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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Failure Cascade
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My dad was a failed spy, who became a lousy spymaster, who eventually found his way to failed Vice Presidential candidate. I was a failure in school so I got into ROTC, and to keep me from fatal failure in Afghanistan, dad got me time guarding the Gulf of Mexico from a boat. But I was a failure at that, too, so I got involved in some of the family’s businesses, and failed there, as well. But my daddy wanted me to be less of a failure than him- to at least fail at trying to be President, so he used the clout he had left to get me a slot in the space program.
Of course, the space program hasn’t been the same since they retired the Shuttle. The Russians promised to keep the Soyuz open to us, but then there was a fracas in some former Soviet Bloc country or another and we sided against them, and they told us exactly where we could stick their rocket. Our replacement, Orion, got scuttled because it was used by Republicans as an example of Democrat overspending, so neither party could justify keeping it alive. So we spent more than the cost of Orion on a space elevator, instead, and since neither party wanted to be the ones who abandoned space to the Russians, everyone kept their mouths shut about it this time. It wasn’t an elevator in the traditional sense (the fact that I remembered an elevator in the traditional sense meant I was older- by far- than my fellow astronauts), but a long tower built from carbon nanotubes, basically artificial diamond rope, that could carry several times more weight for its mass than any metal. The tether, as it was called, wasn’t rigid, but was held in place by the pull of the space station at the end, like how a morning star’s chain is kept taught by of the weight of the flail. And you didn’t ride in a car attached to a cable, but in a climber (though most people called them widowspiders- because of how they looked and how many people they’d killed before they got the bugs all out of them). Daddy must have had more juice than I realized, because I wasn’t just on the mission- I was mission commander. Of course, most of the others were scientists- only me and Bill were real airmen, and even though he was more experienced, I got the feeling that something had happened with him a long time ago, something nobody wanted to talk about that kept him from the job. The red lights of the alert system began to flash, and I knew what it meant; I’d been reading my manual all day before we left, trying to make sure I kept all my procedures in mind. The alarm meant we were entering the inner Van Allen belt, and the climber was about to be pelted with radiation. I got onto the intercom and hesitated a moment to collect myself before I spoke, “We’re approaching inner VA. All crew report to your seats.” There were fourteen of us, and I did a headcount to be sure, though we didn’t really need to, since they’d only bolted in enough seats for the crew, and they were all filled. To shield us from the radiation, the crew compartment was in the middle of the storage bay, lined with all of the supplies that were coming with us up to the station. Everyone was buckled into their seats; half of them had been up before, and those that hadn’t seemed to be talking to the ones with experience to calm their nerves, and for a moment I worried I didn’t have the authority to say what I should, “It’s going to be fine, people. Strictly routine.” As if to contradict me, there was a loud squeal, like what I’d imagined banshees sounded like when my mother first told me about them at Halloween when I was nine. The climber shook, first like it was being buffeted by the wind, then as if we should have bought tickets for the ride. There was a crunch, and we all froze, because it wasn’t the metallic sound of a damaged climber we’d all prepared to respond to- this was harder, harsher, like the sound rocks make when you’re a kid and bash them together, only amplified a hundred times. We waited, two words on the tips of our tongues; we knew it was probably fiction, but one whose possibility was too terrifying to ignore, the possibility that the snapping of nanotubes, firing diamond shrapnel faster than rifle rounds off in all directions, would domino up the length of the tether in a destructive chain-reaction known as a failure cascade. It was a moment before I realized that the climber had stopped, and another moment before I was certain that another break wasn’t pending. The red warning LEDs flicked green, and I tapped into the control console to retrieve the incoming message. Diane and Nathan shared a look from their seats a row apart, only the moment he realized it he looked away, and when she remembered why, so did she, turning red and looking sad. I remembered an inkling from training, where I thought they’d been seeing each other, until a few weeks later when Nathan got engaged to one of the ground engineers instead. I put it out of my mind, there were things that needed me. I read the message onscreen from Mission Control, and spoke loud, clear. “Spider’s finished examining the damage. It’s more than our climber can fix on its own, they’ll have to send up something more specialized in our wake. They’re pretty sure, you know, 90th percentile, that if we keep going up the elevator will hold just fine. Of course, in that small window of error, there’s the possibility of catastrophic failure and horrible reentry death. Since it’s our safety in the balance, it’s our call: so do we act like astronauts and fly by the seat of our jumpsuits, or do we pull the chute and give up this chance to live in the sky?” Damn.