Orbital Cloud Read online

  “Plastic fingers, huh?” Shiraishi raised an eyebrow. “Torture or something?”

  “It hurt. The rest is covered by a nondisclosure agreement.”

  Chance’s fingers were equipped with resin sacs instead of flesh, the latter having been grated off with a rasp after she was caught spying in Syria. It had been a blow to lose her grip strength at the height of her powers, but being able to painlessly extinguish cigarettes with her fingers had its advantages.

  “What an age we live in,” said Shiraishi. “Even spies respect their NDAs.”

  Ignoring his attempt at humor, Chance sat up to toss the cigarette butt into her editor’s bag and then lay back down. She slid her right arm under the pillow, fingers curling around the grip of the SIG-9 that had been specially modified to allow her to fire it with her weakened grip.

  The gun was no secret from Shiraishi, who cringed theatrically, still up on one elbow. “Relax, would you?” he said. “I’m being good.”

  “I wonder,” Chance said. “By the way, did you hear about Kitten Master? Looks like they’ll be bankrupt by the end of next week.”

  “Is that right?”

  “They weren’t the most financially stable company to begin with. Throwing a million dollars at Internet advertising in thirty-six hours could hardly cause anything but a panic. Did you have to set the click-through rate to fifty dollars?”

  “You’re the one who chose Kitten Master,” said Shiraishi, “and their CEO is the one who didn’t change his password even after losing his phone.” He chuckled at the thought. “Anyway, no one’s even come close to figuring out what the Cloud is yet.”

  “What if someone does?”

  “What if they do? They couldn’t do anything about it anyway. We released forty thousand of those things. No one’s going to figure out how to get rid of them all.”

  “Not even Dr. Jamshed Jahanshah?”

  Shiraishi sat up straight. “Jahanshah got his PhD? Is he still in Tehran? Tell me how I can get in touch with him.”

  “Well, this is a surprise. Shiraishi, showing an interest in someone other than himself?” Chance said. “All right, are you ready? Here’s his phone number …”

  Chance recited the contact information she had, counting off each item on her fingers: phone number, email address, videoconference account name. Shiraishi held one finger up before his eyes as well, gaze darting left and right as he concentrated on her voice. This was some kind of mnemonic technique he’d no doubt learned to avoid leaving any written notes behind. Once she had told him what she knew, Chance added by way of warning that the CIA and NSA had people monitoring all calls to Iran around the clock, while the Iranian government blocked all Internet connections from the US and EU.

  “Thinking of sending him a thank-you note for the idea?” she asked.

  “He’s the one who’ll be thanking me,” said Shiraishi. “He knows better than anyone that ideas don’t get into orbit on their own.”

  Shiraishi raised his index finger again and repeated Jamshed’s email address. Chance listened and confirmed that he had it right.

  “There aren’t many people gifted enough to get as far as he did with his idea in a country where you can’t even use the Internet,” said Shiraishi. “But he had bad luck.”

  “You feel sorry for him?”

  “Please. The world’s practically overflowing with unlucky geniuses.”

  “You, for example.”

  “Exactly. I’m as unlucky as they come. By rights I should be at NASA leading the design team for the third-generation shuttle … Hey! No laughing!” he said. “Come on, just one cigarette. What do you say?”

  Chance pointed at the window. “One. With the window open.”

  “Are you crazy? It’s freezing out there.”

  Chance watched the muscles in Shiraishi’s back move as he padded naked and grumbling toward the window. He was over forty, but his physique betrayed no hint of his frequently unhealthy life undercover.

  Shiraishi opened the window and lit up. Powder snow and cold air swirled into the room, mingling with the white smoke from his cigarette. Chance let her eyes rest on the tattoo on Shiraishi’s right arm. A dragon of some sort. Perhaps he’d gotten it done in China. What was that written in the middle of its serpentine body? Rising to her feet, she walked across the room to stand beside him, then wrapped her left arm around him to hold him close.

