The Precipice Read online

  “When we come back, we’ll be rich.”

  “You’ll be rich, boss,” Pancho said. “The rest of us’ll still be employees.”

  Dan laughed. “You’ll be rich, too. I’ll see to that. You’ll be rich.”

  “Or dead,” Pancho countered.

  “One minute,” Amanda said. “I really think we should pay attention to the countdown.”

  “You’re right,” said Pancho.

  Dan watched it all on the displays of the control board. The fusion reactor lit up as programmed. Star-hot plasma began generating energy. Through the MHD channel it roared, where a minor fraction of that heat energy was turned into electrical power. The ship’s internal batteries shut off and began recharging. Cryonically-cold liquid hydrogen and helium started pumping through the rocket nozzles’ cooling walls. The hot plasma streamed through the nozzles’ throats.

  “Ignition,” Amanda said, using the traditional word even though it was now without physical meaning.

  “Thrust building up.” Pancho said. Dan watched the curves rising on the thrust displays, but he didn’t need to; he could feel weight returning, feel the deck gaining solidity beneath his feet.

  “We’re off and running,” Pancho announced. “Next stop, the Asteroid Belt!”

  TOR BOOKS BY BEN BOVA

  As on a Darkling Plain

  The Astral Mirror

  Battle Station

  The Best of the Nebulas (ed.)

  Challenges

  Colony

  Cyberbooks

  Escape Plus

  Gremlins Go Home (with Gordon R. Dickson)

  Jupiter

  The Kinsman Saga

  The Multiple Man

  Orion

  Orion Among the Stars

  Orion and the Conqueror

  Orion in the Dying Time

  Out of the Sun

  Peacekeepers

  Privateers

  Prometheans

  Saturn

  Star Peace: Assured Survival

  The Starcrossed

  Test of Fire

  To Fear the Light (with A. J. Austin)

  To Save the Sun (with A. J. Austin)

  The Trikon Deception (with Bill Pogue)

  Triumph

  Vengeance of Orion

  Venus

  Voyagers

  Voyagers II: The Alien Within

  Voyagers III: Star Brothers

  The Winds of Altair

  THE

  PRECIPICE

  BOOK 1 OF THE ASTEROID WARS

  BEN BOVA

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE PRECIPICE: BOOK 1 OF THE ASTEROID WARS

  Copyright © 2001 by Ben Bova

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 0-812-57989-5

  EAN 978-0812-57989-5

  First edition: October 2001

  First mass market edition: December 2002

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  To Irving Levitt, a rare jewel among men

  To Barbara, who adorns my life with beauty

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to Jeff Mitchell, a real rocket scientist; to Chris Fountain, metallurgist and optimist; and to Lee Modesitt, an economist with imagination; true friends all.

  CONTENTS

  MEMPHIS

  LA GUAIRA

  SPACE STATION GALILEO

  LA GUAIRA

  SPACE STATION GALILEO

  CHENGDU, SICHUAN PROVINCE

  SELENE CITY

  CUENCA

  SELENE CITY

  LA GUAIRA

  NEW KYOTO

  LA GUAIRA

  SELENE

  LONDON

  SELENE

  MASTERSON AEROSPACE CORP.

  THE CATACOMBS

  SELENE GOVERNING COUNCIL

  ALPHONSUS

  SPACE STATION NUEVA VENEZUELA

  SELENE

  SELENE NANOTECHNOLOGY LABORATORY

  PELICAN BAR

  HUMPHRIES TRUST RESEARCH CENTER

  LIVING QUARTERS

  FACTORY #4

  GRAND PLAZA

  ASTRO CORPORATION OFFICES

  STARPOWER, LTD.

  SPACEPORT ARMSTRONG

  BOARD MEETING

  SELENE

  LUNAR ORBIT

  PELICAN BAR

  MISSION CONTROL CENTER

  HUMPHRIES TRUST RESEARCH CENTER

  STARPOWER 1

  SPACEPORT ARMSTRONG

  THE INTERVIEW

  OUTWARD BOUND

  EARTHVIEW RESTAURANT

  SOLAR STORM

  NANOTECHNOLOGY LABORATORY

  STAVENGER THEATER

  TURNAROUND

  EVA

  STARPOWER 1

  MARE NUBIUM

  HUMPHRIES TRUST RESEARCH CENTER

  STARPOWER 1

  BREAKOUT

  BONANZA

  TEMPO 9

  MESSAGES

  STORM SHELTER

  SELENE

  HAVEN

  NANOTECHNOLOGY LABORATORY

  HAVEN

  DEATH

  LIFE

  The modern tropics and their fringes support more than half the world’s population, numbered in the billions. Many already live at the fringe of survival, dependent on food aid transported from the grain belts of more temperate zones. Even a small climatic shift… would physically compress the geographical limits for cereal cropping— I leave it to your imagination what such a pace of climate change would entail for most people.