- I hadn’t meant to bias it like that, but after all these were astronauts, and for some of us, maybe all of us, this might have been our one and only chance at leaving orbit, and- I hadn't finished berating myself by the time everyone had pointed towards the sky. I pressed the send button on the radio, “Mission Control, we're going up.” There was a brief pause, just the slightest hesitation as the laser signal relayed from our geosynched satellite, then theirs back to us. “Copy, you are go for climb.” A cheer went through the crew as the widowspider resumed its ascent. But there was something gnawing at me, and I didn't know why, but I looked to Diane, and there was a cloud over her. She noticed me looking in her direction, and her eyes became wide; I flashed a modest smile and nodded, and she seemed to relax. After a while, the red light flicked off. “That’s the safe zone, people, from one and a half to three radii, between Van Allens. If you want something to eat, drink, need to use the restroom with some privacy, to take a nap not in a flight chair- now's your last opportunity until we reach the station.” There was a moment before anybody moved, then Bill unbuckled and strode off, and he caused a cascade of movement as the rest followed suit. I remained in my seat behind the console, staring absently at the three dimensional scan of the damaged tether section, the widowspider's control computer occasionally highlighting fractures and breaks, beeping out a simple child's lullaby of restrained complaint. Then I kicked out of my seat, filled with a purpose I couldn't describe, but I knew I had to get closer to the tether, as close as possible. I went down to the maintenance mezzanine between decks. There was an eerie sense of deja vu; the trainer in Houston was precisely, down to weird splotches of paint on the door (code from a previous and unknowable regime) the same. I ducked my way through pipes and over vents, stepped cautiously over grates whose blackness extended beyond the dim utility lighting. I didn't know what I was looking for, or even if I could find (or recognize) it if I were able to stumble on it. And I almost stepped on it. It was a little thing, a child's music box, placed in just the right way over one of the vents that its shriek had wailed through the climber, resonating at exactly the right frequency to disrupt the broken nanotubes. If it had been on an even remotely smaller section of the tower, it could have snapped it entirely. Attached to its side was a small Geiger counter. The Van Allen radiation had set it off. I swallowed hard, and weighed my options for a moment. It was possible the device had internal explosives; anyone willing to use such sophisticated sabotage perhaps wasn't above more conventional methods. What was worse, the widowspider had been swept by security teams before we left, and cleared, which meant the only people who had even had access to the mezzanine was the crew: my fellow astronauts. A shiver went through my spine, thinking of what one of those eggheads could have constructed, hooked to a simple mercury switch so it went off the moment it was touched. I thought it would be foolish to pick it up, that I had to have more time yet to examine it, and That's when the red LEDs began to flash again, and before I had a moment to think it over, I'd picked up the music box and I was running back for the crew compartment. I stopped at the first console I came to, and sent the intercom message “Outer Van Allen, everyone back in their seats,” and I knew the excitement was heavy in my throat. When I’d reached our compartment I stopped, forced my heart to beat a little slower, forced my legs to walk with purpose, my face to let all of its tension go, and walked inside. I let the sensations of the room engulf me, not paying attention to any one person, not focusing on anything, but trying to let it all reach my senses unfiltered. I held the music box in my hands as if it were nothing at all, because I knew to most people it would be nothing but a moment’s curiosity. And then I felt them, eyes on me, angry and terrified in the same instant, and I let my eyes focus, then, panning across the room, until I saw the eyes staring at me, now glaring, for a moment, before she realized I’d looked back at her. I set the music box down on the ground where I’d been standing, then said, loudly, “Everybody buckle in. The outer belt’s where things could get interesting.” I waited, until all the crew members were in their seats, most of them looking at me expectantly. Most of them had noticed the box by now, and were peering quizzically at it. But one person was refusing now to look at it, her eyes occasionally darting to me to see if she was still being noticed. I flashed Diane the same smile from earlier, and her mouth dropped open, and she started to shake, before she balled her fists and forced herself to stop and pushed a terse return smile onto her face. “Okay, I want everyone to remain calm.” I paused, just long enough for the thought to sink in, but not enough time for people to start worrying why I needed them to remain calm. “We have a saboteur. The high-pitched wail, the damage to the tower, both came from this. It was meant to be set off by the higher radiation of the second Van Allen belt, a point where the tether was at its weakest, and at a point where we were high enough to float off into space.” And as I said it out loud, as I watched the effect it all had on Diane, and the mournful way she occasionally looked at Nathan, I understood why. “She wasn’t trying to kill us- not directly. Nate, I hate to air people’s laundry here, but I’m afraid yours is a little too dirty to ignore.” Diane went rigid, afraid to look around, because she knew I was close- too close. “You had a, fling or whatever with Diane, and when you ended it, whatever it was, well, she knew that fiancé of yours is on Earth, and I think she thought if she could just have you alone, keep you away from her, she could rekindle whatever” Nathan started to unbuckle his belt; he wanted to stand, and defend Diane, maybe defend himself and his own part in it, but