Mission: Tomorrow - eARC

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  “Is that legal up here?”

  “I’m a cop, right?”

  Felix waited for Keyes to hit the head, then led him to a seldom-used science module. He looked to make sure no one was watching, then pulled the hatch shut behind him.

  “Chilly in here,” Keyes said.

  “Never gets used, other than some science geek checking an instrument every now and then. They don’t waste money heating more than they have to.” He tossed Keyes a bulb. “This’ll keep you warm.”

  Keyes cracked the seal and sipped. “Ugh. What’s in it?”

  “Whatever the engineers pulled from their still last week, with some lime juice.” And a little something extra in yours. Felix opened his own bulb and drank.

  “So tell me, how does a guy get to be a lawman on a space station?”

  “DSS isn’t in space,” Felix said, dodging the question, “and it’s not orbiting. That’s why you’re not weightless. We’re drifting in the upper atmosphere somewhere, and the countries that we fly over feel more secure with some form of legal authority aboard.”

  “Yeah, but why you?”

  “Long story.” Cops who blew the whistle on their superiors didn’t stay cops very long, unless they had friends in high places. Then they got shuffled out of the way. Far out of the way.

  “Get much work?”

  “If you mean paperwork, hell yeah.”

  Keyes chuckled. “I suppose Mr. Foggerty’s little stunt kept you busy for a while.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “They don’t make ‘em any stranger than Foggerty, but he’s a good man.” Keyes took a long pull from his bulb. “Ever since they killed NASA, he’s been looking for ways to reinvigorate the space program.”

  “This trip of his is a publicity stunt, then?”

  Keyes nodded. “He stands to make a bundle, too, if he makes the deadline. Already has the money committed to R&D for more space balloons.”

  “Airships,” Felix corrected automatically. “Don’t let the company boys hear you calling them balloons.”

  Keyes started to speak but tripped over the words. “Woo, this stuff is wicked.” He looked at his bulb accusingly.

  “That it is.”

  He raised his bulb. “To becoming the first humans to see an ass . . . uh, heh, an asteroid up close.”

  “Your orbit’s a cheat, you know.”

  “Whadda ya mean? We’ll pass out the, uh, I mean, outside the NEO. It’s legit.”

  “Barely. It’ll pass just inside your apogee as you swing by. The intention of the bet was to go there, not skate by on a technicality.”

  “S’all legal.” Keyes’s eyes lost their focus. “Mr. Fogg checked with lawyers.”

  “Bad wording, then. A cheat.”

  “He’s gon’ win his bet, y’know.” Keyes swayed, took a wobbly step to the side. “Show that pompous ass . . .” He leaned against the module’s wall.

  Felix pushed his guilt pangs down into his gut and buried them with enough bile that he could taste it. “I’m sorry.”

  “Fer what?” Keyes’s back slid down the wall. “Gonna . . . uh . . . sit. Rest a . . .”

  Felix waited for him to stop moving, then slipped out of the module and pulled the hatch shut behind him. Guilt stabbed at his conscience. Keyes seemed like a good man; he deserved better. Felix forced himself to think about the money, enough to get out of police work and set up his own business. Private investigation, maybe, or security. Somehow the vision seemed flatter than it used to.

  ***

  It was cold.

  Keyes reached for a blanket but found only smooth floor. He wrapped his arms around himself and shivered.

  He drifted back toward sleep, but the chill nudged him closer to consciousness. Mr. Foggerty will be expecting his morning tea.

  He rubbed his eyes, shielding them from the light. His head pulsed. He peeked at the glare outside his eyelids.

  I’m on the space station!

  Not space. Dark sky.

  He fumbled for his phone and stared at the time. Jeez!

  They’d be sealing the airlock any time now, if they hadn’t already. Why hadn’t anyone come to wake him? Foggerty must be furious.

  He scrambled to his feet, kicking the half-empty bulb from last night. Wicked stuff.

  But he’d only had half a bulb. Nothing was that wicked. He rubbed his hazy head. Felix was long gone.

  Felix.

  Did he actually drug me?

  No time to wonder. He composed himself and pushed the hatch open. He bounded down the endless tube, not stopping to close pressure hatches behind him. Someone shouted a curse after him, but he wasted no time looking back.

  He reached the hub, swiveled, looking at the hatches leading to the five arms of DSS. Which one? Cold sweat stung under his arms.

  “Looking for something?”

  Keyes’s eyes snapped to the lone crewman on duty in the hub. “Uh,” he said, trying to force words past his thick tongue. Finally he managed to get out, “Space launch?”

  The crewman smirked and pointed to a hatch. “Better hurry.”

  Keyes stumbled through the hatch and down the tube. His hazy brain could focus on little more than opening the next hatch in line. Damn, how much further?

  “Oh, it’s you,” a voice said. “What’re you doing here?” Keyes vaguely recognized the woman from yesterday’s briefing. Her silky black hair had been down then, not tucked away in a neat bun. He struggled to remember her name. Flight chief something or other.

  The patch sewn to her flight suit reminded him. “Aouda.”

  “What?”

  “Uh, nothing. Just . . .”

