Chapter Nine

POWER STRUGGLES

Neshobe Kalzant tried to think about how her day had started, but she could not remember that far back. She stared down at her coffee cup, trying to figure how long she had been awake, how many cups of coffee she had drunk. But all things blurred together. She had been on theLodestar VII forever; she would always be on it. She had spent all her lifetime waiting out the SunSpot’s pass over the Power Reception Array; she would still be waiting until the end of her days.

She could not clearly remember the all clear call after the SunSpot had been safely reaimed and refocused. She had a vague notion of her security team unstrapping her, but that seemed so long ago that she could not truly believe it was all part of the same day. She must have returned here at some point, drawn, like everyone else on this platform, back to the central point, to the control center, where their joint fate would first be known. If she really concentrated, she could remember the short walk from her quarters.

She could even remember at least some of the polite, meaningless conversations she had had with various politicians. None of the pols had anything larger in mind than the prestige of being seen with the Planetary Executive on this all-important day. Assuming civilization held together long enough to allow it, there would be a whole series of virtually identical new still images: Neshobe smiling and shaking hands with Mayor Blank on Blank’s wall, with Habitat Executive Dash on Dash’s bulkhead, with Representative Dot in Dot’s newsletter, and on and on and on. She did not know whether to marvel respectfully at the way Blank, Dash, Dot, and all the others could focus on the trivia of political gamesmanship at such a moment, or else whether to stand aghast that such powerful men and women had so little imagination and understanding, appalled that they were actually capable of functioning at such a time. Their worlds, their lives, were balanced on a knife edge, and still the buffet table did a steady business.

But even as the day lasted forever, time was running out. Each minute, each second, seemed to pause forever, and then lurch clumsily into the past, shoved aside from behind by the next lumpen fraction of time that would tarry too long, then leave too soon.

The magnificent starscape gleamed down at her from the command center’s main display screen. Inset in the four corners of the screen were numeric displays of one sort or another, showing various parameters and statistics and projections that were no doubt of great importance to the technicians on the main level below. The two numbers Neshobe understood were in the upper-right corner.


CURRENT POWER RECEPTION PROCESS DURATION: 08:51:13 CURRENT POWER STORAGE LEVEL AS PERCENTAGE OF REQUIREMENT: 82.97%


The two numbers kept moving, and no doubt they mattered greatly, but it was the center of the display that demanded her attention.

The satellite Greenhouse floated there, its cratered surface shrouded in gloom, lit in half phase by its distant sun. Dimmer light, reflected off the surface of giant Comfort, lit part of the dark side, forming a band of lighter shadow.

The huge habitats that made the world important were barely visible, tiny gleaming dots of light in the greater darkness, gathered in clusters here and there. One spot of perfect blue-white gleamed from the darkened surface of the world—the Power Reception Array—soaking up all the light energy that the SunSpot could deliver, a few square kilometers of power receptors greedily absorbing all the power meant to light a world.

There was something terrifying in the fact that the Reception Array was large enough, bright enough, to be seen so easily from space. That much power, in so small a space, was deeply unnerving to contemplate. Someone had told her that the SunSpot was beaming as much power as would be produced by a constant series of small nuclear explosions, one every five seconds.

And this is just the banked embers of SunSpot’s former power,she told herself.This is just a tiny fraction of the energy we’ll unleash once we light NovaSpot.

She wondered, only for a moment, if she and her people ought to be trusted with such power. But the mere need to ask the question brought its answer:Of course not. It took but a glance at the shambles they had made of Solace to answer that one. No human beings ought to have such power; none could be trusted with it. But “ought” didn’t matter anymore. This was survival, and the most immoral act Neshobe could possibly choose would be to take no risks, take no action, have her people do only what they ought—and then watch their worlds die.

Just over an hour to go. Power storage crept up over 83 percent as she watched. She glanced down at the lower-right-hand corner and saw that the history graph confirmed what she had thought: The rate of increase had slowed to almost nothing over the last hour or so. But the power was still going in. That much was plain.

“This is the voice of Ignition Control,” said the announcer, speaking from his station in the farthest corner. “We are coming up on the nine-hour mark of power accumulation. Though the nominal period for power reception is ten hours, we anticipate approximately one and a half additional hours during which the SunSpot will actually be in effective line of sight of the Power Reception Array. SunSpot will then move past the point in the sky, as seen from the PRA, beyond which the individual receptors in the Array cannot be pointed. We are anticipating accumulation of the last 17 percent of required stored power during that period. This is the voice of Ignition Control.”

Neshobe Kalzant was starting to develop a strained sort of respect for Ignition Control’s calm and understated voice. All of what he said was true, and yet it was wonderfully misleading. He made it sound as if all was as it had been expected, that everything was going exactly according to plan.

