Tania could hear the lie in his voice. A subtle change in tone, something that took a lifetime of friendship to detect. “Perhaps so,” she said, staring at the picture in front of her. The time did not seem right to confront him. He might have simply forgotten.
“If it makes you feel better,” he said, “I can check our records.”
“No, forget it,” she said.
“Stay focused, dear.”
“I’d feel better if I knew the plan.”
“You will,” he said, “when it’s safe to tell you. But the critical piece of the puzzle is that ship. The what, when, and where.”
“I promise you’ll know as soon as I do,” she said.
“Good. And Tania?”
“Yes?”
“Watch yourself. Warthen tried to spook the council with talk of ‘secret research.’ Don’t forget he still runs the security staff there.”
“We’re being careful,” Tania replied. It almost sounded true.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Gateway Station
7.FEB.2283
Secluded within his personal climber, Neil lay in a plush chair and let his mind drift back to the Elevator’s arrival.
Darwin had almost twelve years to grow around the Elevator at Nightcliff before the plague came. There was extraordinary luck in the location of it—an easily defensible piece of land, bordered on two sides by ocean, in a small but prosperous city within a nation at peace with the world. It couldn’t have been better, for Earth and for the Platz legacy.
Neil pictured the Darwin Elevator, stretching up from Australia, static electricity roiling along its length due to friction from the atmosphere. On up into space, through Gateway Station, and up, and up, and up, all the way to Anchor. To the shell ship.
And then he envisioned another. Another shell ship, floating into position next to its sibling. What purpose would it serve? Spin a mirror image of the original, all forty thousand kilometers of it? System redundancy—it made a kind of sense.
The first Elevator was faltering. Power seemed to be running out. A replacement, perhaps? A real possibility as far as Neil was concerned.
Whatever the case, he knew what must be done: regain control of Nightcliff.
And the council.
To achieve his goal, he needed more resources in orbit. More workers, more fighters, more weapons. He was getting old, and things were going too slowly. He cursed himself for relinquishing power in the first place.
Time to put all the cards on the table, he decided. Before it’s too late.
He could not wait for Tania’s analysis to be finished. Something approached. Therefore something had to be done.
Neil decided to work under the assumption that another ship would arrive over Darwin. Whether it came to repair the original, or replace it, or for some other purpose was impossible to know. Would remain impossible until it was too late to act.
He had to roll the dice. A replacement Elevator he could wrap his mind around.
He let himself out of the chair and made his way across the private docking bay, back into Gateway Station. Neil climbed down through the empty corridor that connected like a spoke to the outer edge of the ring-shaped structure. He could feel the artificial gravity slowly grab hold of him.
The satellite office had been deserted since he pulled everyone back to Platz Station after the security incident. Neil wandered the halls. The council would not reconvene for hours, and he was in no hurry to return to their company.
He needed a bargaining chip. Something that would keep his enemies from unleashing their superior firepower. Something that would force them to bargain, or even better, to cede power.
A plan began to take shape in his mind.
Before anything else, Neil needed to change the decoupling codes.
Since the company first started building space stations along the spine of the Elevator, Neil had insisted on manufacturing them in a central location and then moving them to their ultimate position. It was too expensive to move the manufacturing infrastructure to each location.
The added benefit was that the stations could be repositioned. It was a complex and difficult procedure, not often used. He knew the various station crews rarely reviewed the process. If not for the recent project to realign the farming platforms, Neil wondered if anyone would know how to do it without lengthy training.
As it stood, his scientists at Anchor would know what to do. Tania would know.
But first, the codes. He couldn’t let anyone cancel the procedure, once started. Neil went back to his climber, activated his terminal, and began the process.
The rest he would have to plan as things progressed.
Despite the dizzying array of hurdles before him, Neil couldn’t help himself. He felt excited. Alive. For the first time in years, he looked forward to a future of unknowns.
A future to be conquered.
Sofia Windon leaned forward in her chair, fingers folded in a tent on the cold marble table in front of her.
“The ayes have it,” she said softly. “Russell Blackfield will join the council.”
Alex Warthen locked an expectant stare on Neil, watching for some reaction. Hoping, perhaps, that Neil would fly into some rage.
Neil smiled, instead. “Well then,” he said. “It seems this meeting is over.”
Sofia said, “We still have a litany of issues—”
“Not me. I resign from this council,” Neil said.
His voice resonated in the room, with more authority than he thought himself capable of.
Alex Warthen coughed. “Excuse me?”
“I will not submit to a search by you and your incompetent security force. I will not negotiate for the water produced at my own desalination plants. I will not have the integrity of my research staff questioned,” he said, voice gaining volume as he went on, “and I will not share this table with Russell Blackfield.”
Alex didn’t move; he was dumbfounded. Sofia’s mouth hung open. The rest of the council sat perfectly still.
“You want the food produced by my farms?!” Neil shouted. “You want the water purified by my plants? I’ll consider any reasonable offer, from my headquarters. Good day to you all.”
He stormed from the room before anyone could respond. Even his brother, Zane, looked stunned.
Let them chew on that, Neil thought, while preparations are made. If he stayed a step ahead he would win this race.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Platz Station
8.FEB.2283
The passenger climber ports on Platz Station featured standard earth gravity, a unique feature Neil had insisted upon during the station’s construction.
Eight S-shaped guide rails carried incoming climber cars away from the Elevator’s thread and off to reception ports on the outer rim of the station’s upper and lower rings. Individual rails could be retracted to allow some cars to remain fixed to the climber, allowing them to pass through the station entirely, or be unloaded at a more traditional dock in the central hub, where a lack of simulated gravity eased unloading of supplies.