  “Here to warm me up, eh? Appreciate it.”

  “Not quite,” she said, lifting up his right arm. The writing on the tattoo wasn’t a word—it was a mathematical formula.

  “Ah, the Tsiolkovsky equation,” she said. Shiraishi shivered. The Tsiolkovsky equation was a formula that determined how much acceleration a rocket of a given mass could attain by expelling a given amount of propellant. It applied with cold impartiality to everything that moved through space using that method.

  “Correct,” Shirashi finally replied. “I’m impressed that you know it.” He covered the tattoo with his left hand.

  “Aerospace engineers have been reciting it as their mantra for a century,” Chance said. “Are you sure you don’t still have regrets about not being among their ranks anymore? You wouldn’t rather be flying proper rockets or spacecraft, would you? Or can I interpret this as just a youthful indiscretion?”

  Shiraishi was silent. His hand gripped the tattoo tighter.

  “You haven’t forgotten the goal of the Cloud, I hope,” Chance pressed him.

  Shiraishi’s body tensed for a moment. Then he slammed Chance against the window with explosive force. “Forget?” he snarled. “It was my idea in the first place. For the Great Leap.”

  Chance detected no trace of his usual ironic detachment.

  “I’m going to destroy that hundred-year-old mantra forever,” he continued. “I got this tattoo so I wouldn’t forget that.”

  Shiraishi’s arms strained, and Chance felt her back being pressed against the window. Icy rills trickled down the underside of her arms as her body heat melted the frost.

  “Your phone?” she asked.

  Blue-white light spilled from Shiraishi’s coat by the bed. Rubbing his shoulders, Shiraishi went to extract his phone from the coat’s pocket. Chance saw that ironic detachment in his expression again as the pale light from the screen lit up his face.

  “Looks like we’ve attracted attention from someone a little sharper than usual,” he said. “A blog post’s turned up with the keywords we were looking for—‘SAFIR 3,’ ‘large numbers of objects in orbit,’ ‘circular motion,’ that sort of thing. They noticed the tethering around SAFIR 3.”

  Shiraishi’s lips curled into a smile as he read on.

  “A Japanese blog. Chance, let me look into this. It’s a shooting star forecast site called Meteor News, apparently. Interesting idea for a service, wouldn’t you say?”

  Yekshambe, 23 Azar 1399, 09:05 (2020-12-13T05:35 GMT)

  Tehran Institute of Technology

  “404 File Not Found.”

  Jamshed cursed. “You expect me to believe that this came from a US server?” he cried, jabbing at the cathode-ray monitor with his finger.

  The error message telling him in Persian that the page could not be found was one that Jamshed was all too familiar with. He saw it every time he tried to access a site run by someone from the US or the EU. This time, he had run into it while attempting to download the original observation data linked by the intriguing Meteor News blog post entitled “Thousands of unknown objects around SAFIR 3?”

  No one took the 404 message at face value. It came not from the server in question but from the firewall placed on ISPs by the government. How were they supposed to conduct research like this? It wasn’t surprising in the least that Alef should be agitating for azadi interanet, Internet freedom.

  Seeing no other option, Jamshed returned to the Meteor News blog, to wh
ich access was permitted, and began to laboriously copy the data excerpted there into Windows Notepad.

  “Yes, I see … Spherical coordinates, in radians. Time resolution, one thousandth of a second.”

  Jamshed turned to the drafting table beside his desk to plot the data, then sighed. His last piece of paper was already densely covered with hastily scribbled lines and equations.

  “No Internet access, no paper …” he muttered, retrieving a crumpled sheet of paper from the dustbin. He smoothed the sheet out and laid it on the drafting table, placing a magnet at each corner to hold it in place. Then, wondering if there might be more paper in the lab next door, he got to work. Drawing freehand, he sketched four concentric circles, then added a cross through the center to divide them into quadrants. This done, he began to plot the coordinates he had copied into Notepad on his diagram with small Xs.