Neshobe Kalzant knew otherwise. Receptor efficiency had started high, but had begun drifting lower almost at once. The power storage level should have been well over 90 percent by now, perhaps higher. The mission plan called for reaching 100 percent at about the ten-hour mark, with the last half hour before they lost line of sight spent in banking reserve power.

But the voice of Ignition Control misled in another direction as well. No one really knew how much power they would really need, and no one had really known ahead of time how much they could get. The target of 100 percent by the ten-hour mark was almost completely arbitrary, merely setting down two round numbers that were reasonably close to the rough estimates.

The question marks were on the Groundside part of the operation. The SunSpot’s orbital period was, of course, known down to the microsecond, and likewise its engineers knew everything about its power curves and output signatures. However, there were tremendous uncertainties as to the behavior of the Reception Array and the power storage system. The design had been tweaked and tuned and refined over and over again, maximizing its efficiency at all cost. That had been absolutely necessary. Various engineering restraints meant it would be impractical, or even impossible, to make the Array larger than it was. Even so, the initial simulations had all come up short of the required power levels. So the tweaking and upgrading and fine-tuning had started. The designers had promised the power levels would improve—but the numbers at the moment were almost exactly where the pretweaking simulations said they would be.

But we’re only pretending we know what the required power levels are,Neshobe reminded herself. No one had ever created a temporal confinement this large before, or even anything remotely as big. There had not been time to run the integrated simulations that would have given them a precise figure—or at least a better guess—of how much power was required. If the actual power level required was lower than thought, all might still be well. If it was higher—then they might as well shut down the whole operation and head home now, so the crew could wait out the coming end times with their families.

Neshobe gave up all pretense of doing anything but staring at the image of Greenhouse. Greenhouse, now a world of murk and shadows, with but one tiny, bright gleam of hope aglow upon its surface, and that gleam fading slowly but steadily all day long.

She stared until her neck ached, stared until she realized the pain in the palms of her hands was made by her own balled fists, by her nails digging into her own flesh, stared until she could make nothing meaningful at all of the images she saw, until the globe of Greenhouse was a dark and monstrous eye, a blaze of light for its pupil, staring back at her, pulling her into its soulless gaze. The voice of Ignition Control said something more, his tones booming and echoing in the background, but the words were nothing but pleasant, meaningless noise to her.

At last, by sheer effort of will, she tore her eyes away, turned her back on the huge images, and looked down at the command center, at the people laboring to save the world she could no longer bear to look upon.

As Planetary Executive Neshobe Kalzant looked down, Project Director Berana Drayax looked up. Drayax looked worn down. Her hair, perfectly coiffed at the start of the day, was now in disarray, strands drooping to frame her face. Her clothes were rumpled, her skin pale and drawn, nearly ashen. Their eyes met, but Neshobe could read nothing there. Drayax could not even manage an insincere smile.

Andthat scared the devil out of PlanEx Kalzant.

 

Somehow, Berana Drayax had felt Kalzant’s gaze on her, and known to look up. Kalzant looked worried, worn-out—as well she ought.She’s lucky, Drayax told herself.She doesn’t know what’s really going on. Thank the stars the PlanEx hadn’t ordered status reports every five minutes, or some such damn-fool thing. “Groundside Power Reception,” she said to the open air, and into her hidden microphone, “is there any change in status?”

“Nothing, ma’am. We’ve replaced the bad sensor but the replacement unit shows there is an actual slight misalignment. But even accounting for that, efficiency is still trending down, just barely—but the slope is still getting steeper. And we still don’t know why.”

Drayax looked at the power storage indicator, stuck at 83.01 percent, willing it to climb higher, faster. “Very well,” she said. “What are our manual control options at this point?”

“High-risk,” the voice replied, his tone flat and unequivocal. “I’ve—we’ve—figured out how to configure the control system so we can do it, at least in theory—but there has been no way to test it.”

“I know,” Drayax said. “Not enough time before today—”

“And no chance to try during the day,” Groundside Power agreed.

“And no reason for trying tomorrow,” she said.Unless there was . . . “What about doing a wave-off?” she asked. “A wave-off now, as we are, with the power store nearly full? We let the SunSpot set while we sit on 83 percent of the power we need, plus whatever we can pull in on the rest of this pass. Then we wait for the SunSpot to rise again tomorrow, pull in the last 10 percent or so, plus whatever power we need to make up overnight losses.”

“Ma’am, it won’t work—or at least I’d strongly advise against risking it. Our current lead theory is that we’ve got multiple problems, not just on the receptor alignment that bad sensor was masking. We think there are several additional faults masking each other. There’s something wrong at the storage end too. We’re getting a much faster power drain-off than expected.”

“We knew we’d losesome stored power,” Drayax objected.

