Kirinya, p.36
Kirinya, page 36
‘Yes,’ Anitraséo said. ‘It will be explained to you. There is not time now.’
Have you secrets from me, exemplar? Ren thought as they squeezed through the narrow tunnels to final scrub and seal. As the razor scraped her clean, as the jets of water pummelled her, Ren tested the link. She willed herself into another body, one taller, stronger, whiter, waiting bathed in hard white light. Selves superimposed; she was a shaven rocket, she was a teenage girl naked in the spotlights. Hot air dried her off; in her other body she felt her many complex systems, checked their state and condition. She was well. She was fit. She was ready to fly. Anitraséo wrapped her in a thermal quilt and took her into the white room. It was one hour fifteen minutes to launch. The others were already in the quiet white room, with their white quilts. They nodded, no one spoke. Space Cowboy was in an inverted yoga asana made all the more complicated by two sets of arms. Male, Ren observed. Tsirinana sat with her legs pulled up and her arms wrapped around her, as if by enfolding herself she were also enfolding the child within. William sat with his head back against the wall. Ren did not need to look into his head to know that he was living three minutes in the to-come. Ren sipped distilled water and sat cross-legged on the floor. She looked at the faces of the people she would go into space with. She saw there were different kinds of fear. There was the fear of dying badly, and there was some of that in every face. There was the fear of getting it wrong, of failing others. There was the fear of being seen to be afraid. There was the fear of the unknown, and the fear that is like that but is not it, that is the fear that whatever your anticipations, whatever your preparations, whatever your resources or skill at improvizing, there is something out there that is beyond all of those and will shatter them. She wondered which they saw when they looked at her. Perhaps they saw a fear all her own, the fear that your achievements and abilities are mere luck, or guile, and that in the hour of crisis, you will be exposed as a fraud and a liar. That you can’t do it. That you never could.
Space Cowboy had unfolded into the standing triangle asana. Ren shrugged off her quilt and copied his posture, enjoying the sensuous pull of sinews and joints. He smiled to her. Everyone did what they did with fear. That was what the white room was for.
There was no clock in the white room. There were two opposite doors. The further door opened. The exemplars came in.
‘It’s time now,’ one said.
One hour to lift. They took the crew up a steep narrow companionway on to a gantry. This was higher than the one from which Ren had viewed the spaceship, and abutted the curved back of the orbiter. Four open orifices waited. William’s was that on the furthest right. He shook hands with his exemplar and climbed in. Space Cowboy hugged his exemplar with all his arms and, with some difficulty, squeezed into the slit on the far left. Tsirinana bowed to her exemplar, and slipped in next to the Cowboy. Anitraséo and Ren kissed. Ren wriggled between the cha-plastic lips into the remaining pod. She squirmed to find a comfortable position in the yielding flesh. Get cosy, you’re going to be in it for some time. She closed her eyes, not wanting to see the lips seal out the light. Out there the orbiter would be reforming its ceramoplastic integument. Beneath, the pods redistributed themselves around the central core. Each was a self-contained re-entry body: in theory, should the orbiter sustain catastrophic damage, they would blast clear and return to Earth. In theory.
She blinked up the auxbrain displays from the exterior cameras. The tunnel was empty. The gantry dissolved into the wall. Main engines good, first stage good, separation collar good, orbiter good. Looking beautiful. Feeling so scared it passed into an emotion more than fear, something crystalline and solid in her belly, like obsidian cancer. Surface cameras: a weather balloon whipped away like a fugitive spirit.
Link to William. Shattering layered futures like a supersonic bullet shattering sound-waves. Three minutes from now Anitraséo would tell her Escort 1 was dead.
Link to Tsirinana. System checks a strangely intimate mantra; sharing your body with another woman. Nominal, nominal, within acceptable parameters.
‘Ren.’ Anitraséo: another inner vision showed her in the cramped control room. ‘You’re looking good. We’re going to pressurize now.’
Always, that clutch of panic when the acceleration gel came oozing in from every side, nowhere to turn, nowhere to escape it. Rising up, invading you through every slit and hole. She choked, it went down into her lungs, kept pouring into her. She stopped breathing. Internal and external pressures rose and equalized. The gel matrix stiffened. Ren was embedded in amber. There was now no boundary between her and the ship, physical or mental. She bore herself in her own cha-plastic womb.
