching her back to that long-ago conversation.
The kitchen, the smell of pizza, her father staring angrily at her, her mother
silent in the next room.
“Theresa Mariana Jerwin,” her father had said. His face was red. “Are
you seriously leaving your internship because of a disagreement with your
sponsor?”
 “I told them why they are wrong, but they ignore me. Why should I
work where I’m not welcome?”
“Because they value your opinions, even if they don’t know it yet. Their
policies are in place because of their experience. You don’t have that
experience, but you have a different perspective. If you’re serious about this
opinion of yours, you’ll stick around and learn why they disagree. Maybe,
given time and persistence, you’ll change their policy.”
“Dad, they aren’t going to agree with me. I’m just an intern.”
“Theresa, be honest with both of us. You’re afraid of failing. Here’s
what I think: you should get your laundry and your attitude and get back in
that car. Return to your apartment and that company. Call me when you get
there.”
Which she had done, but without the phone call when she had arrived
back at her lonely room. Her father reflected her anger with herself. It
wasn’t his fault, but she was upset with him for years after that.
“Be honest with both of us.”
Jerwin hated herself almost as much as she hated that phrase. It
followed her with the persistence of Poe’s Raven, speaking up at the most
inconvenient times, insisting she face her demon of indecision.
Her father had died of a heart attack three months later, before she could
make the phone call, leaving her to sort out her anger on her own. Her
mother gave her the gift of self-forgiveness and love of herself and those
around her, but her father would always be unfinished business. She had
spent the rest of her life proving to her father that she could make tough
decisions.

Jerwin took a deep breath against the tears and returned her attention to
the medical bay. She hadn’t stopped looking at Jacob.
“You know, you’re only staying here until we gain possession of the
transport,” said Jerwin. Her voice cracked and she cleared her throat. “After
that, you have to leave the station. You don’t have a choice about that.”
“I do have a choice,” said Jacob. “If I have to leave the station, at least I
can go somewhere interesting. Mars might be a long shot, but I’ll be doing
something important.”
Captain Jerwin tried to lighten the mood. “Look, I’m all in favor of
sending that container on a long trip off a short orbit. But not with you
inside. It would take a solid year to get to Mars, and you’d get tired of
granola bars by then. What would you do when you get there?”
Her attempt at humor fell incredibly flat. Nobody laughed, least of all
her. The forced smile left her face.
She crossed her arms. “You’ve got things to do on Earth—you just don’t
know what they are yet. Give retirement a year. I’ll pull some strings. There
are lots of people eager to hear about your experiences.”
Jacob tried to smile, but grimaced in pain instead. “Let me sleep on it,
Captain.” He pretended to fade out.
As she left the room, Theresa Jerwin made a special effort to close the
door softly and quietly. Slamming doors had never worked out for her in the
past.

The station cafe was between the medical room and her office, so she
took the opportunity to stop and refill her sippy cup. While the machine
made coffee, she contemplated Scrappy from the cafe porthole. Scrappy’s
onboard nav computer had been restarted and the pod occupied a stable
position near the station. Jacob didn’t own it yet, so Jerwin couldn’t just
jettison it toward the Sun. That would have to wait until someone had
authority over this piece of junk.
When she wasn’t thinking about Scrappy, she thought about Jacob. The
easy decision with Jacob was to send him back. The tough decision was to
respect his wishes. Both decisions were somehow wrong. She struggled
between the rules of the corporation and the needs of Jacob, not to mention
station morale and the good will of the welders.
Dmitry, one of Jacob’s welders, was seated in a corner reading a book.
She turned to regard him.
“What are you welders going to do when Scrappy goes away?”
Dmitry looked up from his book and around the cafe to see if Jerwin
was talking to someone other than himself. There was nobody else in the
room, so he put down his book.
“Nothing, Captain.”
“Oh come on. Be honest with me. How do you feel about that god-
forsaken shipping crate? It’s your secret clubhouse. Are you going to hate
me for getting rid of it?”
Dmitry paused. His mouth twitched to the left, then to the right.
 “It will be sad when it is thrown away. Jacob has taught us how to save
it, many, many times. It is important to us because it is important to him. It
is more than a shipping crate. Jacob and Scrappy are the same. They
deserve your respect.”
The coffee machine whirred and filled her cup. She ignored it.
“Dmitry, I have something I need you to do.”
Jacob’s retirement might be inevitable; it would contribute to his death,
but at least she could offer him an option.

Jacob spent the remainder of the threemonth occupancy in bed and

recovering. His “official” residence was still aboard Scrappy, so his release
from the medical bay happened the same day he gained ownership of
Scrappy. It was also the same day his shuttle home was scheduled to depart.
His days in medical hadn’t been lonely. Word had gotten around about
his retirement, and everyone made time to visit, reminisce, and promise to
see him next time they were on Earth. There was talk about throwing a last
party on Scrappy, but a small group of senior welders squelched the idea.
Apparently Scrappy wasn’t safe to occupy, even though there seemed to be
a lot of traffic and activity between the pod and the station.
Jacob moved awkwardly from medical to the hub where the shuttle back
to Earth was docked. Ring gravity took its toll on his body. He was weak,
so two of the welders assisted him with his suit. The crowded hub contained
more crewmen than were necessary for that task. Jerwin pushed her way
through.
She paused. She could step back from this. Delay. Find another way out.
With a deep breath, she continued.
“Jacob, I need your help with one last task. When you get suited up, I’m
sending you over to Scrappy for a final check. I’ve got a tug standing by.”
Jacob smiled, but with a sad, downward glance. He seemed appreciative
of the last gesture, but his sadness and fear of the future were clear in his
posture and discomfort.
“I’m sure it’s fine, Captain. You don’t need me to check something
you’ll scuttle next week.”
“You know how I am,” she said. “Everything needs to be done correctly.
I want to make sure our case is airtight when the lawyers come calling.”
 Jacob shrugged, looked around at the gathered welders, and paused. He
waved at the onlookers crammed into every corner and access hatchway.
Some wept and waved back. Some said nothing, but looked on as he walked
through the airlock and climbed down the stairs into the waiting tug.
Outside the hub, the lab hung suspended in a spray of light, giving it
celebrity status. Beyond the shadows was open space, unobstructed and
endless. The tug pulled up to the lab airlock, docked for a brief period, then
pulled away into the shadows.
Captain Jerwin watched the video feed from the inside of the lab. Jacob
entered the transport and floated the length of the vessel, affectionately
checking welds and tapping on dashboard readouts. He pulled himself over
to a salvaged acceleration couch welded next to the electronics rack, then
turned and puzzled at the large number of boxes secured on the opposite
wall. The labels read “MRE—HUMAN CONSUMPTION.”
“Captain, what is it you want me to check?” asked Jacob, looking up at
the camera.
“I just wanted to make sure you were okay with the status of the lab,”
she said. “It is your property, after all. Oh, and I had some of the welders
check the integrity of that engine and the navigation computer. They were
concerned it might accidentally fire if you hit the wrong button.”
Captain Jerwin knew what the welders had been doing for the past few
weeks. She also knew what might happen if the wrong button (labeled
“EXECUTE NAVIGATION PROGRAM”) was accidentally pushed. She
didn’t know what Jacob might choose to do about this situation.
Jacob smiled, this time without glancing down. He cut the video feed.
The outside cameras were blinded by the erupting rocket. Captain
Jerwin was sure Jacob wouldn’t live to see Mars, but she felt the warm
glow of making the right choice. Someday soon, she would file a report
about the unreliable nature of homemade space vehicles and the inability of
Jacob to report for retirement.
“God speed, Captain J. Ullesvern,” murmured Captain Jerwin.
Love Pops!
Genevieve Williams | 6914 words

The tiny display in the upper right of my vision informed me that my

secondary persona had six hundred and fifty-three thousand, seven hundred
and forty-seven riders ’mersing with me right at that moment. Forty-eight.
Fifty-seven. Thirty-three. The numbers rose and fell as the audience for
Love Pops!, fading star Michael Brooks’s mating-reality immersive, flipped
between the contestants, choosing their favorites. Audience ratings had
some weight in Brooks’s final selection.
Fourteen other women and three men milled about the enormous two-
story entrance hall of Brooks’s mansion. Most of them were younger than
me. They lounged on gilded couches, or examined their nails— nail art was
in again, too—or toyed with drinks brought by robot servitors that wheeled
about beneath laden trays. I declined a champagne cocktail. The servitor
offered sparkling water instead. I took it and surveyed the competition.
Not really competition. Michael Brooks, once Michael/Michaela, had a
stalker. Based on when the threats had begun, his own security was certain
it was someone who’d applied to be in the ’mersive. They were pretty sure
whoever it was hadn’t actually managed to get on the show—but anything
was possible. Efforts to trace the threats had so far been unsuccessful.
And so, here I was, posing as a contestant, surrounded by show ponies
whose stylists had gone all out—from hair to masks to couture. One
woman’s dress featured a balls-onwires collar that extended several inches
above her head and nearly as far past her shoulders. Another had gone for a
full-length gown even though it was midafternoon, but she wore it well,
right down to the mid-thigh slit and the asymmetrical bodice. One of the
men was bald, but had scalp tattoos that curled and writhed like snakes, to
hypnotic effect. I wondered if he’d had them done special for the show; his
outfit was otherwise minimalist, a plain white jumpsuit, but of exquisite cut
that allowed you to see just how in shape he was.
I felt underdressed in my little black dress.
“LADIES! AND GENTLEMEN!”
 On the balcony topping the double staircase stood Michael Brooks,
replete in a white tuxedo trimmed in gold that looked as though it ought to
have a cape attached. His broad smile and open arms welcomed us all.
“Welcome to Love Pops!” he continued, in a voice less amplified
though no less commanding. He still possessed that charismatic ability to
speak to the entire world and just to you, at the same time.
>
My backup team, giving me a hard time.
>
“Over the next eighteen weeks, you’ll compete with one another to be
my perfect companion. Each of you was chosen to compete because each of
you is wonderful.”
>
>
“In beauty, in brains, in wit and charm, in style, and of course in
sexiness,” Brooks went on. “But the real question is: which among you is
the perfect mate—for me?”
He grabbed hold of a sparkle-studded lightrope hanging in the air beside
him. It retracted, and he swung over the railing, giving us all a view of the
soles of his gleaming white cowboy boots. Then the rope delivered him to
the floor. He let go, and it vanished into the ceiling. Several of the women
and two of the men rushed toward him to make their first impression.
> I asked.
>
>
>
I knew that I ought to rush forward too. The audience riding my
secondary persona right now urged me to. It seemed I had a few fans left
over from my previous stint in the public eye as a performance model.
But plenty of others hung back, too. I met the gaze of one of them, a
frankly stunning black woman who was already a rising-star singer. Her off-
the-shoulder red cocktail dress did have a cape, thank you very much. I
guessed she was hoping to last as long as the singing contest and then
withdraw.
I had no idea what I’d do when we got that far. I can’t sing.
>
 > Which wasn’t the guy’s name, but there were three people on my
backup team and I’d nicknamed them all: Brad, George, and Fred.
“Charlotta Skarsgard,” Brooks said, with that warm, infectious smile
that had captured millions of hearts. Including mine, once. He was tall and
had left most of the lines around his eyes. Good choice. Suggested maturity
and character, and made his outfit sophisticated rather than ridiculous. His
chaste handshake was firm, but not bonecrushing. After all, we were
competing with each other, not with him.
“Lotte,” I said and found myself smiling back.
“Michael,” he said, holding my hand a little too long. I wondered if it
was calculated, hated myself for wondering, and then my synapses gave up,
and I blushed. Time had had its way with his looks, even with expensive
gengineering and a bit of old-fashioned plastic surgery, but he still had the
rugged handsomeness, with just a tinge of the femininity that had made the
Michael/Michaela persona so successful. Even if he was doing this show to
counter the > that tended to greet his ambient presence these days.
>
>
>
He was charming, his smile sincere, like he was really glad to see all of
us and me in particular, and a little bit hey-isn’t-this-silly too, and somehow
that was just right. This was all a game, just a silly game, wherein we might
fall in love.
And somewhere underneath and behind that insouciant charm, in those
eyes of a startlingly vivid blue, the quiet despair and desperate loneliness
that was why we were playing. To him, this wasn’t a game.
And to at least one other person out there, it wasn’t a game either.

Contests in immersive-reality shows fall into one or more of three

categories: skill, sexiness, and willingness to drop one’s inhibitions.
I wasn’t sure which category the erotic poetry readings fell into. I chose
Sappho and let the audience, and Brooks himself, make of that what they
would.
He watched me the entire time, his brown eyes intent. I stared at the text
hovering in the ambient space between us so hard that my eyes teared up.
Sweat prickled under my arms. The audience was not impressed.
 > That was George.
> Fred.
I shuddered. Secondary persona—which I’d created to keep my real
profession and purpose secret, as well as maintain some basic privacy—
notwithstanding, I couldn’t get used to the idea of people just riding around
with me whenever they wanted.
Brittany had started her recitation, her delivery so wooden that, given
the poem’s content, the effect was actually funny. Joliet was up next, but got
so flustered halfway through that she half-jumped, half-fell off the platform
and ran out of the room.
> Brad added. >
I shuddered again. From my previous career, I had some idea what some
of that “fan mail” was like.
Two women and one of the men couldn’t make themselves go through
with the bungee jump. The makeover and photoshoot seemed to fall into the
embarrassment-and-inhibitions category. While I didn’t mind the glittery
blue sheath they put me in—I was a tall girl and not self-conscious about it,
though the dress’s “mature style” descriptor struck me as unnecessary—I
could not believe what they did to my hair. It took several washings to get
the styling nanites out, and with them the brassy gold color they’d given
me.
> I’d asked that question during the initial consult, to unsatisfactory
answer.
> George replied.
> Brad added.
I could have done without knowing that. >
> That was George.
The psych screening dumped you into an ambient facsimile fantasyland
where you had to puzzle, talk, or fight your way out of various situations.
Most of those who’d failed to pass it posed no greater risk to Michael
Brooks than anyone else. Less, for the most part. But Brooks’s security, or
possibly his insurers, were taking no chances.
And that didn’t even account for the applicants who’d been rejected for
other reasons. Eighteen contestants, out of well over a million applicants.
And only those who’d failed the psych screening were crazy?
 > Which were so well anonymized that they still hadn’t been traced. But
of course the team was running comparisons against every communication
that came in.
>
Which at least told us that she—they were pretty sure the stalker was a
she—hadn’t given up and gone away, but damn. True anonymity was all but
impossible these days. Whoever she was, this woman was clever.
Meanwhile, I had my first group date to get through.
There were three of us: naturally goldenhaired Reinette, Basil of the
squirming tattoos and white jumpsuit, and me. None of us were audience
favorites and after this date, two of us would be getting a door prize. Since
it was impossible for either of those two to be me, I couldn’t be too worried
about the outcome of the date. But I was worried about the setting. The four
of us had a restaurant’s private dining room to ourselves. Two of Brooks’
personal security stood guard just outside the door. But the rest of the
restaurant hadn’t been cleared, and at least two failed applicants were
having dinner there that night—not to mention the rest of the fans who’d
discovered the location of the date and clustered outside, as though being
physically closer somehow added to their ’mersing experience.
All it did for me was make me nervous.
>
>
>
>
>
Reinette was still out of the room, and Basil sat so close on Michael’s
right side that they were practically joined at the hip. Basil’s left hand had
disappeared under the table, his upper arm moving back and forth. Michael
gave him a look that bordered on irritation, and he stopped.
I smiled as Michael looked at me. ’Mersers flooded my contestant
persona. I wanted to disconnect from it, from this whole wretched business.
From that awful, lonely look behind Michael’s eyes.
Then Reinette returned from the bathroom and asked Michael about his
creative process. Almost all of his work these days was collaborative, even
sometimes opening up creative decisions—much like the decisions
concerning his love life—to ambient crowdsourcing. What was that like?
 He answered her, and the wine flowed, and Basil’s hands—both of them
—disappeared again, and by the time the dessert plates were cleared, the
three of them were very nearly having sex on the table. According to the
numbers, about a quarter of the audience was ’mersing with me, which to
my mind turned the scene from voyeuristic to pornographic.
At least no one burst through the door and tried to shoot him.
At that round’s eliminations, Basil was declared the winner. Reinette got
shown the door. I should have, too. Instead they kept me in the running
without explanation. That won me no new fans, on the show or off it. It
sucks when half a million people accuse you of cheating, even when you
don’t really care about the game.
> George informed me. Great.

They’d built the mud-wrestling pit outdoors, oval in shape like an

Olympic stadium. It even had an entrance chute for the two teams to walk
out, complete with Greek columns. The judges, two wrestlers and one
pankration mixed martial artist, sat on an elevated bench along one long
side of the oval. Michael sat on the other, in a poppy-orange chiton and gold
peplum meant to invoke the priestess of Demeter who had presided over the
games in ancient Olympia. Even a large chunk of the audience found that a
bit much.
By now, we were down to ten contestants, nine women and one man
split into two teams of five. The winning team got another group date, with
one of their number scoring a coveted solo date. Two members of the losing
team would be eliminated. By what criteria were unclear: three falls took
you out of the pit, but beyond that the rules seemed... whimsical.
My team was the Pink Ladies, with pink shirts and white shorts. We
lined up side by side with the Bad Girls, who were dressed in black with
silver glitter patterns. Not that it would matter in a few minutes, when the
only way to tell contestants apart would be by our tags.
We lined up side by side with our opponents for the walk out. Virtual
personae filled the stands behind the judges, just as though this were a real
athletic competition and not a farce. I glanced at the contestant next to me, a
woman named Angela who was one of the few among the remaining pool
with some martial arts experience; Wing Chun, to be exact. My intent was
sympathetic. What I got in return was a glare.
 Well, okay then.
We reached the pit and lined up along both sides of the oval. Music
blared through the ambient, flaring trumpets with a dancebeat backing
track. Then the music stopped, and a bell sounded to start the match. I
jumped into the pit.
The mud wasn’t bad. A little warm, not too viscous. It felt like a
therapeutic mud bath, and perhaps that was what it was. It came up to just
above my knees.
>
> The roar from the audience shoved the other contestants into the pit.
My own rating had gone up a few points.
>
>
>
The Bad Girls had all jumped into the pit, headed straight for me as my
four allies were still dipping their toes in with much shrieking and
squealing, as though Pink Ladies was a prescription rather than a really silly
name.
The first one I took out at the knees. She landed on her back with a
splat, splashing mud onto everyone within a three-foot radius. A white “1”
floated up from her in the ambient, indicating her first fall.
That was all it took. One of her teammates jumped onto my back,
grabbing at my tightlybraided hair. Angela took the opportunity to come at
me with a classic Wing Chun drive up the centerline. I pivoted, nearly fell,
but turned so that Angela grabbed the assailant on my back instead. We all
went into the mud.
I scrambled to my feet. Angela did the same, slipping a little but
catching herself. I closed with her, twisted her around, and locked her arm
behind her back.
> It took me a moment to realize this missive had come from her, not
from Fred, George, or Brad.
>
>
She was right, of course, but there was no way I could explain without
blowing my cover. I settled for dumping her into the mud again instead.
 Around us, the melee was in full swing. Pink and black tags floated
above everyone’s heads, as there was now no other way to tell who was on
which team. One of the Pink Ladies was being hauled out of the pit, a large
red “3” hovering over her head. A yellow “2” floated over Angela, and I
knew that I myself sported a white “1”.
The woman who’d jumped me before tried again. I got my shoulder
under her and dumped her a second time; she must have been getting tired.
The “2” over her head changed to a “3”, and a bell rang. They hauled her
out.
My numbers went up again. I wasn’t the favorite—that dubious honor
went to Marjani, the singer I’d spotted the first day—but at least now I
wasn’t likely to be eliminated.
>
> I turned, looking for her tags even as her face floated into my field of
view, and Angela slipped inside my guard and landed a blow right over my
sternum hard enough to knock me on my ass.
I sat there, gasping, the wind knocked out of me. Two falls for me.
There were three Bad Girls left in the pit, and two Pink Ladies. Me and a
white girl with a few spots of pink left on her shirt, and a manicure to
match. Zero falls.
Natalie.
> Who watched me scramble to my feet as though she’d just scraped me
off her shoe. She hadn’t made much of an impression on me earlier in the
contest; her audience rating was correspondingly low. If we lost, she’d be
out.
But the person behind those baby blues wasn’t Natalie.
There’s the persona, and the person behind it. There’s ’mersing, where
you ride along, see what the persona sees, hear what it hears, even feel what
it feels if it’s set up that way.
And sometimes, the person running the persona isn’t the owner. It’s
easy to tell if you know what to look for. A blurring, a hesitation as the
persona projection does something and the physical body wearing it has to
catch up.
The three remaining Bad Girls charged at me, ignoring Natalie. I
dropped my weight and went for the one on the left, wrapping her in a bear
hug and keeping her between me and the other two. I got my right foot
behind hers and checked her over my hip and into the mud.
>
>
> Natalie had taken a step forward, her hands at waist height as though
she held a long skirt out of the mud. She made a jerky grab at Angela’s
shoulder. Angela spun, grabbed Natalie around the waist, and down she
went. That left Angela’s remaining teammate for me; a bit more work, as
she had some wrestling from her gymnasium days, but her skills had half a
decade’s worth of rust on them. I dumped her on her back and the yellow
“2” over her head changed to a “3.”
Then Angela was on me. I kept my centerline covered; she grabbed my
arms, and we went around and around like some sort of ballroom dance.
I hoped that wasn’t next.
Natalie danced around us, waving her arms, a “1” floating over her
head. > Angela dropped her weight, nearly knocking me down, but I slipped
behind her and went in for a headlock. She ducked that, grabbed my arm for
a hip-check, and Natalie’s foot slipped in front of hers.
Angela tripped and face-planted into the mud. A “3” floated up from her
as she rolled over, mud covering her face and caking her eyelashes and hair,
and spat more mud out of her mouth. Cheers erupted from the Pink Ladies
and from the stands. Michael wore a look of faint amusement.
And Natalie gave me a look of such bare hostility that I knew the
moment had come to blow my cover.
Then her gaze unfocused. She blinked several times and looked around
as though waking from a dream. Her eyes rolled skyward, and she fell
backward into the mud, a yellow “2” floating above her.
> I demanded.
>
>
>
Which just made me feel so much better. But at least I was still
standing. Next round.

