Almost Complete Short Fiction, page 202
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure how well Tad could read my face through a space helmet visor from a wrist comp cam, but I just stared at it. Yes I did care, no I didn’t. Go figure it out.
Whatever passed on that staring channel passed. Tad cleared his throat. “Listen carefully, Pete. We have to deal with political realities. Listen carefully. I think I’ve given you enough information. More than some people would want me to give out. I’ve got to call it a conversation, now. Good luck. Reynolds out.”
Listen carefully? It just occurred to me that someone else might be listening too.
Honor technicalities? The AI would. Good luck, he’d said. If I were up to grasping at straws, there maybe straws to grasp. But if I wanted an excuse to walk away from it, well, I’d been given it. No one, not even Jeanette’s family, would blame me. The whole damn thing was back on my shoulders.
“Hmm,” Tamika said. “The protocol articles specify human control redundancy. Piloting redundancy is a Cislunar Republic requirement, which can be met by the AI. They are not the same requirement. As an adult with a degree in philosophy and a minor in logic, I could more than satisfy the human control redundancy requirement, and you and the Korolev’s computer would satisfy the piloting redundancy requirement. You don’t have to have two qualified pilots.”
Ahmed slapped a hand down on the desk in front of him. “They would call that evading the spirit of the law.”
“But not the letter,” Tamika said.
“Is it cheating?” April asked. “Ethically?”
Tamika frowned deeply. “No,” she said at last. “It is uncomfortably close, but it balances what is uncomfortably close to misuse of law by the other side, I think. And there is the possibility of saving a life to tip the balance toward the greater good.”
Left unsaid was the possibility of harm to her; the possibility of losing April, and possibly me—to an accident. Or her losing me to Jeanette if we succeeded. Could my little family be put back together again? Only three or four years ago, I would have asked nothing more of this universe. Could I resist an attempt by Jeanette to do so now, once we were on Mars?
“Ethically,” Ahmed said. “I think Allah will forgive us for trying. And I think others will forgive us if we succeed. This is not a business for cowards. Jinn,” he addressed his AI, “put another fluid bed on the Korolev, and compose a new flight plan with Tamika as cybernetics officer. Our move.”
Ahmed had been the Lunar chess champion a few years ago, I recalled. He had moved quickly and the opponent had run out of time in the end game. But . . .
“No!” I said. “Ahmed, wait!”
Everyone stared at me.
“Jinn, hold that.” Ahmed looked deflated. “But I do not blame you, friend.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “We need to do what you were going to do. Kelly and his friends will attack the new flight plan with every argument they can think of. If we give them time to do so.”
“Of course,” Tamika said, “but . . . ?”
“Let’s get everything ready, and then file the plan at the absolute last second. Ahmed, while it’s being filed, call Kelly. He’s probably got us flagged, but if he’s busy, the human approval will go to a lieutenant. And file a return plan for our hopper at the same time.”
A big grin split Ahmed’s face. “And a hover test plan for one of my other spacecraft. While I am discussing his rules with him . . .” he laughed. “They will be saturated, and while these discussions go on . . .” he raised his flat hand up from the desk toward the ceiling. “. . . off you go!”
Half an hour later, off we went. The Korolev lifted itself gently on its auxiliary jets to about ten kilometers altitude and put itself between the beam projector and Mars. “Fairy dust” rose toward us, flashed into plasma, and we leapt Marsward. But I hardly noticed the acceleration because, on the screen above me, Kelly’s face turned livid at the bull Ahmed was throwing at him.
I’ll give Kelly credit, it had only taken him fifty seconds to catch onto what had happened. But in those fifty seconds we had reached lunar escape velocity.
“Emergency abort!” he thundered. “Override the experimental field’s AI!”
We could hear the port AI respond over our link. “There is no emergency,” it said. “However, interrupting a beam launch in progress would endanger the occupants, creating an emergency. The abort cannot be executed.”
“I’m telling you on human authority that there is an emergency,” Kelly tried.
