The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

Vanguard 2.0 ^{CARTER SCHOLZ}

From the cupola, Sergei Sergeiivitch Ivashchenko looked down on Petersburg. It was night and the gloomy city sparkled. Around it curved the northern breast of the Earth, under a thin gauze of atmosphere.

Today would have been his father’s sixtieth birthday. Sergei père had been principal bassist for the St. Petersburg Symphony. He’d died 15 years ago, from multiple aggressive cancers. It happened to a lot of Russian men his age. He’d been a young teen at the time of Chernobyl, living in Kyiv.

Vera, Sergei’s mother, was a beautiful young singer when she married his father. She promptly retired, at twenty-three. Never a pleasant person, Vera grew more unpleasant as her looks faded. When his father got his diagnosis, she immediately filed for divorce, moved out, and took up with one of his colleagues in the woodwinds. She said, “I have to protect myself.” Sergei himself was sixteen, an only child.

Two months later his father was dead. Sergei filed for an extension on the apartment, and was turned down. He’d been playing the part of the rebellious punk nekulturny, which didn’t help. (His band was called Alyona Ivanovna, after Raskolnikov’s victim in Crime and Punishment.)

They sold his father’s instruments. Vera took most of the proceeds, but Sergei’s own share kept him going for a drunken while. He couch-surfed with friends for most of a year. He had scholarships and grants and no other options. So he straightened up, and blazed almost contemptuously through math, compsci, and astrodynamics. He had his kandidat nauk at twenty-three. But there were no jobs, not in Russia, and competition in the EU and U.S. and India was fierce.

So he switched tracks, took commercial astronaut training, and ended up in Uber’s NSLAM Division: Near Space Logistics and Asset Management. The work was menial—glorified trash collection and traffic management—but the pay was good, and he liked being off-Earth.

NSLAM employed about twenty astronauts, in shifts, to staff its two inflatable habitats. Apart from the Chinese and European space stations, theirs was the only ongoing human presence in orbital space. All told there were several hundred astronauts worldwide, working for nations or militaries or private industry, but few stayed in orbit.

Sergei was in the hab for three or four months at a time, then back on Earth for the same. Up here he sat in his cubby and remotely managed ion-thrust drones to deorbit space debris, or to refuel satellites. The drones would be out for weeks or months at a time on their various missions.

Once in a great while he left the hab in a spacecraft, to work on more complex projects. One such task, still ongoing, was dismantling the International Space Station. It was decommissioned in 2024 and sold to NSLAM in 2027. They were still salvaging parts—recycling some, selling some on eBay as memorabilia. He made a side income from that.

But crewed missions were rare, because they used so much fuel, and that was fine with Sergei. He liked being off-Earth but he didn’t like leaving the hab. There were too many ways to die in space. Debris, for one. NSLAM tracked one million objects one centimeter or larger. Smaller untracked objects numbered over a hundred million. And it was all moving up to 7 times as fast as a bullet, carrying 50 times the kinetic energy. A fleck of paint had put a divot the size of a golf ball in a Space Shuttle back in the day. The habs were made of dozens of layers of super-kevlar and foam, which flexed and absorbed small impacts, but they were still vulnerable to larger objects.

Then there were solar flares. There was usually sufficient warning, but unprotected astronauts had died. Even inside, he wasn’t crazy about the minimal shielding in the habs. During serious solar events, he’d seen flashes behind his closed eyelids. Often he felt like he was following his father to the same early grave.

Petersburg drifted out of view across the northern horizon as the hab orbited south. They’d be back in 90 minutes, but farther west, as the Earth rotated under them.

Below, a meteor flashed over the blackness of the Baltic Sea. Nearer the Earth’s limb, over Finland, a green veil of aurora flickered. He’d see Izumi in Helsinki next week; his shift was almost done.

He swiveled and opened the cupola hatch. Cold LED light streamed in from the central shaft. He pushed gently to propel himself feet first down the shaft.

She’d hugged him goodbye, kissed him, and said:

Who will take care of your heart and soul?

He shrugged.

She pointed at him. You will. Promise me.

He’d promised, but he wasn’t sure he knew how. He could take care of himself, but that was mere survival. The self is not the soul. The soul is what you were as a child, until you learned to protect it, enclosing that fluttering, vulnerable moth in the fist of the self.

