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  “What are you talking about?” she couldn’t quite help asking.

  Now Jeanette sounded almost gleeful: “Box of fluffy duckies? Seriously? That’s a bad girl running nice girl software. You know what I’m talking about; I’ve seen you two in the hallway, practically holding hands.”

  “She’s my first pick for deputy.”

  “Deputy what?” Jeanette laughed. Then, “Oh, don’t worry, girl, your secrets are safe with me.”

  “Are they?”

  “They are. Really. You can hold hands with whomever you want.”

  Well, Alice supposed it could be worse; she and Bethy had aroused suspicion. Of being lesbian lovers. Hell, there were worse cover stories for suspicious activity.

  And because she was on really dangerous ground here, she simply shut her mouth and said nothing for nearly an hour, while the maintenance pod flung itself out to the rim of the Shade.

  This gave her yet another sense of just how big a structure it was, because the speed indicator on Derek’s instrument panel was consistently reading three hundred kph (relative to the Shade and the station, presumably), and yet they flew and flew over lampshade blankness, while Jeanette and Derek prattled about different types of sandwiches they liked, and then about ways of dressing up instant ramen noodles, and then about the Earthly merits of cooking on an electric stove, a gas stove, or in the microwave. They seemed to be having a good time of it, too.

  “Microwave is your only option up here,” Derek said, “although you can air fry them after they’re cooked. Add some onions and turmeric powder and you’re off to the races.”

  “Hmm. And you make the turmeric in the drug synthesizer?”

  “That and the cayenne pepper, yes. You can also make vinegar, but don’t bother with soy sauce or sriracha. Anything made by controlled fermentation pretty much has to come from Earth.”

  “Unacceptable!” Jeanette said good-naturedly. “We should have beer and yogurt and kimchee up to the eyeballs!” Then: “Alice, isn’t your, um, friend some sort of horticulturist?”

  It took Alice a moment to rouse her voice into action, but finally she said, “I don’t know, I think it’s hydroponics.”

  “Yeah. Same thing. Would you ask her what seed stock we have?”

  “I’m not her secretary.”

  “Ooh, still prickly. You’re going to have to get used to confined spaces, you know.”

  Alice, who’d been crammed into all sorts of aircraft and boats and trailer-home barracks, and even a submarine once, said, “Noted.” Then, feeling like she was doing a bad job as an undercover astronaut, added, “I’m sure it’s an adjustment for all of us, in different ways.”

  Derek and Jeanette apparently considered that too obvious to answer. What Derek said instead was, “At present speed, we’re about four minutes out from the rim. You can actually see it up ahead. See that line?”

  “It’s like the horizon’s getting closer,” Jeanette agreed.

  “Right, well I’m going to flip us around and decelerate so you two can get a good look.”

  “Do we need to hold on?”

  “If you like.”

  The maneuver was actually quite gentle, as was the deceleration that followed. Now they were flying backward, the glowing Shade scrolling past them the other way. Then everything was silent for a minute, until, without warning, light exploded all around them.

  “Fiat lux,” said Derek.

  “Sunrise!” said Jeanette.

  “Jesus,” said Alice, shielding her eyes. Caught off guard yet again, damn it. But what did she think was going to happen?

  “Hold on, I’m going to move us back inward a bit.”

  There was some groaning and thumping from the ACS motors. They drifted back into twilight, and spun facedown so that the inspection pod’s bubble was facing directly toward the Shade.

  “And there it is,” Jeanette said.

  Below, a machine like a combine harvester was sliding along the rim of the Shade and, well, growing it. It was crawling forward at maybe one meter per second, and in its wake was new shield material, glowing red-hot in a narrow line behind the machine and then cooling to a narrower line of opaque black and then, a few meters behind the machine, to a thready translucent material indistinguishable from the rest of the Shade.

  “That’s one of our weavers,” Derek confirmed. “Igbal’s big idea.”

  Alice took the bait. “That’s his big idea?”

