Chapter Seven

A SHIELD OF WORLDS
AND TIME

Berana Drayax watched PlanEx Neshobe Kalzant and the rest of the dignitaries depart her command center with what she hoped was well-disguised relief. For the moment, at least, the political side of her job was over. She let the smile drain away from her face, little by little, as she turned toward the status screens and increased the volume on her earphone. The tiny speaker was concealed inside an earring, and her comm speaker was hidden inside her necklace. It was ridiculous that she had to disguise the tools of her trade as gewgaws, but so doing allowed her to do her job of operational commander while still playing the part of charming hostess.

The cameras were still there, watching her every move. But so be it. Even the most muddled viewer at home would expect her to get serious, to focus, to let her face display concentration, even worry, this close to the moment. And it helped that they were only broadcasting pictures, not voices. She hoped. No, strike that. She didn’t care. If theywere running voices, too bad. She had to do her job, and doing it included talking about bad news. There was still that sensor that had been worrying her. She activated her mike. “SunSpot Power Shunt, this is Project Director. Are you in the loop?” she asked.

“SunSpot Power Shunt here. We’re in, PD.”

The voice on the other end didn’t seem shy or worried about talking to so exalted a person as the Project Director. Good. That’s why they had been trained to address her by her job title or its abbreviation, and not Madam Project Director Drayax or some similar nonsense. It made her just one more voice in the loop, unintimidating enough so they could actually report bad news. “What about that ground station alignment problem?”

“We’re still working it, PD. Groundside Power Reception isn’t quite sure yet, but they now think it’s a blown sensor and not a real problem.”

“They don’t have much time to decide. We’ve got fifty-three minutes and twenty seconds left before it’s too late to call a wave-off for power transfer.”

“Believe me, PD, we’re watching that clock, and so is Groundside Power.”

“Well, don’t be shy about cutting into the loop if you get some news.”

“Copy that, PD.”

Berana stared at the fault display, willing it to go green. No doubt, somewhere down on Greenhouse, someone was frantically pulling out a spare sensor, while his or her sweating team member burrowed down through the cables and conduits and shielding of the huge power receptor station built specifically for this job. Someone else was checking a schematic and shouting instructions through an access hatch, or rigging an improvised piece of test equipment, or checking the ops manual to see how to run a realignment by hand since the autos had packed it in. What showed here as a simple red panel that should be green, what SunSpot Power Shunt saw as a blown sensor, was in reality a collection of sweaty, half-frantic junior engineers getting their hands dirty and their clothes ruined as they crawled around the innards of whatever machine had failed.

They knew, she knew, everyone knew, that, if absolutely necessary, they could abort this first try, and come back again in twenty-seven hours, once the SunSpot and NovaSpot had completed one more orbit and arrived back over the target. But twenty-seven hours from now, the planetary alignments would already have started to deteriorate. Facilities that were shielded now would not be so then.

A one-day delay would thus force more emergency evacuations, and force others who were already evacuees to stay in their shelters longer. Emergency supplies would get used up. Evac shelters would be forced to operate longer, leaving more time for systems to fail, leaks to develop, tempers to shorten. People would stay on watch too long. Machines would stay untended for longer than planned. Those who took ill would be kept away from medical attention that much longer. Almost certainly, someone, somewhere—maybe a lot of someones—would die as a direct result of the delay.

But all that was as nothing compared to what would happen if she called a wave-off, and they tried again the next day—and then failed at thesecond attempt. Never mind that all the problems produced by the first wave-off would be worse than doubled. By the time the next window rolled around, twenty-seven hours after the second attempt, the planetary alignments would have deteriorated drastically. The problems would multiply as the various planets, satellites, and artificial structures moved around in their orbits. With each day that passed, the available time windows for starting the Ignition Sequence would shrink—and even the best of those windows would decay further, starting from a point that was barely acceptable. Both the number of settlements and the total population that would be exposed to massive doses of radiation would ratchet higher every day. Every day would come the choice between killing thousands now, or thousands more the next day, in the gradually fading hope of saving millions later on.

And all those nightmare scenarios started small, with the failure of a part that cost half a starmark, a failure that forced a wave-off on the first attempt.

And now it seemed that the failure might—might—be a failed sensor putting out wrong data, with no relation to the actual state of the equipment at all. Berana Drayax had not thought to addthat extra layer to the fears and doubts she had imagined. But then, life always did find ways to make itself more interesting.

Drayax stared straight ahead at the red light markedGROUND STATION ALIGNMENT on her board, willing it to turn green, begging the seconds in the countdown clock to run more slowly.

 

Neshobe made her way up two decks to her private compartment. Along the way, her security team rematerialized from wherever they had been hovering discreetly, and formed up around her—one in front, three behind. They were all big, tough, and dedicated. They were all absolutely focused on their duty—a very good thing, the way Neshobe’s life was, these days. Once, she had been able to travel with only a minimal security detail, or even, impossible as it might seem, with no protection at all.

