The Long War

volunteers? If so, give me a hint of your technical specialities and I’m sure you’ll fit right in. Journalists?’ Ruefully he glanced over his shoulder at the rising cloud of steam and smoke. ‘You’ll see we just had an incident with a lox storage tank, but that’s not so unusual.’
    Jansson flashed her badge and warrant card. ‘I’m police. Madison, Wisconsin, specifically.’ He glanced at it, but she put it away before he had a chance to figure out she was long retired, and shouldn’t have kept the shield anyhow.
    ‘Oh.’ He looked disappointed in her. ‘Frankly, Lieutenant Jansson, that kind of Datum authority doesn’t have a lot of purchase out here. Even if we were in the US Aegis, which we’re not. I guess you’re here about the troll thing, right?’
    ‘Afraid so, Mr. Wood.’
    ‘Call me Frank . . .’
    ‘I think I recognize you,’ Sally said.
    ‘You do?’
    ‘The video clips. It was you who stopped that tech guy putting the troll down on the spot.’
    He actually blushed, and looked away. ‘Well, I never wanted to be famous. Look, the guy you want to see about all that is called Gareth Eames. Nearest thing to a chief executive we got here. English guy. If I’m honest with you, if not for the fuss in the outernet – yes, we get the news even out here – the troll would have been put down by now. But even guys like us take notice when we’re in the middle of a flame war. Come on, I’ll take you to Eames—’
    ‘No need,’ Sally said briskly. ‘I’ll find the way.’
    Wood looked dubious, then shrugged. ‘OK.’ He pointed to a low, squat concrete building. ‘That’s the admin block, or the nearest we have to it. We build everything like a blockhouse here; living with rockets you learn to be cautious. You’ll find Gareth in there. And that’s where we’re holding the troll too, in the calaboose.’
    ‘Great.’ Sally turned to Jansson, and whispered, ‘Let me get over there and scout it out, without Buck Rogers here hovering over me.’
    Jansson was doubtful, but this was Sally’s modus operandi, she was learning. Always keep the other guy off balance. ‘OK. And as for me—’
    ‘Distract this guy. Let him show you his toy spaceships, or whatnot. I think he has his eye on you, by the way.’
    ‘Garbage. Also, let me remind you, my personal rocket ship takes off from a different launch pad.’
    ‘So he’s no more perceptive than most men.’ Sally winked. ‘Undo a button or two and he’s your slave for life. See you later.’

34
    ‘W E DON’T THINK of this world as Earth West Two Million Plus Change, or whatever,’ Frank Wood said. ‘We think of it as Gap East 1. Because the Gap is the centre of our universe, not the Datum. And a strange kind of world this is, right? Almost empty of humans. Whole continents nobody’s even set foot on. We basically live off fishing and a bit of hunting – while we build spaceships. We’re a tribe of hunter-gatherers with a space programme! . . .’
    As Frank Wood rambled on, Jansson inspected GapSpace. The facility was like a fannish reconstruction of a half-remembered Cape Canaveral, she thought, having visited that old wonderland once as a tourist – and it was there, at the Cape, it turned out, that the GapSpace people had recruited Frank Wood himself. She recognized basic facilities such as kilns churning out bricks baked from the local clay, and forges, and manufacturing plants. Then there were the traditional attributes of a space centre, like huge spherical tanks whose walls were frosted because, Frank told her, they held great volumes of super-cold liquid fuels. The company even had its own logo, a roundel with a thin crescent Earth cupping a star field, the GapSpace name below, and above, a corporate slogan:
    THERE IS SUCH A THING AS A FREE LAUNCH
    Joshua had once told Jansson that that was a line of Lobsang’s. And, most thrilling of all, even to a hardened old heart like Jansson’s, there were spacecraft. There was one capsule-like craft that stood on four robust-looking legs, and a gantry that held a rocket booster, a tank maybe sixty feet tall topped by a flaring nozzle that pointed oddly up into the sky, as if the rocket were preparing for a launch down into the Earth. It was a stand for static test firing, Frank explained.
    The workers here were mostly male, mostly around thirty to forty years old, mostly overweight. Some were dressed in protective gear, or coveralls like Frank’s, but others wore