Tamika giggled, and in a second I realized why. Kelly was trying to get a state-of-the-art exaflop cybernetic system with full access to all the information into an Asimovian logic loop. It had probably checked every possibility and modeled the psychology of its reply a dozen times before Kelly even finished speaking.
“The telemetry on the spacecraft shows no immediate danger. Could you please specify your reason for thinking there is one? Also, cutting the beam now would leave the spacecraft on a very inconvenient trajectory for rescue. Do you wish to take responsibility for a command override?”
Kelly opened his mouth, then shut it and stared. Finally, he said. “Fahsi, first you figure out a way to get them back while I call some people. Then, I’d get ready to clean out your desk. Kelly out.”
“Having a clean desk is a good idea,” Ahmed replied smoothly. “Perhaps at the end of the day will see whose is most clean. Mine, or yours. Fahsi out.”
Kelly’s face vanished.
Ahmed’s replaced it, and he looked worried. The “secure” superscript indication appeared on our screen. He glanced up to where he knew the notation would appear to us.
“They’ll know we have a secret now, but I need to tell you this. We dodged one there; the trajectory is not that inconvenient for us to abort, but the port AI did not realize that because there are some things about this that even my AI does not know. But, if they think of it, the Deimos base projector can send a beam to push you back toward the Moon from almost any point between here and there.
“If you want to avoid that, you will have to quench your magnetic field, then bring it up again twenty gigameters out from Deimos. At that point, the only plausible abort will be to Deimos and they will be faced with a fait accompli. But while your field is quenched, you will be vulnerable to solar radiation storms, so let us hope you think of something else.”
“Us think of something else?”
It was almost a second before Ahmed replied. Half a second of lightspeed delay already!
“They will break into this supposedly secure link in seconds if they have not already done so, but they cannot break into your minds. Anticipate. Use the lightspeed delay to act instead of react. Now, Allah be with you.”
“Ahmed,” Tamika said. “You have taken a great risk; rightly, I think. But what are you going to do?”
We waited a second and then saw a smile on Ahmed’s face.
“I should not say everything. But for one thing, I will call a press conference. Ahmed out.”
Act instead of react.
“Will they push us back with the fairy dust?” April asked.
“It’s possible. I depends on who’s in charge of what, I guess.”
She sighed. “Well, it’s too bad about Mom then. But I guess as mom’s go, she’s about a three. I can deal with it.”
“April!” They teach kids fuzzy logic in fourth grade now; nothing is either-or anymore—it’s all on a scale of one to ten.
“Pete,” Tamika said, “she’s really just saying what Tad was saying—only being more honest. April, remember your ethics. What’s the equivalent inverse situation to your donating a lung to your Mother?”
“Her donating a lung to me? Oh. I see. Do you think she would? Dad?”
What would you do, Jeanette? Would you come back from Mars? You wouldn’t come back to raise your kid, but would you come back to save her life? Or would there be an excuse?
“Sure she would, kid.” I said. Why make things any worse?
“If we lived,” Tamika added, “in the sort of society where you would not make the effort to save her, it would also be a time in which, I think, she would not make such an effort to save you. Good deeds, I think, lend their way to an atmosphere of good deeds, so even if there is no direct reciprocity, all benefit. Meanness, on the other hand, leads to emulation as well. Be careful ‘not to do unto others as you would not wish done unto yourself.’ ”
“Jesus?” April asked.
“In a way. But first, K’ung Fu Tze.”
April sighed. “I feel heavy.”
We were in skin-tight vacuum suits floating in oil, nominally in the zero gravity of neutral buoyancy. Still, there were cues. There was no oil in my helmet and my tongue felt heavy. I could feel the skin on my face sag.
Ahmed looked grim. He was transmitting in the clear. “They will make me shut off the beam soon. I am sorry. The beam from Phobos will arrive in two hours to push you back. Ahmed out.”
But before his face vanished, he gave us a wink. Obviously, he thought we still had a chance.
