The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [69]
Cheyenne Mountain was just one stupid mountain in Colorado. But Dottie lived in the Colorado mountains now. He was going to see Dottie and try to set things straight. Van had already sent her e-mail.
It was a bright, drought-stricken day. The sun gleamed off looming slopes of bare red rock and patches of trapped snow. Cheyenne Mountain loomed so large and bald and frowning that Van had a dizzy spell.
The legendary Cheyenne space base was something of a disappointment to Van. Cheyenne Mountain commanded America’s ICBMs and it had the capacity to blow up the whole world. It should have been a lot stranger than it looked. Cheyenne was basically a rather typical Air Force base, just stuffed inside a big stone bottle. No grass here, no flagpoles. Bad overhead lighting. Miles of dusty exposed plumbing and ventilation.
The entire base was supported on giant, white-painted steel springs. If half of Cheyenne Mountain vaporized in a fifty-megaton first strike, the deep bunker would just bounce on its springs a little. The machinery of America’s nuclear vengeance never came unplugged.
The security people took away Van’s cell phone and his Swiss Army knife. They photocopied his New Jersey driver’s license and demanded his social security number. They let him keep his heavy NSC shoulder bag and his cork-lined instrument case. Without his ever-present pocketknife and pocket phone, Van felt both robbed and naked.
Hickok had secured an appointment with Major General Edwin A. Wessler. Wessler was a big cheese around the KH-13, but he was not Hickok’s boss. Michael Hickok never showed up on anybody’s organizational charts, so he never had any “boss.” Hickok referred to the various interested parties as his “sponsors.”
Major General Edwin A. Wessler turned out to be a big, bluff, balding guy with rimless glasses and a Hawaiian tan. General Wessler had just been reassigned to Cheyenne from a missile-tracking base in the mid-Pacific. Wessler was only partially moved into his new office. The place was all beige paint, gunmetal shelving, and scattered blue folders.
The screen of Wessler’s new Dell showed that he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. Wessler’s topic was “GEODDS, Baker-Nunn, and the ASFPC.”
“GEODDS,” Van muttered, rubbing his aching forehead.
“Yes, sir!” boomed General Wessler. “GEODDS can spot an orbiting object the size of a basketball!”
Van put his heavy bag and case on the floor. His back ached and his wrists were sore. The altitude was killing him. Being at high altitude deep inside a stone cave was somehow much worse.
Wessler flicked Hickok’s business card with his clean, buffed fingernail. “ ‘Executive Solutions,’ so what kind of outfit is that, Master Sergeant?”
“That’s a long story, sir. Ever heard of the Carlyle Group?”
“I don’t need any long stories today,” Wessler told him with a thin smile.
Major General Wessler had an aeronautics degree, an MBA, and had worked for both NATO and NASA. General Wessler was not just any everyday general. He was a literal rocket scientist. Wessler wore an elastic blue one-piece jumpsuit with starred shoulders and a U.S. SPACE FORCE breast patch. General Wessler looked tanned, fit, and ready to spring right aboard the next Shuttle liftoff. Even though he never did anything spacier than stare deep into a tracking screen.
Van found it rather weird to meet a no-kidding, real-life general from a “Space Force.” It was weirder yet that America’s Space Force had bases all around the world, with forty thousand service personnel. America’s Space Force was twenty years old. Why had he never seen any Space Force soldiers in any war movies? Or TV programs, either. Not even The X-Files.
Van coughed on the dry mountain air. Wessler removed loose books from the metal seat of his office chair. “You’d better take a load off your feet, flatlander! I’ll have an orderly bring you