Guests could exit their climber car with the dignity of walking on two feet, while workers and supplies could be brought to the center levels for easy distribution.
The apparatus had one drawback: complexity. A room full of equipment and twenty-four-hour monitoring by an actual person.
Neil stood behind the climber operator, a middle-aged woman with shoulder-length black hair and a strong Venezuelan accent.
They both stared at a schematic displayed on the large monitor on the room’s longest wall. All traffic on the Elevator could be tracked from here, but Neil’s focus was on a single climber that barreled toward the station from Gateway.
The climber’s manifest and layout were listed as “unavailable.” He’d never seen that before, not that it surprised him. Alex was coming to do his inspection, permission be damned.
“When can we get a visual?” Neil asked the woman. “I need to know which cars are personnel carriers.”
She studied the display for a long moment, then tapped a few commands into the panel at her fingertips. “Any minute now, Mr. Platz.”
“Neil,” he said. “Bring it up anyway. I’ll watch it come into view.”
She nodded slowly, then her fingers did a languid dance across the input panel. A frame appeared within the giant wall-sized display above, quickly filled with a high-resolution image of the Elevator cord. Earth loomed far below, mostly in shadow. Despite the excellent contrast of the cord against the dark planet below, the approaching climber was not yet visible.
“Shall I call you when it arrives?” the woman asked.
“Why?” he asked. “I’m here now.”
“It’s just … I’m due for my break.”
She’d been pensive since he’d come in the control room, and had hesitated at each request from him. Not the type of person who works well under scrutiny, Neil decided. His presence had that effect sometimes, but now was not the time for such nonsense. “Forget your damn break,” he said. “We have an unannounced climber speeding toward us. I need you here.”
She slumped in her chair.
“Would you rather be relieved?”
“No,” she muttered. “I—”
“There it is,” Neil said, pointing at the display. “Enlarge that.”
The woman hesitated, again.
“Enlarge it!”
“I need a glass of water,” she muttered, standing.
“Bloody hell,” Neil said. “Sit down. I’ll get your damn water. You get me a clear picture of that climber.”
He stomped to the door and threw it open. A few of his staff milled about outside, talking in hushed tones. They jumped when he stormed from the room.
Skittishness and tension. He had found it at every turn since returning from the council meeting. News of his resignation beat him to the station, of course, and no one knew what to make of it. Neil had isolated them, and many had family or friends aboard other stations.
He considered sending one of them for the drink, but stopped short. A brief walk might do some good. It wouldn’t do to be all frayed and overanxious when the climber arrived.
The common room was a quarter ring away, and Neil made a conscious effort to slow himself. He clasped his hands behind his back and strolled down the center of the burgundy carpet that spanned the entire ring.
Warthen was coming, of that Neil had no doubt. The man had to make good on his threat to search the station, or else lose whatever momentum he was trying to build with the council.
Neil ran through the scenarios in his mind, for the hundredth time. He’d already had the resident Gateway security contingent locked in the central cargo bay, ready to be sent away. He’d ordered all the reception rooms on the landward deck sealed, the door codes changed. When Alex’s climber arrived, Neil would have each personnel car separated and sent to different reception rooms. Split them up, confuse them. They would be expecting to arrive in the central cargo bay.
Once they were divided, Neil would address them. Take your comrades and go home, you’re no longer welcome here. Something to that effect. His privately trained fighters, stationed outside each reception room, were ready in case Alex Warthen decided not to listen. Neil hoped they could remain behind the curtain, but he would use them if he had to.
A solid plan, he thought, as such things go. By the time he returned to the control room with the silly cup of water, he felt relaxed.
Happy, even.
“Here’s your drink,” Neil said. He handed the red plastic cup to the woman, his eyes on the big monitor behind her.
The enlarged feed showed the approaching climber from a top-down view. A cylindrical center that housed the climbing mechanism, and eight spiderlike booms stretching out from it where cars could be attached.
Only four cars hung from the climber’s arms, all personnel-style. Perfect, Neil thought.
“When will it reach the splitter?” he asked.
The woman glanced across the various status readouts. She took a slow sip of the water as she studied them. “Three minutes,” she finally said.
“Route each car to the lower reception areas. I need to know which rooms they will arrive at.”
She turned in her seat, facing Neil but looking at the floor. “I’ll need a few minutes,” she said.
“We don’t have it. Are you feeling ill or something?”
“No.”
“Then what the bloody hell is your problem? This is urgent.”
Instead of responding, the woman turned back to the screens.
With one swift motion, she dashed the contents of her cup across the console.
Sparks flew, screens flickered and went dark. Pale blue smoke shot out from gaps, yanked upward by hungry air panels in the ceiling.
The woman ran.
She flew out the door and into the hall before Neil could comprehend what had happened. He simply stared at the screen where the image of the climber had been.
“Stop her!” he yelled. “Someone stop her!”
Neil went through the door, knocking over a bystander. He looked left and right, along the curved corridor, and saw nothing. The woman had disappeared, just like that.
“Which way did she go?” he demanded of the man he’d toppled. The staffer pointed to Neil’s left.
He started after her, ignoring the complaints from his old muscles. But after just a few steps, he stopped.
The shock of the betrayal had consumed his mind. Neil recognized this feeling and allowed the event to become just another facet in the larger scheme of things.
He considered the rapidly approaching climber. And then his teams of handpicked fighters stationed at the reception bays where no cars would arrive, thanks to the sabotage.
His men were in the wrong place, and precious seconds were passing.
