Stormhaven Rising (Atlas and the Winds Book 1) (13 page)

“Sorry,” he said, snapping to a sitting position. “I was just thinking.”

“Right.” Cole grinned. “Of course that doesn’t explain the snoring sound they picked up on the seismometers in the geology lab."

There was a cup of coffee and a plate of chocolate chip cookies sitting on the desk beside him. “When you missed lunch I figured I’d track you down,” Cole said.

“I wish you’d brought me into the loop sooner,” Tom said, stretching.

“The loop’s tightened up all on its own,” Cole said.

“Do you know how hard it’s going to be to get a license to launch? As long as we stay below 300,000 feet we’re ok, but the moon’s a hell of a lot farther than that.”

“Yeah, it is, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let paperwork stop us,” Cole said, sitting down and scratching his beard. “We won’t survive if they try to keep us in this box.”

“We’ve got almost two years where we have to stay within the lines,” Tom said. “We can’t play like there’s no tomorrow.”

“Have you thought about basing us somewhere else? Like getting a Liberian ship registration,” Cole asked.

“Yeah, but that’s no good either.” Tom said, tapping his desktop screen. “Access to space is controlled exclusively by the big governments. They muscled everybody into signing the Comprehensive Space Treaty. There’s nobody
anywhere
that we could use to get around it."

“What about one of the semi-autonomous nations?” Cole asked. “Like the Hopi, or the Navajo?”

Tom shook his head. “That’s been tried before too. A company out of Canada got the Inuit to front them a license, but the US threatened to pull a massive technology trade deal and Canada stomped the company out of existence."

“So we do it without permission,” he said finally. “Didn’t you once tell me that it’s always easier to apologize, than to get permission?”

Tom closed his eyes, feeling the dryness under his lids like sandpaper. “For Christ sake Cole, that wasn’t legal advice. What the hell are you thinking?”

“Just what I said,” Cole said, the lights in his eyes dancing as an idea gained momentum in his brain.

“They’ll shut us down before we could do it,” Tom said. “How do you intend to keep them from hauling us off to jail?”

“We’ll build a bomb,” Cole said. “That’ll keep them off our butts.”

“A what?” Tom asked, shock cutting through his frustration with Cole.

“You know this situation’s got Homeland Security shoveling shit they’ve never had to face,” he said. “That’s got to be knocking them off center. I’m sure they don’t even know which way to shove things to get them out of the way.”

“Maybe,” Tom said, wondering if Cole would make more sense to him if he wasn’t exhausted. “But you can’t really mean blowing something up?”

Cole grinned again. “Just their reality."

“I’m lost,” Tom said, closing his eyes and then snapping them open as sleep threatened to suck him under again.

“Hopefully they will be too,” Cole said, springing up to head for the door. “We just need to keep it that way.” He paused and spun around, another answer clearly exploding into his brain.

“I need you to write a press release announcing that we're going to launch,” Cole said. “We’ve got to turn this into a circus."

“Why?” Tom asked.

“Witnesses. We need lots of witnesses,” Cole said.

***

Washington:

“Yes, I understand Ambassador Kozin is a busy woman,” John Herman said, “I’ve been leaving her messages all afternoon.” His voice showed none of the frustration he felt. He was too good a diplomat to let some underling get the best of him.

“Perhaps I could help you with something?” the deputy said, his expression showing no real desire to help the Secretary. His face might as well have been a digital avatar for all that it showed sincerity.

“You could tell me where she is, and how I could reach her,” Secretary Herman said. “This is an urgent matter.”

“I assure you, the Ambassador is aware of your earlier messages, Mr. Secretary,” the deputy said, tapping something into his keyboard as he spoke. “I am sure she will get back to you at her earliest convenience.”

“Convenience?” John said. “Maybe you misunderstood me. I need to talk to Ambassador Kozin immediately.”

“If you wish to discuss it with me —“

“I will not discuss this with you or anyone else,” John said. “Tell the Ambassador I’ll be waiting in my office until she calls.” He slapped his hand down on the disconnect button and shoved himself back from his desk. “America is not a second rate country, and I’ll be damned if I’ll be treated like it is."

“Amanda?” he raised his voice as he walked over to the liquor cabinet.

“Yes sir,” his secretary said, popping her head through the door.

“Go on home,” he said, glancing at her as he poured himself a tall scotch. “I’ve got to stay until the Princess of Russia calls me back.” He rarely let his frustrations show, but right now the Russian Ambassador had managed to become his number one source.

“I can stay,” Amanda offered.

“It’s ok,” he said, gulping down the first half of his drink in a single swallow. The burning in his stomach from the alcohol masking a bit of the burning of his anger. “I need to be here if she does call, but you can get someone from the pool to man the front office.”

“I did finally locate the Chinese Ambassador,” she said. “He’s in Beijing for the week but I was told that he will call after he gets back."

“That figures,” he said, topping off his glass with another shot of scotch. “But you scoot and I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Yes sir,” she said, closing the door before he could change his mind.

He walked over to his desk and sat the glass down carefully. “Maybe we really are a declining empire,” he sighed. “Nobody takes us seriously anymore.”

He glanced at his email screen and saw a message from Steve Axelrod at the Damascus Conference blinking in his inbox.
It was supposed to be MY conference. MY moment.

He shook his head and opened the file. Nothing but bad news.

***

Chapter Eight:

Dancing in Pandora’s Box

Cape Canaveral, Florida:

Joshua Lange glanced at Carter Anthony, who hung against the wall staring out the windows at the cloudless sky. The storm had never materialized.

