STAR TREK: The Lost Era - 2298 - The Sundered Read online

  “Nuclear winter,” Zafirah said, the words sounding surreal. This cannot be happening.

  “Then it’s ‘Game Over,’ ” said Avram Baruch, the tall, lanky Israeli who oversaw the particle accelerator project. His eyes were sunken, hollow. “Humanity is finished. Mekhule.”

  Zafirah knew a little Hebrew. Mekhule meant “exterminated.”

  “That’s a lot of frog-hair,” said Claudia Hakidonmuya, the sun-baked Hopi woman who ran the colony’s genetics and [65] life-science research units. “Humans are a pretty tough lot. Besides, the first thing a nuclear war wipes out is the ability to make more nuclear war. We just need to get a better handle on how much actual damage has been done down there.”

  “Why not just lob a few kilograms of that antimatter the particle folks have been synthesizing down there?” said Norman Arce, the huge Fijian construction foreman. “Put the goddamn place out of its misery.”

  “Stow that talk,” Hakidonmuya snapped. Arce immediately went silent. But he still looked miserable, apparently on the verge of tears he didn’t know how to shed.

  “Fine,” Baruch said, his eyes wild, nearly manic. “So mercy killing’s out. How about I just say a long, patient Kaddish for the whole planet instead?”

  Dr. Mizuki put up an aged hand and silence engulfed the room like a shroud. “Let’s not do this, people. I know things look bad at the moment. But the human species is anything but finished.”

  That was true enough in a literal sense, Zafirah thought. After all, probably fewer than 100,000,000 souls perished in the actual explosions. Even the deaths from cancer, radiation burns, and famine that were sure to follow over the next few months might not come close to extinguishing all of the world’s ten billion people.

  But Baruch was still right in every way that really mattered. Humanity’s nascent global civilization, still trapped in its cradle—the species’ single inhabited world—now spasmed in its death throes. The dog packs of the nation-states and the multinational megacorps had finally unbottled the nuclear djinn, and human culture had reaped the whirlwind. Perhaps the various stockpiles of biological and chemical agents secreted around the world had also been unleashed, making further havoc, pain, and death inevitable. How many centuries might it take for the survivors [66] to rebuild that civilization into some semblance of what it once had been?

  Zafirah suddenly felt an unaccustomed kinship to Baruch, and only belatedly understood the reason for it: if the Kaaba of Mecca had been razed, then just as surely nothing remained of Baruch’s native Tel Aviv but radioactive ash. Jerusalem, sacred to Jews and Muslims alike, was no doubt likewise destroyed.

  “The human species will endure,” Mizuki continued, her usually rock-steady voice slightly shaky. “Twenty-two years ago, a half-dozen Earth-crossing asteroids nearly sent us the way of the dinosaurs. But the Americans, the Europeans, and even the ECON decided to put aside their differences, at least for a while. That decision allowed them to develop the technology it took to land on those big rocks and nudge us all out of harm’s way.” She gestured broadly about the room.

  “That’s old news, Kuniko,” Baruch said, flailing an arm toward the planetary charnel house still being displayed on the wall-screen. “What’s your point?”

  Mizuki seemed unperturbed by the physicist’s outburst. “Just this, Avi: None of us would be here, living and working inside one of those hollowed-out rocks, if human beings lacked the capacity to cooperate. We’re supposed to be humanity’s best and brightest. Therefore we ought to have that cooperative quality in spades. We also have a lot of technology that nobody dirtside has. I’d say a great deal of Earth’s recovery is going to be up to us.”

  “Ducking the ’Thirty-One asteroids was mostly dumb luck,” Arce interjected, almost snarling his rage and pain. “We dodged a bullet back then because we happened to bend down to tie our shoes at the exact right time. Today we blew our own brains out deliberately.”

  The ironic truth of the orbital construction engineer’s words was not lost on Zafirah, nor did anybody else seem to miss it either. Zafirah felt something gradually loosening, [67] something deep within her soul. It’s hope, she thought. I’m simply letting go of hope.

