The National Weather Service had been advising residents within two hundred miles of Mobile to evacuate for only the last 20 hours, but many had chosen to wait out the storm. They had done so before in the face of smaller evacuation orders, and many had adopted the near-absolute skepticism of authority common in the slightly educated. Some had been unable to get away in time: the very old, the very sick, and those who stayed behind to care for them.
Callisto had read the reports and asked for the counsel of the meteorologists on board The Creator. They told him the reports were underestimating how bad it would be. In an open meeting of the contestants, he had laid out a plan, asked for permission to intervene, and gotten it by overwhelming vote. He was standing on the “bridge” of the ship, getting ready to give the Captain permission to execute the plan. The man had called it “damned foolhardy but good-hearted” and agreed that he could do it.
They had retrofitted several of the building’s middle stories with beanbag chairs secured to the floor, and the bridge itself had more ergonomic appointments along with large display screens and a variety of control interfaces. Each of the Captains’ “mates” had chosen the one they were the most comfortable with. The communications officer had a keyboard, mouse, and headset; the navigation officer held a joystick in one hand a single-hand keyboard below the other. Several of the other erstwhile “bridge officers” had simple touchscreen tablets. One sat immersed a VR environment of common origin, modified to meet his needs for this particular mission.
Callisto had insisted that they broadcast their planning meeting just the same as any other Governance event; they were broadcasting now, beaming a signal to a satellite cluster that he had redirected into geosynchronous orbit above the Gulf of Mexico. He hadn’t gone out his way to avoid his shipmates who followed and projected TV ratings; they had been skeptical about what their projections showed: none of them really thought that viewership could be that high.
Recalling himself to the moment, Callisto noticed that people were starting to cast him looks of decreasing subtlety. Two red clocks were centered in the display closest to him. Both were counting down, and the upper had just passed zero. He watched those numbers get more and more negative, as the lower clock ticked gradually down towards zero. They were in the activation window. Last chance to chicken out.
He looked around. Adjacent screens showed him the summaries he had requested. 100 people had requested to disembark the Creator and been granted leave to occupy the smaller-scale re-entry vehicles, which was fortunate because that strained their capacity (the ship had enough life-boats to keep everyone alive in the event of a full scale evacuation, but only so many ships that could manage the trip from Low Earth Orbit to sea level). The remaining approximately 900 souls were all accounted for, their bodies as secured as they had been able to arrange. One of the most elderly was in a medically induced coma at his own request.
All of the pre-mission criteria that he had requested were green. Time to start redeeming this ship. Grinning ruefully, Callisto had a final thought, Never let anyone vote on a name again.
“Captain, on behalf of the lawfully elected civilian government of this vessel, I ask that you take full command of the vessel and its crew for the duration of the execution of Operation Suck the Breath Out the Devil.”
The Captain snorted and said, “Aye. If we’re really about this madness, best be me holding the keys to the madhouse. Subsystem leads, report.”
Running through the pre-established order, the first to call out was a waifish woman gazing steely at four monitors in stacked two by two. “Structural is Go.” Next a brown-skinned man rapidly typing at his keyboard, “Thermal is go.”
One by one, cold, taut voices from serious men and women confirmed, “Power is go.” “Electrical is go.” “Intranet is go.” “Health is go.” “Sensing is go.” “Propulsion is go.” “Meteorology is go.” “Payload is go.” “Intervention is go.” “Communication is go.” “Navigation is go.” Callisto’s attention snapped back and forth as each voice took them a single step closer.
While he listened to the procession he heard in his mind some of the criticism that had been aired during the three weeks since the Paine Bombings, criticism of him, of the Governance, of Julius, of what felt like everything in the universe that he cared about. Each time he heard the word “Go” the angry internal soliloquy quieted another degree, until the Captain called out “Command is go!” and a haunted weight fell away from Calisto under the surging tide of cheers from near everyone on the bridge.
“All right folks, you all know how this is supposed to go, but when everything goes to shite, just listen to me and the First Mate and we’ll be back up in space with all our limbs attached. Comms, send the message to our buddies at the UN, US, and Mexico. Give us a countdown from 30 to when it’s over. Meteorology, make sure you all are in Nav’s ears. If that baby turns a tenth of a fucking degree, they need to know two seconds after you do. Propulsion and Power, smooth and steady, and keep an eye on our exit capacity, if Intervention can’t charge our battery, we gotta have enough juice to get back into orbit.”
