Bartholomew Meech stared at the screen. "God damn," he muttered. He hated the way this was turning out. There was no way he could score a benefits package as generous as qNM's ever again. He hit the key that erased the email message and turned to do his corporate duty.
Meech felt the cold shadow on his back before he actually faced the two silent presences.
One was a tall thin man with wrists like I-beams. The other was a short Asian in native costume and very old. Both looked as if they were having a bad day and looking for someone to blame.
The tall one asked, "Who's R.M.?"
"Don't know what you're talking about. Where are your access badges?" asked Meech, pushing his glasses back on his nose.
"Lobby guards wouldn't give me one," said the tall man.
"Why not?"
"Because," answered the short Asian, "they did not want us to enter this place."
"So how did you get past them?"
"We went over their heads," said the tall one.
"Those we did not break over our knees," added the other.
There was something in the cold eyes of the duo that made Bartholomew Meech feel creepily cold in the brightly lit R Quantum Neutrino Mechanics world headquarters.
"So where do we find R.M.?" asked the tall one, flashing FBI ID. When Meech hesitated, he shoved it in his face, saying, "Hurry up. We have a lot of bones to splinter."
"I want immunity," Meech blurted.
"Earn it."
"R.M. is two floors up on eleven."
"Then why is he talking to you by computer?" asked the tall thin one.
"Deniability."
The Asian slipped behind him and asked, "What is your role in this matter?"
"I'm technical project manager of the solar mirror."
"I was right. It was solar."
The old Asian nodded with grim satisfaction. "Yes. A sun dragon."
"We call it a Soletta. It's a gigantic mirror of aluminized mylar. It collects solar energy, focusing and beaming it out as a superconcentrated ray of heat."
"To kill people," said the tall one.
"No! That wasn't it at all. It was for the good of mankind we built it. And for the publicity."
"How does frying patches of the planet translate to 'for the good of mankind'?" asked the tall thin one.
"It's not supposed to fry terra firma. It's designed to hit rogue asteroids threatening Earth."
"Huh?"
"It's true. The planet stands stark naked against an incoming asteroid. Look at what happened to Jupiter. Or the dinosaurs. The ParaSol 2001 was designed to lock on to an incoming asteroid and zap it. Small impactors would be vaporized to nothing. Big extinctors we figured could be deflected from Earth-harming trajectory by vaporizing parts of them. The jets of escaping gases and metal would act like propulsion rockets, redirecting their path."
"Sounds like a giant magnifying glass."
"Exactly."
And the tall one gave the short one a see-I-told-you-so smile that the short Asian pointedly ignored.
"It would have worked except we got tripped up by feature creep. We wanted it to point to Earth in case the Pentagon needed to rent it as a weapon in some future war. Some idiot vendor sold us a defective computer chip, and it was installed in the guidance system, screwing up the orbital orientation. It ended up pointing Earthward, not spaceward. Useless for the original mission. And to make things worse, the company logo was displayed backward."
"So why hit the BioBubble?"
"We didn't know it was pointed backward. We just test-fired blindly, figuring we wouldn't hit anything important up there."
"What about the Reliant and Baikonur?"
"The shuttle was melted to feed Pagan's Martian theory. Then, by some fluke, the qNM logo came out spelling 'Mir' in Russian, and we hit Baikonur so the U.S. wouldn't attack the Russians by mistake and the Russians who launched the ParaSol wouldn't give us up to Washington."
Meech wiped his perspiring brow and licked his sweaty palm clean. He closed his eyes like a man in pain. "After that, it was all we could do to cover our asses between corporate and the media and that damn Cosmo Pagan."
"You hit him to shut him up?"
"Yeah. I mean, no. That was R.M. Everything was him. He gave the orders. I only executed them."
"Like a good little corporate Nazi."
"That's not fair. I never shoved anyone into an oven."
"No. You just fried them where they stood," said Remo.
And suddenly Bartholomew Meech felt a sharp pain in his back. "Did I just get stabbed in the back?" he asked, afraid to turn around.
"Why does that surprise you?" asked the squeaky voice of the little Asian. "Have you not betrayed your own country?"
"I just did what the corporation said."
"And now you get to die for it," said Remo.
"I don't feel like I'm dying. . . "
"It'll catch up. I have a final question."