Fiction River: How to Save the World Read online

  And what the hell was wrong with that?

  Helium-3 fusion, though, would ruin everything, and make those invested trillions worthless. The company itself might fail—unthinkable!—as energy prices tumbled. Oh, any form of fusion was still an expensive proposition; ExEm’s Technology Division estimated that Sunrisearth had already invested thirty billion in its pilot fusion reactor plants in Australia.

  But…good God! At current energy prices, a single space-shuttle load of helium-3 would be worth a staggering two trillion dollars…enough to wipe out the debt already incurred and fund hundreds, perhaps thousands of new plants all over the globe. Enough to vastly expand the mining operations on the moon. Enough to mine and ship all the helium-3 Sunrisearth would need for the foreseeable future.

  Worse, Sunrisearth would be able to offer energy to an energy-thirsty planet at a fraction of the price of oil, and that would mean utter and complete financial disaster.

  The solution was quite simple. Either ExEm had to acquire Sunrisearth and its assets, a takeover that Richard Corbell, its CEO, had so far resisted…or else Sunrisearth’s nuclear program had to be stopped. There would be room for helium-3 fusion in the future, yes…but later, after ExEm’s titanic investments in fracking and other recovery technologies had been amortized, and the company’s continued stability assured. Once that happened, ExEm would be in a good position to slip into fusion in a big way, continuing to provide energy to Earth…and at its usual healthy mark-up.

  A chime sounded. “Mr. Faulkner,” his secretary said, “Mr. Stross to see you.”

  “Thank you, Carol. Send him in.”

  It was time to unlimber the big guns.

  ***

  Resnewski drove the tractor as Pollard guided him up the ramp and onto the track. Behind him, the sled mounting the first in line of the 3He transport tanks slid onto the rail and locked in. “She’s right!” Pollard called. “Pull ’er home!”

  The tank, gleaming white in the sunlight, was a stubby wing shape cast in one piece as a lifting body enclosing a storage canister eighteen meters long and four point six meters wide and deep…just about the same as the cargo bay of the old Space Shuttle. Robotically cast from silica and aluminum foam, it massed only sixteen tons empty, and carried just over 330,000 liters of helium-3 gas. At 59 grams per liter, the tank’s contents massed a total of twenty tons.

  They could have packed more gas into the tank—helium is a hundred times more compressible than water—or they could have cooled it down to four degrees Kelvin and stored it as a liquid, but it was cheaper and simpler to pull off the helium-3 and store it at standard temperature and pressure.

  “Grapples set and locked,” Resnewski called.

  “Right you are, mate. Haul the track out of there and let’s get the AEM connected.”

  The two men had been working almost for eighteen hours, now, with only a short sleep break on board the Sundance. Everything they were doing required brute force, heavy lifting and shoving made somewhat easier by the fact that everything weighed only one-sixth what it would have weighed on Earth. The huge flying wing, for example, with its load of hydrogen gas, massed 36 tons, but here it weighed only six.

  That didn’t make it easy. It still possessed 36 tons of inertia, and could only be jockied around by means of one of the big Mitsubishi surface tractors.

  And now the real heavy labor was about to begin.

  ***

  Faulkner knew ExEm had its work cut out for it on the RM front.

  Twenty years ago, a Daily Telegraph article had called ExEm’s parent company “one of the planet’s most hated corporations, able to determine American foreign policy and the fate of entire nations.” None of that had changed, despite the miracle of recombinant memetics.

  At its most primitive and basic, RM was simply propaganda…information fed into the noosphere to shape human perceptions and attitudes. Advertising was a slightly more sophisticated manifestation, using a jingle, for instance, to encourage people to buy a particular toothpaste or laundry detergent. A particular political catchphrase might lead people to vote for a particular candidate.

  Memes, a term coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, were the cultural equivalent of genes, hypothetical packets of behavioral information that could replicate themselves, passing from human to human or group to group as a unit of cultural transmission. A memeplex was a collection of related memes, such as a specific religion or a political ideology.