I knew that accent was put on. Each sentence the Captain barked was little less pirate-y and a little more professional. The Captain continued to give instructions that were already in place, but Callisto was comforted by the sounds: just bits of reassurance that the driver had his hands on the wheel. Soon the Comm’s officer’s voice broke through his boss's litany of already-issued orders, “30 seconds to end of speech.”
The Captain was silent for a few brief moments. When he began again, his voice was solemn. “First mate, is there anything that I missed?” A few moments later, the first mate, a short, stocky man who had piloted supply aircraft over the Persian Gulf before returning home to build a company that would replace the planes that he had flown, pressed a button on his workstation and addressed the entire ship in an equally solemn tone, “Men and women of the Creator, it is brave and noble work that we undertake. It is an honor to know each of you. Brace for weightlessness.”
The Captain allowed another moment of silence before speaking the command. Callisto was impressed to notice how well he synced it with the 30-second countdown. “Let’s thread the needle, people.”
The ship had swung gracefully through null-g regular rotations to maintain its hourglass orbit over the months of their odyssey. The crew's experience had prepared them for the sensation of microgravity. The feeling of "no down" had long ago become customary and merely inconvenient. Strapped down as they were in preparation for severe acceleration in the later stages of the plan, no one and nothing did so much as float an inch. What Callisto had not been prepared for was the psychological feeling of falling from the heavens directly at the surface of the Earth.
It was frankly fucking terrifying. To be weightless at some generic point between the Earth and the Moon was to be weightless in space. To be weightless as they fell from the sky was activating every ancestral-monkey instinct his DNA and racing heart could summon. Health had warned people that if might be an issue, but The Fucking Captain had insisted that the bridge needed 360-degree vision on screen, and true line of sight out of at least the building.
Callisto could look out the window and see the Earth approaching. Among the many things that were scaring the shit out of him, he couldn’t actually see much solid land, which he imagined might help with its landmarks and familiarity. His direct view was out of the south window, staring directly into the oncoming hurricane, the disaster trailing angry clouds out into a violent, clamoring ocean. Islands he vaguely suspected of being Cuba and Hispaniola were racing towards the growing horizon.
He tried to focus on the screens displaying data, but he didn’t actually have a job to do, and nothing on the screen could quite hold his attention. Normally his ability to regulate his own thoughts was very good. He seldom spent thought on topics outside of his choosing, but today his eyes kept being drawn back to the true window directly in front of him.
Through it the sky turning from black to brilliant blue, the blue-black clouds racing closer and closer.
It didn’t help that he couldn’t stop thinking the same approximate thought, over and over, in increasingly… agitated tones. We are skydiving a fucking skyscraper. We are fucking skydiving in a skyscraper.
The Captain was still speaking in normal tones, but it sounded like screaming to Callisto’s adrenaline-fuelled nervous system. He must have missed Structures deploying the heat shield, because he was no longer weighless. It wasn’t much yet, the atmosphere was still thin at the altitude his UI was showing, but it was becoming more noticeable with every breath he took.
It wasn’t loud yet, but he could hear the ship singing, a deep resonating hum that suffused everything.
As though the sound brought him back to himself, suddenly he was under control again. The first sense that came back was his hearing, and it was the Captain’s voice crowing stridently, “Sensing, get Propulsion adjusted friction-acceleration projections! Meteorology, adjust your estimates, atmospheric density is way outside of your projections. Propulsion, what’s the bottom line.”
Myrta Fugangi, a competent-looking engineer in a red jumpsuit, responded immediately. “Less energy in, more time. More energy out, more time.” Callisto admired how the suit hugged her form, but today, like most days, he was much more appreciative of her effectiveness. Hopefully that means something to the Captain, Cal thought with chagrin. His work preparing the craft for this mission hadn't included more than a cursory study of the bridge. He thought back to hours arranging distributed resource sites around the ship, reassuring older residents that the ship's maneuvers wouldn't overtax their aging organs, and processing the thousands of reports issued for human consumption by the ship's auto-manager.
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The Captain nodded, looking to yet another-- Callisto knew virtually everyone on board the ship, but damned if he could place any of them today besides Myrta today, “Navigation, are we still going to hit our target?”
“No. We need a lateral acceleration, within predicted acceptable tolerances.”
