Rich Man's Sky Page 23

She’d been told there was a full library of Earth environment simulations available, from ocean floors to mountaintops and everything in between. They also had “VR&R” (virtual reality rest and relaxation) at Transit Point Station and, weirdly, at the Marriott Stars. She didn’t see why hotel guests fresh from the planet’s surface would need that, so she’d supposed that was more for the benefit of the staff, going slowly stir crazy on their one-hundred-twenty-day duty rotations. Before the place had opened, guests were already booked out two years in advance, for zero-gee vacations ranging anywhere from twenty-four hours to three weeks, and it was expected to be hard duty for the hotel staff. In theory, the VR&R had also been available to all the military and intelligence personnel who’d commandeered the place, but Alice hadn’t talked to anyone who’d actually used it. Their real lives were quite exciting enough.

  But yes, with a proper VR rig you could stand in a sun-dappled forest with a cool breeze across your face. The high-end headgear could simulate hot desert breezes, too, or dry glacial ones, or swampy humidity. Feeling it against your eyes was somehow allegedly nearly as good as feeling it against your whole body. But that had sounded to her a lot like how vegetarians brag about their fake meat shit tasting as good as the real thing. Not really. First bite, maybe. But Alice had once gone a full month on kosher/vegan field rations, and was about ready to resort to cannibalism by the time she’d gotten back to an operating base. So yeah, VR probably got old quick.

  Ignoring her, Derek said, “Since they took me off Earth-to-orbit shuttle duty, it’s been two and a half years since I touched ground.”

  “Oh. Wow. That’s a long time.” Then, because she was supposed to be a colonist, “I guess that’s all of us, though. Up here forever, going soft.”

  He snorted. “We’re probably stronger than before we left. We land on Earth, I could kickbox the landing boss the minute we open the doors. That’s not the problem. I mean, this place is growing fast—physically growing—but every component serves the master plan. Other than this Ping-Pong table, which doesn’t really work in zero gee, by the way, there’s not a lot of dumb relaxation bullshit here. It’s depressing.”

  Alice could understand that. The gymnasium bubble on the Marriott Stars was expected to be one of its main attractions, but there was also an arboretum and a chapel and a restaurant. Would people take time out from their zero-gee vacations to eat steak, pray, and smell the roses? Marriott certainly seemed to think so.

  “You could build something,” she offered.

  “Me? I’m just a dumb flyboy.”

  “Bowling alley? Puppet theater? An inflatable bubble wouldn’t cost much.”

  “Tell it to Bigballs.”

  “You tell him.”

  He didn’t say anything, and then it was super awkward for a moment. She could see he was too close to the problem, too limited in his thinking by the existing structures and rhythms of the station. Like a dutiful, rule-following Air Force pilot, he couldn’t really conceive of disrupting the place for his own gratification. Soldiers tended to be more pragmatic; when assigned to a camp in the dead center of Nowheresville, they quickly set up makeshift games and wading pools and whatever else the available materials allowed them to come up with. Duct tape, trash bags, parachute cord and empty containers were the 3D printers of field deployment, used to create everything from couches to kites, barbecue grills to piñatas and bongs.

  “Have a contest,” she suggested. “Best use of a bubble module.”

  “Thanks, new girl.”

  “That’s new head of security to you. Anyhow, are we going on your inspection pod?”

  “Yeah. Let’s get it over with. Going to be a tight fit, though.”

  What he meant by that, it turned out, was that Jeanette Schmidt was coming along with them. Alice tried to hide her surprise when she saw Jeanette waiting for them at the docking module, with her blonde hair untied and drifting around her, mermaid-style. Jeanette seemed surprised to see Alice as well, and Alice felt immediately annoyed with herself. Whoever said this was a date? She did. Not Derek.

  Truthfully, she had imagined boning him silly when they were out alone in space again. Why not, right? And it had never even occurred to her that Derek might have something else in mind. That this pod ride was part of his actual job, and he had goals to accomplish and schedules to keep. Derp.

