“For the record, this was not really how I planned to get undressed with you,” Lowen said.
“Really,” Wilson said. “Because this was how I planned it all along.”
Lowen laughed a shaky, exhausted laugh. Wilson turned away, to let Lowen retain her modesty and so she couldn’t see the expression on his face as he tried to ping Hart Schmidt.
Earth Station gave a shudder, sirens went off and that was enough for Jastine Goeth, the Clarke’s shuttle pilot. “Buttoning up now,” she said, and sealed the door to the shuttle.
“I have two people left,” Abumwe said. “We wait for them.”
“We’re leaving,” Goeth said.
“I don’t think you heard me,” Abumwe said, using her coldest Don’t fuck with me voice.
“I heard you,” Goeth said, as she worked her departure sequence. “You want to wait? I’ll unseal the door for you for five seconds so you can get out. But I am going, Ambassador. This place is blowing up around us. I don’t plan to be here when it breaks apart. Now leave or shut up. You can string me up later, but right now this is my ship. Sit down and let me work.”
Abumwe stared at Goeth for several seconds in cold fury, which Goeth ignored. Then she turned, glared one of her staff out of a seat and sat.
Goeth pushed the “Emergency Purge” option on her control panel, which overrode the station’s standard purge cycle. There was a bang as the shuttle bay’s outside portal irised open with the bay’s atmosphere still inside, sucking out through the dilating door. Goeth didn’t wait for it to open all the way. She jammed the shuttle through, damaging the door as she went. She did not believe at this point that it would matter.
Schmidt saw the bulkheads go up, saw Harry yell something at him he couldn’t hear and then took off running again toward gate seven, which he could see at the far end of the section. Schmidt knew at this point that his time had likely expired, but he still had to get there to see for himself.
Which was how Schmidt saw the shuttle leave, through the wide window of the seating area just as he came up to the gate.
“So close,” Schmidt whispered, and could barely register the words over the screams of those trapped in the section with him. They were all going to die in here together.
He wished they wouldn’t be so loud about it.
Schmidt looked at the seating area, shrugged to himself and collapsed onto one of the benches, staring up at the ceiling of the gate area. He’d missed his ride by a matter of seconds. It was sort of appropriate, he supposed. At the end of the day, he was always a half a step behind.
Somewhere in the section, he could hear someone sobbing, loudly, terrified of the moment. Schmidt registered it but didn’t feel the emotion himself. If this was the end, it wasn’t the worst end he could imagine. He wasn’t scared about it. He just wished it weren’t so soon.
Schmidt’s PDA went off; the tone told him it was Wilson. The lucky bastard, Schmidt thought. He had no doubt that even now Harry was figuring out some way out of this. Schmidt loved his friend Harry, admired him and even looked up to him in his way. But right now, at what looked like the end of his days, he found the last thing he actually wanted to do was talk to him.
“Two new missiles launched,” Lao said. “They’re heading for our shuttle.”
“Of course they are,” Coloma said. Whoever was doing this wanted to make some sort of point about people leaving Earth Station.
Fortunately, Coloma didn’t have to stand for it.
She went to her personal display, marked the missiles heading toward the shuttle and marked the ship that had fired them. She pulled up a command panel on her display and pressed a button.
The missiles vaporized and the ship that launched them blossomed into flame.
“What was that?” Balla said.
“Neva, tell the shuttle pilot to go to Earth,” Coloma said. “These ships are firing Melierax missiles. They’re not rated for atmosphere. They’ll burn up. Get that shuttle as deep into the atmosphere as it can go, as fast as it can go.”
Balla passed on the order and then looked back at her captain.
“I told you the CDF was expecting one ship. So they gave me one of their new toys: a drone that fires a beam of antimatter particles. It’s been floating alongside the Clarke since yesterday. I think they wanted it to have a field test.”
“I think it works,” Balla said.
“The problem is that it has about six shots to it,” Coloma said. “I put a beam to each of the missiles and three beams into that ship. I’ve got another shot left, if I’m lucky. If there was just one ship out there, that wouldn’t be an issue. But there are fifteen others. And I’ve just made the Clarke a target.”
“What do you want to do?” Balla asked.
“I want you to get the crew to the escape pods,” Coloma said. “They’re not firing at us now because they’re still trying to figure out what just happened. That’s not going to last long. Get everyone off the ship before it happens.”
“And what are you going to do?” Balla asked.
“I’m going to go down with the ship,” Coloma said. “And if I’m lucky, I’m going to take some of them with me.”
VIII
The first volley of missiles aimed at Earth Station, six in all, destroyed the elevator car and irreparably damaged the beanstalk cable itself. The second volley of missiles, five times the number of the first, violently sheared Earth Station from the cable, severing the two just below their join.
The station and beanstalk were previously under the thrall of impressively high-order physics that kept them where they were supposed to be, at an altitude they should not have possibly been at, constructed in a manner that should not have sufficed. This physical legerdemain was powered literally by the earth itself, from a deep well of geothermal energy punched into the skin of the planet, which took extra effort to reach from Nairobi, situated more than a mile above sea level.
Without this nearly inexhaustible draw of power, the station reverted to life under conventional physics. This spelled doom for it, and for the beanstalk it fed on, a doom that was designed as minutely and purposefully as the station itself.
Its doom was designed to do two things. One, to protect the planet below (and, depending, space above) from falling chunks of a space station 1.8 kilometers in diameter, as well as several hundred kilometers of beanstalk. Two, to keep the secrets of the technology from falling into the hands of Earthlings. The two goals dovetailed into a single solution.
The beanstalk did not fall. It was designed not to fall. The energy formerly devoted to keeping it whole and structurally sound was rapidly and irrevocably committed to another task entirely: tearing it apart. Hundreds of kilometers above the surface of the planet, the strands of the beanstalk began to unwind at the molecular level, becoming minute particles of metallic dust. The waste heat generated expanded gases released by the process, puffing the dust into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Air patterns and turbulence in the lower reaches of the atmosphere did the same task farther down. The people of Nairobi looked up to see the beanstalk smearing itself into the sky, pushed by prevailing winds like charcoals rubbed by a frenetic artist.
It would take six hours for the beanstalk to evaporate. Its particulate matter treated East Africa to gorgeous sunsets for a week and the world to a year of temperatures one one-hundreth of degree Celsius cooler than they would have been otherwise.
Earth Station, damaged and cut away from its power source, began the process of killing itself in an organized fashion before its rotational energy could do it chaotically. Resigned as it was to its own death, the station powered up its emergency energy sources, which would keep the now sealed-off segments of the station warm and breathable for approximately two hours, more than enough time to get the remaining people on the station to the escape pods, which now showed themselves by way of pathed lighting and an automated voice system, directing the trapped and desperate to them. On the outside of the station, panels blew off, exposing the hulls of the escape pods to space, making it easy for them to launch once they were filled.