“The splash is already getting dimmer,” Tamika said.
I looked to my right, at the screen showing the ring center. The “splash” was where the incoming fairy dust blasted itself into plasma and was reflected by the magnetic field. It was dimming—that meant less energy. But I felt just as heavy—we were still doing four gravities. How . . . ? Of course!
“More mass, less velocity,” I said finally. “Energy goes with mass times velocity squared, but thrust just scales directly with mass times velocity. Twice as much mass at half the relative velocity gives the same push, but needs only half as much energy. So the splash is dimmer.
“But that’s not why he did it. The lower velocity stuff takes longer to get to us, so it has to leave earlier—he’s figured out a way to send us all the push we need before they shut him down!”
“Does that mean his beam will still be pushing us when the Phobos beam hits us?” Tamika asked.
“Probably.” I tried to imagine us caught between two blobs of plasma, one trying to push us to Mars, the other trying to push us back to the moon.
“Dad,” April said. “If we move a little, will our fairy dust follow our ultraviolet beam? Like Mr. Fahsi showed us?”
“Yes. Well, maybe.” The sideways thrust of Ahmed’s particles had to be minuscule. “Korolev, what kind of sideways delta v can the beam follow?”
“About half a millimeter a second at this distance.”
“Get started,” I said and focused my eyes on Polaris. “That way.”
“We are already moving that way at almost a meter per second, to stay in the beam center. The beam is not tracking us exactly, so we have to track it. This is not normal, but within our limits.”
“Of course! Ahmed’s giving us some maneuvering room. Okay, you give us half a millimeter a second at right angles to that, just in case the bad guys figure it out.”
“Done.”
“Can the Phobos mass beam find us,” Tamika asked, “if we don’t give it a UV beam to follow?”
I had a moment of hope, then remembered one of the redundancies. “Damn. Unfortunately, yes. Ahmed has corner cubes along the ring just in case the ship’s UV lasers fail. As a back-up, the beam site can shoot a laser at us, and the incoming particles can follow its reflection as if it was our own laser.” But, I thought . . . “But not if we cover them. Korolev, can you cover the retroreflectors?”
“Not at this acceleration. My robot’s servo motors can’t lift their own arms in this.”
“Why didn’t Ahmed give them stronger motors!”
The question was rhetorical, but the Korolev answered it. “These are lunar robots that were put aboard at the last instant.”
Of course. “Can we reduce the reflector field to what they can handle?”
“We can, but then we would not be in position to rendezvous with a deceleration beam at the end of the coast period. Also, I cannot reduce it quickly; the energy tied up in the reflector’s magnetic field has to be radiated away and we don’t have a full complement of radiators.”
“How slow can you go and still make the rendezvous if you give it an hour?”
“Three point one four two gravities.”
“Let’s try three point two.”
“My robots cannot . . .”
“Not your robots. Me.”
I lift weights—most lunar folk do. The image of lunies as weaklings haunts us and some of us overcompensate; lunar weight lifters have won three Olympic weight lifting medals even though the population of the moon is less than that of a large city on Earth. I even lift when I’m on Earth, where I was just a month ago. The human body has a lot of margin built into it; they say we can take four gravities almost indefinitely.
But, truth be told, I hadn’t been lifting that much. When the Korolev got down to three point two gravities, I damn near couldn’t get out of my acceleration tank. I learned very quickly that I had to plan every step. Over to the life support chest with the john in it—there was a tool kit in there as well. Rest standing—I didn’t dare sit down. Over to the door. Rest.
When this was all over, my near middle-aged body was going to pay for it, big time. Every ordinary motion seemed to take an extraordinary effort—it was much more tiring, initially, than just the additional weight would suggest. I had to take the “door” panel off myself—we hadn’t sealed and pressurized yet, but it still took fifteen minutes to get my head out of the Korolev’s cabin.