“Yes, of course. That’s inevitable. Second law of thermodynamics. But we’re getting a much bigger loss than we thought. We’re pouring water into a leaky bucket. The bucket’s filling, because we’re pouring water in faster than the leak is draining it out—but it might be that the leak is getting bigger. Once SunSpot sets, and we’re not pouring anything more in, the leak will take over. We might not even have 50 percent power tomorrow morning—and the power storage system loses efficiency every time it drains power. It might not even accept any additional power beyond what it’s retained overnight.

“Besides all that, the Array took a hell of a beating today. We’ve put a massive amount of energy through it, and it’s deteriorated somewhat. Again, that’s more or less inevitable. Plus the Array ishot right now, but it’s going to get cold overnight. If we heat the whole system up again, with another shot from the SunSpot, something will be bound to give out. And I’d be willing to bet the SunSpot control team wouldn’t want to try the whole thing twice from their end. I’m sure they’ve got the same sorts of problems. And the timing of the orbital alignments for shielding will be way off if we—

“All right. All right. You’ve made your point.” Drayax shut her eyes and tried to shut out the outside world, if only for a moment.Why in the hell did I take this job? she asked herself. She had more than half expected Groundside Power to say what he had said, but that didn’t make it any less frustrating. There had to be some sort of way out.

She opened her eyes and stared at the figures on her center screen.


CURRENT POWER RECEPTION PROCESS DURATION: 09:00:35
CURRENT POWER STORAGE LEVEL AS PERCENTAGE OF REQUIREMENT: 83.10%


To come so far, to be so close . . . Her gaze slid down to the big red button, front and center, in the middle of her console. She could see it through the clear safety cover. The button that would light the NovaSpot. The button wasn’t activated—not yet—but when it was, and if and when she chose to push it—well, whatever happened, would happen. No ArtInt control, no cutouts or countdowns or second buttons that someone else would have to push. She had ordered the system to be set up that way, so it would be her immediate, personal, final choice. However things turned out, people would know who had done it—or who had chosen not to act.

“Groundside Power—best estimate—how much more time will you have the SunSpot usefully visible?”

“Our estimate is sixteen degrees above the horizon,” he replied. That works out to one hour, twenty-one minutes from my mark—mark.But the closer to the horizon, the tougher it will be for the receptors to make the angle. We’ll be less and less efficient with every minute that passes.”

“Understood.” The receptors could track on the SunSpot, but only within limits. And the closer to the horizon, the more one receptor would tend to crowd out another, the western receptors literally casting a shadow over the eastern ones. “You were talking about just barely keeping up with the power loss. When’s the break-even point? When are we just treading water, taking in just as much as we’re losing?”

“Ah, I can’t give you anything exact, but, say, ah, about four minutes before we reach that sixteen-degree point.”

“Can you get me more stored power or less by jumping over to manual control?” Drayax asked, still staring at that big red button.

“Ma’am?”

“We’re running out of time, and we’re not going to reach 100 percent. Will we get closer with manual or automatic?” There was silence on the line. “Well? Which is it?”

“Please, ma’am. Just—please. Let me think for a moment.”

Silence again, and then the young man’s voice again, subdued and hesitant. “It’s—it’s nothing anyone can answer absolutely,” he said. “It’s guesses, probabilities, how much power input we could lose in the changeover, how long the changeover would take, what might work, what might break . . .”

His voice drifted off. Drayax spoke again. “I need an answer,” she said, her voice as flat and hard as she could make it. “I need it now.”

The briefest of pauses, then—

“Manual,” he said. “If I were a betting man, I’d put my money down on manual.”

“Well if you weren’t a betting man before, you are one now. Do it. Get me the power I need. And tell me theinstant we start losing instead of gaining. Now go do it.”

“Understood, Program Director.” The voice was scared, no doubt—but also resolute. “Going off comm now to carry out your instructions. Groundside Power out.”

The line went dead. Drayax felt her heart pounding and wished she had not felt that the leader needed to be seen always standing, directing, upright, and alert—in other words, that she had instead designed her own console with a place to sit down. She desperately needed to rest, to shut her eyes, to make it all go away. No, that wasn’t it. She needed it all to stay with her, to stay together. That was what this was all about—holding it together, as long as they could, buying time for Solace, as much time as they could, buying decades, years, months, even weeks or days, at any cost, in the slender hope that it would be enough time for miracles to happen.

 

Villjae Benzen was halfway across Groundside Power Reception’s control room almost before he finished signing off. He’d been worried about the autoalign system for months, and had spent many a sleepless night fretting over how to configure for manual control in a hurry.

But Villjae hadn’t considered the possibility of auto-align packing it in this late in the game. His extremely sketchy contingency plans had all assumed they would discover a major autoalign failure two days before Ignition, or at the very worst, just after the SunSpot had begun beaming down power. The one saving grace was that they’d all been watching the autocontrol system flaking out all day long, and therefore knew there was a good chance they’d have to override. Villjae had had time to think it through, work out some sort of hashed-together procedure.