As he drifted past Boyle’s cubby he heard his name called. He grabbed a stanchion.

Sergei’s job title was orbital supervisor, which made him the most important person on the hab, responsible for the launch registry, collision avoidance alerts, and flight plans. But Boyle, the shift boss, was his superior. Competent enough, Boyle tended to see nothing beyond his position, so Sergei played his own to type: the stolid Ukie who kept to himself and loved his wode-ka. In truth Sergei hadn’t seen the Ukraine since his father moved them to Petersburg in 2010, and his drink was single malt. Talisker 18 Year, for preference.

What’s up, Geoff?

We’re going to have a visitor. A civilian.

Civilian? Why is he up?

He’s Gideon Pace.

Gideon Pace was Uber’s CEO. He was one of the world’s ten or twenty newly minted trillionaires. The exact number changed daily with the markets, but they were still rare as unicorns, already persistent as myth. This tiny cohort controlled about 5 percent of the world’s wealth.

Uber ran a diverse portfolio of businesses on Earth. Package delivery, autonomous transport, data archived in DNA—all hugely profitable.

NSLAM was an indulgence, a pet project of Pace’s. He was a space nut who wanted a presence out here at any price. So far, Sergei knew, that presence had bled oceans of money, and not a few lives. But now governments were signing on to underwrite the core mission of cleaning up space debris—enough to have launched a second hab.

All four crew turned out to greet Pace and his pilot: Boyle, Sergei, Kiyoshi, and Sheila. Kiyoshi and Sheila had coupled a few weeks into the shift. Sergei liked Kiyoshi; he was a jazz fan, and had hipped Sergei to Kenny Barron. Sheila, the hab medic, was a petite Canadian blonde with chiseled features. She looked like Vera in her youth, which put Sergei off getting to know her. She’d cropped her hair close to keep it from floating in a halo around her head. Sergei himself shaved his; he hated their no-rinse shampoo.

Their visitor had a weasel’s face: dark straight hair in bangs, pinched cheeks, thin sloped nose, pointed dimpled chin, eyes slanting slightly upward. About Sergei’s age, but he looked younger.

Fantastic! Fantastic! I’ve been in space before, but only suborbital. I had to see this for myself.

Welcome to NSLAM Hab One.

You must be Sergei. Chief Boyle tells me you’re the most experienced astronaut here.

He wasn’t looking quite at Sergei. Sergei guessed he was wearing augmented contacts with a headsup display, clocking Sergei’s vitals and recording everything.

Sergei dialed back his English to a cute and unthreatening level.

You gather data on me.

Of course.

Right now. In real time. What don’t you know already?

Ah, I see. Well… how you are. I don’t know that. How are you?

Sergei put on a blank look, but it didn’t approach the blankness of Pace’s.

Pace smiled thinly. It’s what humans do, Sergei.

How would you know? Sergei almost said, but didn’t. Pace’s headsup probably picked up the subvocalization; his smile twitched.

Boyle grabbed a stanchion. Let’s show you around.

I’ve got work, said Sergei.

Join us later, Sergei, said Pace. I brought some goodies from Earth.

He had indeed. The six of them gathered in what Boyle quaintly called the “mess hall,” a multifunction common space packed with gear on every surface—left, right, up, down. The “mess hall” housed some hydrator nozzles and a fold-down table with bungees and velcro to secure plates and feet. It was seldom used. They tended to dine separately.

Pace had brought Kobe beef tournedos in vacuum pouches and a bottle of wine. Sergei would have preferred fresh vegetables.

2013 Napa cabernet sauvignon, Pace said. Heitz Cellar, Martha’s Vineyard. A wine like this you don’t want to suck out of a bulb.

His pilot passed a case, and Pace drew out six glasses and an opener. As he applied the opener to the bottle he let the glasses float. Their cross-section was tear-shaped.

An old NASA guy designed these glasses. The shape creates surface tension to hold the liquid in. Neat, huh?

Pace held one of the glasses while a trigger on the opener let compressed nitrogen into the bottle and forced wine out the spout. The wine sloshed but stayed put in the glass. He drifted glasses one by one to their recipients, lifted his own to his nose, let it twirl slowly while he inhaled. Sergei guessed he’d practiced all this in suborbital.