  “What about the rest of the El Fivers?” said Hakidonmuya, still sounding aggressively upbeat. No one had to be told that she referred to the permanent denizens of the other five O’Neill colonies that orbited the Earth-Moon system’s Lagrange Five point along with Vanguard.

  Mizuki smiled, a pale, unconvincing gesture. “You mean do they see themselves as Earth’s last, best hope as well?” The director shrugged. “I can’t speak for anybody but Vanguard. But I’ve already checked in with the directors of the other colonies. Believe me, they’re as stunned as any of us. But the NicholCorp colony has just given me news that gives me some real hope that human race will pull out of this. It’s from a report they received on their microwave transmitter. Apparently, at least one of the Project Phoenix ground facilities has survived both the firestorms and the E-M pulse.”

  The director paused, her eyes meeting Zafirah’s for a moment. Cautiously, Zafirah recovered her grip on the very faintest of hopes.

  With all eyes upon her, Mizuki said, “Zefram Cochrane and a few key members of his staff are still alive.”

  Perhaps the world had not ended after all. Maybe the human adventure was really only beginning.

  Inshallah, Zafirah thought, clinging stubbornly to a hope she’d nearly given up for dead. If Allah wills it. If Allah wills it.

  Chapter 7

  In the autumn of 2031, technology, money, and politics converged fortuitously. Had this not happened, the human species would very likely have come to an ignominious end, casually extinguished by an uncaring universe that had already created and destroyed so many other forms of life. Lieutenant John Mark Kelly, already aboard the Ares IV spacecraft on his solitary, year-long voyage to Mars, might suddenly have found himself the only Earth-born intelligent creature left alive in the entirety of the cosmos.

  But such was not to be humanity’s fate. The determined effort of many thousands of people around the world—from the United States, to the European Union, to the Pan-African Alliance, to the Eastern Coalition, to the emerging democracies of the Muslim Bloc nations—narrowly prevented Earth’s destruction by a group of killer asteroids. The great rocks had apparently once been a single body, a mix of stony and metallic materials, until it had been ripped asunder by Jupiter’s prodigious gravitational field, the same fate as had befallen comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 late in the previous century. But unlike the comet, which had plunged into the gas-giant planet’s metallic-hydrogen heart, several of this new object’s largest and heaviest fragments were flung elsewhere.

  Directly toward the Earth.

  [69] After humanity’s most powerful heavy-thrust nuclear-electric rockets had nudged the fragments from their original trajectory, six of these stone-and-nickel-iron hulks—each one measuring more than ten kilometers in length, with masses comparable to the bolide that slammed into Yucatan some sixty-five million years ago, putting paid to the reign of the dinosaurs—had taken up long-period orbits around the entire Earth-Moon system.

  But this arrangement wasn’t gravitationally stable. The great rocks would have to be moved again, within a very few years, lest the sky fall once again. Seeing as much opportunity as danger in this looming crisis, humankind acted in concert once again, this time employing the new technologies that had been developed to nudge the worldlets out of Earth’s path in the first place, as well as a goodly number of Cold War-era nuclear weapons, devices that had never before found a constructive purpose.

  So were born the O’Neill Colonies, forged in the very same nuclear fires that would one day consume much of mankind.

  A generation later—and more than five years after the May Day Horror of Fifty-Three—Lidia Song Wu clung to a glistening steel handhold built into the external surface of one of the very same rock-and-metal bodies that had once threatened humanity’s co
ntinued existence. Marking the time by the rhythmic hissing of her p-suit’s respirator, Wu crept slowly and cautiously along the long axis of the asteroid shell that housed the Vanguard colony.

  In Wu’s eyes, the ironies of the world’s current circumstances were as profound as its tragedies. The people who lived and worked within Vanguard and a handful of other tamed, nuke-bored rocks might be the Earth’s only chance of emerging from the darkness that had shrouded it—both literally and figuratively—since the outbreak of the Third World War.

