Ban Xia slowly opened her hand. The coin lay quietly in her palm, heads up.
“Good, it’s heads—that means everything will go smoothly with the work ahead!”
Mere incantations weren’t enough anymore. Recent work has shown clear signs of spell resistance. To enhance the power of her invocations, Ban Xia had started flipping coins before work. If the coin landed heads up, it meant the upcoming work would go smoothly. If it landed tails up, it meant she needed to flip again.
She threaded the coin with a red string and hung it back around her neck.
Then she climbed to the roof and placed a small compass at her feet. Once the needle stabilized, she used a stone to draw a cross on the hard cement, marking the four directions of east, south, west, and north.
She looked just like a feng shui master checking the lay of the land. Next would come the Eight Trigrams and the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches. After spending so much time with Bai Yang and the other ancients, Ban Xia hadn’t picked up any materialist philosophy—instead, she’d become something of a mystic, firmly believing everything had a spirit. She believed computer motherboards housed machine spirits and required prayers before startup. Checking feng shui was exactly the sort of thing she would do.
Having confirmed the directions, Ban Xia lay down on the roof with a ruler and protractor in hand. Starting from true north, she measured clockwise to 196.29 degrees—that is, 16.29 degrees west of true south.
This was the relay satellite’s azimuth angle.
With the azimuth confirmed, Ban Xia set up a wooden stick at the center of the cross, hanging a plumb bob with fine string. She began measuring the elevation angle, stopping at 52.04 degrees.
This was the relay satellite’s elevation angle.
Only with both azimuth and elevation angles determined would Ban Xia’s Sky Piercer-like Yagi antenna know which direction to point. After all, Nanjing wasn’t on the equator, so the relay satellite’s ground track wouldn’t fall directly above Ban Xia’s head.
If all goes well, Heng-Heng Star and Ha-Ha Star (as Ban Xia called them) will enter orbit at 6 PM today. At this moment they were returning from distant space, having wandered the solar system for twenty long years. This afternoon they would re-enter Earth orbit. In geosynchronous orbit, the two satellites would perform a major orbital maneuver, then part ways—the relay satellite remaining at GEO 35,786.03 kilometers above the equator, while the reconnaissance satellite would continue inward to strike at the heart, reaching low Earth orbit.
The orbital design was extremely complex. To ensure both satellites could successfully achieve orbit, the engineers had wracked their brains bald. They developed an incredibly precise positioning system centered on Meihua Villa in Qinhuai District, Nanjing, at 118.798° East longitude and 32.011° North latitude, striving to reduce position error to within one meter.
As one chief designer put it, it wasn’t that they wanted to be so precise—the twenty-year span was simply too long. Even the most advanced navigation systems would drift. A small error on their end would become a major deviation in twenty years. A kilometer’s error here would mean tens of thousands of kilometers of error there. The satellite’s velocity in geosynchronous orbit was 3.075 kilometers per second—one second of timing error meant 3,075 meters of displacement. If the orbital insertion was eight hours early or late, the relay satellite would end up over Africa or America.
Ban Xia looked down at the directions and numbers she’d drawn. Truth be told, it did look like some kind of mystical ritual.
From a certain perspective, it wasn’t much different from feng shui. If Ban Xia couldn’t understand the principles of relay satellites and radio communications, then to her this was simply some mysterious ceremony—if the azimuth and elevation were correct, the ritual tools could communicate with mysterious deities in the void, receiving heavenly revelations. Incomprehensible technology was no different from magic.
She looked up again at the overcast sky.
She seemed to see their return.
He seemed to see their departure.
“What are you looking at?” Lianqiao asked.
“The satellites,” Bai Yang said.
“Satellites?” Lianqiao also looked up, straining to see into the distance. “What satellites?”
“They’ve already left the atmosphere. They’re launching from the other side of Earth—we can’t see them from here,” Bai Yang lowered his gaze. “Even as we speak, they’re leaving Earth’s orbit, heading toward a future no one knows.”
“If you can’t see them, why are you looking?”
“Because I know they’re there,” Bai Yang said. “As long as you know they’re there, as long as your direction is right, you’ll see them.”
