Zero-G ONE A DOZEN PEOPLE DEAD. Good people, people who trusted my judgment-- Retired General Curtis James Stanton, civilian commander of the space station Empyrean, lay on his smartfoam cot and peered into the darkness of his relatively spacious cabin. His IC was set to emergency alert only, yet in this rare moment of quiet his mind was anything but at rest. Eyes open, his memory vivid, Stanton''s brain whipped him with pain he could only allow himself here, in private. He dared not display weakness or distraction while he was on duty in the Drum, and there was no one he could talk to, no one who would understand. There was doubt enough about tactics that his military brain attached to the failed mission. But there was, as always, the chaser: the human component. The first one got a quick, fixed reaction from the brain.
It ran down a checklist, compared the results to the protocols. That move was right . that one wrong . right . wrong . right . chancy . Those decisions never got any better or worse.
The other, though, the human toll: that took a while to seep into his soul and there it got uglier and more suffocating. He saw once again those twelve faces focused on their mission--young and middle-aged, eager and professional, all prepared and eager to serve. They trusted his judgment completely. Stanton''s tortured mind could only scroll back as far as the unit''s preparation for the recon. He saw again and again the bulk of his security detail rocket off and then perish conducting recon of the Chinese space station Jade Star, which had lost control of a particle weapon and was spewing death across near-space. He could not stop seeing the soundless explosions out the window of the Drum, hearing the cries in his IC-- "Stop!" he muttered wearily, helplessly, squeezing his fingernails into his palms. "Please, stop." Commander Stanton''s shoulders moved and the mattress adjusted to hug in him place.
He bunched his fists against his forehead but he didn''t bother to shut his eyes. Open or closed, it was equally dark in his cabin. And either way, there was his security team once again making their preparations, once more sledding into the void. Einstein said that time and space were illusory, that they changed with one''s perspective. Commander Stanton had latched onto that idea during his six months of training for this assignment, but even Einstein didn''t prepare him for how elusive a quality time really was in space. Without day or night to mark its passage, sleep was actually the only real measure--and the lack of it did change one''s subjectivity. For the past week, Commander Stanton hadn''t had much rest. Everything that had happened--the loss, the failure, the personal shame, the way others avoided eye contact--was immediate and ongoing.
It did no good to remind himself or NASA that what he had ordered was a standard by-the-book deployment. Fourteen single-occupant vehicles, all piloted by veterans, but only two returned. And one of those survivors was not even a member of his team. It was Sam Lord''s man McClure. That was the other thought that plagued Stanton. Samuel Lord was the head of the FBI''s six-person Zero-G unit based on the Empyrean. His man had not only survived, it was Lord--just two weeks up from Earth--who had succeeded in personally shutting down the lethal Chinese device with a maneuver that was anything but by-the-book. And unlike Stanton, after the battle, the octogenarian former flyboy was the same tutelary saint he had been before.
Only now with more halo, the fifty-three year-old thought bitterly as he tried in vain to sleep. Nor was Lord''s cool triumph merely the fact that he stopped the Dragon''s Eye. Compounding Stanton''s sense of failure, Lord had also fulfilled the role he had been sent to space to accomplish. He had found the traitors who helped the Chinese build the weapon. That had given momentum to Lord''s reputation as a go-getter who just wouldn''t quit. Meanwhile, Stanton''s career up here, just nine weeks old, was the subject of doubt and subtle derision in the newtiae. These news minutia summaries collected, cross-referenced, and analyzed every public mention of a name or situation to provide an N-rating. In the immediate aftermath of the loss, Stanton''s superiors at NASA had backed the retired army general publicly.
After all, they were the ones who had written the white paper he followed. Then they went silent for six days as the newtiae numbers eroded like the orbit of the United Arab Emirates'' ill-fated DubHigh Hotel a year before. The commander was no longer in free fall and that was only because there wasn''t much distance left to fall. He didn''t expect to be replaced anytime soon, since there was no one on deck: at least there was time to try to rebuild his reputation. Yet that plagued him too because he didn''t know how. He had been sent here because he wasn''t a Sam Lord. He did things in a conservative, traditional manner. Stanton couldn''t get the man''s round, open face out of his brain.