The bridge went silent for a moment, except for the growing din of re-entry shaking the ship. Originally a skyscraper, The Creator was immensely strong--in the direction of its height. The thing was optimized to hold its weight and more, not to get pushed from the side. Callisto remembered the risks. He reminded himself it was designed to resist lateral acceleration from earthquakes. His breathing slowed, but his watch helpfully displayed his heart, still more than double his resting.
The Captain spoke the bridge I to actio. “Nav, Prop: Plan the G for 20 seconds. Comms alert the crew. Sensing, be damned sure that it is doing what we need it to, or we are bugging out of this shit-show. Five-four-three-two-one-zero.”
Listening to the count-down and knowing what was to follow, Callisto was suddenly much more aware of where down was. It was where it should be, below his feet. It had been growing steadily stronger, more down as the air grew denser and pushed harder and harder at the ship. More down as the ship’s engine pushed against the momentum from their figure-8 orbit. When the Captain reached zero, Callisto was jolted sideways in his seat in a way that was just wrong. Down was still below the floor, but it was suddenly at an angle that seemed to reach part of the way towards the windows in front of him. He looked out those windows, and immediately wished that he had not.
Suddenly he was looking down into the storm, and he could finally see their destination: a cylinder of still air at the center of the hurricane. Callisto knew that it was something like twelve miles wide, but it looked so small. It was most definitely NOT directly below them where it was supposed to be… but it was getting closer, straightening out so that he could gradually see more and more of the circular eye of the storm, but still no view of the ground.
Except suddenly the view wasn’t smooth, it was swinging wildly-- no not wildly, like a pendulum-- and sickeningly. Callisto shut his eyes and remembered to breathe the deepest breaths that he could manage. Suddenly down was mostly where it should be and much stronger.
When he heard shouting, he realized that his hearing must have cut out again, I need to figure why that’s happening. Sensing and Navigation were shouting contradictions at the top of their lungs, until the Captain shut them up with a shout. “I’m taking manual control. Give me altitude every seven seconds.”
The humming of the ship and roaring of the air were the only sounds in the room. Then the first readoff. Callisto’s eyes were glued on the Captain now. The man’s attention flickered between his display and the windows. The unerring sense of down wandered around below their feet and varied in intensity from almost nothing to moderately strong. The sound coming from the ship was discordant and hard to classify, impossible to predict. Every seven seconds, Callisto flinched when the Sensing officer called off the number.
Eventually, down settled back to normal. The ship’s shaky singing returned to a less volatile pitch, and Callisto risked a glance out the window. The air was clear, but out the window a few miles away, walls of the darkest clouds he had ever seen boiled and raged. The ground seemed to be a few hundred feet below them, but the wall of cloud was angled above their vantage from the bridge.
The Creator had done it.
They were hovering in the eye of the hurricane.
The Captain looked to his first mate and nodded. The first mate pressed a button on his display and stated in a rock-steady voice, “Phase One Complete; Phase Two to begin in 30 seconds. The Captain grants his permission to celebrate in that time.”
Instant pandemonium erupted on the bridge. Myrta, the Propulsion officer (Cal reminded himself), was jumping up and down with her headset on, hands pumping victorously. The Sensing officer was crying and smiling and hyperventilating, while the Navigation officer had buried his tongue in someone Callisto couldn’t quite make out. Callisto himself was shaking violently and had to touch his face to recognize the smile that was covering his face. The Captain shook the first mate’s hand and nodded at him again.
“ALL RIGHT THAT’S ENOUGH.” The first mate didn’t yell it, but had turned up the volume on his PA so it cut through the insanity and in a more normal tone, “Stations, everyone.”
“Structures, damage report.” He waited a few seconds as the answer was located.
“Some beaching on beams in known resonant points- looks moderate. Main panelling appears OK. Incoming heat shield was totally consumed.”
The first mate replied, “So we are stuck with low G maneuvers unless we want to risk damage or deploy the next shield.” The Structures officer grimaced, “Affirmative.”
The first mate, “Power, report.”
A slender man in full business attire answered, “We could stay here all day, but not all week: 78 percent charge on the batteries.”
“Propulsion.”
“No loss of utility.”
“Electrical.”
“No losses.”
The first mate looked back towards the Captain, who spoke, “Interrvaynshun.”
