Oblivion (14 page)

And so, Banks had to spend a week out of her life sitting in front of microphones in the House of Representatives, defending her standards to a bunch of people who wouldn’t know what standards were if a lobbyist didn’t tell them. It had been all she could do to keep her contempt to a minimum.

Not that it did any good. She was the public face for the program, and so, of course, she was the one whose head went on the block. She got several apologies from her superiors, all of whom said they wouldn’t have removed her from duty if it had been their choice. But it hadn’t been. The suits had decided that standards were too rigorous. Our pilots weren’t getting a fair shake.

And now she had to tolerate a shuddery docking on the International Space Station. A shuddery docking on the wrong part of the ISS could create all sorts of internal problems for the station. If she had time, she would try to affect the piloting problems from here.

She wouldn’t have time, and she knew it. She was on the tightest deadline of her life.

“Ready, General?” The pilot poked his head through the separator.

“Are you certain we’re properly docked?” she asked. “That was a rough connection.”

“All systems go according to the board.”

“I don’t give a damn about the board,” she said. “You eyeball it, mister, and then we disembark. I’ve got nuclear missiles onboard this beast, and I’m not going to lose one of them to your carelessness.”

The pilot’s face flushed. “Yes, sir.” He disappeared into the cockpit again.

She clutched a rung and waited. He hadn’t turned the low gravity on yet either, and they would need it to unload those missiles. This part of the ISS, the newest part, had continual gravity—not as strong as Earth’s—but enough so that the permanent members of the ISS’s staff didn’t get osteoporosis or other degenerative bone and muscle diseases. No matter how much exercise folks did in zero g, it didn’t substitute for the good old force of gravity herself.

Through the closed cockpit door, she heard the slide of the pilot’s exit. Well, at least he took her advice. Only she didn’t think it was her tone that worried him. She thought it was probably the mention of the missiles. Most folks didn’t like the mention of nuclear and warhead in the same sentence, let alone in the same phrase.

She smiled to herself, and floated toward one of the windows. The ISS was a strange place. The first pieces, Russian-built, went up before the turn of the century. The ISS was, as its name suggested, an international project that had been initially designed for research. But as more private industry got into space travel, and as governments saw the point of it, the suggestion of turning the ISS into an interplanetary way station gained legs. The problem was that the ISS wasn’t designed for it. Sure, it had modules upon modules upon modules, but they were held together with spit and glue, and a whole lot of prayer. The newest pieces could barely talk to the younger pieces, and the oldest piece, called
Zarya
by its designers, was mostly shut down because it had become so dangerous. Unfortunately, it was smack-dab in the middle of the main section of the station, so it couldn’t be disassembled or jettisoned, at least not without great effort, great expense, and great risk.

Zarya
wasn’t her problem. The ISS really wasn’t. She was running ops from here, and her biggest problem wasn’t the missiles. It was the deadline. When General Clarissa Maddox assigned Banks the task, she’d said, “I know this deadline is tight. In fact, it’s damn near impossible. But you’re the only person I know who can make the impossible happen efficiently and well.”

It was, Banks knew, both a vote of confidence and an apology for all the things that had happened with the shuttle program. But Banks also knew she wouldn’t be assigned a mission this critical strictly as an apology. She had to be the best for the job, just like Maddox said she was.

There was no margin for error. She wouldn’t allow any. She’d make sure these missiles were unloaded, and then when the next shipment came up, she’d make sure those missiles were properly taken care of, as well.

And she would keep doing that until all the area around the space station was filled with missiles. And then the aliens would see that they attacked the wrong people.

Maddox’s plan was a good one, and Banks was proud to be the one who would make sure everything got done right. She wouldn’t make any friends on this job, but she might just save a few billion human lives.

She grinned.

As long as they were killing a few billion aliens in the process, she could live with that.

May 6, 2018
9:02 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time

161 Days Until Second Harvest

Leo Cross was late and of all the places to be late to, NanTech wasn’t one of them. He had forgotten how these old streets outside the Beltway jammed during rush hour. He was five miles from NanTech and it felt like he was five hundred miles away.

His car was on automatic, following the directions given by the guidance system installed somewhere in Detroit.

“What do those idiots know about D.C.?” he muttered and shut off the guidance system. The Mercedes squawked, “Are you certain—?” before he shut off the vocal controls as well. Then he took over the steering himself, turned right onto a side street, and drove fifteen miles over the speed limit through a residential area that had been built around the time he was born.

He hoped no children were playing hooky from school, no dogs decided to take that moment to cross the road, no cats chased a mouse across his path. He hadn’t driven hands-on in months, not since the last time he’d rented a car in, what? Oregon? when he went out to see Bradshaw for the very first time.

It was rather liberating. He hadn’t realized how controlled he felt by this expensive car, by its automatic everything—so smooth you can forget how to drive and still get where you’re going in comfort, according to the stupid radio ads. Well, he was getting where he was going, in comfort, and
on time,
because he was taking matters into his own hands.

The back streets had none of the crunch of the main thoroughfares. He was beginning to see the problems inherent in automatic guidance systems.

He turned into the NanTech employee lot, bounced over a few speed bumps, and parked behind the building. There was no gilt here, no fancy scrollwork to mar the glass-and-steel design. It looked so ’90s. He’d always found that amusing. He was coming to the cutting edge of nanotechnology, and the building looked dated.

He walked in the back door, ignoring the building as it greeted him—everything at NanTech talked—and happy to avoid the bug sculpture in the lobby. That’s what Bradshaw called it anyway. The sculpture was supposed to be of a human form covered with nanomachines. Instead, Bradshaw said, it looked like some poor guy covered with ants.

