“Start the nanomachines working,” the pilot said, without turning to look at Zach.
“They are working.”
“Very well.”
“Shouldn’t we disconnect from the dock now?”
“No. Not yet.”
THE COLLAPSE
Zach thought it was a little weird to stay connected to the tower’s geostationary docking tunnel while the nanomachines were chewing away at the cables, but he figured the pilot knew what he was doing. The bugs won’t get the chance to damage the Clippership; we’ll disconnect before we’re in any danger, he was pretty certain.
Besides, these two black-goggled pilots aren’t going to kill themselves, Zach further assured himself. Not knowingly.
Outside the ship there was no sound. No vibration. Nothing.
For the first time, the pilot turned in his seat and lifted his glasses to glare directly at Zach. “Well? Have you done it?”
“Yeah,” Zach replied, feeling nettled. “It’s done. Now get us the hell out of here before the upper half of the tower starts spinning off to Alpha Centauri.”
“That won’t be necessary,” said the pilot.
In the geostationary operations center, Emerson felt a slight tremor, a barely sensed vibration, as if a subway train had passed below the floor he stood on.
“What was that?” he wondered aloud.
His assistant’s voice responded, “Yeah, I felt it too.”
Tremors and vibrations were not good. In all the hours he’d spent in the tower at its various levels, it had always been as solid and unmoving as a mountain. What the hell could cause it to shake?
“Whatever it was,” his assistant said, “it stopped.”
But Emerson was busy flicking his fingers along his keyboard, checking the safety program. No leaks, no loss of air pressure. Electrical systems in the green. Power systems functioning normally. Structural integrity—
His eyes goggled at the screen. Red lights cluttered the screen. Forty, no fifty of the one hundred and twenty main cables had been severed. For long moments he could not speak, could hardly breathe. His brain refused to function. Fifty cables. We’re going to die.
As he stared at the screen’s display, another cable tore loose. And another. He could fell the deck beneath his feet shuddering.
“Hey, what’s going on?” one of the technicians yelled from across the chamber.
“Let’s to it, pell mell,” Emerson whispered, more to himself than anyone who might hear him. “If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.”
Bracknell was standing by the ceiling-high window at the Quito airport terminal gate, waiting for the Clippership for Paris to begin boarding. It sat out on its blast-scarred concrete pad, a squat cone constructed of diamond panels, manufactured by lunar nanomachines at Selene. They can use nanomachines up there but we can’t here, Bracknell thought. Well, we’ve gotten around that stupid law. Once we get the patent—
A flash of light caught his eye. It was bright, brilliant even, but so quick that he wasn’t certain if he’d actually seen anything real. Like a bolt of lightning. It seemed to come from the skytower, standing straight and slim, rising from the mountains and through the white clouds that swept over their peaks.
Lara came up beside him, complaining, “They can fly from Quito to Paris in less than an hour, but it takes longer than that to board the Clipper.”
Bracknell smiled at her. “Patience is a virtue, as Rev. Danvers would say.”
“I don’t care. I’m getting—” Her words broke off. She was staring at the skytower. “Mance … look!”
He saw it, too. The tower was no longer a straight line bisecting the sky. It seemed to be rippling, like a rope that is flicked back and forth at one end.
His mind racing, Bracknell stared at the tower. It can’t fall! It can’t! But if it does…
He grabbed Lara around the shoulders and began running, dragging her, away from the big windows. “Get away from the windows!” he bellowed. “Quitarse las ventanas! Run! Vamos!”
“Nothing is happening,” said the pilot accusingly.
“Yes it is,” Zach answered. He was getting tired of the Asian’s stupidity. These guys are supposed to be patient; didn’t anybody ever give them Zen lessons? “Give it a few minutes. Those cables are popping, one by one. The more that snap, the faster the rest of ’em go.”
“I see nothing,” insisted the pilot, pointing toward the cockpit window.
Maybe if you took off those flicking glasses you could see better, creep, Zach grumbled silently. Aloud, he snapped, “You’re gonna see plenty in two-three minutes. Now get us the flick outta here or else we’re gonna go flipping out into deep space!”
“So you say.”
A blinding flash of light seared Zach’s eyes. He heard both pilots shriek. What the fuck was that? Zach wondered, pawing at his eyes. Through burning tears he saw the Clippership’s cockpit, blurred, darkened, everything tinged in red. Rubbing his eyes again Zach squinted down at his laptop. The screen was dark, dead.
Then he realized that both pilots were jabbering in their Asian language.
“What happened?” he screeched.
“Electrical discharge.” The pilot’s voice sounded edgy for the first time. “An enormous electrical discharge.”
“Even though we expected it,” said the copilot, “it was a helluva jolt.”
“Are we okay?” Zach demanded.
“Checking…”
“Get us out of here!” Zach screamed.
“All systems are down,” the copilot said. “Complete power failure.”
“Do something!”
“There is nothing to be done.”
“But we’ll die!”
“Of course.”
Zach began blubbering, babbling incoherently at these two lunatics.
Removing his glasses and rubbing at his burning eyes, the pilot turned to his copilot and said in Japanese, “The American genius doesn’t want to be a martyr.”
The copilot’s lean face was sheened with perspiration. “No one told him he would be.”
“Will that affect his next life, I wonder? Will he be reborn as another human being or something less? A cockroach, perhaps.”
“He doesn’t believe in reincarnation. He doesn’t believe in anything except destruction and his own ego.”
The pilot said, “In that case, he has succeeded admirably. He has destroyed his own ego.”
Neither man laughed. They sat strapped into their seats awaiting their fate with tense resignation while Zach screamed at them to no avail.
The massive electrical discharge released when some of the skytower’s insulating panels were eaten away completed the destruction of the connectors that held the tower’s two segments together at the geostationary level.
Although buckyball fibers are lighter in weight than any material that is even half their tensile strength, a structure of more than thirty-five thousand kilometers’ length weighs millions of metric tons.
The skytower wavered as it tore loose from the geostationary platform, disconnected from the centrifugal force that had pulled it taut. One end suddenly free of its mooring, its other end still tethered to the ground, the lower half of the tower staggered like a prizefighter suddenly struck by a knockout blow, then began its long, slow-motion catastrophic collapse.
The upper end of the tower, equally as long as the lower, was also suddenly released from the force that held it taut. It reacted to the inertia that made it spin around the Earth each twenty-four hours. It continued to spin, but now free of its anchor it swung slowly, inexorably, unstoppably, away from Earth and into the black silent depths of space.