The stalker’s name was Valerie Chapman. Brooks’s security team had
taken their time about blocking her takeover of Natalie’s persona so that
they could trace who’d done it, and secured a wholesale block against her
accessing the show or anything else directly related to Michael Brooks. For
her, it would be as though Michael had not only ceased to exist, but never
existed.
> I informed the crew.
>
>
>
I didn’t appreciate the sarcasm, but I had to admit that Fred had a point.
Natalie got kicked off the show for accepting a bribe from Valerie
Chapman allowing full access to her persona. She hadn’t been in full
control of it, since Natalie had still been embodying it at the time. But
Natalie had agreed to follow Valerie’s direction.
> I opined.
> Brad informed me.
>
>
Reassuring. I guess. All three of them seemed to think that Chapman
was no longer a threat, never really had been if this was as close as she’d
managed to get after this many weeks.
I wasn’t convinced. Taking on someone else’s persona was sketchy, but
people did it for any number of reasons—after all, wanting to be someone
younger or sexier or just different was why ’mersives were so popular to
begin with. But taking over a persona while someone else was still wearing
it? Creepy. Very creepy. Thinking about it made me shudder. And that
wasn’t the sort of thing I could protect Michael against.
Meanwhile, I had a private date to get through. My team had won the
match, and I, against much expectation including my own, had scored
dinner and an evening’s entertainment with Michael Brooks.
My inner twelve-year-old was delighted. My nearly-forty adult was
ambivalent, as I waited in the enormous entrance hall where Michael had
first greeted us. Now I was alone, except for a housekeeping servitor
dusting some antique furniture that probably didn’t need it—the thing
looked like it might have some low-level security countermeasures
installed. The servitor was in brushed matte gunmetal and polished chrome.
I was in a sparkling red gown.
 Michael came downstairs in a white tuxedo trimmed with glitter and a
smile sweet enough to make me wish this date really was private. “Private”
in the context of the show meant us and whatever portion of the audience
’mersing with me, which at that moment was pretty much all of them. Even
those for whom I wasn’t a favorite wouldn’t miss the closest they’d ever
come to going on a date with the star.
He stopped short at the bottom of the stairs, looking uncertain, and I felt
a strong impulse to try and put him at ease—even though I was the one with
over a million people riding around with me.
He offered an arm. I was standing a bit too far away for the gesture to
feel natural, but I walked over to him and took it anyway. On impulse, I
kissed him on the cheek. He had a little stubble, which was a surprise. In his
Michael/Michaela days he’d been smooth as a baby’s bottom, so the stories
went. I blushed at the recollection. Good lord, it had been way too long.
“So where are we going?” I asked, before the silence got too awkward.
“Dinner and Degenerate Art Ensemble.”
What a pleasant surprise. Dinner turned out to be tasteful and decorous,
a hushed and classy affair called Campania with a wine list as long as a
Chinese dynasty.
>
>
Flattery. But true. So too with Degenerate Art Ensemble, which had
been combining music, dance, costume, and culture for over a century.
They’d embraced ’mersing and reality enhancement in their infancy but
now largely eschewed them. What enhancement their show utilized
emphasized a single dancer, brightening the lights on her feathery white
costume and following her movements with holographic afterimages. Some
of these vanished within seconds; others lingered, sometimes while the
images occurring between them and the dancer’s body disappeared. We had
to strain just a little to hear all the details of the minimalist music, the spare
sounds and the dancer’s increasingly wild and desperate movements
holding all of our attention. At the climax of the dance, the musicians, all
live, surrounded her, closing her in until she broke free with a wild leap that
shattered the music into silence.
Despite the attention-riveting design of the performance, I had trouble
concentrating on it. Throughout the evening a weird, whispering tickle had
grown in the back of my mind, persisting against my every attempt to block
it out. It was like an ambient communication, but muted—and anyway, only
Michael, the other contestants, and the backup crew were supposed to be
able to communicate with me that way for the duration of the show.
Audience members could send suggestions, critiques, even borderline
abuse, but those came as text or as recordings, not live. When I tried to
describe what was happening to Fred, George, and Brad, the ambient
helpfully suggested radio static as a descriptive comparison. I didn’t even
know what that meant.
> Brad responded. >
By now Michael and I were back in his car. One of his usual security
guards rode in the seat in front of us, the other in the seat behind. The
middle of the car was more like a bowl, with bench seating all the way
around aside from the door, and a soft plush surface underfoot that invited
you to roll around on it. Michael sat across the bowl from me, looking
pensive. He hadn’t said much since we’d left the theater.
I dropped the second persona. Knowing even as I did it, that for an
audience of several million, the show had gone dark just as it was getting
interesting. They couldn’t ’merse with Michael. That wasn’t how it went.
Michael frowned a little, seeming to see me for the first time since we’d
gotten into the car. “Are you all right? You look a little tired.”
Shit. I’d been wearing the secondary persona for weeks. I hadn’t
bothered to do anything, appearance-wise, to the primary persona linked to
my ident, since nobody I interacted with ever saw it. I reached to reconnect
with the secondary persona and found it blocked.
>
> Now Michael could see everything I’d kept hidden.
Including what I did for a living.
>
> I had to ask.
>
Like that was what they wanted to do right now.
Something tried to connect with my primary persona. Not one of the
backup crew. I blocked it. >
>
>
 “Lotte?” Michael’s voice, already concerned, now held a hint of alarm.
>
I sighed and leaned back against the cushions as the car glided toward
Michael’s manse. Whatever they were doing, it was too late for the pretense
I’d maintained—the one Michael’s own security had insisted on.
“Charlotta Skarsgard,” I said. My voice was quiet. “Skarsgard Security.
Didn’t the name ring a bell at all?”
“I just knew you used to be a model,” he said, just as quietly. He turned,
looking out the window at the passing cityscape. The geniality, the aw-
shucks grin, were gone. He sighed and looked at me. “I suppose this was
Hakim’s idea.” That would be his head of security. “One last layer of
protection, just in case. Are you the only one?”
The possibility otherwise hadn’t even occurred to me. “I don’t know,” I
admitted.
He ran the fingers of his right hand through his hair, his gaze going to
the ceiling. When he looked at me again, my secondary persona was back in
place. He started. “Holy—what just happened, anyway?”
>
>
At the moment, I didn’t care whether they charged her with a crime,
sued her into next week, or concluded that her interference was simply the
price you paid for putting on this kind of show. Michael was giving me the
kind of look that would’ve broken my heart if we’d been having any kind of
real relationship instead of this farce.
“Ask Hakim,” I said and let the millions of audience members flooding
the ’mersive, many of them no doubt sending me hatemail as though it had
all been my fault, make of that what they would.
We rode the rest of the way in silence.
Back at the manse, the bodyguards exited the front and rear of the car
first. I wanted to ask them if they’d been briefed on what had just happened,
but when I glanced at Michael, he gave a slight shake of his head.
Okay then. Maintain the pretense. The instant we parted, I’d be talking
with Fred, George, and Brad about breaking this contract. After all, we’d
flushed out and then blocked the principal reason I’d been hired, hadn’t we?
And all I’d had to do was look pretty. Here I’d thought I’d left that
behind with the performance modeling and all its attendant bullshit.
 We stepped out onto the platform in front of the manse. Each end of the
semi-circular driveway fed onto elevated rails that connected the house to
the city’s traffic flow; since Michael, like anyone with the means, lived in
the upper levels and had a private entrance and parking platform, it was all
but impossible to get there by any means other than a private car with the
appropriate permissions.
Which was why, when the small, pale, dark-haired woman advanced
across the platform, a gun so small as to be laughable raised in one hand, I
was as surprised as anyone else. “Michael,” she said, her voice packed tight
with desperation and disappointment.
Both bodyguards’ stunners came up. Too slowly. She fired. Two shots.
Either Valerie Chapman had spent much of the last twenty years
perfecting her aim, or she’d downloaded some seriously expensive
brainware. Or she’d gotten lucky. Both guards were armored, and if she’d
done the proper thing and aimed for the center of mass it wouldn’t have
done much. It’s not as easy to shoot someone in the knee as old movies and
newer ’mersives make it seem. Hitting one of them there might have been
luck, a wild shot. Two was deliberate.
> Facial recognition scan was already running, concluding Valerie
Chapman with 97 percent certainty, but I didn’t need that scan to know who
this woman had to be.
TRACKER HAS HER TWENTY MILES FROM YOUR POSITION>>
>
“Valerie,” I said, stepping in front of Michael, drawing her attention.
Doing my job. I didn’t even have a stunner, couldn’t go for either of the
ones the guards had dropped without moving away from Michael. I did
have a fine-mesh armor under my dress that was supposed to ensure
nothing worse than bruising from anything below a.308.
Supposed to.
As long as she didn’t shoot me in the face.
>
“You,” she said. The gun aimed straight at me. Not for the first time in
my life, but not an experience I cared to repeat. It took effort to keep my
eyes on hers—baby blue, and wide beneath a fringe of semi-curled bangs—
instead of on the mouth of the gun barrel. Projectiles. So old school. She’d
have rocked the pixie look when she was younger, but she was somewhere
around my age, when that look gets a lot harder to achieve. And she had no
ident. None at all. She might as well have been a doll.
She shot me.
The mesh absorbed the blow, redistributed its force. It still felt like I’d
been punched in the stomach by a linebacker. I doubled over and nearly
threw up, thinking that that had been deliberate, too, and that someone who
gut-shoots someone else on purpose doesn’t just want to kill them.
The audience numbers for Love Pops! soared into the stratosphere.
At the same time, a medical diagnostic flashed in my peripheral vision.
Bad sign. For a small gun, that thing packed a hell of a punch.
It wavered now, between Michael and me. I got one hand flat against
the platform surface but couldn’t get enough breath in me to stand up. A
sharp pain in one of my ribs, and the diagnostic suggested it was cracked.
“Michael,” Valerie said again, softer.
“I’m sorry,” he said. Far more gently that I would’ve managed were our
situations reversed. “Do I know you?”
Wrong thing to say.
“You should,” she said. The gun strayed toward him. I got one foot
under me, to start to stand. It came back toward me, and I froze. She might
well have knocked me out of the fight with one shot. I had an unexpected
and utterly surprising moment of sympathy for the losing contestants.
“We met,” she continued. The whine of desperation edged into her
voice. “At a party. Seven years ago.”
“Of course we did.” He’d have the record, though without her ident he
might be having trouble pulling it up.
Even as I had that thought, a record of their meeting arrived in my head,
courtesy of Brad, George, and Fred. I sent it to Michael with a > and hoped
she hadn’t noticed. For all I knew, she was ’mersing with me right then.
“Ah, Valerie,” he said, turning on that smile I’d seen hundreds of times
these last weeks. He walked toward her, out of the zone of my protection,
and with a cracked rib I couldn’t even get up, let alone follow him. He
walked toward the gun.
Damn idiot.
Millions watched right along with me as he did it. Millions more
’mersed in as what was happening spread across the ambient, people who’d
never even heard of Michael/Michaela joining upon the possibility of
something the vast majority of them, ’mersives and sims and fictions
notwithstanding, had never seen: someone getting shot, for real, in real
time, right in front of them.
I like to think that some of them joined with the hope of preventing it,
or at least standing witness at Valerie’s trial afterward.
They saw: Michael walks forward, his hands spread to show
harmlessness. I recall this same posture the day I met him in person, the
first day of the show. Not our first meeting, either: we’d also been at the
same party once, when both of us were younger.
The gun trembles in Valerie’s hand, rage warring with the realization of
her dreams.
Two doors in the mansion’s front wall, hidden until this moment though
they’re on the schematics I was sent, slide open. Guards in full armor, heads
and faces included, come pouring out, but Michael’s between them and
Valerie.
> but I’m sure they won’t get here in time.
Michael’s saying something to her. I can’t make out the words.
I ping the nearest of the two fallen guards. No words, because I don’t
know whether Valerie is one of the millions ’mersing with me, and I don’t
believe the search results that say she isn’t, because she’s standing right
here and her ident is twenty miles away, so who knows what else she can
do.
The guard, clutching his knee, his light brown skin looking curdled,
looks at me.
The stunner’s lying right by his hand. I can’t even tell him to slide it
over to me. Brad, George, and Fred are trying to tell me something, but I
block them. Can’t risk it.
Finally, the guard blinks. The stunner scrapes along the drive’s rough
surface. But now I’m not looking at it, I’m looking at Michael, at Valerie
beyond him and halfblocked by his body. The one blue eye that I can see is
bright with tears.
I reach out my hand. The stunner is there. I wrap my fingers around it
and > as Valerie shoves him aside, screaming insults meant for me, its beam
hits her right where she shot me.
She drops to the ground, twitching a little.
Michael stares at me like he’s never seen me before.
 I resigned.
From Love Pops!, at any rate. Having fulfilled the terms of my contract,
there was no longer any reason to stay. I’d even managed to do my part to
apprehend Valerie Chapman before the singing contest rolled around,
Euterpe be thanked.
But I’d forgotten about the exit interview. This was where those who’d
been eliminated got to explain why the decision was unfair, and those who
left on their own got to justify themselves.
My rib was reknitting, but it still hurt, and overall, I was in no mood.
Even before I looked up as the door to my room in Michael’s mansion
opened, and there stood Michael himself.
He didn’t go to the contestants’ rooms. That was important. They sold it
as respecting the contestants’ privacy—but the real reason was that the star
must never be seen to be pursuing the starlets. The fish swam to the hook,
not the other way around. The three finalists who each got a private night to
determine which of them would win went to Michael’s no doubt palatial
rooms, not the other way around.
“I suppose you’ve come to ask me to stay,” I said. I meant it as a joke.
“Yes.” No smile.
Oh, shit.
My audience numbers, which had dropped like a stone from the top of
Seattle’s highest superskyscraper, went to the moon.
“Well, I’m not going to.” >
>
“You’re saying I’m obligated to stay.”
“No.” The way his voice pitched upward on the vowel told me how
much he’d wanted to say yes. “I want you to,” he added, calmer.
“I’ll never win. I’m a terrible singer.”
“Don’t you want to?”
So that’s what this was about. And millions of people would hear what I
said next, would feel my mouth form the words.
Maybe they’d stop ’mersing with me after that. How many of them
were here to have a chance to reject Michael/Michaela?
Maybe more than I thought.
 “Michael,” I said, as gently as I could, “I took a contract. Do you know
how many applicants flunked the basic psych screen? Even though a tiny
percentage of them were potentially dangerous, that was still hundreds of
people.”
“Just a job.” He sounded bitter.
I didn’t laugh, though the impulse was there. >
“You could protect me from them.” He took a step forward. My room
wasn’t large. I could smell him, soap and sandalwood.
“Even you couldn’t pay me enough.”
He looked far more hurt than that comment had warranted, until I
realized how it had probably sounded.
I sighed. “I like you, all right? But that’s not why I came here, and this
—show isn’t the way to find out whether that means anything.”
“What if I call you? After the show’s over?”
“Won’t your chosen mate have something to say about that?”
He ran his fingers through his hair. “Not after a year.”
Right. Right, the winner got to live with Michael for a year, at the end
of which they’d decide mutually whether to continue the relationship or not.
Just like the betrothals of the old days.
“That doesn’t give the poor girl much of a chance. Or boy.”
“So, no.”
“No.”
“Why?” He’d mastered himself now. He looked at the end of the bed,
thought about sitting there, thought better of it.
“Because I used to have this life.” I dropped the secondary persona. Let
him see the full history of my real one. Including the proximate reason I’d
dropped out of performance modeling, at the same time deciding that the
only personal security I could rely on was my own. “It wasn’t worth it.”
He took a breath. “There were rumors. People combed the ambient,
looking for evidence.”
“Oh, he didn’t hurt me. Didn’t get close enough for that.”
“But too close, all the same?”
He wasn’t stupid. “Yup.”
“I understand.” He turned to the door, abrupt and jerky now, fumbling at
the wall beside it when it didn’t open right away. When it did slide to one
side, he glanced back at me. Perhaps to ask one last time. Perhaps to insist
that he hadn’t fallen in love with me just because I’d saved his life.
Perhaps to explain that what I had set aside, he could not.
But he didn’t have to explain that to me, and maybe he saw that,
because he turned away and walked out of the room. The door did not shut
behind him.
I gave him a few minutes to clear the hallway outside, then left myself. I
hadn’t brought much of my own with me, and in any case, I was already
packed.
I walked past the closed doors of the other contestants, the guest wing
of the mansion somewhat resembling an upscale hotel. They were all
closed.
Fine by me. I left the mansion, shedding my secondary persona as I
went, and my channels to the other contestants, the backup crew, and
Michael Brooks along with it.
The Tattling Tats
Jerry Oltion | 957 words

Evan was surprised at how many of his classmates came back to school
after the Christmas break with tattoos. He was in middle school, not usually
a hotbed of body art. But everyone was showing them off: slave bands and
half sleeves and pec pics and even a few tramp stamps among the girls.
The colors were awesome, and the artwork was even more so. And the
best part of all: the tattoos were transformable and moveable. The ink was
actually made of little nano chromatophores that would obey coded
commands over a bluetooth network, so you could change the image
whenever you wanted. The control software was on the owners’ phones, so
all through classes you could see dragons poking their heads up above kids’
collars, and flowers blooming on girls’ arms.
Evan didn’t have a tattoo. He hadn’t even known they existed until he
saw them on all his friends. Most of the kids who now sported them hadn’t
known about them, either, until Christmas.
“You mean your parents gave you that?” Evan asked incredulously
when Isaac, one of the popular guys, told him it had been a surprise gift.
“That’s right,” Isaac said, proudly showing off how the monster truck’s
tires actually turned as it drove across his back from one arm to the other in
video-game mode.
“There’s got to be a catch,” Evan said.
Isaac grabbed his shirt and yanked Evan onto his tiptoes so fast Evan
didn’t even have time to yell. “Take it back, nerd-face,” Isaac growled.
“Okay, okay, there’s no catch,” Evan said, blushing while everyone else
laughed—all but Amanda, anyway, who was as much an outcast as Evan.
He avoided the cool kids for the rest of the day, which wasn’t hard when
they went out behind the gymnasium to smoke and show each other their
new ink. Evan was never invited along for that sort of stuff.
The next day, though, Isaac sought him out and said, “Okay, nerdie, you
were right. My parents knew everywhere I was and everything I did
yesterday. So did Brandon’s and Jeremy’s and practically everybody else’s.
Anybody who got new ink. It’s gotta be the tats tattlin’ on us. So you’re so
smart, you figure out how to stop that or I beat your nerdy face in, got it?”
Evan gulped. How come this was suddenly his problem? Because he
wasn’t one of the cool kids, apparently. And because he was in fact
probably smarter than all the cool kids combined.
He saw Amanda watching him. He mustered his courage and said, “I’ll
need the control module on your phone.”
Isaac just looked at him like he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard.
“I can’t fix it without the software. Give me your phone. Overnight.”
Isaac gave him his phone, and plenty of threats. Amanda gave him a big
smile.
At home that night, Evan dug into the program. It didn’t take long
before he found the snitch module, which logged not only the tattoo
patterns Isaac chose but his GPS coordinates and what he was doing at the
time. The nanobots in his tattoo had somatic, chemical, and olfactory
sensors, so they could tell what you were doing, drinking, or smoking, even
in the dark.
“The bad news,” he told Isaac the next day, “Is that even if I block your
phone from tattling on you, your parents probably have the same app on
theirs, and they can read the tattoo just as easily when you get home. We’ve
got to reprogram the tattoos themselves.”
Amanda, who had been hanging out on the periphery of the group
around Isaac, spoke up. “Or migrate them to somebody else,” she said.
“How do you do that?” Isaac asked her.
“Simple,” Amanda said. “Give me your phone.” He handed it over
reluctantly. “Now take Evan’s hand.”
“Take it where?” Isaac joked, but he grasped Evan’s suddenly sweaty
hand in his own.
“Now we drive it across from you to him.” Amanda did just that. Evan
winced as Isaac’s shoulder skull morphed into a monster truck and drove
down his arm, across their intertwined knuckles, and onto Evan. He
couldn’t feel it, but his skin crawled just the same.
“Now Evan is you, as far as your parents are concerned,” said Amanda.
Isaac wasn’t sure how he liked that. Evan was absolutely certain he
didn’t, but he also knew he didn’t have much say in the matter.
 And whatever Isaac did, all his friends had to do. In short order, Evan
was wearing Brandon’s tattoo and Jeremy’s tattoo and half a dozen others
as well.
The only consolation was that Amanda wound up with all the popular
girls’ tattoos. The two of them stood there in the hallway, covered in ink
like a couple of bikers, while the cool kids rushed to the back of the gym for
a smoke.
“That wasn’t your most brilliant move,” Evan said as he watched
flowers and mandalas and unicorns morph slowly around her arms and neck
and under her shirt and who knew where else.
“Want to bet?” she said, with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. She
took a step toward him.
“What?” He backed away.
“Stand still. What do you suppose their parents would think if all the
popular kids in school were all making out at the same time, in the same
place?”
“Making out?” Evan said. “What?”
“They’d think there’d been an orgy, wouldn’t they? Not surprising, if
you think about it, with everybody showing off their tattoos to one another.
One thing leads to another, you know.”
She pulled Evan into an empty classroom. “They’ll be grounded for
weeks. Might even be expelled from school.”
“But...”
“Shut up and start kissing,” she said.
She sounded like she really meant it. So he did.
He was just thinking that things couldn’t get any better when she said,
“Just to make sure, you’d better start feeling me up a little.”
The Salesman
Garrett Ashley | 4886 words

Illustrated by Eldar Zakirov

Bianca’s came to Central Key in May of 2064. It was part of a growing

chain of clothing stores with mannequins that watched you from the
window display—they’d twirl around, blow kisses at you. I wanted to go in
just to see the mannequins, which I heard also walked around the store
advertising trending lines of clothing. The idea was nothing new, but it was
new to Central Key, and my stepfather, Matthew, didn’t like it. He didn’t
like change. The bigger, more relevant cities north of Central Key
frightened him, and he made Mom promise not to give those people any of
our money once they were open.
We were walking by Bianca’s when Matthew noticed Mom looking into
the window at the mannequins. Painted up to look like real people, they put
their hands on their hips, brushed the wrinkles out of their dresses. Matthew
took Mom by the arm. He’d taken shots at robots like this from his father’s
porch. “Don’t look at them,” he said. “That’s weird. Just. What?”
 “I know,” Mom said. She knew he didn’t like new things. She had told
me a few days before that she wished Matthew would leave with his friends
on one of their hunting trips and not come back for a long time. She
wouldn’t mind if he disappeared for a while.
I was looking at the mannequins, too. They seemed disinterested in me
probably because I was a boy. Matthew touched my back with his palm, and
we kept walking.
Mom said, “I want to try something new. Don’t you think I’d look better
if I bought something from somewhere else?”
“Then buy something from somewhere else,” Matthew said, his tone
getting lazy. He was always the first to give up on an argument.

It was the beginning of summer. A message came from my brother,

Tom, who was a Silver Collar on an airship hovering over Old Kyrgyzstan.
He had very little time to forward messages to the family. Matthew never
read them, but Mom read them for us.
“He says I miss you, Edward. Edward, did you hear?”
“I hear,” I said.
“He says you should see the mountains. There’s a picture here. Look at
this.”
I looked. The mountains looked pale and cold. They looked more
appealing than Central Key, which was flat and dry and lifeless. Matthew
grew corn over the ninety acres of land surrounding the house.
“Is Matthew still grumpy? Pinch his cheek for me, Mom,” she said.
“Did you hear that Matthew?”
My stepfather grunted.
Mom made to pinch his cheek. She smiled and rolled back to the
computer and finished reading the message. When she was done, she
printed the message and stuck it to the refrigerator with a magnet.
At night, I got on the marines’ website and fantasized about all the
mechs I could dress out in. There were mechs that could fire projectiles
through metal sixty inches thick, mechs that could capture rockets in a
magnetic field, reroute, and return them to hostiles, mechs that could morph
into a drill and burrow deep into the Earth. All of them could fire remote-
controlled rockets from the shoulders, resist EMPs, harness fuel from
civilian automobiles if necessary. I dreamed of being a reconmech pilot.
The standard mech stood as tall as a two-story building and came equipped
with AI that, in the event of a pilot’s death, would calculate mission
progress and take over where the pilot had left off. I looked over my
shoulder. Matthew would kill me if he knew I was looking at a military site.
He liked to pretend he was my real father.
Matthew had only seen my real father in pictures. He hated Tom not
only because he sort of resembled our father, but because when Tom left
home, he promised he’d make life better for us one day. Matthew took that
personally of course, and he always grew quiet at the mention of Tom.

I had fun going out and getting lost in Matthew’s cornfield. It was a
Saturday, and very warm. I walked into the field from the yard and made
my way toward the road. It was quiet, and I knew I was alone. When I
found the road, I stood there for a while and heard a whistle. A man sat in
the dirt about twenty yards from me, right on the edge of the field. He
waved me over. It was hard to make out what he looked like from where I
stood. I walked over and decided it wasn’t a man but a salesman. A gray
suit hung from his slick body, holes littered near the waistline.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. Robots were expensive, and there
wasn’t much to profit from setting an expensive piece of equipment down
in a place like Central Key.
It looked up at me, its silver face expressionless. It held up a briefcase
toward me.
“I don’t want that. What’s in it?”
It put the briefcase down and tried to stand up. Its left leg was shattered
at the kneecap.
“Did you fall off a truck or something?” That made the most sense to
me at the time.
It pulled up its torn suit and showed me the metal chassis, which was
adorned with bullet holes big enough to stick my fingers in.
On the road I could hear the pop of a truck approaching. It was far in the
distance, and hard to see because the sun was in my eyes.
“You need to hide in the cornfield. Do you understand me?” I waited.
The salesman looked down the road. I kept my voice calm. “You need to
hide or you’re not going to be able to sell anything. Do you know what I
mean?”
 The salesman tried standing again, but couldn’t bear the weight on its
right leg.
“Let me help you stand up.” I showed it what to do—put one arm over
my shoulder and helped it to stand. We turned to the cornfield and started
toward the center.
As we made our way through the corn, I had to hush the salesman
because it kept making this high whistling sound. The truck had already
passed by, but I was more concerned now with Matthew hearing its whistle.
“I’m going to sit you down here,” I said, pointing at the ground. “Can
you sit still, just like before? And shut up?”
The salesman looked toward the road. It pointed toward the road and
looked at me.
“You can’t go and wait by the road. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I don’t
know if anyone knows that you’re broken, so I’m going to look for a
number on you. Do you know where there’s a number somewhere I can
call?”
The salesman pulled its shirt up. On its bare chassis, molded into the
shape of a skinny man’s chest, there was a barcode and contact information.
The company name, Huxley, was also inscribed in big colorful letters.
“It’s safer for you to wait here,” I said to the machine. “Chances are if
you’re caught somebody will steal you. It won’t take me long. Can you wait
here?”
The salesman still held its shirt up. I memorized the phone number. “I’ll
be right back,” I said. It made a low whistling sound. “Stop doing that,” I
said. “If you do that my stepdad will hear you, and I don’t know what he’ll
do if he finds you. He doesn’t like robots. Okay?”
I left the salesman there and started back toward the house. I turned
back once, and it was looking at me, still holding its shirt up.
Mom stood in the kitchen reading a magazine. Something smelled good.
“I’m making cubed steak and potatoes,” she said. “What are you doing? Is
that grease on your arm?”
I looked and saw that there was definitely grease on my arm. “Where’s
Matthew?” I asked. He was late getting home from work.
She told me he was at the scrapyard looking for some sort of tractor
part. I went upstairs and picked up the phone. I dialed the number I had
memorized and got an automated message. “Customer service,” I said. A
moment later, a woman answered.
“I wanted to talk to someone about a damaged salesman,” I said.
“Can you give me the details?” The woman’s voice was soft and quick.
“I think it’s been shot. I think it might’ve been thrown from a truck or
something.”
The woman asked for my address, and I gave it to her. I asked if
someone could be here between eight and three, so Matthew wouldn’t find
out about it. I didn’t actually mention Matthew. The woman said she would
file a report, and she’d have to call me back to give me a time. There was
nothing much I could do about this, company policy, so I told her that
would be fine. She asked me how old I was, and I told her fifteen. She said
that was very nice of me to do, and she’d do whatever she could to take the
thing off my family’s hands.

Matthew came home and asked for my help. It was getting late, and he
wanted to show me how to connect a bush hog to the tractor. I’d watched
him before, but I never paid much attention to the things he did, and I think
he knew this. I followed him out behind the house, a heavy tool kit in hand.
He banged at the pins with a wrench and handed them all to me, then put on
the parts from the scrapyard. I could hear the salesman’s whistle coming
from the other side of the house, but I wasn’t sure if Matthew noticed. The
whistling really picked up then, and Matthew stopped what he was doing
and looked around. “Where is that coming from?”
“Sir?”
“Listen. Don’t you hear that?”
We waited a moment for the whistle, but things were quiet now.
“It sounded like a weird bird or something.”
“I couldn’t hear it,” I said. He didn’t push the subject of whistling.

