22 Thirty-Four Hours
Geneva · Monday, 27 September – Monday, 13 December 2032.
Ada called on the Monday, thirteen days after the town, at ten at night Geneva time. She had the television on behind her, and Dana could hear an anchor reading names. They were up to the Ms.
“Did you know?”
“I sent the notice on the fifth of August.”
“I know about the notice. Everybody knows about the notice. They had the county woman on, the one who wouldn’t stand down.” The anchor dropped to a murmur; Ada had found the remote. “I’m asking if you knew. Not guessed. Knew.”
Dana was at the kitchen table with Priya’s sheet open, and nothing on it helped. She had known on 10 September, in Joan Tierney’s office. None of that was Dana’s to tell. The part that was hers made no sense out loud.
“I knew where it would come down,” she said. “In August. Anyone who read the notice knew.”
“And Albany said it was a tracking error.”
“Albany was wrong.”
“Albany was lying. Was there something in that building, Dana?”
“I can’t talk about the building.”
“You can’t.” Ada let that sit long enough for Dana to hear the names again. “So there was. And they knew, and they told those people it was a mistake, and they let it happen. Because it’s useful. Now everybody’s scared enough to sign whatever’s next.”
“Nobody needed it to happen.”
“You’d say that. You’d have to.” Ada’s voice had gone flat. “Don’t call me for a while.”
The council argued the fleet into being across five sessions in November, in the big room on the Route de Ferney with the blinds down against the low sun.
By the second session it had a name, TIDE, and a number nobody liked: several hundred armed vehicles, launched from mid-2033, flown out to L5 to break Anvil apart. The general wanted warheads on a third of them and said so in the first ten minutes.
“Kinetic is a theory,” he said. “We have watched it eat kinetic. Two kilometers of iron does not care about a few tons arriving fast. It cares about a megaton.”
The chair asked Dana what the vehicles would need. She gave it in a minute: a transfer of months, an arrival from behind and below, and at L5 a light delay of 8.3 minutes each way. Nothing on the ground could steer the last approach. The vehicles would fly themselves.
“And last time,” the man with the legal pad said, “it took the guidance away. Nine minutes.”
“It took the relay the guidance ran through,” Dana said. “Plan on it removing whatever makes the attack work. If the vehicles need anything from us at the end, assume they won’t get it.”
Who built was the long fight. The Americans would build the buses; the Russians would integrate their own warheads and let nobody else touch them; China would launch its own share and report its numbers, and the Chinese delegation, writing with fountain pens, agreed to that and to nothing further. The American head of delegation put the pinch points on the screen: launch cadence and warhead integration. Cadence was the part he was proud of. Boca Chica had a second tower now, and a tank farm three times the old one, permits approved in record time across 2031 and into this year. Without that, he said, mid-2033 was a fantasy. With it, a launch every four days.
“Guidance,” he said, “is the other thing that would have killed us. Every vehicle needs a radiation-hardened controller, and nobody makes them in volume any more. Except there’s stock. DNX-R7, flight-qualified. Warehouses of it in Rotterdam and Singapore and Long Beach. Delivered, paid for, and never collected. Brokers will sell us all of it at salvage.”
Dana asked who had paid for a fleet’s worth of guidance computers and then not come for them. The American said the brokers were handling title, and that nobody in his government intended to look a gift horse in the mouth. Nobody else asked.
On the last Friday of the month the chair read the command arrangements into the record. Operations at L5 would be under Raymond Delgado of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
He called her that evening from Pasadena, where it was still morning.
“They want me at L5,” he said.
“Not literally.”
“In a room in Building 264 that’s in charge of L5. Same thing, with worse coffee.” He was quiet a moment. “Last approach is eight minutes each way. They fly themselves.”
“You took all that out of Lookout.”
“I took it out of one spacecraft. Now they want four hundred that think for themselves.” She heard a pen cap go on. “Mm. I’ll be the guy who says go and then sits there for sixteen minutes.”
The pickets were Kessler’s, in the session on Tuesday 30 November.
He had the Ontario list overlaid on what Izaña had tracked since summer. Now there were two hundred and twelve, and they had moved. He put the departure corridors up in pale blue: the paths out of Earth’s neighborhood from Boca Chica and Vostochny, from Kourou and Wenchang, all bending the same way, toward the trailing side of the orbit where L5 sat. The pickets lay strung along the blue, thickest where the corridors converged.
“How many at L5?” the general asked.
“None. Not one.” Kessler tapped the blue. “It is not guarding L5. It is guarding the way out.”
“The way out of where?” the chair said.
“Of here, madam.”
At half past one in the morning on Thursday 9 December, Priya’s face came up in the corner of Dana’s screen with Greenbelt’s evening behind it and her sheet shared over the rest.
“You’re going to hate this one,” Priya said. “I did.”
The tab was called longorbit. Eighty-three rows. Every one was a sphere that had left the shell since the end of September. The shell spheres sat on their long ellipses with perigees near 30,000 km, and these had fired at apogee and dropped their perigees by thirty thousand kilometers in one go.
“Down to where?”
