Читать книгу Abyss Deep - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 9

Chapter Four

At least I wasn’t under arrest, or even restricted to base. Twenty-­four hours later I was up-­El, 35,800 kilometers above Earth’s equator at the Cayambe Space Elevator’s Geosynch Center. The place is a bustling hive of space industry, communications, orbital hotels, and offices. From the Universe View of the sprawling Hilton Orbital Wheel, I could look down at the shrunken Earth with the nearby elevator cable vanishing with perspective into the blue planet’s center. She was a little past full at the moment, spanning just twenty degrees. If I held up both hands side by side at arm’s length with fingers outstretched, I could just about block half of her from view. Off to one side, several of the big, free-­orbiting solar reflector mirrors and microwave antenna arrays hung in open space, angled to reflect sunlight onto Earth’s northern hemisphere. Bit by bit, in tiny steps, we were winning against the grinding southward advance of the ice sheets.

At least that’s what the newsnets told us. Sometimes I wasn’t sure I believed them. A good third of the planet’s northern hemisphere was locked in ice, gleaming in the glare of daylight. I stifled a small, cold shudder.

“What is it, E-­Car?” Leighton asked, looking at me askance. “You okay?”

Sergeant Joy Leighton, U.S. Marines, was a friend … a very dear friend. Military regulations frowned on enlisted personnel becoming sexually involved, but military regulations rarely acknowledged that personnel are human, not machines. Joy and I had been in combat together, out on Bloodworld, and that counts for a lot. I’d patched her up and dragged her ass out of a firefight. That counted for more. And as long as we didn’t go around flaunting the relationship, rubbing it in the brass’s collective face, no one was going to say a word.

“I’m fine, No-­Joy,” I told her, lying through my teeth. “Just fine.”

“I think they’re going to let that whole security-­breach thing drop,” she said, knowing I was lying, but misunderstanding the reason for it. “Everything is too public now. They don’t want to be seen as punishing a genu-­wine hero.”

I didn’t answer right away, watching the Earth instead. The Hilton’s viewing lounge counter-­rotated to the rest of the habitat, providing a half-­G of spin gravity but cancelling the dizzying spin of the rest of the universe.

“What hero?” I asked after a moment. “Taking down Capricorn Zeta? We all did that.”

“Actually, I was thinking about the Hero of Bloodworld, the doc who brokered peace with the Qesh. You’re still a highly newsworthy commodity, you know. GNN probably had a whole army of newsbots programmed to follow you, sniff you out as soon as you popped onto an unsecure channel. In any case …” She leaned over and kissed me. “You’re still my hero.”

“Ooh-­rah,” I said quietly, a lackluster rendition of the old Marine battle cry.

“That’s not what’s bugging you, is it?” she asked. “It’s Paula again.”

No-­Joy is sharp. Paula Barton was the woman I almost married back in ’forty-­four when I was still in Hospital Corps training … until she had a stroke while we were in a robot-­skippered day sailer off the Maine Glacier. The boat’s first-­aid suite didn’t include a CAPTR device—­most civilians don’t have access to that technology on a routine basis—­and by the time the EMTs got to her, I’d lost her.

I always thought of her when I looked down the North American ice sheet like that. Paula’s death and the ice—­the two were inextricably locked together for me now. I hated the ice now, as if it were a living, despicable thing.

“I suppose it is,” I admitted. “Damn it, I just felt so fucking helpless.”

I don’t think Joy resented Paula, the fact of her. I’d been able to talk to her about what had happened off the Maine coast, about what I still felt.

Or didn’t feel. Often all I felt was numb, even yet, three years later.

“There was nothing you could have done, Elliot.” She’d only said those words a few thousand times since I’d met her.

“I know. I know.” I managed a grin. “It’ll be better when they finally manage to melt the damned ice.”

The New Ice Age got its official start in the late twenty-­first century as a result of—­of all things—­what used to be called global warming. Rising temperatures all over the planet—­but especially in the polar regions—­began melting the polar ice caps, especially the one that covered the Arctic Ocean. Cold, fresh water poured out through the Davis Strait into the North Atlantic, short-­circuiting the Atlantic Conveyor—­that part of the globe-­circulating currents that brought warm water north from the tropics, keeping New England and Northern Europe livable.

