John Barnes - Mother of Storms

The new priorities go out four seconds later to the individual engineers. The engineer for Hawaii is still asleep while his software receives the new orders, checks through the list of places he inspects, and sends out a notice of early inspection to NAOS, the corporation that operates the new Kingman Reef Heavy Launch Facility.

The notice of an early inspection is thus the first thing seen at breakfast by Kingman’s two heads. Akiri Crandall, chief of general operations, who is overseeing both the remaining construction and the daily operations, is exasperated; not for the first time, he wishes he were back in the Navy with his old destroyer command. The inspector will be climbing all over the station for a full day, and wherever he goes, all work will cease, and rumors will fly.

Gunnar Redalsen, chief of launch operations, was already in a bad mood; lately he gets up in bad moods. The Monster is the biggest rocket ever to fly, the first test launch is just three months away and already they’re ten days behind schedule, and the last thing he needs is another delay.

Crandall and Redalsen don’t get along, which is unfortunate, and they are known not to get along, which is worse. Within three hours of the day shift beginning, partisans of each side are constructing rumors in which the early inspection is somehow the fault of the other, and petty sniping and harassment are beginning to fly between launch ops and general ops. By lunchtime, Crandall and Redalsen find they have to hold a “peace conference” (for a “war” neither of them was fighting) and order people to cut the crap and get back to work.

All afternoon, those people who are inclined to nurse slights and injuries do, and by evening there are marital spats, upset children, and many people going to bed a little angry.

During the whole long day, the Pacific rolls on outside as it has for thousands of years, but because fine clear warm weather is so normal, and going outside the station so rare, no one pays much attention except a few sunbathers who have the day off. Waves roll in over the western horizon, splash up the sides of the concrete pillars, and roll out over the eastern horizon; with the tides, the water rises a little on the sides of the station, and sinks a little, and that is all. As night falls, the stars in their thousands come out to dance, but no one sees them.

Inside, Crandall tosses and turns, trying to get to sleep. He knows the inspection is going to upset Redalsen and there will be more trouble. The Monster, now bobbing quietly by its launch tower, not to be fueled for months yet, will get off on time—Redalsen will see to that—but Crandall knows there are going to be a lot more squabbles.

Redalsen falls asleep wondering why Crandall doesn’t understand that the point of a launch facility is to launch things.

After he talks to his brother, Jesse Callare leans back in the zipline compartment and considers. Becoming an influential activist on campus is not likely to work. Besides, it will be months until Naomi gets back, and then she’ll have to notice him, and notice he has changed, and—well, it would all just take too long, is the problem. On the other hand, he doesn’t think she’ll appreciate it if he just follows her to Tehuantepec.

But he is an engineering student. And TechsMex, the group that sends engineers and interns south to teach, always has openings. Going to Tehuantepec might be a bit overt, but he can go somewhere in the same part of the country—

He dials up TechsMex and scans the openings. Not as easy as he’d thought—there are ten jobs he could do but most are in Ciudad de Mexico or farther north….

The only one that is in the far south, anywhere near Tehuantepec—and “near” is very much a relative term—is tutoring preengineering students at a comunity college in Tapachula, almost at the Guatemalan border. Even by air, that’s 220 miles to Tehuantepec, and there’s no zipline that far south yet.

But another part of his mind points out that he could be down near the equator, doing something valuable in a quiet little border town… and he won’t have to see any of his old friends. Running away after a flopped love affair may be something a character in a book would do, but one reason they might do it is that it might work.

He decides to decide that night. Meanwhile, there’s at least a chance to catch up on the news. For the hell of it, he decides to do something trashy, and he pulls out the scalpnet for his phone and plugs into XV, deliberately choosing a real lowbrow channel. He’s just in time to get to be Rock, and get it into Synthi Venture (he used to love to do that as a teenager) one more time before she goes off on vacation. It’s great, especially once he sets it to pulse back and forth between her and him; there’s so much passion and violence in the ecstasy of the intercourse that when it’s finally over, Jesse can’t help thinking that the Christian XV guys have a point when they say that if the Diem Act were strictly enforced, Doug Llewellyn, the president of Passionet, would long since have gone to the chair.

The doors open at Tucson Station and the zipline wishes Jesse a pleasant day. He shoulders up his pack and walks back into the bright sunlight. It’s hours until the party tonight, hours until he can do anything effective. Maybe he’ll study.

Berlina Jameson has been enjoying breakfast, partly because she hasn’t been paying for it and mainly because she is having company. Haynes Lamborghini, the New York Times textchannel reporter, has taken her to breakfast because today is to be his last day in Barrow, and they’ve gotten to be friends.

“So do the ‘nobody will talk to me’ story,” he says. “And start thinking about distribution if you haven’t already. You’ve got most of the video footage there is. Just from a standpoint of history, that’s too important to let it rot someplace, or to wait until it’s in an archive.”

“I thought you text guys didn’t like video.”

“Beats hell out of XV,” Lamborghini says. He takes another gulp of coffee. “Boy, one thing I won’t miss is the coffee here. They compensate for the lack of flavor by watering it down. The thing is, Berlina, the camera is not objective, and TV may be for people who can’t read, but it’s still light-years ahead of XV. At least you know what happened in front of the camera and at least people have their own feelings about it instead of having the reporter’s. And potentially a lot more people could access your work than mine, so there will be a few people with an objective view.”

“But a view of what?” Berlina says. “Everyone I talk to here is determined to tell me there’s no story. I’ve burned up most of my long-distance budget on calls to Washington and no one will talk there either.”

Lamborghini raises his hands, palms up, as if he were a magician turning her into a fairy princess. “But you have all that footage of people saying there’s no story. And you have a bunch of contradictory statements about why there isn’t, and enough outside testimony to make it clear that there probably is a story. That’s all you need. ‘Why aren’t they telling the truth?’ is the phrase that’s sold more news than anything else. Kid, you’re home free. Just put the story together into one documentary and distribute it.”

Berlina nods. “I guess I’ll try,” she says. The conversation goes on to other matters.

When she gets back to the Motel Two and starts to check her mail, she finds the usual things—a mass of short phone calls from various offices saying they have no statements, junk mail, notices that she’s getting close to the end of the line she lives on. The datarodents haven’t reported much except the usual stuff—there’s one obnoxious one out there that flags every weather report for her, and she hasn’t been able to track it down and kill it—