Enjoy. I want to thank you all for the incredible job you’re doing up here. NSLAM is now the most trusted actor in near-Earth space. It’s all because we stepped up to do something about the Kessler Effect, and you’ve all executed flawlessly.

Sergei wasn’t sure he believed in the Kessler Effect, that a cascade of debris could destroy satellites to produce more debris to destroy more, et cetera. Noisy disaster movies had been made about it, but if it was truly happening, it was proceeding so slowly that only spreadsheets detected it.

The oven chimed. They all bungeed in and began to eat. Sergei had to admit it was pretty good.

So let me tell you why I’m here. It’s not just to sightsee. I want Sergei to do me a favor.

Hm?

You know Vanguard 1?

No idea.

Launched by the U.S. in 1958. Still in orbit, though long defunct. It’s the oldest human thing in space.

And?

I want it for my collection. I’d like you to steal it for me. He smiled at the others.

Why not use drone?

I don’t want to wait for a drone. I want to take it home with me tomorrow.

Sergei shrugged. Let me run numbers. He returned to his tournedos.

Pace was crazy, but that didn’t bother him. Everyone in the world was crazy, no exceptions. One managed one’s condition in more or less socially acceptable ways, according to one’s capacities and resources. He’d once blamed the situation on the overwhelming complexity of modernity, yadda yadda, but he’d come to believe the condition was ancient and fundamental.

His own way of coping involved these long months off-Earth. Pace’s, well, who could say. He knew Pace was a believer in the Singularity—the omega point at which machine intelligence was supposed to reach a critical mass and become self-sustaining and independent of humans. To Sergei that was bonus crazy. But Sergei had a parallel notion about what happened to money, when you put enough of it in one place. These guys were as separate from normal humanity, and as alien, as AIs were supposed to be. But they weren’t the intelligence: the money ran them.

The mission looked doable. A Hohmann Transfer would take a little over an hour to reach Vanguard’s orbit at its apogee. Changing orbital planes was, as always, the bitch; the delta-v budget for that alone was almost four kilometers per second each way. That’s why they almost never ran crewed missions like this.

Kestrel One was the only vehicle with enough thrust. It was scarily minimal, about three meters in diameter and four meters long. The forward half tapered to a blunt point. The rear half was for fuel. It would never have passed a design review at any national space agency. Among other shortcuts, it had no life support, relying on the astronaut’s spacesuit instead. Sergei figured the suit’s eight hours would be enough, but he’d take extra oxygen, in case. Kestrel was docked at the propellant depot orbiting behind them. He programmed it to dock with Port Two after fueling itself.

The tricky bit would be locating his tiny target once he got into its orbit. He had its orbital data, but in TLEs, two-line element sets. The format was archaic. Futile editorials periodically appeared in Orbital Debris News calling for an overhaul of the system, but it was too entrenched.

The TLEs were tailored to a general perturbation model that was accurate to a kilometer at best. He’d have to get in the neighborhood, scan with radar, then grab it. That’d take how long?

He wanted sunlight for that, so he adjusted his start time. Coming back, the two orbits weren’t so good for rendezvous. He’d have some stay time.

There were other, non-orbital considerations, but they weren’t really his. Kestrel would be picked up by ground radars, but the radars were almost all managed by NSLAM, and the company’s manifests were private. If anyone happened to ask what he’d been doing out there, which was unlikely, the company would make something up.

OK. What does this thing look like? How big?

I’ll show you.

Pace popped the latches of a Pelican case. The released force spun the case in the air. Pace steadied himself against the wall and got hold of it. From die-cut black foam he drew a small metal sphere, then plucked six thin rods about half a meter long from the case and screwed them into the object’s threaded bushings. Finally he drew his hands away and let the small thing float between them. He tapped a vane and the model slowly spun, a silvery seedpod.

Very small.

Pace gazed past it and his eyes twitched. Six and a half inches in diameter, three and a half pounds. Khrushchev called it the grapefruit. It was the first of four Vanguards, sent mainly to test the launch vehicle. It’s the only one still in orbit, brave little guy.

Why is this grapefruit so important to you?

You kidding? It’s historic.

How so?

