Here Be Dragons (14 page)

She paused, glad that Rivkah couldn’t see her face in the galley.

“You know, that sounded funny in my head for some reason.”

Elena exited the galley and found that Rivkah had finished and seated herself at the table. The fifth pouch of wine was still tied in place.

“I apologize, Doctor. Sometimes I speak a little too freely around you.”

She sat down across from Rivkah. They had traded positions from the seder, and the captain was once more the leader. She looked Rivkah full in the eye, and for once the doctor met her gaze and didn’t look away.

“Please don’t be embarrassed, Captain. I’ve lost patients before. I know how it feels.”

Elena had always thought the word “handsome,” which was used to flatter men, was reserved as a condescension towards older women. But she began to see the merits of the word. The doctor’s face was mildly lined and still deeply tanned, though it hadn’t seen the desert sun for decades. Her coarse black curls were pulled back and braided so tightly that they looked like they would break. But her pale blue eyes against her burnished skin were like oases in the desert. Elena found herself swimming in them.

“And who is that for?” She nodded to the pouch.

“That is for the prophet Elijah.”

“And does he ever come?”

“No. And he will not, until it is time to prepare the way for the Messiah. When Elijah drinks from this cup, it will mean that our redemption is at hand.”

Elena took it by the hand, and shook it gently to hear the juice slosh.

“I was hoping it was empty.”

Rivkah laughed, just as Elena had hoped she would.

“Maybe next time,” the doctor said. “In Jerusalem.”

“Elijah may not have shown, but I thought the guest list was quite distinguished.”

“I thought so also.”

“Eclectic, even.”

Rivkah laughed again.

“You can ask, Captain.”

“Why did you invite me?”

“At the service, for Mr. Arnaud. It was not from the Torah, but I recognized the passage you chose nonetheless. It was not at all what I had expected.”

“Yes, well,” Elena said. “It seemed appropriate at the time.”

“Can you imagine how lonely that man must have been, even with his disciples? He could walk among them, and he could love them, but he could never be one of them. He would always stand apart. That was the first price he paid.”

Elena had always eaten alone in her cabin. She’d passed by the wardroom many times, but by tradition the captain never ate with her officers, even the senior staff. This was the first time in six months that she had broken bread with anyone, even Vijay. Rivkah knew that—everyone did. The doctor had not replied to her question, but she had an answer nonetheless. Rivkah had invited people like her, the downtrodden, the outcast, and the solitary.

She watched the doctor’s Cross of David float above her breast. She had never asked why the doctor had left the desert and what remained of her people to join the Space Agency, where she would always be
the
Jew. Elena had been alone ever since she had lost Anne, over two years before. But Rivkah had chosen to be alone, and Elena wanted to know why, from her own lips.

Elena looked down at the table to see that their hands were nearly touching. She stood up.

“It’s getting late.” This was true. “And I still haven’t written my report.” This was not.

“Of course.”

“Thank you for having me, again. It was nice to share a meal for once.”

“We should do it again sometime.”

“Have a seder?”

“No, Captain. Not a seder.”

Rivkah was smiling.

“How about six months from now?” Elena asked.

“I’ll mark my calendar.”

Elena left, wishing she hadn’t. She regretted not asking Rivkah the question. But more than that, Elena wished that she had touched that hand on the table.

That night as she laid in her hammock,
Gabriel
was eclipsed by Jupiter and passed into its shadow. Under Ikenna’s supervision, the third shift communications officer transmitted one final report to Control, and then contact was lost, drowned in a sea of static. It was a long time before Elena finally managed to sing herself to sleep, and when she awoke the next morning, alone, she could still hear the music in her head.

Collateral Damage

Six months earlier

E
lena didn’t vote, but she had cast a ballot nonetheless. She awoke on Election Day as she always did, one hour before her shift began. The balloting had been underway for almost twelve hours, across half the world’s time zones. It had just begun in East Africa, Syriana, and the western reaches of Russia, and was already ending in the Pacific. The final polls would open in Cairo when the ship’s bell rang in the day watch, and they would close that evening with the election won and lost.