  After the first nuclear bombs had exploded over London [70] and New York, Tel Aviv and Riyadh, Karachi and New Delhi, nearly half a billion people, had died. The postatomic horror that followed the blasts made the Bell Riots of 2024 look like a Boy Scout jamboree. Terrorists and rogue states exploded so-called suitcase-nukes and released toxins and biological warfare agents, everything from sarin to ebola. Legions of battle-suited, drug-addled soldiers had been sacrificed in scores of dubious “conventional” battles on the ground after the computers necessary to guide the bigger tactical nukes had failed. Millions more civilians, including those responsible for maintaining even the pretense of law and order, continued even now to be slaughtered by the thousands in various conflicts around the world, as the remnants of the world’s great powers and genocidal warlords like Colonel Green fought over the scraps.

  Only up above it all, in the artificially created O’Neill habitats, did human civilization, technology, and culture stand an even chance of survival, the hostile environment of deep space notwithstanding. Only here, beyond the brown-and-orange haze of the still-fading remnants of the nuclear winter of Fifty-Three, could a traumatized humanity lift its eyes from the banal horrors of day-to-day survival.

  Only here could a person find solace in the hope that better things lay ahead.

  Even back in 2031—still referred to by most who had experienced it as the Year We Dodged the Bullet—the idea of constructing O’Neill-type space habitats was not a new one. Rafts of books had been written over the past century or so about the concept, its benefits, and its theoretical problems. In fact, it had been some of the works of the earliest space-age science writers—luminaries such as Asimov, Sagan, Ferris, and Zubrin—that had fired Wu’s young imagination, spurring her to flee Hong Kong’s inflexible social stratification to pursue an engineering degree at Cambridge. The twentieth-century scientific essayist Gerard K. O’Neill, [71] another of Wu’s favorites, had been among the first to champion the idea of constructing large-scale, permanent human habitats in space.

  Now, clinging precariously to the hide of the Vanguard asteroid as she inched cautiously along its length, Wu understood viscerally that she and her colleagues were living out O’Neill’s wildest dreams.

  Wu felt a sudden, violent tug on the toolkit she had strapped to her thigh. Instinctively, her gloved hand grabbed for the small box. It took a moment for her to realize that the kit itself was secure; she had merely forgotten to close the cloth flap that covered it, leaving it vulnerable to the outward centrifugal pull of the asteroid’s spin-generated artificial gravity.

  Sloppy, she thought, chiding herself. Wu was all too aware that such accidents could easily get people killed. She quickly sealed the flap, pausing just long enough to recheck her suit for any other loose objects. Satisfied, she resumed her careful hand-over-hand motion toward photovoltaic array gamma-six.

  Wu understood well that performing even basic maintenance work on the outer shell of a spinning O’Neill colony could be even more difficult and dangerous than the first spacewalks of the earliest Soviet cosmonauts and U.S. astronauts. True, her pressure suit was tremendously more advanced than the one that had kept Aleksei Leonov’s blood from boiling as he stepped into the airless void that lay beyond the skin of his Voskhod capsule. Wu didn’t have to contend, as Leonov had, with a garment that grew so distended that it had to be almost completely depressurized before she could go back inside. Wu’s Kevlar-laced suit resisted the stiff-limbed “balloon” effect so prevalent during those ancient EVAs of nearly a century ago. It responded easily to the motions of her limbs, with joints assisted by small but powerful electrical servomotors. The internal fans and heat exchangers kept her helmet’s faceplate almost entirely fog-free, no matter how much she exerted herself. And the paper-thin [72] insulators of which her gauntlets were composed allowed her to work with the smallest of tools with almost a jeweler’s precision. Wu sometimes imagined that Buzz Aldrin, the U.S. Gemini program’s extravehicular-activity pioneer, would have been awed by the pressure suits that so many O’Neill-colony dwellers now took utterly for granted.

  No, dealing with a p-suit wasn’t the most challenging aspect of her job. The real difficulties lay in staying connected to the surface of a hollow asteroid that spun rapidly enough to create a feeling of almost Earth-normal gravity in the habitat’s outermost levels. Because of this unending centrifugal motion, those inside the asteroid thought of its exterior layers, all the way around the roughly cylinder-shaped asteroid, as “down.” One became progressively heavier as one moved “down” toward the asteroid’s skin. At the moment, Wu was as far “down” as it was possible to be on Vanguard.

