The Next Continent (44 page)

THE TAXI PULLED
into the graveled driveway of the mansion on the shore of Lake Makino and stopped at the entrance. Tae was waiting, wearing a beret and lugging a suitcase almost larger than she was. She maneuvered it into the backseat and was about to get in when a voice called to her.

“Where do you suppose you're going?”

Kiichiro was standing at the columned entrance to the Toenji mansion. This place, and her father, had never felt as if they belonged to her. But she turned to look at him, almost against her will.

“Are you going to stop me?”

“Do you want to be stopped?”

“Why are you always like this?”

“I'm just trying to respect your wishes.”

“How kind. Have you turned over a new leaf?” She stared daggers at him. “I'm not your toy. And neither was Mother.”

“That was an accident. How many times do we have to drag that swamp?”

“We don't. I've heard enough.” She raised her hand in farewell.

“Wait!” Kiichiro stepped toward her. “Sixth Continent will fail.”

“You mean you'll make it fail. I was impressed. You not only paid off the board, you created an ‘independent' group to harass us. A textbook example of a conspiracy. You taught me something new.”

“The board backed me 100 percent! Everyone in the company—”

“What about Reika? She quit, didn't she? Do you know where she is? Tanegashima. If everyone had her guts, ELE would be deserted.”

“The threat from debris is real. It killed a man.”

“I know what he would say if he were alive. Challenges are something to face, not run away from. And TGT has the solution.”

“You actually think they can neutralize the danger? Do you have the funds for that?”

“It doesn't concern you.”

“Tae—”

“Don't talk to me.” She looked at him icily. “You never even met him. Now he's dead, and you're using him to further your agenda. It's disgusting. I have nothing left to say to you.”

“Tae!”

“Goodbye.” She got into the taxi. The car drove slowly through the gates.

Kiichiro slammed his fist into a column. In the taxi, Tae's face was buried in her hands. Her beret had fallen to the floor.

[4]

EDEN CRATER, THE
lunar south pole. White multidozers shuttled back and forth under the sun, fulfilling their tasks. Several hundred meters away, in the darkness of a smaller crater, the only source of heat was a single linear motor.

The Turtle squatting here was different from its compatriots. It bore a machine, a powerful computing unit in a shielded oblong container, topped by a fifteen-meter parabolic antenna that scanned the heavens with exquisite deliberation.

Something had drawn the machine's attention. The antenna was motionless now, pointing toward a distant star. A signal, an anomalous stream of energy emerging from the cosmic background, had stirred the machine's circuits into activity.

Wavelength: sixty megahertz. Flux density: fifty millijanskys. No antenna on Earth could have caught this whisper from space. The atmosphere would have masked it.

The machine began running a transform analysis. The signal might be something unremarkable: perhaps the radiation signature of a stream of hot gas, accreting from one star to another in a distant binary system. The machine searched for matches between the signal and known natural sources. It found none.

Could the signal be intelligent, from beyond the solar system?

The machine was inorganic, free of preconceptions. Without a tremor of anticipation or interest, it initiated its verification subroutine.

If the signal were intelligent, its maker would want someone to notice; it should persist long enough to reliably detect and interpret. But five minutes later, it disappeared. The diagnostic software could discern no pattern in that strange signature.

The machine consigned its findings to the database. The parabolic antenna resumed its slow revolving scan.

Forty minutes later, another signal flashed from Eden Crater toward the star. The machine did not detect it. Its antenna was pointed skyward.

CHAPTER 7

SECOND ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT AND NEW CONSTRUCTION PLAN

[1]

THE DESCENT MODULE'S
engine was small but innovative, capable of fifteen successive ignitions without reconditioning. On November 24, 2032, it fired once to leave lunar orbit and once more to touch down outside Eden Crater.

The square hatch of the core module opened forty minutes later. A figure in a sleek green space suit with a compact life-support backpack emerged from the cone and cautiously climbed down a ladder to the surface. His left foot touched the hard-packed surface first, followed by his right. He released the ladder and slowly turned to survey his surroundings.

Ten long shadows—six multidozers, two moon rovers, and a pair of carpenter robots—stretched from both sides of the graded road surface that even now was being extended from the landing site. In the distance, to his right, was a glistening array of solar panels. In the opposite direction lay the regolith-shrouded bulk of Xiwangmu 6.

These were the first sights that met thirty-one-year-old Sohya Aomine's excited gaze on this, his second trip to the moon.

He looked down. The landing pad was an immaculately packed disk of black regolith, like a freshly scrubbed stone porch. His insulated boots left no impression.

“What a beautiful welcome.” Those were his first words.

One by one, three more space-suited figures clambered down to the surface—Yamagiwa and two Gotoba engineers. Six months had elapsed since
Apple 7
's tragic mission. Sixth Continent was a year behind schedule. Now, at last, they were here.

“The contrast between light and shadow is unbelievable,” said Yamagiwa. First words, but not for the history books. It wasn't that they were indifferent to the historic nature of their mission—they simply didn't much want to be noticed. In fact, they had done everything they could to stay inconspicuous. The main focus of Sixth Continent's publicity was another mission taking place at this same moment. That was the mission Tae had chosen.

“Do you wish she were here too, Sohya?” Yamagiwa put his hand on Sohya's shoulder.

He shook his head inside his Manna suit. “It was her decision. Her mission has a higher profile. At least we hope it does.”

“This mission is at least as important.”

“Technically, sure, but…” Sohya looked at the descent stack. Their first landing was a major step forward; there was no doubt about that. Instead of a standard hydrazine-fueled engine, they would be using LOX and hydrogen extracted on the surface to return to orbit, something never attempted and, indeed, impossible till now. The new descent engine was temperamental but had a longer operating life. If everything went well, they would travel back and forth between lunar orbit and the surface without ever depending on Earth for fuel again.

