The Ascension Factor

She dolloped enough milk into her coffee to cool it off, then sipped at the rim while she replayed the brief, chilling message.

0630 Memo:

Location brief, Launch Bay Five, air time 0645.

Lead: Crista Galli still in hands of Shadows.

Second lead: OMCs to Orbital Station today.

Detail: ref terrorists, arms, drugs, religious fervor, Shadows. Final assembly of Voidship drive in orbit, OMC installation imminent. Items follow on Location.

Secondary discretion: Mandatory at 0640.

Time out: 0631.

Beatriz glanced at the processor's time display: 0636.

"Secondary Discretion!" she muttered. That meant they were doing a time-delay. Time enough that Holovision could run a pretaped Newsbreak if she didn't show up or, worse, if they didn't like what she said on the air. Ben had warned her it would come to this.

"Damn!"

What else was he right about?

The elevator to the Newsbreak studio at Launch Bay Five was only a dozen meters down the passageway from her office. She fingered the tangles out of her hair and hurried out the hatchway. The hurry didn't slow her worrying one whit.

Ben had something to do with this Crista Galli thing, and she knew that Flattery knew that, too. Why, then, was there still no release on Ben? The answer was one that Ben had tried to warn her about, and it chilled her to think it.

They'll see that he disappears, she thought. If there's nothing on him in the briefing. She didn't want to think of that.

Flattery knows about us. about Ben, she thought. She knew about the disappearances, the bodies in the streets of Kalaloch in the mornings. Ben had warned her about this more than once and shown her firsthand, finally, how it happened. She knew that unpopular people disappeared. She had never thought it would happen to one of them.

Another thought shook her as she faced the elevator.

If I don't say something about him on the air, then he's going to disappear for sure!

She was scheduled to fly with the crew that delivered the OMCs to the Orbital Station for their Voidship installation. He must know about her budding relationship with Mack, that was no secret. The installation of the Organic Mental Cores was a nice piece of propaganda for Flattery that would take her conveniently out of the picture. It would also make it impossible for her to investigate Ben's disappearance on her own.

She hadn't known what to think last night when she'd had to fill in for Ben. She'd read the prompter cold, too surprised at the lie on her screen, at the suddenness of the lie, to challenge it there. Flattery had finally tossed her a gauntlet.

What is the worst? she asked herself now.

The worst would be that they would both disappear.

She squeezed into the elevator among the press of techs and mechanics, left their greetings unreturned. They were a sweaty bunch in the cramped humidity.

What is for sure?

For sure Ben would disappear if she said nothing, if Holovision Nightly News continued to lie about his absence.

She rounded the passageway into the studio suite of the Holovision feature assignment crew. It was an engine assembly hangar with ten-meter-high ceilings. The makeup tech's hands were fussing over Beatriz's hair and face as soon as she entered the hatchway. Someone else helped her slip into a bulky pullover blouse with the Holovision logo at the left breast. As usual, several of the crew were talking at once, none of them saying what she wanted to hear. She wouldn't be doing this Newsbreak unless Ben were still missing.

She had seen Ben and Crista Galli together a few days ago at Flattery's compound. Ben and Crista, in the hibiscus courtyard, Ben leaning toward Crista in that intent way he had. Beatriz knew then that he had fallen in love with the girl. She also knew that he probably didn't know that yet himself.

I should have had a talk with him. not a lover talk, a friend talk. Now he might be dead.

She patted her cheeks flush and the lights turned up. It was nearly time, and still she spoke to no one, heard little, viewed the blank prompter with a certain measure of fear. He had held her own gaze intently hundreds of times over the years, dozens of times with the same argument.

"I look at the big picture," she'd say. "Pandora's unstable, we've seen that. We could all die here on any given day at the whim of meteorology. We need another world. " And he would always argue for the now.

"People are hungry now," he would say. "They need to be fed now or there won't be a later for any of us. "

She always felt insignificant in the studio in spite of her fame, but today as they scrubbed and dusted her face, fluffed her hair and placed her earpiece she was writing her own script for the Newsbreak — one that she hoped would keep Ben in the news but keep Flattery off her back. She looked into the prompter, adjusted the contrast and cleared her throat. She had thirty seconds. She cleared her throat again, smiled at the lens cluster and took a deep breath.

"Ten seconds, B."