Bisesa grinned. Surely less than that if the factories do their job. And it isnt so much. Weve still got three years. Youd be surprised what Boy Scouts and Girl Guides can produce when theyve a mind to do it.
Siobhan shook her head. This needs thinking through. But if its possible Ill owe you a debt of gratitude.
Bisesa seemed embarrassed. Its an obvious idea. If I hadnt come up with it, you would have yourselfor somebody else.
Maybe. She smiled. I ought to introduce you to my daughter. Saving the world is so 1990s disaster movie! Nobody believes in heroes anymore, Mum This way, everybody would be a hero, she supposed. Maybe it would catch even Perditas imagination.
Bisesa asked, Why did you show me this stuff?
Siobhan sighed. Because this is real. This is engineering. This is what were building, right now. I thought if you saw this
It might puncture my fantasies, Bisesa said.
Something like that, maybe.
Just because something is big, indeed superhuman, doesnt make it any less real, Bisesa said evenly. Or any less relevant. And anyhow, as Ive said, you dont have to believe me. Just look for proof.
Siobhan stood up. I really ought to get back to my meeting. But she hesitated, intrigued despite herself. You know, Im open-minded enough to accept the existence of extraterrestrial aliens as a possibility. But what youre describing makes no psychological sense. Why would these hypothetical Firstborn try to destroy us? And even if it were so, why would they give you these hints and glimpses? Why would they warn any of usand why you?
But even as she spoke, Siobhan thought of a possible answer to her objection.
Because there are factions among these Firstborn. Because they are no more united and uniform of view than humanity iswhy should a more advanced intelligence be homogeneous? And because there are some of them, at least, who believe that what is being done is wrong. A faction of them, working through this woman, Bisesa, are trying to warn us.
This woman could be crazy, Siobhan thought. Even after meeting her, she was ninety percent sure that was true. But her story did make a certain sense. And what if she was right? What if an investigation did turn up evidence to back her claims? What then?
Bisesa was watching her, as if reading her thoughts. Siobhan didnt trust herself to speak again, and she hurried away.
When she got back to the Council Room, the level of chatter among the population of heads dropped a little. She stood in the middle of the room and peered around. Youre all acting as if youve got something to be ashamed of.
Bud said, Perhaps we have, Siobhan. Its beginning to look as if things arent as black as we painted them. The issue of the solar pressure and positioningone of us came up with a solution. We think.
Who? Siobhan faced Rose Delea. Rose. Surely not you.
Rose actually looked embarrassed. Actually it was our conversation earlier. When I said something about how wed have no problem if the sunlight was allowed to pass straight through the shield? It got me thinking. There is a way we could make our shield transparent. We dont reflect the sunlight. We deflect it
The shield would be made clear, but scored on one side with fine parallel grooves: prisms.
Ah, Siobhan said. And each ray of sunlight would be turned aside. Wed be building, not a mirror, but a lens, a huge Fresnel lens.
It would be an all-but-transparent lens that could turn the sunlight away a little, by only a degree or less. But that would be sufficient to spare the Earth from the blast of the sunstorm. And a lens would suffer only a fraction of the photon pressure of a fully reflective mirror.
Rose said, Its really no more of a manufacturing challenge than our current design. But the total mass could be much less.
And so were back in the realms of feasible design solutions? Siobhan asked.
With a vengeance, Bud said, beaming.
Siobhan glanced around. Now she saw restlessness in their expressions, even eagerness; they were all keen to get back to their people, to begin exploring this new idea. It was a good team, she thought with pride, the best there was, and she could trust them to take this new idea and worry it until it was thoroughly integrated into the design and the construction programby which time the next obstacle would have appeared, and they would all be back here again.
Another bit of good news before we close, she said. I may have a solution to the nanotech manufacturing problem too.
Eyes widened.
She smiled. It will keep. Ill mail you the details when its fleshed out a bit more. Thank you, everybody. Meeting closed.
The screens winked out, one by one.
You old ham, Toby grinned.
Always leave them wanting more.
Were you serious about the smartskin issue?
Needs work, but I think so.
You know, Toby said, mathematically speaking L1 is a turning pointa point where a curve changes direction, from downhill to up. Thats why its a point of equilibrium.
I know thatah. You think weve gone through a turning point on the project today?
What do you think?
I think you should leave the headlines to the journalists. Okay. Whats next?
23: Heathrow
In March 2040with another dismal Christmas come and gone, and just a little over two years left before sunstorm dayMiriam Grec decided to visit the shield construction site in person. And that meant flying into space, for the first time in her life.
As she was driven away from the Euro-needle that day she felt guilty but excited, like a child playing hooky from school. But she needed a holiday; her friends and enemies alike would agree on that, she thought wryly.
Londons Heathrow had been an airport for a century, and now it was a spaceport too. And, sitting on a long, hardened runway in the watery sunlight, the spaceplane looked quite remarkably beautiful, Miriam thought.
The Boudicca was a slim needle some sixty meters long. It had alarmingly small vanes at its nose and tail, and even its main wings were just stubby swept-back deltas. Mounted on the wingtips were fat, asymmetrical nacelles that contained the principal rocket motorsor rather they would work as rockets in the vacuum of space, but in Earths atmosphere they breathed air like jet engines. The planes upper surface was a dull white ceramic shell, but its underside was coated with a gleaming black plate, a heat shield for reentry, made of a substance that was a remote descendant of the thermal tiling that had given the venerable space shuttle so much trouble.
Despite the ground support vehicles that clustered around it and the clouds of vapor steaming from its tanks of cryogenic fuel, the plane really did look as if it belonged to another order of creation entirely, and had only diffidently set down here on Earth. But it was a working shipindeed, a veteran of space. That gleaming outer hull was punctured with the nozzles of attitude control rockets around which the surface was scarred and blistered, and repeated reentries had splashed scorch marks over its underside.
And the plane was proudly British. While the tailplane bore on one side the starry circle of the Eurasian Union, on the other side waved an animated Union flag, and on the spaceplanes wings and flank were painted the famous roundels of the Royal Air Force, a reminder that this soaring bird of space could be called on to serve military duties.
The design had an ancestry dating back to pioneering studies in the 1980s by firms like British Aerospace and Rolls-Royce, paper birds with names like Hotol and Skylon. But those studies had languished until the 2020s, when a new breed of materials technologies and engine designs, and the new push into space, had suddenly made a fleet of fully reusable spaceplanes a commercial proposition. And when the planes actually flew, of course, the British were quite unreasonably proud of their beautiful new toys.