Those days were gone. As PlanEx, her primary duty these days was to preside over a mounting series of crises and disasters, none of which she could prevent, and most of which she could do little to make better. It did not make her the most popular of leaders. There had been attempts on her life—a lot of them. She had the idea that there had been more tries than her security team was willing to report, perhaps out of fear of hurting her morale.

So be it. So far, her security people had had 100 percent success in not letting her get killed. She had no reason to question how they did their job. If they wished to be silent as well as invisible, she would not argue. Still, there were times when she was taken aback to realize how much she took them for granted. More than once, she had started to disrobe for the bath while her security team was in the room, simply because she had ceased to be aware of their presence.

Today, however, there was no forgetting them for long. TheLodestar VII was a big ship, and there were a lot of people aboard, and no matter how carefully all of them had been vetted, there was no telling who might be nursing a grudge these days. The endless disasters had cost too many people family members, or property, or fortunes, or status. The security team kept close to her anywhere outside the ultrasecure areas, such as the command center.

They arrived at her cabin, and Neshobe obediently waited in the corridor while two of the team did a careful sweep of it, the other two standing guard over her in the corridor. After a bit, one of the team inside emerged, and signaled the all clear to his fellows.

She entered the cabin and took her place in the crash chair in the center of the room. She made no move to strap herself in. She had learned the hard way, long ago, that there wasn’t any point. Hands more skilled and less gentle than her own adjusted the belts and clips, tugged and pulled to test the restraint. One of the team sealed and locked the hatch from the corridor, while another checked over the hatch to the cabin’s escape pod one last time, then climbed in to check the pod’s status board. The first check had been for bombs and assassins hidden in the pod. This check was to make sure the pod itself was in good working order, ready to save Neshobe if need be. The agent nodded in satisfaction and climbed back through the hatch. Apparently all was well. And never mind the fact that there was no good place to escape to, if the ship failed.

Confident that she was properly strapped in, that the door from the corridor was locked, and the escape pod was functioning, the four security operatives strapped themselves in, then vanished from Neshobe’s consciousness. So far as she was concerned, she was alone. She used her seat’s controls to bring up the countdown display and the image of the worlds outside. The world theLodestar VII orbited, and the world that world orbited . . . Wheels within wheels, worlds around worlds. That was the way of it, the essential truth of the situation, written in orbits and in geometry.

Lodestar VIIorbited Greenhouse, and Greenhouse was a medium-sized moon orbiting the gas giant Comfort. Comfort orbited the star HS-G9-223, officially named Lodestar. There was a sort of symmetry about the ship calledLodestar VII orbiting the object that orbited the object that orbited the star called Lodestar. In name, at any rate, the least came round to meet the greatest. It was a notion that appealed to the stratified, neofeudal worldview of rank-conscious Solacian society.

Other worlds circled Lodestar, of course—most significantly, a world called Solace, that poorly terraformed and swiftly failing more or less Earth-like planet. As the display showed, Lodestar was at present behind Comfort as seen from Greenhouse, and Solace was behind Lodestar as seen from Comfort. Put another way, the four bodies were, momentarily, lined up like unevenly spaced beads on a string, thusly:

Greenhouse, Comfort, Lodestar, Solace.

But vital as that alignment was to the Ignition Project, it was not the natural worlds, but artificial suns, that were the central issue.

SunSpot, simply put, was an artificial sun that orbited the small world of Greenhouse once a day, every 27.3 hours—precisely the same period as a Solacian day. The new NovaSpot was circling Greenhouse about eighty kilometers behind SunSpot in the same orbit. Once it was ignited, it would quite literally be a nova—a new star—in the skies of Greenhouse.

As Neshobe Kalzant worked to strap herself in, SunSpot and NovaSpot were already between Comfort and Greenhouse. In something like twelve hours and forty-five minutes, the minor outer planet Alloy, home to the mining stations Goldrush Alpha, Goldrush Beta, and Goldrush Gamma, would move behind Greenhouse as seen from the NovaSpot. In other words, the bulk of Greenhouse itself would serve as a radiation shield for Alloy. Shielded by Greenhouse, Alloy would be safe. Similar alignments would shield the other major outer-system population centers.

A handful of smaller free-flying stations had been forced to change orbits, or evacuate for the duration of the Ignition Project, but aside from those trivial exceptions, it was the alignment of the worlds themselves that would serve as natural shields against the hellish blast of radiation that would be part and parcel of igniting NovaSpot’s fires. The engineers and physicists all gave strong assurances that, assuming all went well, NovaSpot’s output of hard radiation would settle down to barely more than the local background of cosmic rays and stellar wind within a few hours of primary reaction initia-tion.