  After a few minutes spent struggling with the creases in the paper and marking each azimuth and elevation, Jamshed was struck with a sense of déjà vu. The next point would be … here. And the next … yes, right there. As if the two points were holding hands and whirling in a circle. Even the slight quiver in the circle was the same as the oscillation he’d observed in his experiments back then.

  “This … this is my space tether. What’s it doing up there in orbit?!”

  “Alef!” Jamshed cried. “Are you in here?”

  The students gathered in the student center turned as one to stare at him. Most of them were young, dressed in jeans and dirty jackets. Many wore scarves to conceal the lower parts of their faces, no doubt fearing identification and arrest.

  Jamshed buttonholed a student carrying a yellow poster so new it still smelled of ink. “Where’s Alef?” he asked. “Alef Kadiba.”

  After a brief pause, the student lowered his scarf. “Over there,” he said, turning to point at the tarp that hung from the roof in the middle of the hall, dividing the space in two.

  As Jamshed craned his neck to see, the friend he was searching for lifted up the sheet and poked his head out.

  “So, have you come to join us after all?” he asked.

  “Alef!” Jamshed said. “My tether’s in orbit!” He thrust the student with the poster aside and started to run toward Alef, only to be intercepted and held in place by other students around him. “Let me go!” he said. “I’m not with the government.”

  Hands raised, Alef walked calmly toward the mass of students, which parted as he approached. “Let him go, everyone,” he said. “He’s a friend of mine. You,” he added, turning to a nearby student. “Bring us two cups of chai.”

  Ushering Jamshed into the makeshift office behind the tarp, Alef handed him a small cup of chai on a porcelain saucer. “Drink, drink,” he said. His pliant voice alone had a calming effect. “Now, what’s gotten into you? Your tether, you say? Those balloons you were launching a few years ago—you got that thing into orbit? Congratulations, my friend!”

  “No, that’s not it,” Jamshed said. “Someone got my papers somehow, and they’re using them to fly it on their own!”

  “Are you certain? Maybe they just had the same idea as you.”

  “No, that’s impossible,” Jamshed said. He explained how closely the observation data posted on Meteor News matched his own papers. His tether propulsion theory had a few “magic numbers” in it, numbers he’d painstakingly extracted from experiments that involved dropping test units from balloons and seeing how far they could move off course. The same numbers could be found in the observation data. The chance of another experimenter coming up with them independently was practically zero.

  Alef nodded receptively, long eyelashes lowered. Jamshed doubted his friend understood one tenth of what he was saying but appreciated that he was making the effort to listen.

  “Tether propulsion is such a fringe idea that no one else is looking into it anyway,” Jamshed said finally. “No, there’s no mistake. Those are my space tethers up there.”

  “I see,” Alef said cheerfully, one hand at his chin. “And so?”

  “I want to tell someone.” Jamshed pointed at the yellow case slung from Alef’s shoulder. “Will you lend me your tablet? Just for a day. If I don’t let NASA or the European Space Agency know about this, whoever stole my papers is going to get the credit for inventing the space tether.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Alef, placing his hand on the tablet case. “I can’t do that. It’s true that this SIM could get through to them, but it’s being monitored. I can’t afford to attract any attention right now. Not with the demonstration next week.”

  Jamshed hung his head. “I see,” he said.

  A web camera came into view before his downcast eyes.

  “You can still get through to Japan, can’t you?” Alef said, offering him the camera. “Why don’t you get that Meteor News site to pass on your message?” He turned over his wrist to check the time—11:12. “You’d better hurry, though. Word is that the government’s going to lock down the whole Internet at noon today. And once that happens, even Japan will be out of reach.”

  Sun, 13 Dec 2020, 16:19 +0900 (2020-12-13T07:19 GMT)

  Fool’s Launchpad, Shibuya, Main Conference Room

  The image of a white tower brightly lit against the night sky covered the conference room’s whiteboard. The tower was Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral, where Ronnie Smark’s rocket Loki 9 was awaiting liftoff. The swollen, metallic gray fairing at the top of the rocket held the partly exposed spacecraft Wyvern.

