Exo: A Novel (Jumper)

by Steven Gould

  We had our exam in the Destiny module so she could use the ultrasound unit to give our sinuses, lungs and, in my case, heart a look.

  “The voltage went from arms to legs? Yeah, you could have had fibrillation.” She did an electrocardiogram and a neurological assessment, too. “For a person who should be dead twice over,” she said, “you’re looking all right, but there could be delayed effects.”

  She gave us a both a stern look and said, “For the barotrauma I recommend a high-oxygen environment for the next forty-eight hours.” She grinned. “I happen to know you have such a facility available.”

  “Yes. And when you’ve got an hour or two,” I said, “we’d love to have the newlyweds over for dinner.”

  “The newlyweds would be delighted. I’ve been curious about your resident.”

  “Really? We’re looking for someone interested in monitoring her long-term progress. It would help, I suppose, if that person knew how to handle themselves in microgravity and just happened to have a specialty in space medicine.”

  She stared at me, her face still. “Don’t say that if you don’t mean it. Misha and I are slated for retirement. Our chances of another mission from either of the space agencies is exactly nil.”

  “I do mean it. I’d love to get Misha’s input on our upcoming solar-panel installation.”

  “Well then, I think we could say that once Misha and I are officially retired from our respective agencies you will find us very interested in your future endeavors.”

  *

  The restaurant was in Stanville, Ohio, and the spécialité de la maison was the soft-serve ice cream dipped in a chocolate coating that seemed more like wax than cocoa, but Dad insisted.

  “It’s the perfect time. They’re deserted the hour before school gets out.”

  We sat in the corner booth on hard, laminated seats.

  Joe got the red-plastic basket of popcorn shrimp, though he was having an adventure finding actual shrimp in the breading. I got a small chocolate shake. Mom had a diet soda. Dad got the dip cone.

  “Your father played bad cop and I played—”

  “Good cop?” asked Joe.

  Mom looked embarrassed and I groaned. Joe hadn’t seen Mom the last time I was in Hyacinth Pope’s control.

  Dad shook his head. “That’s not exactly how I would put it.”

  I asked, “Did you get out the baseball bat again?”

  Mom looked prim.

  Dad said, “We had the box they wired to the oxygen rack. She never actually touched one of them, but—” He held his hands a foot apart. “She could get sparks this big.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So you played bad cop and Mom played insanely scary cop and you got them to tell you where the Retreat was?”

  Dad shook his head. “It was in the recently found addresses in the ambulance’s GPS. Mother just got really creative with her questioning to make sure that’s what it was.”

  “And made sparks,” Mom said. “Big sparks near their heads. Their hair stood up; I never intentionally zapped them.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Intentionally?”

  “It wasn’t on purpose!” Mom looked a little guilty. “There was a learning curve. The guy was wetter than I thought. Grounded.”

  Dad said, “She took advantage of it. She screamed, How many guards monitor the video cameras facing the entrance at thirty-seven thirty-two Montrose Avenue! He nearly wet himself.”

  “He may have wet himself,” Mom said. “It wasn’t that long after you dropped him in the pit. How would you tell?”

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  Dad cleared his throat and “screamed” softly, “How should we fucking know? That woman at the tunnel took the girl and sent us back to reset the trap! We’ve never been in their stupid bunker!”

  “You believed him?” Joe asked.

  Mom said, “We played variations on the same theme with his partner a little bit later. Similar results. He actually provided enough description for us to find the stupid door. We’d never have figured out that it was down there in the parking garage. Then it was just a case of finding the crowd of people trying to escape a sucking maw of death.”

  Between them, Mom and Dad had dropped over eleven guards and staff into the pit by the time they found us.

  “They were still pretty shook up,” Dad said. “All but the two outside guards got caught in your, uh, low-pressure system.”

  “So, whose idea was it to call the FBI?”

  The San Francisco FBI office fielded the agents who went into the scene. The Retreat was built into the foundation of a commercial bank in Silicon Valley, accessed from a gated section of the lowest level of the adjoining parking garage.