  And just as recombinant genetics could create new life forms, recombinant memetics allowed those with the appropriate assets to reshape or even to create whole cultures. Of course, getting the information out there, infecting the noosphere—the sphere of human consciousness—was the real trick. Only recently had RM become a science in is own right, with memeticists shaping the world through social networks and the incredible power of the Internet. A given, carefully tailored meme could be floated in the Internet as a virtual cloud of memebots, designed to replicate and transmit itself from network to network, from human to human, changing how people thought, what they believed, and even how they behaved.

  Obviously, the more emotional punch a given memeplex carried, the more visible it became, and the more minds it would win.

  “We expect the Dynospace expedition to return to Earth within the next three to five days,” Faulkner told Eugene Stross. “And I want you to destroy their spacecraft just as it lands.”

  Stross’ eyes widened. “Destroy it?”

  “I want it to make as big an RM footprint as you can manage.”

  “Oh, it’ll do that, sir. Absolutely.”

  Not many outsiders realized that ExEm had its own military force. Generally, of course, the supermajors could guide national governments to do their bidding.

  In fact, wars were being waged now across the planet, ostensibly over political issues and national interests, but in fact over the control of dying oil fields. Gazprom, controlled primarily by the Russian mafias, was squared off against Royal Dutch Shell and Total S.A. over fracking rights in southeastern Europe. The world’s titan, Saudi Aramco, was pitted against Chevron and ExEm in West Africa. The American supermajors controlled the U.S. Congress and a string of puppet presidents all neatly bought and paid for, and decided where next to send the troops.

  But while government-controlled militaries served corporate interests, there were times when a dedicated military force was necessary. Eugene Stross, former U.S. Army major general and architect of the U.S. intervention in Venezuela ten years before, was now commander of ExEm’s private military forces.

  Stross nodded. “So, you’re not looking for an invasion of Australia, sir.”

  “No. Certainly not. This operation needs to be invisible…at least in so far as our involvement goes. I’m thinking of a crowbar.”

  “We could do that,” Stross said. “We have a Scorpion on the pad at Johnston Island now. It’s earmarked for the Spratleys, but—”

  “Do it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What I want, Stross,” Faulkner said slowly and deliberately, “is nothing less than the Hindenburg, live and spread all over the Internet.”

  ***

  It was fashionable these days to blame much of the planet’s problems on what once had been known as Big Oil, on the so-called supermajors in the West, and on the government-controlled oil and gas conglomerates elsewhere.

  They’d started off honestly enough, attempting in their earnest, capitalist way to satisfy the planet’s unquenchable thirst for energy, but the increasing scarcity of the product had meant increasing power…power to buy governments, launch wars, or serve as the power behind thrones.

  In the third decade of the 21st century, Earth’s masters were not the monolithic super-corporate state assumed by most to be pulling the world’s strings. Gazprom, Sinopec, ExEm…they all were locked in a death struggle over the last dregs of the planet’s petro-reserves.

  And it wasn’t just oil and natural gas, especially now t
hat the oil fields were dwindling away to nothing. Among them and often behind the scenes, the big multinational corps controlled nearly all energy production on the planet—natural gas and oil, nuclear, wind, hydropower, biogas, and geothermal. And if they didn’t control it, they were in an excellent position to kill it.

  Wittgenstein knew that only too well, from personal experience. They’d so nearly killed Dynospace.

  Hell, they would try to kill anything that threatened the status quo…or which might cut into the almighty profit margin, even if that meant dooming Humankind to a cold and bleak existence squabbling in the shattered ruins of civilization as the last of the fossil fuels dried up.

  Wittgenstein stepped out of the mission control building and onto a second-story balcony overlooking downtown Fremantle. The weather was blistering hot—typical for the port in late December—but the Fremantle Doctor was blowing from the southwest, cool enough to take some of the edge off.