The last time that happened was twelve thousand years ago. The planet was warming, the ice sheets of the Pleistocene were retreating, and suddenly the ice collapsed—­quite possibly as the result of a small asteroid impact—­and fresh water poured into the Atlantic. The Earth plunged back into a short-­lived ice age known today as the Younger Dryas. The megafauna of North America—­mammoth and mastodon and short-­faced bear and countless other species—­abruptly went extinct. Human communities known as the Clovis ­people, who’d crossed in skin boats along the edge of the ice from Europe hunting seals, were wiped out as well, or forced to migrate to the American Southwest. The renewed cold and drought may well have stimulated the growth of agriculture in the near East when climactic change led to starvation among hunter-­gatherer cultures.

The same thing was happening today. This time, however, instead of Clovis spear points and skin boats, we had the space elevator and orbital solar arrays. The North Hemisphere Reclamation Project had been reflecting sunlight and beaming high-­energy microwaves onto the ice for well over a century now, but carefully. The Commonwealth didn’t want to eliminate the ice entirely; that would toss us back into the bad old days of the pre-­ice twenty-­first century, when cities like Miami, D.C., New York, and London all were in danger of being swallowed up entirely or in part by the rising sea levels. The idea was to gradually increase the temperatures of both the ice sheets and the cold North Atlantic until a comfortable balance was struck, a balance that could be indefinitely maintained by the Commonwealth’s NHRP and applied global climate engineering. It was the biggest-­scale piece of applied engineering ever attempted, and the one that promises to affect a larger percentage of Earth’s population than any other by far.

And there’s just a chance that it killed Paula.

Oh, the theory is largely discredited now after some four centuries of study—­the idea that high-­frequency microwaves can cause everything from cancer and Alzheimer’s to high blood pressure and stroke. There’s never been a provable link, but the neo-­Ludds and other anti-­space groups often trot out various statistics that show increases in those conditions when they started beaming microwaves down from Geosynch along with reflected visible light. Paula and I were out on the fringes of the beam, which should have been diffuse enough not to cause a problem.

Still, sometimes I wonder how much I have in common with some of the neo-­Luddite crazies. It would be so easy to blame the NHRP and its synchorbital microwave arrays for my pain.

“You know, Doc,” Joy said gently, emphasizing the title, “there’s stuff you can do for that. Nanomeds and neuroengineering and all of that.”

I nodded, but said nothing. Of course there’s stuff that can be done, just as we can block the doloric receptors in the brain and switch off physical pain. Grief is just chemicals in the system, same as love and anger and any other emotion you care to name. You lose a loved one, and the pituitary gland at the base of the brain secretes adrenocorticotrophin hormone—­ACTH—­which is part of the fight-­or-­flight response. Among other things, ACTH acts on the adrenal glands, perched on top of the kidneys, to release a cascade of reactions that lead to the production of a steroid hormone called cortisone.

Normally, cortisone switches off the production of ACTH, but if the stress, the grief, continues, cortisone levels rise … and rise … and rise, eventually reaching ten or twenty times their normal levels.

And that does all sorts of nasty things, among them shutting down our thalamus and switching off the production of leukocytes. No white blood cells, no way to fight bacteria, viruses, and even precancerous cells.

There’s also CRF—­corticotrophin releasing factor. That is a stress-­related neurotransmitter and peptide hormone that shoots sky high with the loss of a loved one. It stimulates the production of ACTH, and can lead to a number of truly nasty conditions, including major depression. You find elevated levels of CRFs in the spinal fluid of most suicides.

I’d gone through therapy after Paula’s death—­been required to do it, I should say. They’d given me the option of nanomeds—­including CRF nanoblockers—­to kill the emotional pain associated with my memories of Paula. Problem was, I didn’t want to lose Paula. I know it sounds crazy, but the memories, and the emotional pain connected with them, were all I had left, and I didn’t want to give them up.

So I went on a nanomed routine aimed at boosting my immune response, circulatory support, and anticarcinogen ’bots. Treating the symptoms rather than the cause, yeah, but at least I wouldn’t die of grief, as a lot of other ­people still do. As for the grief itself, well, lots of other ­people were able to get through it, had been getting through it since long before nanomeds and thalamic receptor blocking. I would get over it. Eventually.

