“Don’t think I knew about that. Hmmm. Well then. To answer your question, she was watching in a special guest room with all the Iowa kids . . . ,” Rush’s voice, and it’s been a while since I heard it.
Langley’s up-lit giant spheres shine vaguely through the snowy fog like prehistoric full moons that seem to follow me in my mirrors as I speed to the hangar. I envision the PONG attached to the pine tree near my closet, wondering if it’s still there. Wondering where it is this minute. Almost missing it as much as I do Carme. And I must be tired. Running on empty as I speed to the hangar.
“Is Dr. Rong still there?” and I have no doubt of it.
My subroutines are running like high-speed trains beneath my thoughts. The blood spatter cooking on the steam pipe’s asbestos cover in the Yellow Submarine tunnel. The mysterious blood tube in our protective services evidence refrigerator. The tampered-with crime scene and stolen badges, including mine. Landing on a lot of things Carme could be blamed for and maybe already is.
But I’m not so sure she’s done anything wrong. Quite the opposite, and it’s obvious that if she had something criminal to do with the hacking into 1111-A and all of NASA, then she wouldn’t leave blood right by the FOD-1. But I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what she did. Left blood because she wanted me to find it, and it won’t turn out to be hers, that’s for sure.
“. . . Oh yeah,” Rush’s voice. “Everybody’s waiting on you to save the day, getting those comms back up so we can watch you rescue our astronaut. Hopefully.”
“Based on the mess she’s in, I think she’ll have to rescue herself,” I reply, and I probably could say the same about my sister. “Commander Whitson is stuck, and nobody can get to her. This could turn out really, really bad.”
“I hope they’re not freaking out up there, wondering where everybody went.” Blowing out a tired breath. “If we can’t get the arm working, Calli, I honestly don’t know what they’re going to do.”
“And I honestly wonder how all these so-called mishaps will affect Pandora Space Systems doing business with Wallops,” I reply with just the slightest whiff of sarcasm. “Because I’m not so sure I’d want to install a pad at a spaceport where a rocket just blew up right in front of me. Or if I did, and this is the more likely scenario, then I’d expect to have some serious leverage while negotiating the deal.”
Dr. Rong was in Virginia yesterday for sure. Had to be if she was going to make it to Wallops in time for this morning’s launch. And I have to ask myself. Would she come here and not try to see her relocated disgruntled sister? The unfortunate Vera, who couldn’t get her doctorate, and worked for her CEO sibling, and was suicidal.
The poor robotics and sensors scientist in Prada, implanting devices, doing research on her own body. A body that Neva doesn’t want autopsied and is much too eager to have flown to Texas. Who might have benefited from Vera never talking again to anyone about her missing badge or anything else?
It’s going to be a bear to prove.
“. . . Maybe Neva Rong’s lucky day. Maybe Mason Dixon’s too. Our mishaps are their jackpots and headlines,” Rush’s soothing voice.
Never frazzled, he doesn’t sweat the little stuff or much of anything, making me feel like a jitterbug by comparison. Awkward and antsy around him, never saying exactly what I feel or mean especially when he locks me in with that green-gold stare. Those luminous eyes that seem to have an unlimited power supply, so intense they feel hot like the sun through a magnifier, going back to when Carme and I were seniors in high school and he was starting at Langley.
My sister doesn’t play her game of trading places when it’s someone she wants all for herself, and it’s true what that lawyer said 22 years ago. Most people can’t tell the two of us apart, especially if that’s our intention. Even Rush has his confused moments when the three of us are together. Most recently when Carme was home last month, and he walked into Mom’s kitchen while I was peeling carrots in the sink.
Replaying it like a movie in my head, the two of us alone, my sister out on one of her punishing 8-mile runs along the fitness path at the air force base. I can still feel his breath on my neck and my thoughts shorting out as he wrapped his arms around my waist from behind.
00:00:00:00:0
HOLDING me hard, sliding his hands up alarmingly. “How are we besides beautiful?” nuzzling my ear.