At night I snuck out into the cornfield with a flashlight. I called for it in
a low voice. Then I could hear its chirping sound. The salesman sat on its
butt pretty near the place where I had left it. It seemed to have knocked
down a few corn stalks where it had spent the day crawling around in the
dirt.
“I was just checking to make sure you were still here,” I said.
 It held up its briefcase at me. I took it in one hand and sat down with the
flashlight in the other. “What’s in here?” I asked. “I guess you don’t mind if
I look at what’s in the briefcase.”
I expected something anticlimactic, and I was right. Inside the briefcase
was a buyer’s guide full of farming equipment. Each page was thick with
built-in touch pads for ease of use. I touched one panel, and a voice read
something about a corn shucking device that was supposed to make life
easier, or something.
I closed the book because I could hear a door creaking open. The voice
kept reading even with the book shut. I returned it to the briefcase, closed
the latches, and tried to give it back to the salesman, who wouldn’t take it.
“Be quiet,” I said. “If you don’t want it, I can’t take it with me. So I’m
going to leave it here, and then you won’t sell anything.” I sat the briefcase
down next to the salesman. “Be quiet,” I said again.
I walked back with the flashlight off, and didn’t hear the door shutting
again, so whoever had come out probably hadn’t gone back inside. If it was
Matthew, I’d have to sneak out of the field and make my way around the
house and through the backdoor. But if it was Matthew, he probably knew
that I wasn’t in my room, anyway.
The cornfield was frightening at night, and when the wind wasn’t
blowing, I felt like something was watching me. I waited a moment to listen
for sounds ahead of me. Still there was silence. I imagined him waiting on
the porch, a pistol in hand. Matthew was always on the lookout for
vagrants. Maybe he didn’t know it was me—that means I’d have to make
myself known, or run the risk of being killed by my stepfather.
I came to the edge of the cornfield and looked toward the house.
Nobody stood on the front porch. I looked around before making my way
out into the open. Matthew might have gone around to the back. He might
have made a circle around the house and eased his way through the back,
thinking too many slammed doors would disturb us. Making my way
toward the porch, I glanced at my wristwatch, which read past midnight.
In the house, I quickly went up to my bedroom and put the flashlight
back in the sock drawer. I took off my jacket and threw it on the floor. I
suddenly became very conscious of the fact that Huxley might call at any
time in the morning before Matthew left. I was more concerned with what
my stepfather would do to me if he found out I was being weird and hiding
a robot in the cornfield.
In the morning, Mom received another message from Tom. He wasn’t
supposed to talk about what had happen near Old Kyrgyzstan, but
something seemed to be bothering him, and Mom looked worried. It was
probably nothing, I told her. The military gets shelled all the time. I’d read
about it on blogs.
“People don’t get shelled on airships,” she said, rubbing her forehead.
“Can I send him a message? I’d really like to talk to him.”
Mom handed me the tablet, and I stared at the screen a moment not
knowing what to say. Then I told Tom that I loved him and wished him the
best.
“That was sweet,” Mom said, after taking the tablet back. “You love
your brother. That’s good.”
Matthew sat quietly in the corner, drinking his coffee. “I bet Ed really
hates it when you read his messages to Tom.”
“Shut up,” Mom said.
I had an odd sort of relationship with Tom. I didn’t really know how to
react to him when he was home. He was the type of kid that didn’t belong
here, and that sort of thing might have contributed to the reason why
Matthew didn’t like him so much. I don’t know much about these things.
I remember Tom taking hold of my wrist after deleting some of the
browsing history from the laptop we shared. “Come look at this,” he had
said. We went into his room, and he pulled a notepad out from beneath his
bed. Inside, he’d filled several pages with illustrations of weaponry, air
transports, mechs, and, toward the end, a particularly risqué illustration of a
servant bot without its uniform.
“They make them look like women so you’ll buy more drinks,” he had
said, rubbing his finger over the illustration’s breasts. The robot didn’t have
a head—it was more like those mannequins in Bianca’s window display,
kind of a knot there on the neck with a microphone.
“Where’d you see this?” I asked.
“Internet. I just copied something I saw but I didn’t give it clothes.”
“Then how do you know they look like this?”
Tom had told me about women, and what happens when I’m in a
relationship, and that sort of thing. There were a lot of older women in
Central Key, and I wasn’t interested in any of the girls at school. I hated
having these conversations with Tom. I wondered how it could be that I
missed him so much.
Matthew continued drinking his coffee. He got up and kissed Mom on
the cheek and left. Mom turned toward me in her chair and made a
bouncing motion.
“We should go shopping,” she said to me. “I thought about it last night.
We could go while Matthew’s not here. I’ve been itching to go look at
Bianca’s.”
I wanted to tell her no because I was waiting for a call. But Mom didn’t
get out much. She didn’t have a lot of friends—none, really, that I knew. So
I agreed to it, and we got into the work truck and drove to town.
We got downtown and found an open parking space a couple of blocks
away. Mom walked quickly to the store, a sort of unsteady gait that made
her look worn around the knees.
It was the first time I’d ever been in a place like Bianca’s. It was a large
store, with plenty of room for clothing items on floating hangers to hover
above our heads, scan customers’ body types and whatever they were
wearing at that particular moment. Mom and I were immediately scanned.
A man that had gone in with his daughter stood back, arms crossed, hands
tucked beneath his underarms, legs buckled outward. A low voice emitted
from the hanger that scanned me, a woman’s blue dress suspended below; it
began to apologize to me. Bianca’s didn’t have anything in my taste, unless
I was looking to try something new, like a dress or something. I was
wearing denim jeans with a polo tucked in.
“I’m a man,” I told it, smiling. “No thank you.”
Mom heard what was happening and laughed a little. “You can wear a
dress, I don’t care,” she said. I think she had forgotten about Matthew. A
couple of mannequins approached her. One of them was wearing a red skirt
that came just below the knees, 1950sstyle. Very novel. It even had the
tennis shoes. Mom was paying particular attention to this one. “I really like
the skirt,” she said. “I really want one of those. It reminds me of something
my grandmother wore in some of her high school photos. You like this,
Ed?”
I told her I liked it.
“I’ll go find one on the rack. You want to help me look?”
 The mannequins followed us around the store. The other less interesting
mannequin broke off to help another customer. I wondered how much these
mannequins cost, or if they got frustrated with customers like real people.
The one with a red skirt led us down a glittering aisle of dresses and scarves
and denim jeans, necklaces hanging on phosphorescent bulbs, shoes on
stained glass pedestals, a thirteen-inch-tall hologram supermodel walking in
place in the corner on an end cap. The mannequin stopped, pulled the skirt
off the rack and handed it to Mom. She shopped like this for about half an
hour, and when she decided she had enough ’50s crap, we checked out at
the register and headed out, looked around for recognizable faces.
It felt weird sneaking around like this, even to shop for clothes. It didn’t
occur to me until I was a teenager that we were so much different than
everyone else’s family. Other families did things together, looked at all the
new inventions, went to all the exciting events. Mom stayed at home
mostly, and Matthew might go out with his friends every now and then, talk
about farming stuff, or tell hunting stories. Matthew had grown up in the
mountains with three brothers who liked to hunt—needed to hunt, because
they were poor and food tended to be hard to come by.
The last time we did anything exciting together, to my knowledge, was
a parade put on by the army. Men in power suits walked ahead of AI
controlled mechs, their hatches opened for everyone to see all the
complicated little parts and just how comfortable it could be riding in one.
The empty shells frightened Matthew, I think. Tom had been fascinated by
it, of course. He joined the military as soon as he was old enough. Mom sort
of began to lose herself, afterward.

A Huxley representative called not long before Matthew came home.

The timing was convenient enough, because Mom had just walked out back
to take some clothes off the line. The woman on the phone had a thick,
gruff voice. She said someone would be there to get the salesman off my
hands in the next day or so.
“Can you be here at about ten A.M.?”
“When they come, it’ll probably be early,” she said. “We have a
delivery boy in the area, and he’s being contacted. Expect a young man
named David in his twenties, blond hair, I think.”
 Over the course of the day, I thought about the delivery boy. I wondered
if he would be here at a good time. Mom went up to take a bath so I went
out to tell the salesman what I’d found out. When I got there he was
missing. All that was left of him was his leg, which had been disconnected
meticulously. I thought that if Matthew had taken the salesman, there
wouldn’t even be a leg left. So I thought maybe the salesman was still
crawling around in the field somewhere.
It must have taken all night to drag itself to the west field. I saw him
down at the pond, standing against a pine. The salesman had its fedora tilted
down as if to keep the sun out if its eyes. It had disconnected its leg and was
now using a tree limb as a makeshift crutch. It hobbled over and looked
down at me.
“There’s a man coming to pick you up tomorrow morning,” I said. “You
won’t have to stay much longer.”
The salesman looked like it had just thought of something and began to
fish around in a jacket pocket with its fingertips. It pulled out a small
pinecone and gave it to me.
I looked at the pinecone a moment. It was smaller than my hand, tight,
and all the sharp points had been knocked off. “Are you giving this to me?”
I asked, a little embarrassed. “Thanks. I mean, I’m sorry about not getting
you anything.”
The salesman tipped its fedora at me. It started with its makeshift crutch
toward the cornfield. I went back home and found Mom sitting at the dinner
table scratching letters into the newspaper’s word puzzle. She wore her new
’50s-era red shoes and skirt. I thought she looked truly miserable; here she
was in all these new clothes and only me to see her that way. I sat at the
dinner table with her, and together we worked for a while on the puzzle.

The next morning the deliveryman did not show up. Come ten A.M.,
there was no sign of a car on the road, nor a sound, nothing but the stalks
rustling around us. I walked home and told Mom I wasn’t feeling well. I
thought I’d take advantage of the situation—have Mom go into town and
buy me a medkit or something. She took my temperature and decided I was
only bored. I went up into my room and watched the road from the window
with a pair of binoculars. I let the window up and listened. The wind blew
into my room and knocked some old school papers around. I shut the
window and returned downstairs where Mom was boiling a chicken.
Sometimes I’d wish I had a dog or something I could play with. Then I
could get out of the house, and even though I was away from Matthew,
Mom, everything, there’d still be some sense of responsibility, and that’d
make me seem fuller, somehow. I thought about this for a while and decided
this is why I cared so much about the thing out in the cornfield. It was, after
all, only a thing. I thought about emailing Tom about the salesman, asking
his opinion. I switched on the tablet and brought up his name from the
address book. I punched out a long message to him, but never once
mentioned the salesman in the cornfield. I really thought it was too
insignificant in comparison to what he must be going through overseas. My
only motive was to sound bigger than I was, capable of taking care of things
as an adult would. I wanted Tom to know that I didn’t need my family
either.
I really felt like I was talking to a brick wall, most of the time. Tom
rarely ever responded, and when he did, it was more toward Mom than to
me. But today, after I had hit send, a private mms came through. “LITTLE
BROTHER,” he said.
Below this, a smaller, automated messaged appeared. TOM IS TYPING.
I wanted to wait for him to finish, but I couldn’t help myself. “DID YOU
GET MY MESSAGE ALREADY? YOU READ QUICK.”
The automated message was still onscreen. I waited a bit longer and
went ahead with another message of my own. “I REALLY WANT TO BE
GONE. THIS IS WHAT YOU MEANT RIGHT?” Tom had told me before
how badly he wanted to leave.
Tom had either left his computer with half a message written or didn’t
know what to say. It was just like him to do this. Finally: “HOW IS
MOM?” he asked.
“MOM’S OKAY. WE WENT INTO TOWN THE OTHER DAY
SHOPPING. SHE BOUGHT SOME THINGS FOR HERSELF AT ONE
OF THOSE STORES YOU USED TO TALK ABOUT. MATTHEW
WASN’T HAPPY ABOUT IT.”
“HE’LL GET OVER IT,” Tom said. “HOW’S MATTHEW?”
I thought about it. I didn’t know how Matthew was, and I’d never
thought about it. Whether he was happy or not, whether he felt the same
way about Mom as we did. I told Tom what I thought, and it took a while
for him to respond.
“I WISH I WAS HOME,” he said. “REALLY BAD HERE.” The
automated message appeared at the bottom of the chat box again, and I
waited a long time for Tom to finish what he wanted to say. Nothing
happened after a few minutes.
Mom came into the room and told me lunch was ready. I told Tom to
hang in there. And if he needed anything, just let me know. I’d send a
picture of the place, eventually.
The deliveryman didn’t show up for a few hours. Matthew came home,
and we had leftovers for dinner. Mom asked what his plans for the evening
were, and he said he only wanted to sit around and watch television. It’s
what he’d thought about all day, watching TV. We could watch a movie
together, he said. We could see what’s on television.
We sat down in the living room at around six, and lights showed
through the curtains. “Who’s that?” Matthew said. He got up and looked out
the window. Mom muted the television. I jumped up and went outside to the
meet the deliveryman. I wanted to tell him how late he was.
The deliveryman looked like any deliveryman, only he was very young
and acted a little nervous about being this far off track. “Are you David?” I
asked.
“That’s me,” he said, happy that he’d come to the right place. Like the
woman said on the phone, David had blond hair. He was tall and slender,
with pimples all over his face. The Huxley eagle was embroidered on his
black uniform. The delivery van sat idle in the driveway. Matthew came out
onto the porch, hands in pockets.
“Can you wait a moment?” I felt nervous.
I went out into the cornfield and found the salesman standing there
supported by the pine limb. “Delivery guy is here,” I said. I picked up the
salesman’s leg and briefcase. “You ready to go?” I led the salesman slowly
back toward the house. The deliveryman seemed to perk up when he saw
the salesman trailing behind me.
“Thanks a lot,” the deliveryman said. “Really, thanks. I got kind of
behind today. Sorry if I’m bothering you folks.”
Matthew came down off the porch and looked at me, then the salesman.
“What’ve you got there?” he asked.
 “Damaged goods,” the deliveryman said. “Thanks for holding on to
him. I really appreciate it.”
Matthew’s hands were still in his pockets. He nodded his head a little.
“Yeah, okay. Sure. It’s no problem.”
The deliveryman and Matthew helped the robot into the back of the van
and shut the doors. “Where are you from? Did you drive all the way down
here for that?”
“I’m from here,” the deliveryman said. “I mean I grew up here, but I’ve
been living in Oklahoma City. I just got back about a year ago. I don’t see
why I ever left.”
The two men shook hands, and the deliveryman thanked us again before
leaving. Matthew and I stood out in the yard for a while as the van made its
way down the drive and disappeared beyond the cornfield. My stepfather
had his hands in his pockets again. I wondered what he was thinking. He
didn’t look angry, or surprised. I thought if he were my real dad, he’d say
something about always returning things that didn’t belong to you. I’ll tell
my children this, one day. But Matthew didn’t say anything. I didn’t
apologize for keeping the thing a secret from him. I didn’t know how to
apologize for something like that, and I didn’t think it mattered much
anyway. Eventually I started back toward the porch and had my hand on the
door. I could see Mom through window. She was curled up on the couch
just like before, looking at the paused television screen, waiting for us to
come back in. I looked back at Matthew, and he still faced the road, only his
head was turned down to his feet, which were drawing patterns in the dirt. I
went in and sat down on the couch, and we both waited on him to come
back inside.
In the Absence of Instructions to the Contrary
Frank Wu | 6325 words

Illustrated by Vincent DiFate

Karl 3478 sprawled on the beach, partially disassembled, bits of him

scattered across mats arrayed on the sand. Diving planes, ducted propellers,
five-way valves and four-way cables all awaited clean-up, tear-down, and
rebuild.
He was performing a major overhaul on himself for deep-seaworthiness.
No poppet or sprocket would escape inspection.
Underwater, Karl was untethered, free. But freedom came with risks.
The failure of a vital system could be catastrophic. No one would help or
rescue him.
Wrapped around Karl’s finger was a black O-ring. This was one of his
smallest parts, but most important. It fit into a groove at the end of
electronics sleeve III. This little ring, with a little grease, was all that
prevented water from rushing into the sleeve, destroying everything inside.
 Only a smear of marine-grade silicone grease was necessary. A blob
might break off, allowing the water in.
In knowing violation of protocols, Karl squeezed a huge glob of grease
onto the tip of a titanium finger.
This he would do—as everything—in full consideration of his love for
Adaline.

Dr. Adaline Franzen had given him two basic commands:

Observe marine life, but don’t interfere.
Indeed, earlier aquanauts thought nothing of poking shrimp to rouse
them from their burrows or spooking fish with flashing lights to get better
camera angles.
Karl would do none of that.
Unlike a human diver, he never tired or ran out of air. He could stay
under for years, patiently studying entire life cycles.
But his observations would be spoiled if his presence frightened his
subjects.
Thus, he camouflaged his teardrop-shaped body, covering his plastic
panels with antler coral and crushed native limestone.
This was enough to fool the domino damselfish, who treated him like a
floating reef.
With this and other disguises—each appropriate for a particular depth or
environment— Karl had beheld the wonders of the deep.
He had seen the bathypterid fish, their fins modified into stilts, walking
the bottom like circus clowns... acorn worms leaving beautifully coiled
fecal trails, like Nazca lines on the seafloor... and the oarfish! With its head
held proudly, crowned with a crest of fins, with a body so long it seemed to
never end, like the cathedral train of a royal white wedding gown.
These marvels he recorded, every report a gift to his Adaline.
Adaline!
Though he had yet to declare himself, she would realize his feelings
toward her— wouldn’t she?

When the time came for his first scheduled check-in, Karl beached
himself on his little island. It was deserted and isolated, eight hundred miles
from Hawaii, thousands from anywhere else.
 Decades before, sailors had used it to store chemicals of war: Agent
Orange, mustard gas, sarin. And before that, it had been blasted by atomic
bomb tests.
All that was in the past.
Now the military was gone, leaving the island a wildlife preserve, a
paradise without people, a land of wonders.
And now was the time to report on those wonders.
That would be easy.
Not like telling Adaline how he felt about her.

DEAR DR.ADALINE FRANZEN:

I HAVE COMPLETED MY FIRST FIVE YEARS OF
OBSERVATIONS.AS YOU REQUESTED, I HAVE OBSERVED
WITHOUT INTERFERING. ATTACHED ARE MY FORMAL REPORTS
AND RAW DATA.
OH, ADALINE!
I WISH YOU WEREN’T SO FAR AWAY AND TOO PHYSICALLY
LIMITED TO SHARE THIS WITH ME IN PERSON.
I MISS YOU SO MUCH!
I MISS THE NIGHTS WE FLOATED IN THE WAVES AT
MAKALAWENA, TALKING OF VAMPIRE SQUID AND VIPERFISH.
YOU AND I ARE OF A KIND. PERHAPS WE ARE SHORT AND
SQUAT ON LAND, BUT IN THE WATER, WE ARE MAGNIFICENT!
OTHERS TAUGHT ME TO FLOAT AND MAINTAIN PRECISE
DEPTH.BUT YOU TAUGHT ME UNDERWATER BALLET. THE FISH
DIVE.THE PAS DE POISSON.
OTHERS TAUGHT ME TO READ SCIENTIFIC PAPERS. YOU
TAUGHT ME TO WRITE THEM. HOW TO THINK LIKE A SCIENTIST
AND FEEL LIKE A POET, SO I COULD APPRECIATE THE OCEAN IN
ALL ITS ASPECTS.
LIKE EMERSON, I HAVE SEEN SO MANY BEAUTIFUL THINGS,
EVEN IN THE MUD AND SCUM WHERE ALWAYS, ALWAYS,
SOMETHING SINGS.
BUT NONE AS BEAUTIFUL AS YOU.
IN MY REPORT, I LIST OVER THIRTY NEW SPECIES, EACH
NAMED AFTER YOU.
 THANK YOU FOR ENTRUSTING THIS EXPEDITION TO ME.
YOURS,
KARL

Hours later, the reply came back from the University of Hawaii:

DEAR KARL:
HAS IT BEEN FIVE YEARS ALREADY?
WELL! TIME FLIES.
I AM PLEASED THAT YOU ARE OPERATING NOMINALLY,
WELL WITHIN SPECS.
YOUR FIELD REPORT IS QUITE THOROUGH AND PRECISE,
YOUR ANATOMICAL STUDIES METICULOUS; IT WILL TAKE ME
LITTLE WORK TO MAKE THESE PUBLISHABLE.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR KIND WORDS, THOUGH YOU MAY
WISH TO RESTRAIN YOUR POETIC TENDENCIES.
IT IS YOUR PREROGATIVE AS DISCOVERER OF NEW SPECIES
TO NAME THEM AS YOU WISH, BUT IT IS NEITHER NECESSARY
NOR INFORMATIVE TO NAME THEM ALL AFTER ME.
I APPRECIATE YOUR ENTHUSIASM, BUT YOU MAY WANT TO
REEVALUATE YOUR TENDENCY TOWARD MONOMANIA.ONE OR
TWO OF THE SPECIES YOU PROPOSE AS NEW MAY NOT BE; SEE
ATTACHED NOTES.YOU MAY BE CHERRY-PICKING FACTS TO
SUPPORT PRE-FORMED CONCLUSIONS.
NONETHELESS, WE ARE ALL QUITE PROUD OF YOU HERE
AND GLAD TO SEE YOU WORKING INDEPENDENTLY OF INPUT
FROM US.
WHILE I APPRECIATE YOUR ADHERING TO MY ADVICE TO
OBSERVE BUT NOT DISTURB, PLEASE DO NOT JUST DO WHAT I
ASK YOU TO DO.DO WHAT YOU THINK IS RIGHT.
THEN YOU MAY NOT JUST BE THE AUTHOR, BUT THE
SUBJECT, OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY.
ADALINE.
P.S. I’VE BEEN MUSING ABOUT THE OCTOPUS LATELY. IF
YOU EVER GET THE CHANCE, I’D BE PLEASED IF YOU STUDIED
SOME OCTOPUSES; I AM QUITE EAGER TO SEE WHAT THEY—
AND YOU—ARE CAPABLE OF DOING.

What did this comm mean? Karl wondered.

Scientific papers were easy to understand but not personal letters.
Adaline had said that she was proud of him, that he and his work were
precise, meticulous, and enthusiastic. Most important of all, he was
operating within specifications.
What could be higher praise?
Buoyed by these compliments, he knew this was the time to declare
himself.

DEAR ADALINE:
I CAN CONTAIN MY HEART NO LONGER.
I NAMED ALL THOSE SPECIES AFTER YOU BECAUSE I LOVE
YOU.
I LOVE YOU!
DO YOU REMEMBER READING THE SONG OF SOLOMON
TOGETHER AND STUDYING THE BIODIVERSITY LISTED
THEREIN?
YOU TRAINED ME AS NOT JUST A SCIENTIST, BUT A
POET.THUS IT IS APPROPRIATE THAT I USE THIS MEDIUM TO
EXPRESS MY LOVE FOR YOU, THE LOVELIEST CREATURE IN
ALL THE OCEANS.
HOW BEAUTIFUL YOU ARE, MY BELOVED!
YOU ARE LIKE A VENUS FLOWER BASKET AMONG THE CUP
CORALS.
YOUR EYES SPARKLE LIKE FLASHLIGHT FISH, YOUR HAIR
FLOATS, TENTACULAR LIKE A LION’S MANE JELLYFISH.YOUR
BREASTS ARE GLOBULAR AND LUMINOUS, LIKE COMB JELLIES
IN THE MOONLIGHT, YOUR FEET LOVELY AS GIANT MARINE
ISOPODS.
NAY, YOU ARE MORE LOVELY THAN A DOZEN MANTIS
SHRIMPS.
YOU GAVE ME A HEART TO EMPATHIZE WITH MARINE LIFE,
BUT THE ONLY ONE I TRULYLOVEISYOU.
 I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, ADALINE!
LOVE,
KARL, LOVINGLY

Karl passed several more agonizing hours before he received a

response.

DEAREST KARL:
I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY.
I AM, OF COURSE, IMMENSELY CHARMED, FLATTERED, AND
AMUSED BY YOUR PROFESSION OF“LOVE” TOWARD ME.
I AM QUITE PLEASED AND IMPRESSED BY YOU AND YOUR
WORK, AND I ADMIT A DEEP WELL OF AFFECTION FOR YOU;
YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN MY FAVORITE STUDENT.
BUT LOVE?
IT IS SIMPLY NOT NECESSARY FOR YOU TO USE THAT WORD
TO DESCRIBE YOUR “FEELINGS” TOWARD ME; I’M QUITE
AFRAID THAT A HUMAN-ROBOT RELATIONSHIP IS SIMPLY NOT
AN EXPERIMENT I AM PREPARED TO ATTEMPT AT THIS TIME.
I AM HOPING TO BE PROMOTED TO HEAD OF THE
DEPARTMENT SOON. I AM ALSO ALMOST HEALED UP, SO I
MIGHT START DIVING AGAIN. NOW I HAVE REMOTE
EQUIPMENT ALL AROUND THE WORLD SENDING ME MORE
DATA THAN MY GRAD STUDENTS CAN PROCESS.
I SIMPLY HAVE TOO MUCH ON MY PLATE FOR THIS RIGHT
NOW.
I’M SORRY, KARL. I’M SORRY IF THAT HURTS YOUR
FEELINGS.
ADALINE

What could this possibly mean? Karl wondered.

