ACT I: THE BLACK CITY

The rain in New York doesn't wash things clean. It just makes the dirt wetter. I know, because I've watched it fall on this city for twenty years—twenty years of rain on asphalt, on fire escapes, on the rusted fire escapes of buildings that were already rusted when I was a boy in Brooklyn.

My name is Nick Kane. I'm fifty-one years old. I have a wooden leg, a liver that's seen better days, and a pension from the Marine Corps that barely covers rent in a studio apartment in Hell's Kitchen that smells like mildew and other people's cooking.

I served in the Gulf War. Not the one everyone talks about—the one with the press conferences and the press pools. I served in the quiet war, the one that happened at night, in the desert, in places that don't appear on maps. I was a scout. I found things. I reported what I found. And then I came home and nobody asked me what I had found.

After the Marines, I tried civilian life. It didn't work. Civilian life expects you to be normal. I wasn't normal. I was the kind of normal that stands at attention when he walks into a room, that sleeps with one eye open, that hears explosions in his sleep and wakes up reaching for a rifle that isn't there.

So I became a window cleaner. High-rise window cleaning in Manhattan. It's dangerous work, which is why they can't find people to do it, which is why they pay well, which is why I do it. I hang from ropes three hundred feet above the street, wiping glass while taxis honk and tourists gawk and the rain falls and the city grinds on.

It was on the forty-second floor of a building on Fifth Avenue that the Colonel found me.

He didn't look like a Colonel. He looked like a man who had bought his suit at a department store and hoped nobody would notice that the fit was wrong. He was thin, balding, with a face that was forgettable in the way that faces of men who spend their lives being forgettable are forgettable.

"Mr. Kane," he said. "I have a job for you."

"I clean windows," I said. "That's it. That's the job."

"This is different."

"How different?"

The Colonel looked at me. His eyes were the colour of weak tea. "As different as it gets."

ACT II: THE EYE OF THE SUN

The Colonel took me to a warehouse in Brooklyn. Inside the warehouse was a door. The door led to a staircase. The staircase led down, down, down—three flights below ground level—to a room that smelled like ozone and coffee.

In the room was a man in a lab coat and a man in a military uniform and a table covered with photographs.

The photographs showed a mirror.

Not a hand mirror. Not a bathroom mirror. A mirror that was so large it defied comprehension. It was silver—silver in a way that silver doesn't exist on earth, a silver that seems to come from somewhere else, from the space between stars.

"This," the Colonel said, "is the Sun's Eye. It's in geosynchronous orbit. Thirty thousand kilometers above the equator. It's three thousand square kilometers of mirror surface. And it is the most important object ever built by human hands."

"Why?" I asked.

The man in the lab coat answered. His name was Dr. Friedman. He was a physicist. He looked like a man who had not slept in three days.

"Because it can focus sunlight," he said. "Not reflect it—focus it. We can direct a beam of sunlight onto any point on the Earth's surface. The temperature at that point can reach three thousand degrees Celsius. Enough to melt steel. Enough to ignite gas. Enough to—"

"Destroy a city," I said.

Dr. Friedman didn't answer. He didn't need to.

The Colonel explained. The Sun's Eye was a weapon. Not a conventional weapon—a conventional weapon drops bombs or fires missiles. The Sun's Eye was different. It used the sun itself as ammunition. It was invisible, untraceable, deniable. You could destroy a building, a factory, a city, and there would be no explosion, no debris, no evidence. Just a spot on the ground that was suddenly, impossibly, molten.

"And you want me to clean it," I said.

"We want you to maintain it," the Colonel corrected. "The mirror requires regular cleaning. Solar wind degrades the surface. Micrometeorites create micro-fractures. If the mirror is not maintained, its accuracy degrades. And if its accuracy degrades—"

"You can't hit the target," I said.

"Precisely."

"Why me?"

The Colonel smiled. It was not a nice smile. "Because you're a Marine. Because you're good at following orders. And because you're the kind of man who doesn't ask too many questions."

"I'm asking one now," I said. "What happens if I say no?"

"Then I find someone else."

"What if I talk?"

The Colonel's smile didn't waver. "Then I find someone else who will talk less."

ACT III: CHESS PIECES

I went to orbit on a Tuesday.

The spacecraft was military—a modified shuttle with black paint and no markings. There were twelve of us on board. Four Marines. Four engineers. Four cleaners. I was the only cleaner who had military experience. The others were civilians—men and women who had cleaned windows or ski slopes or anything that required climbing and a fearlessness that bordered on stupidity.

The journey took five hours. I spent most of it staring at the Earth through the viewport. It was beautiful, I'll give it that. Blue and white and green, swirling with clouds and oceans and continents. It looked peaceful. It looked innocent.

It was neither.