In the meantime, I had my career in the Hospital Corps, and I had Joy, and if I occasionally felt overwhelmed by grief or by those nightmare memories of helplessness when Paula had her stroke, well, that was all part of the territory, as my father likes to say. He’s senior VP of research and development for General Nanodynamics, and he’s the one who suggested I go into the Hospital Corps in the first place. Out on the frontier, interacting with newfound cultures and civilizations, that’s where Humankind will learn new technologies, develop new nanopharmaceuticals, and make new fortunes.

That was the original idea, anyway. I’d long since given up on making fortunes—­you don’t enter military ser­vice with that as your goal—­but I think Spencer Carlyle still had hopes for his Navy med-­tech son.

Too bad. I hadn’t been home since shortly after Paula’s death.

“C’mon,” Joy said, grabbing my arm and tugging me closer to her. “We’re here to have fun.”

Yeah … fun. Specifically, losing ourselves for a few hours in the Hilton’s Free Fall … a combination restaurant and microgravity swimming sphere that’s a bit on the pricey side, but well worth it. We managed to go there once every few months, for celebrations, as often as the budget allowed. And this was a celebration. We’d survived the assault on Capricorn Zeta … and while I was under an official cloud, I hadn’t been court-­martialed.

At least, not yet.

We’d been to the Free Fall before. Hell, the first time Joy and I had had sex with each other had been up there, in that shimmering blue sphere of water suspended in microgravity.

We weren’t here for swimming this time. We entered the rotating sphere at one pole, in zero-­gravity, the interior rotating around us. A human hostess met us, and led us down along the curving deck through exotic tropical foliage to a table between sky and water, with every step taking us into a higher G level until we reached our table near the equator.

Directly overhead, the big, ten-­meter hydrosphere flashed and rippled blue-­green in the constantly shifting beams of sunlight, hovering at the center of the fifty-­meter hollow globe rotating around it. Where we sat, the turning of the main hab sphere generated four-­tenths of a gravity, about the same as on Mars, and a transplas viewall section in the deck showed the stars and Earth sliding past beneath, making a complete circuit once every twenty-­some seconds.

A human waitress arrived to take our drink orders. That’s one reason the place is so expensive, of course—­human waitstaff instead of robots. In keeping with the jungle theme of the place, they wore either skin nano or animated tattoos—­I couldn’t tell which—­that gave their skin constantly shifting dapplings of sunlight and shadow.

“So … what do you think of the latest from Earthside?” Joy asked after she’d left.

“I haven’t been paying attention,” I told her, truthfully enough. I’d told my AI secretary to put a block on all of my auto news alerts and downloads. “At this point I’m afraid to download anything. What is the latest?”

“Oh, come on, e-­Car!” She laughed. “Get with the program!”

“I’ve had other stuff on my mind,” I said. “Like maybe getting court-­martialed and ending up in Atlantica for ten years?” Atlantica was a seafloor colony off the coast of Florida, mostly a civilian facility with a scientific research community, but which included a Commonwealth submarine base and a high-­security naval prison.

“Well, there is that. Don’t worry, though. If you go to Atlantica, I’ll bake you a cake with nano-­D in the flour.”

“Thanks so much. I’ll have to remember to practice holding my breath before I use it, though.”

“Seriously, Elliot. If they were going to lock you away, or even send you for deep neurophysiological rehab, you would not be walking around free now. They might decide to kick you out of the Navy just to be rid of you, but nothing more. Okay?”

I shrugged. “I’m sure you’re right.” What I didn’t add was that getting booted out of the Navy would be as bad as having my brain rewired. I’d found a home here, a place of my own, a meaningful career.

Not to mention Joy. We were still deep in the initial rampant lust phase of our relationship, but I could see it moving beyond sex and pleasant companionship to something more permanent. Maybe.

If I could just shake off Paula’s ghost, and put her to rest at last.

The waitress returned with our drinks—­a Cosmic Dehibitor for Joy, a Metafuel Thruster for me. I paid her by linking through to the restaurant’s e-­pay AI, and included a generous tip for her. She thanked me, then took our orders for dinner. Meat from Earthside has to be shipped up-­El and is expensive, but there are some locally nanufactured proteins indistinguishable from nature. Real cow meat from the Amazon prairies is just for status; the stuff built up molecule by molecule really can’t be distinguished from the real thing. We both ordered local cultures, mine in the form of lobster tail, hers looking and tasting like steak.

“So what’s the news?” I asked when we were alone again.

“War, of course. At least there’s serious talk of war. The Commonwealth is blaming the CAC for hijacking that mining station … and for trying to drop an asteroid into the ocean. That’s an act of war in anyone’s manual.”