“All right,” he called out to the controllers at their stations. “You heard the director. We’ve got to pull this one out, people!”

“I wish I could get my hands on the genius who designed this system,” Ballsto Vaihop growled. “Buran Rufdrop got all the medals for design. I wish to hell he could see how nice all his pretty systems are working now.”

“Me too, but he’s too busy being dead,” Villjae replied.

Villjae could not help but think that, if an exhausted pilot hadn’t killed himself and Designer Rufdrop and half the rest of the trained staff in a lander crash three months before, then perhaps they wouldn’t have been in this mess. Or perhaps they would be anyway. Villjae had started to have doubts about Rufdrop, and Rufdrop’s design, since the day he had been tapped to take over the section.

“Ballsto, get on panel three and bring up Subroutine Gamma-Two. Curthaus, I need you to get down to the power distribution panel on Downlevel Baker. Panel 343. Get the safety cover off, stay on comm, and stand by. Beseda, you cut panel one’s power off, then breathe down my neck. I’m going to need more hands than I have hooking up the test-stand controller. Ballsto, got that subroutine up?”

“Yah,” Ballsto Vaihop answered. “Should I run it now?”

“No!No! That might scramble the whole system. We don’t run it untilafter we’ve got the manual control plugged in. Wait for my say-so. Somebody, get the hand-controller module and roll it in here. Fast!”

Beseda Mahrlin cut out panel one using the command console at her station and hurried after him. The two of them shoved chairs out of the way and knelt in front of the main control console. Villjae popped the cover off and peered into the gloomy interior.

“Handlight!” he called out, and one appeared at once, offered from behind him. “Hold it for us,” he said to whoever it was who had produced the light. He didn’t have time to look behind and see who it was. He heard a rattling rumble off to one side and saw the battered old wheeled utility table that held the hand-controller lash-up being rolled into place.

“Okay, point the light over toward that corner a bit. Okay. Good. Beseda, start handing me hookups from the test-stand controller.”

The test-stand controller, a three-way hand-controller scavenged off an old remote operator system, was the one piece of hardware in the control center that could be used to control the pointing of the Receptor Array directly, without any computer input. They’d used it during the final phases of construction and during the few dress rehearsals they’d managed before today. Mainly it had been used to simulate a deflection or impose a misalignment to see how the system would respond. Now the very shabby-looking old industrial joystick bolted to a rollaway table was the one thing left that might get them out of this.

“We should have flipped to manual two hours ago,” Villjae muttered as he started hooking the leads up to the panel’s innards.

“We weren’t scared enough to do it then,” Beseda replied. “And they weren’t scared enough to give the order.”

“Well, we’re all plenty scared now,” said Villjae. He pulled his head out from under the console’s access panel and scooted backward on his hands and knees. “Okay, Beseda, double-check me. Are those all the leads? Are they in right? One chance only on this one.”

Beseda Mahrlin took the handlight and checked each connection carefully. Villjae resisted the temptation to shout at her to hurry. He had picked her to check him because she was the most thorough, the most careful. “Check blue-four,” she said.

Villjae grabbed the light and stuck his head back in. Sure enough, there was some sort of crud between the hold-on clamp and the board. He pulled the clamp and wiped it on his none-too-clean shirt. Well, if the residue from sweaty lab clothes prevented good comm contacts, not a damn thing in the whole place would work. He hooked it back up again and scooted out from under the console, then stood, moving carefully as he moved around the hand-controller’s table so as not to disturb any of the connections they had just made.

“Okay, Beseda, cut all main path net linkage to console one, then give me local power.” Beseda pulled the links, then flipped the local breakers. In theory at least, console one was no longer part of the command center net, but electricity was again running through it—and, for what it was worth, the hand-controller hookup wasn’t throwing sparks in all directions.

“Somebody get me a chair,” he half whispered as he stood in front of the controller. Suddenly a chair was right behind him. He sat down, pulled himself up carefully, and with as much reluctance as if he were expecting a massive electric shock, reached out his right hand and took hold of the controller. With his left, he started powering up panel one’s displays, now routed through the hand-controller hookup.

“Okay.” Suddenly, not one but two alarming thoughts popped into his head. “Oh, damn. I didn’t think of it in time.” Now that he had hold of the controller, he didn’t want to let go of it. Villjae knew the state of the aiming system’s net-link hookups. The thing looked finished with the panel doors shut and the nice shiny covers in place, but inside, it was a mess of temporary hookups turned permanent, test clips, bridge wires, jumpers, and every other bad practice Rufdrop could have left to his successors.

Villjae should have torn it all out and started over months ago, but there hadn’t been time for that, either. Which left the small but real possibility that there was some forgotten cross-connected diagnostic line, some backdoor patch-link still connecting console one to the rest of the net. If he took his hands away from the controller, and the controller sagged to the left the way it did sometimes, it might be received as some sort of low-level command input to the aiming system—and the aiming system didn’t need any more problems.

