As he was shoved into position at the table, Patrick leaned forward. “Jerzy, you shouldn’t be here. The doctors insisted you stay in the hospital.”
“Fooey. I wouldn’t-” Jerzy broke up in coughing that jerked his body, and Holle could see the pain every movement caused him. The paramedic hovered with an oxygen mask, but Jerzy shook his head minutely, and she backed away. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” Jerzy looked around, his one good eye glinting. He found Holle. “How’s my boy? They haven’t let him see me.”
“We thought that was for the best,” Magnus Howe said.
Jerzy snapped, “I asked Miss Groundwater.”
“Zane’s fine,” Holle said. “But-” She thought of Zane as he’d been in the hours since the accident, Zane who’d hardly spoken a word to anybody, Zane who seemed to cling to corners, to shadows, Zane pushed in on himself. She said at last, “He’s working. His work is good.”
“Ah. That’s all one can ask, isn’t it? Tell him I’ll see him as soon as I can.”
“I will.”
“So we’re all here,” said Gordo Alonzo, rapping on the tabletop with a fat, old-fashioned fountain pen. Holle wondered vaguely where he got the ink. “I have to face President Vasquez herself later today, and make my recommendations about the future of Project Nimrod. I suspect that in my heart of hearts I’d rather just can this bull session right now, and go do something more productive. Because, you know why? I think I already know what recommendation I’m going to make, no matter what is said today. That we pull the plug on this whole fucking shambles.”
“You don’t have the authority for that,” Patrick said heatedly. “In terms of the command and reporting structure-”
Gordo laughed. “Don’t you guys get it? Command structure! At this minute that’s me, pal. When your magnetic bottle went pop it took everything else down with it.”
Kenzie said, “There’s also the issue of hope, Colonel Alonzo. Of purpose. What would you have the administration do instead? Give the Homeland goons bigger sticks with which to beat back the refugees?”
Gordo said, “The sea is going to cover over us all in a few years or less whatever we do, buddy. I’m not sure if to give false hope is a worse sin than to give no hope at all.” He turned to his charts and boards. “Let’s get back to basics. Tell me how you think you’re going to fly this dumbass mission in the year 2040. Which, let me remind you, is just four years from now.” He stared around. “Who wants to lead off?”
Edward Kenzie spoke up again. “The basics are simple. We need to assemble a starship, with a crew of no less than eighty, in orbit.” He got up stiffly. With age he was getting ever stouter, and according to Kelly he suffered badly from gout. He went to a flipchart and turned pages until he came to a construction schedule. “From scratch, we built a space launch center at Gunnison, Colorado.” He tapped the whiteboard, and up came an image: a single launch gantry, blockhouses around it, mountains in the distance. He sat heavily in an empty seat by the board. “Intended to fly Ares I and V booster stacks, the launch technology designed to take humans back to the moon and to Mars, which of course never happened. We had to procure transport facilities. Fuel manufacture and storage-”
“Yadda yadda,” said Gordo. “You flew one bird out of there so far, didn’t you? One stick, one Ares I, unmanned, to orbit. How many launches you think you’re going to need to assemble your ‘starship in orbit’?”
Liu Zheng answered that. He tapped a touch pad, and the whiteboard lit up with graphics. “Fifteen launches, sir. Five of the heavy-lift Saturn V-class Ares V, unmanned, and ten of the human-rated Ares I sticks, each carrying eight or ten crew. The plan so far has been to reinhabit the abandoned ISS, the space station, and use that as a construction shack to-”
Gordo waved him silent. “Your deadline for completion of on-orbit assembly is still 2040. Right? You’ve managed one launch in the last four years. You imagine you’ll get through fifteen in the next four. Fifteen launches, and that’s without tests and failures, and you haven’t flown a single Ares V out of Gunnison yet. And you’re going to reoccupy the ISS, a station which has been mothballed for sixteen years. My God, at NASA we’d have looked at that alone as an activity that would likely take teams of trained astronauts years. It’s down here as a milestone on your chart-no resources assigned to it-nothing. Who’s gonna do that, the tooth fairy?”
Patrick steepled his fingers. “We’re at a point at which our schedule is expected to accelerate, as significant mission milestones-”
“Bull,” said Gordo simply. “This ain’t the first fucked-up project I’ve been involved with, Mr. Groundwater, and I recognize all the symptoms, and I heard it all before. We screwed up, we missed all the milestones so far, but the future is bright! And you’ll notice I haven’t yet come to the issue of antimatter production. Remind me. How much antimatter are you going to need for your starship?”
Liu Zheng said, “We believe half a kilogram. That may not sound much but such is the energy density of the-”
“Yes, yes. Let’s take a look at your production facility.” Gordo tapped the chart, and brought up live images of the ongoing disaster in the Denver suburb of Byers. The accelerator site was a crater from which protruded odd bits of wall or the skeletal tangle of reinforcing steel cables. Smoke snaked up from a dozen fires, and rescue workers crawled in their bright orange gear through mounds of rubble. In one place a refugee camp had been destroyed, canvas tents blown flat. On the fringe of the disaster zone, ragged protesters faced a line of cops and soldiers and Homeland goons.
“There’s your antimatter factory,” Gordo said. “A hole in the ground, which it would have been a lot cheaper to produce by dropping a fucking nuke. Let me tell you something. No matter what else comes out of this disaster, I don’t believe it’s going to be acceptable to President Vasquez to go back to manufacturing this stuff in the middle of Colorado.”
“Then we’re screwed,” said Jerzy Glemp, his damaged body twitching under his blanket. “Screwed. The whole point of the design is the warp bubble, Colonel. We can’t fly without that. And we can’t create a warp bubble without antimatter.”
“I’m aware of that,” Gordo snapped. “And I’m also aware of the short-cuts you took to get your precious atom-smasher up and running, Dr. Glemp.”
Glemp grew more agitated. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Like hell you don’t. I’ve seen the documentation trail. The asscoverers in your organization kept a record of every time you leaned on them to cut a test, disregard a safety precaution, push a design without a backup. If this was a court of law I’d have a case to prosecute you.”
“It is rich for you to berate us for schedule delays then accuse me of negligence for my attempts to meet targets.”
“It was always out of your reach,” Gordo said. “This dream of star flight. That’s the truth, isn’t it, Dr. Glemp? You always saw that more clearly than these others, and yet you pushed ahead anyhow, as far and as fast as you could, regardless of the risks-”
Edward Kenzie stood up again. “Colonel, it’s four years since President Vasquez made her Nimrod speech, her Kennedy moment. You were involved then, and you’re sure as hell involved now. But none of the problems we’ve faced since have anything to do with you-is that what you’re telling us?” He pointed a fat finger at Gordo. “Is that the game, Colonel? Blame?”
Jerzy struggled. “I want to say-oh, let me speak-” His voice broke up into a coughing jag that left him shaking.
Edward tried to speak again, and Patrick, and others joined in, and Gordo tried to shout them down. It was a room full of old people shouting at each other.
Holle tuned out. She felt stunned, emptied out. She hadn’t suspected that the project was so far behind schedule, or that such risks were being taken to accelerate it. And all for me.