Elena washed, dressed, and sat at her desk to find an interview request from the Office of Special Investigations waiting in her inbox. They’d already remotely debriefed her twice in the three days since the explosion, once while she was on the moon, and again when she had returned to
Gabriel
to prepare for the trial cruise. On both occasions she’d managed to managed to answer their questions truthfully, if less than candidly. As of yet, neither she nor
Gabriel
was officially a subject of interest to the inquiry—the working theory was that the ballista shot had triggered a dead man’s switch and detonated a nuke onboard a military satellite platform.

Half the planet had watched the sky burn above them that day, and now every man, women, and child on Earth knew the name Overstar-12, the same way they knew Hiroshima and Tel Aviv. Someone would have to pay for that. The only reason she was in her stateroom and not a cell was that no one had yet thought to question Third Officer Pascal Arnaud, who was under strict orders not to lie about what he had seen.

Elena agreed to OSI’s request, and moved on to the rest of her inbox. At precisely 0800 hours a message from Vijay appeared.

The chief’s presence is requested in forward weapons control.

When she arrived and peered down through the door Vijay was looking up, steel ball in hand.

“Would you like to pitch in?”

Elena drifted through the hatch and hung by one hand from a gunner’s chair.

“What is all this?”

“This, Chief, is a hunch.”

He held the round aloft, then pressed his bracelet to it. Elena heard the slow ticking that had sounded from her own bracelet, in this very room. The Geiger counter identified the ball as nonradioactive. Satisfied, Vijay set it back onto the rack and took another.

“You went cabin fevered quicker than I thought.”

“Chief, I don’t think there was a bomb on Overstar-12 at all.”

“I saw it explode myself, Vijay. All the way from the moon.”

“I do not doubt that there was an explosion,” Vijay said. His bracelet chattered softly. The light from its surface shone on his jumpsuit and illuminated the stenciled name
Nishtha
on his breast. “In fact, I have already reviewed the records.”

“Those records are classified.”

“Ours are. But civilian telescopes have a charming habit of releasing their data to the public.”

“And?”

“I think the nuke was inside our round, Chief.”

Elena let her mouth drop as she glanced at the shiny metal ball in his hand, as she knew he expected she would. When OSI hadn’t caught her on to her immediately, she’d allowed herself a measure of hope. That had been a mistake, and in that moment she killed it, for her own good. If Vijay had figured it out this quickly, someone else had as well—and if they hadn’t, they would. She couldn’t hide forever.

“Nuclear artillery.” She kept her voice level.

“A plutonium core of sufficient mass, traveling at ballista speeds, could easily achieve criticality,” Vijay said. “I have done the maths thoroughly, Chief.”

He scanned the shell, and set it aside.

“Vijay, has it ever occurred to that those balls are steel?”

“That is what they would like you to believe.”

“Uranium and plutonium tarnish in the open air,” Elena said. “If any of these rounds were nuclear, you’d know just by looking at it.”

“Not if they were steel jacketed,” Vijay said. “As they would have to be, if the ballista were to fire them. Uranium and plutonium are not magnetic.”

“And to get onboard this ship, it would have had to pass through a dozen security checkpoints, maybe more, with radiological sensors at each one. Steel isn’t dense enough to shield radiation.”

“No,” Vijay said. Another round finished, he returned it and launched himself back up into the air, to a storage locker along the wall. “But this is.”

He opened the locker, and removed a small cargo crate. Elena didn’t have to check the shipping data to know which one it was. Vijay slid the lid open, and she saw that the bottom panel had been removed to reveal a sheet of dull gray metal beneath. He tapped it. Elena floated to him, and rubbed the plate with her finger. It was soft and dense.

“Shit.”

