Orbital Cloud Page 7

  The door closed with a bang.

  Sat, 12 Dec 2020, 10:15 +0900 (2020-12-12T01:15 GMT)

  Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Tokyo Office,

  Solar City, Ochanomizu

  Surrender space, America!

  A man in an olive-colored outfit that wasn’t quite a military uniform and wasn’t quite a work suit raised his fist into the air and smashed it down on a press conference–style table.

  Daiki Kurosaki was watching the man give a speech in a thirty-person capacity room on a one hundred–inch display used for meetings. With him was a coworker under his supervision, Makoto Sekiguchi. They were both taking notes while nibbling on junky snack foods.

  A report that North Korea would be giving an “important” speech on space development had reached Kurosaki at six o’clock that morning. The JAXA International Relations Department, to which Kurosaki belonged, had to provide their “space experts’ opinion” to the minister of science and education and the minister of space policy. A Japanese space-development official had brought him on board and gotten him up to speed, but apparently the original intelligence had come from America. A country that listened in on all communications was on a whole different playing field.

  As he was thinking all this, Kurosaki followed the machine-translated English subtitles superimposed over the chest of North Korea’s leader, without which he would have been unable to follow the speech.

  The steady march of our space program has been impeded again and again by the superpowers. The test launches of our rockets intended for peaceful use are called missiles, and mere observational satellites are seen as orbital weapons. Why are such iniquities allowed to prevail?

  Kurosaki couldn’t understand the audio at all, but YouTube’s machine translation was smooth, if a bit wordy. And the same sentences kept looping over and over.

  “That’s the third time he said that,” muttered Sekiguchi in the seat across from Kurosaki.

  Looking over, Kurosaki saw him poking at his tablet with his elbow on the table. “You look really bored,” he said.

  “Yeah, because he just keeps repeating the same thing.”

  “Hmm. So he does.” Following Sekiguchi, Kurosaki pushed his pen and pad to the side and reached into a bag of potato chips. The speech was the usual vitriol dressed up in courageous language. “We’ll be watching this recording a few times more anyways. So let’s try to enjoy it as regular viewers this time around. Like, just look at the kid. He’s completely transformed.”

  In the eight years since the Supreme Leader had been inaugurated, his eerily glossy skin and frequently trembling voice had begun to settle into maturity, and he was giving speeches to the people more frequently. The careful choreography of following in the footsteps of his grandfather rather than those of his more reticent father had probably forced him to grow up, thought Kurosaki.

  “Is there something different about him?” asked Sekiguchi.

  “Sure. He’s a big boy now. Before he was so obviously a child.”

  Give back space! The leader’s voice and the sound of him punching the table rang out together.

  “No way, Kurosaki-san. That’s a little kid right there if I ever saw one.” Sekiguchi pointed to the screen with his straw and laughed, showing a flash of white teeth. Being in his midtwenties, Sekiguchi probably didn’t know how bumbling and green the Supreme Leader had been at the time of his inauguration. That would’ve been when Sekiguchi was in high school.

  “I’d watch what you say there. Child or not, this is the ruler of a nation we’re talking about. But, man, is this long. The guys making the official Japanese translation must be in tears. Poor suckers.”

  “If all we needed was English, this machine translation looks like it would do the trick. It’s just scary how smooth it is … Huh?”

  Sekiguchi cocked his head to the side quizzically and looked at the English subtitles on the screen in bewilderment.

  At this juncture, we of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have decided to strike the iron hammer of justice upon those symbols of American supremacy and imperialism—space stations.

  “What’s up?” asked Kurosaki.

  “The speech and the subtitles don’t match.”

  “You can speak Korean too?”

  “Just a touch. It’s not as good as my Chinese.”

