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  The trillionaire glared at the doctor and asked, in Russian, “You’re certain this is drinkable?”

  “I’ve drunk it myself, sir, with no puking and no hangover. I print a lot of booze for people as it is, so I’m in a position to say, it’s at least as good as the drug-printer recipe.”

  Dona was now impatient herself, so she tossed the bottle toward Orlov, who caught it with a slight fumble. His reflexes still haven’t adapted to weightlessness, she noted, filing the information away in case it might be useful. He hasn’t personally spent very much time in space.

  Orlov pointed the spout of the bottle into his mouth and squeezed. Nothing happened.

  “Oh, you have to take off the safety seal,” she told him. “We thought of that, yeah, so they don’t get tampered with, and so they don’t leak during reentry.”

  Grumbling in annoyance, the trillionaire unscrewed the cap, peeled off the plastic seal, tossed it behind him into the corridor, and then screwed the cap back on. He’d spilled a few large drops in the process, and these he scooped with his hand, casting them, clear and shimmery, into his mouth.

  “It’s warm,” he said, wrinkling his nose.

  “Apologies,” said Sergei. “This is freshly printed and filtered; there was no time to chill it.”

  Orlov took another taste, this time from the spout as intended. He swished and swallowed. Took a third taste. Then he tossed the bottle at Dona, and said, “Very well. Double the price every week until this distributor stops ordering. Then find another distributor who’ll buy at that price. The first man tells us what the market will bear, you see? And the second man actually bears it. Apparently, ethanol is one of the hydrocarbons we now produce, but the game remains the same as any other product.”

  “I did well?” she asked, perhaps too eagerly.

  He seemed to think about that for a moment before answering, “Better than expected. Imaginations tend to be limited here. This is not impressive, but I am glad to see you are at least capable of original thought.”

  And that was how Dona Obata joined Orlov Petrochemical.

  That night, she did more than just put her arm around him. A proper seduction was slow, not quick, and so it was a small beginning—a hand job in the dark, like a good, chaste girl might do. Not that she was fooling anyone—he knew perfectly well who and what she was—but the body wants what it wants, and even a bastard like Orlov wanted to feel like somebody liked him the proper way. And she did want to like him, first of all because that was easier than pretending, even for a practiced liar like her. And second of all because here in space, making a trillionaire her lover was clearly the best of the available options—all the more so if both of them were actually feeling it. Obvious, right? And third—there was a third!—because she was also a bastard, and she thought perhaps around Orlov she wouldn’t have to pretend otherwise. It might just be that for the first time in her life, she could think of showing a man her true face, and be accepted for it. It was a surprisingly nice thought.

  1.6

  12 April

  ✧

  L.S.F. Dandelion

  En Route to Earth-Sun

  Lagrange Point 1

  Cislunar Space

  They traded off hibernation cycles, with Derek asleep for a week and then Alice asleep for a few days, and then Derek asleep for a week and a half, and it confirmed for her that he really did want to spend as much time as possible in hibernation, drawing a salary but barely breathing, barely aging, totally unaware of the boring boring BORING passage of time.

  Alice skimmed every operator’s and maintenance manual for the Dandelion that she could find in the onboard systems. Other than a few introductory pages and the odd wiki article copied from public sources, most of it seemed machine-written from CAD drawings and circuit diagrams, and maybe even from AI observations of the actual ship in action. It made for tough reading, but having nothing better to do, Alice skimmed every page and then, with still more time on her hands, carefully read every word.

  She lacked the physics and chemistry background for some of it, but on her third full pass through the documents, with numerous dictionary and encyclopedia lookups along the way, things started to come together. The ship operated by accelerating ionized xenon gas out the back, which was efficient but also provided extremely low thrust, which is why it took sixty-six days to get from low Earth orbit to ESL1, whereas a typical flight to the Moon—about a quarter the distance—took only three days with chemical rockets. But that required fuel tanks the size of grain silos, as heavy as a whole fleet of buses, whereas Dandelion’s fuel tank held just two hundred fifty kilograms of liquefied xenon gas. Basically, the mass of a very fat human being. That was a big difference, but it was also why the passengers needed to sleep through the journey—because even with excellent air and water recycling, the ship would need to be much larger and heavier to support a full complement of non-hibernating passengers and crew for that long. It would eat up all the savings.

