Delta-v, page 4
“What about the others?”
“George Burkett’s quieter, more calculating, but he’s been investing billions in space for decades. He’s focused on heavy-lift rockets, rocket reusability, but also building commercial logistics systems in cislunar space to support his Moon-mining aspirations. As the richest man in the world, Burkett’s got the money to pull it off—but he’s taking the slow-but-steady approach.”
“And Halser?”
“Raymond Halser, hotel tycoon. Delivered on space tourism when he built the Hotel LEO from his inflatable hab units in the ISS’s old orbit. However, the strategic investments we made in his inflatable hab technology paid off when we built NASA’s Lunar Gateway. Similar habs are also slated to be components of NASA’s Deep Space Transport. Of all the billionaires, Halser is the only one currently making a significant profit in space.”
“What about that British fella, Morten?”
“Sir Thomas Morten. His company’s technology is suborbital—making it more of a tourist ride than a serious space vehicle. I wouldn’t say that’s in the same league as the other NewSpace Titans.”
“And your Davos friend—the one with that party island?”
“Nathan Joyce. He’s not a traditional aerospace investor, true, but I believe he intends to make significant investments in the NewSpace sector over the next decade.”
“It’s hard to take him seriously when he’s mounting Kickstarter campaigns to finance a manned asteroid-mining operation. Sounds a lot like selling the Brooklyn Bridge to me.”
Staff and folks in the gallery chuckled.
Lisowski shifted in her seat. “NASA likes to encourage risk-takers and dreamers in private industry whenever we can, and hopefully we can coordinate their activity to the benefit of all.” She leaned in to the microphone. “But I wouldn’t underestimate Nathan Joyce, Senator. He’s more serious than most people realize.”
CHAPTER 3
Settling Accounts
DECEMBER 13, 2032
Nathan Joyce stood on a tarmac in an orange flight suit, helmet under one arm, and smiled into the camera. “It’s time humanity stopped flirting with manned deep space exploration and actually got busy doing it—which is why I founded Catalyst Corporation, with the goal of sending a group of exceptional people on a mission to mine a near-Earth asteroid. In fact, I’m willing to match all the funds raised by this Kickstarter campaign to make that happen . . .”
Archival video footage played of an oblong asteroid moving against the background of Earth. “We all remember when the asteroid Apophis missed Earth by just 20,000 miles back in 2029. That showed the threat asteroids pose for humanity. However, these same asteroids also contain the raw materials we need to establish new, space-based industries.”
The video cut to a close-up of Joyce. “Your contribution can help launch the space age we’ve all dreamed about. Pledge now at the two-hundred-dollar level, and you’ll receive this commemorative Catalyst Corporation hoodie with the—”
James Tighe clicked the video off and lowered his phone. He couldn’t help but wonder what he’d gotten himself into. An extended publicity stunt, apparently.
And yet, part of that publicity stunt included Joyce purchasing eighteen seats on Burkett’s and Macy’s commercial launch systems—ostensibly for “in-orbit training.” That meant eighteen people were definitely going into space on Joyce’s dime. Tighe hoped to be one of those people.
He moved through Orlando International Airport among sunburned tourists and checked the instructions again on his phone. Tighe then followed signs for a shuttle to the “general aviation” terminal. This was a smaller, nicer facility with shorter security lines. In just a few minutes he arrived at his gate and checked the time—half past nine in the evening.
He was early, and there was a phone call he had to make that he couldn’t put off any longer. Stepping to the side in the flow of other business travelers, Tighe scrolled through the contacts on his phone, then hesitated a moment before tapping the name.
The line rang a couple of times and then picked up, with the sound of children in the background. “Wow, Jim. Is it really you?” A Wisconsin singsong accent was evident in the voice.
“Yeah, hi, Ted.”
“Merry Christmas. I hope everything’s okay.”
“Everything’s fine. Merry Christmas to you, too.”
“You’re not stuck in some foreign country?”
Tighe had to admit it was a valid concern. “No. I know it’s been a while since I’ve been in touch.”
“So did that documentary thing ever work out, or . . .”
“That’s partly why I’m calling.”
Kids shouted again in the background. An aside: “Quiet, please. Daddy’s on the phone!” Then he was back. “I’d ask where you’ve been all this time, but I’m sure it would take an hour. Where are you, anyways?”
“I’m here in the States. Orlando.”
“You there to dive those limestone caves? What are they called? Cetotes?”
“Cenotes. No, I’m catching a flight out this evening. How are Jill and the kids?”
“Oh, you know. We’re all fine. Jill’s practice is growing. We went to the Caribbean, all of us, last year. Mom, too. One of those Disney cruises.”
“Yeah?”
“It was really something. I posted the pictures on Facebook. I don’t know if you saw them.”
Tighe didn’t have a Facebook account.
“The buffets! Let me tell ya, we just about ate ourselves to death.”
Tighe could already feel the vortex threatening to suck him in. “My mom went? I’m surprised.”
“Oh yeah. She even let Jill pay, if you can believe it. To be with the grandkids.”