“All this new technology is not of much interest to our customers,” said Sohya. “No one cares what the bus they're on is using for fuel.”

“I'd stick to the science and let Marketing do their job.”

“Just remember, if they don't come, Gotoba and TGT go down together. We don't have the kind of financial backing we used to.”

Having completed his walk-around check of the descent stack, one of the engineers joined them. “Not only that, but our costs keep going up, thanks to that stuff.” He pointed toward Earth, or rather, to the space around Earth. Yamagiwa shook his head.

“Phase E is a service to humanity. If the mission goes well, we should be seeing contributions from space agencies around the world.”

“I think you're being optimistic,” said Sohya.

“Let's quit jawing and get to work.” Yamagiwa clapped his gloved hands and frowned when he realized they made no sound. “First we have to get Xiwangmu's environmental control system booted up. Multidozer repair, regolith decontamination, fuel synthesis—we've got a mountain of work to get through.”

“I'm going for a drive first,” said Sohya.

“You're kidding. You're not setting a very good example for the rest of us, Mr. Site Supervisor.” Yamagiwa was about to say more when he noticed the direction of Sohya's gaze.

“I want to pay my respects.” He was looking up at a tiny, glinting point of light atop the crater rim, which was the height of a low range of hills. “You go ahead. I'm going to leave some flowers and a picture of his parents.”

Sohya climbed back into the core. When he returned with a small package, Yamagiwa was checking over one of the rovers. He got in and patted the passenger seat.

“Come on, let's get moving.”

“You're going to drive me there?”

“This is what I do. We have to test this thing, you know.”

Yamagiwa stared straight ahead, as if impatient to start right away. He would stay on the surface with the first team as another cost-cutting measure to keep the number of Eve launches to a minimum. He was eager to prove he could be just as useful on the ground as in space. With an extra team member, work would proceed more quickly, but one of the four crew members would have to spend his sleep periods in the core module.

“All right. Drive carefully.”

“Roger that.” Yamagiwa nodded and pushed the starter switch.

The rover sprang forward.

APPLE 10
was in low earth orbit, crossing over the Horn of Africa.

“I have a visual fix. Standard Object 38124. Type: spherical, attached valve. Metal finish. Looks like a thruster pod. Object is within size limits.”

“Orbital analysis complete. Puffball is in range.”

“Proceed,” said Tae.

The image on the monitor, magnified by a zoom lens, showed a gigantic spherical object lit ash blue by earthlight. The sphere jogged into its new path with a nimbleness that belied its size. A few minutes later, light gleamed briefly at the edge of the sphere and a cone of fire seemed to pierce its semitransparent interior. An instant later the light winked out.

The navigator scanned his array of monitors. “Fragmentation complete. Vaporization 2 percent. Maximum fragment axis, eight millimeters. Good job.”

“That makes twenty. How much fuel do we have?” asked Tae.

“Forty-two percent. Maybe ten more objects.”

“Then let's go to the next probable orbit.”

“Roger. That's three and a half orbits from now, five hours and fifteen minutes.” The three crew members relaxed and floated upward from their flight couches.

Apple 10
's mission, one of a series planned for Phase E(xtra), was a process of patiently eliminating one piece of space junk after another. The core module, equipped with a sensitive video camera and image processing system, was orbiting near the “puffball,” a huge sphere designed to break space debris into harmless fragments. From a distance, it looked like a two-hundred-meter sphere of steel wool. A closer look would have revealed multiple vortices of fine wire twisted into larger strands like lily yarn. Each strand was perforated with one-centimeter holes.

The puffball's perforated strands wound from the surface toward the core in a uniform, weblike spiral. At the center of the puffball was a propulsion module with six-axis thrusters. The thruster exhaust gas flowed out through the web into space.

The puffball's unique feature was the nested arrangement of its strands. The entire sphere could be compressed to a diameter of five meters and carried inside the payload shroud of an Adam rocket. Its mass was exactly one hundred tons, Adam's maximum lift capacity. Once in orbit, the shroud was jettisoned, and the puffball elastically expanded to two hundred meters.

TGT's strategy was based on careful planning. Flying along in a spacecraft and simply scooping up the debris would seem to be the most straightforward approach, but this was quickly shot down. To creep up on each piece of debris would call for precise synchronization of relative orbital speed. The huge amount of fuel that would consume made this approach unworkable.

The solution was to ignore relative speed and rely on position and timing. This meant the debris would be approaching with a relative velocity of several kilometers per second—not something to stop with a rubber bumper. At that velocity, whatever intercepted the debris would also be destroyed. Materials like aluminum, advanced ceramics, or Kevlar wouldn't stand a chance. The awesome kinetic energy would be instantaneously converted to heat. Beyond a given impactor size, no obstacle could stand up to that kind of blowtorch. Anything in the way would be vaporized or blown apart.

Anything massive enough to withstand such impacts would be too heavy to loft into orbit, yet the interceptor could not be too small either. If they miscalculated and the backstop wasn't tough enough, the resulting breakup would simply create more orbiting junk.

TGT's answer was a three-dimensional woven structure known as the puffball. Its steel strands were not designed to cushion the shock of impact; space debris would penetrate faster than any network of strands could respond by deforming. Instead, the debris vaporized the strands and broke apart as its kinetic energy was rapidly converted to intense heat. The plasma jet would punch a tunnel through the strands, but the puffball would stay intact. After penetrating a few tens of meters, the debris would either be vaporized or reduced to trapped fragments. The only fragments able to escape would be under a centimeter in size, including shattered strands, and would pose relatively little risk to spacecraft.