Suit drill took about fifteen minutes. It covered everything from breathing patterns to the external emergency purge-and-pop switch meant to be used for rapid extraction in dire situations. Bashar was acutely aware of time crawling, of knowing the launch was in final countdown, of being as badly out of place as he’d ever been in his adult life. Every word, every movement up here in orbit, was him faking it.

  Undercover wasn’t a problem. He’d spent literally decades undercover. Being under a cover he didn’t understand in a location he had no information about made him crazy.

  At least it was that idiot Bibendum who was droning through the safety precautions and handling instructions. Not Moselle or Lu, who were far more dangerous to him personally. Bashar paid attention—he wasn’t suicidally stupid—but still his mind raced.

  The next unstupid thing he needed to do was stop thinking of Bibendum as an idiot. The kid wouldn’t have been tasked to his reception team if he was. Slow and doughy didn’t mean foolish. Or even not dangerous. If nothing else, it was Bibendum who knew all those little things like the airlock passcodes and the pressure suit safety margins. This kid could kill Bashar simply by not speaking up.

  “I gave you an all-purpose suit,” Bibendum told him near the end of the safety lecture.

  “Why?” asked Bashar.

  “Cheaper than the mission-specific equipment. If you find some new way to hurt it or yourself, less of a problem for the rest of us.”

  Bashar was momentarily diverted by sheer intellectual curiosity. “What’s the difference between the suit types?”

  “There’s engineering suits, and mining suits, and long-duration suits. Those last ones are basically tiny little shuttles in their own right. Each type carries tools and equipment appropriate to the job. What you’ve got? Rated to seventy-two hours for use in re-entry applications.” Bibendum giggled. “Takes a long time to get down by glider. And they have basic atmospheric capabilities, for escape if a re-entry goes wrong. But minimally powered here in orbit. Don’t go jetting around. You’ll run out of juice and have three days to be real sorry about it before you die of asphyxiation.”

  “Surely you have search-and-rescue capabilities.”

  “All depends on the priority. You’ve already validated the target maps, after all.”

  That was an unambiguous statement of his current importance in the local scheme of things. Not to mention a nicely veiled threat. Well, in truth, not even all that veiled.

  Then they went Outside.

  * * *

  After about two minutes of being towed by the little booster sled Bibendum was piloting, Bashar recovered his wits. The Earth was … huge. And blue. None of the photography and virteography he’d seen over the years did this view even the remotest justice. The Moon was somewhere else, not in his line of sight, but Orbital Zero stood close and big.

  And the stars. The cold, unblinking stars. It wasn’t hard to see where Lu got his terror from. This was like looking down a well the size of the Universe and wondering why you weren’t falling in. Still, Bashar didn’t think he shared Lu’s kenophobia.

  Just a respect for the depth of the tumble he’d take if he missed his step up here.

  “Nice view, huh?” Bibendum’s voice crackled over a dedicated suit-to-suit channel as he towed both of them through empty space with a little powered sled to which the suits were closely tethered.

  “You’re orbit-born, aren’t you?” Bashar asked, confirming an earlier thought. How had he gone all his life without ever seeing this view in person?

  The kid’s reply was disgusted. “You think they’d bother to lift someone like me out of the gravity well?”

  “Is everyone born up here like you?”

  “No.” Then, reluctantly: “I have Yonami syndrome. It’s a genetic disorder unrelated to conception or gestation in orbit. One or more of my grandparents got into some pretty toxic stuff. I also have friable bones, from growing up here without being healthy enough to use the high-gee workout rooms. That can be an orbit-born problem. I’ll never go down the gravity well. Not if I want to keep on living.” It sounded like a rehearsed speech.

  Bashar could almost feel sorry for the kid. At least, he would have if Bibendum weren’t neck deep in an effort to murder a million people on Bashar’s home turf.

  “So what’s in it for you?” he asked softly. “The rock drop on Seattle. Everything that will come after. Are you actually dedicated to zero population rewilding? Or is this all in a day’s work for Bibendum?”