All the inhabited worlds and stations would be shielded by the bulk of Comfort, or the lesser but still quite adequate mass of Greenhouse, or by Lodestar itself, during those hours.

All the worlds save one: Greenhouse itself, the aptly named moon that was the center for terraforming and climatic-repair operations for the entire Solacian system. Without Greenhouse’s expertise and storehouse of diverse genetic material, held in the form of living plants, animals, and microbes, Solace would have collapsed years before, indeed would never have been terraformed in the first place.

Greenhouse was dotted, from pole to pole, with endless domed habitats. Once, long ago, during the main Solace terraforming project, virtually all of them had been operational at the same time, nurseries and genetic labs for the thousands of species that were to be adapted, and then introduced, onto Solace. The domes of Greenhouse had been bursting with life.

But before the Ignition of the first SunSpot, nothing at all was alive on the surface. The original SunSpot had been ignitedbefore the domes were even built, let alone populated with living things. Indeed, the SunSpot was lit before there was much of anything alive anywhere in the Solacian system. The blast of killing radiation produced by the SunSpot’s Ignition hadn’t been much of a problem, simply because there was nothing much for the blast to kill.

The original terraforming plan had seen Greenhouse as an interim home for the living things that were to be transplanted onto Solace. It had been expected that the SunSpot would serve its purpose and that the last of the domes would be shut down—or simply abandoned—long before the SunSpot guttered down to die, its fuel expended. But it hadn’t worked out that way. Solace had never lost its reliance on Greenhouse.

An ecosystem could be considered closed when it received no significant outputs from the outside, aside from raw energy. Earth was a closed ecology, completely reliant on itself, except for the Sun’s light and heat. In hindsight, at least, it was clear that the Solacian ecosystem had never really been “closed” at all, even after the planet had been officially declared to be terraformed. It had always been an open ecosystem, dependent on outside sources, mainly Greenhouse, for substantial biological inputs, such as additional populations of a plant species that had died out, or additional biomass in the form of raw organic material to serve as foodstock for bacteria, or even new species. Whatever Solace needed to meet the ecologic crisis of the moment, Greenhouse provided. Greenhouse still did so, down to the present day.

But the SunSpot was dying. The engineers had performed miracles to keep it going—but even miracles could only do so much. They had run out of tricks, run out of ways to stretch its dwindling output of light and heat.

And that led directly to the current crisis and the present mad plan of action—a plan of action suggested centuries before by Oskar DeSilvo himself, before his supposed death.

DeSilvo. We’re actually here, getting ready to do what DeSilvo says again. That was the heart of the madness, so far as Neshobe was concerned.

DeSilvo, hero to all those who knew half the story, and devil to the very few who knew it all. DeSilvo had led the effort to terraform Solace. That much, everyone knew. Everyone also knew that the failures, the things that had gone wrong, were all bad luck, or the fault of sloppy management, or a failure to follow properly the plans that DeSilvo had left behind.

One man had learned more only quite recently, and informed Neshobe. At her direction, what they had learned was being kept very, very quiet, for fear of touching off stars alone knew what sort of unrest. Neshobe now knew that DeSilvo was, at the time he was terraforming the planet,in possession of incontrovertible proof that the terraforming attempt would inevitably fail.

Neshobe had spent many a night wondering: Did DeSilvo fail toread the evidence—or did he fail to understand it, or refuse to believe it? Or did he read it carefully, understand it perfectly, believe it completely—and forge ahead anyway?

Neshobe’s thought flitted briefly to Anton Koffield, the man who had discovered the fraud, the man who had come to warn Solace, who had been cruelly tricked and punished for doing so, the man who had discovered that DeSilvo had faked his own death and was likely alive, the man she had sent off in pursuit of DeSilvo.

It had been nearly two years since Koffield had departed on his mission to find DeSilvo. There was no word of him since a sketchy intel report, now over a year old, that had him leaving Earth’s Solar System. Nothing since. It was not time to give up hope—but it was just about time to stopexpecting Koffield to return.

Hell’s bells and damnation,she thought.It’s past time to expect anything good to happen.

The countdown display caught her eye, and she focused again on the matter at hand, on the marvelous irony that they had turned to DeSilvo’s century-old scribblings on the backs of envelopes for a solution to the problem.

The core of the conundrum came down to this: No matter how cleverly they made use of planetary alignments to shield the other worlds, it was impossible to ignite a replacement for the SunSpot without releasing massive amounts of radiation, twenty times more than enough to sterilize an entire hemisphere of Greenhouse—indeed, something more than a hemisphere, as the replacement SunSpot swept overhead in its orbit. And if they killed that much of Greenhouse, Greenhouse could no longer supply the biomass and living things needed to keep Solace’s ecology creaking along.