She curled into the foetal position that was the strongest and safest against high gees.
Count t-20. Tsirinana switched the ship to internal power. Anitraséo came on to tell Ren that Escort 1 was beyond repair. Pre-flight checks were completed satisfactorily. The course computer was updated. Inertial stabilizers were reprogrammed. Meteorological reports predicted a slight lull in surface wind speeds. The mission was outside abort parameters. Barely.
T-10. At three widely spaced locations on the wind-swept coral spine of Iles Glorieuses, thirty metre discs of bed-rock dissipated into spores and were swept away on the storm wind. Rain swirled around the aerodynamic contours of the orbiters cowering in their silos. Ancillary services were disconnected. The launch was at Level Two Abort: if there were an accident now, the second stage engines would fire, throwing the orbiter clear of the ascent booster to splash down in the ocean. Main engine compressors were brought up to speed.
All these Ren felt as potencies in her body, awakenings, empowerings, penetrations, conceptions. Moment by moment, she was reinvented. It was birth to adulthood in minutes. Tsirinana switched her on, system by system. She was electrically alive.
T-5. The digits counted down in her visual cortex. T-4. Wait! she wanted to shout. Hyper-oxygenated acceleration gel swallowed her words. T-3.
‘We’re committed,’ Anitraséo said. ‘Launch in one hundred and seventy seconds.’
Seconds. It was down to seconds now. It was a joke. They couldn’t do it. This sort of thing didn’t happen. There were no such things as rockets, there was no such place as space, the sky was a hollow shell of plaster and paint.
Sixty seconds. Fifty-nine.
‘Commence primary ignition.’
Oh God. They were going to do it. It was real after all.
‘Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven,’ Anitraséo counted.
Listen to me! Ren tried to shout. I’m not ready, there’s stuff I’ve forgotten.
Count zero zero five. The main engines lit. Count zero zero zero.
No, please…
The scream froze in Ren’s throat as eight gees of thrust turned her into a living fossil.
56
From the shores and islands of the Indian Ocean, the Coalition fleet launches. Three full four-ship squadrons from New Perth’s Eighty Mile Beach sites. Two battle groups from the Dreamtime Nations in Arnhem Land. Eight ships from the Sunda Federation’s Barat Daya bases. A Level One abort keeps one of High Sumatra’s two orbiters in its silo in the Barisan Mountains, but the escorts kindle the dawn sky. Twelve pillars of fire burn from the mountains behind Port Elizabeth: from the valleys of Transkei, KwaZulu throws its two battle groups starwards. In Xai Xai the single orbiter and escorts of the Royal Mozambique Navy send the birds flapping and screeching across the salt marshes. On its many islands, the Merina launches. Four ships from Réunion, eight from Mahé and Coetivy. From Comoros, four ships. On the storm-swept verandah of the beach bungalow at Nosy Bé, a precog, a Spacewoman and a pregnant engineer watch four fingers of fire reach up from Nosy Mitsio into the low, hurtling clouds. And from Iles Glorieuses; three ships climb towards orbit.
Multiple gravities crush Ren McAslan. Her bones creak, her inner organs are spheres of granite, her blood is liquid lead in her veins. Her brain is a numb throb of weight and blindness. Buried deep in red blood, a voice nags: you could do it in training in the centrifuge, with the simulator. These people need you to do it now. Do it now or you will all die. The gel matrix enfolds and upholds her. Suites of bloodstream buckies link to form architectures of nanocarbon around her tubes and sacs.
Ren tries to move her muscles against the cocoon of gel and gravity. Tearing agony. But she feels the matrix yield, just a millimetre. That’s enough. Her body will obey her. She has control.
T+40. Iles Glorieuses Control detects oscillations in Escort 2’s flight. The rocket is unstable. At t+60 the destruct command is given. Escort 2 consumes itself in a blast visible over several hundred square kilometres of eastern Indian Ocean. Orbiter and Escort 3 continue ascent.
Seventy-seven space craft climb over the dark half of the planet.