  —Stephen Drury

  Stepping Stones: Evolving

  the Earth and Its Life

  … some men have already embarked on a bold new adventure, the conquest of outer space. This is a healthy sign, a clear indication that some of us are still feral men, unwilling to domesticate ourselves by any kind of bondage, even that of the spatial limitations of our planet’s surface.

  —Carleton S. Coon

  The Story of Man (Third Edition)

  MEMPHIS

  “Jesus,” the pilot kept murmuring. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

  The helicopter was racing north, bucking, jolting between the shattered land below and the thick dark gray clouds scudding just above, trying to follow Interstate 55 from the Memphis International Airport to what was left of the devastated city.

  You could not see the highway; it was carpeted from horizon to horizon with refugees, bumper to bumper traffic inching along, an unending stream of cars, trucks, vans, busses, people on foot swarming like ants, trudging painfully along the shoulders of the road in the driving, soaking rain, women pushing baby carriages, men an
d boys hauling carts piled high with whatever they could salvage from their homes. Flood water was lapping along the shoulder embankment, rising, still rising, reaching for the poor miserable people as they fled their homes, their hopes, their world in a desperate attempt to escape the rising waters.

  Dan Randolph felt the straps of his safety harness cutting into his shoulders as he stared grimly out the window from his seat behind the two pilots. His head throbbed painfully and the filter plugs in his nostrils were hurting again. He barely noticed the copter’s buffeting and jouncing in the choppy wind as he watched the swollen tide of refugees crawling sluggishly along the highway. It’s like a war zone, Dan thought. Except that the enemy is Mother Nature. The flooding was bad enough, but the earthquake broke their backs.

  Dan put the electronically-boosted binoculars to his eyes once again, searching, scanning the miserable, soaking wet throng below for one face, one individual, the one woman he had come to save. It was impossible. There must be half a million people down there, he thought. More. Finding her will take a miracle.

  The chopper bounced and slewed wildly in a sudden gust of wind, banging the binoculars painfully against Dan’s brow. He started to yell something to the pilot, then realized that they had run into another blustery squall. Fat, pounding raindrops splattered thickly against the copter’s windows, cutting Dan’s vision down almost to nothing.

  The pilot slid back the transparent sanitary partition that isolated Dan’s compartment. Dan suppressed an angry urge to slam it back. What good are sterile barriers if you open them to the outside air?

  “We’ve got to turn back, sir,” the pilot yelled over the thrumming thunder of the engines.

  “No!” Dan shouted. “Not till we find her!”

  Half turning in his seat to face Dan, the pilot jabbed a finger toward his spattered windscreen. “Mr. Randolph, you can fire me when we land, but I ain’t going to fly through that:9

  Looking past the flapping windscreen wipers, Dan saw four deadly slim dark funnels writhing across the other side of the swollen Mississippi, dust and debris flying wherever they touched the ground. They looked like coiling, squirming snakes thrashing across the ground, smashing everything they touched: buildings exploded, trees uprooted, autos tossed into the air like dry leaves, homes shattered into splinters, RV parks, housing developments, shopping malls all destroyed at the flick of the twisters’ pitiless, mindless malevolence, blasted as completely and ruthlessly as if they had been struck by an enemy missile attack.

  The enemy is Mother Nature, Dan repeated silently, numbly, as he stared at the advancing tornadoes. There was nothing he could do about them and he knew it. They couldn’t be bought, bribed, flattered, seduced, or threatened into obedience. For the first time since he’d been a child, Daniel Hamilton Randolph felt totally powerless.

  As he locked the partition shut again and fumbled in his pockets for his antiseptic spray, the chopper swung away, heading back toward what was left of the international airport. The Tennessee National Guard had thrown a cordon around the grounds; the airport was the Memphis region’s last link with the rest of the country. The floods had knocked out electrical power, smashed bridges, covered roads with thick muddy brown water. Most of the city had been submerged for days.

  Then came the earthquake. A solid nine on the Richter scale, so powerful that it flattened buildings from Nashville to Little Rock and as far north as St. Louis. New Orleans had already been under water for years as the rising Gulf of Mexico inexorably reclaimed its shoreline from Florida to Texas. The Mississippi was in flood all the way up to Cairo, and still rising.

  Now, with communications out, millions homeless in the never-ending rains, aftershocks strong enough to tumble skyscrapers, Dan Randolph searched for the one person who meant something to him, the only woman he had ever loved.

  He let the binoculars drop from his fingers and rested his head on the seat back. It was hopeless. Finding Jane out there among all those other people—

  The copilot had twisted around in his seat and was tapping on the clear plastic partition.

  “What?” Dan yelled.

  Instead of trying to outshout the engines’ roar through the partition, the copilot pointed to the earpiece of his helmet. Dan understood and picked up the headset they had given him from where he’d dumped it on the floor. He had sprayed it when they’d first handed it to him, but now he doused it again with the antiseptic.