Know anything about space law? Once upon a time, the sky was “free.” After aircraft came along, it was said that a nation “controlled” its “airspace.” Then satellites came along. They crossed all airspaces. There was no legal regime. The U.S. knew the Soviets would object to a military satellite, so they crafted Vanguard, a very public “scientific” mission with no military objectives. Except for establishing the precedent that space was beyond national boundaries. I want this little guy hanging in my office to remind me how elegant that strategy was.

There was a lot Sergei could have replied to that but he controlled himself, and said, I need to launch in twenty-four hours, when Vanguard is in best position relative to us.

Pace reached out and stopped the model’s slow spin.

Take this with you. When you’ve got the real thing, insert this back into its orbit.

They were over Australia in daylight when Kiyoshi stuck his head in.

Dobroe utro, Sergei.

Ohayou gozaimasu, Yoshisan.

English was the lingua franca, but they’d each learned a few words of the other’s tongue as a formality, to show respect. It didn’t hurt that Sergei had already picked up some Japanese from Izumi.

Sheila and I need a flight plan to Hab Two. They’ve got some problem with their water recycler. We need to bring a spare.

Both of you?

Boyle says as long as I’m using fuel, Sheila should come along and give them a checkup. Here’s our launch window.

Yoshi showed him a tablet.

OK, I’ll upload a flight plan.

Spasibo.

Douitashimashite.

Same time window as Sergei. Leaving Boyle and Pace and his pilot alone on the hab.

Sergei watched the hab dwindle against the ocean, positioned between Patagonia and the Antarctic Peninsula. He could see Pace’s vehicle, docked at Port One, surprisingly big, as big as the hab itself.

One kilometer out, he yawed and started the transfer burn. Thrust was about half a G. It felt good. How he would welcome gravity when he went down! And fresh air and blue skies. After four and a half minutes, he ended the burn as Kestrel passed over the Sahara.

He’d be over Petersburg in fifteen minutes, this time in daylight. Summer was coming to the Northern Hemisphere. He’d relish the long days, the white nights, of Helsinki in July. Izumi and he had been together for almost two years, though he’d been in space most of that time. She was a few years older than him, had been married once, to a Finn. She worked in IT for a comprehensive school. She was also a singer, classical and cabaret. They’d met in Petersburg at a concert. Shostakovich string quartets.

He didn’t know where it was going, the two of them, or where he was going, solo or not. He had a sometimes-piercing dread that one day soon she was going to lose patience with him.

Hell, he was losing patience with himself. His smell in the spacesuit was rank. Water was too precious up here to use for washing, especially clothes. When they grew too foul, they were thrown out. He changed his socks and shorts about once a week, his shirt about once a month. They were past due. So was he. The self was too much with him.

He was now over Vladivostok. He’d gained almost 4,000 kilometers in altitude and the Earth was palpably smaller. South across the Sea of Japan was Kyoto, Izumi’s birthplace. She’d taken him there once, for a week. They visited Ryoanji temple one morning, arriving very early, before it opened, to avoid the tourists. It had rained in the night but the day was sunny, the road vacant. They hurried past an old woman on their way. Black birds stared at them from the roof of the locked gate. The old woman caught them up, and she looked to them in concern: What time is it? She was the gatekeeper, worried she was late.

Over the South Pacific, in darkness now, he burned to shift his orbital plane into Vanguard’s. Ten more minutes of welcome gravity, its force steadily increasing from half a G to over a G as the ship burned fuel and lost mass. When it ceased, he checked his bearings. He was now in Vanguard’s orbit.

But nothing was out there. Lots of nothing. More nothing, and more nothing. Then S-band radar bounced back from something about two kilometers ahead of him. He burned briefly into a lower orbit to phase up on it. At 100 meters’ separation, he burned back up to stationkeeping. There: a point of light drifting against the stars. After long, fussy minutes of edging up, he had it, closed the arm on it, and brought it into the bay. Mission time: 3 hours, 39 minutes.

It wasn’t tarnished or pitted, but the metal bore a slight patina, weathered by solar radiation and micrometeor abrasion. He cupped it in his gloved hand. It was that small. He felt a mild revulsion at the thought of handing this storied thing over to Pace.

But he secured it, then loaded the imposter into the bay and launched it. He checked his position against the hab’s, and ran both coordinates through the flight computer. He’d have to stay for 42 minutes until ship and hab were aligned.