The “splash” was a huge, brilliant, violet ball below the ring with a spike stabbing up through it as a small portion of the plasma escaped along the magnetic field lines that went through the center of the ring. The black tube of the reflector electromagnet ran overhead through the center of the framework supported by big “X” braces every five meters—a ring within a ring. Actually, with all the force from the plasma being applied to the magnet, the ring frame was hanging from the loop rather than loop supported by the frame.
At my present weight, the lattice structure of the ring looked downright flimsy. There was a catwalk on its bottom, but it definitely did not look designed for someone to walk around on it at over three gravities. Not only that, but it wasn’t immediately clear how I would get on it—what was an insignificant half-meter drop from the cabin frame to the lower longerons of the lattice ring in lunar gravity now looked like the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
You’d go down a wall like that by rappelling, I realized. It may seem ridiculous to rappel down a half-meter door ledge, but that’s just what I did, anchoring one of my safety tethers to the hole in a vertical longeron above the door. I wrapped the line around the shaft of a universal driver from the tool kit as a kind of friction bearing and used that to partly support my weight as I dropped one foot down to the framework and then the other.
Next to the cabin and a cross beam, the longeron held my weight. Still holding onto the safety line, I took a step out.
The frame bent under me, curving down over a centimeter, I guessed. The groan of composite longerons bending conducted its way from the abused frame through my feet and bones and into my ears.
“What’s my margin?” I asked the Korolev.
“The stress on the frame is over the redline limits, but still 20% below expected strength. I am compensating for the frame distortion with active tension controls.”
Okay. I told the clip on the safety line to release itself, reeled it in, and stretched to attach it to one of the magnetic loop supports ahead of me. Supporting part of my weight with the safety line and part with my feet, I took a first tentative step. There were guide wires, but they didn’t look like they would support any significant weight; I ignored them and hung on to the safety line.
The catwalk bent alarmingly, but didn’t break. I took another step. This got me close enough to reach forward and attach my second safety line to the next support. I had to rest after the simple act of holding my arm above my head long enough attach the clip.
So. Half brachiating on safety lines and half walking, I got to the first retroreflector. It was a full five meters over my head—an insignificant height on the moon, but a mountain in these circumstances.
Plan A had been to climb up there somehow and detach it with my tool. No way.
Plan B was my flare pistol. I took careful aim from almost directly below, bracing my shooting arm on the frame. The minirocket from my first shot missed to the right and I was rewarded by a brilliant flare high above the spacecraft.
The second shot hit the frame below the retroreflector’s platform with a shower of sparks—and the smashed minirocket fell at incredible speed, missing me by a few centimeters. The third shot hit the right side of the retroreflectors platform and did nothing obvious. I put my arm down and rested. I could think of nothing to do but try once more.
This time, the platform tilted, breaking free on one side.
Another shot missed. If I could just hit it one more time . . .
I did and was rewarded by the entire retroreflector falling down through the frame and into the plasma ball below me. It had taken almost 45 minutes. I knew without asking that my act of half swinging on the safety lines was too slow. I would have to risk my entire weight to the flimsy catwalk. I resolved to move swiftly—things take time to yield and break.
Getting started was the hard thing, like diving into a cold lake. I knew it would probably work—20% margin in theory—just like you know that, in theory, you’ll survive that cold plunge into the lake. But I didn’t feel that way. That catwalk could snap, dumping me into the white-hot splash ball below me. I stood there, frozen by doubt, and took another look up at our destination, as if that would fix my resolve again.
It did. As I looked, Mars instantly changed from its normal bright red to an incredibly brilliant purplish gray. They had started, damn them, and I still had two retroreflectors to disable. I turned to make my way back to the cabin. Pete, they’ve beaten you. Face it. You don’t care that much. I could take getting beaten, but did I want April to see me give up this way—with her Mom’s life at stake? Tamika’s words haunted me—suppose things were the other way around? What if it were April’s life at stake? Why the hell couldn’t those idiots in charge of the mass beams and the lasers see that—it could be them! What business was it of theirs to stop me?