He saw the attentive eyes and thoughtful brow topped with gray steel-wool hair, the easy roll of Lord''s big shoulders as he walked. He heard the newtiae praise, replayed in his exhausted brain the interview with Hiromi Tsuburaya, the Japanese chief operating officer of Consolidated Bandwidth of Asia, where Lord was a hero for avenging the attack that had devastated the nation-- "It was a team effort," Lord had said. "But you were the leader of the team," Tsuburaya had responded. "''A'' leader," Lord had replied modestly--with intentionally boastful false modesty, Stanton was sure. Because then he went on to talk about the teams he had served with in two wars, in test piloting, running through his credentials as if they were talking points on a campaign trail-- Dammit! Enough. Stanton dug the heels of his palms into his exhausted eyes. He found himself envying Blake Tengan, the forty-eight-year-old commander of NASA''s Armstrong Base on the moon. She had a PhD in astrophysics to go with her credentials as a decorated military veteran.
Not only did she make all the right calls up there during the Dragon''s Eye crisis, but she had breadth that he lacked. Inferiority on top of failure was a deadly, paralyzing combination. The hell of it was, he had lost personnel before. There had been thousands of deaths among his elite troops during the War on Narcotics and the Pan-Persia Occupation. But those situations had been volatile. They had been classic terrestrial problems fought with traditional weapons--if a neutron bomb that killed people without destroying property could be considered traditional. This was outer space, the final frontier, God''s backyard. His command on the Empyrean was only supposed to be about organizing science and engineering projects with selective political surveillance on the side, electronic intelligence gathering paid for by agencies like the CIA and run by two specialists in the Drum.
The threats beyond Earth''s atmosphere were supposed to be radiation, micrometeoroids, structural fatigue, centripetal gravity distortion. They weren''t supposed to be old global conflicts carried beyond the atmosphere by old global lunatics, he thought bitterly. NASA and capitalism were supposed to have things under control up here. They should have been supporting him, not scapegoating him with silence-- Stanton angrily punched the air and, with a pop of the foam, the motion carried him several inches off the mattress toward the wall on his right. He met it with open palms and pushed himself back. The residences in Radial Arm Five had from one-quarter to three-quarters gravity; the artificial pull was strongest toward the outer reaches of the structure. "That''s where stuff gets flung by centripetal force," was how team physicist Dr. August Bird had dumbed it down for Stanton during his orientation briefing.
Bird was also the man who had explained Einstein to him. In order for him to be close to the centrally located Drum, Stanton had to take one of the lesser-gravity cabins. Until this moment, it hadn''t been a challenge. He had mastered everything from showering to shoving a foot in his boot without becoming a human cannonball. At least Isaac Newton and his third law aren''t against you, Stanton thought as he settled back. The wall had simultaneously exerted a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction from his fist. Otherwise, thanks to Newton''s first law, he would have gone sailing away, a body in motion continuing to be in motion. Science, bless it, was reliable.
The "urgent" IC ping from Lancaster Liba was both welcome and not. It allowed Stanton to stop thinking about past disasters and turn his attention to whatever this new emergency might be. "Go," Stanton said, engaging Liba''s icon with a wink. "Commander, the SRO is misbehaving," the agricultural officer said from just outside the Vault. "Misbehaving very badly." "Coming," Stanton said, rolling his shoulders so that he was immediately sitting upright. The light came on automatically as the commander stood. "Are you contacting Dr.
Carter?" "My next call, commander," Liba said. Stanton winked on the "out" icon, an exit sign. Even though the biophysicist was a consultant on the Merlin project, he was FBI and not on the Empyrean''s emergency alert list. Notifying the Bureau''s resident medic.