  Sekiguchi gave Kurosaki a wink through a thin slit he created between his index finger and thumb. A career bureaucrat on temporary assignment from the Ministry of Science and Education, Sekiguchi’s language abilities had been recognized by JAXA, who’d assigned him to the Department of International Affairs. He’d told Kurosaki he only had “a smattering” of foreign languages, but as it had turned out, he was proficient in English, French, German, and Chinese, and now a fifth language had been added. If he suddenly starting speaking Arabic next, Kurosaki wouldn’t have been surprised at all.

  “There it is again.” Sekiguchi pointed at the screen.

  “You mean the bit where he says ‘iron hammer’ or whatever?”

  “Yeah. You hear where he says cheolgwon. That means ‘clenched fist,’ but the English subtitles say ‘strike the iron hammer.’ He’s not saying anything about any space station at all. If you put it together in context and translate it roughly into Japanese, it’s something like ‘American space development will come up against our powerful fist-like will.’ The fact that YouTube’s machine translation has been this smooth is just weird to begin with.”

  “I don’t really get it, but … This is no good.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “It’s the minister.” Kurosaki turned over the paper on which he’d been taking notes and handed it to Sekiguchi. Printed on the back were the schedules of the minister of science and education and the minister of space policy. The former could be set aside because he was currently traveling abroad, but the problem was the space minister, who was known for frequent gaffes. “He loves English—actually, that’s about all he has going for him—so he should be able to read these subtitles himself. Then he’ll jump to mad conclusions about the speech.”

  The minister of space policy was set to have an interview that evening and then make an appearance later that night on the online media site Piyo Live. It was up to them to make sure he didn’t say anything stupid.

  “Oh boy. Piyo Live, is it?” said Sekiguchi. “Journalists doing the Japanese version of Geeple will be there too. Did you hear the news? The headline in English was ‘ROD from GOD attacks ISS!’ I’m pretty sure there was a Japanese—ah, here it is.”

  Sekiguchi turned his tablet to show the screen to Kurosaki. Above what could only be called random nonsense about orbital weapons was an all-too-well-realized illustration. Annoyingly, a kitten leaped out of an advertisement for cat food and ran across the article.

  “Take a look at the comments. Someone is posting from their Facebook account that North Korea’s ‘iron hammer’ from the speech is the Rod from God.”

  “Who? What idiot would write something as irresponsible—”

  “An ex-NASA engineer, apparently.” When Sekiguchi opened the link for the comment, a Facebook account appeared. After staring at it for a while, he said, “This is weird.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “If this is a real ex-NASA engineer’s profile, I’m Neil Armstrong.”

  “A prank, huh? Oh boy.”

  Kurosaki pressed the sides of his eyes. If the minister improperly understood the subtitles of the leader’s speech and then heard from a journalist that a NASA engineer had stated that the ‘iron hammer’ was the Rod from God, he’d probably be seized by the idea that North Korea was using orbital weaponry to keep America in check. Kurosaki was reminded of what an old friend had once told him: “People are most certain about the things they discover for themselves.” The minister simply lacked the familiarity with space-development te
chnology to tell how preposterous the Rod from God theory was.

  Sekiguchi was tapping on his tablet like crazy.

  “What are you doing?” Kurosaki asked.

  “Translating the North Korean speech into Japanese. Ugh, this sucks. And I thought I’d be home by evening.” Sekiguchi was smiling. By nature, he liked to be the one to resolve a crisis.

  “I see. Well, I’ll send in a report that says the so-called Rod from God is not a plausible weapon. If we can get the minister some information that’ll make him feel more in the know than the journalists, that should stop him from loosing his lips.”

  Kurosaki remembered his friend. If he’d been here in this situation, what kind of report would he write? Just like Sekiguchi smiling there before him as he rushed in to put out the fire, he’d surely have …

  Shambe, 22 Azar 1399, 09:02 +0430 (2020-12-12T05:32 GMT)

  Tehran Institute of Technology, Aviation Research Building

  A spider descended from the ceiling on a thread and landed on a drafting table that stood on the edge of a grubby desk. Jamshed Jahanshah swept the cuff of his loose work suit over the paper resting on the drafting table and tried to knock the eight-legged intruder that had interrupted his calculations onto the floor. The dangling thread’s movements defied Jamshed’s predictions, and with a soft flutter, it tangled itself into his mustache. The cause of this little incident was that someone had opened the door.