  “There’s a lot going on in that thing. It’s a whole nanofactory in there, drawing power from the Shade, and material from that square hopper on top. Like Pac-Man in reverse. At its peak, the station was producing weavers at the rate of ten per month. Now it’s about a third of that. Replacement level, basically. As of this morning, there are two hundred ninety-one of these operating.”

  Jeanette asked, “It uses a cubic-meter block of raw material every day?”

  “Feed cubes, yes. Every three days, I think. And each cube equals just over a square kilometer of Shade, so altogether we’re adding about twice the area of Manhattan every day. Those numbers might be out of date.”

  “Holy fucking shit,” Alice said, with no particular emphasis.

  “What?” said Derek and Jeanette, mildly and almost in synchrony. As if to say, what’s surprising about that?

  “It’s . . . This is a lot. And it’s all just swarm technology? Nobody really at the helm?”

  “Moment to moment?” Derek asked.

  “In general.”

  He shrugged. “Like any factory, I guess. Machines do the work. People are just there to look for anomalies.”

  “And do you find any?”

  “Me? Not usually. I mean, one time a solar flare knocked out about a quarter of the bots, and I had to physically monitor the cleanup swarm. I was out here three days on that one.”

  “The Shade didn’t act as a solar-wind barrier?” Jeanette asked.

  “Oh, it did,” he said. “Too well. We had charge dispersal surges all over the place, shorting everything out. Sandy Lincoln might know the details, but the energy involved was . . . pretty big.”

  “Huh. I haven’t met Sandy.”

  “You will. She’s all right. A little bookish, but nice.”

  Alice was annoyed to find that she was annoyed again, at this whole situation. Neither Derek nor Jeanette seemed to find anything extraordinary about any of this, but Alice could see exactly why President Tompkins and the other Coalition leaders had been so freaked out. Given time, these people could blot out the entire Sun if they wanted to. They could refreeze the North Pole, bring back the glaciers, make it snow in Miami, and then freeze the whole fucking planet. And they really didn’t give a shit.

  “How much longer are we going to be out here?” she asked.

  “What now?” Derek asked, sounding irritated with her change of tone.

  “I need to pee,” she answered. “And yes, I went before we left.”

  He sighed. “There’s one of those portable things in the locker behind you. We can avert our eyes.”

  “No, I’m not doing that.”

  He sighed again. “Look, if I turn us around right now, we’re an hour away at safe speed. But we’ve got five more weaver sites and two more rips on the roster. If I do a quick flyby, I could have you back in ninety minutes. Can you hold it that long?”

  “Fine,” she said tightly. And then, because none of this was actually Derek’s fault, and because an hour would not affect the general fuckedness of the world one way or the other, she added, “I mean, yes. Thank you. I’m sorry to bother you about it.”

  “Not a thing,” he assured her. And Jesus H. Christ, why did the fucker have to be so nice? Was it too much to ask, that the behavior of the world around her line up moment to moment with how she was feeling inside?

  Momentarily fed up with pretense, she said, “You like a damsel in distress, don’t you? How would you feel about saving the whole world?”

  “Great,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Whe
n do we start?”

  To which Jeanette added, “It’s what we’re all here for, honey. Every one of us.”

  Later, from the privacy of her room, she searched again for signs of eavesdropping, and then dug out her tablet and texted the President: Evaluating possible scenarios. Permission to recruit a retired Air Force captain to the cause?

  She waited for a response, wondering what the President might say. Yes? No? You’re an idiot? A minute went by, and it occurred to her to wonder about the speed of light. Would it take more than a minute for her signal to reach the Earth? One more thing she didn’t know. She waited another minute. Then five minutes. Then ten minutes. Still no answer.

  Surely the signal had gotten there by now. Was the President even listening? Was Alice in any sort of communication at all?

  Twenty minutes.

  Thirty minutes.

  Fuck.

  5.3

  24 April

  ✧

  H.S.F. Concordia

  Moored to Transit Point Station

  Low Earth Orbit

  “Harvest Moon just sent me their feasibility study,” Miyuki said, pulling herself up into Concordia’s bridge.