  The response was a while in coming. “It’s just math,” the kid finally said. “That’s what I do. Calculate deorbits and payload trajectories. I’m something of a savant. One of Yonami’s few benefits.” Pride crept into his voice as he spoke. “The computers are smarter and faster than all of us put together, but I’m better at framing the problems and interpreting the results than anyone.”

  “You know your math is going to kill a million people not too long from now?” Then three billion more in the next year or two, given the evidence in the darwin file.

  “So what? I’ll still be here. Besides, what do you care?” His head twisted to look at Bashar directly, though glare made Bibendum’s visor brilliantly opaque. “It’s your plan, Bull Dancer.”

  “Just curious about all our places in history,” Bashar said slowly. He’d often had that same so what, I’ll still be here thought.

  The carrier on his subcutaneous relays began to blink in Bashar’s visual field, tweaking his optic nerve. What the hell? Up here?

  He twitched the appropriate muscle sequence to accept the transmission. Words began to scroll across his visual field.

  cox:: ¿¿¿bashar???

  bas:: charity … busy here

  cox:: lightbull in my room now

  bas:: you going to live?

  cox:: not a hit … you know about seattle?

  bas:: rock is in front of me

  Which was true. They approached something that looked like a tiled-covered sculpture of a big, stubby glider.

  cox:: you in orbit?

  bas:: yes … trying to stop this

  cox:: lightbull says tied to darwin

  bas:: short bald man?

  cox:: yes

  Bashar had a lot he could say to that, but any threats would be empty, any warnings redundant.

  bas:: check on schaadts shack … dont know if ill make it home

  cox:: save seattle … then come home

  bas:: to darwin

  cox:: one crisis at a time

  That was also certainly true. He realized Bibendum was speaking.

  “… not a hell of a lot to see. It’s a rock, covered with heat-resistant tiles, with some attitude jets and control surfaces stuck on. World’s heaviest glider, basically.”

  bas:: must go

  cox:: love you

  “Fly by wire from orbit?” Bashar asked.

  “Not if I’ve done my job right,” Bibendum responded with some irritation. “Can’t get a signal through during re-entry burn off, so fly by wire wouldn’t work in any case. That’s where I come in. My job is to plot orbital insertions. Plus this thing has onboard manual control for minor course corrections or relocations before we drop it.”

  Onboard manual control? Ah-ha. “Show me the jets and controls. We may need targeting flexibility if there’s another drop like this.”

  “You people are idiots,” hissed Bibendum. But he steered the two of them around the blunt end of the mining package and began to point out strapped-on pieces of hardware. Bashar wondered why they bothered, as surely it all burned off during re-entry, but maybe not. He didn’t know anything about this kind of engineering. He wasn’t in a position to learn it now.

  Besides, what he really wanted to see was the manual control. Could this hunk of rock possibly have a cockpit? Bashar studied the exterior of Bibendum’s suit, thinking over the safety drill. How quickly could he disable the kid and take control of the situation?

  A laconic voice with a thick Australian accent crackled over Bashar’s suit comms. “You blokes got another ten minutes before we nudge her out of here and on her way.”

  “Roger that,” Bibendum said. “Tourists,” he added after a moment.

  I’ll show you some tourism, Bashar thought. Maybe he’d make the kid ride the rock down.

  Then they came upon the little teardrop metal cabin on the dorsal surface of the mining package, tucked far back from the leading edge.

  “See?” said Bibendum. “Now let’s get out of here.”

  “Hold on a moment,” Bashar replied. He laid one hand on the arm of Bibendum’s pressure suit as if to steady himself. The kid didn’t react, so Bashar’s other hand reached for the emergency purge-and-pop switch.

  * * *

  He hadn’t been sure what to expect. The actual result wasn’t much of anything at all. Just a rush of air that fogged, crystallized and vanished. Bibendum didn’t even make a sound over the suit comms.

