Hartle growled. ‘Geopolitics. Just to prove their balls are as big as ours.’
‘Space as the symbolic arena. Well, I guess you’re right. But they hardly need symbols, Al. China’s GDP passed ours years ago.’
‘I know. That, and this woman in orbit, and this damn Shuttle crash, have sent us all into a fucking panic. I tell you, it’s like Sputnik all over again. And look what came out of the dumb decisions that were made when Sputnik went up. Apollo. Holy shit. A disaster that has reverberated for fifty years.’ He eyed Hadamard. ‘So you still throwing money down the john for another Shuttle?’
Hadamard laughed. ‘I’ll tell you all about it when you tell me about your Black Horse program, Al.’
Hartle grunted, and took a deep slug of his bourbon. ‘And your space cadets haven’t responded to our L5 proposal yet.’
The L5 proposal was the Air Force’s official recommendation on what to do with the left-over Shuttle and Station technology. The Station should be completed, and converted to a surveillance station – maybe even some kind of weapons-bearing battle station – and towed out to L5, the stable Lagrangian point two hundred and forty thousand miles from Earth, at the third corner of a triangle including Earth and Moon.
Hartle stabbed a finger at Hadamard’s chest. ‘You heard the case. It’s the new heartland of space. Circumterrestrial space encapsulates Earth to an altitude of fifty thousand miles. Who rules circumterrestrial space commands Earth; who rules the Moon commands circumterrestrial space; who rules L4 and L5 commands the Earth-Moon system.’
Hadamard sipped his drink. ‘Maybe you’re right, Al. But –’
‘The Red Chinese,’ Hartle hissed. ‘The Red Chinese. Those bastards think this is going to be their century. They’re making expansionist noises all over, impacting ten countries, from Taiwan to Russian East Asia to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea … Christ, even the Australians are worried.’
Hadamard murmured, ‘Is it really so bad? Our weaponry is still so far ahead of theirs that we can contain them for a long time to come. And –’
But Hartle wasn’t listening. ‘If we don’t take Lagrange soon, we’ll find the damn Red Chinese up there waiting for us. And then we’ll have lost, Hadamard. We’ll be paying tribute to the bastards for the rest of time. Just like the days of the Qing Dynasty. Read your history, boy.’ He approached Hadamard, and thrust forward his hawk-like face, weathered by altitude and desert sun, and that inner anger burst to the surface. ‘Listen to me,’ he said, his voice a thick rasp. ‘I know some of those assholes in the NASA centers are putting forward dumb-ass schemes about leveraging this Chinese-in-space stuff into some big new Flash Gordon adventure in space. They want to start the whole damn thing over again. But that’s bullshit. You hear me? You try to fly any such damn thing and we will shoot you down, boy.’
He backed off, fixing Hadamard with a final glare, and stalked off into the crowd.
Good grief, Hadamard thought. He found himself trembling. He took a slug of his own drink, to regain his composure.
What anger. But we’re not at war, he thought, cowed by Hartle’s intensity. For all his political antennae, he couldn’t tell if Hartle’s anger was representative of the thinking inside the closed doors of the military, or if Hartle was some kind of ageing maverick, frustrated because he was unable to get his case accepted.
In fact Hadamard still had to make his decision, about disposing of the Shuttle assets.
Nobody wanted to go back to a regular flight schedule with the three remaining orbiters – the cumulative risk was just unacceptable – but some kind of one-off mission was still plausible, politically. And besides, he was still waiting for Benacerraf’s recommendation.
Anyhow, Hartle was threatening the wrong guy. Hadamard was no space buff. He was interested, he told himself, solely in managing budgets; if NASA never flew more than another July 4 skyrocket he could care less.
… But, oddly, against his expectations, he found himself leaning more towards proposals like the ones coming out of Marshall, about fantastic jaunts to the Moon or Mars or Venus, rather than building some monstrous Buck Rogers space battle station in the sky.
He couldn’t get the image of the crashing orbiter out of his head, the idea of the grizzled old Moonwalker at the controls to the last.
He found Paula Benacerraf, who was here with her daughter, and a kid: a boy, who looked bored and restless. Maybe he needed a pee, Hadamard thought sourly. On the daughter’s cheek was an image-tattoo that was tuned to black; on her colourless dress she wore a simple, old-fashioned button-badge that said, mysteriously, ‘NED’.
Hadamard grunted. ‘I’ve seen a few of those blacked-out tattoos. I thought it was some kind of comms problem –’
Jackie Benacerraf shook her head. ‘It’s a mute protest.’
‘At what?’
‘At shutting down the net.’
‘Oh. Right.’ Oh, Christ, he thought. She was talking about the Communications Decency Act, which had been extended during the winter. With a flurry of publicity about paedophiles and neo-Nazis and bomb-makers, the police had shut down and prosecuted any net service provider who could be shown to have passed on any of the material that fell outside the provisions of the Act. And that was almost all of them.
‘I was never much of a net user,’ Hadamard admitted.
‘Just to get you up to date,’ Jackie Benacerraf said sourly, ‘we now have one licensed service provider, which is Disney-Coke, and all net access software has built-in censorship filters. We’re just like China now, where everything goes through the official news agency, Xinhua; that poor space kid must feel right at home.’
Benacerraf raised an eyebrow at him. ‘She’s a journalist. Jackie takes these things seriously.’
Jackie scowled. ‘Wouldn’t you, if your career had just been fucked over?’
Hadamard shrugged; he didn’t have strong opinions.
The comprehensive net shutdown had been necessary because the tech-heads who loved all that stuff had proven too damn smart at getting around any reasonable restriction put in place. Like putting encoded messages of race-hate and smut into graphics files, for instance: that had meant banning all graphics and sound files, and the World Wide Web had just withered. He knew there had been some squealing among genuine discussion groups on the net, and academics and researchers who suddenly found their access to online libraries shut down, and businesses who were no longer allowed to send secure encrypted messages, and … But screw it. To Hadamard, the net had been just a big conduit of bullshit; everyone was better off without it.
Jackie was still droning on, in the sanctimonious way that might have been patented by serious young people. ‘This is the greatest reverse in free access to information since Gutenberg. The net was never meant to be sanitized and controlled. The shutdown will hit technological development, education, jobs …’
Hadamard was quickly bored. His glance was caught again by Jackie’s button-badge – which sat, he couldn’t help notice, over her breast, which was small and firm. Her little boy clung to her leg.
‘NED. Who’s that, a rock star?’