  For Leonov and Aldrin, coming untethered from their respective spacecraft while in orbit had been a real worry. Had that happened to either man, the result would have been a slow drift away from the capsule. With nothing to push against, the lost person never could have been recovered.

  Wu knew that if she were to come untethered from fast-twirling Vanguard, her own inertia would launch her, projectilelike, into space with better than a one-gee acceleration. Rescue might be possible before the suit’s resources exhausted themselves, but using a powered skiff to locate and match velocity with her would be no mean feat.

  She therefore had to hang on for dear life as she worked, like a supine window washer working on a skyscraper that had been pitched onto its side. A multiply redundant safety net of diamond-composite tethers held her suit to the asteroid’s rough, metal-rich surface, which was still being pitted even now by exposure to the L-5 region’s high concentrations of dust particles.

  Years ago, Wu had learned to avoid vertigo by ignoring [73] the noticeable movements of the Earth and the Moon, both of which steadily wheeled over and past the asteroid’s extremely short horizon, only to reappear less than a minute later from the opposite direction.

  Wu finally came to a stop when she reached the edge of a football-field-sized cluster of space-black photovoltaic collectors, one of the habitat’s principal sources of electrical power. Using a key strapped to her leg, she opened a small junction box mounted beside the array. Replacing the burned-out relay took only a few moments. Once she had finished and run a quick diagnostic test on the relay’s keypad, she tapped a control near her suit’s neck ring, engaging the radio transmitter.

  “Wu to al-Arif.”

  “I read you, Liddie,” came Zafirah al-Arif’s smooth voice in response. There was very little static on the connection, probably because sunspot activity was currently in its low but slowly rising phase. Wu chose to regard this as a good omen.

  “How do the power relays look?” Zafirah wanted to know.

  “They’re all operational now,” Wu said. “You can power them back up. And you can tell the other habitats that we’re finally ready to fire up all six accelerators in tandem.”

  “Good work, Liddie. I’ll give the others the go-ahead signal as soon as you’re back inside.”

  “If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to stay out here and watch the fireworks,” Wu said. “I have the best seat in the house.”

  “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” Zafirah said.

  Wu scowled. She’d expected this. “Come on, Zaf. It’s not like I’m standing in the path of the beam. And just being outside the rock exposes me to a hundred times more stray radiation than the experiment is going to give off. Besides, you’re not gonna order me to miss witnessing history are you?”

  After an
elastic moment of silence, Wu heard her [74] colleague sigh resignedly. “All right, Liddie. You win. Just take some nice pictures for me, all right?”

  “For all of us,” Wu said, patting her toolkit, where the camera remained stowed. And for all the generations who are going to follow us.

  Wu cast her eyes toward the asteroid’s western horizon. The Earth and the Moon, respectively at their slender crescent and nearly full, phases as seen from the L-5 point, had just disappeared behind the colony’s sunlit side. In their absence it was far easier to see the outlines of the potato-shaped asteroid that housed the Roykirk colony, which loomed a mere 150 kilometers away. The remaining four asteroid colonies, though out of Wu’s immediate line of sight at the moment, were spaced at similar intervals along an ellipse centered on the Earth-Moon system’s gravitationally balanced L-5 point.

  Wu shivered with exhilarated anticipation. The time for the test firing had finally arrived, a tangible justification for hope. Barring some last-minute equipment foul-up either here or on one of the other colonies, the six O’Neill habitats, working in concert, would soon offer the world a limitless supply of cheap energy. Shortly the O’Neill colonies would furnish heat, light, and transportation for ordinary people all over the Earth, instead of merely supplying exotic antiparticles to Earthbound researchers like Zefram Cochrane.

  Within the next few moments, they would create the first completely functional subspace warp field.

  The Earth and the Moon reappeared in the east, moving inexorably across the star-dappled night. Turning sideways, Wu looked at the cloud-fleeced magnificence of the Earth, its dark side lit sporadically by the lamps and hearths of a much-reduced human civilization. What little she could see along the planet’s narrow sunlit crescent now seemed pristine, its cerulean hue evoking a time before anyone had heard of nuclear winter.