  “Next time, kid, don’t mess with my people,” Bashar said. It would do, for an elegy.

  He unhooked himself from the tow sled, wishing like crazy he had a spare suit to latch on. Before he wrestled with the sled any further, Bashar made sure to hook his safety line to the mining package’s control cockpit. He didn’t think the traffic controller had any telemetry on their suits—Bibendum certainly hadn’t hooked him up to anything that would have done that job.

  Bashar got the sled pointed back in the general direction of Orbital Zero. He then discovered the go-button was a dead man rig. Well, that made sense. You wouldn’t want uncontrolled acceleration up here. He made a slipknot out of the slack in Bibendum’s safety line, which was beastly slow work in his own suit gloves, especially given that the line had obviously been engineered to be kink resistant, and therefore was largely knot resistant as well. With any luck, it would spring free fairly quickly and cut the acceleration so as to leave the tow sled moving on its own without further power. That ought to look like a normal flight pattern.

  The Australian’s voice eventually crackled over the comms once more. “You two moving out, or headed home the hard way?”

  Bashar hazarded a response. “Bibendum’s getting us headed home right now.”

  “Roger that. Initial burn in one minute, forty-two seconds.”

  These people relied on instrumentation far more than visual contact, he realized. If someone were eyeballing him, they’d already be on to what he was up to.

  Bashar re-aimed the sled, which had been drifting, and tugged his slip knot tight. The sled’s compressed gas motors puffed and it slid away, dragging Bibendum’s corpse along.

  The absolute silence would eventually drive him mad, he realized. All he could hear was his own breathing, and the occasional whir of some relay or motor in the structure of his suit. Bibendum’s death should have made a noise. The sled ought to whoosh.

  He’d seen too many movies and virteos. And they never got the smell right either. His suit stank like an old fashioned gym locker room. Did all space suits reek like this?

  Pushing the thought aside, he contemplated the control cockpit’s tiny hatch. That they surely would have wired into telemetry. He didn’t dare open it until the mining package was far enough into its de-orbit process to be past the point of no return.

  Instead he huddled as low as he could so as not to profile himself to any casual visual observation, and studied the hatch mechanism. At home, back on Earth, with just a few not-so-simple mechanical and electronic tools, he could bypass most entry sensors. Here, in space, with nothing but blunt-fingered suit gloves, he didn’t dare risk it.

  Bashar wedged himself in tightly and watched the planet loom above him. It was the world, the whole damned world, glowing blue and brown and white and green as night swept in from the curve of the east and clouds danced across the central Pacific.

  He wondered how many wars would have been stopped if everyone had been shipped upstairs once in their life for this view.

  Finally he just waited for the rock’s initial de-orbiting burn, his breath echoing in his ears as the sweat sock stench of the suit crowded his nose, watching the world drift and reflecting on what a terrible, terminal idea this was.

  * * *

  Moselle’s voice crackled over the suit comms. She sounded worried. “Biòu. Where the hell are you!?”

  It took Bashar a moment to recall that Biòu was him. The cover identity to which Baldie-with-no-name hadn’t tipped him. He didn’t see much point in answering her, as that would constitute passing intelligence to the enemy. It seemed unlikely that they didn’t know where he was by now.

  “Biòu.” She sounded calmer. “Don’t be an idiot. You will die out there. We can still pick you up.”

  She was right about one thing. Bashar knew he would die out here. He had no idea if that business about being able to pick him up was true, but he wasn’t going to encourage a test from this end. Besides which, she sounded like she was fishing. Bashar left the control cockpit’s hatch alone a little longer, just in case they thought he was floating around outside Orbital Zero somewhere with the late, unlamented Bibendum.

  Her voice crackled a third time. “Damn it, answer me.”

  If I could drop a rock on you, lady, I would, he thought, then returned to his contemplation of the eye-boggling majesty of Earth.

  The pleas ran on for a while, every minute or two.

  When after about fifteen minutes, they shifted to a roaring spate of enraged profanity, Bashar figured his latest cover was well and truly blown, and so he let himself in to the cockpit.