  Beseman, strapped into the copilot’s chair and tapping at a bank of touchscreens, turned and looked at her. “Bad news?” he asked.

  “Good, actually.”

  He visibly relaxed. “They can mine thorium?”

  “From Imbrium basin, yes. It’s a long drive from Shackleton, but they put a cost proposal together, and it’s . . . doable.”

  He sighed, looking unhappy again. “How doable?”

  “Without disrupting our timeline? Fifty billion dollars. That’s not fixed cost, either, so figure a hundred billion by the time we’ve dealt with all the overruns.”

  “Is it fixed schedule, at least?”

  She nodded. “It is. I told them that part was nonnegotiable.”

  “Good. Okay. Good. But that means the cost of the LIFTR is actually just a fraction of the total cost to us, which is not good. Am I going to have to sell The Tunneling Company to pay for this?”

  “We haven’t run the numbers yet, but . . . probably, yes. I’m sorry about that.”

  He ran his fingers through his hair, and she could see him absorbing this new reality. Moving it to column “A” in his mind. “Well, it’s one less headache to worry about, I suppose. Running two businesses from Mars would’ve been . . . Well, damn.”

  She knew The Tunneling Company meant a lot to him. He’d started it because one person too many had told him it wasn’t possible to build a Hyperloop tunnel underneath the Rocky Mountains, from Denver to Grand Junction, and he figured he had the money not only to prove them wrong, but to turn a gigantic profit. It was his first really bold play as a trillionaire, and the last thing he did before setting his attention on outer space.

  “I’m sorry, Dan,” she said again.

  “Yeah. Thanks. So it sounds like we definitely need to get rid of the tokamak reactor.”

  “We do, yes. Right now it’s just taking up space.”

  “Okay. Any chance we can unload it on somebody? Orlov, maybe? Between the purchase price and the launch cost, we’re probably half a billion in on that. I’d prefer not to just melt it down as scrap.”

  “I’ll look into that,” she said, “but there is another option.”

  “Hmm? Do tell.”

  She could see he was ready for any kind of good news at this point—anything to soften the blow—and fortunately she had something he was going to like. “Remember that Magnasat proposal, to put an electromagnet at Mars Solar L1 to block the solar wind?”

  Miyuki remembered it very well indeed, because one little satellite could supposedly cut, in half, the amount of radiation people would receive on the surface of Mars. Planetwide. She’d tried to push Beseman into looking at it more seriously two years ago, but at that time he didn’t see the need. It was a column “C” item, when there was still a whole township to build. But as a way of repurposing equipment he’d already paid for . . .

  “Didn’t that require a really strong magnetic field?” he asked.

  “Not really,” she answered. “No stronger than an old-school MRI machine. The magnets in the tokamak are more than strong enough to do that same job. It’d be like a tower magnet for the whole planet at once. If we strip the shielding off, slap an ion engine on it for station keeping, and, I mean, also just to push it out there. Fuel the engine with oxygen ions instead of xenon, because we don’t have any xenon, and can’t get any for the foreseeable future. But yeah. I think we could probably do the whole thing with materials on hand, for under twenty mill.”

  For basically nothing, in other words. She watched his face, as the Magnasat moved from “C” to “A” back there behind his eyes.

  “Wow. That’s . . . Okay, let’s look into that. But, uh, wasn’t that also a terraforming proposal? Didn’t it build up the atmosphere over time?”

  “It does have that effect, yes, but the researchers who proposed it were way off in their initial time estimates. Last I heard, based on the actual rates of outgassing from the Martian lithosphere, it would take about twenty-five million years to double the present atmosphere.”

  “Oh.”

  He’d looked excited for a moment there, and then let down for a moment, but that kind of thing was part of the daily roller coaster of running a business in outer space, so there was nothing all that unusual about it. Within a few seconds, she could see he was thinking the issue through in practical terms. He said, “Well, that’s a little outside our time horizon, eh? And still not a big enough difference to matter. But it sounds good. It’s an attractive idea, even just from a crew protection perspective. It blocks half the radiation? Am I remembering that correctly?”