  She arched an eyebrow at him.

  “On time?” he managed to stammer.

  “Barely. We’re just about to close the airlock.” She looked him over, frowned. “I thought you weren’t coming.”

  “Wha?”

  “No time. If you’re going, you better get in there now.”

  The airlock door was an open hatch on the floor, which the chief ushered him through. Keyes found himself in a long thin tube clinging to inset rungs. He glanced down into the dizzying depths below. The hatch clanged shut above him.

  With nowhere else to go, he climbed down the tube. A clang sounded from below, then a voice. “Get a move on. We need to shove off if we’re going to make our launch window.”

  He hurried his pace and soon found himself climbing through another hatch. A man in a flight suit slammed the hatch behind him. The flight engineer, but Keyes couldn’t remember his name.

  He looked Keyes up and down. “Thought you guys cancelled.”

  “What? No. Why would we do that?”

  He shrugged. “Dunno. Mission control said they got a message from Foggerty an hour ago.”

  “Mr. Foggerty would never—”

  “Whatever. Get strapped in.”

  He had himself almost strapped in before his foggy brain thought to ask the next question. “Isn’t Mr. Foggerty on board?”

  The pilot continued her preflight work, ignoring him. The flight engineer looked at him with his eyebrows raised. “You see him anywhere?”

  “I have to find out where he is!”

  He reached to undo his straps, but the engineer grabbed his hand. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  A slight tug pulled Keyes forward as the attitude engines fired. On the pilot’s video display, DSS lazily receded.

  Flight Chief Aouda’s image in Felix’s tablet looked harried. “Better come over to the ascender dock, Detective. We have a situation here.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s that Foggerty guy. He’s on a rampage.”

  “On my way.” Felix charged down the tube, slamming pressure hatches behind him. The ascender docking module wasn’t very far; a good cop plans ahead.

  When he arrived, Foggerty was mostly calm. “Look,” he said, “I don’t know where this text message came from, but I surely didn’t send it. But that’s water ov
er the dam. What’s important is how you’re going to get me onto that ascender.”

  Aouda sputtered. “Get onto it? You can’t.”

  “My good woman, where there’s a will, there’s a way.” He turned his attention to Felix. “I’m sure you’ll agree, Mister . . .”

  “Detective Felix.”

  “You don’t say.” He eyed Felix appraisingly. “Are you in charge of security on this station?”

  “I am.”

  “Then we must have some words when this is all said and done. But first I must get aboard that airship!”

  “If the chief says it’s impossible, sir, then it’s impossible.”

  “Tut. You have those atmospheric airships I rode up in. Take me up in one of those.”

  “No, no, no,” Aouda said, agitated. “If they could get to orbit themselves, we wouldn’t need the orbital ascenders. DSS is at the limit of their buoyancy, and even then they need special low-pressure propellers after seventy K feet.” Foggerty began to object, and the chief added pointedly, “Not that we’d risk an airship or its crew trying, even if it was possible.”

  Foggerty’s face dropped. “Well that’s it, then. I knew Stuart would try to cheat. Didn’t think he’d be clever enough to pull it off though.”

  Felix averted his eyes from the crestfallen man and tried to focus on the money he stood to make. It would have been so much easier if he didn’t have to face his victim.

  Victim. The word made Felix feel like a criminal. Maybe Foggerty was bending the rules, but Stuart was outright breaking them. And I helped him, Felix thought.

  Damn it.

  Inexplicably, Foggerty’s lips erupted into a smile beneath his handlebar. “Ah, but you have another ascender under construction!”

  “Really, sir,” Aouda said. “It’ll be another few months before it’s ready for flight.”

  “Well it looks complete. What’s it missing?”

  “The engines,” Felix said.

  “Oh.” Foggerty’s smile collapsed and his shoulders hunched in defeat.

  I have him, Felix thought. All I have to do is keep my mouth shut. “But it still has plenty of buoyancy.”

  “Oh ho! That it does!”

  Aouda frowned. “You can’t be serious. I can’t authorize—”

  “I can,” Felix said with a smile.

  “Bull,” Aouda said.

  “Well, I have override codes. I can release the tethers holding it in place before anyone knows what’s happening.”

  Foggerty clapped him on the back. “Good man!”

  Aouda arched her eyebrow at Felix. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  Ending my career. Giving up my dream. Doing the right thing. “Will we be able to catch the other ascender in time?”

  “We?”

  “Mr. Foggerty doesn’t know how to fly. I’ll have to go with him.”

  “The good news,” Aouda said, “is that without engines the ascender is a lot lighter than the fully loaded one. It’ll rise faster. If you leave soon, you just might catch up to them before they reach two hundred K.”

  “That’s when the engines kick in,” Foggerty said.

  “That’s the bad news.”

  “Well then,” Felix said, “let’s get a move on.”

  Stealing a spaceship wasn’t as difficult as it sounded, especially when the next closest cop was a hundred forty thousand feet below. Felix looked over the work crew rotation. Luckily, the engines were preassembled on the ground and none of them had arrived on station yet, so just a few maintenance guys were aboard the ascender at the moment.