“Rush . . . ?” His name catching in my throat, tucking my elbows in close, cueing him to stop before he finds his mark.
But too late for that, and he says, “Huh,” with a perplexed frown.
As I twist myself around, facing him. “Rush? Ummm . . .”
“Yeah. Sorry.” Letting go, stepping back apologetically, and I could see it in his eyes.
Passion cooling rapidly from smoldering to unsure to uh-oh. Looking me up and down, trying not to be obvious. Because Carme and I have never been constructed exactly the same, our topographies as different as geography.
“You know I’m Calli, right?” and I’ve had to say it too often in life.
00:00:00:00:0
THE WORD out of the gate is that the off-nominal event is being investigated. Period. End of story at only 15 minutes out since everything hit the fan.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have some idea, and we do. At T-minus 30 seconds in the countdown, a dish antenna near LP-0A was hacked by some unknown bad actor attempting to take control of the rocket, which is basically a missile minus a warhead.
For sure less dangerous than an atom bomb but you wouldn’t want it headed in your direction. A 130-foot Roman candle blasting off with 800,000 pounds of thrust would pack a devastating punch if diverted off course. Away from the water, over land, headed toward a dense urban environment, for example.
I’ve been saying forever that a hijacked rocket could level the Wallops spaceport. The navy base. The Pentagon. Quantico. The CIA. The White House. Take your pick of the high-value targets in this part of the world. Were it not for our masters of space antenna ninjas in their blockhouses, I don’t know what might have happened.
They spied the rogue signal in the nick of time and were quick on the trigger with the kill signal. Or in our usual understated nerdy parlance, “The safety officers resorted to the flight-termination system to disable the vehicle.” We blew it up our freakin’ selves. Millions of dollars in equipment and research projects lost in a massive eruption of fire and brimstone.
But beyond the substantial financial loss and plasmic egg on our face, the damage is minimal in the grand scheme of things. Nobody was hurt. Not yet.
Deep breaths.
Driving fast toward the hangar off Runway 8, at the end of a taxiway we share with the air force base. Along Langley Boulevard in blowing snow, my adrenaline pumping. It’s all I can do not to panic.
Focus! Focus! Focus!
“The worst part is getting up there,” and Rush isn’t talking about outer space, but he may as well be. “I’m sorry I’m not around to help.”
“Not a big deal. I’ve been up there enough times before,” I reply, and it’s not true.
It is a big deal. Freezing cold, snowing on a deserted campus in the pitch dark, and I’m supposed to climb up on the roof of the NASA hangar. Normally, I’d never do such a thing in these conditions, but we have an astronaut and her top secret payload tethered to a failed robotic arm that quit 56 feet from the Space Station. We don’t know what happened to cause the malfunction, and if the international crew in their various modules do, they can’t tell us.
That’s the reason I need to climb up on the roof, and it’s not child’s play on the prettiest of days. First, I’ll have to enter through a lower door and climb 10 stories of stairs or see-through metal catwalk grating. If you do the math, that’s 160 steps, plus catwalks and ramps. Once I reach the ceiling, I’ll exit through another
door to an outdoor platform, where I’ll climb an iron ladder up the side of the building like a human fly. Exposed to the wind and cold some 100 feet above the tarmac, and were it not for the urgency of the situation, I would take a pass.
But there’s no choice. Houston has a problem this time. A much bigger one than NASA knows, because everywhere I look, I’m seeing sabotage. The Station loses communication, and I find out our rooftop dish magically got switched from Remote to Local mode. To do that, someone had to physically access the antenna pedestal the same way I’m about to, by climbing up to the roof.
Hauling butt through the snowy parking lot, I notice light spilling on the ramp in front of the huge retractable door on the other side of the fence. I don’t know why the bay would be open, certainly not at this godforsaken hour and in this weather. No aircraft are being towed in or out, and I wouldn’t expect anybody to be here for any reason, especially during a furlough.