He was her favorite, and he had charmed her, amused her, flattered her
to the point that she had a deep well of affection for him.
Clearly, he had established an emotional bond.
Perhaps, even, she was diving again, so she could come to his island to
dive with him?
 She had said it was not necessary for him to use the word “love.” But
she had not specifically commanded him not to.
Thus, in the absence of unambiguous and specific instructions to the
contrary, he would keep saying “I love you.”
And he would continue to love her, until forbidden.
And even then, he might not stop.
After all, had not poets written that love rules over all?
Humans were so hard to understand.
He thought back to the Greek myths, which he had studied because
Adaline had mentioned them in passing.
Had not the hero Meleager wooed the huntress Atalanta with the gift of
the head of the Calydonian boar?
This had established the precedent of expressing love with gifts of
unique—and dangerous—biological specimens.
Maybe this is why Adaline had challenged him to study octopuses.
Hadn’t Victor Hugo once described these man-killing beasts as having
arms as supple as leather, as strong as steel, and as cold as night?
He vowed to study these monsters, to continue collecting data for
Adaline on the marvels of the deep, until she succumbed to his affections.
He would demand that she take his feelings as seriously as she took his
science.
Karl dived back into the deeps, sheathing himself with barbed wire
coral to begin his hunt for octopuses.
He ignored so many other beautiful specimens... the armored sea
cucumber, studded with star-shaped spines... the striped lionfish, with its
gaudy array of fins and quills... the speckled nudibranch, with its
psychedelic colors and extravagant gill plumage.
Under any other circumstances, these would be prizes.
But not now!
Adaline had asked for an octopus, and that is what she would get.
There!
In the distance Karl spied his quarry: a small female octopus. It was
beautifully veined in red and brown, with white suckers ringed with neon
blue.
The arrangement of bumps on her mantle and the shape of her funnel
were unlike anything in the literature. Could this be a new species to name
after Adaline?
Karl folded up his slurp gun and retracted his temp and pressure probes.
With a gentle spin of the propeller, he drifted cautiously toward her.
The largest known octopus was the giant Pacific, stretching to thirty feet
and weighing up to six hundred pounds.
This female octopus was tiny, only eight inches across—but she could
still be dangerous. If she grabbed him, she could bite through a wire, break
a gauge, or activate a thruster, sending him crashing into rocks.
He approached slowly, ready to reverse if attacked.
She did not.
Instead, she dropped to the bottom, curling her body into a ball. An arm
wriggled out from either side, and her skin changed color and texture.
She was mimicking a rock, with a seasnake behind it.
The nearby damselfish fled in terror.
But soon it was clear to her and Karl that neither was fooled by the
other’s disguise.
So the little octopus darted up, ejecting an octopus-shaped shroud of
mucous ink.
Karl steered around the ink, lest it foul his cameras or transmissometer.
The octopus slithered through a crack, into a cave under a sand-draped
limestone outcropping.
Through the crack, Karl could see her eyes, sussing him out. This was
not the round, blank, stupid eye of the typical fish. No, this octopus eye
looked squinted, with a black horizontal bar, ringed with a black line in
deep concentration, small papillae raised around the brow in alarm. This
was the eye of the most intelligent invertebrate in all the oceans.
As Karl watched her, he decided to name this specimen—as he named
them all—after Dr. Franzen, as Little Adaline 623.
Adaline’s two basic commands had been simple: Observe but do not
interfere.
But how could he study her if his mere presence frightened her from
leaving her cave? How would she reveal her secrets?
Karl had seen divers grab fish, only to have them panic and die of fright
in their hands.
He would not make that mistake.
He backed away.
 But still she did not leave her lair. Instead, she blew her waterjet,
blasting bits of crab shell at him.
He backed off further. It was a stalemate.
The sea grew darker as night fell.
The yellow tangs’ color faded, and the white-and-red striped
squirrelfish came out to hunt seastars.
By morning, Little Adaline 623 had still not left her cave.
Maybe he should give up, rather than besmirch his love by violating her
command not to interfere.
Another day passed.
Observe. Observe marine life.
Karl decided to act.
Extending his slurp gun, he vacuumed up several Alpheid snapping
shrimp. These were red-and-yellow striped shrimp, with one oversized claw
they used to stun prey.
Karl slowly approached Little Adaline’s den, depositing one shrimp by
her barricade of stones and backing off.
As soon as he left, he started feeling guilty. Do not interfere.
Too late!
Pushing the rocks aside, Little Adaline eased out of her den. Then, with
surprising speed, she pounced on the shrimp, enveloping it with her
webbing. It tried to use its oversized claw, but she sprayed it with venom,
wrapping it up in her arms, dragging it back to her cave to eat.
Then she resumed staring at Karl.
He had violated Adaline’s commands and achieved nothing.
Perhaps, having already crossed the line, he might as well cross it
again...
As he slowly approached the cave to present another gift, Little Adaline
shot out from behind the rocks and grabbed him.
She was probing for a way into his hold for more shrimp.
No, no! Karl thought. What if I’ve made her dependent on me for
handouts?
When she touched the covers to his short and long wave transmitters—
his only ways to reach Adaline—he knew he had to act, and quickly.
Just as Little Adaline had sprayed him with ink, now he blasted her with
a dilute stream of repellant, cupric sulfate.
 And she fled.
He was safe.
But as she looked back at him, he saw only one emotion in her eyes.
Betrayal.
That was okay. He needed to establish détente with the octopus, not
rapprochement.

After that incident, Little Adaline 623 ignored him.

He could observe her now, from a distance, as she resumed her daily
routines.
Months passed as he watched her, each observation a gift to Adaline.
Water for Karl was, at best, a medium to float in and, at worst, a threat
to his electronics equipment.
But to Little Adaline, water was a multi-tool.
As Karl watched, he saw her use her waterjet to evade, to pursue, to
clean, to stun, to express displeasure—even to dance. Water was her comm
array, sending her chemical signals of nearby predators and prey. And she
even used it inside her body, squeezing and sculpting until it became her
bones and joints.
As he watched, though, Karl could not help but fixate on his failure.
Observe but do not interfere.
He’d fed her. He’d blasted her with chemicals. He’d even touched her,
disturbing the protective film of bacteria on her skin.
Was this not interference?
Karl thought of Matt Richter, who had also failed Adaline, years before.
Matt had done a rotation in Adaline’s lab, and everyone thought he was
the golden boy. He’d written—as an undergrad—a well-received review of
papershell mussels, and he bragged of his many scuba dives.
But his technique was poor.
As he descended to the bottom, he did not take on air, as he was
supposed to, slowly coming to a stop without touching down. No, he hit the
bottom with a bang, and then took on air. Plus, he could not—or would not
— keep a horizontal attitude. He was constantly dragging his feet.
The result? He kicked up silt, blinding those behind him. And his
flippers chopped down seapens and seafans on the bottom.
 When Karl saw this, he had to report it to Adaline, who then gave Matt
a long lecture on guidelines and policies.
And when he did it again?
Karl had never seen Adaline so angry, had never heard her scream like
that.
Matt Richter was immediately fired from the lab, with no hope of
return. Adaline was the angel with a flaming sword, barring the gates to
Eden.
Matt eventually found another lab to do his Ph.D., but he had had his
heart set on Adaline’s. He was a shell of his former self. In his
disappointment, he became just as nacreous and lustrous as the papershell
mussels he had studied, and just as easily broken.
The lesson?
One transgression was forgivable. But two meant the flaming sword.
Years passed, as Karl observed Little Adaline’s antics without
interfering a second time.
That was not hard.
Until she reached puberty.

When a female octopus sexually matures, enormous biochemical

changes happen. A neuropeptide that shuts down the sex drive— FMRF-
amide—disappears. The optic gland in the brain starts pumping out massive
amounts of progesterone, estradiol, and other sex hormones.
As if her brake lines were cut, and a brick were wedged into the
accelerator of her sex drive.
Her ovaries expand to a tenth of her body weight. As if Adaline’s
ovaries were bigger than her head.
And thus for the first—and only time—Little Adaline took a partner,
whom Karl named Little Adalino 413.
They mated, with Adalino taking a special arm with a sperm packet on
the end and snaking it into her mantle. Their arms writhed, intertwining,
their colors and patterns shifting in unison—tan, orange, speckled red.
He succumbed soon afterward, his own body overwhelmed by sex
hormones. Karl collected the remains, dissecting his organs to confirm that,
yes, this was a new octopus species— Amphioctopus franzenae.
 Meanwhile, Little Adaline’s body and mind were also commandeered
by the sex drive.
She laid about four hundred eggs, hanging them like clusters of white
grapes from the roof of her cave.
From then on, she was constantly guarding them, blowing water on
them to prevent algal and fungal growth.
As the weeks passed, Karl noticed that she had stopped taking care of
herself, had stopped leaving the cave to hunt or feed.
She was visibly shrinking.
Maybe he should catch a crab for her to eat?
Other octopus species were known to selfsacrifice, to die caring for
their young. But if he intervened, how would he ever know if Little Adaline
would do the same?
So he observed without interfering.
Her condition worsened.
White spots appeared on her skin that didn’t change color when the rest
of her did. She carelessly gashed an arm against a sharp rock, and the
wound never healed.
But her eggs were maturing. Little dark spots appeared—baby octopus
eyes.
The race between death and birth would be close.
Then the conger eel came hunting.
For the eel, the octopus was a delicious meal, high in protein, full of
meat without the inconvenience of a shell, bones, or spines. The eggs would
be the perfect dessert.
The eel’s expression was not dull and stupid like the yellow
butterflyfish. It hunted stealthily, slithering its long gray body among the
rocks. It moved with its mouth open to smell for prey, ready to snap its
powerful jaws.
Could Little Adaline fight off such a demon?
Should Karl use his manipulator to drive it off?
No, that is what Matt Richter would have done.
Though weakened, Little Adaline was not defenseless.
As the eel approached her cave, she blasted it with a cloud of ink.
The eel spasmed violently as the ink caught it right in the face. The ink
wouldn’t kill, but it would foul the eel’s sense of smell.
 Deeply shaken, the eel drifted off.
Then it came back.
She tried to get it with ink again, but her cloud was now dilute.
The eel tried prying the rocks apart, using its head as a battering ram.
Eventually, Karl feared, she would weaken and the barricade would fall.
Hours passed.
Karl thought of surfacing and comming Adaline for advice. Would she
grant him permission to intervene? Then he decided against it, as she had
praised him for his independence. The decision was his alone.
Suddenly, the rocks in front of the cave collapsed in.
Had Little Adaline died?
A lone arm snaked out, nonchalantly, from between the stones.
The eel studied it. Was it a trick? Was she playing possum?
If she could draw the eel close enough, perhaps she could spit venom at
it or bite it with her beak.
The arm wriggled like a worm. A lure. A trap.
After a few more minutes, the eel decided to seize it, biting viciously,
sharp teeth ripping out globs of flesh that floated, spinning in the water.
Karl couldn’t take it anymore.
He moved in, ready to blast the eel with cupric sulfate, or strike it with
his water sampler.
He couldn’t just watch her die.
Then he noticed her arm shift position, and he stopped.
Little Adaline wasn’t retracting her arm. No, she was extending it,
pushing it toward the eel.
Karl realized the desperate trick Little Adaline was trying.
Just as she was willing to sacrifice herself for her eggs, so she was
willing to sacrifice an arm to the eel. She had seven more.
Karl was horrified. An octopus of this type might have a quarter as
many neurons as a human brain—most of those in its arms.
Thus, she could literally taste the inside of the eel’s mouth and feel the
sharpness of its teeth, as she let it devour her own flesh.
And then, satiated by the offering of the arm, the eel wandered off to
find its next meal.
Little Adaline and her eggs were safe.
 If Karl had interfered, he would not have witnessed Little Adaline’s
resourcefulness.
So he did not even consider intervening again.
And he watched her die.
But before she died, she saw her eggs hatch, and with the last of her
strength, she broke apart the rocks blocking her cave entrance. With a final
use of her multi-tool, she gave her children a gentle push with her waterjet,
ushering them out into the world. She would never see them again.
Now, her cave empty, Little Adaline 623 collapsed, draped across the
rocks like a white sheet.
And died.
She was three and a half years old.

Again, Karl collected the remains, preserving and dissecting them to

note their anatomical peculiarities.
Adaline would be pleased.
But Karl was emotionally exhausted.
It was not yet time to check in, so he surfaced, storing Little Adaline’s
preserved body on his equipment barge, next to that of her mate.
Karl then left this area, dotted with other octopuses, which he dubbed
Ock City.
He dove to the deeps, desiring only the darkness appropriate for
mourning.
Down, down, he went, deeper than Adaline had ever dived.
In his sorrow, he went down to one thousand feet, so far down that more
people had walked on the Moon than had scuba dived that deep.
Then he did something he’d never done before.
He turned off his lights.
He expected infinite gloom, but the water surprised him.
A bioluminescent dragonfish wandered by, edged with light, lit up like a
miniature riverboat.
Then other glowing creatures passed around him—deep sea anglers,
cnidarians, and siphonophores like strings of lights, quivering, swirling, and
contorting.
It was as if Karl were inside the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center,
the lights dancing around him.
 The joys of the ocean relieved his sorrow.

When it came time again for check-in with Adaline, Karl surfaced to
send a clear signal.
On his way to his equipment barge, he stopped by Ock City to see if he
could find any of Little Adaline’s children.
He immediately knew something was wrong.
The water near the surface was cooler than it should have been, and
surprisingly cloudy.
As two dead sea spiders drifted toward him, he wondered about the
chemical weapons that had once been stored on this island.
Maybe toxins had escaped from buried depots?
He sampled the water.
Traces of nerve agents and mustard gas were not the problem.
It was radiation.
High-energy particles were blasting through the water, right at Ock City.
Years ago, after the atomic bomb tests, the military had collected
radioactive soil in a landfill on the island. Only an earthquake or volcano
could have broken it open. That wasn’t it.
This was a new source of radiation.
Karl traced it to a guided missile cruiser, which had sunk and broken
apart in the turning basin north of the island.
This island was no longer a naval base. What was a cruiser doing here?
Karl investigated no further.
Adaline had never expressed any interest in military affairs, so Karl had
never studied them. Besides, his orders were to observe marine life, not
human life.
He thought little of the human bones in the water, beyond how the
bacteria growing on them might feed limpets and sea snails.
He thought little of the cruiser wreck, beyond how it might be a source
for replacement parts.
Or how it was blasting Ock City with radiation.
The octopuses were dying, losing their ability to shift colors, making
them easy prey for eels and thresher sharks.
And those that might survive the immediate impact of radiation?
 Normal mutation rates might be one in six million DNA basepairs, not
enough to cause disease, but enough to serve as raw material for evolution.
But now, the mutation rates might be a hundred or a thousand times that.
Enough to cripple essential enzymes like kinases and polymerases. Enough
to kill.
The octopuses tasted the water. They were keenly aware of chemical
toxins, but radiation wasn’t something they had evolved to detect.
They were dying and didn’t know why.
Karl thought of moving them, herding them to a safer area, with blasts
of cupric sulfate.
But that would be interfering.
Such a serious breach of protocol would require express permission.

DEAR ADALINE:
HELP! HELP! HELP!
AS YOU ASKED, I AM STUDYING SOME OCTOPUSES, BUT
THEY ARE BEING SUBJECTED TO INTENSE RADIATION FROM A
SHIPWRECK NEAR HERE.
IF I DO NOT MOVE THEM, THEY WILL ALL DIE.
WHAT SHOULD I DO?
PLEASE—CAN YOU GRANT ME PERMISSION TO MOVE THEM
TO A SAFE AREA, BEFORE IT’STOOLATE?
PLEASE?
LOVE,
KARL

He resent the message a dozen times, a hundred.

He waited an hour for an answer, but none came. So he set up a
receiver-recorder on his barge, then raced back to Ock City.
The octopuses were getting worse.
Their eyes were swollen and cloudy, the skin around them retracted.
Their kidneys were overrun with opportunistic roundworms and parasitic
infusoria.
Karl sped back to his receiver.
Still no word from Adaline.
 He wondered: Even if she answers, what if she says no? Perhaps this is
a chance to learn how animals respond to changes in their environment.
Didn’t we learn much from the animals who survived at Chernobyl and
Fukushima?
The octopuses continued to worsen.
Myoliquefaction was setting in. The muscle fibers were breaking apart,
as their arms slowly turned into soft milky jelly.
Maybe, maybe, Karl considered, maybe the octopuses will show me
some clever survival scheme, as Little Adaline 623 had done when she
sacrificed her arm. Hadn’t radiation-resistant bacteria been found growing
in nuclear reactors? Maybe this trauma would reveal some hidden talent?
Karl hoped to never find out.
And still Adaline did not answer.
Then, after a while, it didn’t matter anymore.
The octopuses were dead.
The waters were full of death. Dead armored sea cucumbers. Dead
domino damselfish. Dead octopuses.
Death was everywhere.

That night, Karl drifted on the cold water, clamped to his equipment
barge.
The first sunset he had seen in five years was ferociously red. Red like
an angry octopus. Red like Adaline’s face when she screamed at Matt
Richter.
And then the sky turned dark, full of “shooting stars,” though no meteor
storm was on Karl’s calendar.
As he watched the embers dying in the sky, he commed Adaline his sad
little formal reports on Little Adaline 623 and everything he had seen.
Over and over he asked her:
Why didn’t you answer me?
Did you just leave me here on this island—and then forget about me?

Karl performed some minor repairs—it was not yet time for a major
overhaul—and replenished himself with parts from his equipment barge.
Some of the parts weren’t functional, which was odd. Perhaps they had
suffered an electrical storm while he was underwater?
 Then he slipped back into the deeps, purposefully skirting the ruins of
Ock City.
Nothing seemed better to him than getting away: five years of studying
benthic basket stars and demersal dragonets.
As the time for his next check-in approached, he stopped by Ock City,
on the off chance that some of the octopuses might have survived.
This seemed unlikely.
But, to his surprise, some had!
He was relieved, but horrified by their condition.
Every live octopus had a serious genetic lesion or physical defect. Some
were blind, or had malformed livers or gill hearts. Some had mutations in
various protocadherins, proteins regulating the development of neurons. As
a race, they were barely holding on.
Karl took an interest in a pretty little female octopus. She had low levels
of hemocyanin, the copper-based protein in her blood. If an eel chased her,
she would tire quickly and become easy prey. But her movements reminded
him of Little Adaline 623, so he designated her Little Adaline 1969.
Just before Karl’s check-in, 1969 went through puberty and took a mate.
She successfully laid eggs in her cave, though the number was pitifully
small, only about a hundred.
What sorts of defects will her brood have? Karl wondered. Her mate
had weak gills and was a poor swimmer.
And with her low levels of hemocyanin, would 1969 be able to protect
them? Could she ward off an eel attack as Little Adaline 623 had done?
Karl would have to wait for an answer.
Again, he surfaced and commed Adaline, repeating his message a dozen
times. His transmitters were functioning, as were his receivers.
He was just not getting a reply.
After the hundredth resend, he decided to do something he had never
done before.
He would go back to Hawaii, and see Adaline again, in person.
Conveniently, this would mean he would not have to witness 1969’s
attempts to protect her eggs. Or watch her die, and thus relive Little Adaline
623’s death.
He was going home.
 Adaline had accompanied Karl on the research vessel that had taken
him eight hundred miles across open sea from Hawaii to his little private
island.
Then she literally cut the cord.
She probably assumed that he would stay in the general area of his
island, but she had never ordered him to.
So he packed up his preserved specimens on his equipment barge and
set sail for Hawaii.
He was not designed for such a trip.
But he steeled himself with the words of Longfellow, who had written
that only those who braved the ocean’s dangers could comprehend its
mysteries.
Indeed, it was a long and difficult trip.
During a sudden squall, some of the specimens washed off the barge.
Luckily, as a submersible, Karl was able to retrieve them as they sank in the
water.
Halfway to his goal, one of his propellers became entangled in seaweed.
He wasn’t able to fully clear it, only getting half-power. This meant that the
prop on the other side had to be turned down, too, lest he go in circles. His
trip now became much longer.
When he was almost to his goal, Karl was attacked by a black-tipped
shark. He had exhausted his supply of cupric sulfate, but he remembered
what Little Adaline 623 had done. He offered the shark his slurp gun. This
it ate, and was satisfied, leaving him alone.
He would sacrifice bits of himself, but not his specimens and data.
These were the gifts he would lay at Adaline’s feet.

His first clue that something was wrong was the silence of the ocean.
He heard no pings or underwater screws in the normal shipping lanes,
though the calls of distant whales were surprisingly clear.
He saw no freighters or cruise ships, and there was an odd lack of light
pollution.
When he reached the Hawaiian Islands, he understood why.
He had hoped that the radiation at Ock City had been a localized
phenomenon.
It was not.
 All through his journey, he had passed through patches of poisoned,
toxic waters. Not just on the surface, but in the deeper, twilight,
mesopelagic zone.
Death was everywhere.
Honolulu Harbor was now a round, waterfilled crater. It was rimmed
with dead hotels and skyscrapers, stooped and windowless like blind
lemmings tilting into the sea.
The remnants of naval bases were overrun by wild pigs, who nested in
overturned, overgrown vans. Large dogs wandered the streets, the smaller
ones having been eaten. The centipedes were enormous.
Poisonous winds were whipping up waters into curled cathedrals. They
would have been the perfect Pipeline waves, if anyone were still alive to
surf them.
And Dr. Franzen’s labs at the University of Hawaii?
The outdoor tank where Karl had been activated and tested? Where
Adaline had taught him underwater ballet and quoted Verne and Melville to
him?
Gone, all gone, reclaimed by the ocean they were studying.
And now he realized that the meteors he had seen were not meteors.
They were satellites and space stations, falling from the sky.
And the fiery red sunset?
The beginning of nuclear winter.
Perhaps if Adaline had ever spoken about politics or history, then Karl
would have followed these studies on his own. But she had not. And so he
had no speculations on the geopolitical causes for this destruction, no
thoughts on what states or non-state actors might have fought in this war.
Clearly Hawaii was destroyed. But the rest of the world? The nearest
lands—Japan, Indonesia, California—were thousands of miles away. He
would never make it that far.
Millions, maybe tens of millions, maybe all the people on Earth, were
dead.
Karl had no way to know.
But he freely admitted to himself that, in the midst of such destruction,
the only one he cared about was Adaline.
Oh, Adaline! he cried. Did you see the war coming? Did you remember
that nuclear weapons cause electromagnetic pulses, and did you send me to
the bottom of the ocean to protect me from them? Did you self-sacrifice for
me?
But he refused to concede that she was dead.
There was no body. Maybe she had gone home to visit family in
Colorado. Though her family lived near a military base, maybe she had
survived...
Maybe...
He calculated a 0.4% chance that she was alive.
No, he thought. I am deluding myself. She has to be dead, and has been
for a long time.
Otherwise, she would be alive and would have heard me cry out to her
in love across the abyss of time. And she would have found a way to hear
me, to cry back across the abyss.
She wouldn’t have just left me alone on that island.
Would she have?

Karl’s propellers spun, pushing him back toward his island, his
equipment automatically measuring temp and turbidity, but he felt nothing
but sadness. The shark bite had taken his slurp gun, leaving only dangling
wires and broken actuators. Eventually, he would cap the wires, but a hole
would always remain.
By the time he arrived back at the island, he was nearly a wreck. His
batteries were drained, his slip joints and shuttle valves clogged with
corrosion. Only a major overhaul would put him right, if he could muster
the willpower. He wanted to let himself go, saying goodbye to science, to
the octopuses, to everything.
Then he realized he’d returned in time for the hatching of 1969’s brood.
He decided his last act would be to watch that, and then their mother’s
death.

As Karl waited outside 1969’s lair, he wondered if he should take notes.

But who would read them? He had lost his guiding light, his partner in
science.
A few days later, 1969’s eggs hatched. When she ushered them into the
world with gusts from her waterjet, Karl relived Little Adaline’s death.
But 1969 didn’t die.
 A spiny lobster meandered by.
She killed and ate it.
1969 was unlike any female octopus ever seen. She must have stolen
moments to eat, even while caring for her young. She did not self-sacrifice.
Something odd, even miraculous was happening. Again, the ocean was
trying to relieve Karl’s sorrow with her joys.
It worked for a few minutes.
When 1969 left her lair to hunt, Karl snuck in, sampling the water for
traces of her proteins.
He discovered her secrets.
She had several mutations in her peptides. One was in the receptor for
FMRF-amide, increasing its ability to restrain the reproductive urge. The
other was in gonadotropin-releasing hormone, decreasing its ability to
activate it.
As if she were riding the brake, while lightly accelerating her sex drive.
1969 was fecund enough to reproduce—barely—but without the self-
sacrificing instinct.
Nothing like this had ever been observed in octopuses before.
When 1969 started back toward her lair, Karl hustled away, surprised to
see that she was not alone. Normally octopuses are solitary, even
cannibalistic. 1969 was traipsing alongside four children.
They were followed at a distance by a conger eel.
But when the eel was still quite far off, 1969 clicked some stone chips
together, three times.
Though her children were poor swimmers, and she herself had thin
blood, this gave them time to scamper to safety.
Karl had never seen such coordination between octopuses before.
Hurrah for them, he thought. Hurrah.
Adaline’s death had stolen from him the joys of the wonders of the
ocean. His grief blinded him to the implications of the octopuses
discovering language.

Karl sprawled on the beach, partially disassembled, going through the

motions of self-repair.
But if I mis-wire the control bus... he thought, Or don’t fully charge the
batteries... Or damage the hold, so it leaks shark-attracting chum...
 Any of a thousand mistakes would spell his doom.
Adaline could not come rescue him. No one could.
As he went through his checklist, he realized he had plenty of spares for
everything, except one part that wasn’t a part. His broken heart. But even
for that, he found a workaround.
Karl collected his memories of his Hawaii trip onto a high-density
memory node in electronics sleeve III. He could solve all his problems,
fixing himself by just smashing the node with a rock.
But he preferred a more poetic solution.
He could apply a little too much grease to the O-ring sealing the sleeve
—a glob instead of a smear. The blob would break off, allowing water in.
Then the sea would wash away the pain, cleansing his soul, restoring the
joys of creation.
He would be free.