  As he clamped it over his head, he heard the metallic, static-streaked voice of a news reporter saying, “… definitely identified as Jane Scanwell. The former President was found, by a strange twist of fate, on President’s Island, where she was apparently attempting to help a family of refugees escape the rising Mississippi waters. Their boat apparently capsized and was swept downstream, but snagged on treetops on the island.

  “Jane Scanwell, the fifty-second President of the United States, died trying to save others from the ravages of flood and earthquake here in what remains of Memphis, Tennessee.”

  LA GUAIRA

  It was raining in Venezuela, too, when Dan Randolph finally got back to his headquarters. Another hurricane was tearing through the Caribbean, lashing Barbados and the Windward Islands, dumping twenty-five centimeters of rain on the island of La Guaira and Caracas, on the mainland, with more to come.

  Dan sat behind his big, bare desk, still wearing the rumpled slacks and pullover that he had travelled in from the States. His office smelled musty, mildewed from the incessant rain despite its laboring climate control system. He wasn’t wearing the protective nose plugs; the air in his office was routinely filtered and run past intense ultraviolet lamps.

  Leaning back into the softly yielding caramel brown leather of his swivel chair, Dan gazed out at the windswept launch complex. The rockets had been towed back into the assembly buildings. In this storm they could not dare to launch even the sturdy, reliable Clipperships. The launch towers were visibly shaking in the gale-force wind, lashed by horizontal sheets of rain; roofs had already peeled off some of the smaller buildings. Beyond the launch towers, the sea was a wild madhouse of frothing whitecapped waves. The wind howled like a beast of prey, rattling even the thick double-paned windows of Randolph’s office.

  Third storm to hit us and it’s not even the Fourth of July yet Business isn’t lousy enough, we’ve got these double-damned hurricanes to deal with. At this rate I’ll be broke by Labor Day.

  We’re losing, Dan thought. We’re in a war and we’re losing it. Hell, we’ve already lost it. What’s the sense of pretending otherwise?

  The dampness made him ache deep in his bones, an arthritic-like reminder of his age and the dose of radiation sickness he’d contracted years earlier. I ought to get back to Selene, he told himself. A man with a broken-down immune system shouldn’t stay on Earth if he doesn’t have to.

  Yet for hours he simply sat there, staring out at the pounding storm, seeing only the face of Jane Scanwell, remembering the sound of her voice, the touch of her fingers, the soft silkiness of her skin, the scent of her, the way she brightened a room, they way she had filled his life even though they were never really together, not more than a few quick hours now and then before they fell into bitter argument. There was so much separating them. After she had left the White House, they had managed to spend a couple of days together on a tropical atoll. Even that had ended in a quarrel.

  But for once they had seen things the same way, had the same goal, fought the same fight on the same side. The greenhouse cliff meant war, a war pitting humankind’s global civilization against the blind forces of nature. Jane understood that as well as Dan did. They were going to fight this war together.

  And it killed her.

  Should I go on? Dan asked himself. What’s the use of it? What’s the sense of it? He wanted to cry, but the tears would not come.

  Dan Randolph had always seemed larger than his actual physical size. He was a solidly-built welterweight, still in trim physical shape, although now, in
his sixties, it took grueling hours in the gym to maintain his condition. His once-sandy hair was almost completely gray now; his staff people called him “the Silver Fox” behind his back. He had a fighter’s face, with a strong stubborn jaw and a nose that had been flattened years ago by a fist, when he’d been a construction worker in space. Despite all the wealth he’d amassed since those early days, he’d never had his nose fixed. Some said it was a perverse sense of machismo. His light gray eyes, which had often glinted in amusement at the foolishness of men, were bleak and saddened now.

  A chime sounded, and the sleek display screen of his computer rose slowly, silently out of the desktop surface.

  Dan swiveled his chair to see the screen. His administrative assistant’s young, somber face looked out at him. Teresa was a native of Caracas, tall, leggy, cocoa-cream complexion, deep brown almond eyes and thick lustrous midnight dark hair. Years earlier Dan would have tried to bed her and probably succeeded. Now he was simply annoyed at her intrusion into his memories.

  “It’s almost dinnertime,” she said.

  “So what?”

  “Martin Humphries has been waiting all day to see you. He’s the man Zack Freiberg wants you to meet.”

  Dan grimaced. Zack had been the first one to warn Dan of the impending greenhouse cliff.

  “Not today, Teresa,” he said. “I don’t want to see anybody today.”

  The young woman hesitated a heartbeat, then asked, softly, almost timidly, “Do you want me to bring you a dinner tray?”

  Dan shook his head. “I’m not hungry.”

  “You have to eat.”

  He looked at her image on his screen, so intent, so young and concerned and worried that the boss was going off the deep end. And he felt anger rising inside him, unreasoning blind blazing rage.

  “No, goddammit to hell and back,” he snapped. “You have to eat I can do any goddamned thing I want to, and if you want to keep drawing your paycheck you’d better leave me the hell alone.”

  Her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened, but she said nothing. Dan snapped his fingers and the screen went blank. Another snap and it folded back into its niche in the desk’s gleaming rosewood top.