Taking off my ballistic vest, my gun belt, I place them on the floor behind the front seat. Because I can’t climb a ladder in all that, but I’m not leaving my gun. The Glock goes in my backpack, and I work my arms into the shoulder straps, fastening the sternum strap. Pulling on my black leather gloves, I lock the truck.
Trotting toward a side door, I hope like mad that my temporary smartcard works. And it does. Stepping inside the prewar tiled hallway, not seeing anyone. Listening, hurrying past NASA showcases and photographs, then Flight Operations, lights on inside but don’t see anyone. Almost passing up the ladies’ room but the last thing I need on top of everything else is to feel like I’ve got to pee while climbing up the side of the building in a snowstorm. Just the thought, and I can barely make it, dashing inside, unzipping and untucking as I hurl myself into a stall, cargo pants dropping to the floor, snatching at toilet paper. Flushing and running.
Banging through that door and out another, this one solid metal and leading inside a hangar big enough to shelter a fleet of fixed-wing and rotorcraft of all sizes and descriptions. Well, some of them defy description. Not everything that ends up in here is for public consumption. Some things a lot of people are better off never knowing about. I can’t and won’t talk about a lot of what I’ve seen over the years, and I suspect what I’m looking at right now is a good example.
Six black Suburban SUVs, a black Ford F-150 pickup with all their domes and antennas. And the Secret Service agents who go with them, including the bearded man I noticed earlier at the 7-Eleven and the woman who was with him. Military officers I don’t recognize are busy at mobile workstations, and Dick Melville is sitting at a table with my father.
Nobody’s looking in my direction as I creep up a flight of maintenance stairs, hoping like crazy I’m not spotted. No question they wouldn’t take kindly to me sneaking up to the roof. And I can’t announce myself in an emergency when there’s not a second to spare, and up the metal steps I bound, as quiet as a cat, eyeing the table of signal analyzers.
From two stories up, I can make out colorful waves on the lighted displays, and good thing I left my phone in the truck. But I have the remote control key that’s transmitting a signal even as we speak, stupid me! And I frantically pat myself down, as if it matters now. But it’s not in my jacket, and none of my pants pockets. I know I didn’t put it in my backpack, meaning it must have fallen out while I was in the bathroom. And just this one time, that’s a good thing. No question the Secret Service agents are scanning even as I’m climbing, and I don’t need anybody interfering.
Moving fast and stealthily, climbing and climbing. Those below none the wiser, the length of a soccer field away and sufficiently preoccupied near the open bay door. Near a mountain of unmarked wooden crates on pallets flown in here late last week on a C-17, destined for a classified storage facility on the air force base. I don’t know what’s in them, didn’t ask, don’t always want to know.
Five stories up and sweating, my heart about to hammer out of my chest as I hurry, looking down through the red-painted mesh metal steps at everything below. The T-38 trainer jets. The gutted Gulfstream packed with electronic and radar equipment. The Chinook helicopter that’s been squatting here for months. Watching my dad in his corduroys and button-up denim shirt, light winking off his glasses as he sits at a table, laptops open around him.
He doesn’t look happy, and I can tell from his mussed-up gray hair that he’s been running his fingers through it the way he does when he’s frustrated. Dick hovering nearby, I can’t think of any reason for my dad to be here with him unless it’s about my sister. Unless what I’m seeing gathered below is the posse out to get her. All these people are in here because of Carme.
What have you done!
Or more likely, what do they think she’s done? Or might do? What really? The things Dick said and all that’s occurred don’t quite add up to my sister turning into a monster. Not a consummate one. Until there’s proof, I don’t accept that she’s hurt anyone. Not the missing Noah Bishop. Not the dead Vera Young. Certainly not my parents or me. She’s had ample opportunity, has been inside the barn while I was. She could have hurt me. She could hurt everyone. And she hasn’t.
The PONG can spy on all of us, and it might. But Carme won’t harm us. No matter what she’s gotten involved in, she wouldn’t hurt her family. She wouldn’t hurt Rush, and even as I think of him, everybody below looks up at me at the same time like a spotter plane finding a whale. That’s when I remember his birthday gift. Still wrapped in an expired sectional flight chart, forgotten inside my backpack.
