Solar Express (4 page)

Was this repair necessary at this time? Would the client have even noticed the difference in signal strength?

Alayna did the math, then checked it. The disabled section of the antenna should only have resulted in a deterioration of less than half of one percent. For some observations, that would make a difference. She frowned.
Except Marcel reported it as five percent.

“Marcel? The amount of usable antenna lost to impact damage was less than one percent. Why did you report it as five percent?”

“The lost segment was eight tenths of one percent, but the signal loss was five point seven percent.”

“Why the difference?”

“Without an analysis of the damaged section, that is impossible to say.”

“Would the infiltration of Class II lunar dust have affected the signal transmission?”

“That is impossible to determine at this time.”

“I don't believe that. Isn't there any research on that?” Alayna recalled reading something, but not where.

“The electrostatic properties of regolith dust have been studied—”

“Cancel that. What I want to know is whether the triboelectric charging effect could create a field that would affect more than one antenna row.”

“There's no research on that, Dr. Wong-Grant.”

“Great. A wonderful topic for a scholarly paper … as if it would do me any good.” Alayna took a deep breath and began to compose a reply.

Dr. Wrae:

In regard to your inquiry about the impact on the client's data, according to system measurements taken by the AI, approximately one percent of the antenna array was nonfunctional, but the system status was only ninety-three percent after the impact. Once the repairs were accomplished, system status returned to ninety-nine percent. This suggests that electrostatic loading by the Class II regolith dust in the vicinity of the impact damage had an effect, although I could find no research either supporting or refuting that possibility. Because the measured loss was more than five percent, and because it appeared likely that I could complete the repairs before the beginning of Deep Listen, I went ahead with the repair procedures. Because of the unforeseen high concentration of Class II dust in the vicinity of the damaged section of the antenna, more extensive antistatic cleaning measures were necessary, which extended the repair time. For the record, the system records did not note that that section contained excessive fine dust levels. Under these circumstances, I made the judgment that immediate repairs were in the client's best interests.

What else could she say? After adding a few polite phrases expressing concern and appreciation for the inquiry, Alayna sent off her reply, again glad that she didn't have to explain verbally.

Then she went back to dealing with all the routine messages.

More than two hours after she'd reentered the COFAR control center, she finally opened the message from Chris, half guiltily.
But you deserve a few minutes for yourself.
She began to read, smiling as she did about his description of the bureaucrats.

He's actually thinking about where you are … or wanting you to think that he is.
She smiled ironically since, either way, it was thinking about her. Given how few bureaucrats traveled willingly to Luna, it was also likely that he was transporting the Noram Inspector-General team. Her eyes went back to the last lines.

 … I'd like your thoughts on what he has to say, especially the second paragraph on page 37 …

She smiled at the words that followed.
It's as if he knew what kind of day I was going to have.

When Alayna finished, she glanced at the attached book file, quickly opened it, and read the title—
Observations on Politics.
She frowned.
Why would he send me this? Except for internal Foundation politics, I could care less.
Still, she was intrigued enough to skip to page 37, where she read.

Good politicians understand one fundamental aspect of human nature—that the concern of most individuals attenuates on a geometric basis with the distance in time or space. That was the principal reason the successful development of space facilities exclusively by governments was initially limited. The costs were high and the benefits distant in both time and distance. Only the threat of monopolization of the power conveyed by the commencement of the Sinese space elevator, an installation created by a government with greater resistance to popular opinion, spurred the development and completion of the WestHem space elevator. Without either another threat or immense profits, further and more extensive space development, especially beyond the Martian colonies, is unlikely.

She frowned. She'd have to think about that. Idly she skipped through the pages, when a highlighted phrase—a title, really—caught her eyes.

Those to whom politics is music are most adept with the symbols.

With a smile at the words, one that quickly faded, Alayna read a few of the lines beneath.

In a sense, the “music” of politics reflects current culture, because it embodies the heavy use of symbols, i.e., coded language, and percussion, the continuing, not quite simplistic, heavy and repetitive beat designed to frame apparently new issues in terms of old memes …

If he reads this sort of thing, your burner-boy is deeper than you thought.
Except … he wasn't hers, and at three years older than she was, he was hardly a boy. She closed the message and shifted the letter and the book to her personal directory.

There's something else you need to do.
Abruptly she remembered. “Marcel, what about that anomaly in sector five? What can we report?”

“The anomaly has moved, but not enough to calculate either speed or projected path accurately. We're close enough to day that we won't get another observation until April twelfth.”

“Then we file a report, and someone else gets part of the credit.”
If they haven't already.
“Do the report and let me see it.”

“It's already done. It's in your pending file.”

Alayna called up the report, in standard format for the International Astronomical Union, and read through it. She had no corrections, not that she likely would have had, since Marcel had years of experience in drafting such reports, and all had been seen and corrected, if necessary, by others, likely with far more experience than Alayna had. Still … she wondered what the anomaly might be, although given the odds and how well the solar system had been mapped over the past century it was most likely a long-period comet.
And being a discoverer of a comet wouldn't hurt professionally … assuming no one else has reported it.
Even if Marcel was really the discoverer … and she was probably the tenth astronomer to report it.

“Go ahead and send it, with copies to Farside Operations.”

“Transmission is complete, Dr. Wong-Grant.”

She still had to clean the roller, and that needed to be done before the inspection team arrived.
You might as well get that done now.
The way things were going, who knew what might come up if she waited … and she still had to go over the briefing materials she'd barely skimmed … and get off a message to her father, something she'd put off too long, not that he sometimes wasn't exactly regular in messaging, but he regarded her reporting in as more necessary than his.

