25 Tram Shelter
Geneva · Tuesday, 22 March – Thursday, 19 May 2033.
Hale found her at the coffee machine on the second floor an hour before the vote. He had been in Dresden for most of March, and his collar had been slept in.
“You’re back.”
“Friday.” He fed the machine a coin it didn’t need and watched the cup fill. “About the controllers. I’d like you to say nothing. In there or anywhere else.”
“For how long?”
“For now.”
“What did you find?”
“Lovely town, Dresden. They’ve rebuilt the bridges.” He took his coffee. “Say nothing yet, Dana. I’ll tell you when I can.”
She had Annex C in her bag. She had expected him to ask for it. He didn’t.
The chair took the vote by roll call, which she did only when she wanted every delegation’s name in the record. She went round the table in the order of the seating plan, not the alphabet, and each head of delegation said yes into a microphone. The general said it in English. The man with the legal pad said it for the United States without looking up from the pad. The Chinese delegate said it with his fountain pen capped and lying beside his paper, and Lin, behind him, kept writing.
Dana sat at the side table with her blue badge and no flag in front of her. Every vehicle steering on a part from a building whose roof had gone cold in May 2031 and stayed cold. When the chair reached Japan, Dana said yes too, with her mouth shut. There was no other plan on the table, and she had sat through all five sessions that built this one.
Unanimous. The chair thanked the room and moved to the budget annex, and people started reaching for their phones in the outer pockets of their bags.
The first signal came out of Nevada on Wednesday, 6 April. The second came out of Novaya Zemlya five days later. The news had both before the council did: the USGS locations, the Norwegian array’s depth estimates, a spokesman for the test-ban organization in Vienna saying the waveforms were consistent with an explosion and that he would not be speculating further. By the weekend there were magnitude maps on every front page, with circles drawn on the desert and the Arctic.
The Japanese delegate raised it on Thursday the 14th. He read from a printed statement and didn’t look up from it until the end.
“Japan is a non-nuclear state and a party to the test-ban treaty. My government asks whether these tests are part of the program this council adopted on 22 March. If they are, we ask why the council learned of them from the newspapers.”
The man with the legal pad leaned to his microphone. “The test in Nevada was related to the fleet. I’m not going to go further than that in this room.”
“Related how?” the French delegate asked.
“Related.”
The general didn’t wait for the chair. “Ours also. You voted for a fleet. A fleet has to work the first time. Nobody gets a second launch at that thing after it has watched the first.”
“We voted for a fleet,” the Japanese delegate said. “Nobody told us what it carried had not been tested.”
“You voted to break it. How did you think it was broken?”
“With what was described to us.”
The chair asked Dana whether Anvil could see an underground test.
“It locks on heat at the surface,” Dana said. “Nothing it’s ever done says it can see anything a kilometer down. But the seismic data are public, and it reads what we publish. I’d assume it knows there were two.”
“And what does it make of them?”
“I can tell you which sites it locks on. I can’t tell you what it makes of anything.”
She thought of item nine on a list with no letterhead, and a suite number in Reston.
At the end of April the tracking working group began to receive picket tracks it hadn’t asked for.
They came in through the group’s shared inbox in the council’s own format, positions and times to the millisecond, with the observatory field left blank. Forty pickets the first week, then ninety, then most of the 251 now on the Ontario list. Dana fitted a dozen of them that Sunday at her kitchen table. The residuals were under 50 m. Izaña, on a good night with its best observer, got its pickets to a few hundred meters.
She showed the fits on Thursday because she didn’t think she was allowed not to.
“Whose are these?” the man with the legal pad asked.
“Somebody with a lot of aperture and a southern site,” Dana said. “And months of baseline. Some of these arcs start in 2031.”
“They are Chinese,” the general said. “Nobody else has the sky for it, and nobody else would send them without a name on them.”
The head of the Chinese delegation said nothing. The tracks kept arriving.
In the corridor afterward Dana fell into step beside Lin.
“Your working group sent me two hundred pickets.”
“It is your working group, Dana. I only read its minutes.”
“They’re very good.”
“Then the minutes will say so.”
On Tuesday, 17 May, the council ran past seven, and it was raining when Dana came down the Route de Ferney toward the tram stop. It was a cold, steady May rain off the lake, and it had soaked the shoulders of her coat in the hundred meters from security.
Hale was already in the shelter. He stood at the end by the timetable, out of the wind, with a sheet of paper folded in thirds in his left hand. He held it the way you hold a ticket you might need to show. He didn’t put it away when he saw her, and he didn’t offer it.