  If they could still catch him, well, he’d done everything he could.

  * * *

  Piloting an artificial asteroid in a decaying orbit wasn’t very much like flying a microlight at treetop level over the Cascade forests. But that was all the aviation experience he had.

  “Not a hell of a lot to work with here,” Bashar told himself. Then he realized if he could open a comms link to the surface, he might be able to get some advice.

  Unfortunately, being tucked into thousands of tons of rock meant his line-of-sight options were severely reduced.

  Did the mining package even have a comms capability? That was a technology he did understand fairly well.

  The cabin wasn’t pressurized, so all the equipment must be hardened against vacuum and radiation. Which in turn meant nothing looked quite like he expected it to. Still, the rock had to have communications capability—how else would the traffic controllers at Orbital Zero be able to signal for burns and course corrections prior to atmospheric insertion? Bashar suddenly became very interested in cutting off that access.

  He finally settled for depowering and unracking the comms rig completely. Then he jacked his suit comms into the antenna line that connected to something somewhere out on the surface of the mining package. Bashar couldn’t imagine using a directional dish on a high velocity throwaway deployment like this—it had to be meters of omnidirectional antenna, hopefully on multiple faces of the rock.

  Unsurprisingly, the orbital tech was fundamentally the same as the downside tech. That meant he could use his implanted ultra low power gear to interface to the suit comms, then boost with the suit comms to the mining package’s antenna.

  Bashar told his communication wizard to find a terrestrial connection, and left it to hop bands and ping for handshakes. He then turned his attention to the flight controls.

  “The Wright brothers would recognize this.” The rock was flown, if that was indeed the word, by a pair of joysticks and a small rank of thruster controls. They were labeled, but the labels didn’t mean much to him. “Ventral Boost 2” didn’t exactly tell him what it did.

  And what was he going to do? Assuming he could alter course, was it better to undershoot or overshoot? If he couldn’t undershoot far enough to put the mining package down in deep Pacific waters, he was probably better off overshooting as far as possible. They wouldn’t be too happy about it in Wenatchee or wherever it was this thing hit in central Washington, but the major damage would be at the impact site and eastward, clear of Seattle and behind some nice, sheltering mountains. With a hell of a lot fewer people involved as either corpses or disaster refugees.

  Bashar tried very hard not to think about who else was out there as well.

  The problem was knowing what to do. He wasn’t even sure if the right move was to speed the rock up or slow it down.

  Then he had a connection. Bashar squirted out Charity’s comms address.

  She answered quickly enough. But then, his wife knew where he was and what he was doing. “You still alive?”

  Her voice was like a balm to him. The comm lag from surface to orbit and through several satellite bounces was a lot less calming. “A little while longer,” Bashar said.

  The response to that was annoying seconds later. “You must still be in orbit.” Charity couldn’t keep the fright from her voice.

  “Yes. Coming home the hard way. I’m riding the rock right now.” One last plunge, like Milton’s Satan without a lake of ice to land in.

  Nine times the space that measures day and night

  To mortal men, he with his horrid crew

  Lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf,

  Confounded though immortal.

  Another lag, some of it emotional, some of it imposed by the relentless laws of physics. “They after you up there?” Charity asked.

  “Oh, surely. No idea if they can catch me. I have to assume not.” There hadn’t been any more cursing from Moselle for a while, at least. “I want your help.”

  That answer came as fast as the electrons permitted. “What do you need?”

  “Someone who knows a lot about orbital mechanics.” He’d killed his last expert an hour or so ago, Bashar realized. But he still didn’t see any way he could have either suborned Bibendum or forced the boy to help him. “I have to find a way to drive this thing not to hit Seattle. All it’s got are attitude jets, and airfoils for the upper atmosphere. So I can’t repoint it at, say, Wake Island.”

  Lag. “Where are you going to put it?”

  “Pacific, by preference. Otherwise as far east of Seattle as I can make the rock fly.”