Callisto couldn’t resist a little snort at the return of the man’s accent, for which he received a tolerant glare in return. The Intervention Lead was a pro gamer, Callisto suddenly remembered, and had been famous for running a clan that took over the world’s most popular First Person Shooter. “We lost two remote pilots during re-entry: one improperly secured their controller array, and one passed out. Shouldn’t affect us in the long run, just slow us down by a few percents.”
The Captain nodded. “Intervention, send out the first drones, get your calibration data and report back.”
“Aye, aye sir.”
Callisto no longer had trouble regarding what had once been an extra large conventional hall as the bridge nor viewing the men and women on the bridge as officers. Technically, they are veterans now; the first volunteers in service to the Creator’s navy. He damn sure was going to buy each and every one of them the intoxicant of their choice after it was over.
He watched on his monitor as four dots left the aircraft bay where he had landed his plane so long ago. They darted away from the ship at right angles. This part of the plan was the moment when they learned if they were actually going to be able to do what they came here to do. As the dots approached the walls of the hurricane, Callisto looked towards other monitors where cameras on board each drone were transmitting. Each drone’s video was a little different. The whole mission had been cobbled together with the parts that they could cannibalize from the ship. Twenty floors had been sealed off, all of the copper and electronics stripped from them like so many resources on a virgin planet.
Each drone was slightly different. There was little enough known about conditions within hurricanes that they couldn’t predict the exact conditions. The idea was that each drone was slightly stronger and more durable then the next. They would send the different craft into the eye’s walls and see which survived. They had plans to utilize whichever types of drones survived to pull energy from the storm, and hopefully collapse the eye, reducing the strength of the hurricane and turning it into what was essentially a very large thunderstorm.
When the plan had been first proposed, It had captured everyone’s imagination. Questro had run some numbers. The amount of energy that they would have to extract from the storm in order to cause a measurable decrease in the damage the storm would do was large, but not impossibly so. In fact, it wasn’t much more than the ship had harvested as tidal and solar power in a month back when it was the Venturi building.
Several of Questro’s scientific competitors ran parallel computations and said that the storm could be reduced by harvesting less energy than he had originally predicted. Suddenly people were interested in it with a lot more than their imaginations.
The idea’s originator, Felinx Swearthy, was a sweaty gentleman now serving as the Intranet officer. His research rank shot instantly up in the Governance leaderboards. Callisto started paying attention when people began missing meetings with him to work on the idea. He really paid attention when he saw the drone designs. They were decades beyond what he had been selling the military.
He tried not to think about whether drone technology was relevant in a post-Paine-Attack world.
The drone operators were to be the real heroes of the mission, piloting to the storm wall and charging the onboard batteries then returning to the ship to transfer their energy to the Creator’s larger capacity storage systems. They were going to do it continuously and as quickly as possible until the storm wall began to collapse.
They had dropped into the eye of the storm about five hours before it would have made landfall and had another four before they hit US coastal waters, at which point they were going to return to orbit. There really wasn’t anything to do while the drones approached the wall. The smallest and fastest hit the wall about two seconds before the final three.
Three drones immediately dropped offline. There were audible groans from people all over the bridge. The footage and output from the final display expanded to fill Callisto’s screen. Visibility was a joke; water, shadow, and cloud were broken by occasional flashes of light in a monotone nightmare kaleidoscope. Readings from the drone’s instrumentation were a lot more steady, but still was a mess of jumping numbers and twitching needles. In Cal’s mind, the pilot was working a near miracle.
The number that held everyone’s attention was the battery reading. It took two minutes to move the battery from 50 percent to fully charged. Intervention did that math that everyone was dreading, and announced his results in a disappointed voice. “Given the constraints of drone availability and charging and transit time, we will only be able to pull 30 percent of target energy from the hurricane’s wall.”
A bearded man broke in, his workstation peppered with meteorological charts. “That should shrink the eye of the storm by 2-4 miles, but won’t collapse it. It’s an improvement, but still in the Category 4 range.“
The Captain raised his hands and the room went still. Callisto watched the man look inwards for a few moments. He shook his head and looked directly at the Intervention officer. “Launch all the heavies. We might as well do what we can while we’re here.”
Then, looking to the rest of the assembled crew, “In the meantime, if any of you have been saving up any bright ideas, this is the time.”
No one said anything, but several people looked from him and started working their workstations with renewed vigor. Meanwhile, the quiet of the eye was broken as dozens of ships buzzed out of the building into the pregnant sky. The first drone returned and docked for a few moments before shooting off again, back to the storm and the work that all present hoped would save lives.