  It might well be part of Jeanette’s job as well. Wasn’t she some kind of space resource expert or asteroid-mining expert or something? She seemed young for that, but then again Alice herself was not yet thirty, and the President of the United States had entrusted this potentially deadly mission to her.

  Speaking of which, yes, Alice had her own job to do! Bethy was right; she was losing focus. Something about this place—this whole setup—was really distracting her somehow. But okay, this maintenance pod trip could provide her with good information about the Shade and the Station and their respective vulnerabilities. How would she take the place down? If worse came to worst, could she somehow just drop the whole thing into the Sun?

  That thought made her shudder, for two reasons: first because she had calmly (if fleetingly) considered the cold-blooded murder of thirty innocent people. Second, because she had the vague sense that the physics didn’t actually work that way, but she wasn’t sure why. If the Shade was “hovering” on the pressure of sunlight, didn’t that mean it could fall if the whole thing turned clear and the sunlight were allowed to pass through it? Pilot trainee or no, she realized she knew fuck all about orbital mechanics, and on the heels of that she recognized that the President had not sent her here to modify the orbits of things. She was here for petty violence, pure and simple. But yeah, where, and how, and against whom? Should she and Bethy simply put a round in the back of Igbal’s head and then lock all the controls until the space marines arrived?

  Again, the idea made her shudder. No. There was a better way, somewhere out there waiting to be found.

  By way of greeting, Jeanette said, “I hear Dona stole that shuttle and hid it somewhere.”

  Alice responded with frustration and confusion she didn’t have to fake. “You heard right.” And then, before Jeanette could ask her next question she added: “I don’t know how or why. It’s super troubling, yeah?”

  Jeanette nodded, her eyebrows cocked as high as they would go. “Little bit, yeah. Watch our backs around here. So, you’re coming with us on today’s inspection?”

  She sounded disappointed.

  “I need to understand the facility and its vulnerabilities,” Alice told her without irony.

  “Come on,” Derek said wearily, opening a docking hatch and waving the two of them through. “You’re going to have to share a seat belt.”

  Alice saw immediately what he meant: the pilot’s seat was a kind of saddle, with weird stirrups and arm sleeves to hold him in place against what must be fairly moderate acceleration.

  Behind that was something that looked for all the world like the back seat of a twentieth-century automobile: a bench of padded synthetic leather in weirdly tasteful burgundy and gray, with a padded backrest and an adjustable fabric belt buckled across it. She and Jeanette would fit in it together, but barely. The pod had big rearview mirrors on either side, much like the Dandelion, but the front of it was a single curved bubble of some thick, transparent material that was held to the aft hull with a ring of maybe twenty-four bolts. Alice felt a momentary flutter of panic, remembering there was actually no air out there, and realizing her whole existence depended on bolts and gaskets and whatnot.

  But Jeanette was calmly gliding into the seat, and Derek was closing and dogging shut the hatch behind it, and Alice was supposedly fearless, with ice water in her veins, so she moved in beside Jeanette and buckled the two of them in.

  “It’s like a carnival ride,” Jeanette said.

  Except carnival rides didn’t have pilots. What it was actually like was a “tuk-tuk” motorized rickshaw Alice had once ridden in Kaohsiung, right before the whole Taiwan th
ing went south. Driver in front, two passengers crammed in back, and not much feeling of safety. But she liked Jeanette, and didn’t feel a need to be snitty, so all she said was, “Yeah.”

  Derek slapped on a headset, flipped a couple of physical switches, and started talking to the empty air. “Echo 2 requesting departure clearance. Affirmative. Affirmative. Filed eight hours ago. Correct. Two passengers, ID Alice Kyeong and Jeanette . . .”

  “Schmidt,” Jeanette supplied.

  “Schmidt. Correct. Roger that.”

  There was a banging noise behind them that almost made Alice flinch.

  “Roger, I show four docking clamps released. Roger that: Echo 2 on departure.”