I shook my head. “I have trouble believing that the CAC government would be openly behind something like that. Some extremist Islamic sect, maybe … or a rogue paramilitary group operating in the shadows. But the ­people, the ruling council in Dushanbe, they aren’t crazy.”

“They are neo-­Ludd,” Joy pointed out. “Or strongly supportive of the movement. And a tidal wave in the Pacific wouldn’t touch them.”

“No, but the outraged survivors of the rest of the world would.”

“True. But maybe they didn’t count on you figuring out where those tangos hailed from.”

A shrill squeal sounded from overhead and we both looked up. A ­couple had managed to propel themselves clear of the hydrosphere and had landed in the nearly invisible netting surrounding the water in case of just such an eventuality. Laughing, naked and glistening wet, they half-­scrambled and half-­flew across the netting toward the sphere’s zero-­gravity poles to re-­enter the water. I half expected some of the flying spray to reach us … but subtly directed air jets were in place to whisk away any stray flying droplets and keep the diners below from getting rained on. The illusion of dining in a rain forest did have reasonable limits, after all.

“I don’t buy it,” I told her, as the squeals died away again. “Those men had to know that someone would pull a DNA analysis on them if they were killed or captured.”

“Maybe they just didn’t count on the U.S. Marines coming in and spoiling their party,” she said. “Either they would have their demands met … or they would all be incinerated on impact. Either way, no DNA left to sample.”

“I suppose.”

But I wasn’t convinced.

The terrorists who’d seized Capricorn Zeta had clearly had a neo-­Ludd agenda. Their demands had been that all asteroid mining be stopped—­not only in Earth orbit, which was a song they’d been singing for a long time, but out in trans-­lunar space as well.

They needed high-­tech help. The Chinese were out, because if something had gone wrong and the asteroid had come down anywhere in the Pacific, the tidal waves would have washed them away. The CACs had the ideology, yeah, and they were far inland, but why use their own ­people in the attack, inviting military retaliation? It seemed likelier to me that those Central Asians we’d captured had been mercenaries, hirelings being used by someone else, possibly with an eye to calling attention to Dushanbe and away from the real masterminds.

Who would profit, I wondered, from having asteroid mining stopped? Or from having a one-­kilometer asteroid fall out of the sky, killing a few hundred million ­people or more?

And with their plan for extortion blocked, what would they do next?

An inner ping alerted me to an incoming call request. I glanced at it, saw that it was another GNN e-­comm request, and dismissed it. I’d become a pretty popular guy, it seemed. “A highly newsworthy commodity,” like Joy had said. Reporters, both on Earth and embedded at HQ, wanted to talk to me.

Well, I didn’t want to talk to them. I felt used and ambushed, and I wouldn’t have opened the channel even if Gunny Hancock hadn’t told me he would skin me alive and hang me out an airlock to dry if I did.

“Let’s change the subject,” I told Joy. “I don’t really want to discuss work when the most gorgeous U.S. Marine in the Galaxy is sitting here right across from me.”

“Flatterer.”

“I like the utilities.”

She dimpled. “Thank you. I put so much work into it.”

In fact, she was wearing ordinary ship utilities, a black skinsuit that clung to her like paint. She’d stroked the top away, though, to give her the currently fashionable Minoan Princess look, proudly bare breasted. She’d programmed the remaining nanofabric to give it an illusion of depth, scattered through and through with gleaming stars.

She was radiantly beautiful.

“Elliot, someone is pinging our ID.”

The voice wasn’t Joy’s. It was my AI secretary, a smart bit of AI software that normally resided silently within my in-­head hardware without making its presence known. That it was speaking now, interrupting my conversation with Joy, meant that it had detected a close-­in attempt to physically locate me by homing in on my personal electronics. Normally that stuff is pretty heavily firewalled, with name and rank only out there for public access, but I’d opened it wider in order to pay for the drinks and the meal.

Or maybe the name and rank had been enough. Damn it!

“Where is he?” I asked my secretary.

“Highlighting. To your left.”

I looked, and saw a conservatively dressed man coming through the restaurant entrance, about forty meters away, painted with a green nimbus by my in-­head. He stopped, looked around … and our eyes met. He smiled and started walking toward us. His pace was slow, shuffling, and a bit awkward; I pegged him as a groundpounder, someone who hadn’t been in space much and wasn’t used to walking in low-­G.