  “Not quite half,” she confirmed. “I think it really was about the same as a tower magnet, which would be forty-five percent. That would save us from having to carry a tower magnet down there with us, and it would also protect us from ionizing radiation when we’re outside of the township. So that’s a double win.”

  With that word, “us,” she was being a bit presumptuous; she was a leading candidate in the sponsorship race, with some of her substantial backing coming out of Beseman’s own pocket. He was sponsoring her even though he’d promised not to play favorites, and even though he knew, for a fact, that if she got to Mars she would no longer be his assistant. She’d be starting a life of her own, on a brand-new planet. The yearning for it ached inside her, every minute of every day. But like anyone else in the competition, she could be displaced by a better-funded candidate. Only Dan and Carol Beseman were guaranteed a spot, and only because it was—ahem!—their ship.

  But Beseman did seem to hold some genuine hope that Miyuki would make it, and it was apparently in that spirit that he said, “Put together a promo video, and see if you can’t get your own followers to pay for this. Anything you raise, we’ll tack onto your sponsorship total, and use it to show how ongoingly critical you are to the colonization effort.”

  She couldn’t help smiling at that. “You’ve got your thumb on the scales, boss. Be careful that doesn’t come back to bite us.”

  He shrugged, unrepentant and unimpressed. His relationship to Miyuki was necessarily a very close one, since she literally did half his thinking for him. She doubled his productivity, by letting him focus on the things that only he could do. She’d ended up as his personal assistant mostly by accident, because she’d been middle-managing some critical-path projects during the early design and build days for the Marriott Stars. Beseman tended to be a very hands-on leader, so anything on the critical path took up a lot of his attention, and so over a period of months he and Miyuki had ended up in the same room together almost every day, for anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. He’d come to know and trust her enough that when Ara, his last assistant, had quit, he had ignored a hundred applicants to replace her and quite rudely asked Miyuki if she wanted the job.

  An
d although the question was nominally insulting, Miyuki had said yes immediately, without taking any time to think it over. It meant a substantial raise for her, and an upgrade to a jet set (and later, space set) lifestyle that would have seemed very glamorous to most people. She also knew, even before she’d answered, that it would mean she couldn’t have a life of her own. She’d be on call 24/7, and within physical earshot of him for at least eight hours every day. She knew all this, and still she said yes, because she’d sensed—correctly!—that it would put her on a trajectory to Mars. That her one-in-a-thousand shot of making it there would rise to something more like one in a hundred. Maybe more. So she said yes, and although it was a hard road, it was the best road available to her, and she wouldn’t regret the decision even if she did lose her spot to someone else. She had to take the chance. She had to.

  Since that day, she’d been within earshot of him for almost more hours than she hadn’t. She always traveled with him, unlike Carol Beseman, who frequently stayed home. Miyuki had occasionally mused to herself, that it would be easier in some ways if she and Beseman were also sleeping together. Lord knew, the job made it nearly impossible for her to sleep with anyone else! But he wasn’t exactly her type, and anyway her self-esteem wouldn’t let her sink that low, and the chance of losing Mars to a stupid love triangle was more than she could bear. In any case, Beseman did really seem to love his wife, and probably never wanted to find out what she might do if she caught him cheating. It could be the end of everything! The end of Mars, not just for her and him, but for everyone. But Miyuki would be lying if she said she didn’t sometimes enjoy his company, even when they were busy and stressed, which was always. She hoped they’d be friends, in that magical future when she had her own life again.

  Meanwhile, a company like Enterprise City never slept, and running it while building Concordia and Antilympus Township required literally superhuman effort. It required Beseman to delegate fiercely, to collect updates constantly, and to move his own physical self to the trouble spots, wherever they might be. Asia, Antarctica, low Earth orbit . . . they all blurred together in a haze of constant motion.