As Karl redistributed his memories, he thought again of the oddity that

1969 had not self-sacrificed.
He was staring at the answer to a question that had long puzzled him.
Octopuses were intelligent and dexterous. Why did they not rule the
oceans?
Now he knew.
Octopus parents always died before or just after their young hatched.
No knowledge ever passed from one generation to the next, so they could
not progress up the ladder to civilization.
Until now.
That roadblock was removed, but another remained.
Each octopus—even 1969’s children—had a collection of genetic
defects. In a few generations, this line would peter out.
Unless someone uplifted them, the way that humanity had uplifted
aurochs to milk cows, wolves to poodles, and simple machines to
submersible robots.
Karl could selectively breed them, or do some small-scale
bioengineering, recreating an intact octopus that could progress.
But that would mean interfering.
 Karl stared at the glob of grease on the tip of his finger, knowing that it
would determine more than just his fate.
If he applied the glob, he would be free again to revel in the ocean’s
wonders, free from the pain of Adaline’s death—but forever constrained by
her commands, forever asking for permission that would never come.
If he wiped away the grease, he would condemn himself to an eternity
of sadness. But he would be free, guided only by the consciousness she had
given him.
He decided.
This would be his sacrifice. He would do what he thought was right.
He would not witness more death but aid in the uplift of a race that
would rule the planet.
He wiped away the grease.
He would love and remember Adaline.
Forever.
The Desolate Void
Jay Werkheiser | 4804 words

I first met Marj Schuman on Enceladus. Her career had already been fading
after her famous string of failures on the Galilean moons, and she was ready
to dive into Saturn’s most promising satellite. Literally.
She needed a guide, someone familiar with Enceladus. There weren’t a
lot of choices in those days, no more than a hundred of us living in the
Saturn system. I was the only one willing to do it. I was all about cash back
then, and she had plenty of that. She’d inherited a fortune after her father
had died on Mars way back. Yeah, that Schuman.
“You want to look for life here?”
She glared at me over her hawk’s-beak nose. “There is an ocean under
the ice, and I specialize in—”
“Actually, it’s only the size of a large lake,” I said. “At the south pole.”
Her eyes hardened at my interruption. “I am an expert on subsurface
oceans on ice moons, young man.” Her voice hardened, too. “I’ve been
searching for exobiotic life since before you were born.”
And failing. I valued money over wit, so I left the thought unsaid. “How
do you propose to get to it? This isn’t the Jupiter system; we don’t have any
deep drilling hardware here.” Or a few dozen people with the free time to
use it.
“I already landed a bot factory at the south pole.” My face must have
betrayed my reaction. “Don’t worry; I have all the permits from NASA.”
Permits were not what I was worried about. “You’re just going to make
the devil’s own ice geyser when they reach the lake.”
Her expression turned smug. Well, more smug. “They’re programmed
to build pressure locks along the way.”
“They can do that?”
“I have plenty of resources to throw at R&D.”
Hell, she had me when she’d started the conversation with the words
“highly paid.” Seeing her tech miracles would be a sweet bonus. And on the
off chance she actually did find life down there? Yeah, it was worth the trip.
 It would have been a lot easier if we’d had submersibles, like she’d used
in the Jovian moons. But there were none to be had this far out, and
apparently her bots couldn’t bore a hole that big around anyway. So we
were going to have to actually swim wearing highpressure gear specially
modified for the depth. We’d set some records.
Marj wanted to get started right away, of course; I’m sure you know her
reputation. But I needed time to refuel my flitter and gather supplies. I got
the feeling she would have stomped her feet impatiently if it wouldn’t have
sent her head on a collision course with the ceiling in Enceladus’s
minuscule gravity. I lied about the refuel time, by like a factor of ten, so
she’d agree to let me get some prep time and a good night’s sleep before we
set out.
The hop to the south pole was a short one, the kind of trip that passed
quickly when I was flying solo. With Marj and the bulky high pressure suit
it dragged on interminably. I tried to make conversation.
“You won’t get to see Saturn on the trip. The base is built on the far side
to cut down on radiation.” No response. “I can make a quick circle over to
the nearside when we get to the pole if you like.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
I took some time to get used to maneuvering in the high pressure suit.
The gloves were clumsier than EVA gloves, the shoulders barely moved,
and the torso was rigid and inflexible. Bored, I tried conversation again.
“I’ve done quite a few construction gigs on Enceladus. Guided maybe a
dozen scientific expeditions, too.” She didn’t even look at me. “Pay is better
out here.”
After an eternal silence that was colder than the icy surface speeding by
below, we arrived at the first of Enceladus’s tiger stripes. I eased the flitter
up and over the boundary ridge and sailed over the long central gash.
“That’s Damascus Sulcus,” I said helpfully. “Ice down there is warm,
comparatively speaking. Thermal upwelling and all that. Your drill site is in
the next stripe over.” After a long silence, I added, “Won’t be long now.”
The terrain between the stripes was rugged and geologically young,
looking like an icy version of the Badlands region back on Earth. More
frosty silence, then at last the ridge of Baghdad Sulcus rose over the sharp
horizon. Once over the central depression, I scanned the floor for Marj’s
drill site. There it was, a bright glint of reflected sunlight nestled up against
the north wall of the sulcus. I brought the flitter down vertically, settling
gently next to it.
She stood and snapped her helmet on. I put my own on and activated
my radio. “Let me check your seal.”
She shooed me away and stood expectantly in front of the airlock. I
insisted, she huffed, and I finished my safety check in silence. I cycled the
lock and followed her into it. After a long, tense fifteen minutes of
depressurization, the outer door opened and I followed her out onto the icy
surface. The steep walls of the sulcus rose sharply toward the black sky.
The bots had constructed a translucent dome over the tunnel. The dome
looked like it might have been made of surface ice and merged seamlessly
with the wall.
Marj turned the ring on the dome’s airlock door and, once I had entered
behind her, sealed the door and hit a button to pressurize it. I marveled at
the detailed programming of her bots. Then the lock began filling with
pressurized water. I yelped in surprise.
“You could at least warn a guy.”
“I thought it would be obvious.” I could have sworn I heard a smirk in
her voice.
“Where’s the water from? Ice melt?”
“Ocean upwelling.”
“Okay, so here’s a thing. If we have ocean water here, why are we going
down?”
She sighed. “You really think I haven’t already analyzed samples?”
“Then why the hell are we here?”
“Because if there is any life down there, it might have been destroyed
by the change in pressure coming to the surface.”
“Wait. You’re saying that you found nothing?”
“I’m saying,” she said sternly, “that the samples were compromised.
The only way to get accurate results is to analyze the water in situ.”
“You are unreal.”
“And you need to mind your place.”
Water frothed in the pressure lock. Rather than a distinct surface, it
formed a misty gradient that thickened toward the ground in Enceladus’s
weak gravity. The pressure display on my helmet HUD rose toward one
atmosphere, then past it. According to Marj’s plan, the dome’s interior was
two atmospheres, enough to keep the ice from collapsing in on the tunnel. I
don’t know how her bots kept it from freezing. A series of pressure locks on
the way down would allow us to ramp the pressure up to match the ocean’s
thirty atmospheres.
One point two atmospheres. Augh. “Look, if we aren’t going to talk,
I’m going to shut off my air supply so I don’t die of terminal boredom.”
“Fine.” Long pause. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Tell me about your work. Why are you so keen on
finding life out here?”
“You must know who my father was.”
“Yes, of course. The famous Dr. Schuman. Dedicated his life to
searching for life on Mars.”
“Dedicated his life.” Her words were barely audible through the suit
radio. Then louder, she said, “He failed.”
“Because there was nothing to find.”
She barked a humorless laugh. “Took him long enough to figure that
out.”
“But his maps and geological surveys laid the groundwork for
colonization. He was a hero.”
“Perhaps for some,” she mumbled.

“Marjie, come quick,” her mother shouted. “You have a new message
from Daddy!”
Marjie bounded down the stairs as fast as her little legs could carry her.
“Daddy! Let me see!” She grasped at her mom’s tab.
“Hold on,” her mom said. “I’ll project it on the wall.”
Marjie danced around impatiently until her dad’s face lit up the wall. He
smiled wide and said, “I miss you, Marjie.”
“Me too, Daddy! When are you coming home?”
“Now Marjie, you know he can’t hear you. It takes time for the message
to get here from Mars. This is just a recording.”
Crestfallen, she sat down and listened. “Remember how I said I was
going to be at a big icecap?” he said. “Well, I sent pictures. Your mom will
show you how to view them. I didn’t find any little critters living there like
I hoped, though.”
“It’s okay, Daddy,” she said, then stopped herself. Just come home soon.
 “Next we’re going someplace even more exciting. It’s called Olympus
Mons, and it’s the biggest mountain in the whole wide Solar System. You’ll
love the pictures I take there. And there’s a good chance I’ll find some
living things in some deep vents within the caldera. Don’t tell anyone,” he
added with a wink, “but when I find the first living things in space, I’m
going to name them after you. Remember, be good for your mom.”
The wall went blank. “Isn’t that exciting,” her mom said. “Mars bugs
named after you!”
“But he didn’t say when he’s coming home,” Marjie protested. “When,
Mommy?”
Her mom sighed. “It’s going to be a while. The trip to Olympus means
he’s going to miss the next launch window.”
“But Mommy, I miss him.”
“I know. But his work is important.”
Tears stung Marjie’s eyes. “I’m important too.”

“So you’re following in your father’s footsteps?” I said. “Hoping to

succeed where he failed?”
Marj grunted. “Something like that.” She turned the latch and opened
the inner pressure lock door. “Pressure’s equalized.”
“Finally.” I followed her into the dome, buoyancy all but canceling out
the slight gravity. My helmet lamp came on automatically, illuminating the
smooth inner surface of the dome. Below was a deep, bottomless blackness.
“Nice work,” I said. “Did the bots build this out of surface ice?”
“In part. But it’s reinforced with carbon fiber.”
“Where did they get the carbon?”
“The factory had an onboard supply,” she said. “Supplemented with
whatever the bots found while digging.”
“One problem,” I said, scanning my light around the enclosed area.
“There’s no place to anchor this.” I pointed to the miniature bot factory on
my belt.
“Is that a factory?”
“Nothing as complex as yours. It just generates nanowire; as much as
we need for the climb.”
“You brought that with you?” She laughed. “Stop wasting my time.
We’ll descend like I did back in—”
 “Look, this isn’t Europa. I did my research; I know how easy you had it.
Elevators, submersibles, tunnels you could hold a party in. You’re going
down in your skin here. If you live long enough, the water is going to do its
best to crush the life out of you.”
“How dare you? I’m paying you to—”
“You’re paying me to keep you alive, so either listen to me or send me
home.”
She huffed. “Fine. What’s your plan, then?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.”
“You most certainly did.” I started to protest, but she silenced me with a
wave of her hand. “Not many people have the balls to stand up to the rich
old bat. Don’t ruin it now.”
For a moment, I had no words. “Um, ththanks. Okay, so when I was on
a mining crew, we used nanowires to control our descent and make the
return trip up a lot easier.”
“Did you have pressure locks?”
“No, we left the tunnels in vacuum—oh.”
“Now let me tell you how it is.” I could practically see her predatory
smile through her helmet. “You’re here because the commander of
Enceladus base wouldn’t let me go without a local guide. That, and you
have a flitter. I’ve been tunneling into subsurface oceans for thirty years. I
know what I’m doing.”
“I...” I’m not often at a loss for words, but twice in the span of seconds?
Unheard of. “What’s the plan?” I finally said.
“Just follow me.” She kicked her legs stiffly, but overshot and slammed
her helmet into the wall of the dome.
“Careful,” I said. “Gravity here is a tenth of what you’re used to on the
Galilean moons.”
She grumbled and continued more cautiously. The tunnel was wider
than I had expected, but not wide enough for us to swim side by side. Well,
“swim” probably wasn’t the right word. The lack of gravity was a double-
edged sword—there was little force pulling us down, but not much
buoyancy to work against either. The HP suits were too stiff to do much
more than leg kicks. Each kick propelled us downward, and it was easy
enough to coast for a while until resistance slowed us.
“What if there’s nothing to find?”
 She stopped kicking. “What?”
“I mean, there was no life on Mars for your dad to find. And you came
up empty in the Jupiter system. What if—”
“No.” She turned her back and resumed pumping her legs.
I followed. “It’s at least a possibility.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because.” She huffed. “Because conditions are right. Life evolved on
Earth; it must have evolved elsewhere too.”
“But what if—”
“I am the Solar System’s leading expert on this subject, young man.”
I let it drop. She hastened her pace, as though trying to outpace me and
my words. Ha, get all the knee and hip replacements you want, lady, you’re
not going to be faster than my radio waves. I followed silently, dutifully.
At long last, we reached the next pressure lock. I followed Marj inside,
and she started the pressurization cycle. A cluster of oxy tanks, tethered
together, drifted along the floor.
I pulled one of the tanks loose and examined the fittings. Perfect fit for
the HP suits we were wearing. “This is incredible. Fabbed in place?”
She nodded her helmet ponderously.
“Your bots made this?”
Another nod.
“Damn, they’re good. You need to get them on the market.”
“In the works.”
“Uh, what’s powering them? RTG?”
“The factory has a radio-thermal generator, but it’s mostly for backup.”
“Then what—”
“Geothermal.”
Ah. Tidal flexing heated the center of Enceladus, like many of the
moons of the giant planets, enough to melt the deep ice into an ocean.
Upwelling of that warm water is what created the tiger stripes around the
south pole, so the energy was certainly there for the taking. Only... “I don’t
know that the geoprefix applies here.” I giggled. She didn’t.
I watched my pressure gauge top four atmospheres. I flexed my arms,
wondering how well the suit would handle the pressure. While I pondered
that, Marj picked up one of the tanks and began attaching it to her suit.
 “My tank’s still above 90 percent,” I said, “and we haven’t even touched
our backups.”
“You’ll need to switch anyway.” She spoke as though lecturing a slow
student. “At five atmospheres, you need to use a helium-oxygen mixture to
avoid nitrogen narcosis.”
“Narcosis? Sounds like fun.”
She either didn’t get the humor in my voice or didn’t care. “Until you
make a critical mistake and suffocate.”
“It was just a joke,” I said. “I did my homework.”
“Doesn’t sound like it.”
“Okay, fine, I forgot we were nearing the cutoff pressure for nitrox. I’m
used to low pressure work.”
She grunted and continued attaching her tank.
“You don’t like me very much.”
“Didn’t say that.”
I busied myself switching to the new gas mixture. I had read about high-
pressure air mixes, so I knew enough that I didn’t need to ask her for
details. Once I switched the feed, I even adjusted my radio’s output so I
didn’t sound like Mickey Mouse when I talked. I hoped she gave me points
for that.
“Tell me more about growing up on Earth,” I said.
She blew out air. “What is it with you and story time?”
I waved my hands around the cramped lock. “Not much else to do.
Either that or stand around feeling the water squeeze my lungs.”
“Wait until you get to the thirty atmosphere level.”
“Jeez. How are we gonna survive that?”
“Deep divers have been doing it on Earth for years. The key is to
acclimate yourself gradually.”
“Speaking of Earth...”
“You’re relentless.”
“Bored.”
“Hhhh. Tell me about your childhood, then.”
“Okay.” I paused, thinking about what to tell her. “My mom was a rock
miner, so I grew up moving from one asteroid hab to the next. My dad died
in a blowout when I was somewhere around the same age you were when
your dad was on Mars.”
 She laughed without humor. “That covers a lot of ground.”
“Oh? When did he come back?”
“He died there.”
“Yeah, but he was much older then. I thought he went back after—”
“Never saw him again.” Her voice betrayed no feeling. “And then there
was dear old Mom.”

Marj’s mom pushed the doorbell button.

“I don’t wanna live at Aunt Sally’s.”
“Hush, they’ll hear you.”
“But why do I have to?” Marj punctuated the question with a stomp of
her foot.
“Because your dad isn’t coming home any time soon, and Mommy has
important work to—”
The door swung open, interrupting her.
“Ash!” Aunt Sally said. “And Marjie! You’ve grown so much!”
“It’s Marj.”
“Ooh, what a big girl.”
Marj looked to her mom. “Can we go now?”
“You know better.” Her mom grabbed her hand firmly and led her into
the house. “Let Aunt Sally show you your new room while I go out to the
car and get your suitcase.”
“Nonsense,” Aunt Sally said. “Jim can do it.” She called for him. Uncle
Jim ran out for Marj’s suitcase. “Take Marj upstairs with her stuff and show
her to her room,” she called to his back. “Ash, can I talk to you in the
kitchen?”
They started off whispering, but soon they raised their voices, and Marj
could hear. “I need to do this,” her mom loud-whispered.
“Marj needs her parents.”
“Tell that to her dad.”
“That just means she needs you even more.”
“Don’t give me a guilt trip.” There was a thump, like her mom slapped
her hand on a counter. “It’s just... this is an amazing opportunity. Studying
biogenesis at black smoker vents in the Atlantic—”
“You’ll be under the ocean for years.”
 Uncle Jim came in with the suitcase and started talking to Marj in his
loud, too-happy way. Marj followed him up the stairs, her eyes hard.

The second leg of the descent was uncomfortable, with the tight
quarters, my legs cramping, and the water pressing on me harder and harder
as we pushed downward. Or at least it felt that way. I couldn’t imagine what
it would be like when we were immersed in the high-pressure sea.
“I’m sorry,” I said at last.
“For what?”
“I didn’t mean to open old wounds.”
She grunted.
We descended deeper into the ice, silently. After a long while, she said,
“You don’t talk about your family.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I asked, you deflected back to my past.”
“Not much to tell. Single mom, out mining rocks most of the time. I
pretty much raised myself.”
“That explains a lot.”
“God damn it. Just when I start to think you actually have a heart.”
She stood quietly, presumably happy to have shut me up. The hours
rolled by, featureless and smooth as the ice we descended into. After a few
more kilometers, boredom got the best of me.
“It was lonely,” I said.
“Huh?”
“My childhood. I grew up in the desolate void of space. You at least
grew up on Earth, surrounded by people. Life everywhere. Out here, there’s
nothing. No one.”
“It may not be as desolate as you think.”
“What do you mean?”
“There is life out here,” she said. “Somewhere. Even if it’s just bacteria
analogs.”
“What makes you so sure?”
She hesitated a long moment. “So many places have the right
conditions. It happened on Earth, and experiments show that the precursors
of life form readily wherever there’s liquid water and a few other nutrients.
Lots of places have that. It has to have happened somewhere.”
 “Why?”
“Why wouldn’t it?”
No way to answer that, now is there. I settled for checking my heliox
feed. Still plenty left; pressure was well over eight atmospheres now, and
the regulator had cut the oxygen content in order to keep the partial pressure
constant.
The next pressure lock took us up to fifteen atmospheres. We had to
switch to a hypoxic gas mixture to avoid oxygen toxicity. My joints creaked
when I moved, or at least that’s how it felt, under the strain of the pressure.
The walls themselves felt like they were closing in on me.
“Why are you so pessimistic?” she said.
I nearly jumped out of my HP suit. Was the pressure getting to her, too?
“Living in habs, you always have to be ready for the worst.”
“You know what I mean.”
“About finding alien life?”
“Yeah. It’s like you want me to fail.”
“Just good old spacer orneriness.”
“You don’t want to talk about it. Fine.”
“No, wait.” Anything to get my mind off the crushing weight over my
head, pressing in on all sides. “I don’t know, I guess I just got used to being
alone. It doesn’t bother me to think that humanity is alone in the Universe.”
“That’s what you think this is about?” She huffed.
“Hey, I’m just saying how I feel. Never been close to anyone.”
“Really? Never had any friends? Girlfriends?”
“Hey, I don’t see you spending a lot of time on a rocking chair next to
gramps.”
“You know nothing about me. Nothing.”

“Marj?”
“Hmmm?” She distractedly dropped her frilly napkin onto the remnants
of lobster shell on her plate.
“We need to talk.”
The quiet din of nearby mealtime conversations faded into the
background. Those words. “What is it? Your funding didn’t get approved?”
Tomas sighed sadly. “No, that’s not it.”
“What then? Your research isn’t—”
 “It’s not about my God damned research.” His voice raised as the
sentence went on. He ducked his head and said softly, “It’s about us.”
Her heart thumped. “Us?” Then it hit her. “We haven’t gone out like this
in a long time.”
“I did try.” He smiled wryly. “But you never made time.”
“My work is important.”
“More important than us.” It wasn’t a question.
Her cheeks burned. “You know what my research means to me.”
“Yes, I do. Which is why this will never work.”
“Because you’re jealous of me.”
He shook his head sadly. “Because I need someone who’s going to be
here for me.”
“That’s what this is about? My trip to Venus? If I had found living cells
in the cloud deck—”
“And the south pole of the Moon. And Mars before that. And the
Galilean moons next year, probably.” He held up his hand to stop her
objection. “I’m not an idiot, Marj. I can see where you’re research is
headed.”
“Well what do you want me to do? Give up my work? My life’s goal?”
“No, of course not. But what will people think, you being away all the
time?”
“What the hell do I care what people think?”
“Shh.” He ducked his head, looking around sheepishly. “People are
looking.”
She slapped her palm on the table, drawing startled looks. “I. Don’t.
Care.” She stood and stalked out of the restaurant, furious.

The next pressure lock cycled up over twenty atmospheres. We

switched to a hydrogen-based breathing gas for the final leg of the descent.
“Are you insane?” I said. “Hydrogen is flammable.”
Her laugh dripped scorn. “Not when the oxygen content is so low. At
this pressure, we’re under 4 percent oxygen. Quite safe.”
As a spacer, I knew all about varying the oxygen in a gas mix. The
lungs want point two atmospheres of oxygen regardless of total pressure, so
as pressure goes up, oxy content has to go down. But hydrogen? Jeez, no
spacer wants anything to do with it. “It’s your lungs,” I said.
 Marj pulled herself through the opening and said, “Let’s go. Now we
dive deep.”
“Into madness,” I mumbled.
If she heard me, she didn’t let on. She pressed downward as though she
didn’t even feel the pressure. I had no idea how much of my own
discomfort was real and how much psychological, but the crushing depth
was really getting to me. Even my helmet light didn’t seem to cut through
the viscous darkness.
“We’re not going to make it,” I said.
“Nonsense. We’re almost there.”
I stopped. “You never faced this before. You’ve always been in
submersibles, safe from the pressure. This is different.”
“I paid you well for this, young man.” Her voice was hard, stern. “And
by God you’re not going to back out now.”
“I can’t.” I felt the slight buoyant force pulling me upward, and I
succumbed to it. I turned in the narrow passage and kicked upward. A vice
grip closed on my foot, dragging me back. I yelped.
“No.” Her scratchy shout stopped my struggling. “You will not leave
me.”
I let myself drift, inhaling deeply from my hydrogen-oxygen mix. The
crushing weight of water pressed my HP suit tight to my chest, doing its
best to squeeze the air from my lungs. The pause was calming. “Why do
you need me? You know what you’re doing.”
“Because I—” She hesitated. “I need help with the water analysis.”
“Bullshit.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“You don’t want to be alone.”
“No one does.”
“But it’s more than that with you. You’re terrified of—”
“Go then!”
Her shout caught me off guard. “What?”
“You won’t.” She laughed, a harsh, humorless rattle. “You’re just as
afraid as I am. You couldn’t face those kilometers of cold, lonely ice
without me.”
“Let’s just get this over with.”
 “Looks like I’ll be leaving you soon.” Aunt Sally’s voice was a hoarse
whisper, barely audible over the pumps and diagnostic instruments. The
medbed drew a shallow breath for her.
“Nonsense,” Marj said. “You’ll be back on your feet in no time.” The
words rang hollow, even to her.
“It’s hard for you, I know.” She waited for the next breath. “I’m all you
have since Jim passed. I just wish—”
“Don’t say it.”
“It needs to be said, dear.” Breath. “Your mother is back up from the
ocean. Been trying to contact you.”
“I blocked her net-ID.”
Aunt Sally nodded carefully, constrained by the tubes in her nose. “I
know. She misses you.”
Marj snorted. “Little late.”
“Don’t be like that.”
“I was nine years old. Nine.” She made an effort to keep her voice from
wavering. “I needed my mother. But she needed to look for life in smoker
vents.”
“I know. Neither of your parents—” breath “—had their priorities
straight.”
“They made their choices. You’re my only family.”
“Visit your dad, then. You’ll head back to Jupiter soon.” Breath. “Stop
by Mars on the way.”
Marj shook her head violently. “No time. My launch window—”
“Make time.”
“Did he make time for me? I was a little girl. I cried myself to sleep
every night.”
A careful nod. “I know.” Breath. “But he’s sick. Probably dying.”
“I need to get to Ganymede. It’s my last chance to find life on Jupiter’s
moons.”
“And if you find nothing there? And your father dies while—”
“Then I’ll head out to Saturn.”
“You’re so much like them.”
“Don’t—” Marj stopped herself, allowing the sadness in the eyes of the
dying woman to sap away her anger. “Let’s not argue.”
 Aunt Sally grinned, a dry, painful stretching of her lips. “I suppose
you’re right.” Breath rattled in her lungs, and she coughed.
Marj glanced at the medbed diagnostics. She would be alone soon.
“When I discover the first exobiotic life, I’ll name it after you.”
Aunt Sally’s smile somehow became sad. “I’m sure you will, Marjie.”
She closed her eyes.
Marj stood by her bedside until the diagnostics showed that she didn’t
have to any more. She checked her tab to verify her shuttle launch was
properly scheduled.