DeSilvo had seen the answer to that problem—but he’d seen it generations before technical advances made it possible to do the engineering that made the answer practical.

Temporal confinement had made interstellar flight vastly more convenient—once the equipment for it became cheap, light, and powerful enough to be widely useful. Generate a spherical temporal confinement field, and time inside the field would slow down by whatever factor you wished—if you pumped sufficient power into the field. Slow time down enough, and a hundred-year-long passage between the stars would seem to last only weeks, days, or even minutes.

Electromagnetic radiation passing through a temporal confinement field did not slow down, but instead experienced Doppler-shift effects, slipping down the electromagnetic spectrum, becoming far-lower-energy radiations. Beam gamma rays and hard X rays into a 15,000,000:1 temporal confinement field, and sensors inside the field would detect nothing more malign than easily managed infrared, visible light, and ultraviolet radiation. Visible light would be detectable only as radio waves.

DeSilvo’s back-of-the-envelope solution, little more than a doodle or two of a planet with a circle drawn around it, a crude representation of the SunSpot, and a few scribbled numbers alongside, had become one of the most famous graphic images in the Solacian system over the last few years. It had been endlessly reprinted, and used to illustrate innumerable news reports about the Ignition Project. There was a reproduction of it hanging on the port-side bulkhead of Neshobe’s cabin. She turned to glance at it. The legend under the doodles said it all:


Use Sunspot Output & Put G-house in Temp Confine Field.


Simple enough in concept—but almost impossible in execution. In theory, and given modern temporal confinement technology, draining the remaining power output from the old SunSpot would provide more than adequate power to run the confinement—but how to store, then channel, that much power that fast? Besides, a confinement had to be powered from theinside, and the whole point of the operation was to keep the old and new SunSpots on theoutside of the confinement. Beyond all that, no one had ever attempted to create a temporal confinement field a tenth, a hundredth, a thousandth as large as would be required to shield Greenhouse.

And that was only the start of the list of problems—the big, obvious problems. There was an endless series of others. For example: Was there any point in attempting to evacuate the hemisphere of Greenhouse over which Ignition would occur? Thousands lived in domes near the target area.

If the Ignition attempt failed, after the last of the SunSpot’s power had already been drained, Greenhouse would descend into the cold and dark that was the natural environment of a small world in the outer reaches of a star system. No living thing on Greenhouse would survive for more than a few days, except for places with their own power sources. Besides, there simply were not the ships, crews, places of refuge, or other resources to evacuate the satellite before a failure, let alone after, when the job would be far more difficult. The cold-blooded analysis said that anyone remaining on Greenhouse after a failed Ignition attempt was dead anyway.

In the end, that whole murky debate was resolved by looking not at what was desirable, or necessary, but what was possible. Neshobe Kalzant knew better than anyone just what resources were available, and what could and could not be done. Time and treasure spent on an evacuation plan that merely made people feel better was a luxury they could no longer afford, whatever the political advantage there might be to running an evac.

There were a thousand such choices, large and small, mixing science, engineering, logic, politics, and the rawest of emotions, that Neshobe had been forced to make. Never had she been able to make them based on complete information or even a solid idea of the risks. It seemed as if nothing was solid anymore.

And always, in the back of her mind, was the story Wandella Ashdin had told about Glister, a world in a nearby star system that been wrecked by a similar series of disasters.

The Glisterns had met a series of worsening setbacks with a series of “all-out” efforts. Every “all-out” effort had drained resources and diverted them from other uses where they might have done some good. Worse and worse climatic disasters were met by “all-out” responses that grew weaker and weaker, until the disasters were so vast, and the remaining ability to respond so weakened, that Glister collapsed altogether.

Neshobe had diverted vast resources to ignite the NovaSpot and save Greenhouse. With every authorization of time, materials, ships, equipment, people, or money, she had asked herselfwhat will be left ? When the next bad news came—and it would come—would the cupboard be bare?

In a sense, the answer didn’t matter. Greenhouse was vital to the long-term and short-term survival of Solace. If they didn’t save Greenhouse, they were all dead anyway, and there was no need to waste time worrying about what they could and could not afford.

Time.Neshobe blinked and came back to herself. She had been staring, unseeing, at the countdown clock, and yet had completely lost track of how much time there was left. She refocused her eyes and her attention.Twenty minutes, fifteen seconds . Not very long—but long enough to keep worrying.

But no,she thought.The displays would show it. We’d know already if anything was going wrong. Wouldn’t we?

She was appalled to find herself suddenly missing the soothing tones of the voice of Ignition Control. Still, she resisted the temptation to turn up the sound.

After all, she told herself with a smile, her security team might have turned invisible, but they weren’t deaf. No point in letting that damned voice drivethem mad.