  Wiping off the thread, Jamshed turned around in his chair. There, in the dim laboratory doorway, stood Alef Kadiba, a friend of his enrolled in the Department of Law.

  “Here you are,” said Alef. Wearing brand-new jeans, a warm-looking sweater, and a North Pole mountain parka, he carried a tablet in a yellow case under his arm. An American model owned only by a select few at Tehran IT, it was even fitted with a SIM that let him access the websites of America and the EU. Such service contracts were usually reserved for foreigners, but he was able to acquire the privilege because his father ran a trading company.

  The cuff of Jamshed’s cotton work suit was all black now, so he stripped down to his regular clothes underneath and slung the suit over the back of his chair. Another draft came in, and the threads hanging from the ceiling began to sway about erratically.

  “I’m surprised to see you too. What are you doing up so early in the morning, Alef, and all the way out here?”

  Alef frowned with his shapely eyebrows, brushed off the thread that had made contact with his nose, and looked up at the web-covered ceiling. “This room is just incredible.”

  “I’ve got no funding. No tea to offer you. No students even.” Jamshed beckoned his friend over.

  The exterior of the Department of Astronautical Engineering research building looked impressive, but everything else about it was sorely lacking. The electricity was insufficient, to say nothing of the computer network. The walls were uninsulated and the ceiling bare of panels. Power cables and the absolute minimum number of Ethernet cables ran along the rungs of wiring racks that spanned exposed beams down to an array of computers directly below them, and countless spiders had made nests in the cracks. The computers, too, left much to be desired, all of them outdated models connected to bulbous cathode-ray tube displays. Even Jamshed, the head of the research center, had been reduced to applying a Chinese-made update to a pirated version of Windows XP and was nursing that along carefully.

  “I found an interesting news clip,” said Alef. “It has to do with Korea.”

  “You mean Professor Ryu?”

  In the Department of Astronautical Engineering, if you said “Korea,” it meant “Professor Ryu,” sent there from North Korea on a technological exchange program. He’d been sold as an engineer involved in the important task of constructing the Taepodong-2 missile, but the professor was not exactly pleasing to the eye and had garnered little respect. Rumor had it that he had been demoted for failing at some project or perhaps inciting the displeasure of the upper echelons. Saying they were exchanging personnel and technology made great PR, but the program was also being used by both countries to foist incompetent rejects on each other.

  “No, I mean North Korea. The professor’s home country. Those guys are really going for it. You should take a look for yourself, Jamshed.”

  “I couldn’t care less what North Korea is doing. Underdeveloped countries have no bearing on my research.”

  “You mean like those balloons you sent up? How did that go, by the way? You don’t seem to be working on it much these days.”

  “Oh, I’m working on it,” said Jamshed, glowering at Alef. He had finished a paper summarizing his experiments dropping homemade devices from a balloon, but Hamed, his advisor, had been demoted to a post in North Korea without ever understanding its real significance. His demotion had come about because the SAFIR 2 he had helped to design had failed to release its satellite. “There’s no way I’d stop this research. The experimentation stage is over. All that’s left is to do calculations on paper.”

  “Well, keep on it, then,” said Alef, pulling a sheaf of papers piled on the desk toward him and propping up his tablet against it before pressing play on a video. “This is a speech given by the leader of North Korea that was broadcast earlier today, but did you hear that thing he just said, ‘iron hammer’? I thought you might be interested in seeing the real thing.”

  Looking proud of himself, Alef stroked the screen and brought up an English article entitled “ROD from GOD attacks ISS!”