Cross pressed a button for the elevator. He debated, as he waited for the doors to open, whether or not to shut off the vocal unit, but then decided not to. He was late. He deserved it.

Besides, he didn’t know where everyone was meeting.

The elevator doors slid open silently. The elevator was empty. Cross cursed under his breath, and stepped inside.

Dr. Cross. You are half an hour late. I will take you to the fifteenth floor.

“Thanks,” he muttered, knowing he didn’t sound grateful at all. He hated having inanimate objects talk to him. Portia Groopman, she of the genius mind trapped in a twenty-year-old’s body, said she found all this idle chatter “comforting.”

Cross was really afraid to think about what the world would be like in his old age.

If the world survived to his old age.

He shuddered, wishing that for one day he could forget how very close they all were to losing everything.

The elevator doors opened. The nanomachines had formed a series of teddy bear sculptures, all of them pointing to the left.

“Cute, Portia,” Cross said.

She had designed the nanosculptures, as she called them. They changed daily, sometimes hourly. Nanomachines were programmed to form several different images. Usually the changes followed a prearranged program, but sometimes someone—usually Portia—made them do something special for a guest. In this case, a late guest.

Cross followed the pointing bears down one hallway until he reached an open doorway. Inside, he saw Bradshaw, Portia, and two other members of NanTech’s whiz squad, as Bradshaw called them. None of the NanTech employees on this team, at least, were older than twenty-five.

“Hey, Leo, it’s about time,” Portia said. She looked up from the screen she’d been studying. She was a slight girl, whose delicate frame made her seem even slighter. She wore rose-tinted glasses and had her black hair cut in a perfect wedge. Her skin was tanned from her trip to South America with Bradshaw.

Bradshaw looked up at the mention of Cross’s name. Bradshaw was the oldest member of the Tenth Planet Project. He was nearly sixty, although he didn’t look it. He had lost weight since coming to Washington, D.C., but he still had love handles, as Britt called them, and his graying hair needed a trim. He, too, had tanned on this last trip, and it accented the laugh lines around his eyes and mouth.

“Leo,” he said. “You’re late.”

“It’s the damn car,” Cross said, and came into the room. “It insisted on driving us the slow route.”

“You know, you can program the guidance systems to do anything you want.” Jeremy Lantine, the head of the biology division at NanTech, was a scrawny black-haired man who, in a different generation, probably would have been a poet. His goatee was an affectation that matched his beret. His beat-up leather jacket hung on the chair beside him. He wore a see-through muscle-T that revealed his muscleless chest. “You can even make them ignore all the rules of the road. It takes some jury-rigging, but—”

“Some day,” Cross said, “I’ll let you adjust my machine.” “Excellent,” Lantine said.

“I wouldn’t let him loose on it,” said Yukio Brown. Yukio wore his dark hair in a modified Mohawk, and he had tattoos on both cheeks. The designs matched—two S-shaped squiggly lines on one side, and two inverted S-shaped squiggly lines on the other side—but Yukio said they signified nothing except his lame attempt to get his father’s attention. “He might instruct your guidance system to drive only on lawns.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Lantine said. “I never repeat myself.” “See why I don’t have a car?” Portia said. “These guys would just screw it up. Although that was kinda funny, watching you chase after your car as it dug ruts in all that nicely mowed grass.”

“It was not funny,” Brown said. “That old lady on Third made me pay to have the whole thing resodded.”

“Made me pay, you mean,” Lantine said.

“No,” Brown said. “I made you pay.”

“Enough, children,” Bradshaw said. “Leo wasted enough of our time being late. When this crisis is over, you can tell us all you want about your car wars. Until then, the stories get canned.”

Cross whistled. “You’re being tough, old man.”

“I’ve had to listen to them for a week, Leo.” Bradshaw looked aggravated, but his eyes were twinkling. “While you’ve been—what have you been doing since you got back?”

Cross came around the table. They had several screens set up, all with different views of the nanomachines. Many were models that were rotating. Some were changing as if they were going through a cycle.

“I’ve been visiting our friends at the Pentagon mostly,” Cross said, “trying to find out what the government’s doing with the other nanoharvesters. No one’ll tell me. Clarissa Maddox says that I’ll know when she knows.”

“But you’re the guide behind this thing,” Lantine said.

“I am not a specialist in nanotechnology,” Cross said, modifying his voice so that he sounded like Maddox. “Really, Dr. Cross. You can’t oversee everything.”

“Yes, Dr. Cross,” Bradshaw said, and then shook his head. “How do they expect anything to get done if they’re going to clamp down on the information flow?”

“They have to,” Cross said. “They don’t want it in the wrong hands.”

“Since when did you become the wrong hands?” Brown asked.

The room was silent for a moment. Cross felt his breath catch in his throat. He hadn’t thought of it that way.

“It’s the military way,” Bradshaw said. “One branch doesn’t tell the other branch what’s going on, not without a big conference about something or other.”

“It’s the government way,” Cross said, thinking about the stuff his friend Mickelson went through as secretary of state.

“I suppose ” Portia said. “But it seems weird to me. They don’t know we have these, do they?”

Cross shook his head.

“You expected this?” Lantine asked.

Cross’s smile was small. “No, I didn’t. But Maddox warned me. She didn’t have to. She could have ordered me to bring
everything to her after I’d arrived in D.C. But she told me before.”

“You think that was a warning?” Brown asked. “Sounds like that good old-fashioned oxymoron, military intelligence, to me.”

This time, Cross glared at him. “Clarissa Maddox is one of the smartest people I know. And she’s damn political. She doesn’t make a mistake like that. She let me know she was going to cut me out of the loop, it was part of her job, and she gave me a choice of going around her.”