  “That was Hunt. One prisoner he was willing to bend the rules on, but he thought the rules against domestic operations would, uh, snap rather than flex when it came to concealing the death of a billionaire and the covert imprisonment of his security staff.”

  “You put them all back before they came, right?”

  Dad nodded. “They had those handy cells downstairs. I hope the FBI found the keys. I didn’t use ’em. They certainly found plenty of other stuff.

  “Daarkon Group is going down hard. This was their very unpublic records. Offshore accounts, payment schedules to more than a few purchased congressman and senators, some interesting blackmail video and photos starring various highly placed officials, foreign and domestic.

  “And there was one hundred thirty-five million dollars’ worth of Euro bearer bonds, a half million in gold, and two Picassos in Gilead’s closet.”

  I blinked. “Wow. The FBI told you about the bearer bonds?”

  Dad scratched his nose. “The FBI found an empty closet.”

  “What?” I looked at Mom.

  She was looking at the ceiling and shaking her head. I had the feeling this was not a revelation to her.

  Dad said, “Bastard blew up my home. Subverted my mother-in-law’s surgeon. Tried to kill my entire family. Kidnapped my daughter and her boyfriend.” He ground his teeth together, then visibly unclenched them and rubbed at his mastoids with his fingers. “Look, the U.S. government is seizing the offshore accounts. We’re talking three billion plus. I think they can afford to leave some for us. They wouldn’t have any of it if not for our efforts.” He raised his glass to me. “Our joint efforts. I just wish I knew what happened to Hyacinth Pope.”

  I cleared my throat.

  “General Sterling called me up this morning about a new cloud of orbital debris.”

  “Why?” Mom said. “Does he want you to remediate it?”

  I shook my head. “He called me because its point of origin was my standard orbital insertion over the Marshall Islands.”

  “Is that where you were twinning?” Dad said.

  “Yes. He’s seeing a bunch of books and papers and office supplies that ended up there. And one elongated object between one and two meters, approximately sixty-five kilos.”

  Joe blinked. “You said Hyacinth booked.”

  “She did. She is still booking—seven thousand seven hundred twenty meters per second.” I sipped from my water, staring down at the table. “I think she was trying to stop it—the depressurization. Anyway, she stuck a knife in me and it worked so well she just kept going.”

  Mom said, “She tried to stab you?”

  “Whoa.” Joe shifted back in his chair, eyes wide. “Insanely scary cop, I presume?”

  “Mom, she’s in orbit. She wasn’t exactly dressed for it.”

  Mom took a couple of deep breaths. “So she’s not coming back?”

  “Sometime near the end of next month she will burn up in the upper atmosphere. Call it cremation.”

  Dad reached over and patted the back of my hand. “Wasn’t your fault.”

  I glowered at him. I knew he was right but she passed right through me. It was … unsettling.

  “She’ll go out as a shooting star,” Dad said. “It’s more than she deserves. I’m not exactly sad,
but I promise you, if I see any meteors next month I won’t be making a wish.”

  I exhaled, puffing out my lips. “Okay, then. Does the FBI want to talk to me? For murder?”

  Dad shook his head. “They’re not sure you were there. The guard who survived isn’t talking, or Gilead’s assistant—what can they say? ‘We were torturing this seventeen-year-old girl we kidnapped and she hurt us?’”

  Joe raised his hand, “I helped a little.”

  Dad smiled. “Okay, ‘and she and her boyfriend kicked our butts?’ So if it’s not a kidnapping/torture investigation, it’s also not a murder investigation. Gilead wasn’t exactly shot—autopsy says cerebral aneurism. The guard’s embolism is also not a regular murder method.”

  “Hunt knows we were there,” I said.

  “Hunt is the guy who encouraged us to stay out of it.”

  Joe said, “What are they saying happened, then? Like when all their air went away?”

  Dad said. “Suspected gas leak.”