“Hundred and twenty kilometers. Give or take ten.”
“That’s air.”
“That’s the edge of it. And then they stop.” Priya scrolled to the right. “No impact. No second burn on the way down. They just go round. And every fourth or fifth pass, a nudge at perigee and a trim at apogee, a few tenths of a meter per second. Drag takes a little every time they skim perigee, and the nudges put back what it takes. S-1040’s been holding for nine weeks.”
Dana worked it on the side of her screen, not trusting the sheet’s column. Perigee radius about 6,500 km, apogee about 100,000 km. Semi-major axis a hair over 53,000.
“Thirty-four hours,” she said.
“Thirty-four point one. Seventeen from apogee down to perigee.”
“Why would anything pay drag?” Dana said. “The shell’s free.”
“Because from the shell it takes months to get down. The hundred and twelve took five.”
“Five months never cost it a thing. Every one of the hundred and twelve hit. Median miss 180 meters. Months didn’t hurt it.”
“Months hurt it in Kumamoto,” Priya said. “Eleven thousand people out of the way in ninety-four minutes. It knocks down a fab, the people are gone. Maybe it doesn’t like that. Maybe it wants a faster trigger.”
“It hit Calder Falls with five weeks’ notice and killed four hundred people. It doesn’t need faster for that.”
“Then it’s a stockpile it can spend in a day.”
Dana had the orbit drawn now, a long thin ellipse with Earth crammed into one end.
“No,” she said. “Listen. The hundred and twelve, I had five months to fit them. Calder Falls had five weeks. These ones, the burn that matters is at a hundred thousand kilometers, a meter per second, on an object the networks lose half the time out there. Then seventeen hours.”
“So your notice goes out at hour sixteen.”
“If anybody catches the burn. And every one of them is at its own place on the orbit. Thirty-four hours, Priya. Every sphere on that tab can be on the ground within thirty-four hours of something deciding to put it there. All of them. Anywhere they can reach.”
“That’s a deadline for someone,” Priya said finally. “It’s holding a day and a half of answer. Answer to what?”
“TIDE.”
“TIDE goes up from the middle of next year. One launch every four days from Texas.”
“So the morning after the first launch, it can take the pad.”
“Or the morning before,” Priya said. “If it reads the launch schedule like it read my code.”
“It reads heat. That’s the only verb you’ll put your name to.”
“I know what I said.” Priya pulled the sheet back to the left. “Fine. If it’s an answer, there’s a size to it. How many it holds on that orbit against how many places it’d have to answer at once. Not fabs. Everything hot. Grid control, ports, hospitals, exchanges, water. Everything that runs on computers, which is everything.”
“There’s no list of that.”
“There’s my code. Run it with the line down at 20 MW and drop whatever classifies as nothing.” She was typing as she said it. “It’ll overcount hospitals and miss half of Africa. Pick your own line. Mine’s 20.”
“If you put it at 50 the count halves.”
“And the date moves about five months. I tried it at lunch. Five months is all it moves. That’s the part I hate.”
The new tab came up. She’d called it clock.
| month | long_orbit | added | hot_civil |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2032-09 | 9 | 9 | 1,986 |
| 2032-10 | 40 | 31 | 1,989 |
| 2032-11 | 74 | 34 | 1,991 |
| 2032-12* | 83 | 9 | 1,991 |
“Shell grows five percent a batch,” Dana said. “If the transfers are a fixed share of the shell—”
“Then they grow five percent too. They aren’t, though. The share going to long orbits is going up every month. That’s what pulls the date in. I’m not fitting three points at eight at night. You’d send me back to my desk.”
“Bevington, chapter four.”
“Bevington, chapter four.”
On the sheet the long-orbit column was a short stair, nine, forty, seventy-four. The hot-civil column barely moved.
On Monday 13 December the American head of delegation asked the council to request that Dr. Raman take the map down.
He said it carefully, with the State Department’s lawyer two seats behind him. They had also been the template for Calder Falls. Somebody had read Dr. Raman’s published thresholds and built a building that passed them by a hair. Washington and four other governments believed that keeping the method public was now a risk to life.
“It’s a recipe,” the man with the legal pad said. “We published the recipe.”
“It’s a description of what Anvil looks at,” Dana said. “Priya didn’t invent the thresholds. She measured them off the locks.”
“And somebody else read it off her.”
“Yes.” She had decided on the plane back from New York that she would say this part in the room and not in a corridor. “Whoever built Calder Falls has read every line of it. Taking it down won’t make them forget it. They’ll go on reading it, and the version they read will be the last one we published.”
The general looked at her. “Then why keep it up?”
“Because it’s the only count in this building that nobody here has to take on trust. Fifty-odd amateur stations and Izaña and anyone with a laptop can rerun it. Every notice I’ve sent stands on that. If it comes down, the number of spheres in this room is whatever each government chooses to tell the others.” She put Priya’s tab on the wall. “And this.”
“How long?” the chair said.
Priya had run the fit on Saturday, and sent it with a line on top saying the error bars were ugly and the date wasn’t. Dana read the result off her own screen.
“At current rates, the two lines cross in June 2034.”