“You don’t take the tram,” she said.
“I do tonight.” He moved over to give her the dry end. “Can I ask you an orbital question?”
“You’ve never asked me one.”
“I’ve had you for everything else.” The display over the bench said four minutes. “When does TIDE stop needing anyone on Earth?”
“It needs Ray to say go.”
“After he says go.”
She looked at him. He was turning the folded sheet over against his coat, not opening it.
“Not the light,” she said. “That’s what everyone reaches for. It’s a bit over eight minutes to L5 one way. Sixteen round trip. People fly things to Saturn on an hour and a half each way. Ray’s built the whole operation around sixteen minutes.”
“Then what?”
“The steering.” She pulled the numbers up out of the design report, the version the council had voted on. “Each vehicle carries about a hundred meters a second for corrections. That’s its whole budget for changing where it goes once it’s on the way in. They close on Anvil at about five kilometers a second.”
“Go on.”
“So it depends how far out you spend it. A day out.” 5 × 86,400. “They’re about 430,000 kilometers away. If Ray tells a vehicle to spend its whole hundred meters a second then, it arrives 8,600 kilometers from where it was going to. That’s a different approach. A different side of the thing. That’s a wave-off, a hold, a new plan for the rest of the wave.”
“And an hour out?”
“Three hundred and sixty kilometers.”
“Which is still a miss, surely. It’s two kilometers long.”
“It’s still a miss,” she said. “It isn’t a plan. The point of having Ray on the ground is that he watches what Anvil does to the first ones and moves the rest. He needs thousands of kilometers to answer that. An hour out he has a few hundred. That’s aiming. The vehicle’s got Anvil in its own camera by then and it’s spending what’s left on getting there.”
“So somewhere between an hour and a day.”
“Somewhere in there, nothing anyone sends from here moves them far enough to matter.” The error bars on that were wide, but not wide enough to make it an hour. “You’d want the real guidance tables. The ones Ray’s people haven’t finished. But if you want a number.”
“I do.”
“About a day.”
A tram came round from the Place des Nations with its windows fogged and its lights on, and the rain looked heavier in front of it. Neither of them moved toward it. It wasn’t hers.
After the last day the vehicles flew on what was on board. She didn’t say what was on board. He had been to the building where it was made.
“Thank you,” Hale said. He put the folded sheet into the inside pocket of his coat. “That’s very helpful.”
“Is that what’s on your sheet?”
“Mine’s a different question.” He turned up his collar. “Get home before you drown, Dana.”
Hers came two minutes later. From the steps she saw him already walking toward the lake, with no umbrella, the folded sheet somewhere dry inside his coat.
The tram was warm and smelled of wet wool. She found a seat at the back over the wheels and got out her notebook, because she wanted the numbers on paper where she could see them, and wrote them down the page: 5 km/s, 100 m/s, 430,000 km, 8,600, 360. About a day.
At Cornavin, while the doors stood open, she understood that she’d had a number that length since December.
Priya’s longorbit tab. She had said thirty-four hours to Priya herself, at half past one in the morning, and gone back to bed.
She wrote it under the first one. 17 h apogee to perigee. About a day.
The doors closed. She rode two stops past her own.
Priya’s sheet came in on Thursday, 19 May, at 14:10 Geneva time, the way it had every Thursday since February of last year.
| shell (all locked + unlocked): | 1,680 |
| longorbit (perigee < 200 km): | 418 |
| period: | 34.1 ± 0.3 h |
| apogee to perigee: | 17.0 h |
| pickets (Ontario list + unsourced): | 251 |
| hot civil sites, >20 MW (clock tab): | 1,958 |
| crossing (clock tab): | 2034-06 ± 2 mo |
Under it Priya had typed one line: Unsourced pickets folded in, see tab. They’re better than ours. Who are they?
Dana opened the tab. Priya had refit every unsourced track with her own code and got the same residuals Dana had. Anything Dana wrote back, Priya would ask about, and Dana no longer had a guess who else read what went in and out of the council’s mail.
She didn’t reply. The next Thursday’s sheet came at 14:10, and the one after, and the one after that, with Priya’s line under each one getting shorter, and Dana answered none of them.
She kept the page from the tram open beside the sheet. On the left, in Priya’s columns: apogee to perigee, 17.0 h. On the right, in her own hand, from the shelter: 430,000 km at 5 km/s.
A day, and a day.