But Villjae didn’t dare remove his hand for another, and far more basic, reason: He didn’t know if he could work up the courage to reach for it again if he let go. He was already thinking too hard about how the fate of worlds depended on the hash-up he was making of the control room.

In any event, it would take three hands at least for what came next, and he was coming up short. Left hand working the panel, right hand still on the controller, he looked behind him and saw Bosley Ortem, holding the handlight. “Bos—I don’t want to let go of this thing. Reach into my breast pocket and pull out my datapad.” Villjae had worked long hours to get his datapad to do receive-and-repeat of the data the hand-controller would need during the switch to manual. He had worked it all out ahead of time, except for the last detail of getting the damned thing out of his pocket while his hands were busy.

Bosley did as he was told, plainly feeling most awkward about pawing about in the boss’s pockets. He came out with the little pocket-size datapad and looked to Villjae. “Now what?”

“Flip to screen three. It should be showing remote repeaters of the aiming data.”

“Ah, yeah. Yeah, that’s right.”

“Okay. Now fish in my pocket again. There should be a data cable there. Pull it out and jack it into port two on the datapad.”

“Uh, okay. Hang on. Ah, sorry.” After a moment of apologetic fumbling, Bosley found the slender cable and plugged it in. “Now what?”

Villjae nodded toward the hand-controller settings panel. “Jack it into the test port there. The one up in the corner.”

Bosley did as he was told, and suddenly the hashed-together beast they had frankensteined out of console one, the hand-controller, and a datapad configured as a data repeater came to life, information flowing in alongside the electricity. They could have fed the aiming data direct from the system, but Villjae was not interested in taking chances. Using the datapad as a repeater prevented any premature feedback to the main system.

Villjae worked the console-one display settings with his left while he kept his right steady on the hand-controller. He ordered up graphical symbol-logic displays of the ideal and actual alignment, and swore to himself when they appeared. Things were drifting even more than he had feared. “Beseda, I can’t do this all from here. Give me an overlay of my current weighted center. Once we’re on manual, I’ll need you to work from console two and keep me tracked on it.”

The Reception Array was big enough that the aim-angle for the receptors on one side was going to be slightly different from the receptors on the opposite side. The pointing system was designed to compensate for this; but in order to run the calculations, it needed to be told which single receptor would be treated as the center point. As the SunSpot moved in its orbit, the optimum center point, the weighted center for the whole Array, moved as well.

The system allowed them to choose any single receptor as the center, keying all the pointing corrections off that position. Along with everything else, that selection was supposed to be automatic—so automatic, so supposedly reliable they had barely monitored it after the initial start-up procedure. But also along with everything else, the weighted center autoselect was very slightly off. Worse, the history chart showed an error that had been gradually increasing all day long. Villjae could see it the moment Beseda brought up the displays.

“God damn it all,” he swore. “Why the hell did Rufdrop have to make this thing so bloodysophisticated ?” The supersophisticated aiming and pointing systems, and all the rest of the cutting-edge stuff, were part of an attempt to squeeze every last drop of power from the system. But there hadn’t been time to test it, debug it, tune it, and find any tiny systemic biases. They should have gone for something solid, something simple.

They were left with a delicate, finely tuned system that, in theory, would produce maximized power—ifconditions were perfect. Rufdrop had built them an overbred and nervy Thoroughbred intended for blue skies and dry tracks, when what they needed was a strong, stolid plow horse that could still haul the cart no matter how thick the mud.

It was becoming plainer and plainer to Villjae that each overtuned subsystem was introducing its own errors, and the errors were amplifying each other, not canceling each other out. No wonder the damned thing was underproducing. “Beseda, you were right—we should have gone to manual—but we should have done it five minutes after we switched on. Or maybe five before.” Villjae checked his displays and nodded. “All right, that’s about as good as I’m going to get this. Beseda, how’s your panel?”

“I’ve got you slaved and matched with real time,” she said.

In other words, his hand-controller would go active “knowing” the precise pointing of the Array at the moment of switchover. Now all they had to do was make the switchover without crashing the whole system. “Curthaus,” he called out to the comm panel. “You with us?”

“With you,” Curthaus Spar’s voice replied from the overhead speaker. “I’ve got the cover off 343. Standing by.”

“All right. Now, everybody, listen up. Ballsto, make sure I’m feeding to everyone’s comm. Am I?”

“Ah—you are now. Go.”