  It took Alice a few seconds to realize they were moving. The acceleration was more substantial than the gnat-fart whisper of an ion engine, but still so gentle that she mainly felt it in her hair, which slowly pooled behind her on the headrest. With her ass belted firmly to the bench seat and her hips wedged between a bulkhead on the left and Jeanette on the right, her body didn’t physically move. Nevertheless, in the portion of the rearview mirrors visible to her, she could make out the docking module falling slowly away from them, at roughly the velocity of a turtle. They were picking up speed, though: now walking speed, now running speed, now the speed of a bicycle. Now a car on the highway, and the station was shrinking behind them.

  Out in front there was only the blankness of the ESL1 Shade, a dim, gray-black expanse, like flying over a desert at night, with a starry sky above it. Not twinkling. The central Hub is opaque, she reminded herself. But up ahead, the “horizon” of the Hub was bright, as though the desert were surrounded by a giant, ring-shaped city just out of view.

  “You two okay back there?” Derek asked over his shoulder.

  “Peachy,” Jeanette confirmed.

  “Echo 2,” Alice said. “Figures you’d have a cool-ass call sign.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Call sign has to be cool, or what’s the point? You must have used one, too. What was it?”

  “Mockingbird.”

  He snorted. “Yeah, that figures.”

  “Who were you talking to, anyway?”

  “Lurch. He handles traffic control, among other things.”

  “Oh. That’s creepy.”

  Suddenly, the brightness rushed toward them, and the little inspection pod was bathed in light. Alice couldn’t see the Sun itself—that was “under” them—but the Shade was now an expanse of glowing fabric, like a lampshade. Alice could see texture in it at many different scales: filaments crisscrossing with threads crisscrossing with cables, like a Halloween spiderweb on a fireplace screen on a linen tablecloth.

  “Whoa,” she said, abandoning her reserve for a moment.

  “That’s right,” Jeanette chortled. “Pretty amazing actually being here, isn’t it?”

  “What is all that stuff?”

  She was asking Derek, but it was Jeanette who answered, “Electrical wires. A square kilometer of Shade generates almost a hundred megawatts of power. Has to go somewhere.”

  “Jesus,” Alice said, wondering why, for all her studying and all the briefings she’d sat through, she still had no idea what was going on up here. She knew the thing generated electricity, but she had never asked why. “What’s it all for?”

  Jeanette tossed her head. The acceleration had subsided, so her hair spun around her like a golden crown. “That’s the trick, isn’t it? People talk a lot about energy and how to get it. They don’t talk as much about how to use it when you’ve got this much. The station is zone-refining space rocks by the shit ton, literally as fast as the gatherbots can haul them in. That basically means melting the rock in a linear fashion, like a little stripe of hot lava passing through it, while it’s in a centrifuge. That tends to push different materials apart, so you get this rainbow of different materials you can literally just cut apart with a saw. It’s very power-intensive, and so is the machinery that turns that material into products. RzVz is known for hab modules and spaceship parts, right? And the Shade itself. But most of what we’re producing here are weavers and stitchers and more gatherbots, to build the shade. It’s a very viral situation. But even all of that barely puts a dent in the available power! It still has to go somewhere. So there’s a particle accelerator cranking out antimatter—specifically, antilithium antideuteride—to bank the excess energy until Igbal figures out what to do with it. Starship propellant or whatever. That’s an inefficient storage process, but the energy density is phenomenal.”

  “How much antimatter?” Alice demanded, suddenly cold and hot at the same time.

  “Almost a kilogram, I think.”

  “Jesus.”

  Alice knew fuck all about antimatter, just like she knew fuck all about everything else up here, but she knew the Air Force was deeply concerned about it in milligram quantities. A kilogram was, what, a million truck bombs, all in one little chunk?

  “We’re coming up on the first stitcher seam,” Derek told them both. He pointed, and through the domed front of the pod Alice could see a discoloration in the Shade up ahead; a dark smudge surrounding a pinpoint of brightness. As it drew closer, it looked like a river of ants marching alongside a river of white-hot molten steel, and then it flashed by, underneath and behind them, and Alice caught a glimpse of what was actually down there: a rip in the fabric of the Shade, hundreds of meters long, surrounded by spidery robots. The size of pickup trucks, they were brightly illuminated by the sunlight spilling through the rip, and their arms were moving with a blurry speed that was somewhere between comical and creepy.