  Through these awful documents, Alice learned all about the plumbing and electrical and propulsion and data systems of the ship, and about what was behind the walls and panels of the bridge and hibernation stations. Emergency procedures were worryingly sketchy, but she learned what she could, and tried to fit it in a framework of everything she knew about aircraft and ground vehicles, emergency medicine, and basic human health. She would have liked to have known a lot more, but when she downloaded some textbooks over the ship’s reeeally slow data connection, they were basically impenetrable to her. She was, after all, a glorified paramedic, and had reached the limits of what her brain could process. Ah, well.

  When learning slowed and stopped and even threatened to reverse itself a bit, she turned to exercise to pass the time. The ship had a little treadmill in back, to which you could strap yourself with gravity-simulating bungie cords. Boring as hell, but at least she could listen to music. And yet, there were only so many hours a day you could slog pointlessly. Eventually she took the bungies off and just danced in midair, until even the music was tiresome. And then, with still nothing to do, she went back and actually read every crew briefing RzVz had ever sent her, and some publicly available stuff about the ESL1 shade, and the company (and the man) that had built it. For a spy, she’d done a pretty lousy job of knowing what was going on, but finally she began to feel at least vaguely ready to pass herself off as a genuine space colonist. And then, yes, to perform her mission, whatever that might turn out to be.

  5.2

  15 April

  ✧

  Mars Today

  Premium Downloadable Content

  #Marsnow #takeme #iwanttogo

  (ERROR: ActivAI sound mapping features not enabled for 3D viewer)

  GLASS: We’re here today with Dan Beseman, founder and CEO of both Enterprise City and The Tunneling Corporation, and the single greatest force behind space colonization in our time.

  BESEMAN: Whoa! I don’t know about that.

  GLASS: False modesty is uncalled for, Dan. Our audience knows exactly who you are and what you’ve been up to.

  BESEMAN: They also know we’re not the only game in town, Howard. Let’s not dumb this down. Now, you put the word “Mars” in there and absolutely, we’re the clear leader.

  GLASS: Who else is even in the game? Mars, I mean.

  BESEMAN: Well, the Russian and Chinese governments, obviously, although they’re five to seven years behind us, at best. The U.S. government is no longer on that list, though. You may have heard: as of last month, NASA has officially subsumed its Mars colonization efforts into ours. This vastly decreases their budget, which was a primary motivation for them, but it also vastly increases ours, with the only stipulation being that the U.S. government gets to select two of the male colonists, and two of the females, with no input from Enterprise City, Incorporated.

  GLASS: Which you’ve agreed to.

  BESEMAN: Which we’ve agreed to, yes. On a per-person basis, these four people would be the highest-sponsored
candidates in the whole expedition, by at least a factor of five, and we also expect them to be among the most qualified. Since literally anyone can buy a berth in the colony, it’s mainly a matter of definitions; the U.S. government has bought four seats that simply won’t be outbid. Any government could do the same, and in fact at least six of our candidates include national governments among their key sponsors. So the U.S. offer makes sense for us on basically every level. We’d have to be crazy to turn it down, and as NASA itself has reaffirmed, we’re not crazy. We’re very serious about putting a hundred colonists on Mars within the next five years, and we’re going about it very systematically, trying to head off literally every problem the human mind can anticipate.

  GLASS: Such as?

  BESEMAN: Well, for example, we’ve got provisions for up to half of the colonists to chicken out after six months on planet. We hope nowhere near that number take us up on it, but I can virtually guarantee that return flight will not go back empty, either. So it could be anywhere from, say, five people to fifty. The fact is, we simply don’t know. We don’t have any way to know, because nobody’s ever done this before.