that wasn’t why I’d stopped talking. Goddamn me, I knew she’d snuck the music box on board, for all intents and purposes a bomb under these circumstances, I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought she might have brought a gun, too. It was made of ceramics and plastics. I knew the weapon; it was the kind of gun we’d kept on the space station since one of the Russians killed one of the Italians over a Chinese woman a couple of years ago; the Indian commander tried to separate them, and got his throat half-slit, almost by accident, and the rest of the crew had to watch as the Italian crew member was suffocated because they were busy trying to keep their commander from bleeding out in zero gravity. But I was distracted, and the history, the preparation, ran past me in an instant. The gun used pressurized gas and a lead-tipped ceramic slug that was meant to penetrate and then shatter; since each round had to have enough pressurized gas to accelerate to subsonic speed, it only held three shots, though some models only had one or two. She was far enough away and her hands were small enough that I couldn’t be sure which variant she had. She was pointing it right at my heart. “It could have been perfect,” she said, and for the first time I realized she was sobbing. She looked to Nathan, who instinctively half-raised his hands, even though she kept the weapon trained on me, and repeated, more quietly this time, “It could have been perfect.” “It doesn’t have to end like this,” I said, and I immediately regretted it, because her eyes, no longer mournful, flicked back to me. “Shut up.” She said. “You ruined this. Ruined everything.” My chest got tight, and I knew what was about to happen, and before I could stop myself my eyes shut. The sound of it was actually very light and soft- just gas escaping at a high velocity, which was nothing to the concussive bang of powder. The ceramic bullet seemed to have the same softness, and it felt like someone flicking my chest with a finger, like my mom had done when George and I fought as kids. And an instant later the pain came, as a hundred different cuts inside my chest all opened at once, and it was like a choir’s crescendo, a blinding moment, like the beauty of light coming in through a stained glass window as the swell of their song peaked- only the religious experience was pain, and I felt for a moment like I was being crucified from the inside out. I was only vaguely aware of hitting the ground, and the extra pain that came with that as the impact hammered the ceramic shrapnel deeper into my wounds. My eyes were open, though it took me a moment to realize it. The crew reacted quickly, dividing neatly into two groups that had either come to my aid or attacked Diane, as if there’d been a plan all along and this was just its next step- but I knew that was just the kind of thing that came from training vigorously with the same unit for as long as we had. And I found myself laughing inside my own head (though I certainly couldn’t have done it physically): the first thing I’d done well, first job I’d done right- and I’d fucked it up anyway. I saved lives, and I got to die a hero, but… I became vaguely aware that the medical officer and a few of the nonmedical doctors were talking around my body. A few of them, a growing majority, it sounded like, wanted to cut the climber loose, abort the mission. The medical officer wasn’t really arguing against it- she just knew that I was dead either way, sometime in the next few minutes. I wouldn’t live long enough to splash down, let alone make it to a hospital advanced enough to save me- and even that was a pretty big if. The problem was they seemed to like me; it had always been my better feature, I knew, being liked. It came so much more naturally than being competent. None of them wanted me to die, especially when there was something, some gesture that could at least absolve them of their guilt. I sat up, and realized how much I’d been dissociating the pain; dozens of little razors with purchase in my chest slashed new holes in my flesh as I did, and I winced, and shuddered as I tried to keep myself from throwing up. I grabbed the nearest doctor, and I didn’t know who it was until I saw our geologist, his little mousy face suddenly horrified to be held so close to me. “Keep climbing. I’ve been killed for this mission, and you damn sure aren’t aborting on me.” I let go of him and all but passed out; my body went numb, and limp, and I smacked onto the floor hard enough that for a moment the pain in my head outstripped the pain in my chest, but with every beat of my heart the chest pain grew, and grew, until it was almost everything, and then I felt myself floating away from it, and I became aware of my surroundings as if I no longer had a body of my own. Bill, my second, came over. Diane was unconscious, buckled into her seat, restrained with some cords. “What’s the word?” he asked, not sounding hopeful. The geologist, Marvin, Mortenson, something with an M and an N that I knew and couldn’t grasp, turned to him, afraid to be the one to tell him, but sat up straight anyway, realizing at that moment he was still an astronaut, and trying for all he could to live to that, “He wants us to keep going, sir.” Bill paused, giving me a moment of silence in his own head, and then turned to the crew. “You heard him. Everyone who’s not attending to the commander get back in your seats. We’ve still got work to do.” I realized then how tired I was, not just in my body, that was no longer moving save for the dull palpitating of my heart, the slow and staggering breaths that stopped and started around sharp pain as they went. I was so tired, in my eyes, and they rolled shut, and so tired in my own mind, I felt that if I could only stop thinking for a moment, just rest my head for a minute or two, everything would be just all right… |
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