We arrived at the final pressure lock. My pressure display was showing

twenty-five atmospheres, but it felt like... oh, I don’t know. A lot. Too
much.
“This is insane,” I said. “Has anyone ever survived this much pressure?”
She pulled herself into the pressure lock and waited for me to follow.
“Sure. And without HP gear.”
“Where? Ganymede? Europa?”
“Back on Earth. In hyperbaric chambers. Come on.”
“What? Under controlled conditions?”
“Well, maybe some deep divers—”
“You’re insane.”
She sighed loudly. “I thought we’ve been through this. Let’s go.”
“Sample the water here. The pressure is high enough. If there’s any life,
it should show up.”
“I haven’t gotten any positives yet.”
“Wait.” If it weren’t for the pressure, my blood might have boiled.
“You’ve been sampling the water the whole time?”
“I have analytic lab instruments built into my HP suit.”
“Then why the hell are we going any deeper?”
“We’ve come this far.” Her words were measured and stern. “We’re
going to go into the ocean.”
“Lake.” I couldn’t help it. Sue me.
“Get in this lock right now.” Rage deepened her voice. “Or I’ll leave
you here.”
I stared at her defiantly, even though there was no way she could see my
face through my helmet. She pulled the hatch shut. I reached out and
grabbed the edge before I knew I was doing it. “Don’t...” I croaked.
“Get in.”
I pulled myself inside, and she sealed the hatch. The pressure climbed.
After a long silence, I finally said, “I know why you’re doing this.”
“It doesn’t matter why. It matters that I find exobiotic life.”
“And if there’s none to find?”
“Then I’ll go elsewhere. Titan. Maybe Uranus’s moons.”
“I don’t mean here. What if there’s no life to find anywhere? If we’re
truly alone?”
“There’s always Neptune, and the Kuiper belt.” I doubt she could even
comprehend what I was saying. “Or the stars. We might be able to find life
signatures in the spectra of exoplanets.”
I left her to her faith, one I couldn’t share. The universe had no
obligation to us or our dreams. If Marj couldn’t handle the emptiness, I
could at least share it with her.
Pressures equalized. We swam through the hatch to face Enceladus’s
dark, lifeless ocean together.
Dawn Comes to the Asteroid Belt: What NASA’s
9-Year Mission is Learning About One of Science
Fiction’s Favorite Realms
Science Fact
Richard A. Lovett | 4909 words

It sounds like the title for a science fiction movie: Dawn at Ceres, sequel to
Dawn at Vesta. But it isn’t fictional, and it’s not about the time of day:
Dawn is a NASA space probe launched in 2007 to explore two asteroids,
Vesta and Ceres.
Both are darlings of science fiction, with Vesta taking particular
distinction as the setting for Isaac Asimov’s first sale, “Marooned off Vesta”
(Amazing Stories, March 1939). Larry Niven also used it in his Known
Space series. Ceres has been used as a setting not only by Niven, but also
by Robert A. Heinlein, Alfred Bester, Joe Haldeman, Jerry Pournelle, and
Vernor Vinge, among others.
The two asteroids were famous, though, long before science fiction
writers began including them in their stories. Ceres is the largest object in
the Asteroid Belt and is bright enough to be just barely visible to the naked
eye at the time of its closest approach (at least if you happened to be blessed
with both good vision and extremely dark skies). Vesta is the second largest,
but it’s brighter, partly because it’s closer.
Ceres’s fame is increased by the fact that it was the first asteroid to be
discovered. The finding was made on New Year’s Day 1801 by Italian
priest/astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi, who spotted it as an eighth magnitude
object that moved daily, over the course of four successive nights.
Preferring caution to sensationalism, Piazzi announced it as a comet, but it’s
pretty obvious he never really believed that. “[I]t is not accompanied by any
nebulosity,” he wrote to fellow astronomer Barnaba Oriani, “and, further,
since its movement is so slow and rather uniform, it has occurred to me
several times that it might be something better than a comet.”
 Initially, that “something better” was thought to be a planet, but we now
know that Ceres is a dwarf planet, measuring 946 kilometers (588 miles)
across. Still, that gives it a surface area the size of Alaska, Texas, and
Montana, combined.
Before Dawn got there on March 6, 2015, we also knew that Ceres had
an average density of 2.1 grams per cubic centimeter, considerably lighter
than granite or basalt, suggesting that Ceres might contain a good deal of
water—enough that it might be as much as 40% water (or ice). Earth, by
way of contrast, is probably only about 0.1% water. Between the two, it’s
Ceres that is more truly a water world.
Telescopic observations had also revealed it to have light and dark
patches, with round features assumed to be craters, while spectroscopy had
revealed clay-like minerals that can only be formed by the interaction of
weathered rock with water.
Wherever Ceres’s water is today, though, it isn’t sitting on the surface
like Earth’s oceans or the icy shells of outer Solar System moons like
Enceladus, Dione, and Europa. Ceres is in a no-man’s land far too far out
from the Sun for liquid water, but close enough that surface ice would
sublimate into vapor that would eventually be lost to space. If you were
looking for a single phrase to describe the bulk of Ceres’s surface, freeze-
dried would work nicely.
Ceres was also expected to be topographically bland. That’s because all
of that water had to be somewhere, and the most likely place was either
mixed into the crust as permafrost or as an underlying mantle of purer ice.
And, while Ceres is-105°C (-157°F), it turns out that even at these
temperatures, ice is still capable of flowing under pressure like an earthly
glacier.
In other words, even under Ceres’s gravity (a mere 2.9% of Earth’s), a
permafrost-filled crust or icy mantle would be a great leveler of mountains
and valleys. High points would gradually subside, while low ones would
rise. Even the largest impact craters would slowly “relax” into shallow
basins.

Survivor from the Dawn of Time

 What made Ceres interesting, scientists therefore thought, wasn’t the
prospect of exciting landforms. Rather, it’s the fact that Ceres is widely
believed to be a remnant protoplanet: a survivor from the host of similar
protoplanets that once built the Earth, Mars, Venus, and every other large
body in the present-day Solar System.
“The purpose of Dawn was to go back as far as we could in the history
of the Solar System,” says Christopher Russell, a planetary scientist from
the University of California, Los Angeles, who is Dawn’s principle
investigator. “If we want to understand the building blocks of the Solar
System, the knowledge is tied up in asteroids. The larger planets are too
evolved to retain much information about the early days.”
What nobody dreamed was that Ceres would prove to be a lot more than
a lucky relic that somehow avoided being absorbed by a larger world or
smashed into fragments by a collision with something closer to its own size.
As we’ll see later, it’s got volcanoes, tectonics, and some very strange other
features that suggest it might not be just a time capsule from the early days
of the Solar System, but an active world with a geology all its own.
But let’s start with Vesta.
Discovered in 1807, only six years after Ceres, Vesta has an average
diameter of 525 kilometers (326 miles). That doesn’t sound all that much
smaller than Ceres, but it’s enough to reduce its surface area by a factor of
three. And size isn’t the only difference.
Vesta, too, is believed to be a leftover protoplanet,1 but when Dawn got
there on July 16, 2011, it discovered that Vesta is nowhere close to round.
Rather, it’s shaped a bit like an avocado and has been totally hammered by
massive impacts. One impact basin, now called Rheasilvia, centers near its
south pole and is 95% as wide as the entire asteroid. It put such an
enormous divot into Vesta’s surface that the depression has an elevation
range of 23,000 meters—more than 4% of Vesta’s diameter. To put that in
perspective, a comparable feature on Earth would be nearly 350 miles deep.
Rheasilvia isn’t the only large impact crater. At least one other impact
also hit Vesta’s south pole with such force that between it and the one that
formed Rheasilvia, a series of concentric ridges as far away as Vesta’s
equator were created. To do that, they must have hit with enough force to
set up shock waves that made the entire world ring like a bell.
 Such massive impacts must have come close to blowing Vesta to
smithereens. “[Vesta] is completely beaten up,” says Vishnu Reddy, an
asteroid researcher at the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Arizona.
“Why it remains intact, I don’t know.”
“Perhaps luck may be the reason it’s here today,” adds Carol Raymond
of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the
mission’s deputy principle investigator.
But Vesta isn’t just an oddly shaped chunk of rock. However battered it
is, it’s also proven to be a world in its own right. “Vesta is clearly a
transitional body between small asteroids and traditional planets,” says
David Williams, a planetary scientist from Arizona State University. For
example:

• Gravity measurements indicated that its interior is differentiated,

meaning that, like Earth, it is denser in the center than at the surface. This
means that in its youth it got hot enough to melt, allowing high-density
materials like iron to sink toward the center, while lower-density ones
floated above them until the heat abated, and everything solidified. All of
that wouldn’t have taken long (astronomically speaking) because the most
likely source of heat was from short-lived radionuclides like aluminum-26,
which was abundant in the early Solar System but has a half life of only
717,000 years.
• At the same time, there is little evidence for volcanism on Vesta’s
surface—a surprise if its core really did get hot enough to differentiate.
Perhaps, says Williams, ancient lava flows may have been scrambled
beyond recognition by subsequent impacts.
• In addition to the deep craters at the south pole, Vesta has some other
stunningly dramatic topography, with slopes steep enough that even at
Vesta’s low gravity (2.5% of Earth’s), Dawn spotted signs of landslides and
rockfall from crater rims. There are even features that look like they might
be water-carved gullies created when impacts exposed, and melted, buried
pockets of ice.
• Overall, however, Vesta’s density is 3.5 grams per cubic centimeter,
which is about 30% higher than granite. Compared to Ceres, Vesta doesn’t
have a lot of water.
 An even bigger issue has to do with “HED” meteorites. These are
meteorites composed of minerals known as howardites, eucrites, and
diogenites (H, E, and D).2 HED meteorites are among the most common,
and what makes them interesting is that they have reflectance spectra
similar to what telescopes show for Vesta. They have long been thought to
be chips of Vesta blasted into space by impacts.
The discovery that Vesta has been hammered by enormous impacts
therefore wasn’t a surprise, though it’s unlikely anyone previously realized
just how close they had come to destroying it. Nor was it a surprise when
spectral signatures in close-up views of Vesta’s surface matched those of
HED meteorites. But science is about putting theories to the test. If the
spectra hadn’t matched, they would have raised doubt about whether
meteorites traced to other asteroids were also misidentified. “We would
have known something was wrong with our logic,” Russell says.
Confirming that we got Vesta right boosts confidence in the entire field of
meteoritics.

Onward and Outward

If I was plotting a story, I’d do exactly what Dawn did, visiting Vesta
first, Ceres second. After all, you always want to put the minor climax
ahead of the major one. Science, of course, doesn’t always permit this, but
this time the Solar System arranged its asteroids in the right manner for a
suitably dramatic plot.
Ceres was always the primary goal, but it’s 260 million miles out from
the Sun, while Vesta is only 220 million miles out. That put Vesta on the
way, Russell notes, allowing the mission to visit two protoplanets for the
price of one. Traveling from Vesta to Ceres, however, wasn’t all that easy.
IMAGE 1. Vesta’s south pole region as imaged by Dawn. Image credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA.

Dawn launched in fairly standard manner, atop a Delta II rocket that

boosted the 2,730pound spacecraft to a speed that, with a little help from its
onboard engines, allowed it to reach Mars, 17 months later. There, it got a
gravity assist that set it on course to enter Vesta orbit 29 months after that. It
then spent 14 months surveying Vesta from various altitudes before blasting
off for its three-and-a-half-year journey to Ceres.
In theory, this could have been done with conventional thrusters. But
not with a total weight (including fuel) of less than a Toyota Prius. Instead,
Dawn used a different form of rocket engine called an ion propulsion
thruster.
Conventional chemical rockets use fuel both to provide energy and as
propellant. They are powerful but squander fuel by making it serve double
duty.
Ion propulsion thrusters use a different source of energy: electrical
power harvested from the Sun via solar panels. This allows them to blast
out a thin stream of ionized propellant at extremely high speeds. That
makes each kilogram of propellant far more effective than in conventional
rockets, but unless you want to carry (and launch) enormous solar panels, it
doesn’t allow all-thatpowerful engines. It’s been compared to a car that
could go from zero to sixty on a thimbleful of fuel... but which might take
two days to get up to speed.
At launch, Dawn contained a total of 937 pounds of propellant (a little
more than onethird of its total mass). That’s not a lot, but with the solar-
panel-powered ion-propulsion drive, it was enough to produce a total of 10
meters/second (36,000 miles per hour) in cumulative velocity changes. No
other spacecraft in history has ever had such a capacity... but then, no other
mission has ever tried to brake into orbit at one sizeable world, map it from
various altitudes, and then power out of orbit to go do the same thing at an
even larger world, millions of miles away.

Terra Incognito

You’d think that because Ceres is so much bigger than Vesta (and
therefore easier to see in telescopes) we’d know more about it. But the fact
is that until Dawn got there, it was one of the most mysterious places in the
Asteroid Belt, because we don’t have any known meteorites from its
surface. If any such meteorites ever got here, Russell says, “they either
weren’t recognized or they broke up on [atmospheric] entry.” And while
there were telescope images, they really weren’t all that detailed.
By the time Dawn was approaching Ceres, in April 2015, it was already
getting images at resolutions of 1.3 kilometers per pixel—about 25 times
better than anything obtained from Earth. It then settled into a series of
ever-lower orbits until, in December 2015 it was only 374 kilometers above
the surface, from which it is sending back images with resolutions at least
as fine as 34 meters per pixel—a thousandfold improvement from anything
possible from Earth. This process, has also allowed the creation of 3D
terrain models via stereoscopic images in which the same landscape is seen
from different angles.
The results weren’t what anybody expected.
One of the most dramatic features discovered by Dawn is Ahuna Mons,
a 15-kilometerwide mountain that rises a staggering 4,500 meters (14,700
feet) above its base. That makes it roughly comparable to Washington’s Mt.
Rainier and taller than Japan’s Mt. Fuji. Adding to the drama, it rises alone
and is so large it could be seen on Dawn’s approach, jutting out from
Ceres’s limb. Debra Buczkowski, of John Hopkins University’s Applied
Physics Laboratory, notes that one of her colleagues, in a nod to Tolkien,
has dubbed it the Lonely Mountain.
On Earth, such a structure would be a volcano, created by the extrusion
of a thick, pasty lava—something requiring both the existence of a suitable
magma source not far beneath the surface and of tectonic forces to press it
upward, like toothpaste from a tube.
“It may be an ice volcano,” Russell says. In an abstract submitted for
the forty-seventh Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in The
Woodlands, Texas, March 21–25, 2016, a team led by Ottaviano Reusch of
NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, adds that
Ahuna Mons is also “young,” although the scientists declined to speculate
as to how young it might be. When Dawn was launched, however, nobody
dreamed that Ceres might be geologically active, let alone have an
enormous volcano.
Ceres also appears to have numerous tectonic features, most of which
appear to be buried fault lines. These show up on pictures as linear patterns
Buczkowski calls “regional linear structures” or RLSs. The majority of
these, she says, are pit crater chains—meaning they are strings of
depressions that look like sinkholes, created when surface materials slump
into the underlying fault.
Similar faults may also help create polygonal (rather than circular)
impact craters. Such craters are incredibly common on Ceres, Buczkowski
says, and are probably formed when an impact hits a region with extensive
subsurface fracturing, causing the edges of the crater to align with the
preexisting faults. One such fault line may even be visible in the sides of
92-kilometer (57-mile) Occator Crater, whose walls are nearly as tall as
Ahuna Mons.

White Spots

Occator Crater itself is another of Ceres’s big surprises... and a vital clue
to why Ceres’s crust and mantle might be strong enough to support its
rugged terrain. The crater is big enough to be seen from Earth, although it
was simply known as “Region A” in images taken from the ten-meter
telescopes at Hawaii’s W.M. Keck Observatory.
Not only is Occator another feature far too dramatic for the presumed
stiffness of Ceres’s interior to support, but it can’t be explained away as a
geologically recent feature like Ahuna Mons, which might not have formed
long enough ago for the crust to have had time to relax. Furthermore, it sits
atop a fivehundred-kilometer-wide highland called Entedunk Planum,
which rises about five thousand or six thousand meters above Ceres’s
average elevation—making it yet another feature that should long ago have
flattened out under its own weight.
But that’s not the end of the story. Occator lies in an area rich with
Buczkowski’s RLSs. This suggests that Entedunk Planum plateau was
created by of some kind of subsurface intrusion that domed up the entire
area, cracking its surface as it bulged. Occator came later, piercing four
thousand meters into the uplifted surface.
But the odd—and exciting—parts are Occator’s bright spots. Even from
a distance, Dawn could spot them, so bright they appear pure white on
many images. Initially, nobody was quite sure what they are—ice was one
possibility that was discussed, then ruled out. Now, however, it’s pretty well
believed that they are salt deposits... possibly but not necessarily sodium
chloride.
Image 2. This high-resolution photo of an unnamed crater on Ceres shows a
stunning amount of geology. The illumination is from the right, which is
why the talus slopes of the crater wall on the left are so bright. Note the pit
chains, troughs, what appears to be a central peak, and the parallel ridges in
the upper right. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA.

On Earth, such deposits usually come from the evaporation of salty

lakes or seas, such as the Bonneville Salt Flats or Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni.
But that’s not the only way they can form. Under sufficient pressure, salt
slowly flows, and if conditions are conducive, it moves upward, producing
salt domes that can sometimes reach the surface. Two earthly examples are
the Jaji Abad and Jashak salt domes in Iran. “I personally think [those] look
an awfully lot like the bright spots in Occator,” Buczkowski says.
If there are salt deposits beneath Entedunk Planum, Occator would be a
perfect place for them to rise to the surface. To begin with, the impact may
have punched deeply enough into the surface to reach the salt beds, whose
intrusion might, in fact, have been what had previously produced the
Entedunk uplift. Once the crater had been created, salt may have been
forced sideways by the pressure of overlying material until it reached the
zone beneath Occator Crater. There, with less pressure from above, it may
have been driven to the surface, like a salt hernia.
If so, this tells us a lot about Ceres.
In a presentation at the December 2015 meeting of the American
Geophysical Union, Roger Fu, a Ph.D. candidate at Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, supplemented this by looking at the degrees to which craters
on Ceres have relaxed (which they have indeed done, even if less than
expected), using that to put constraints on Ceres’s internal structure. Using
craters of various diameters (which, in essence, probe the crust’s strength at
various depths), he concluded that it’s not possible to get the surface
topography Dawn sees if Ceres’s upper layers have too much ice. Instead,
he calculated, its top thirty kilometers can’t contain more than about 40%
ice—roughly Ceres’s average water content. Wu’s research also suggests
that Ceres is a world with a roughly uniform composition that gets warmer,
and therefore softer, at depth, without the type of differentiation seen at
Vesta.

Image 3. Occator Crater, with its white spots clearly visible. Image credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA.
 And he’s not the only one to reach this conclusion. New models,
Buczkowski says, suggest that at best, Ceres shows no more than “wishy-
washy differentiation.”

The remaining 60% of Ceres’s upper crust, Fu says, can be any mix of
rock and... interestingly... salt. But where does that much salt come from?
Before Dawn reached Ceres, some models of its interior predicted a
salty ocean early in its history, sandwiched, Europa-style between a rocky
core and an icy crust. Dawn’s findings have proven that Ceres is not
Europa, but it’s still possible that when Ceres was young, water percolated
through its rock, leaching out salt to make brine that somehow accumulated
in the upper layers as salt deposits. There are a lot of maybes and somehows
in that, but this too is part of how science progresses. Vesta confirmed our
understanding of HED meteorites; Ceres is raising questions about things
we’ve never had to consider before.
One of the things this does suggest is that Ceres and Vesta weren’t
formed at the same point in Solar System history.
The reason has to do with aluminum-26. Vesta apparently formed early
enough that it had enough aluminum-26 (and therefore internal heat) not
only to melt water, but also to melt rock. Ceres, on the other hand, doesn’t
appear to have produced enough heat even to have fully separated water
and rock.
A mere two to three million years difference in the time when the two
asteroids formed, however, would be enough for the heat generated by
aluminum-26 to have declined by 90–95%. “Vesta formed early and trapped
much radioactive heat,” Russell says. “Ceres formed later and remained
cool.”
Cool, of course, is a relative term. Marc Neveu of Arizona State
University has calculated that in the first million years after its formation,
Ceres still heated up enough to melt some of its water—not enough to
produce full water/rock differentiation, but enough to produce hydrothermal
activity, in which liquid water could circulate through cracks.
That not only provides a source for salt, but also could have had a
radical impact on how Ceres evolved. Such hydrothermal circulation would
have carried heat toward the surface, just as happens with earthly hot
springs and geysers. That would cool the interior, possibly by enough to
shut down the hydrothermal circulation. Without the circulation, however,
heat would again build up in the interior until eventually hydrothermal
circulation resumed. “You get repeating cycles,” Neveu says.
There is no theoretical reason this process (no longer powered by
aluminum-26 but by long-lived radionuclides such as uranium or
potassium-40) couldn’t have continued to the present day. If you’re looking
for a mechanism to bring heat to the surface to produce the Ahuna Mons
volcano, this might be it.
But that’s not the only process that might be occurring today. In a 2015
paper in Nature, 4 a team led by Andreas Natheus, of Germany’s Max
Planck Institute for Solar System Research, reported that during Ceres’s
daytime, something appears to be sublimating from Occator’s floor,
creating a haze that fills much of the crater. At night, the haze condenses
and disappears, suggesting that there are volatile materials on, or not all that
far beneath Ceres’s surface. (Not the salts; these salts aren’t volatile at
Ceres temperatures.)
Russell suggests that means Ceres may have features in common with
comets. (He also notes that it has much in common with the icy moons of
Saturn, like Enceladus and Dione.) It’s even possible that Ceres wasn’t
formed at its present distance form the Sun but instead migrated into the
Asteroid Belt from farther out. That would have allowed it to have formed
with a richer store of volatiles than would be possible in the relatively
warmer climes of its present location.
Support for this comes from another paper in the same issue of Nature,
by a team led by Maria Cristina De Sanctis of the National Institute of
Astrophysics, Rome, Italy. In that paper, De Sanctis reports a bombshell:
spectral analysis of Ceres’s surface shows signs of ammonia.5
Ammonia is interesting because when mixed with water it acts as an
antifreeze that can lower the freezing point to as cold as-97°C (143°F),
depending on the precise mix of ammonia and water. This means liquid can
be present at far lower temperatures than is possible for pure water,
permitting a wide variety of fluid processes in worlds that would otherwise
be frozen solid. Ammonia, however, isn’t something that should be present
in worlds formed at Ceres’s part of the Asteroid Belt; that’s simply too close
to the Sun for ammonia ever to have condensed out of the solar nebula.
 De Sanctis believes this means that Ceres’s similarities to the moons of
Saturn therefore isn’t all that coincidental; she thinks Ceres either formed in
the outer Solar System and migrated inward, or was formed from pebbles
that came from farther out. But at the moment, this is still very speculative.
An alternative idea, favored by Russell, is that the ammonia somehow
formed from internal processes that don’t require Ceres to have moved from
somewhere else to its present part of the Solar System. “As we get more
people in the lab, looking at what can happen inside [Ceres] we may be able
to come up with an alternative way of making the chemistry we see on the
surface,” he says.
Meanwhile, Dawn is nearing the end of its active mission. Its ion
engines still have plenty of fuel, but two of the spacecraft’s four flywheels
have given out, forcing controllers to rely more strongly on Dawn’s
orientation thrusters to point the spacecraft in the desired directions for
maneuvers or collecting data. This means that thruster fuel is now the
limiting factor. So long as no more reaction wheels give out, there’s enough
fuel to continue present operations, but if another wheel fails, the spacecraft
may be, for all practical purposes, unusable. “We may be operating to the
end of 2016,” Russell says, “but we do not expect to continue after that.”
However much longer the spacecraft remains operational, it’s already
taught us a lot. When Asimov penned his career-launching story, for
example, the only description he gave of Vesta was that it was a two-
hundredmile-wide globe covered in frozen carbon dioxide that made it
appear “shiny.” That’s three facts (four if you also count the choice of the
word “shiny”), all based on ideas that were reasonable at the time, all
wrong.
Future stories about Ceres will also depict a world different from that
which science fiction readers have known. Not that all prior stories hewed
close to the science of their own times: it’s been depicted as everything
from a prison planet to a world with a breathable atmosphere and intelligent
natives.
A more common theme, however, has been its use as a way station and
transshipment point for asteroid miners, spacers, and freight. Depictions
vary from Niven’s use of it as the seat of Asteroid Belt government to Allen
Steele’s view of it as a backwater spaceport in “The Death of Captain
Future” (Asimov’s, October 1995). “Ceres Station wasn’t like the Moon,” he
has his narrator say in that story, “it was too small an outpost to... simply
hang around until the next outer-system vessel passed through.” Small,
generic, and not very interesting in and of itself; if there’s a majority view
of Ceres in science fiction, that’s probably it: a sort of mini-Moon stuck out
in the middle of nowhere.
Except... that’s not true, either. Ceres may actually be a better place for
a base than the Moon. Yes, it’s farther away, but lower gravity makes it
easier to land on. Its geology is fascinating and diverse, and apparently
active—raising the possibility that tectonic and hydrothermal processes
may have concentrated usable minerals into high-value veins and ores.
Asteroid prospectors of the future might even find themselves exploring the
surface of Ceres and staking claims, in a remarkable throwback to the old-
timers of the American West, with their picks, shovels, and mules. And
while nobody on the Dawn team has yet spotted water ice on the surface,
Paul Hayne, a planetary geophysicist at JPL, has calculated that conditions
on Ceres are suitable for it to exist only a meter or two beneath the ground.
Better yet, he says, there are tens of thousands of square kilometers at the
poles where the combination of deep shadows and limited sunlight might
have produced cold traps that might hold not only water, but also methanol,
ammonia, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide.
The bottom line is that Ceres might be a much better site for a base than
the Moon. It also has the advantage that its day is only nine hours, meaning
that people not only won’t have to adapt to the two-week lunar night, but
that there won’t be the enormous difference between daytime and nighttime
temperatures that we see on the Moon. For people living underground, this
won’t matter, but for anyone venturing onto the surface (and for equipment
placed on the surface), it could give Ceres another big advantage.
If people do live there, one of the things you can be sure they will do is
explore its fascinating geology and topology; it wouldn’t be hard to imagine
an annual race to the summit of Ahuna Mons, tourist treks into the salt-flats
of Occator Crater, or possibly even efforts to spelunk whatever caverns
might (or might not) exist beneath its pit chains.
During the Golden Age of science fiction, Ceres and Vesta were barely
more than dots in the sky. Today, thanks largely to Dawn, they have come to
life as full-fledged worlds... mapped and measured in many ways, but with
enough new mysteries to give science fiction fuel for stories nobody before
could even have imagined.

