A Deepness in the Sky

"Oh Pham, tas. Tas." Jau stepped to one side of the consensus image, and jabbed his hand deep into the haze of satellites, marking one blue dot with the labelKINDRED GROUND RECON SATELLITE 543 followed by orbital parameters. He glanced in Pham's direction, and there was a quiet smile on his face, as if he were expecting some reaction. The numbers didn't mean anything to Gonle. She leaned to one side, looked at Trinli around the edge of the image. The old fraud looked just as mystified as any, and not at all happy with Xin's smile or Silipan's smug chuckle.

Trinli squinted into the display. "Okay, so you matched orbits with Recon543." Beside him, Ezr Vinh sucked in a surprised breath. This made Trinli's frown even deeper. "Launch date seven hundred Ksec ago, booster chemical, period synchronous, altitude..." His voice trailed off in a kind of gargle. "Altitude twelve thousand damn-all kilometers! That must be a mistake."

Jau's grinned widened. "No mistake. That's the whole reason I went down for a close look."

The significance finally percolated through to Gonle. In Supplies and Services, she dealt mainly with bargaining and inventory managment. But shipping was a big part of price points, and she was Qeng Ho. Arachna was a terrestroid planet, with a 90Ksec day. Synchronous altitude should have been way higher than twelve thousand klicks. Even for a nontechnical person, the satellite was a magical impossibility. "It's stationkeeping?" she asked. "Little rockets?"

"No. Even fusion rockets would have trouble doing that for days at a time."

"Cavorite." Ezr's voice was faint, awed. Where had she heard that word before?

But Jau was nodding. "Right." He said something to the display, and now the view was from his pinnace. "Getting a close look was a problem, especially since I didn't want to show my main torch. Instead, I fried the satellite's cameras and then did an instantaneous match from below....You can begin to see it now, at the center of my target pointer. The closing speed has fallen from fifty meters a second, to an instant now where we're stopped relative to each other. It's about five meters above us now." There was something in the pointer, something boxy and dead black, falling toward them like a yo-yo on a string. It slowed, passed a meter or two below them, and started back up. The topside was not black but an irregular pattern of dark grays. "Okay, freeze the image. This should give you a good look. A flat architecture, probably gyro-stabilized. The polyhedral shell is for radar evasion. Except for the impossible orbit, this thing is a typical low-tech stealthed satellite... ." The satellite slid upward again, but this time was met by grappling hooks. "This is where we took it aboard the pinnace—and left behind a credible explosion."

"Good flying, man." That from Pham Trinli, acknowledging someone almost as good as himself.

"Ha. Tas even tougher than it looks. I had to run my zipheads near the edge of a nonrecoverable panic all through the rendezvous. There were just too many inconsistencies in the dynamics."

Silipan interrupted cheerily, "That will change. We're reprogramming all the pilots for cavorite maneuvers."

Jau killed the imagery and frowned at Silipan. "You screw up, and we'll have no pilots."

Gonle couldn't take much more irrelevant chitchat. "The satellite. You have it here? How did the Spiders do this?"

She noticed Nau grinning at her. "I think Miss Fong has identified the immediate issue. Do you remember those stories of gravity anomalies in the altiplano? The short of it is, those stories weretrue. The Kindred military discovered some kind of—call it antigravity. Apparently they've been pursuing this for ten years now. We never caught on because Accord Intelligence missed it, and our penetration of the Kindred side has always lagged. This little satellite massed eight tonnes, but almost two tonnes of that was ‘cavorite' cladding. The Kindred Spiders are using this remarkable substance simply to increase their rockets' throw weight. I have a little demonstration for you... ."

He spoke to the air. "Douse the fireplace, cut ventilation." He paused, and the room became very quiet. Over by the wall, Qiwi closed a tall window that had drawn a taste of moistness in from the lake. The park's fake sun peeked between breaks in the clouds, and streamers of light glittered on the water. Gonle wondered vaguely if Nau's zipheads were so good that they could orchestrate his world for these moments. Probably.