  I did have to laugh at that. “Ow. Literally true, too.”

  “If that’s settled, I want dessert,” said Joe. He looked at Dad. “Do they take bearer bonds here? I think you should buy.”

  FORTY-TWO

  Cent: The List

  The list is a monster that never dies.

  Two weeks after our visit to the Retreat, Cory finally got his spacewalk, thirty minutes of tethered inspection work clambering around the outer skin of Kristen Station. I took him out and delivered him to his first tether ring, then backed off. He did the rest himself, with three ten-meter pieces of climbing line with snap-on carabiners at each end. The only time I had to intervene was when he lingered over our cooling-exhaust port.

  Dad followed, eager.

  Mom went next, reluctant, but she understood that we needed jumpers out there with the “spatially normative” for both normal and emergency transport. I cheated—after five minutes of tethered work on the station, I jumped her to 160 kilometers altitude with the earth spread across her entire field of vision. We spent the rest of the spacewalk pointing out beautiful clouds and identifying landforms to each other. Her attitude about wearing the suit was greatly improved by the time we returned to the station.

  Joe went next. Grandmother declined and Seeana said, “Maybe later.” Jade and Tara said, “Spring break, for sure!” but Jeline and Tessa leapt at the chance.

  This led up to the famous photo on the cover of Wired. Six spacesuited figures (Dad, Mom, Cory, Joe, Jeline, and me in all the working suits) arranged round the exterior frame of the viewport with Grandmother, Seeana, and Tessa inside. The sun was behind the station and we were all lit by full earthlight, all but Dad’s visor open, all but Dad’s face visible. All of our heads pointed toward the center of the view port, a white coveralled snowflake with triaxial symmetry.

  We needed every one of those suits a month later, when the station’s outer skin began delaminating in earnest. We’d already noticed the tendency and, though it was expensive, we were ready.

  We didn’t replace the outer skin—we enclosed it with a thicker version, with more Kevlar, more layers, a heavier deposition of aluminum on the Mylar outer layer and space-rated bonding agents.

  The new skin had to go up in two halves because we didn’t have the option of jumping the entire station within an intact sphere. Thank goodness, we hadn’t started the exterior geodesic framework for the solar panels, so we just had to deal with through ports for exhausts, wiring, and, of course, the view port. Seams and through ports were sealed with exotic adhesives and shielded with Mylar overpatches.

  The suit video recorded during this project, edited by Jade and Tara and narrated by Grandmother, went to PBS, which filled it out to a full hour by having Connie del Olmo do split-screen questions and commentary with Grandmother, ground to orbit.

  With the proven capability of their equipment, Matoska CounterPressure Spacesuits received contracts from NASA, SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, ESA, and Roscosmos, with additional interest from the China National Space Administration and the Indian Space Research Organisation. Venture capitalists were trying to throw money at Cory, but thanks to a substantial influx of Euro bearer bonds from an unnamed investor, he was able to turn away all offers with the information that the fiscal foundation of MCP Suits, Inc. was sound.

  Apex Orbital entered into formal agreements with NASA, ESA, and Roscosmos for orbital emergency transportation and limited routine transport of personnel and cargo. We, too, had an influx of anonymous capital, and were able to shift Earth-side support, research, and development to a set of employees selected by our new director of ground-side operations, Wanda Chappell. She was a regular visitor to Kristen Station to “properly assess her division’s performance in meeting station needs.”

  Cory resigned his Stanford teaching position—there was just no time—but MCP Suits, Inc. entered into a formal research relationship with the university.

  Joe and Jade got full-ride scholarships from their respective schools. Their appearance as Stanford and Smith “interns” in orbit during the first Connie del Olmo interview had generated huge press for each institution and general increases in alumni donations.

  When Jade let “slip” that the Apex Orbital Services director of public relations was considering Smith College, Tara’s test scores were reviewed by admissions and, in a “coincidental” meeting outside one of Jade’s classes, the dean of financial aid told Jade that there was a “great deal of assistance available for diverse students with high academic potential and a precollege engagement with their career of choice.”