  Dynospace had started as his father’s company, one of the early mob of commercial space companies that had gotten its start by launching satellites for NASA. It had been named Dynospace when it began working on a demonstration orbital power project, building the big solar powersat array in the early 2020s. Wittgenstein’s father had gone bankrupt when the supermajors had come after him, draining the company’s assets as completely as they’d drained the North Slope and Canadian Fields in a drawn-out series of court battles and expensive lawsuits.

  The storm of RM catchphrases when that fight had gone public had made Wittgenstein Senior look like a monster: beaming solar power to Earth would heat the atmosphere and flood the planet; beaming solar power to Earth would kill birds and disrupt migration patterns; beaming solar power would kill millions with skin cancer.…

  The supermajors didn’t like competition. Not even to save the planet.

  His father had died, broken and in debt. Wittgenstein had saved the company only by taking Dickie Corbell’s offer to move it to Australia and partner with Sunrisearth. There didn’t seem to be a hope in hell for solar powersats back in the States, not with the supermajors determined to squelch them or to buy them out.

  But Sunrisearth was working along different lines…not solar power satellites, but mining helium-3 on the Moon, using 3He to fuel a chain of small and highly efficient reactors under construction in the Australian outback. If it worked, Australia would become Earth’s leading distributor of energy with the throw of a single switch.…

  Earth was now poised on the brink of a precipice, a drop into anarchy, endless war, and technological collapse. But as pleasant as it was to blame the supermajors, Wittgenstein knew that they were merely another symptom of the problem. Unrestrained political power meant corruption, to holding onto power for its own sake.

  But whose fault was it that the supermajors had become so powerful? Who had voted corrupt politicians into office in exchange for bread and circuses?

  There was still a chance, the possibility of a game-changer that would reverse the slide into a new and literal Dark Ages. Importing helium-3 in commercial quantities offered hope that the old order could yet be swept away and the planet be saved.

  A chance…

  It was all his father—and Wittgenstein—had ever really wanted.

  ***

  “Power on,” Pollard said. “Capacitors to full charge.”

  “Copy,” Resnewski said. “Locks are off. Kajura is ready to roll.”

  “Copy, Kajura. Twenty seconds.”

  Kajura was one of the many names for the Rainbow Serpent of the Australian aborigines—a mythic creator deity from the country’s southwest associated with the most precious resources of the outback, oils and water.

  “Good luck, mate,” Pollard added. “See you on Earth!”

  “It’s a date, buddy. Three days.”

  Resnewski squirmed a bit, trying to get more comfortable. The cockpit was tiny; John Glenn had had more wiggle room in Friendship 7. The entire unit had ridden to the Apollo Basin strapped to the outside of the Sundance, tractored to the launch rail, crane-lifted, and mounted atop the helium-3 tank with special connectors. It massed just five tons, but this would definitely be a no-frills passage.

  He took a last look out the thick, lunar-glass cockpit windows. When the helium-3 operation was fully up and running, no human pilots would be required. This first shipment of mined 3He, however, needed to make an important recombinent memetics point—that humans had returned to the Moon at last, and that they’d done so to change the world. A human pilot guaranteed that the journalists and net media reporters would be paying attention. Robots puttering about on the surface of another world were old news, but humans on the Moon were hot. The joint announcements by Sunrisearth and Dynospace that a human mining crew was now on the Lunar farside had immediately gone super-viral on the ‘Net.

  “How’s the paint job look out there, Thom?”

  “Perfect, mate. No worries.”

  They’d stenciled the message—blatant advertising—on both sides of the return tank’s hull, their very last job after bolting the Earth-return booster to the cargo tank’s stern.

  Stretching out ahead of the ungainly craft, a gleaming ribbon of lunar metals came to a perspective point on the bright horizon. The Lunar regolith—the top several meters of soil—had turned out to be a remarkable source of basic construction materials, and the small city of Japanese teleoperated robots had been busily extracting those resources and putting them down for the past six years.