The Sun's Eye was larger than the photographs suggested. Much larger. It filled the viewport—silver and flat and endless, stretching in every direction like a frozen lake that went on forever.

My job was to clean it. I would wear a spacesuit, attach myself to the mirror's surface with a harness, and move across it with a mechanical brush. A shift was eight hours. A rotation was three months.

But cleaning was not my only job.

My real job was to monitor the mirror's targeting system. The Marines had installed a control console on the mirror's surface—a small room, pressurized, with screens and keyboards and communication equipment. My job was to watch the system, report any anomalies, and, if necessary, adjust the mirror's angle.

I wasn't the only one watching.

Within a week, I realized that the Sun's Eye was not just an American project. There were others on board—men and women who were not who they claimed to be. A cleaner from Belarus who spoke Russian too fluently to be Belarusian. An engineer from Germany who had military training that didn't appear on his resume. A Marine from Arizona who reported to someone other than the Colonel.

The Sun's Eye was a chessboard. And we were all pieces.

I learned the layout slowly. The Americans controlled the targeting system. The Russians had infiltrated the engineering team. The Chinese had placed an agent in the cleaning crew. And the Colonel—God help me, the Colonel was playing all sides. He was feeding information to the Russians, to the Chinese, to everyone, because in his world, loyalty was a weakness and betrayal was a tool.

I was a tool. That much was clear.

But unlike the other pieces, I had something the others didn't: I had seen war. I knew what happened when weapons like the Sun's Eye were used. I had seen cities destroyed. I had seen people melt.

I knew what the Sun's Eye was capable of.

ACT IV: THE SHADOW

I had three choices.

I could follow orders. I could clean the mirror. I could monitor the targeting system. I could do my job and let the Colonel and the Russians and the Chinese play their games while I played mine—the game of staying alive.

Or I could refuse. I could refuse to clean the mirror. I could refuse to monitor the system. I could refuse to be a piece in their chess game.

But refusing has consequences. In space, refusal means death. You refuse to wear your spacesuit, you suffocate. You refuse to eat, you starve. You refuse to follow orders, you get thrown out the airlock.

Or I could betray them all.

Not betray in the sense of turning against my own country—I don't have one anymore. Not since the Gulf War. Not since I came home and nobody asked what I had found.

I could betray in the sense of giving the Sun's Eye's controls to someone else. Not the Americans. Not the Russians. Not the Chinese. Someone neutral. Someone who would not use the mirror as a weapon.

There was one person who might help me—a journalist named Sarah Collins who had been investigating the Sun's Eye project for six months. She had sources inside the program. She had documents. She had proof of what the mirror was capable of. She just needed access to the mirror's control console to download the targeting data—the data that would prove beyond doubt that the Sun's Eye was a weapon of mass destruction.

I made my decision on a Thursday, exactly three weeks after I arrived in orbit.

I waited until my shift ended. I waited until the other cleaners had returned to the station. I waited until the Marines were asleep. And then I slipped into the control console room.

The console was simple—a keyboard, a screen, a data port. I plugged in a drive that Sarah had given me (she had smuggled it into the spacecraft inside a tube of cleaning solution). The screen lit up. Data began to flow.

I was halfway through the download when the door opened.

The Colonel stood in the doorway. He was wearing a black suit. He always wore a black suit. It was as if he had never taken it off since the day he hired me.

"Nick," he said. "I expected this."

"You expected me to betray you?"

"I expected you to try. The question is whether you'd succeed."

I looked at the screen. Halfway done. Fifty percent.

"The Russians know," the Colonel said. "The Chinese know. Everyone knows. You think you're doing something secret? This is the most monitored room in the solar system."

"Then why are you here?"

The Colonel smiled. "Because I want to see what you do. Because I'm curious. Because you're a Marine, and Marines don't give up. Even when they should."

The screen flashed. Download complete.

I pulled the drive. I turned to the Colonel.

"What now?" I asked.

"Now," the Colonel said, "you decide. Are you a Marine? Or are you a man?"

I looked at him. I looked at the drive in my hand. I looked at the mirror through the viewport—silver and silent and vast.

I made my choice.

--- OBJECTIVE TENSOR CODE (OTMES-v2): Name: The Shadow Orbit Variant: 05 Code: OTMES-v2-ZHONGGUOTAIYANG-05-2F7A9D-E07.2-5-T225-8B3E E_total: 7.2 Dominant Mode: M5 (Politics) Theta: 225 degrees (Power Game) TI: 72.0 (T2-03 Disillusionment Level) M_Vector: [8.0, 1.0, 7.0, 5.0, 8.0, 2.0, 3.0, 9.0, 4.0, 5.0] N_Vector: [0.70, 0.30] K_Vector: [0.35, 0.65]