  Launch Complex 36 had a long and respectable history, having been used for everything from the Apollo program to the Space Shuttle. Ronnie’s company, Project Wyvern, had bought it outright and maintained it impeccably. Even the clock at the corner of the screen, counting down the minutes until launch—00:19:13, 00:19:12 … —was an original NASA model from the days of the Apollo program.

  Kazumi was sitting on two chairs he’d lined up in the conference room, one to sit on and one for his feet. He had just finished his work on the site for the day, having posted some brief comments on Ozzy’s data on his blog followed by a teaser for the post Akari had just suggested, predicting where Loki 9 would fall back to Earth.

  Watching the circles appear on the world map that showed where the hits to his site were coming from, Kazumi added some words of appreciation for his anonymous visitors who were taking the time to check his shooting star forecast even as Project Wyvern’s launch broadcast held the world’s attention. Hits were coming from all over the world, but the circles from Seattle and Seoul were largest. Perhaps a dozen or so in each city. There was even one person connecting from right in the center of the Middle East. And that circle in the Indian Ocean had to be Ozzy “X-Man” Cunningham.

  Kazumi murmured a word of thanks to Akari, still fast asleep, and raised his cup of coffee, long since cold and sour, to his mouth. As he took a sip, a notification popped up on his laptop screen. A chat request.

  “Who could this be?” he muttered. The account name on the pop-up just read “JJ.” Kazumi wondered if those were initials or a pseudonym.

  With only fifteen minutes until launch, Kazumi decided to ask whoever it was to wait until afterwards.

  Clicking the speech bubble next to the account name to enter the chat, Kazumi found that “JJ” had already started talking.

  >emergency!

  >have news about safir 3

  >video call pls. no time. hurry

  Kazumi smiled. Whoever it was, their English wasn’t easy to understand. According to the map in the connection information, the call was coming from off the west coast of Africa. Ghana or Nigeria, maybe? Email from X-Man in Seychelles yesterday, a videoconference with someone in Africa today … Meteor News was becoming quite cosmopolitan.

  >ok

  Kazumi hit enter and clicked the camera icon. He would just tell “JJ” face-to-face to wait until the launch was over, or perhaps s
uggest that they watch it together. It wasn’t every day that Loki 9 took Ronnie Smark into orbit, after all.

  The window for the video call opened on Kazumi’s display. Heavily accented English came through his speakers before the video even came online.

  “Thank you for taking my call. You are the owner of Meteor News?”

  “Yes. I am Kazumi Kimura, owner of Meteor News. It’s nice to meet you.”

  “I am relieved I am getting through. Please listen to me for just a few minutes. My name is Ja— … Jay. I am calling you in Japan because I can only—”

  The end of the sentence was too garbled to catch. The audio was very choppy, and the video still hadn’t come online. A network problem?

  “Jay? I can call you Jay?”

  “… fine, fine. Jay is fine.”

  Kazumi glanced at the whiteboard. The broadcast being projected there was coming over the Internet too, and it was coming through fine at thirty frames per second. If network speed was the problem, it certainly wasn’t on his end. Jay must have been having problems with uplink speed. Perhaps that was par for the course in Africa.

  “Thank you. Kazumi, please …”

  Again, his words dissolved into unintelligibility, but the video finally came on as they did. The image was noisy, but Kazumi could make out a man in a dark room with a patch of blue sky showing through a window in the upper right. The windowsill was clearly illuminated by the sunlight, but it was difficult to make out the man’s face in the gloom.

  “I can’t hear you very well, Jay,” Kazumi said. “I’d like to propose that we talk again in thirty minutes. I’m waiting for the launch of Ronnie Smark’s rocket, Loki 9. Are you watching it too?”

  “No! I cannot wait. Please, hear me out!”

  The man moved violently, setting off a swirl of pixelation that danced around him. Kazumi could just make out what looked like a beard.