While he waited he played the second Shostakovich string quartet through his suit’s phones. It was what he’d been hearing when he first saw Izumi, two rows in front of him in the shadows of the concert hall. That elegant profile. He’d studied the shape of her left ear as she moved her head so slightly.

This quartet had been his father’s favorite. Sergei could see him seated at the north-facing window with his cello between his knees, practicing in the pale light, occasionally stopping to mark the score.

The final chords resounded, an angry but halfway resigned lament against the shortness of life, its futile complications, the thwarting of joy.

Sergei checked the flight computer. It was time. He watched the countdown, then burned for two minutes as thrust climbed steadily to over two Gs. His heart labored.

Another hour passed in silence as the ship followed its new trajectory to the lower hab orbit. The curvature of the Earth’s limb slowly flattened, and the Moon, half-full, rose above it.

It stared at him and its glory pierced him. The intricate Sun-Moon-Earth system was best felt from here.

Something hit.

Blyad!

The vehicle jolted. Or maybe it was him who jolted. He thought he’d heard the hit—a faint crack, something you might hear underwater.

For a moment the world was pure falling. A crowded emptiness. Millions of specks streaked through this vastness of orbit. Thoughts in a void of unmeaning. Subatomics in a space of forces. In that maelstrom, once in a great while, two specks collide: a neutron lodges in a nucleus, and changes its nature.

In the center of the window was a pock: an irregular, finely terraced crater about five centimeters across. Sunlight raked it into fine relief. The particle, whatever it was, had vaporized on impact. A little larger or a little faster and it would have continued straight through his visor.

He smelled the sharpness of fresh sweat over his stale miasma. At least he hadn’t shit himself.

The rest of the way back his eyes were on the radar. Not that he would see anything coming before it hit him. It was just magical thinking.

But as he approached the hab he did see something. Four bogeys, faint echoes, inconsistent returns, in parallel orbits.

Kiyoshi stopped by.

I heard. You okay?

Ah, yeah. You know.

Kiyoshi did know. He’d almost run out of oxygen on an EVA. How are they on the other hab?

Kiyoshi frowned. Their water filter was fine. Sheila ran her tests. They’re all good.

Sergei shrugged.

Two pointless EVAs in one day. You could have been killed.

I’m fine. Arigatou gozaimasu.

Beregi sebya.

He thought that would be it. It wasn’t.

Sergei, my friend. May I come in?

In one hand Pace held two of the tear-shaped glasses. In the other was a bottle: Talisker 18 Year.

It wasn’t worth getting upset over, but it annoyed him. Pace didn’t need to parade his research.

I want to thank you. I heard you almost got centerpunched out there.

Sergei watched the glasses float while Pace scooped whiskey into them. Now he was almost angry. As far as he was concerned, it was over. What more did Pace want? He meant to keep his mouth shut, but he saw that sunlit pock in the glass again, heard that distant crack, felt himself jolt. He wanted to make Pace jolt.

You launched something while I was gone. You and Boyle. Four objects.

Pace looked at him with interest. Why yes. Yes we did. It was awesome.

Why send me away?

Pace regarded him carefully through the lenses of his headsup. What was he reading there? Sergei’s pulse, BP, skin temperature—what else was he tracking? Pace was like a windup toy that never ran down. It was tiring. Sergei didn’t want to be sitting here drinking with him.

Well, I truly did want my Vanguard. But I also wanted my objects off the registry. If you were onboard, you would be the one to record them.

What are they?

Pace seemed to think about this.

You know about the Outer Space Treaty. Bans nuclear weapons in outer space. I mean, this goddamn piece of paper is from 1967, but nations still take it seriously, or at least they have to seem to. But we’re a private company. That piece of paper means nothing to us.

United States company. Subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

Listen to the space lawyer! No no. They were launched into space by an LLC doing business in the Maldives—which is not a signatory to the treaty.

Maldives? Practically underwater.

We built a seawall and shored up our island.

Why not put objects into orbit direct from Earth? Why from space?

Maldives are still a UN member. They’d have to register my objects with the UN. The fucking UN! Isn’t that quaint?

They register your launch?

Sure, but that launch didn’t put the objects into orbit. Orbit was accomplished up here.

What are they?

Oh, so far, nothing. They’re platforms.

Platforms for what?

Pace took a silence, looked troubled, but he was enjoying it.

