Michael Kube-McDowell - The Quiet Pools

At Prainha, the incredible guy-and-column mountain of the launch tower rose nearly four kilometers above the river plateau. The tower was the unchallenged centerpiece of the Para. At night, its fairy-castle lights were visible from Macapa and Belem, and even from ships in the Atlantic off the coast of the Ilha de Marajo. The nearest natural feature that could compare with it was half a continent away.

The aperture of Kasigau’s launch tower stood as far above sea level as Prainha’s, above as much energy-stealing atmosphere. But it stood not on river plateau, but atop Kasigau Rock, a small round-topped mountain. Consequently, the tower’s central beam tube was half the height, and the shrunken fairy castle clung to the contours of the mount like a great spindly-legged insect which had paused there in its wanderings.

And if that were not enough to diminish it, there was Kilimanjaro, its dramatic volcanic profile rising from the Masai Steppe to the west. Inbound to Kasigau, the Celestron slicing down through the high thin air, Dryke had been gifted with a long look at Kilimanjaro’s steep western face and rugged snowcapped summit. Against that memory, the Kasigau cannon looked like the unfinished skeleton of a mountain, a child’s backyard imitation of the real thing.

“That’s one heck of a scenic outlook you folks built for yourselves,” he said to the air controller.

“Only view of Kilimanjaro anywhere in the nyika ,” came the answer. “Four thousand meters up and not a cloud in sight. Not that anyone ever gets to enjoy it, except the tube monkeys and mirror mechs.”

Dryke understood. For Kasigau was strictly freight, its ten-gigawatt compound laser array hurling a steady procession of pilotless T-3 capsules on one-way journeys into orbit. No pilots’ colony, no astronaut union or joybirds here. Kasigau belonged to the working class, to the high-energy laser techs and the mirror mechanics, the loaders and launch bosses of the self-named “HELcrews.” The complex mechanical ballet they performed, sending a fully loaded T-3 skyward every twenty-two minutes, day and night, was the only show in town.

One launch every twenty-two minutes. Almost three per hour. Sixty-five a day, lifting thirteen hundred tonnes of electrochemicals, microphysics, and human consumables from ground to orbit. But even at that pace, Kasigau was running at less than fifty percent of design capacity. Prainha was regularly topping ninety launches a day, with an amazing peak record of one hundred twenty-two.

Most of the difference was infrastructure. Prainha was thirty-five years old, mature, settled. Kasigau was just thirteen years old, gangly and growing. The airways, roadways, railways, and seaways which fed it were still unequal to the task of supporting Kasigau’s design capacity. Especially the seaways. Even with the recent upgrade of the railhead and freight handling, the port at Mombasa was overwhelmed.

The transshipment bottleneck was not, at heart, a security problem. But Site Director Yvonne Havens was looking to Dryke for a solution all the same. What Havens wanted was to stream-line the cargo security procedures enough to boost the schedule to eighty or more cycles a day. To Dryke’s annoyance, Sasaki had endorsed the request, obliging Dryke to come to Kenya and study the options.

“Most of the company’s reserve launch capacity is there, at Kasigau,” Sasaki had reminded him. “The long-term solution is here, with the new launcher proposed for Almeirim. But the company can’t justify the capital investment in a third spaceport under present conditions. So we must look at Kasigau. A single additional lift a day means another seven thousand metric tons a year. We can use the capacity, especially since the mix here must shift toward passengers when we begin ferrying colonists to Memphis .”

Havens was a plump fast-talking black woman who wore the wound-wire bracelets and patterned cheek scars of the Rendille, the most popular of Kenya’s revival tribalisms. Using her smile as a commentary, she underlined Sasaki’s point while she and Dryke toured the spaceport together.

“Kasigau is insurance—leverage,” she said as they walked through the cargo assembly center. “We’re what keeps the Brazilians from jacking the transshipment taxes on Prainha. We’re what helps keep the can drivers in line. We could fly T-2s out of here with no one at the stick, and they know it. But it’s all a bluff if we can’t run at capacity.”

“If you compromise security and have to close down for a few months because of a hit, you won’t even have a bluff.”

“I don’t want our security compromised,” she said, smiling. “I want it factored out of the traffic stream.”

The conversation continued in the skimmer. “I looked at your incident log before I came here,” Dryke said. “The cargo inspectors stopped a half dozen bombs and booby traps in the last six months. Your perimeter defense smothered a shoulder SAM and two planes so far this year.”

“I’m very proud of our security team. Homeworld hasn’t touched us.”

“Homeworld hasn’t tried. All you’ve seen so far are amateurs. Shiftas . Bandits.”

“Amateurs do not own shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles,” she said stiffly.

“Anyone can own one, if they’ve got a hundred thousand dollars and a contact in Chile or South Africa,” Dryke said. “And besides, only an amateur would try to use a shoulder SAM against a T-ship. You’ve got ten gigawatts of laser energy to play with and a mirror system up in the castle that can split a dozen secondary beams off the main beam. Anything that gets within a thousand meters of a capsule on the beam is going to be fried. I’m not worried about someone shooting down a T-ship. It’s a surprise package in the cargo that worries me.”

They had reached the operations center entrance, but Havens made no move to leave the skimmer. “It’s a trade-off, Mr. Dryke,” she said, smiling. “I need another hundred tonnes a day. I could use another four hundred. Balance that against a slightly greater risk of an accident—”

“Not an accident. A terrorist hit.”

The smile widened. “You’re not the only one who’s been reading, Mr. Dryke. I’ve looked at your report on Jeremiah and the Homeworld. They’re not terrorists. They’re protesters. They’re playing a public opinion game. They’ve never killed anyone. They’re not going to strike blindly at Kasigau. And you’ve already said they can’t knock down a can. So why are you tying my handlers up in knots?”

“To make sure that Jeremiah isn’t tempted by opportunity.”

“There are no guarantees, Mr. Dryke. Make it difficult for him. That will be enough.”

Dryke frowned. “I won’t know if I can agree with that until I’ve seen more.”

“What do you want to see next?”

“I think Mombasa.”

“We can go there now, if you like.”

“Now is fine,” Dryke said. “But I’ll go by myself, thank you.”

“As you prefer,” she said, cracking the skimmer’s door open. She climbed out, then turned and squatted to peer back inside at Dryke. “Please try to remember, Mr. Dryke—it’s not that we’re reckless. We’re desperate. And that changes the rules sometimes.”

Dryke nodded. “For Jeremiah, too,” he said.

In the choppy waters of Formosa Bay, two hundred kilometers from the fences of Kasigau, a small fishing boat flying the flag of the East African Union rode a sea anchor against a gentle breeze. The nameless craft had made its way up the coast from Zanzibar over the last sixteen hours, running the Pemba Channel under a blazing midday sun and passing Mombasa in the night.

It was rigged and outfitted for anchovy fishing, with fine-mesh purse seines, brails, and buoys. But none of the five men aboard were fishermen.