Tighe glanced at the time on the flight listings. “So listen, Ted. I want to wire you some money—partial repayment for what I owe.”
There was momentary silence on the other end. Then: “Really?”
“I know it’s been a while.”
“Well . . . yeah. I . . . To be frank I wasn’t thinking—partial payment. So . . . how much would that be, then?”
“Twenty thousand. I have the account number you gave me back when you—”
“The 9360 account?”
Tighe looked at the contact listing on his phone. “Right. Bank of the West.”
“That’s the one. Twenty thousand! Really? An early Christmas present. And you’ll wire it today?”
Tighe’s thumb hovered over his banking app—then clicked “Send.” “I just sent it. You should receive it in the next few minutes.”
“Well, that’s a surprise, Jim.” Then he backed off. “Not . . . I’m not saying—and it’s not the whole amount—especially when you factor in interest. You remember the interest.”
“Fourteen percent.”
“I think that’s right.”
“It is right.”
“Well, that’s really great. I’ll work out the balance and send your new total.” There was shuffling on the other end. “What’s your email address these days?”
Tighe glanced at the clock on the gate listing. “Same, but I don’t check it much.”
“Facebook account or . . .”
“Like I said, I’m headed out of the country—in fact, I’ve got to race to catch my flight.”
“So, is this phone number—?”
“I’ll be unreachable for the next ninety days at least. Just send it to my old email address. I’ll get it.”
“Three months. Wow, where are you off to now?”
“Just another expedition.”
“Okay. Be safe. But hey!”
Tighe almost hung up anyway. But then he lifted the phone to his face again. “Yeah, Ted.”
“You should call your mother. It’s Christmas, and she hasn’t heard from you in a while. You’re still her son. She goes on about it.”
“She doesn’t really want me to call. She wants to tell people that I don’t call.”
“But you don’t call.”
“I don’t know what it would accomplish.”
“We’re family. It doesn’t need to accomplish anything.”
“Look, I’ve got to catch this flight. Tell my mother I said hi. And best to Jill, too.”
“Okay, Jim, if you—”
Tighe hung up and pocketed the phone. He headed toward his gate. In the darkness beyond the tall windows, the nose cone of an unmarked white Boeing 787 loomed—a plane destined for Joyce only knew where.
Just one passenger stood in line ahead of Tighe at check-in, a slim, sharply dressed Asian woman in her thirties. Tighe glanced down at his own faded jeans and T-shirt and wondered if he should have made a better impression. The instructions said clothing would be provided at the destination.
Then it was his turn. He stepped up to a young man in a Joyce Airlines polo shirt at the check-in podium. Nearby, two suited men with earpieces watched Tighe closely. There were several more people—older men and women—in business casual clothes milling about in the waiting area. They kept their eyes on him, too.
The clerk nodded. “Good evening.” He gestured to an iris scanner on the desk. “Please look into the eyepiece with your right eye.”
Joyce’s people had scanned Tighe’s iris and taken blood and fingerprint samples during the contract signing back on Baliceaux. While that had given him pause, the signing bonus helped it go down smoother.
Tighe lowered his head to the scanner.
The clerk watched the display until it chimed, at which point he gestured for Tighe to board the aircraft.
Tighe continued down the jet bridge and was met at the aircraft door by a middle-aged woman, also in Joyce Airlines attire.
She glanced at a handheld tablet computer before smiling. “Mr. Tighe, good evening.”
“Good evening.”
“Please follow me.”
Tighe followed her through the galley section. He noticed the first-class cabin to the left was sealed off by a closed bulkhead door. She brought him past a gauntlet of several more men and women wearing khakis and polo shirts, all of them carrying computer tablets and studying him as he passed.
While she brought him down the nearest of the plane’s two aisles, Tighe glanced at who he presumed were other candidates, all spaced rows apart. The plane was barely a quarter full. Each candidate looked physically fit and in their mid-thirties to mid-forties. In fact, the youngest people on the aircraft seemed to be the staff. The candidates were ethnically diverse, with every skin color and continent of origin in evidence. Likewise, the group seemed evenly split between men and women. It was like a charter flight to a middle-aged Olympic village.
His escort brought him to an unoccupied row, then gestured. “You’re in 21A.”
It should have been a window seat, except for one detail. He looked up and down the cabin. “No windows.” The plane appeared to be a converted air freighter.
She studied him. “Does the lack of windows cause you anxiety?”
Something about the way she said it put Tighe on alert. “No. Not at all.”
“Very well.” She nodded and gestured for him to sit. “Please refrain from speaking with your fellow travelers. It will be a long flight. There will be meal service but no in-flight entertainment, no Internet connection, and no phone service. Hopefully you’ve brought something to keep you occupied. The lavatories are behind you, but again, please refrain from speaking with anyone. Do you have any questions?”
Tighe dropped his bag on the seat next to him. He shook his head. “No. Thanks.”
She departed.
Tighe looked around again and exchanged glances with several other candidates who were doing the same. A South Asian man grimaced as if to say, Pretty strange, eh?