The Director didn’t know what to make of the astronomer, mostly because they’d had no time to talk. He’d read the dossier that the DHS had dropped on his desk last night, but there was nothing in it that would have raised an eyebrow. The astronomer had been overpaid in the private sector and was sure to be upset when he got his first paycheck from NASA, but it probably wouldn’t matter in the long run.

Right now, even without knowing the man, it was obvious that Dr. Anthony wanted to choke several of the engineers seated around the conference table.

Lange had quit trying to persuade them to throw everything they knew out the window. Ultimately, it needed to be done and it was as simple as that. So he sat listening to them re-explain the reasons they could never push a shuttle launch up by three weeks.

Secretary Anderson had insisted that the engineering staff were not
need-to-know
but if he could just explain why, he knew they’d figure out how to do it. “The orders have to stand,” Lange said. “I can’t do anything to change it."

He stood up, walking to the podium to look at the flight procedure manual that had been placed there by one of the engineers. Thumbing through its thousands of pages he shook his head. “We’ve got to get outside the box and somehow get the
Liberty
off the ground in seven days. Cut everything that’s redundant. Skip anything that you can.” He pitched the book to the middle of the table. “I don’t care how much you’ve got your careers built on particular components or procedures, that shuttle has to be lit up on time."

“It’s not going to happen,” Patrick Archer, Chief Flight Programmer said, slamming his hand on the table. “Maybe you don’t get it, but even if we had everything ready to code, the computers couldn’t get it processed in time. We don’t have the hardware to crunch the numbers.” He stood up, grabbing the book off the table, flipping through it quickly before he shoved it at the Director. “See that page? That single step represents 800 hours of processor time. We’re not talking manhours. Electrons only move so fast through the hardware. It’s nuts and bolts physics.”

Joshua looked at it for a couple seconds. Glancing over, he saw that Carter had punched in his headset and was talking to someone. “Yeah I understand,” Lange said. His tone added fuel to the man’s anger. “What you don’t see is that we will get whatever it takes to get the job done.” He leaned on the table with his hands on both sides of the book. “What would it take?”

“A Goddamn miracle!” Archer spun away and stormed over to the window beside Carter, his face bright red. “We’d need a Generation Six supercomputer, but even that might not do it.”

“Will you need a coder, or do you have your own ADA2 people?” Carter asked, covering the mic on his headset. Joshua almost laughed. “Secretary Reynolds wants to know where you want it delivered and whether tomorrow will be soon enough."

“See what I’m saying?” Lange said, without missing a beat. “If we need something, we’ll get it.” The stunned faces around the table were comical, but no one made a sound.

“Tell him I’ll get back to him in a few minutes,” Joshua said.

“Stand by Mr. Secretary, we’re working out the details,” Carter said, into his headset.

“I think it’s shitty that Washington won’t let me explain why, but we’ve got all the horsepower we’ve ever wished for so let’s put it to good use."

Joshua sat down and slid the manual toward the engineer sitting beside him. “I recommend you start by getting the
Liberty
unloaded from the carrier and strip the bay. The Air Force will be delivering their cargo in the next day or so and you’ll need to have her ready to load.”

He held his hands up to stave off the next round of protest. “Since we’ve already wasted too damn much time arguing, and I can’t do anything about it, I think you need to get on it. This meeting is over."

After the room was empty Joshua stared at Don Cramer, the one man who’d remained silent throughout the meeting, and the only one that had the authority to call Joshua to task. Under ordinary circumstances.

Don was the type who spoke quietly, and almost never in a large group. He was also the one person that no one dared ignore. He was the Flight Safety Officer. It was his job to pull the plug if something didn’t look right.

Joshua had expected to see Don after the meeting, “Ok, it’s your turn. I suppose you’re going to tell me it’s impossible too.”

“Nope. That’s their job. I’m supposed to tell you it’s dangerous.” He sat back, rocking in his chair. “Let me ask you, is it worth the risk?”

Joshua leaned forward on his arms. “If it weren’t, I’d have told them to go fuck themselves, but we don’t have any choice.”

“There are always choices, Joshua,” the older man said, “it’s just sometimes we can’t accept the cost involved. Astronauts know there are risks in space flight. You know it’s part of the job. Every time we light one up and it kicks them in the ass, they get a visceral reminder. But these engineers don’t live in that reality. To them it’s an abstract mathematical universe, where risk is a variable to be constrained. Their job is to eliminate it from the equation.”

He sipped his cup of coffee. “What you’re doing, is forcing them to stare at the terrifying possibility that any miscalculation can send a crew to their death. You make it real to them.”

“I understand that Don, but they’re professionals—“

“Professionals be damned!” he said, cutting Joshua off with an unexpected surge of anger. “That means they get paid to do a job, nothing more. What they really are is a bunch of scared kids being handed a big gun and told not to accidentally kill somebody!"

Don shook his head. “If you need me to sign off on it I will, but remember, if it goes bust, it’ll be the end of those kids.” Standing up, he started for the door.

“Wait a minute, Don.” The Flight Safety Officer stopped, but didn’t turn. “You and I have a lot of miles together. You signed off on every one of my flights. Out of everybody here, you’re the only one I can count on.” The older man stood there but still didn’t turn.

“I’ll get my ass busted for this,” Joshua glanced at Carter who nodded, “but you need to know what’s coming.” He pulled a copy of the data file out of his shirt pocket and flipped it across the table. “Look that over and then let’s talk."

Don picked up the microdisk and walked out without comment.

Glancing at the door, Joshua asked, “Did you really get us a Gensix?”

“Not yet,” Carter admitted, “but it worked to get them moving, and it gives us most of the day to figure out how to get one."

***

Washington: