Free Last and First Contacts (Imaginings) by Stephen Baxter

you find that reassuring or not depends on your faith in technology, I suppose.’
    ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this. It’s so – archaic! I feel I’m locked into an AxysCorp instrumentality.’
    He didn’t seem to appreciate the sharpness of her tone. Perhaps he’d prefer to be able to patronise her. ‘This shuttle’s got nothing to do with AxysCorp, which was broken up long ago.’
    ‘I know that.’
    ‘And you’re a historian of the Heroic Solution. That’s why you’re here, as I couldn’t find anybody better qualified to help resolve this problem on Tempest 43. So look on it as field work. Brace yourself.’
    With barely a murmur the shuttle leapt into the air. No amount of padding could save Freddie from the punch of acceleration.
    The ground plummeted away.
     
    Tempest 43 was a weather control station, one of a network of fifty such facilities thrown into space in the 2070s, nearly a century ago, by the now maligned AxysCorp geoengineering conglomerate. An island in the sky over the Atlantic, Tempest 43 was locked into a twenty-four-hour orbit, to which Freddie would now have to ascend.
    But before proceeding up to its geosynchronous rendezvous the shuttle went through one low-orbit checkout. For Freddie, snug in her theme-park couch, it was ninety magical minutes, as the cabin walls turned virtual-transparent, and the Earth spread out below her, bright as a tropical sky.
    The ship sailed over the Atlantic towards western Europe. She wished she knew enough geography to recognise how much of the coastline had been bitten into by the risen sea. At the Spanish coast Freddie saw vapour feathers gleaming white, artificial cloud created by spray turbines to deflect a little more sunlight from an overheated Earth. Southern Spain, long abandoned to desert, was chrome-plated with solar-cell farms, and studded with vast silvered bubbles, lodes of frozen-out carbon dioxide. The Mediterranean was green-blue, thick with plankton stimulated to grow and draw down carbon from the air. On the far side of the Gibraltar Strait, the Sahara bloomed green, covered in straight-edged plantations fed by desalinated ocean water. And as she headed into evening she saw the great old cities of southern Europe, the conurbations’ brown stain pierced by green as they fragmented back into the villages from which they had formed.
    Asia was plunged in night, the land darker than she had expected, with little waste light seeping out of the great metropolitan centres of southern Russia and China and India. The Pacific was vast and darkened too, and it was a relief to reach morning, and to pass over North America. She was disappointed that they travelled too far south to have a chance of glimpsing the camels and elephants and lions of Pleistocene Park, the continent’s reconstructed megafauna.
    And as they reached the east coast they sailed almost directly over the Florida archipelago. Freddie was clearly able to see the wound cut by the hurricane. She called for a magnification. There was Cape Canaveral, venerable launch gantries scattered like matchsticks, the immense Vehicle Assembly Building broken open like a plundered bird’s egg. The hurricane was the reason for her journey – and, incidentally, the ruin of Canaveral was the reason she had had to launch from Guiana. Hurricanes weren’t supposed to happen, not in 2162. Stations like Tempest 43 had put a stop to all that a century ago. Something had gone wrong.
    Antony Allen spent most of the orbit throwing up into paper bags.
    At last the shuttle leapt up into deeper space, silent and smooth, and Earth folded over on itself.
     
    ‘Tempest 43, Tempest 43, this is UN Space Agency Shuttle C57-D. You ought to be picking up our handshaking request.’
    A smooth, boyish voice filled the cabin. ‘C57-D, your systems have interfaced with ours. Physical docking will follow shortly.’
    ‘I’m Doctor Antony Allen. I work on the UN’s Climatic Technology Legacy Oversight Panel. With