  GLASS: And what if more than half the people want to go back, and your return ship can’t hold them all?

  BESEMAN: In that unpleasant scenario, we can put those excess people into hibernation on the ground for six months, until the next resupply mission brings another lander. They won’t experience the passage of time, and their resource utilization will be less than a fifth what it would be if they were awake. Like the first fifty returnees, they’ll simply wake up back on Earth. Now, that kind of very long hibernation is an extreme solution, and a health risk, though presumably less of a risk than letting a very unhappy person walk around in a deadly environment like Mars. I don’t think we’re going to need that, but honestly, even knowing the possibility is there may serve as a kind of psychological safety valve. Nobody’s going to feel trapped.

  GLASS: You’d still need some people awake to care for those hibernators, though.

  BESEMAN: Probably ten people, yes. So we can afford a ninety percent washout rate and still move forward to a second wave of colonists. Who will still arrive years ahead of the Chinese and the Russians, assuming they’re coming at all.

  GLASS: And despite what you said earlier, you don’t take just anyone for this mission, right? There are fairly strict qualifications each candidate needs to meet.

  BESEMAN: I’m not sure what you mean by “strict.” Most able-bodied humans can meet the base requirements, which amount to little more than a doctor’s note stating basic physical and mental fitness for space travel. We don’t begin any sort of weeding-out process until an applicant has raised a minimum bid of one million dollars, a hundred thousand of which is nonrefundable, to defray the expenses associated with each application. So in that sense, we’re selecting for people who can find a million dollars somewhere, from someone. Is that “strict”? Not really. Again, the way the sourcing program is set up, that’s not a high bar. Micro-sponsorships alone account for nearly twenty billion dollars of our total donation pool. That’s just ordinary people who want to help, or who dream of going to Mars themselves one day, but don’t want to be first.

  The primary requirement after that is to submit to, basically, eight weeks of house arrest with a bunch of sensors strapped to your head and chest. We do want to eliminate people with heart conditions, or who take poorly to captivity, and we want to encourage people who stay fit and active during that confinement. Also, every applicant has to specify which of twenty-five different job descriptions they’re applying for, so in that sense, yes, people do need to convince their sponsors they can do that particular job. But to the extent there’s any enforcement there, it’s the sponsors themselves who are doing it. I mean, we have exactly four pilot slots, exactly two of which have to be filled by women, so if you’re going for one of those slots, you’ll need to stand out in the crowd. Actually, pilot is a bad example, because that’s our single smallest applicant pool, and two of the slots have been very decisively claimed by NASA. A better example is janitorial, which can be done by literally anyone. You don’t need to be anything special to fill that job, and so, ironically, it winds up being our most competitive category. The male janitorial slot is currently bidding at four billion U.S. dollars, and looks to go higher if Oliver Wang sells his company to regain front position.

  GLASS: Strange to think a billionaire would give it all up to push a broom.

  BESEMAN: On Mars. Again, if you add that word in there, it makes a lot more sense. Oliver’s a very driven person, and on Mars he can leave a mark on history that he never could on Earth. He may start out pushing a broom, but who knows what that’s going to look like five or ten or twenty years from now? Who knows how that society, and the people in it, are going to evolve?

  GLASS: Are you rooting for him, then?

  BESEMAN: I can’t play favorites, Howard. You know that.

  GLASS: All right, well, I hope your friendship can survive whatever happens. Now, let’s talk about some rumors that have been swirling around you lately.

  BESEMAN: [Laughs] It’s not true that I’m planning to crown myself King of Mars. In fact, the only government on planet will consist of a five-person steering committee, elected annually, and while I do plan on running for that, and so does Carol, it’s up to the colony whether they want either one of us, much less both at once.

  GLASS: You’ve sunk more than a trillion dollars of your own money into making this dream come true, and it’s hard to imagine anyone with a firmer grip on the issues your colony will face. Surely the voters will appreciate that they wouldn’t be there at all without you.