  “You see that?” Derek said, apparently to Jeanette. “Once a tear is reported, the swarming behaviors kick in until a quorum is achieved. They’ve already arrested the spread, or else there’d be two swarms concentrated at the ends. Since they’re spread out evenly, they must figure it’s well in hand. Probably have it sealed up by the end of the day.”

  “Silk,” Jeanette said, approvingly.

  “I can slow down if you need a closer look at the next one.”

  “Thanks. That would be nice.”

  “I’m fine back here,” Alice said, letting some of her annoyance leak through. Her body and mind had been calibrated for something altogether different from this. But if she rolled the tape back in her mind, she had to admit, Derek had never come close to asking her on a date. She’d had that conversation with herself! But with Jeanette here, Alice also had no opportunity to sound Derek out on the whole U.S. of A. thing—to see where he’d be standing if (actually, when) the government took control of this place. So that was two opportunities missed.

  Sloppy. Alice was coming to terms with the fact that President Tompkins had been wrong about her. Maybe she did have ice water in her veins on a combat drop, but she was not a creature of nuance or deception, and she had a sense that here at ESL1 she was already running out of options and time.

  But her comment went unanswered. Derek was in self-importantly busy flyboy mode, and Jeanette was absorbed in her own mission.

  “What do humans even do around here?” Alice asked her.

  “Not Shade maintenance,” Jeanette said. “You’d need a million people, and what would they all eat? Nah. Wouldn’t work.”

  “So why are we even out here in this pod? Don’t these drones have video you can tap into?”

  “They do,” Derek said. “The beast with a million eyes. We can even order a robotic flyover for particular sites if we need to.”

  “So what are we doing out here?”

  “Same thing we’re doing everywhere: big-picture stuff. Looking for issues nobody knows about yet. Machines don’t innovate, they just do what they’re told.”

  Spoken like a flyboy.

  “How often do you do these inspections?”

  “Me personally? Two or three times a year. Hobie Prieto does it more than I do, but I also inspect the sunny side, which he does not do. It’s quite a bit more dangerous; if I had a problem, I’d have to cut right through the
Shade to get back. Or go around the long way.”

  “Hmm. Hobie’s the frozen guy?”

  “Yeah.” Derek sounded glum again. “Right now he’s the frozen guy.”

  They changed course a few times, looking at the sites of two smaller rips, both swarming with stitcherbots, and it seemed to Alice that the Shade was a living creature of sorts, constantly repairing itself. Commanding cellular armies to the site of sensed injuries. Of course, the human body was not only constantly building and repairing itself, but also constantly dismantling. Thinning the bones when it thought they weren’t needed, letting the eyesight deteriorate, letting the ends of the chromosomes wear away, ticktock. Humans were born to slowly die—something the Shade was presumably not. Why should it?

  At the third site, moving much more slowly this time, they saw something new: a house-sized, jellyfish-looking thing passing cube-shaped blocks of shiny-black and shiny-silver material to the stitchers.

  “Oh!” Jeanette said, clapping her hands, “that’s a fillerbot! That’s my job, Alice! Resource utilization. Look at that thing: right now all we’re getting out of mined asteroids is five elements, two molecules, and ‘slag.’ We could be doing so much more. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Every part of the buffalo?” she quipped.

  Beneath a mane of floating gold, Jeanette made a frown that was somehow self-congratulatory. “Earth is a long way off, and right now our supply lines are shut. So yes.”

  “Okay,” Alice said, suddenly hostile for some reason.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means okay. Thank you for helping us use our resources efficiently.”

  “Well, you’re welcome.”

  “Do I have to turn this thing around?” Derek said without looking back.

  “We’re playing nice,” Jeanette assured him.

  “Not sure this one knows how,” Derek told her. “She’s more of a shooter.”

  “Yeah,” Jeanette agreed, nudging Alice with her shoulder. “You and that Kiwi girl, Bethy.”

  Alice froze. Just for a moment, but Jeanette felt it.