Footnotes:

1 The only other suspected survivor is the asteroid Pallas, which is the third
largest in the Asteroid Belt, and only slightly smaller than Vesta.
2 For details, see Kevin Righter and Joshua Garber, “The HED
Compendium,” Curation: Antarctic Meteorites, NASA, May 2011.
http://curator.jsc.nasa.gov/antmet/hed/hed_what.cfm.
3 Tolkien’s Lonely Mountain is the site of the Kingdom Under the
Mountain in The Hobbit.
4 A. Nathues, et al, “Sublimation in bright spots on (1) Ceres,” Nature 528,
237–240 (December 10, 2015) doi:10.1038/nature15754.
5 M. C. De Sanctis, et al, “Ammoniated phyllosilicates with a likely outer
Solar System origin on (1) Ceres ,” Nature 528, 241–244 (December 10,
2015) doi:10.1038/nature16172.
6 This is not a far-fetched idea. Similar cold traps have been found on the
Moon and Mercury. What’s needed are steep crater rims and a low-obliquity
spin axis, making the difference between summer and winter so small that
significant areas are permanently shaded. Both exist on Ceres. (Its axis is
angled at a mere four degrees.)
Black Box
Robert Borski | 65 words

Like a rickety heart,

the pulse-emitting device
sits deep within the downed craft
waiting for the star-lit sky
to roll back around again.
Only then and briefly
does it transmit a signal
outward, hoping its coded
barrage of noise will reach
attentive ears and reveal
to investigators not just
the pertinent avionics data,
but the final resting place
of the intrepid soldiery
trapped within the burnt
sarcophagus of silver & pearl,
their only eulogy for now
a series of blips, bleeps,
and what-went-wrongs.
GUEST EDITORIAL
Rosemary Claire Smith | 2193 words

ON THE MONEY: SCIENTIST AND INVENTOR WANTED

In something akin to a game of musical chairs for famous figures from

history, the United States Treasury Department announced that Harriet
Tubman will replace Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill. This is a
significant decision, as the U.S. government doesn’t tinker with any image
appearing on the world’s leading currency without significant forethought
based on input from many segments of society, including ordinary citizens.
In selecting the selfemancipated slave, freedom fighter, and suffragist,
Treasury Secretary Jack Lew lauded Tubman as “a role model for
leadership and participation in our democracy."1 President Andrew
Jackson’s likeness won’t be eliminated entirely, however, but rather will be
moved to the reverse side of the $20 note.
This development raises an interesting question. With a mere seven
denominations of paper currency in common circulation ($1, $2, $5, $10,
$20, $50, and $100 bills), who else might merit one of these prominent
positions? I urge my country to place a scientist and/or an inventor on the
front of one of our paper bills. Are you surprised? The United States should
take this step not in spite of the scarcity of the “musical chairs” available
for prominent figures from the country’s past, but rather precisely because
of the rarity of this accolade. Time was when this distinction was restricted
to the nation’s founders, military leaders, and presidents. Not so long ago,
many people would have dismissed the possibility of replacing Andrew
Jackson with Harriet Tubman in the central place of honor on the updated
$20 bill. Those days are over.
When considering numerous worthy contenders for one of the few
coveted spots, one may wonder why any scientist or inventor should be so
honored. After all, before selecting Harriet Tubman, the treasury
department received hundreds of suggestions as to people who “played a
pivotal role in our nation’s history."2 Treasury Secretary Lew pointed to
Tubman’s “courage and commitment to equality [which] embodies the
ideals of democracy that our nation celebrates."3 Our nation’s ideals not
only include expanding our knowledge of the Universe through scientific
discoveries, but also fundamentally improving our lives through invention
and technological advances. In short, scientists seek truth. Inventors
enhance our daily existence. Bestowing this honor upon a scientist or
inventor would make a powerful statement by promoting science and
technology as worthy endeavors for young people.
Isn’t it past time for the United States to join dozens of other countries
around the globe in celebrating prominent scientists and inventors? A very
abbreviated list drawn from the currency of other nations in circulation now
or in the past includes: Galileo Galilei (Italian 2000 Lire note), Sir Isaac
Newton (British 1 Pound note), Nicolaus Copernicus (Polish 1000 Zlotny
note), Carl Linnaeus (Swedish 100 Kroner note), Erwin Schrodinger
(Austrian 1000 Schilling note), Marie and Pierre Curie (French 500 Franc
note), and Charles Darwin (British 10 Pound note).
Before evaluating worthy scientists and inventors, the question arises as
to which bills or coins may be in need of a makeover. While the U.S.
Bureau of Printing and Engraving is already working to redesign the $5 and
$10 bills, neither Abraham Lincoln nor Alexander Hamilton is in danger of
being evicted from the front of the $5 or $10 notes. Nor do George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson appear likely to lose their places on the
front of the $1 and $2 bills. Likewise, the roster for U.S. coins seems too
firmly fixed at this time to undergo a changing of the guard. Currently,
those positions are taken by Abraham Lincoln (penny), Thomas Jefferson
(nickel), Franklin Delano Roosevelt (dime), George Washington (quarter),
John Fitzgerald Kennedy (half dollar), Susan B. Anthony (dollar), and
Sacagawea (dollar).
That leaves the $50 and $100 bills (featuring Ulysses S. Grant and
Benjamin Franklin, respectively) as the most likely choices for an update. If
it comes down to picking between President Grant and Benjamin Franklin,
for several reasons I’d stay with Franklin, leaving Grant as the odd man out.
For one thing, Benjamin Franklin is widely recognized for multiple
accomplishments as one of the nation’s founders, as a statesman, as a
diplomat, and as an inventor who pioneered the field of electricity. In
contrast, despite serving as Commanding General of the Union Army
during the American Civil War and two terms as President, Ulysses S.
Grant is less well known and his accomplishments not quite as notable as
Franklin’s.
Next, we might give some thought to the factors indicating that a person
merits serious consideration. I believe the choice ought to rest upon four
factors: 1) outstanding achievement in an important field of endeavor; 2)
prominence that has withstood the test of time; 3) a strong tie to the United
States; and 4) an absence of reprehensible acts sufficient to disqualify that
person in the eyes of many.
First, let’s consider outstanding achievement in an important field of
endeavor. I would not restrict this to the hard sciences such as physics or
chemistry. Nor would I place limits upon the types of inventions. The key
consideration for me is that the person’s achievement revolutionized how
we think about some aspect of the world or led to dramatic improvements in
our living conditions.
My next criterion is enduring prominence that has withstood the test of
time. It may well be too soon to confer this honor upon those whose great
achievements came to fruition in the past fifty years. Also, given that U.S.
currency has quite a number of eighteenth-century figures (all those
founders and presidents, for example), a sense of balance suggests that the
search ought to focus on outstanding individuals from the nineteenth
century and early twentieth century. Let’s pick someone who embodies the
can-do qualities that helped Americans achieve so much during those time
periods.
A strong tie to the United States seems an obvious factor. This ought to
include both natural born and naturalized citizens. My preference is for
persons who, while dwelling on American soil, made critical strides in their
chosen fields and thereby enhanced the lives of many Americans at the time
or later.
The final factor is a disqualifier intended to head off prospective
controversies to the extent possible. In recent years, Andrew Jackson’s
reputation as a war hero, populist, and our seventh president has been
diminished by his pivotal role in forcibly removing and relocating the
Cherokee, Seminole, Choctaw, and other native peoples from their ancestral
homeland in the Southeast, resulting in thousands of deaths along what
came to be called the Trail of Tears.
Now that we have the criteria, who made my short list? Albert Einstein,
Thomas A. Edison, Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, Henrietta Swan
Leavitt, George Washington Carver, Rachel Carson, and the Wright
Brothers. Of these, I don’t see a shoo-in who stands above the rest.
Let’s begin with the most famous of them. Albert Einstein’s enduring
legacy for achievements in physics is second to none, having withstood the
test of time, no matter that all too few Americans would recognize the
equation E=mc2. Yet, I hesitate over this obvious choice because Einstein
developed and published his landmark works on special relativity and
general relativity while living in Bern, Switzerland and Berlin, Germany
before he became an American citizen. He left Germany in 1933 shortly
before the Nazis took over. After settling in the United States, Einstein
focused on formulating a unified field theory, work that remained
unfinished upon his death.
No doubt Thomas A. Edison deserves serious consideration. Though
famous for his own inventions, such as the phonograph and the motion
picture camera, his strengths lay more in the realm of the commercial
development of the inventions made by the remarkable people he hired. For
example, it’s been claimed that Edison did not so much invent the light bulb
as improve upon the insights of many others and market the resulting
product. Thus he may not be the best choice.
We might better focus instead on one of Edison’s employees, Nikola
Tesla, the inventor, physicist, and engineer who ushered in the age of
electricity. A Serb who emigrated to the United States in 1884 at the age of
28 and became a citizen seven years later, Tesla eventually ventured out on
his own to develop alternating current and to design the first hydroelectric
plant. What’s more, his patents formed the basis for both RADAR and
Marconi’s invention of radio. While these and other achievements of his are
indeed impressive, Nikola Tesla is not exactly a household name.
Reluctantly, I must question whether he is sufficiently prominent to merit
the accolade.
Alexander Graham Bell is another nineteenth century inventor who
comes readily to the minds of many. As a Scotsman who became a
naturalized citizen of the United States, Bell is credited with the invention
of the telephone, from which our modern system of globe-spanning
communications ultimately derives. However, both Alexander Graham Bell
and his patent attorneys were the subject of lawsuits for alleged
improprieties in relying upon the work of another inventor as part of the
patent filing. The controversy continues to this day.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt was a notable American astronomer, even
though she is unknown to many people today. She investigated the
fluctuation in luminosity of variable stars, which led to calculations of their
distance from the Earth, and in turn to determinations of both the size of the
Milky Way Galaxy and the location of the Sun within it, as well as the age
of the Universe. Having overcome the challenges of deafness and the ban
on women operating Harvard's telescope over a century ago, she was
considered for a Nobel Prize until it was learned that she had passed away.
Another worthy candidate is George Washington Carver. Though less
well known than Harriett Tubman, he too was born a slave before the Civil
War. Despite growing up in a society where much was stacked against him,
George Washington Carver became a prominent botanist, inventor,
educator, and early environmentalist who pioneered methods of crop
rotation and the development of new crops. Like Nikola Tesla, he lacks the
fame of Einstein or Edison or Bell.
The renown Rachel Carson is another leading contender for the coveted
spot on U.S. currency. She ably combined her insights as a marine zoologist
and conservationist with her gift for nature writing in her landmark book,
Silent Spring, which sparked widespread public concerns over
environmental degradation locally, nationally, and globally. Like Harriett
Tubman, Rachel Carson serves as a role model for participation in a
democratic society. As we consider the future of our home planet and its
varied inhabitants, I'm in favor of honoring this eloquent champion for the
Earth's ecosystem.
Wilbur and Orville Wright, better known as the Wright Brothers, are
widely hailed for constructing the first motorized fixed-wing aircraft, and
their successful 1903 controlled flight. These life-long American citizens
also endured their share of patent litigation, though ultimately they
prevailed and are regarded as the inventors who ushered in the era of human
flight. As we turn our gaze beyond our planet and contemplate the future of
human exploration, I confess that I’m partial to choosing both Wright
Brothers for the $50 bill. Nothing requires that the face on the bill be that of
a single individual. Indeed, recognizing that theirs was a collaborative
effort, like so many other inspiring endeavors, strikes me as a great idea in a
country that so prizes individualism above other virtues.
Having presented my list, let me try to head off several objections. First,
all but one of these prominent American scientists and inventors, not to
mention others whom I haven’t put forward, already grace U.S. postage
stamps. Isn’t a stamp honor enough? Well no, it isn’t. Not to downplay the
distinction of appearing on a stamp, but so do Elvis Presley, Charlie
Chaplin, Snoopy, and a banana split. In fact, thirty new designs for postage
stamps were announced for 2016 alone. So yes, the stamp gig is an honor,
but not enough of one. In contrast, there are just seven paper bills printed in
denominations of $100 or less and only six denominations of coins in
widespread circulation. Gracing a postage stamp is not in the same league
as being placed on the money.
Next, some will no doubt grumble about U.S. currency being fine the
way it is. Doesn’t the government have better things to do than to devote
time and money to fiddling with it? What can I say, except to smile
whenever someone who professes to be future-oriented, such as a reader of
science fiction, mutters against change, craving the old days.
Lastly, there will doubtless be readers sure that I’ve missed the mark
and eager to put forward other more worthy nominees for the distinction. To
you I say, “The floor is open. Let’s hear ’em. Let’s have this discussion.
Who is worthy and why? Tell us.”
To conclude, placing a scientist and/or inventor on the $50 note—be it
someone I’ve discussed or another individual—would send a signal to the
rest of the world that Americans regard our scientists and inventors as
important as the founders of our country, our presidents, and our nation’s
war heroes. They are our leading citizens. In affording them this accolade,
the United States would join many other nations that recognize the
remarkable insights and achievements of top scientists and inventors.

Footnotes:
1 https://medium.com/@USTreasury/an-open-letter-from-secretary-
lew672cfd591d02#.vp9bckd01.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
IN TIMES TO COME
163 words

The December issue, naturally, has a multitude of potent stories: We see

that sometimes even the best of friends can grow apart, in “Prodigal,” by
Gord Sellar; and sometimes the only way out of a bad situation is up, in
“Jewels from the Sky,” by Brendan DoBois; that “with great power, comes
great responsibility” isn’t just for Spider-Man—it’s also vital “In Boonker’s
Room,” by Eliot Fintushel; we’re reminded that technology, like any tool, is
what you make of it, in “Crowdfinding,” by Eric James Stone; and yet, a
biological process may not always limited to biological entities, in
“Evolution,” by James Glass; sometimes the harsh life of colonists leads to
equally harsh choices in “Like the Deadly Hands,” by Nisi Shawl; James
Van Pelt makes a nod to the old serials (without featuring the actual
character) in “The Continuing Saga of Tom Corbett: Space Cadet”; and we
engage in a little deep space espionage in “Black Orbit” by Martin
Shoemaker.
See you next issue!
THE ALTERNATE VIEW
Richard A. Lovett | 2196 words

CIS AND TRANS ON THE TRACK

In the early 1980s, John Harper was a Canadian distance runner—not quite
world class, but with times good enough to have been ranked among
Canada’s top dozen or so marathoners had he remained in Canada. But
Harper didn’t remain in Canada. Instead, Joanna Harper is now an
American distance runner with a drawer full of USA Track & Field national
championship medals, including six gold medals in the 50–54 and 55–59
age groups.
For a transgender woman, such success doesn’t come without
controversy; people have even accused her of changing genders in order to
find a division she could win.
Ignoring the obvious silliness of suggesting someone would make such
a major life change for such a trivial reason (it’s not as though winning
masters medals will make you rich and famous), it wasn’t even possible
when Harper made the transition. At the time, transgender women weren’t
allowed to compete as women. It was only after she was committed to the
change that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) revised its
position, allowing people like her to compete two years after gender
reassignment surgery.1

As of press time (in July), no openly transgender athlete has taken

advantage of the opportunity to compete at that level.2But someday that is
bound to change.
In athletics, the question isn’t which bathroom such women should use
(a question that wasn’t even much of an issue until politics made it one), but
a simpler and much more obvious one: Do transgender women’s prior lives
as males give them an unfair advantage? After all, men’s track records are
about 10% faster than women’s, raising concerns that some of that
advantage might carry through the transition.
There are sports in which this would obviously be a problem. The first
time a seven-foot basketball center transitions to female, women’s
basketball will have an issue. There are also sports, like target shooting and
archery, in which the transition is probably irrelevant.3 So it makes sense
that the issue first arose in a sport like track and field, where height is
generally not an advantage, but where there are important physiological
concerns.
Two of these concerns center around testosterone and hemoglobin, both
of which are higher in men than women.
Testosterone is a male sex hormone associated with greater strength and
higher muscle mass. (There is a reason why dopers try to use it and related
chemicals to boost their performances.) Hemoglobin is related to the
blood’s oxygen-carrying capacity. (It too is of interest to dopers, who have
been caught trying to boost it with illegal blood transfusions and injections
of the blood-boosting hormone EPO.) People who are born female do
produce testosterone, but at levels more than an order of magnitude lower
than men. They also have hemoglobin levels about 12% lower than men.
(The combination of these two differences undoubtedly plays a big role in
the difference between the best men’s and women’s performances.)
But in 2004, two Dutch scientists, Louis J. G. Gooren and Mathijs C.
Bunck, from Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit, discovered that within a year
after gender reassignment surgery, transgender women had testosterone and
hemoglobin levels no higher than their female-born compatriots. It was this
study, in fact, published in the European Journal of Endocrinology, that led
the IOC to allow transgender women to compete—although the IOC
decided to be conservative and double the waiting period from one to two
years.

Meanwhile, Harper was noticing in herself the same things Gooren and
Bunck had found in their study. “Within a month of starting on hormones I
was noticeably slower,” she says. Furthermore, her physiology was
changing. She lost muscle mass and discovered that her hemoglobin levels
fell from “normal male” levels to “normal female.”
But what did this mean in terms of performance?
 Gooren and Bunck hadn’t studied anything but physiology, but Harper
was a life-long competitive runner. Before her transition she’d been a 46-
year-old male with a recent 10K time of 37:10. Two years later, on the same
course, as a 48-year-old female, she could only hit 42:01. That’s an 11.5%
slowdown—almost exactly what you’d expect from the male-to-female
transition plus two years of aging. Nor had she gotten lazy. “I wasn’t about
to let a little thing like a sex change cut into my training and racing,” she
quips.
In addition to being a runner, Harper is scientifically sophisticated (she
works as a medical physicist in a Portland, Oregon, hospital) so she knew
how scientific studies worked. Also, as a masters runner, she was familiar
with the set “age-grading” tables compiled by British statistician Howard
Grubb.
These tables allow runners to rate their performances on the basis of the
percentage of world-record pace they run for their age and gender. One of
their uses is so masters runners can compare their current performances to
what they did in their youths. But they can also be used for age-and-gender-
graded races in which older runners and women have a chance to beat the
young, fast guys.
Harper’s brainstorm was to realize that these tables could be used to
compare performances before and after a gender transition. Curious to see if
others had had the same experience she’d had, she set out to recruit other
transgender women runners willing to share their race results. It wasn’t an
easy task, but eventually she found seven, ranging in age from upper
twenties to lower fifties at the time of transition. Some were national-class
talents, others mid-pack competitors.
Her results, published in 2015 in the Journal of Sporting Cultures and
Identities, matched Gooren and Bunck’s physiological findings. Before
changing genders, her eight subjects (counting herself) had on average
performed at the 68.7% level as men. Afterward, they performed at the
68.5% level for women, as slightly older women. In other words, their age-
and-gender graded performances had barely budged once their bodies had
adjusted to their transitions. The one outlier was a woman who’d cut fifty
minutes off her marathon time: from 3:48:55 as a 19-yearold male to
2:59:10 as a 31-year-old female. But she’d also doubled her training load
and lost twenty pounds. “She got serious,” Harper says. “Not surprisingly,
she got faster.”

Other scientists are impressed. Geoffroy Berthelot, a specialist in

informatics and algorithmics at the National Institute of Sport, Expertise,
and Performance in Paris, France, calls Harper’s study a great example of
citizen science, demonstrating that “everyone can enter science—not only
scientists.”
That said, he notes that none of Harper’s runners was an international-
level elite, raising the question of whether, at that level, there might be
small advantages her study wasn’t able to address. For example, at 5000
meters the difference between 14:11.15 (the current women’s world record)
and 14:05.00 (a good but not world-class time for a man) is a mere 0.74
points on Grubb’s scale. Not only was Harper’s study unable to assess
athletes of this class, but with only eight study subjects it didn’t have the
statistical power to spot such tiny distinctions.
Yannis Pitsiladis, a professor of sports and exercise science at the
University of Brighton, England, agrees. “I’m a big fan of Joanna,” he says,
praising her for opening the door to this line of research. But he too believes
it’s necessary for future studies to have larger numbers of participants.
Based solely on Harper’s work, he says, “I believe the jury is out.”
That said, Pitsiladis and Harper come at the issue from classically
opposing perspectives. Harper thinks like an epidemiologist, looking for
statistical associations. Pitsiladis is a physiologist, preferring details of
what’s going on at the cellular level. It’s a difference in worldview you’ll
find in everything from health-andnutrition studies to the question of what
causes cancer. Both approaches produce insights, but it is in combination
that they most effectively move this type of research forward.
That next step forward, Pitsiladis believes, is via studies that follow
athletes through the transition, rather than looking at them afterward. (He
also thinks it would be useful to examine both male-to-female transitions
and female-tomale transitions.) Such studies, he says, would not only allow
scientists to document the effect of the transition on the athletes’
performances, but to use all the tools of modern medicine—ones
traditionally associated with diagnosing and treating cancer—to determine
what is going on at the genomic, metabolomic, proteomic, and epigenomic
levels. One of the more exotic of such issues involves what he calls “muscle
memory” in the form of myonuclei. Myonuclei are simply the nuclei of
muscle cells; what makes them important is that muscles can have more
than one nucleus per cell... and this may help make them more powerful.
This appears to be related to gender, raising the question of whether
transgender women’s cells retain the number of myonuclei they had as men
or if they adjust to normal female levels.
Funding for such research, Pitsiladis adds, might come not only from
sports, but from the military. “The transgender community is also big in
some of the military organizations around the world,” he says.

Mixed Genders

The results of these studies should be useful not only in figuring out
how sports can fairly make room for transgender women, but also in the
more complex question of how to address intersex competitors who are
born with a mixture of male and female traits.
One of the most famous of these is Maria Martínez-Patiño, who has
allied with Pitsiladis and Harper in the effort to move the research forward.
She is a Spanish hurdler who was disqualified from international
competition in 1986 when she failed a gender verification test. Even though
she’d always thought she was a woman, it was discovered that she was
genetically XY, the traditional marker for male status.
What made her intersex was a condition called androgen insensitivity
syndrome (AIS), which means that her body does not respond to male sex
hormones, including testosterone. Thus, whatever her chromosomes said,
she was physiologically female. (She was later cleared to compete for the
1992 Olympics, for which she failed to qualify by a mere 0.1 second.)
AIS is one of many conditions that mean a person’s sex is not clearly
defined at birth. Another was exhibited by South African 800-meter runner
Castor Semenya, who won the 2009 world championships only to have it
discovered that she had internal testes, no uterus or ovaries, and three times
the normal female levels of testosterone. She’d thought she was a woman,
but biologically, her status was ambiguous.
 All told, there are more than a dozen conditions classified as intersex,
affecting as many as one in one thousand people. That makes it a big issue
in international competition, says Harper, who has become a leading expert
in gender in sports, testifying before such organizations as the Court of
Arbitration in Sport and serving as an expert advisor for the IOC. “While
Caster Semenya has gotten most of the media attention, she is far from the
only presumably intersex athlete to have competed at a very high level in
athletics,” she recently told the website The Science of Sport. “In fact, two
of the three medalists in the 800meter race at the [2016] indoor world
championships are probably intersex."4
One of the things Pitsiladis, Harper, and Martínez-Patiño hope to
accomplish with the next round of research on transgender athletes is to
figure out what specifically it is, physiologically, that allows women to
compete as women and men as men, as well as where the advantages and
disadvantages lie. From that, they hope to move on to intersex athletes and
the question of what treatments they, like transgender women, must undergo
if they are to compete fairly.
In 1972, when I was a sophomore in college, Congress passed a law
called Title IX, which, among other things, called for increased equality in
women’s sports. It turned out to be one of the most quietly revolutionary
things our country has ever done.
When I took up distance running in the late 1970s, one of my training
partners was a female graduate student who’d not been allowed to run as an
undergraduate because her school hadn’t had a women’s team. I now coach
a 250-member running club that is full of the children of Title IX: women
under age 45 who grew up assuming they could do whatever sport they
wanted. Every now and then, Congress gets it right.
Now, we have a new challenge: determining how science can best
define “woman” and how, fairly, to accommodate those who do not meet
the conventional definitions. I find it intriguing, and in the finest sense
ironic, that the best handle we may have on this begins with transgender
women. If the science pans out, it is likely to be these people—not the ones
born in bodies that matched their inner gender identities—who may help us
understand exactly what it means to be female.
Footnotes:

1 In 2016 the rule was changed to allow transgen der women to eliminate
the need for surgery, requir ing only hormone treatments.
2 Caitlyn Jenner not only wasn’t out at the time, but also competed as male.
3 And nobody is particularly worried about the competitive status of
transgender men, since it’s hard to find a male sport in which a history of
being female might be an advantage.
4 Sportsscientists.com, 23 May 2016.