  “This is from Geeple, right?” Even Jamshed, who was unable to connect to America and the EU through the Internet, had heard of the online tabloid Geeple. That was because the Japanese service Meteor News occasionally pointed out Geeple’s mistakes in their paid newsletter. The subscription fee of two euros a month was a lot for Jamshed, but he was grateful to have access to the service, as it provided glimpses of the outside world.

  “I know this site is full of hoaxes, but it all depends on the article. This one seems legit. There’s even an illustration to go with it. Have you heard of the Rod from God? It’s an orbital weapon that uses connected energy to smash a token project into the Earth.”

  Jamshed skimmed through. The article was filled with hyperbole and text in all caps, so he could kind of understand Alef’s mistakes, but still … “Hey, Alef. I know this article might be a tough read, but it says the weapon drops tungsten projectiles on the Earth with kinetic energy.”

  “Oh. What does that mean?”

  Jamshed sighed. “To put it plainly, all it says is ‘drop a metal rod from orbit onto the Earth using gravity.’ ”

  “Wow, that’s amaz—”

  “Sure, but hold on,” Jamshed interrupted, trying to think how he was going to explain this to his friend, whose major was law, so that he would actually understand.

  “Smacking an orbital object into the Earth is much harder than you’d imagine.” Jamshed flipped to a fresh page on the drafting board and drew two concentric circles. On the outer circle he also drew an arrow.

  “The inner circle is Earth, and the outer circle is the orbit followed by satellites. Got it?”

  Alef, hand to his chin, nodded.

  “Satellites with the altitude, for example, of the International Space Station fly at a velocity of 7.7 kilometers per second.” Jamshed added an X to the outer circle and wrote 7.7 km/s. “Now imagine we were to release a metal rod here. What do you think would happen?”

  “It would fall to Earth.”

  “Nope. The inertial motion of 7.7 km/s isn’t going to just disappear. It would keep flying along the same orbit.” Jamshed drew a curving line from the X along the outside of the outer circle and added another arrow.

  “The only way to make it fall to Earth is to whack it in the opposite direction.” Jamshed added a short arrow above the X going in the opposite direction of the previous one.

  “When disposing of satellites, rev
erse thrust is used in this way to bring them down to a lower orbit, where they come in contact with the atmosphere and burn up.” Jamshed drew a straight line from the X toward the perimeter of the inner circle, the surface of the Earth. “To do something like what’s described in that article, you would have to eliminate the weapon’s orbital velocity all at once. But you’ve got no brakes or anything like that to work with. The only way is to accelerate against the direction of motion.”

  “So you’d need something like a rocket engine, I guess.”

  “Exactly. And there would have to be fuel in the engine. So say we wanted to knock ten tons of metal from the altitude of the ISS on a course directly perpendicular to the ground. Well, the gravitational acceleration is a bit small, but if we were the SAFIR’s engine …” Jamshed wrote 10exp(7700/350/8.7) on the margin of a piece of paper. He was using the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. Formulated more than one hundred years ago in 1898, the equation remained valid even today, obeyed by all rockets that flew by expulsion of propellants. Jamshed tapped on a scientific calculator with the numbers worn off and completed his calculation.

  “It looks like one hundred … and twenty-five tons of fuel would be required. Keep in mind this is an extreme example.”

  “One hundred twenty-five tons to drop ten tons …”

  “And to get that up into orbit, you would need an immense amount of fuel as well. Just to put it in perspective, the object we used SAFIR 3 to send up only weighed 100 kg.”

  Alef looked back and forth between Jamshed’s face and the numbers at his fingertips, his mouth agape.

  “You didn’t get your PhD with only pencil and paper for nothing.”

  “Are you being sarcastic?”

  Alef opened his eyes wide, looked up at the ceiling, and clicked his tongue. A gesture that meant “no.”

  “Fine, whatever. You’re right that no one does calculations like these in their head these days. But paper and a calculator”—Jamshed crumpled up the piece of paper with the circles on it and threw it in the garbage bin—“are the only tools I’ve got. Only the students working on the SAFIR get computers.”