Low orbit missile shuttles Bull Run and Shenandoah, WorldWatch satellites 6 through 9, MIsats MacArthur and Schwartzkopf and space station Unity’s planetary observation platform simultaneously report multiple violations of their operational envelopes. Booster plumes from twenty sites in the Indian Ocean. The high-speed link at Greensboro glows with orbital data. Majors and generals analyse and assess the initial threat.
The Pentagon is advised of a Class One nuclear alert. Early warning radars track the ascent. Any of these bogies could sow multiple warheads over the western United States within thirty minutes. The acceleration is terrifying. The war room transmits the primary level authorisation codes for Operation Defender. The defence satellite weapons charge up their weapons and acquire targets.
The President sets down the emergency PDU as the attaché arrives in his office with the nuclear briefcase. Outside, a military helicopter sets down on the well-watered lawns.
Pictures form out of the pain. Images in red, fragmentary glimpses of stars through an envelope of glowing air, at her feet three pillars of fire, beneath her, a map of Madagascar and South-East Africa. This is your body, Ren yells at herself through the gravities. Live in it. Be it. Burning. Her body is on fire.
The vision stabilizes. The dome of her skull is lifted away: three-dimensional space rushes in. She sees in further senses than sight. Those actinic dots rising far across the curve of the planet are her sister ships. The pain is forgotten: she is a burning woman, flying free. She opens the link to Tsirinana. Her auxbrain tumbles with engineering displays and command buttons. First stage separation is imminent.
Somewhere, Anitraséo is shouting at her.
I hear you, she subvocalizes. I hear you. Ascent is…normal.
T+240. Automatic stage separation blows the dead booster clear. It tumbles towards the dark ocean, glowing with re-entry fire. The orbiter’s three aerospike engines take over. The acceleration eases back, three gees, two gees, one gee. The acceleration matrix relaxes but still keeps a secure hold of its foetal crew. Too sudden a pressure drop would kill them with the bends.
Ahead, rendezvous at I-point.
The President with his generals and majors is climbing to thirty-five thousand feet above the Washington/Baltimore conurbation. In Air Force One’s war room they sit in swivel leather chairs before a wall screen. The nuclear briefcase, which is more like a chromium egg, rests in the President’s lap. It is chained to his wrist. There are three views onscreen. The first is a map of Earth, the ecliptic sining across it. Dots, arrows and lines display the array of forces. The second is a plan view of the planet surrounded by concentric discs of the near-to-high defences. Coloured lights are slung around it like decorations on a Christmas tree. The colours change as each sector is brought up to combat readiness. The third view is a vertical cross-section of a chord of earth. A narrow vee radiates out from the equator: the forces available ahead of the hostile fleet, their status and response times. The defence strategy and its weapon systems are only named after Star Wars. They are not fast, lean little fighters, that seemingly need no fuel to perform their high-velocity astrobatics and fire their incredibly destructive ray guns. This is Space War, fought out with limited resources and opportunities on a battlefield of fractional orbits, firing arcs, recovery times and gravity wells. This is where the computers fight.
A major says: ‘NORAD confirms that the hostiles are not on ballistic trajectories.’
A general interprets for the President: ‘It’s not a nuclear strike.’
The President closes over an open cover on the chromium egg. The generals and majors pretend not to have noticed.
Another major says, ‘We have projections from Greensboro.’
A new schematic presents itself to the President: the Earth-BDO system. Hostile red lines loop away from the equator across space to tangle the BDO in a web of parking orbits.
A major says, ‘The fucking niggers are going for the Star Gate.’
It is not necessary for a general to translate that for the President. The President looks at the screen. He looks out of the window at the summer-dry woods and geometric farms of Maryland.
‘Stop them,’ he says.
The slaughter begins.
Ren knows the timing of main engine shutdown to the millisecond, but it still takes her by surprise. Free-fall is the one experience Anitraséo could not simulate. The closest Ren can compare it to is the flight into Iles Glorieuses through the monsoon. But those drops bottomed out. This never will. Falling and falling and falling. Her stomach knots, she wants to be sick, but all there is is distilled water and a hard plug of gee-gel. She feels lost, vertiginous: her three-dimensional vision betrays her; is Earth up or down? Are the stars around her head or under her feet?