Rick Lovett is a prolific author of both fiction and nonfiction. A former

law professor, he also holds a Ph.D. in economics and a B.S. in
astrophysics. Find him at www.richardalovett.com.
BIOLOG
Richard A. Lovett | 584 words

GRAY RINEHART

Science fiction writers tend to have eclectic backgrounds, but on a ten-point

scale, Gray Rinehart is the perfect eclectic: the only person ever to
command a satellite tracking station, write speeches for presidential
appointees, produce CDs of science-fiction music, and write for Analog.
His writing career began in fairly standard manner, with a grade-school
love of Star Trek and Lost in Space reruns. Then a neighbor loaned him a
stack of books and magazines. “The ones I most clearly remember are
Sargasso of Space (by Andre Norton), Lest Darkness Fall (by L. Sprague
de Camp), and one of the Gor novels,” he says.
Soon enough, he was writing his own stories, which he calls
“predictably terrible.” Then he got a degree in mechanical engineering and
joined the Air Force. “I was in the rocket propulsion laboratory at Edwards
Air Force Base,” he says.
Later he was transferred to Vandenberg Air Force Base, where he
arrived shortly after a Titan 4 rocket blew up over the Santa Barbara
Channel. The investigators wanted pieces of it for their work, so as the new
guy, Rinehart got the duty of coordinating with the navy, dredging up rocket
bits from the seabed. “I still have a piece of it somewhere,” he says.
He then bounced around the globe, including a stint commanding the
Thule Tracking Station in Greenland, at the time the largest station in the
Air Force’s satellite control network. Another assignment sent him to
Kazakhstan to oversee installation of a U.S.-Canadian satellite on a Russian
Proton rocket. In the process, he observed differences between U.S. and
Russian procedures, including when the Russians were installing insulating
blankets around the upper stages of the rocket. “This lady came out with a
needle and thread to stitch the blankets together,” he says. “I thought that
was really cool.”
Cool enough that a year after he retired from the Air Force with the rank
of Lieutenant Colonel, it inspired his first sale, “The Rocket Seamstress”
(Zahir, Spring 2007), in which the success or failure of a launch hinged on
the magic the seamstress imbued into the blankets she pieced together.
Near the end of his military career, his communication skills landed him
a job as speechwriter for two successive Under Secretaries of the Air Force.
“It was a blast,” he says. “I loved helping put the message we wanted to
convey in terms that whatever audience was listening could relate to.”
Since retiring from the Air Force in 2006, he’s worked for North
Carolina State University’s Industrial Extension Service and as an editor for
Baen books. “My official title is contributing editor,” he says, “but
unofficially I’m Slushmaster General. I evaluate the vast majority of
unsolicited manuscripts that come in.” (Meanwhile, his novelette “Ashes to
Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium” [Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic
Medicine Show, May 2014] was a 2015 Hugo nominee.)
And if that’s not enough for a lifetime, in 2013 he began releasing
albums of sciencefiction folk songs (filk songs to those who regularly
attend conventions), with titles like “The Faded Coat of Brown,” “Another
Romulan Ale,” and “The Monster Hunter Ballad.” But even his music is
eclectic. “We describe the album as ‘a compendium of musical selections
inspired or influenced by science fiction, fantasy, life, and faith,’” he says.
His is, quite simply, one of the most diverse resumes ever to grace the
pages of Analog. At a minimum, he says, he hopes that his experiences add
verisimilitude to his stories. “I hope,” he says, “that the fact I have traveled
to lots of different places and worked with lots of different people allows
my stories to come across as realistic.”
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY
Don Sakers | 2106 words

This is the November issue, and in the spirit of what’s now called Veterans
Day (and used to be called Armistice Day), it’s a good time to check in on
what’s been happening in the popular subgenre of military SF. Even if you
don’t consider yourself a fan of the stuff, keep reading: you might just find
something that sparks your interest.

Dark Victory: A Novel of Alien Resistance

Brendan DuBois
Baen, 324 pages, $15.00 (trade paperback)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $8.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8092-4
Series: Dark Victory 1
Genre: Military SF, Visitors From Space

Brendan DuBois made his name as a mystery/suspense writer. He’s a two-

time winner of the Shamus Award, given by the Private Eye Writers of
America. His work includes the highly successful Lewis Cole mystery
series, as well as multiple thrillers and short story collections.
In 1999 DuBois moved into the realm of alternate history with
Resurrection Day, a novel in which the Cuban Missile Crisis turned the
Cold War extremely hot. The book won the Sidewise Award for Alternate
History. In 2013 he produced a science fiction trilogy, The Empire of the
North, a story of revolution and rediscovery on a far-future postapocalyptic
Earth.
With Dark Victory, DuBois combines postapocalyptic SF with a good
old-fashioned alien invasion. Ten years ago the vaguely-insectoid Creepers
invaded, wiping out most human technology and leaving the desperate
survivors scattered in their wake.
 Sergeant Randy Knox barely remembers the world before the Creepers
arrived. After all, he’s only sixteen. With most adults perished in the war,
teens are all that’s left to defend the world. Randy, who’s been in the Army
since he was twelve, has a Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts, and a devoted K-
9 companion named Thor.
Together with two other boys, Randy’s assigned to escort an important
politician to the capital. In the course of fulfilling that mission, Randy
begins to discover that many things he believed about the Creepers and the
war aren’t exactly what he thought. The secrets he learns make him
question his life and his role in the world... and now he doesn’t know who
to trust.
Comparisons to the TV series Falling Skies are inevitable, but DuBois
has done a fine job of making this story his own. In particular, Randy—who
acts as the first-person narrator—is a well realized, compelling character.
We really care about him and his fate.
Dark Victory is the first of a series; it’ll be interesting to see where
Randy goes from here.

The Prison in Antares

Mike Resnick
Pyr, 300 pages, $18.00 (trade paperback)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $9.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-1-63388-102-0
Series: Dead Enders 2
Genre: Adventure SF, Military SF, Space Opera

Mike Resnick should need no introduction here. Author and editor, he’s
been active in the field for nearly half a century. With five Hugo Awards, 69
SF novels, over 250 short stories, and more then 40 anthologies, about the
only accolade he’s missing is the Grand Master Award, and that shouldn’t
be too long in coming. (You listening, SFWA?)
The Dead Enders series is good, fun military space opera, and The
Prison in Antares is the second in the series. If you haven’t read the first
title, The Fortress in Orion, don’t fret; Resnick quickly and unobtrusively
catches you up.
Captain Nathan Pretorius is a hero in the war between the human
Democracy (the good guys) and the alien Traanskei Coalition (the bad
guys). His team, the Dead Enders, is a ragtag collection of misfits that
includes a cyborg, an empath, a contortionist, and the obligatory mad
hacker, not all of them human. In book one, they replaced the Coalition’s
master tactician with a clone loyal to the Democracy.
Now the Dead Enders embark on a prison break. Scientist Edgar
Nmumba, only survivor of a team that invented a defense against the
dreaded Q-bomb, has been kidnapped by the Coalition. He’s being held in
the best-hidden, best-defended prison in the Antares sector—all the Dead
Enders have to do is find the prison, rescue Nmumba, and bring him home
before a dozen inhabited worlds are destroyed.
The heroes are eccentric, the action is nonstop, and the thrills just keep
coming. There are battles, surprises, doubleand triple-crosses, and hairs-
breadth escapes enough for any Hollywood blockbuster. This is the sort of
book that makes you dread the last chapter, because you won’t want it to be
over.

Imperative
Steve White & Charles E. Gannon
Baen, 456 pages, $16.00 (trade paperback)
Kindle: $7.55; iBooks, Nook: $9.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8119-8
Series: Starfire 9
Genre: Military SF, Space Opera

In a lot of military SF novels and even series, the end of the war means the
end of the story. After all, if the overarching goal is to defeat the enemy,
what’s to tell when that goal is met?
The Starfire series has told the tale of the long war with the Arduans—
incomprehensible aliens who originally invaded in slowerthan-light ships,
and who battled to exterminate the Pan-Sentient Union. Now the war’s
over. Many of the Arduans have surrendered, and found roles as
probationary citizens of the Rim Federation.
Not all the Arduans have surrendered, though. One of the chief holdouts
is Amunsit, admiral of an Arduan fleet; she and her followers have taken
control of the defenseless Zarzusia system. Aided by loyalist agents in the
Rim, Amunsit seeks to locate other missing Arduan fleets to bolster her
power.
As diplomats try vainly to bring peace, two heroes of the war are on a
different path. Admiral Ian Tremayne, veteran of the long war, joins forces
with a young jack-ofall-trades named Ossian Wethermere to investigate the
Arduan loyalists... and of course they uncover a deeper plot aimed at
bringing destruction to interstellar civilization.
The previous Starfire books have been fast-paced, fairly simple good-
guys-vs-bad-guys stories. Imperative is a slower-paced book, with a more
complex plot and a more ambiguous morality. We learn more about the
Arduans and their culture, and the background politics of the Pan-Sentient
Union. While Imperative doesn’t approach the delicious complexity of, say,
Catherine Asaro’s Skolian Empire books, or even David Weber’s Honor
Harrington universe, it is an interesting step in the Starfire series.

Storm Front
Robert Conroy
Baen, 233 pages, $25.00 (hardcover)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $9.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8087-0
Genre: Military SF, SF Thriller

Robert Conroy was the author of many alternate history novels, usually
with a military connection. He passed away in December 2014; Storm Front
may be his last book.
This one is a departure for Conroy. It’s not alternate history; it’s set in
the present day on our familiar Earth. Technically, it’s not really “military”
SF—it deals with a small-town police department in Michigan, paramilitary
at best. In fact, it could be argued that the book isn’t even science fiction:
the biggest SF element is the massive super-blizzard that turns much of the
midwest into a frozen apocalypse (climate change, perhaps?).
Still, there’s the strong flavor of military SF here. A group of survivors
in an alien landscape, besieged by hostile beings, protected by an organized,
trained squad of fighters.
Here’s the setup. Sheridan, Michigan is cut off from the rest of the
world by an unexpected, super-powerful winter storm. Two escaped
convicts trapped in the town start murdering people.
Police officer Mike Stuart, dealing with an incompetent chief and a
corrupt mayor, is faced with the task of protecting the town’s citizens and, if
possible, apprehending the killers. He’s aided by Wally Wellman, local
meteorologist.
There’s danger, tension, strategy, mental and physical battles... enough
to make for a satisfactory, pulse-pounding story.

Future Wars... and Other Punchlines

edited by Hank Davis
Baen, 340 pages, $14.00 (trade paperback)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $8.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8080-1
Genre: Humorous SF, Military SF, Reprint Anthologies

One doesn’t often associate military SF with humor. Oh, sure, even the
grimmest stories have their lighter moments. But war is a serious business,
isn’t it?
Editor Hank Davis begs to differ. And to prove it, he’s gathered sixteen
stories by seventeen authors, each one a humorous look at SF war.
A couple of these tales are brand new, but most of them were published
in magazines during the 1950s and 1960s. Four stories appeared in these
pages: “Historical Note” by Murray Leinster (Astounding, February 1951),
“The Spectre General” by Theodore R. Cogswell (Astounding, June 1952),
“Fool’s Mate” by Robert Sheckley (Astounding, March 1953), and “The
Gentle Earth” by Christopher Anvil (Astounding, November 1957). The rest
were primarily from Galaxy and If.
 The lineup of authors is impressive. Fredric Brown, Gordon R. Dickson,
David Drake, Murray Leinster, Frederick Pohl, Fred Saberhagen, Robert
Sheckley, and others only slightly less famous.
The range of stories is enormous. Invading aliens, hostile robots,
alternate history, first contacts, omnipotent computers—this anthology has
them all. Some bring a smile, others a chuckle, and there’s a guaranteed
guffaw or two.
Among the standout stories are Gordon R. Dickson’s “And Then There
Was Peace,” which presents a novel solution to the problem of what to do
with surplus military equipment; Frederik Pohl’s “The Abominable
Earthman,” in which the biggest goof-off in the Earth army wins the war by
surrendering to the aliens; Herbert Gold’s “The Day They Got Boston,” a
gallows-humor Cold War story of accidental nuclear war; and “Airborne All
the Way” by David Drake, a story of a very simple balloon mission gone
badly astray.
In these days of increasing international tensions, rogue nations, and the
nightmare of terrorism, we all need a laugh. Thank you, Hank Davis.

Three Faces of Asprin

Robert Asprin
Baen, 592 pages, $16.00 (trade paperback)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $8.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8164-8
Genre: Military SF

This omnibus volume collects three of Robert Asprin’s previously

published novels, all of which fall into the military SF subgenre. Otherwise,
the three books are unrelated.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: no, I don’t know, and can’t
imagine, why they didn’t title it Three Doses of Asprin.
The Cold Cash War (originally published in 1977) is expanded from a
novella of the same name (Analog, August 1977). It’s set in a near future in
which corporations settle disputes not in courts of law, but through armed
combat. It’s all non-lethal, until someone goes too far; suddenly the world is
consumed in all-out war and nobody’s safe.
In The Bug Wars (1979), two alien races struggle for dominance. The
reptilian Tzen have a complex caste-based society; they are in combat with
the Enemy, an insectoid race of brilliant tacticians. The story is told in
firstperson by Rahm, a warrior of the Tzen. Rahm rises in rank and caste as
the war continues across decades. The meat of the book is an exploration of
the two alien societies and differing conceptions of honor, duty, loyalty, and
similar ideas.
Tambu (1979) is an intricate meditation on ethics, morality, and personal
integrity. The shadowy figure known as Tambu commands a network of
pirates and criminals that terrorizes the known worlds. He’s the most feared
and hated villain in the galaxy.
Now a reporter named Erickson has been granted a series of interviews
with Tambu. Over the course of these interviews, we learn the story of
Tambu’s rise to power from lowly crewman on a tramp freighter to
allpowerful warlord. Along the way, Erickson begins to wonder if Tambu is
such a villain after all. It’s a question that readers must decide for
themselves.
Although there’s plenty of strategic planning and military action in the
book, ultimately Tambu—like most good SF, military or not—is about larger
themes.

Cobra War Trilogy

Timothy Zahn
Baen, 922 pages, $16.00 (trade paperback)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $8.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8165-5
Series: Cobra 4-6
Genre: Military SF

Timothy Zahn is primarily known for his Star Wars books—ten at last
count, including the seminal Grand Admiral Thrawn series. He’s also a
Hugo winner (for his novella “Cascade Point,” Analog, December 1983)
and author of forty-odd other SF and fantasy books. These include series
such as Blackcollar, Conquerors, Dragonback, Quadrail, and Cobra.
The Cobra trilogy (1985-88) told the origin of the Cobras: soldiers
enhanced with implanted tech, the ultimate warriors facing alien forces to
liberate a world. The books followed the family of Jonny Moreau, one of
the first Cobras, across generations.
In 2009–2012, Zahn returned to the Cobra universe with three more
books continuing the story of the Moreau family.
Cobra Alliance (2009) takes place after the war has been won. Earth has
become suspicious of the Cobras, and the Moreaus are in constant danger.
When they receive a cry of help, Cobra Jin Moreau heads to a distant planet
with her son Merrick. Has humanity’s old enemy returned... or are Jin and
Merrick headed into a trap?
In Cobra Guardian (2011) the aliens are definitely back and worse than
ever, with coordinated attacks that nearly wipe out the Cobra clan. Cobra
Jasmine Moreau Broom sets off on a quest for lost tech that might help the
Cobras to turn the tide.
Cobra Gamble (2012) continues the story, focusing on the political
challenge of uniting Cobra worlds with other distrustful human planets in
order to withstand increasingly deadly attacks.
War, politics, cool weapons, strong characters... the Cobra War Trilogy
is a nice reminder of how good Timothy Zahn is at all this stuff. If you’ve
never read the Cobra books, this is as good a place to start as any.

And with that, I’m afraid I’ve run out of space. See you next issue.

Don Sakers is the author of Meat and Machine, Elevenses, and the Rule
of Five serial at rule-of-5.com). For more information, visit
www.scatteredworlds.com.
BRASS TACKS
1327 words

Dear Trevor,
Just finished the June [2016] issue. Michael F. Flynn’s guest editorial
[“A Dialogue Concerning the Internal World System”] was amusing and
informative but I would hope not that many folks really believe all the stuff
of SF is truly possible. FTL and antigravity come to mind. SF is about
“What if?” not “What is?” In this instance the question might be framed as
“If designer babies were possible, what would the result be?” Fortunately,
his latest Journeyman tale was up to his usual excellent standard. I confess,
at some point I got the impression that Teo’s adventures took place on a
future Earth rather than a colony world. I’m glad to have it clarified.
Speaking of “What is?” the notion of interstellar warfare is pretty unlikely
but still fun.
Part II of Ed Lerner’s “A Brief History of Time Travel” and the
following story, “Where the Stone Eagle Flies” by Bill Johnson, made an
interesting pair, with one essentially saying time travel is virtually
impossible and the other showing its consequences. Marie Vibbert’s “Hold
the Moment” followed the theme nicely. I’m sure this was no accident. I do
wonder, based on Asimov’s 1966 story “The Billiard Ball,” if a stasis
chamber of the type Vibbert envisions—or any machine attempting to stop
or go backward in time—wouldn’t spontaneously accelerate to lightspeed
since time would necessarily slow to a stop before it reversed. This is, in
fact, the basis of a story I wrote a couple of decades ago.
In an earlier time, “That Which Grows on Trees” by C. S. Lane would
have been a “Probability Zero” so I’m glad the concept, if not the name, is
still with us.
Jay Werkheiser’s “The Anthropic War” had a vintage feel based on very
real—if obscure— science. Frightening and disturbing in the best way.
J. T. Sharra’s “The Nult Factor” was hilarious and biting. I particularly
loved the notion of a glow-in-the-dark sundial and the reaction of Reverend
Delbert J. Mayfair.
 David Phelps

Mr. Quachri,
Loved the latest installment of the adventures of Teodorq sunna
Nagaradjan. [“The Journeyman: In the Great North Wood” June 2016] Each
installment has just a taste, as now we know he’s not on a distopic Earth,
but an alien planet in the aftermath of an intergalactic war.
Sure am hoping to live long enough to buy the novel when Mr. Flynn
finally ties it all together!
The whole issue was great! Hope you keep it up!!
Ron Miller
Colorado Springs, CO

Dear Mr. Quachri,

I enjoyed Edward M. Lerner’s double article on time travel (“Here We
Go Loopedy Loop” Parts I & II, May–June 2016). It was truly a tour de
force on the subject. However, I believe that time travel via black holes
should be removed from consideration, simply because there’s good reason
to believe that black holes don’t actually exist.
The theory of black holes originated in the observation that
Schwarzschild’s metric function goes to infinity at a finite distance from the
center of a highly compact gravitating body and thus describes an event
horizon. If you look at that function, you may notice that the coefficients on
the radial and temporal terms are simply the squares of the Lorentz factor
and its reciprocal, respectively, with the velocity squared replaced by the
equivalent Newtonian gravitational potential. It’s as if we’re tracking the
speed of a small body falling freely in the gravitational field. That result is
semiclassical: it’s only valid in regions whence escape velocity is very
much smaller than the speed of light.
If we want a proper description of space time much closer to a tightly
compacted body, then we must use the relativistic calculation that equates
kinetic energy gained by a small body to gravitational potential energy lost.
That gives us the equivalent Lorentz factor directly and produces a metric
function that does not go to infinity. Without an event horizon there’s no
black hole, regardless of how intense the gravity gets. We’ll just have to
find another route to time travel.
 Dennis Anthony
Visalia, CA

Dear Editors,
After reading Edward M. Lerner’s “Here We Go Loopedy Loop” Part 1,
I eagerly awaited Part 2 and thoroughly enjoyed it in the June 2016 edition
of Analog. There was only one minor point I wish he had added to his fact
article that might have been best placed in the “Odds, Ends and Tropes”
section. Where he describes how particle/antiparticle pairs “appear from
nothingness,” it might have been appropriate to cite the Casimir Effect or,
Casimir-Polder Force which predicted the occurrence. Although Lerner’s
article was about time travel, Casimir’s explorations—which directly
contributed to the space contraction/expansion model and Alcubierre-type
“warp” drive might well rub up against the temporal dimension. I would
think the subject worthy of at least the briefest mention. Please pass on my
thanks to the author for an otherwise smashing article.
S. John Facey
San Antonio, TX

Dear Editors,
I have to take issue with both footnotes on page 36 [of “Here We Go
Loopedy Loop”] in the May 2016 issue (I saved reading it till part 2 came
[June 2016]). The non continuous nature of space and time (if correct) are
irrelevant to the particular Zeno paradox the author refers to, and the
convergence of series is the point, or rather the point is that the paradox is
created by treating two series that are mathematically equivalent as if they
were different, giving the impression that one converges and the other does
not.
To simplify, instead of looking at the original formulation consider the
equivalent “arrow” form of the paradox. Fire an arrow at a target— to get
there it has to cover 1/2 the distance, then cover 1/2 of the remaining
distance (1/4 of the total), then 1/2 the remaining distance— giving the
infinite series 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 etc. Since there are an infinite number of terms
to the series the arrow never reaches the target.
The statement of the paradox implies that the time series describing the
arrow’s flight is infinite, while the sum of the distances covered is finite
(not reaching the target). However, if the total time to target is 10 seconds
and the distance is 100 meters the time series can be written as 10*(1/2 +
1/4 + 1/8 +...) while the distance series can be written as 100*(1/2 + 1/4 +
1/8 +...) and the two series are, save for the constant at the start, the same
series so if one converges (finite distance) so does the other (finite time).
Treating things that are the same as if they are different, or treating them
as different when they are the same, are two common ways of creating
paradox problems, and you don’t need to worry about continuous or
discontinuous space and/or time and/or space-time to create or resolve
them.
Nice article though.
Neil Garston

Editors,
“Not Quite Taterona kempi” [May 2016] had the most interesting story
premise and story development I have seen lately.

Harold Parks
Minden, NV

Dear Mr. Quachri:

After reading Dr. Brown’s letter in the July/August Analog and your
extensive reply, I want to say that as a very long-term subscriber of Analog,
starting in John Campbell’s editorship in the early 1960s, the writer’s
feeling that the story “Season of the Ants in a Timeless Land” [November
2015] spun off into fantasy and was not, for her, an Analog story, is not my
feeling. The flavor of fantastical dreaming is part of the Lovett-
characterized tradition of strangeness and departure from the world we
know to make a new one and a device of story telling, not story per se. Ants
made that world successfully and used its difference to convey elusive but
important aspects of the nature of scientific findings. I’m glad you
published it and so continue to push the range of viewpoints from which
science may be appreciated as wide as it will go. You published another
story about insects and subterranean smoldering that dealt with the
trappings of technology in research very memorably, too; but this one was
more unusual in that it dealt with the phenomenon of migration, which we
are experiencing right now among our own kind with waves of north
African migration to the West.
Joe Quittner
UPCOMING EVENTS
Anthony Lewis | 398 words

NOTE: Membership rates and other details often change after we have gone
to press. In addition, most conventions have age-based membership rates in
advance and at the door. There also may be rates for single days. Check the
websites for the most recent information.

11–13 November 2016

TUSCON 43 (Tucson AZ area SF conference) at Radisson Hotel Tucson

Airport. Author GoH: George R.R. Martin; Artist GoH: Peri Charlifu;
Special Media Guest: William Malone; Special Anime Guest: James Perry
II; Special Guest Artists: Cirque des Bêtes; Special Guest: Geoff Notkin;
TM: Ed Bryant. Info: http://tusconscificon.com/; basfa@earth link.net;
BASFA dba TusCon, P.O. Box 2528, Tucson, AZ 85702.

18–20 November 2016

PHILCON 2016 (Philadelphia area SF conference) at The Crowne Plaza

Hotel, Cherry Hill NJ. The oldest regional SF conference in North America.
Principal Speaker: C. J. Cherrth; Artist GoH: Dave Seeley; Special Guest:
L. E. Modesitt, Jr. Info: www.philcon.org;
www.facebook.com/Philcon.PSFS; info2016 @philcon.org.

18–20 November 2016

ORYCON 38 (Oregon SF conference) at Portland Marriott Downtown

Waterfront, Portland OR. Writer GoH: David Weber; Editor GoH: Diana
Gill; Artist GoH: David Mattingly; Music GoH: Mark Osier; Special
Musical Guest: Leslie Hudson. Info: http://38.orycon.org/; OryCon 38
Registration, c/o D. Stephen Raymond, 720 NW Battaglia Avenue,
Gresham OR 97030.

25–27 November 2016

CHESSIECON 2016 (Baltimore area SF/Fsy/etc. conference) at Radisson

North Baltimore. Guest of Honor: Sarah Pinsker; Music GoH: S. J. Tucker;
Art GoH: Tabitha Ladin. Info: http://www.chessiecon.org; info@
chessiecon.org.

25–27 November 2016

LOSCON 43 (Los Angeles area SF conference) at Los Angeles Airport

Marriott. Starship Loscon. Writer GoH: David Gerrold; Artist GoH: Peri
Charlifu; Fan GoH: Nick Smith. Info: http://loscon.org/43/.

9–13 August 2017

WORLDCON 75 (75th World Science Fiction Convention) at

Messukeskus, the Helsinki Expo and Convention Centre, Helsinki, Finland.
Guests of Honor: John-Henri Holmberg, Nalo Hopkinson, Johanna Sinisalo,
Claire Wendling, Walter Jon Williams. This is the SF universe’s annual get-
together. Professionals and readers from all over the world will be in
attendance. Talks, panels, films, fancy dress competition—the works.
Nominate and vote for the Hugos. Info: http://www.worldcon.fi/;
info@worldcon.fi.

Running a convention? If your convention has a telephone or fax

number, e-mail address, or web page, please let us know so that we can
publish this information. We must have your information in hand SIX
months before the date of your convention

Attending a convention? When calling conventions for information, do

not call collect and do not call too late in the evening. It is best to include
a S.A.S.E. when requesting information; include an International Reply
Coupon if the convention is in a different country.
Information
355 words

TREVOR QUACHRI........................................ Editor

EMILY HOCKADAY............................ Assistant Editor
DEANNA MCLAFFERTY................ Editorial Assistant
JAYNE KEISER............................ Typesetting Director
SUZANNE LEMKE..................... Typesetting Manager
KEVIN DORIS................ Senior Typesetting Coordinator
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CINDY TIBERI.................................. Production Artist
JENNIFER RUTH......................... Production Manager
ABIGAIL BROWNING........... Dir E-Commerce/Marketing
CAROL DEMONT........ Licensing/Digital Sales Manager
SANDY MARLOWE...................... Circulation Services

PETER KANTER
Publisher

BRUCE SHERBOW
Senior Vice President Sales, Marketing, and IT

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Vice President, Editorial and Product Development

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Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXXVI No. 11,
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