“All right. Everyone, listen up. The Project Director ordered us to switch to manual power. I think what we’re about to do will work, but I don’t know. Okay, first off, I’m going to talk about what we’re going to do. Don’t anyonedo anything right now. Clear?” There was a muffled chorus of assent. “Right. I’ve talked about some of this idea with some of you, but not much, and mostly I’ve just worked it out in my head. The pointing hardware, the system actually driving the motors and actuators, is programmed to ride out a five-second loss of signal from the aiming system that does the computation and direction, then hand that off to the pointing hardware. If it regains signal within that five seconds, and the protocols are all right and so on, it accepts the signal as legitimate and just moves on.

“If there’s more than a five-second lapse, it assumes the aiming system has failed or been sabotaged, locks out further input, and drops back to a pointing routine that directs the system based on past inputs from the aiming system—and since the aiming has been off, that backup system is going to be way off from the start, and only get worse. Wecan get back control once it locks us out—there are written procedures, and some of you were here when we rehearsed it.”The others who were here all died in that crash, but never mind. “But that’s a complicated procedure, and it takestime. We don’thave time. So we’re going to do a complete control transfer, autoaim to manual, in less than five seconds.”

Another murmur of voices. “We can do it,” Villjae said, with maybe 10 percent more confidence than he actually felt. “I know how. Beseda knows the control links better than anyone, and she believes it will work.”

Villjae glanced at Beseda and prayed that no one else saw her hold her hand up, palm down, and wiggle it back and forth. Villjae felt a momentary annoyance. What was she doing signaling a “maybe” when he needed a “yes”?

No. She was right. What he needed wasn’t cheerleading, but honest assessments. It was the lack of such assessments, along with a few other bad habits, that had gotten them into this mess. Rufdrop had always tended to assume that “automatic” meant “accurate,” for example. And Rufdrop had not appreciated it when Villjae had told him otherwise. The desire not to be like Rufdrop washed away all traces of his resentment toward Beseda. She might think the idea was a maybe—but she was still in on it, trying to make it work. That counted for a lot.

“Okay, now, nobodydo anything yet. We’re just talking. Here’s the plan. Curthaus—there’s a main breaker for the pointing-aiming comm loop down there. Don’t touch it yet. Do you see it?”

“Yeah, right in front of me.”

“Okay, good. Here’s what’s going to happen once we go. Curthaus is going to give us a countdown, and then open that breaker when he gets to zero. He’s going to keep counting, and we’re going to work to the count. We’ve got five consoles live, numbers two through six. We need number three to run a special subroutine, so it stays on. It’s the only console without a hookup to the aiming-pointing comm link. When Curthaus saysone, we need four fingers on four buttons, shutting the other consoles off. When he saystwo, Beseda will power upmy console, and the patch-through to the hand-controller. Atthree, Ballsto will run his subroutine off console three. It copies itself to console one, shuts off console three remotely, and does a hard restart on the aiming-pointing comm loop, getting all input from console one. The subroutine should make the actual switch in about a tenth of a second.

“So, one, two, three. We need to do all that withinfour seconds, because 4.5 seconds after he opens it, Curthaus is going to close that breaker again.” He looked around the roomful of worried faces. “Is that clear enough?”

There was silence for a moment, then Beseda spoke. “I think it needs rehearsal.”

For one brief and irrational moment, Villjae thought she meant he should practice his speech a few times. But then he understood her properly. “She’s right. We’re going to run through it a couple of times—but we have to do itfast . We don’t have much time.”

As if anyone needed to be told that.

 

Berana Drayax certainly didn’t need to be told. Time was the only factor that mattered—until they activated the temporal confinement. Until then, she would do anything—everything—she had to do in order to make all their gambles worthwhile. There was almost no price she wouldn’t pay at that point—if need be, she even would make a small down payment in lives. And it might come to that.

“NovaSpot Control, this is Project Director. Do you copy?”

“Project Director, this is NovaSpot. We are on schedule and on track for a nominal Ignition Sequence.”

“Glad to hear, NovaSpot, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. Stand by. I’m patching in Temporal Confinement Groundside Control. Groundside Temporal, this is Project Director with NovaSpot Control in the loop. Do you copy?”

“Project Director, this is TC Groundside Control. Understand NovaSpot Con is in the loop. Go ahead.”

“Thank you, Groundside TC. We’ve got a serious power problem at Groundside Power Reception. They might not reach the power levels listed in the operations specs, and they also seem to be experiencing a serious power storage drain. Right now they’re working to shift to manual control in order to up their power inputs.If that works, maybe they can do something about the power drain—but I doubt they’ll have time and bodies enough to do much before the SunSpot sets.”

“The hell you say—uh, I mean, copy that, Project Director.” NovaSpot Control just barely managed to get her voice under control.

“Copy, PD.” Temporal Confinement Control sounded almost as unnerved. “So is this a wave-off? We reset for tomorrow’s window?”

“Negative,” Drayax replied, quiet steel in her voice. “The situation will only be worse—a lot worse—tomorrow. The systems are deteriorating. We’re going to have to go today—and maybe go early.”