  Nearly all of the mining facility had been built strictly from local materials. Anorthite found in the regolith was an excellent source of aluminum, calcium, silicon, and oxygen. Abundant quantities of ilemite held iron, titanium, oxygen, and even traces of solar hydrogen. Lunar glass—optically superior to terrestrial glass because of the absence of water—and glass ceramics could be cooked from silicates, as could fiberglass. Unprocessed regolith could be cooked, then slowly cooled into an extremely strong form of concrete. Solid rocket fuel could be manufactured from oxygen and atomized aluminum. Raw materials that would have cost $25,000 a pound to ship up from Earth were free here for the digging.

  The launch rail ahead of the Kajura had been laid down by a special tracked processor unit that had cooked iron and metallic calcium from the regolith, spun the metals out as wire, and imbedded them in lunar concrete. Several acres of solar panels assembled from silica and trace metals powered the track, a linear accelerator twenty-nine kilometers long. Test loads fired from the device, a powerful magnetic railgun, had demonstrated the concept.

  It had never been used to launch a full payload, however…or a human pilot.

  “Five seconds,” Pollard’s voice said with maddening calm. “Four…three…two… one…launch!

  A titanic hand pressed down on Resnewski’s chest, squeezing him back into the padded couch. He couldn’t breathe, and blackness engulfed him. He wasn’t sure, but he thought later that he must have passed out briefly. Twenty-four seconds at a skull-and chest-crushing ten gravities…

  And then the Kajura left the launch rail, which by then was rising up the gentle slope of the Apollo Basin’s inner ringwall, travelling at 2.38 kilometers per second…lunar escape velocity. Resnewski’s consciousness returned as the giant released him. He was in freefall, the Kajura steadily rising, the brightly-lit and heavily-cratered surface dropping away below.

  “Fremantle, this is Kajura,” he called. “We have launch.”

  Three seconds passed, the round-trip time delay between Earth and the Moon, plus a brief detour through the farside communications satellite in its L-2 halo orbit.

  “Kajura, Fremantle Mission Control. We copy you away.”

  “You be careful of that cargo, yank,” Corbell’s voice added. “That’s a cool two trillion’s worth of merchandise.”

  “So you’re saying,” Resnewski said, grinning into a darkness thick with diamond-hard stars, “no pressure at all.…”

  ***

  “Three…two…one
…and lift off! We have lift-off.…”

  The towering white Zeus-Centaur rocket rose steadily above the billowing clouds of smoke, the rocket’s thunder startling clouds of seabirds and briefly overpowering the roar of the surf. Johnston Island, nine hundred miles west of Hawaii, had until the 1970s been a U.S. military airbase and a weapons testing site. Later used as a nuclear and chemical weapons disposal area, it had been decommissioned in 2004. ExEm had acquired the island in 2020 and rebuilt the former launch facilities, ostensibly for launching petroleum-spotting Earth resources satellites.

  But it was an open secret that they launched Scorpions from the tiny atoll as well. Like the arms merchants of the early 20th century, the supermajors had become very good at pitting nation against nation as they attempted to control the world’s dwindling oil reserves…but there were times when they needed to take more direct action—like now.

  Faulkner watched the launch from his office with Eugene Stross. “I’m concerned about being able to hit the target with a single shot.”

  “Crowbars are incredibly accurate,” Stross told him. “We’ll time the Scorpion’s passage with the tanker’s landing. The range will be around two thousand kilometers, but the projectile will be travelling fifty kilometers per second. That’s a flight time of forty seconds. The projectile has adjustable flight controls and a navigational system that lets it make microcorrections right up to the moment of impact. It’s accurate enough, all right.”

  “Good, because you’ll only get one shot. More than one, and everyone will know they’re being shot at.”