Doesn’t matter, she realizes. That’s two-dimensional, ground-ape thinking. You are the centre of a sphere of senses that moves through time, not space. She thinks, this must be how precogs perceive their world.
Thinking: precog, she perceives radar images on the edge of her sensory globe. Death Stars, moving on attack vectors. The battle is already joined; the East Indian and Australian ships have deployed their defence mirrors. Three minutes from now Ren feels the second wave of Death Stars gain lock-on and target their weapons. Her auxbrain feeds the information to the navigation computers. Manoeuvring thrusters fire, outflanking the Death Stars.
But up ahead, in the new future, an orbiter out of the Dreamtime explodes in a silent blossom of white energy.
Something is wrong with the plan.
Air Force One is coming down, to earth again, now that Washington is not going to end the day as a crater of radioactive obsidian. The big plane banks. On the screen, red dots scatter and squirm away from the stabbing white rays of the Death Stars.
‘It’s like the fuckers know what we’re going to do,’ a general says.
‘They do,’ a major ventures. ‘I’m betting they have precogs on those ships.’
‘Precogs?’ the President asks.
‘They have a limited foreknowledge of the immediate future.’
‘Sperm of Satan,’ another general whispers.
Greensboro reaches the same conclusion when the first wave of orbital lasers fire on empty space. They watch, trapped by their own recycle times, as half the primary targets unfurl dozens of secondary munitions. One hundred metres from target, the missiles explode in a spray of fullerenes. Solar panels erupt in sulphur-yellow flowers; spears of pseudo-fungus erupt through the plastic skin. Nuclear generators run critical. The first wave of Death Stars die in radioactive and molecular meltdown.
White stars nova and fade in Greensboro and Washington. Orders come from under the Pentagon. They can see three minutes into the future. Use that against them. Draw them close, then cut them apart when they can’t manoeuvre out of the firing arcs.
The second wave of Death Stars drop lock on. Beyond them, Space Defence Sectors Three and Four come online and position themselves to cover the BDO orbital windows.
The Coalition fleet flies on. Orbital mechanics are implacable. There are two points from which it is possible to reach the BDO, and two only. Combat Group One, four Arnhem Land and four Sunda Federation ships, fly into the sights of twenty-five fully charged orbital lasers. The precogs look ahead. They see twenty-five fully charged orbital lasers, doing nothing. They look again. The Death Stars hang, silent. A third time they look. They see themselves dying in fire. The isopathic pilots burn thruster fuel. The precogs look again and again, and again. Wherever they look, they die. There is no way out. The Australian and Javanese crews spend their last two and half minutes living their deaths. The Death Stars fire. Bevawatt lasers sweep away the inflatable mylar mirrors, carve refractive scales like a scalpel dead flesh. Exploding liquid hydrogen tears ships and crews apart. Combat Group Three throws its escort missiles at the gunline; burned-out Death Stars use their last drops of fuel to intercept them as the main group takes Combat Group Two apart.
Ren sees orbiters exploding silently, beautifully, spilling hydrogen fire across the orbital marches. Escape pods tumble Earthwards, Death Star reinforcements swoop in on fast return orbits: two shots, and out. Dead defence satellites close with Coalition missiles and detonate their nuclear power piles. Fission bursts pin-prick high orbit. A dazzling light, a scream on her ship-senses: an EMP drone has detonated, blinding an entire squadron of satellites. While Death Star computers activate self-repair systems and reload AI targeting software, a single High Sumatran orbiter pulls away from the rout.
For it is a rout. The South’s ships are well designed, their crews skilled and courageous, but they are untried. And they are not equal to the task. The United States has had fifteen years to prepare for this.
Now the Federations of South Africa, the KwaZulu and the Royal Mozambique Navy run the killing zone. The Americans are good at this now. The Death Stars that have discharged their capacitors on the second wave turn to deal with the escorts at close range while the reinforcements dive through on assassination orbits, gutting African ships like market fish. It is simple slaughter. A battle group of twenty ships goes in. Nothing comes out. Ren’s extreme range senses register thruster burns around Unity: tugs despatched to comb out survivors. There are no survivors! she wants to shout to them. Once you start the machines killing, they will never stop. Coiled in her inner ear, Anitraséo is whispering, disengage. Get out. We will contact Washington.