“But I don’t see anything,” Lianqiao blinked.
“You don’t know that you’ve seen them, Sister Qiao. Think about it—if the world was pitch black, and the universe was pitch black, with only that satellite giving off light, wouldn’t you easily spot it? The reason you can’t see it is because everything around is too bright. Too much light enters your eyes, and that satellite is too small and far away, its reflected light is too weak. Even when it enters your eyes, your brain ignores it,” Bai Yang said. “You’ve already seen it, you just don’t know it.”
Lianqiao pondered this. It made sense.
“When you put it that way, it’s quite sad,” she said.
“Why?”
“Everyone can see it, but everyone ignores it,” Lianqiao said. “It goes so far away alone—did we abandon it, or did it abandon us?”
The two leaned against the stone railing by the Qinhuai River. The evening breeze stirred Lianqiao’s hair.
They had walked far that afternoon. Though it was supposedly for taking photos, Bai Yang felt he had just been accompanying Lianqiao sightseeing. Her energy and stamina were incredible. They walked the entire circuit of Xinjiekou, Confucius Temple, and the Imperial Examination Museum, all on foot, moving at a brisk pace. She finally saw her long-awaited Qinhuai River—though her first words upon seeing it were “That’s it?”
Her second comment was “Why is the water green?”
After taking a full-body photo with the “Literary Hub of the Empire” arch (Lianqiao had mispronounced it, prompting Bai Yang to joke about whether she’d bought her diploma), Lianqiao dragged Bai Yang to take a boat ride on the river.
Bai Yang went reluctantly, feeling that as a local he shouldn’t be such a sucker. But since Sister Qiao was visiting Nanjing for the first time, he had no choice but to be a good sport.
Bai Yang suggested they should come at night for the boat ride when the lights would make the scenery more beautiful.
On the boat, Lianqiao tested his observation skills: had he noticed? The fifth person ahead in line and the fifth person behind were both plainclothes officers.
Bai Yang asked how many plainclothes officers were around him.
Lianqiao shrugged and said, “Give it up, Yang. Everyone on the boat is plainclothes.”
Bai Yang knew he was under heavy protection and surveillance, but now he worried just how extensive it was. When he was doing certain crafts late at night that weren’t meant for public viewing, was there an office somewhere watching a live stream?
“You’re carrying countless lives on your shoulders. Try to understand our work,” Lianqiao patted his shoulder. “This is no small matter. No one can afford any mistakes.”
“Then shouldn’t I get a battalion of HQ-9 air defense missiles? Type 99A main battle tanks leading the way, Type 15 tanks bringing up the rear, an army aviation regiment of Z-10 attack helicopters on standby, a field army brigade stationed by the compound, with Colonel Man Guangzhi himself in command,” Bai Yang propped up his head. “And while we’re at it, let’s summon half the world’s leaders to all stay at Meihua Villa, with command center business taking absolute priority. Would that be proper? Would people accept that?”
“Who wouldn’t accept it?”
“The readers at the library wouldn’t accept it.”
The boat docked, and the two walked along the road toward the subway.
It was now 5:40 PM. Operation Dongfanghong would officially launch at 7 PM tonight when both the reconnaissance and relay satellites would enter orbit. BG4MSR would transmit data through the 725 radio to their hands. Such an elaborate operation was finally reaching its moment of truth—success or failure would be determined in one stroke.
A battle determining humanity’s fate was about to begin. One could imagine Uncle Zhao and Dad were too anxious to sit still now.
Bai Yang was glad he wasn’t home this afternoon—how could anyone stand the atmosphere at command? Better to be outside, where everything at Xinjiekou, Confucius Temple, and the Qinhuai River continued as normal, step by step, forever crowded with tourists, peaceful and happy.
Lianqiao walked slowly ahead, humming an old song.
Bai Yang listened carefully.
Just from the melody, he could tell it was an old song—she was truly a lover of oldies.
He couldn’t remember the song’s name.
But Bai Yang recalled it was a Teresa Teng song, about love and loss, about walking into an endless sea of people.