The motion-charging sensors I built into the tactical pen are transmitting signals that the analyzers are picking up in the noise floor. It took but a few minutes for their algorithms to do their continuous subtractions, and catch me in my own trap. Any low-level noise from the pen’s GPS and other sensors is showing up as something new in the room. Then everyone zoomed in on the source, and now the chase is on.
I haul open the heavy metal door 10 stories up as I hear a herd of booted feet pounding across the concrete floor below, headed to the stairs.
They think I’m her.
They’re looking for Carme and not expecting me to be here. They’ll confuse me with my twin like everybody else, only this time I might get shot. Slamming the door behind me, and I’m blasted by snow and frigid wind, my eyes watering badly as I grab a rung of the iron ladder attached to the outside of the hangar 100 feet above the asphalt. Gloved hand over gloved hand, never looking down, climbing as the wind grabs at me, tears streaming down my face.
One rung to go as I calculate how much time I have, maybe 5 minutes before they overtake my head start and are on this same ladder. Hauling my legs over the lip of the snowy roof, and it’s slippery as crap up here, flat in the middle but pitched just enough on the sides to make gravity a worse enemy than usual. Rather much like taking a tumble in outer space if you lose your balance, can’t stop yourself from sliding downhill to the edge and going over.
The snow is about three inches deep, and I feel around in it for the walkway safety matting that leads directly to the radome, and I’m mindful of the men coming after me. I don’t know how many or who, but the longer I duck them, the harder it will be to explain why I’m up here and that I’m not my fugitive sister.
Moving as fast as I can toward what looks even more like an igloo surrounded by snow. I don’t see the footprints leading away from the maintenance door until I’m about 20 paces out, fresh tracks without the lightest dusting of snow. Only one set of them. Left as recently as minutes ago.
36
MY FEET almost go out from under me, making me feel a lot like that stranded astronaut I’m trying so desperately to help.
Flailing in an environment that couldn’t be more unfriendly, slip-sliding on snow in a blustery wind, my eyes so flooded I can scarcely see. And a bad slip could send me tumbling into the ether. Trying for
all I’m worth to make it to the radome’s access door, to scan my temporary smartcard and get my hands inside the pedestal.
Breathing hard, working out of the backpack’s shoulder straps, ditching it because it’s throwing off my balance. And I can’t pull out my gun. That’s the quickest way to end up dead on this winter wasteland at the top of the world, my ears frozen, my nose and eyes running like faucets, and I dig into my coat pockets for the smartcard.
I feel my heart sucked out of my body, patting myself down frantically as it dawns on me. The temporary ID was in a pocket of my cargo pants and must have fallen out when the truck key did in the ladies’ room.
“Shit!” This time I say it, the entire word.
Turning around, my boots going out from under me, landing on my ass. Scrambling up and retrieving my backpack, not for the gun but for the damn pen that’s caused all this damn trouble. Tearing open the flight-chart gift paper, ripping into the small box, snatching the pen out of its lightly magnetized sheath as I flip up the white polyurethane cover over the fail-safe keypad.
The old-style metal-button numbers are protected under glass that I shatter with one sharp tap of the pen’s carbide tip. I punch in the master code, the lock clicks free, and I sling open the access door as I hear voices shouting in the wind. The posse is on the roof, headed toward me. I have maybe two minutes. Inside the radome, and it’s dark as a movie theater.
I don’t want to make myself an easier target. But I didn’t bring a flashlight, didn’t think I’d need it. But I can’t afford to press the button for the low-noise lighting. It would illuminate the radome enough to be seen from the ground. Feeling along the antenna’s pedestal, I knock against something that crashes to the floor. Leaning down, I feel for what it was. A small laptop computer, and when I flip it open and tap a key, the screen lights up, the display streaming with waves and peaks of spectrum analysis going on in real time.
Quantum Page 31