“No, Captain,” Vijay said. “Lead.”

“That was an Agency nuke?”

“We may have fired it.” Vijay replaced the lid and set the crate back in the locker. “But we did not create it.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“The Treaty of Jerusalem is more than our law, Chief. It is our foundation. It predates the Global Union, and to break it would be to break the Union itself. That was not our plutonium, I am sure of it.”

“It could have been meant for the outsiders.”

“If we would stoop so low to win, we would not deserve victory.”

He sank back down to the ammunition rank.

“Then whose?”

“We went to war during the Nuclear Crisis because the independents built their own reactors. We thought we got them all. But those are big countries, Chief.”

His bracelet chittered softly, slowly.

“How many rounds does
Gabriel
carry?” Elena asked, though she knew the number of every component onboard, down to the unit.

“Two hundred,” Vijay said. “Well, one hundred and ninety nine at the moment.”

“And how many have you checked?”

“Ten.”

“Then you had better get back to work,” Elena said. She already knew exactly what he would learn. She and Arnaud had scanned each of them. “Let me know if you find something.”

Vijay swam headfirst to the ammunition racks.

“I rather hope that I do not.”

“Oh?”

“If we built nukes to use against the outsiders, then we built more than one—they could always miss the target,” Vijay said. “And plutonium is expensive, while the independents can barely keep their satellites in orbit. I sincerely doubt they could afford to build more than one nuke—not that they would need more. The damage has already been done.”

“The election.” Vijay nodded. “That would have been good timing. But if there was only one nuke, how could they be sure that we’d fire it?”

“I suppose they would need a man on the inside,” Vijay said. “Inside this room.”

Elena changed the subject.

“Tell no one, and keep me informed,” she said, and kicked off the chair for the door. Vijay pulled another shell off the rack.

Elena returned to her stateroom to begin her paperwork. But after five minutes after her desk, she had to read a single order, let alone sign it.

She had assumed that the nuke had been built by the Agency, and intended for the outsiders. That was the only possible reason she could imagine for placing it on an
Archangel
, the only ships created to take the fight to the outside. It had never occurred to her that she had found the plutonium less than a week before the eection.

Any nuclear reactor which bred the plutonium-238 inside the isotopic batteries could easily create plutonium-239 as well, and the Agency reactor was an open secret, well known but never officially acknowledged, its location the most closely guarded secret in the world. But Elena would have wagered
Gabriel
herself that it was up here, sharing an orbit with her, right now. The Union had entrusted it to the Space Agency, the one Global entity that did not involve itself in Earth politics. No nation would ever admit to having one on its soil—its own citizens would riot.

But there were exceptions to every rule. The smoking craters in Australia and Brazil and the Congo—supposedly all that remained of the independent nuclear programs—were testimony to that.

On a whim, she logged back into the globenet and ran a search, and narrowed the results to those within the last week. It was a common name she searched for, so she had to sift through a lot of junk. Elena filtered the results by election news, and there it was, on the
Times
channel. The video’s caption said it had been recorded the day before, in the Australian desert. The stridently internationalist
Lunar Times
was not in the habit of going there for commentary on Global politics. And more strangely still, the subject was not identified by any nationality, but simply as a spokesman for the Alliance for Sovereignty.

He was short, but the camera didn’t know that. His black hair had grayed and receded at the temple, and he was dressed simply for the hot weather in a cotton shirt and pants. She could see the sweat beading on his forehead just standing still. The land behind him was lush and verdant, and wavered in the heat. The vegetation was a soybean farm, painstakingly grafted onto the desert. Its straight green edges clashed with the yellow dust of the wasteland which surrounded it. Australia had been completely embargoed since the Nuclear Crisis, and ate only what they could grow or smuggle.