“Say again?” Both controllers spoke the same words at the same time, which surprised Drayax not at all.

“We’re throwing out the operations plan,” she said. “We are not going at the start of the optimum shielding period—we’re going the moment Groundside Power tells me they have the maximum power they’re going to get. If they’re at 95 percent, or 101 percent, or 112, we go when they say. The latest that might come would be just as SunSpot sets, but it’s likely to be something on the order of twenty minutes before that time. Based on what Groundside Power told me, I would estimate the earliest possible moment would be an about an hour and fifteen minutes from now—about 16:02 hours. But when they tell us the power storage is at max—we go.”

“Project Director—we can’t do that!” NovaSpot Control protested. “There are people in unshielded habitats on Alloy. If the NovaSpot ignites before it moves around behind Comfort as seen from Alloy—”

Then people on Alloy will die.But she could not speak those words. Instead she brought up a textcom window on her console, typed in a few words, and sent off a message. “I’ve just sent a text communication shelter alert to Alloy, and we’ll resend that, and voice alerts, every two minutes. The first alert will reach them at least an hour and fifteen minutes before we ignite NovaSpot.”See? I typed three little sentences, and solved the problem just like that. Somehow, her interior thoughts were taking on something like a hysterical tone, bright, grim, unfunny little jokes, even as she kept up her tough but sensible exterior.So which one is really me? Which one should I pick?

“You know as well as I do they don’t have enough shelter space out there! That’s why Ignition had to wait until Comfort eclipsed NovaSpot for Alloy in the first place.”

“Understood, NovaSpot Control.”Who would you like to kill instead of the miners on Alloy? “But we’re down to hard choices. Comfort will eclipse for Alloy at 16:43:05—one hour, forty-one minutes from now. If wecan wait until then, we will. But we can’t wave off. It’s do it now, maybe a little early, or never.”And if it’s never, it’s never-never time for all of us.

There was silence on the line for a moment. “Do you copy, NovaSpot Control?”

“We copy. I sure as hell don’t like it, but we copy.”

It’s not my favorite idea either,Drayax thought. “Temporal Confinement Control—do you copy?”

“We do—but we’re not too happy either.”

“No one is, but we’ve run out of good choices,” Drayax replied. “But I need to know from both of you, all other issues aside—can you be ready to go, at your last programmed hold before initiating, at 16:02 hours?”

“Stand by on that, Project Director. NovaSpot Control out.”

Was NovaSpot’s controller going to consult with her technical people, or was she just sitting there, comm off, taking her soul out and taking a good hard look at it?

Never mind. “Temporal Confinement?”

“We’re at Power Shunt standby now. All we have to do is link to the Groundside Power’s energy store, charge the initiators, and induce the field. The whole sequence should take three minutes, maximum. No problem.”

“Copy that.”Was Temporal Confinement’s controller that much more cold-blooded? Or just so wrapped up in playing with his wonderful toy that he wasn’t willing or able to think about radiation deaths on Alloy? Or does he figure that it’s NovaSpot Control’s problem? Or is he a more or less decent person doing what you’re doing, dearie—trying to stay professional on the outside while his insides want to scream? “But there’s another problem—power levels,” Drayax went on. “You’ve had the chance to power up to standby and evaluate your integrated system efficiency. What’s your floor, the dead-minimum power level you need for the confinement to work at all?”

“No real problem there, either, Project Director, if things hold together. We can at least initiate a field with a power level of, say, 75 percent of rated storage capacity. We’re there now, and then some. The question is, then what? With 75 percent, we couldn’t hold that field for more than ten minutes, external—and it would be far less intense than we’d want. The good news is that inducing a field this big is the power hog. Once the field is there, maintaining it doesn’t take nearly the power.”

“What can you give me at, say, 86 percent?”

“Half of Greenhouse burned to a crisp,” the disembodied voice said briskly. “Ifeverything works just right, it’s going to take at least seventeen hours before the NovaSpot’s under enough control to block hard radiation. Probably closer to twenty hours. At 86 percent, wemight be able to hold together a minimum field for, say, ten hours—and that’s a field that’s just barely intense enough to redshift out the heavy radiation. But ten hours in, even that field would die.”

“Go at it the other way. With what you know about your hardware right now, what’s the lowest level that would let you go the whole way?”

“Stand by.” A moment’s silence. Drayax was learning to get used to careful pauses—but she was also learning to hate them. But it was another voice that spoke next.

“This is NovaSpot Control, back in the loop. We have those figures for you now. We cannot initiate Ignition until—”

Don’t say it yet,Drayax thought. “Stand by, NovaSpot. I’m waiting on a reply from Temporal Confinement. TC, do you have anything yet?”

“Ah, yes, yes we do. Our projections say we’d really need to have 91.2 percent to provide minimum full coverage. Anything less than that, and at least part of Greenhouse gets some sort of dose of heavy radiation.”