Tighe turned forward again and couldn’t help but notice that tinted surveillance camera domes dotted the center of the ceiling at intervals. He decided to give all the outward appearances of patience.
Eventually the flight staff took their seats, and a voice came in over the speakers to announce their imminent departure and that all passengers had to fasten their seat belts. It felt oddly liberating not to get the obligatory safety speech.
He took a deep breath as the jet’s engines spun up. He had no idea where they were going.
* * *
—
After a half hour or so sitting quietly in flight, Tighe looked over at his bag. He dug through the pockets and produced a small plastic case containing a microSD chip. The case bore the printed label “Tian Xing Exp. Vid.” Joyce’s staff had given it to him. Four terabytes of XHD video—more than two hundred hours in all. He tapped the case nervously with his finger. He’d intended to watch the video over the past weeks, but perhaps he was more traumatized than he thought. Somehow he hadn’t found the time. Yet, he needed to see it, and right now he had nothing but time on his hands.
He slipped on wireless earphones and carefully took the tiny chip out of the container, inserting it into a socket in his phone. A moment later he was navigating thumbnails of video clips.
There were hundreds of numeric file names without any discernible pattern. The file dates didn’t help either, since they’d all been copied at the same time a couple of weeks ago. He peered at the thumbnail image for each one and tried to guess what the file might contain.
Finally, he just sorted them in ascending order by file name, then clicked the first one, an image that appeared to show people surrounding an orange glow.
His phone screen filled with a view of the Tian Xing caving team, mostly men, standing around a campfire in relatively clean orange troglodyte suits, sans helmets, raising large brown bottles of local Chinese beer. Tighe stood arm in arm with Richard Oberhaus, his fifty-something mentor.
It was bittersweet seeing those smiling faces.
Most of the expedition members weren’t cave divers like Tighe, Richard Oberhaus, and Christen Lykke. The other thirteen members were there to establish base camps and rig ropes to descend a thousand meters over kilometers of uneven limestone chambers and passages, all to reach the place where Tighe, Oberhaus, and Lykke could begin their dive—to push forward the map of Tian Xing to places unknown, beyond the 200-meter-deep flooded passages that blocked their way.
The camera now focused on Chang Fu Yuen, a handsome and successful thirty-something businessman from Beijing who had financed the entire expedition as part of his effort to increase Chinese interest in caving, and to prove that China’s karst regions contained the largest and deepest caves in the world.
Chang raised his beer bottle in a toast, speaking in English. “Here’s to the best team of guilos I could assemble.”
Everyone laughed uproariously at this inside joke. Guilo was a mildly derogatory Cantonese term for white people; roughly translated it meant “ghost man.” Chang was referring to overheard comments by his rural countrymen about the cavers. Laughing at the term defused the tension. The fact was, caving was only just becoming accepted by Chinese society at large—as something not entirely insane. Chang wanted to change that, and the team he had assembled included several local up-and-coming cavers, eager to gain experience from veteran cavers from around the world.
But before everyone could raise their bottles, Chang waved them aside. “Not the real toast. The real toast is this . . .” He raised his bottle again. “To caves that go long and that go deep. To caves that go, and to the people that go with them.”
Everyone shouted, “Hear! Hear!” and clanked bottles.
Tighe closed the video.
Chang wound up surviving the expedition—although Tighe knew they would never speak again.
There were hundreds of video files.
Tighe decided to scroll way down the list and noticed a thumbnail that looked dirty brown. He clicked on it.
The video opened with the camera heaving as the wearer panted for breath. It was a view of the ground as it shook and stone cracked. The roar was deafening. Memory of it raised Tighe’s pulse.
Caves were never entirely stable. So being in a cave during an earthquake was hell. With darkness all around and huge boulders falling, the helmet-cam whirred and blurred, indicating panic.
But then the tremor subsided. There was rubble and dust everywhere. Someone—male or female—was screaming unintelligibly in the background.
The wearer of the camera seemed to come to a decision and started pulling at a pile of shattered rock with gloved hands, grunting with the effort. After a while, the rescuer uncovered a still-illuminated LED lamp and pulled more frantically to uncover a body brown with mud and dust. The helmet on the body was crushed sideways, the face difficult to see.
The camera moved in as the rescuer removed a glove and checked for a pulse on the neck.
The wearer of the helmet-cam cursed in Mandarin.
Tighe stopped the video. He put the phone aside for several minutes. But after a while, the need to see what he was searching for was too strong. Tighe picked up the phone and scrolled even further in the file list, clicking a random file.
The video opened on several bloodied and exhausted-looking cavers standing near a chasm several meters across. Lights shined down revealing a 100-meter drop. The helmet cam turned upward again and then pushed through the crowd.
Tighe recognized his own voice, as the wearer of the camera, shouting, “Share light whenever possible. We need to get to Camp 4 before we go dark. Keep moving!”
A nearby voice—Chang’s—said, “What happened to trying for Camp 2?”
“We no longer have time to rebelay. Bolt climbing will take way too long.”
