Charles Sheffield - Starfire

His private office was a disaster. No, a mess. Save disaster for when you really need it. Wet floor, wet walls, wet desktop. Someone had tried to dry the chair seats, but water was still dripping in from above. Nick sat down. His pants seat would dry out, too, as soon as the rain stopped. He called for a readout of waiting messages and mentally assigned them as they appeared to his three standard categories: ignore, assign, answer.

There was one surprise: Celine Tanaka was on her way here, to this building. She had flown low-orbital from Washington, on her way to Tierra del Fuego. Nick noted who was down there: the remnants of fourteen planeloads of American lunatics who had flown in for the particle storm. He automatically thought media opportunity. Celine would be shown talking with the survivors, and she would make some points relevant to her own agenda. Politics was alive and well.

But why was she stopping here, in New Rio? This was far off the great-circle route from Washington to Tierra del Fuego. If it was a question of suitable facilities, a low-orbital landing-and-takeoff facility existed at Punta Arenas, spitting distance across the strait from Celine’s destination.

The red handset on his desk began to blink. Nick glared at it. The dedicated private line. Its buzz was loud and insistent. Damn Gordy Rolfe, he always thought his business was more important than anyone else’s. Nick called down to make sure that Celine would be brought to him the moment she arrived, then picked up the set. Infuriatingly, at the very moment he placed it to his ear the connection went dead.

He could try to call back — but now his main line was active. “Yes?”

“President Tanaka is on the way up to see you.”

“Good. Bring her right in.” He had no idea what she wanted, but he liked Celine. She was one of the world’s few rational people.

Whereas Gordy Rolfe definitely wasn’t. Gordy Rolfe was an arrogant, obsessive little shit. Gordy could wait.

The habitat lighting mimicked surface conditions, a thousand feet above. Now it was night. Gordy could turn on artificial lights anytime he chose, but for the moment he held that in reserve. Sudden brightness might scare away nocturnal hunters, but it was a big might for minisaurs who had caught a whiff of blood. Just as likely, it would attract interest.

Waiting on a call that no one answered was agony, and after thirty seconds Gordy gave up. He would try Nick later, but meanwhile time was too precious to waste. He recalled, with no satisfaction at all, that he was the one who had insisted that neither man have recording devices attached to the private line. To receive Gordy’s call, Nick Lopez had to be in his office. He was, most of the time. But where the devil was he now?

Gordy replaced his hard shoes with soft-soled slippers. He crept across the floor in just enough light to follow the outlines of large objects. It was minutes since he had last heard the snuffling at the barricaded door. That had accompanied a scraping sound, the noise of a pile of furniture and kitchen fixtures shifting on the smooth floor. The minisaur had an advantage. The floor of the chamber was smooth, while anything on the other side had the purchase offered by the soft ground of the habitat.

He waited to make sure that the animal had gone away before he ventured close to the door. What he saw wasn’t too bad. In the room’s unnatural silence, the improvised barricade had sounded like it was collapsing or being pushed clear out of the way. In fact it had moved no more than an inch.

He eased everything back into position. As he was wedging a tilted chair against the handle of the refrigerator door he was struck by another thought. Could he hide inside the refrigerator?

But if he would fit in there, how long could he stay before he suffocated? And how would he know when it was safe to come out?

Not a good choice: death by suffocation, or death as a minisaur’s dinner. But not a choice that he needed to make. He fully expected to be rescued.

All the same, Gordy opened the door of the refrigerator and confirmed that, small as he was, he could not fit inside. He went back to wedging the chair in place. As he did so, he heard new movement beyond the wall. He could smell a musky body odor, mingled with the stench of bad meat.

He sat down, braced himself with his back against the refrigerator, and took out the gray handset. He told himself that he had plenty of time. The minisaurs had learned to be cautious when dealing with humans. They would not attack until they were sure of the situation. Even so, Gordy felt a huge impatience as he waited for the row of red lights to indicate a call going through to its distant destination.

“And what can I do to help you?”

It was so like Celine’s own technique for cutting through visitors’ small talk that she couldn’t help smiling at Nick Lopez.

“I’m not here for favors, Nick. Actually, I’m going to do you one — a doubtful one, and when you hear about it you may decide it isn’t a favor at all.”

The change in the world between the Washington takeoff and the New Rio landing was striking. The first particle wave had arrived, swelled to a peak, and as swiftly subsided to its steady background level. After the gridded sky and beautiful aurora, Washington had become calm and sunny. Here, just a couple of hours later, torrential rain gurgled away from the surface through endless thousands of little black pits that riddled the landscape. Roads, metal covers, the sides of buildings, concrete sidewalks, bare soil — nothing was exempt. The dark pockmarks were everywhere. The room she sat in had a leaky ceiling and a leaky floor, water streaming in and out through openings not much bigger than pinholes. The only unchanged element was Nick Lopez himself. Tall and broad, with water dripping steadily onto his gray pompadour and down his cheeks, he sat on a wet chair as relaxed as if today’s particle storm had never happened.

He listened carefully to Celine’s words and said, “A favor? Then you’re ahead of the pack already. I’m not used to favors. Everybody else who comes to the WPF wants something from me.”

“I want something, too. I want you to keep a secret.”

“That’s a big something. Remember the standard political assumption: anything you say, anywhere and to anybody, is likely to become public knowledge.”

“I know. I can’t ask you to keep what I tell you totally to yourself, because you may need to act. But I’d like you to use extreme caution in deciding who is told.”

Celine summarized her morning conversation with Wilmer Oldfield and Star Vjansander. At the end of it, Lopez was not smiling.

“You believe them?” he said. “Of course you do, or you wouldn’t be here. But they may be wrong. They even told you they may be wrong. But I agree with you, this has to be handled very carefully. Who else knows? Or rather, who else do you know knows?”

“Wilmer. Star. John Hyslop and Maddy Wheatstone, up on Sky City. Me. And now you. Of course, it will spread.”

“Of course it will. There’s no such thing as a secret. What plans have you made?”

“None. What plans can you make to deal with the end of the world?”

“If this homeostasis thing is right, nothing.” Nick flicked water droplets away from his bushy eyebrows. “Hiding a mile deep or ten miles deep won’t do a bit of good if the planet has no oxygen, or if temperatures go up a hundred degrees. I think we stay with the original party line: We’re in for a storm bigger than anything we expected, but Earth will come through it and finally return to normal. We plan for that.”

“That’s exactly what I decided. But I wanted another expert opinion.”

“With something like this, there are no experts.”