And, as had been the case, for most of the time she'd been at COFAR, so far, at least, her duties, her familiarization with the station, and more maintenance than she'd expected had left her far too little time to pursue her own research into the mysteries of the solar photosphere. But then, she'd been told that her research came behind everything else. She just hadn't realized how far behind that would be.

 

4

T
HE
N
EW
Y
ORK
T
IMES

26 M
ARCH
2114

[O
TTAWA
] “Throwing money into space makes no sense when the world's greatest city is drowning.” In the debate over the annual appropriations for the Department of Off-Earth Activities, Senator Riccardo Castenada (CP-NY) went on to attack the Yates Administration's request for supplemental finding for DOEA. “Far too many dollars go to the Space Service already. Many of those jobs could be more cost-effectively handled by private industry.” Castenada refused to comment on rumors that he had threatened to reveal classified DOEA material to the media if the Administration failed to provide additional disaster relief to New York City in the wake of the destruction caused by Hurricane Teresa.

Senator Tanya Patton (D-SASK) noted acerbically that Castenada had been the one leading the floor fight against funding for restoring New Orleans and who had created the coalition to block appropriations for the San Francisco Bay flood barriers and for disaster relief for Sacramento. Castenada did not reply.

In dismissing Castenada's charges, DOEA Secretary Karl Luvalle stated, “To turn the control over fusion-powered spacecraft to private industry, as the good senator proposes, would invite a return to the aircraft and missile terrorism of a century ago.” He went on to suggest that Castenada's views ignored the resurgence of the Sinese effort to mount manned explorations to the moons of Jupiter and well beyond.

There was also no comment from the EC, although Chancellor Rumikov had earlier declared that off-Earth activities would always require careful government oversight, given that excessive reliance on the goodwill of the private sector had been the principal cause of the economic implosion of the 2030s that led to the near-collapse of the United States and Mexico, and that had been so artfully ignored that the full collapse of 2081 had become inevitable. Rumikov has said often that “the Russian Federation avoided economic disasters by careful oversight.”

The Sinese Minister for Space declined direct comment, but an official of the Space Ministry is rumored to have previously observed that the Noram DOEA was the handmaiden of the ultra-military Space Service, and that the Space Service was tacitly supporting the Indian Dyaus project and had a hidden agenda. He did not describe that agenda, but sources suggest that he referred to Noram plans for the militarization of space. That charge has been repeatedly denied by both the Noram Secretary of Defense and by DOEA Secretary Luvalle.

An unnamed Indian government spokesperson again denied any coordination or collusion between the Indian Space Administration and the Noram DOEA.

President Yates's office issued a statement praising the Noram Senate for addressing funding issues in a timely and constructive manner.

 

5

ON
EILL
S
TATION

26 M
ARCH
2114

At 1513 UTC, Tavoian completed the post-loading check of the supplies for Low Lunar Orbit Station, some of which were for the station, and some of which were for transshipment elsewhere on Luna. The rear/lower passenger cabin was also loaded with supplies, as it often had been over the past four months, with fewer passengers heading to the Moon. He returned to the control deck, going hand over hand along the ladder between decks, easy enough in the null-grav of the station docking ring. Once there, he logged the completion of the inspection, then began the preboarding checklist, taking his time. He finished at 1542 UTC and put the ship's power and nav systems on locked standby.

Because he had a few minutes before his passengers arrived, he called up the last message Alayna had sent—he'd saved them all in his private files, something he wasn't about to tell Keiser or any of the other pilots—and began to reread it.

He hadn't even gotten through the first paragraph when the comm buzzed.

“FusEx three, Ops Control. You're down to three passengers. The two from OutSpace canceled.”

“OpsCon, understand cancellation of two passengers. Interrogative cause of cancellation?”

“Three, log it as operational necessity. They departed on FusEx four alpha.”

“Interrogative delay in notification.”

“Unable to reply. That is all, three.”

Tavoian frowned. By all rights OpsCon wasn't required to tell a pilot the reason for a cancellation, especially that a pair of LLO-bound passengers had shifted to a burner bound for Phobos earlier in the day. Keiser's burner, no less. Why would a commercial outfit shift a team from lunar assignment … with the penalties involved?
Unless they'd never intended to go to Luna.
But that was an astronomical price, literally, to pay in order to keep their eventual destination hidden. Or had their assignments been changed? OutSpace was a Sinese-controlled multinational, and that meant their scientists and professionals did exactly what the government wanted.

He made the log entries and was still mulling over the oddity when the lock alert chimed, notifying him that his passengers were ready to board. He closed the message he hadn't reread, then ran over the passengers' names in his mind—Antoine Deveau, Geoffrey Hart, and Dominique Perez—names suggesting political compromise more than technical expertise, but then, Noram was more than large enough to accommodate both needs, Tavoian suspected as he made his way aft to the forward/top passenger deck, where he checked the pressures, and then unlocked the outer hatch, opening it to the umbilical. Once the monitors showed that the three and their gear—a small kit bag each—were in the lock, he used the manual stud to close the outer hatch, making sure it was sealed before opening the inner lock.

He waited until the three were all inside the upper passenger deck before closing the inner lock and surveying them. Deveau was the tallest and broadest, perhaps in his early forties, swarthy with receding black hair. For all of her Latino heritage, Perez was almost as tall as Deveau, and trimly muscular, with blue-back hair and a slightly olive complexion. Hart was a good five centimeters shorter than Perez, with the odd combination of thick, coarse, and short-cropped blond hair, a thin face, and fine features. All three wore dark blue shipsuits without insignia.