  BESEMAN: [Laughs] Thanks. We’ll see.

  GLASS: Of course, you’ll still be CEO of Enterprise City, the company in sole control of supply lines from Earth, and crew transit back and forth between Mars and cislunar space. So whether the colonists elect you or not, you’ll still be in a very powerful position.

  BESEMAN: Is that a question? It’s true, I’m going to continue to run the day-to-day operations of Enterprise City as my primary job. If anything, that makes me less involved in the day-to-day operation of the colony. But I’ll have the ultimate skin in the game, which is to say, my own skin, and that of my wife. We have the same vested interest as everyone else, in those supply lines running smoothly. But people in the township will also be counting on life support to function, every minute of every day. And food production, and even janitorial services. In a space colony, every person is critical to every other person. That’s why the real magic is in the interpersonal relationships we’re forming right now, even before we get there.

  GLASS: Okay, but isn’t that at odds with selling berths to the highest bidder?

  BESEMAN: Not at all. Our process has the happy side effect of selecting for only the most determined and qualified people. There aren’t going to be any free riders at Antilympus Township, I can promise you that. We all know that about each other, and it’s an excellent starting point for any type of personal relationship. So no, not at odds.

  GLASS: Talk to me about that name, Antilympus. You came up with that yourself, right? That’s not any sort of astronomical designation.

  BESEMAN: That’s correct, yes, although it was actually Carol who came up with it. There’s a thing called “areoid,” which is the equipotential surface in the Goddard Mars Gravity Model. Areoid is the Martian equivalent of sea level; it’s how we measure altitude. So, Hellas Basin, also known as Hellas Impact Crater, is the lowest-lying ground on Mars, an average of seven kilometers below areoid. So, a fairly deep depression in the surface, right? And by miraculous coincidence, it’s roughly antipodal to the Tharsis Bulge, which is the region that’s highest on Mars, at about six kilometers above the areoid. That is, they’re on opposite sides of the sphere. The thinking is that the asteroid impact that formed Hellas also formed Tharsis, by literally directly pushing a cylindrical plug of matter several kilometers along its long
axis. We’re talking about a plug of matter extending all the way through the planet, just pushed, like that. Now, the highest point on Mars is the summit of Olympus Mons, and our little crater, Antilympus, isn’t literally antipodal to that. It’s actually about eighteen degrees off, but we figure, hey, eighteen out of three hundred and sixty, that’s close enough. We’re at the very lowest point on Mars, nearly opposite to the very highest.

  GLASS: And when you say we . . .

  BESEMAN: The robots building the township, yes. We like to see through their eyes, and we often talk about it as though we’re actually there with them. It’s their township now, but not for very much longer. We like that word, township, by the way. Like a spaceship, fully enclosed and self-sufficient, except it’s on the ground and it’s a permanent home to hundreds of people. Eventually hundreds. So it’s a town, ship.

  GLASS: And how are the robots doing? How is that very important part of the project coming along?

  BESEMAN: [Laughs] Well, let’s just say it’s not the limiting factor in our timeline. Landing hab modules and cargo pods is a lot easier than transporting a hundred living people. The H.S.F. Concordia is a spaceship like no one has ever built, with crew space and stores sufficient to support ten people for twelve months, plus ninety sleepers in live cargo, plus a hundred kilograms of personal effects for each person, and certain other supplies to help the township through its first Martian year. There’s already food and seed and a certain amount of water in place at Antilympus; that’s easy. Concordia is transporting more difficult cargo like live plant cuttings, emergency medicines, emergency oxygen, stuff like that. So it’s a lot of delicate machinery, packed on top of the world’s first self-refueling planetary lander and return vehicle. And all of that is packed on top of a giant, reusable chemical rocket the size of a skyscraper. The H.S.F. stands for high-speed ferry, but it’s basically a hospital ship strapped to a fuel tanker strapped to a heavy-lift booster. People think building a base is the hard part, but nothing could be further from the truth. Building the ship to get us there is much harder.