“Understood.” She herself paused—and hated it. Then she spoke, choosing her words carefully, very much aware that NovaSpot Control was listening as well. Even if she was addressing Temporal Confinement Control, she needed both of them to get the message. “Understood, TC. You need 91.2 power to provide minimum protection. Thank you for that input. But be aware, Temporal Confinement, that if we max out at under 91.2 percent power, if we only get to 86 percent—we are still going.

She kept talking, struggling to keep her voice under some semblance of control. “We went into this trying to save lives, and that’s still what we’re about. But unless Groundside Power Reception can pull out a miracle, we’re down to buying lives tomorrow with deaths today. It’s too late to wave off. Groundside Power won’t be able to regroup in time, and I don’t think the SunSpot is in much better shape. If we don’t go today, we don’t go—andall of Greenhouse dies when the SunSpot goes dead. After what it’s been through today, the SunSpot can’t last more than a few more weeks or months at the outside. If Greenhouse goes, it takes Solace down with it, probably a year or two from now. If Solace goes, so does every habitat in the system, sooner or later. Save a few lives today, andeveryone is dead five years from now.” She paused again. “Are we clear?”

Silence on the line. And then TC Control spoke. “We copy, Project Director.”

“Thank you for that, TC Control. NovaSpot, we’re ready for your report now.”

“Ah. Hold off on that just a second, Project Director.”

Lose your nerve, NovaSpot? Feeling a bit less noble?If the situation had been a bit less grim, Drayax would have been tempted to laugh. Sheknew, knew to a moral certainty, what had happened.

Drayax didn’t know NovaSpot’s on-duty controller well, but she did knowHaress Bevard, NovaSpot’s chief engineer. He was a peppery old sort, given to picking his ground and standing on it. All very well when it was an engineering issue, something he had studied and worked on for years, and he truly did know the One Right Way to do things. People quite properly deferred to him at such times.

But the old boy had a tendency to assume that he was due that deference in all things, from the right amount to tip a waiter on the rare occasions he picked up the check in a restaurant with human service—nothing if service wasn’t perfect, and make damned sure they didn’t try to tack their tip onto the bill—to the proper form of address when speaking to the Planetary Executive—no honorific, just “Kalzant”—hehadn’t voted for her. He could be irritating as hell to deal with, but his engineering skill gave him a certain degree of license.

At times, however, when he realized he had gone completely over the line, he was the very picture of a sincerely repentant little boy, his eyes downcast, his booming voice suddenly low and apologetic. It could be most amusing—or heart-wrenching—to watch the puffed-up little man visibly deflate right in front of you.

Drayaxknew, absolutelyknew, that Bevard had sputtered with indignation at the very idea of going early and endangering Alloy. He had pulled some high-and-mighty engineering reason out of thin air that made it impossible to move up the moment of Ignition. The controller on duty had been about to report that, put it on the record, when Drayax had stopped him—and stopped him just in time.

And, now, as she waited, she knew that her words had reached Bevard, actually made him stop and listen. Even he could understand that sometimes there were no good choices, or even right choices.

But there wasn’t time for handholding and making people feel better. She needed the answers she needed—and she needed them at once. “NovaSpot Control, we are very much on the clock. Can you now advise as to earliest possible time we can begin the Final Ignition Sequence?”

“Stand by one more minute,” the controller said. Before the mike cut off, Drayax could hear muffled voices for a moment, the sound of a hurried and heated conference. In far less than a minute, the controller came back on-line. “Project Director, this is NovaSpot Control. We’ll need a few more minutes to give you an absolutely precise figure, but if we scratch two programmed holds we don’t expect to need at this point, we can press ahead to minus three minutes in our countdown, and get to minus three as of approximately 16:08. We can hold at minus three for at least twelve hours, so we’ve got a lot of flexibility at that moment. That gives us first possible Ignition start as of 16:11 hours, assuming three to four minutes’ notice.” There was another moment’s silence, then the voice came back. “We here would like to emphasize that is an estimate based on purelytechnical grounds. We still urge delay until 16:43:05 hours and Comfort eclipsing for Alloy if at all possible.”

Drayax allowed herself a sigh of relief. That was as close to a “yes” as she was ever going to get. “Thank you, NovaSpot Control. You are ordered to scratch unneeded holds, press ahead to minus three minutes, and hold at that point in your count. I promise to do everything I can to hold off until eclipse for Alloy. Project Director out.”

She cut her mike and stared at screens full of information she no longer had the will to read. That promise to do everything she could would be an easy one to keep; there was as near nothing as could be thatanyone could do. Everything,everything, was on the shoulders of the well-intentioned, far-too-young, hopelessly inexperienced team at Groundside Power Reception.

Berana Drayax hoped to hell they didn’t have time to think a great deal about how much was up to them.