Let’s say that I worry about mankind. We had a close call with an asteroid a few years ago, you may remember. It’ll be back soon. We need assets out here to help us with that problem.

And so, you want to put on these platforms…

Nuclear weapons. What else has enough push for an asteroid?

Bad idea. Could end up with hundreds of small asteroids instead of one big one.

You know what would be a much worse idea? Doing nothing.

Why you?

Nobody else is doing it, that’s why.

Where you going to get nukes?

Oh, look, it doesn’t have to be nukes. Use giant lasers if you want, whatever. I’m offering these platforms to any nation that wants to contribute to the long-term survival of mankind. I’ve got interest at NASA and DoD.

No pushback?

NASA? They’ve already ceded Earth space. DoD? SecDef is ours, a former Uber VP. The Joint Chiefs are mostly on board, and for the whiners there’s always early retirement. I don’t need to own their weapons. They’d simply be under our management.

Hard to believe they give you control.

Pace tapped his glass into a slight spin. A small blob of whiskey escaped. He sucked it into his mouth, and swallowed. Smiled.

They let us manage their satellites. We’re a trusted actor. DoD would love a way to bypass the Outer Space Treaty. I offer us as a beard, that’s perfect for them. Get a few allies on board, even better.

At this point, Sergei knew it would be wise to shut up, finish his drink, say goodnight. He didn’t feel wise.

What is your long game?

Pace squinted at him. What makes you think I have a long game?

You are smart guy.

Sergei let the silence stretch. Pace was compelled to dominate a conversation, to fill up the social space. That went against the solitary, obsessive nature that Sergei recognized, but he saw how Pace had learned to deploy that nature tactically. Now he saw Pace shift out of the social space, back into his own mind. He squinted as he manipulated his headsup. It was like watching a lizard.

You’ve read Max Weber? Pace said at last.

Some.

Pace’s eyes flickered as he quoted: “A state is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.”

So?

Here’s my long game: I want to redefine “human community” for the better. My method is to redefine who’s “legitimate.”

Yes?

The nation-state as a form of political organization is recent. Treaty of Westphalia, 1648. There’s no reason it needs to persist. There are better alternatives.

Sergei gave him more silence. Pace shifted back into his public mode.

See, I’m big on dual use. Once these platforms are armed, they can also protect against dangers from below. I mean, look at the data. Nation-states have very bad metrics. You know that. So many wars, so many killed. So much property damage. We can do better. We will. We can build and manage the defense cloud.

Platforms are vulnerable.

I’m an optimist. These platforms are stealthy and maneuverable. Anyway, ASAT’s a non-starter, Kessler Effect and all, that’s unwritten but fundamental. It’s why we’re up here, am I right? Soon I’ll have memoranda of understanding with certain public and private actors, which will make any action against the platforms a lot more complicated. Let’s say that I foresee a regime in which it’s in everyone’s interest to leave them the hell alone.

Meanwhile they are traffic hazard.

Oh, they’ll be no trouble. The orbital elements are in your database. You have what you need to protect all our assets.

All our assets?

Pace held out his hands in a kind of embrace.

Everything that’s up here under our management. To quote one of my heroes: They’re our assets now, and we’re not giving them back.

Why tell me?

You’re smarter than you like to let on. There could be a place for you in our ground operations.

Sergei shrugged. Pace shook his head.

Hate to see expertise go to waste. Here’s my private email. Let me know if you’re interested.

That night, strapped in his sleeping bag after Pace and his pilot had departed the hab, Sergei thought it over.

In 2029, the asteroid Apophis had crossed Earth’s orbit. A scary close approach, closer than many geosynchronous satellites. The thing was 350 meters across. Not extinction-level, but many times Tunguska. A one-gigaton impact was nothing to sneeze at.

Sergei had been in space then, had watched it fly by. It brightened to third magnitude, moved through about 40 degrees of sky in an hour, faded, was gone. It was due back in 2036. Odds of impact were only a few in a million, but Sergei saw how useful that recent near miss and impending return could be to a system selling itself as asteroid defense. The nuclear option against asteroids made no sense, but politics made no sense. The meme of “protection” was more powerful than reason.

As to Pace’s longer game, he didn’t buy it for a couple of reasons. First, the U.S. would never hand over control of nukes. They’d invented them; they’d become the global hegemon with them, and more or less remained so because of them. But: that “more or less.” Pace was lying, but his lie had exposed a deeper truth that eroded Sergei’s faith that the U.S. was the U.S. of his imagination.