“What’s the matter?” Joy asked. She must have seen the blank look on my face while I talked with my secretary.

“We’ve got company,” I told her. “Wait here.”

I got up and walked over to meet the guy. I pinged his ID as I approached, and got a readout: Christpher Ivarson, Global Net News. By the time I reached him, three-­quarters of the way up the curve of the sphere, I was at a slow simmer but well on my way to coming to a boil.

“Petty Officer Carlyle—­”

“What the fuck are you doing, following me around?” I demanded. “Can’t a guy have any privacy?”

“You’ve been blocking our newsbots, sir, and we really would like to have you answer a few questions.”

“Maybe there’s a reason I’ve been blocking you,” I told him. “Such as … I don’t want to answer your questions.”

“This will only take a moment, really.”

“No. This ends now. I’m having dinner with a friend and I will not have it spoiled by the likes of you!”

“Now, don’t be like that, Elliot! If the Central Asian Caliphate was behind the hijacking of that asteroid, the public has a right to know! And after all, the Hero of Bloodworld will have a unique perspective on the attack! You might not know it, but Elliot Carlyle is big news right now! First Bloodworld and the Qesh, and now you’re charging a terrorist stronghold with the U.S. Marines! Great stuff!”

“Oh … you want a … what did you say? A unique perspective?”

“Absolutely! If you could just—­”

“Here you go,” I told him, reaching out with both hands and grabbing the lapels of his stylish maroon tunic. Bending my knees, I shoved upward … hard.

As noted, the spin gravity at the Free Fall’s equator was around four-­tenths of a G. Three-­quarters of the way to the sphere’s pole, which was at zero-­G, the gravity was a lot lower … maybe a tenth of a G, or even a bit less. The GNN reporter probably massed eighty kilos, but he only weighed about eight here … about as much as a large cat, so once I got him moving he kept moving, moving hard. My shove sent him sailing up into the air, arms and legs thrashing … and he yelled bloody murder when he realized he wasn’t coming down again.

Gravity inside rotating systems like the Free Fall is tricky. Ignoring things like air resistance, he technically was in zero-­gravity as soon as he left the deck, but the Coriolis effect caused his straight-­line path to curve alarmingly against the hab module’s spin. For a moment I thought I’d misjudged, that he was going to miss.

Then one thrashing arm snagged the safety net surrounding the central sphere of water thirty meters above the restaurant’s deck. He screamed again and grabbed hold with both arms and both legs, dangling far overhead.

Of course, the net was turning with the rest of the module, so hanging on up there he probably felt a spin gravity of something like fifteen hundredths of a gravity … maybe twelve kilos. If he let go, he’d drift back to the sphere’s inner surface with a tangential velocity of, oh, a few meters per second, and if he didn’t fall into some diner’s salad, he’d be just fine.

But for someone born and raised on Earth, the possibility of that thirty-­meter drop between the outside of the safety net and the restaurant floor was terrifying. The net enclosed the water sphere from pole to pole; it was designed to catch ­people falling out of the water and keep them from dropping onto the restaurant clientele. Ivarson only needed to clamber along the outside of the net until he reached one of the access tubes at the sphere’s axis.

But panic had set in, and all he could do was cling to the outside of the net and howl.

I returned to Joy, who was watching the spectacle overhead. “What in the world …?”

“Out of the world, I’m afraid.”

“Why did you—­”

“Reporter,” I told her. “The bastards have been dogging me electronically ever since Zeta Capricorn, and now it looks like they’re siccing humans on me.”

“Excuse me, Petty Officer Carlyle?”

I turned and found myself facing a polite but stern Free Fall employee. I didn’t know they had bouncers in places like that.

“Yes?”

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

I looked up at Ivarson, whose shouts and screams by now had become the focus of attention for every patron in the Free Fall. A ­couple of men in work utilities were making their way across the net to reach him.

“He’s a reporter,” I said. “Gross invasion of privacy.”

“I quite understand, sir. Still, our guests have a right to enjoy their meals without … spectacles of this nature. I can ask you to leave, or I can summon the shore patrol.”

“No need,” I said. “Joy? You can stay and enjoy your meal, if you like… .”

“What, and miss a date with a man who can throw an asshole thirty meters? You’ve got to be kidding!”

So we left. We never did get our homegrown steak and lobster.

But it turned out to be a spectacular evening nonetheless.