The interviewer’s questions, lobbed from a comfortable bureau office in Jakarta, were probing, tough, and eventually hostile. His own past came up repeatedly, which was undoubtedly why the
Times
had sought the interview. But it was easy to see that he had once been a politician. He deftly parried and riposted with an elan that Elena could not remember, and admired despite herself. And his stilted but earnest English provided an earthy contrast to the interviewer’s lofty elocution. She closed with a biting lament that exiles could not vote in Global elections.

“My voice will be my vote,” he said. “Vote Sovereign, and for a true peace on Earth.”

When the video ended, Elena saw that it had been viewed more than a million times in less than twenty four hours. She had not expected his novelty value to be so high. It had been fifteen years, after all, and she had doubted that anyone but her own countrymen still remembered the name Ernesto Gonzales.

Elena climbed, feet first, along the ladder that led to the dock. She felt herself grow heavier, kilo by kilo.
Gabriel
hung suspended at the center of the hollow cylinder that was Glenn Station, connected umbilically like a child in the womb, and as the station rotated around its longest axis the ship spun as well. But since rotation is always faster at the edge than at the center,
Gabriel
lacked the artificial gravity that was provided aboard Glenn. It was an odd feeling to be spun faster and faster around, for her legs to weigh as much as her torso. She felt as if an invisible hand had grabbed her waist and was pulling her down the tube and away from
Gabriel,
and
she became dizzy from the sensation. But then her feet hit the floor, and the moment passed.

She hadn’t expected a welcoming party.

“Good to see you, Elena,” Chief Officer Recip Erdogan said, extending his hand. He was her replacement as Glenn’s commanding officer, and would lead the skeleton crew set to take over for the crew of
Gabriel.
They shook, and Vijay saluted. “Everyone’s waiting in the lounge.”

As they walked—Glenn’s gravity was about half of Earth normal, which was just enough to put in a spring in her step—Vijay said to her, “Everyone not on duty, that is. Second Officer Okoye will not be joining us.” His search of the ballista ammunition had revealed nothing.

“Be good,” Elena whispered.

After spending the day in
Gabriel’s
tight corridors and cramped compartments,
Glenn Station’s main lounge should have seemed cavernous to Elena. But after the canyon that was Maginus City, it didn’t seem like much. The walls were off white and softly curved to please the eye, and there was room to hold almost a hundred people more or less comfortably, but the lack of a third dimension left it seeming intolerably crowded to Elena. And standing pinned against the inside of a rotating barrel made her feel as if she were always walking uphill.

She made an exception for the long windows that had been set into the floor, like a glass bottom boat. At first Elena had hated the idea of anything but a firm bulkhead in between her and the vacuum. But after that morning—or evening, depending on how she chose to look at it—in the observation bubble above Maginus, she had begun to see the appeal of the skylights.

Elena walked over to one and looked down, too suspicious to step on it directly. The skies beneath her feet were black, lit with streams of soft gold—the lights from Earth’s sleeping cities. This was a view that would have been impossible just a few decades before, when megatons of ash and smoke had blocked out the sun. Two centuries of climate change had been wiped out by a few days of nuclear war, and temperatures had plunged worldwide and dragged the planet into a long winter that had yet to truly end. If it had been daylight, Elena would have been able to see snow in Russia and Scandinavia that hadn’t melted in a century.

But it was in nighttime in Asia now, and she began to count those cities which were missing—Seoul, Pyongyang, Beijing, Qingdao, Shanghai, Lhasa, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Tehran. To the far east were the dimmed home islands of Japan, depopulated by emigration, starvation, and suicide. To the far west was the lonely crater where a black market Soviet warhead had annihilated Tel Aviv in 2048—the first of many, the Storm’s opening act. When the Western Hemisphere rose to meet her in a few minutes, Elena would be able to see the black holes of the old United States—Washington, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Wichita, Austin, Boulder, Sacramento, San Diego. Restive cities that the President, then in his ninth term at his capital in Cheyenne Mountain, had summarily executed before the chief of his Secret Service detail had put two bullets in his head and turned the gun on herself.