Second, it made no strategic sense to station weapons in space. Launch costs were high, platforms vulnerable, delivery difficult. Earth-based systems were the better choice.

Unless the weapons were assembled in orbit. But why do that?

He remembered a job he’d done months ago, EVA, in person, servicing an orbital nanofactory which produced microscopic pellets—flecks of material embedded in zero-G-perfected beads of glass. Manifests identified the material as LiDT: lithium deuteride and tritium. Mildly radioactive. He’d been curious, but had forgotten about it once he was safely back.

Now he logged onto SIPRNet and searched classified scientific papers. Soon he found “Typical number of antiprotons necessary for fast ignition in LiDT.” Primary author: R. Fry, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The paper detailed the results of the first break-even fusion reaction a few years back.

That was it, then. The Livermore Lab had worked on fusion since its founding, eighty years ago. Its founding purpose was nuclear weapons, and its grail was a pure fusion weapon. This bomb could be small and light and still hugely destructive. Sergei was no nuclear scientist, but those pellets were clearly nuclear fuel. They were being produced in orbit; and so could bombs that used them.

What about delivery? Uber already had a thriving Earthside business in package delivery using small drones. Suppose you mounted a few dozen fusion bomblets on drones, packed those drones in a cheap capsule, dropped it from orbit, popped it open in the troposphere, where you could then MIRV the drones to individual targets. The only defense would be to destroy the capsule before it opened. If the capsule were small and stealthed, could it get through? He didn’t know.

He could be wrong. Maybe they weren’t working on bombs. Maybe they wouldn’t succeed. Maybe it would take a long time. Maybe he should forget the whole thing.

Kiyoshi and Sheila’s alcove was near his. Sergei could hear the thumps and moans of their tangled bodies through the thin walls. He allowed himself to think of Izumi, of tracing his finger slowly along the arch of her foot, hearing the intake of her breath, taking her big toe in his mouth and hearing her gasp.

His heart and soul didn’t buy his maybes.

Two days later he was on the way back to Earth. They would touch down in Kazakhstan. Kiyoshi and Sheila were also ending their shifts, while Boyle stayed on. Sergei looked away from the couple, strapped in across from him, their hands intertwined.

It would make sense to take Pace’s offer. It had come wrapped in a veiled threat. Pace even had a point. Sergei had no sentiment for the nation-state. During World War II, Petersburg had been under siege for nine hundred days. Shostakovich had been there. The population went from 3.5 million to 600,000. In his lifetime, the endless Chechen wars. Was any of that right?

Out the small window, sun slanted across a long wall of cumulonimbus over the coast of Venezuela. Somewhere below the clouds, American troops were liberating oil fields.

“The right thing.” Who could know what that was? Imagine all the damned souls who believed they had done the right thing. Who may in fact have done the right thing, and found themselves damned anyway.

And Sergei was ready, maybe, to finally stay below the clouds. To keep his feet on the ground, to have a normal life.

But that was mere survival. There was a Russian saying, vsyo normal’no, “everything is normal.” No matter how screwed up: “everything is normal.” Also that American saying: “the new normal.” Universal surveillance was the new normal. Resource wars were the new normal. Climate refugees by the millions were the new normal. And if Pace got his way, his executive monopoly of “legitimate” violence would be the new normal.

Sergei shut his eyes as the faint whistle of reentry grew to a thunder and the capsule juddered. Soon they’d be at four Gs. Pure falling, again, but now into the burning force of the still-living planet’s atmosphere. Still living for how much longer?

Izumi had said to him once: You think a lot, but you follow your heart. He wasn’t sure he did, but he was glad she thought so, or at least that she said she did. He let the memory of that gladness echo in him. Maybe it was time to be sure.

Who will take care of your heart and soul?

The self is not the soul. The soul is what you were as a child, until you learned to protect it, enclosing that fluttering, vulnerable moth in the fist of the self.

Outside, the heatshield roared and burned. A firedrake of plasma, the capsule passed over Helsinki, Petersburg, Moscow, specks in a crowded emptiness. He opened his eyes.

He saw that both his fists were clenched tight. Very slowly he allowed his hands to open.