  Dr. Rasmussen-Grebenchekova had Grandmother start some weight-bearing exercises involving elastic bands. “You should put in a treadmill. She should walk and, maybe later, run.”

  To everyone’s surprise Grandmother started jogging without the treadmill, clearing a path around the inside of the inner hull that was slightly inclined off of the equator of the station to avoid the stack’s support lines.

  “I had Seeana find me these shoes with tacky rubber soles,” she explained.

  She would start with a good tangential tug on one of the stack anchor lines and then begin pushing with her feet. As her forward speed increased, the force against her feet became greater, like a skateboarder or a stunt bicyclist doing a complete loop inside a cylindrical concrete tunnel.

  A month later Rasmussen tested her on a reduced oxygen mix, monitoring her blood oxygenation resting and exercising, then had us reduce the station’s oxygen content to 50 percent. This forced us to go back to mask prebreathing, but we were glad to.

  One day Grandmother floated up to me and said tentatively, “I’ve received an offer, but I don’t think I should take it if you think it’s a bad idea.”

  “Did one of those marriage proposals hit the spot?” I said. I was only half joking. She’d gotten about four hundred.

  She twitched her hand, flicking away the great mass of lovelorn humanity with a flip of the wrist. “No. I’ve been offered a half-hour show on the Retirement Living cable channel. I’d have a guest on for most of the show and take audience questions and do some sort of personal essay at the end.”

  “Do they want the guests to come up here?” I said, alarmed. I was against that, and not just because of security. I didn’t want someone bringing anything communicable and getting her sick.

  “No. We’d do them split screen, guests on Earth, me here. The producers and I were talking about one-third medical, one-third lifestyle, and one-third celebrities over sixty.” She bit her lip then said in a rush, “I was just worried it was exploiting the station and you and everything you’re working on up here for my ego.”

  I hugged her. “Nonsense. Go for it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely! Is the satphone rig we have up here good enough?”

  “They want to use the satellite they lease capacity on but they said they would provide all the equipment we needed. We just have to schedule the show for when we’re no
t on the wrong side of the earth from that satellite.”

  “I had to calculate that when we were looking at geosynchronous-based satphone providers. We’re blocked from any particular geosync point for about seventeen minutes every six-hour orbit. Surely they can find a good slot in the other almost-twenty-three hours.”

  Everyone knows the opening credits of the show: Cue catchy music, title over station exterior, tracking shot to the view port with Grandmother gesturing the viewer in, and the jump cut to the interior with her floating forward to say the show’s catchphrase, “Welcome to my world.”

  It rapidly became the channel’s most-watched show, drawing viewers from outside its target demographic. When they took the format to an hour after five weeks, there was pressure from corporate to move it away from the “old folks” channel, but Grandmother refused.

  After it went to an hour, I made one five-minute appearance, for her sake, but mostly I kept a low profile.

  The damn list was not getting any smaller.

  We got the framework and the panels and the charge controllers installed. We didn’t do active pointing but distributed them uniformly across the perimeter of the sphere. This meant that a large percentage of them were pointing away from the sun at all times, but enough were in sunlight that I got to stop running batteries up and down.

  Wanda’s people, working with Misha and Stanford, came up with a zeolite swing-bed CO2-absorbent system that also absorbed moisture, keeping me from having to haul soda lime or swap out the desiccant.

  Still on the list was a system that would electrolyze oxygen from water, a system for automatically reactivating our charcoal filters, a food freezer, a food heater, and, always, an improved microgravity toilet.

  The list is a bitch. No matter how many things you take off of it, it grows and grows.

  Still, one day I jumped down to the relatively new offices of Matoska CounterPressure Spacesuits, Inc., and walked into Cory’s office.

  He looked up from his computer, an annoyed you-have-disturbed-important-work look on his face, but it vanished when I set the plastic-bagged jar on the desk with a clunk.