Space. Stephen Baxter

Sand drifted across the empty car park, gathering in miniature dunes.

      She walked out to the old press stand, a wooden frame like a baseball bleacher. She sat down, looking east. The sun was in her eyes, and already hot; she could feel it draw her face tight as a drum. To the right, stretching off to the south, there were rocket gantries. In the mist they were two-dimensional, colourless. Most of them were disused, part-dismantled, museum pieces. The sense of desolation, abandonment, was heavy in the air.

      Sally Brind had turned out to work for Bootstrap, the rump of the corporation which had sent a spacecraft to the Gaijin base in the asteroid belt, three decades earlier.

      Madeleine was not especially interested in the Gaijin. She had been born a few years after their arrival in the solar system; they were just a part of her life, and not a very exciting part. But she knew that four decades after the first detection of the Gaijin – and a full nineteen years after they had first come sailing in from the belt, apparently prompted by Reid Malenfant’s quixotic journey – the Gaijin had established something resembling a system of trade with humanity.

      They had provided some technological advances: robotics, vacuum industries, a few nanotech tricks like their asteroid mining blankets, enough to revolutionize a dozen industries and make a hundred fortunes. They had also flown human scientists on exploratory missions to other planets: Mars, Mercury, even the moons of Jupiter. (Not Venus, though, oddly, despite repeated requests.) And the Gaijin had started to provide a significant proportion of Earth’s resources from space: raw materials from the asteroids, including precious metals, and even energy, beamed down as microwaves from great collectors in the sky.

      Humans – or rather, the governments and corporations who dealt with the Gaijin – had to ‘pay’ for all this with resources common on Earth but scarce elsewhere, notably heavy metals and some complex organics. The Gaijin had also been allowed to land on Earth, and had been offered cultural contact. The Gaijin had, strangely, shown interest in some human ideas, and a succession of writers, philosophers, theologians, and even a few discreditable science fiction authors had been summoned to converse with the alien ‘ambassadors’.

      The government authorities, and the corporations who were profiting, seemed to regard the whole arrangement as a good deal. With the removal of the great dirt-making industries from the surface of the Earth – power, mining – there was a good chance that eco recovery could, belatedly, become a serious proposition.

      Not everybody agreed. All those shut-down mines and decommissioning power plants were creating economic and environmental refugees. And there were plenty of literal refugees too, for instance, all the poor souls who had been moved out of the great swathes of equatorial land that had been given over to the microwave receiving stations.

      Thus the Gaijin upheaval had, predictably, caused poverty, even famine and war.

      It was thanks to that last Madeleine made her living, of course. But everybody had to survive.

      ‘… I wonder if you know what you’re looking at, here.’ The voice had come from behind her.

      A woman sat in the stand, in the row behind Madeleine. Her bony wrists stuck out of an environment-screening biocomp bodysuit. She must have been sixty. There was a man with her, at least as old, short, dark and heavy-set.

      ‘You’re Brind.’

      ‘And you’re Madeleine Meacher. So we meet. This is Frank Paulis. He’s the head of Bootstrap.’

      ‘I remember your name.’

      He grinned, his eyes hard.

      ‘What am I doing here, Brind?’

      For answer, Brind pointed east, to the tree line beyond the Banana River. ‘I used to work for NASA. Back when there was a NASA. Over there used to be the site of the two great launch complexes: 39-B to the left, 39-A to the right. 39-A was the old Apollo gantry. Later they adapted it for Shuttle.’ The sunlight blasted into her face, making it look flat, younger. ‘Well, the pads are gone now, pulled down for scrap. The base of 39-A is still there, if you want to see it. There’s a sign the pad rats stuck there for the last launch. Go, Discovery! Kind of faded now, of course.’

      ‘What do you want?’

      ‘Do you know what a burster is?’

      Madeleine frowned. ‘No kind of weapon I’ve ever heard of.’

      ‘It’s not a weapon, Meacher. It’s a star.’

      Madeleine was, briefly, electrified.

      ‘Look, Meacher, we have a proposal for you.’

      ‘What makes you think I’ll be interested?’

      Brind’s voice was gravelly and full of menace. ‘I know a great deal about you.’

      ‘How come?’

      ‘If you must know, through the tax bureau. You have operated your –’ she waved a hand dismissively ‘– enterprises in over a dozen countries over the years. But you’ve paid tax on barely ten per cent of the income we can trace.’

      ‘Never broken a law.’

      Brind eyed Madeleine, as if she had said something utterly naive. ‘The law is a weapon of government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.’

      Madeleine tried to figure out Brind. Her biocomposite suit looked efficient, not expensive. Brind was a wage slave, not an entrepreneur. She guessed, ‘You’re from the government?’

      Brind’s face hardened. ‘When I was young, we used to call what you do gun-running. Although I don’t suppose that’s how you think of it yourself.’

      The remark caught Madeleine off guard. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m a pilot. All I ever wanted to do is fly; this is the best job I could get. In a different universe, I’d be –’

      ‘An astronaut,’ said Frank Paulis.

      The foolish, archaic word got to Madeleine. Here, of all places.

      ‘We know about you, you see,’ Sally Brind said, almost regretfully. ‘All about you.’

      ‘There are no astronauts any more.’

      ‘That isn’t true, Meacher,’ Paulis said. ‘Come with us. Let us show you what we’re planning.’

      

      Brind and Paulis took her out to Launch Complex 41, the old USASF Titan pad at the northern end of ICBM Row. Here, Brind’s people had refurbished an antique Soviet-era Proton launcher.

      The booster was a slim black cylinder, fifty-three metres tall. Six flaring strap-on boosters clustered around the first stage, and Madeleine could pick out the smaller stages above. A passenger capsule and hab module would be fixed to the top, shrouded by a cone of metal.

      ‘Our capsule isn’t much more sophisticated than an Apollo,’ Brind said. ‘It only has to get you to orbit and keep you alive for a couple of hours, until the Gaijin come to pick you up.’

      ‘Me?’

      ‘Would you like to see your hab module? It’s being prepared in the old Orbiter Processing Facility …’

      ‘Get to the point,’ Madeleine said. ‘Where are you planning to send me? And what exactly is a burster?’

      ‘A type of neutron star. A very interesting type. The Gaijin are sending a ship there. They’ve invited us – that is, the UN – to send a representative. An observer. It’s the first time they’ve offered this, to carry an observer beyond the solar system. We think it’s important to respond. We can send our own science platform; we’ll train you up to use it. We can even establish our own Saddle Point gateway in the neutron star system. It’s all part of a wider trade and cultural deal, which –’

      ‘So you represent the UN?’

      ‘Not exactly.’

      Paulis