  “I need you all to evacuate the ship.” Felix suppressed a smile. “Police matter.”

  “Let’s see a badge.”

  “Don’t be a smart ass, Charlie.”

  The maintenance guys laughed and filed out of the crew module and up the airlock tube.

  When the last of them was gone, Foggerty grinned. “Good show. Let’s shove off.”

  “Yes, let’s,” Aouda’s voice said from the airlock tube.

  Felix looked up just in time to see her climb down the last few rungs. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Someone’s got to fly this thing.”

  “I put in my required time on the simulator.”

  “Wait,” Foggerty said. “You were going to try to fly solo with only simulator training? And they say I’m crazy.”

  “Ha,” Aouda said. “Strap in and let’s get this bird moving.”

  Felix sat and fastened his straps. “You know you’re throwing away your career,” he said.

  “I couldn’t let you two kill yourselves trying to fly. Besides, Mr. Foggerty is rather charming when he’s not badgering innocent flight chiefs.” She grinned impishly.

  “Oh, I must apologize,” Foggerty said. “No excuse for treating a lady that way.”

  “Pssht,” Aouda said. “He thinks I’m a lady.”

  The radio hissed and Aouda dialed the volume down. “I don’t suppose mission control is happy with us,” Felix said.

  Aouda grinned. “I can’t hear them. Antenna hasn’t been installed yet.”

  “I doubt they have anything interesting to say anyway,” Foggerty said. “So what’s your excuse for breaking the law, detective?”

  Felix met Foggerty’s gaze for a moment, then dropped his eyes. “I owed it to you, Mr. Foggerty. I . . . uh, I’m the one who made you miss your flight.”

  “Yes, of course you were.”

  Felix’s eyes snapped to Foggerty’s. “You knew?”

  “Who else could it have been? You’re the fellow who best knows security.”

  “Why didn’t you report me?”

  “No need for that; the deed was done.” Foggerty harrumphed. “I just wonder how much the old windbag paid you.”

  “Not enough to crush a man’s dreams.”

  “Didn’t take you for a philosopher.”

  Felix chuckled. “Neither did I.”

  “Uh, we have a problem.” Aouda’s voice was ice cold.

  Felix’s heart skipped. “What’s wrong?”

  “Our O-2 tanks are empty. The ascender must have been getting its air from the station. I opened the auxiliary O-2 supply, but . . .”

  “But what?” Ice gripped Felix’s throat.

  “We’ll be cutting it close, making it to the buoyancy ceiling. And there’s no way anyone’s making it back down.”

  “Well then I guess we’re all going over to the other ascender together.” Foggerty’s voice betrayed no fear; he might have ordered a cup of tea with that tone. “Have you made radio contact with them?”

  She tapped the radio console.

  “Blast.”

  “I’m sure DSS mission control has been squawking since we left. Believe me, they know we’re coming.”

  “It has to be Mr. Foggerty,” Keyes said. “Who else would come after us in a stolen airship?”

  The flight engineer looked at him sharply. “They still haven’t responded to DSS. We have to assume hostile intent.”

  “Nonsense! Have you tried to contact them? I’m sure he’ll talk to us.”

  The pilot pinned Keyes with a stern look. “I’m not taking any risks. As soon as we reach the two hundred K ceiling, we’re thrusting to orbit.”

  “But Mr. Foggerty will—”

  “Foggerty can just float his ass back down to DSS.”

  Keyes tried a new tactic. “But the whole point of the launch is to get him to the NEO and back.”

  “Mission parameters are to refuel, execute a Hohmann transfer, snap a few pics, and come home. Doesn’t matter who’s aboard.”

  Keyes huffed. “Without Foggerty’s money, there wouldn’t be a mission.”

  “We have a narrow burn window,” the pilot said sternly. “We miss it and all Foggerty’s money is wasted. Now shut your trap and let me do my job.”

  Keyes folded his arms and looked away. That Felix guy had drugged him last night. Probably made Foggerty miss the launch in the first plac
e. What if it was him in the stolen ascender? To what lengths would he go to stop the mission?

  Maybe the pilot was right after all.

  Felix shivered and sucked in another breath of stale, freezing air. The chill spread through his lungs. “How much longer?”

  “Soon,” Aouda said. Her video screen displayed the feed from the topside camera. The ascender showed as a tiny V against a black sky. She zoomed the blurry image. “Crap.”

  “What is it?”

  “They’re maneuvering into position to begin thrust.”

  “Well then we’d better get moving,” Foggerty said. “How are we getting over there? Some sort of escape pod?”

  Felix’s face flushed. What else had he failed to consider before running off half cocked?

  “Not a chance,” Aouda said. “We’re going to have to shoot a tether to them and climb over. Hope you have strong arms, because it’s a long way down.”

  “Won’t it be cold?” Foggerty asked.

  “Ha! I’d be more worried about the lack of air if I were you.”

  Felix locked eyes with Aouda. “Please tell me we have suits aboard.”

  “I checked the inventory before I came aboard. Let’s get suited up.”

  Felix blew out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “Thanks for saving our butts. Again.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. There’s no time to depressurize.”

  “Crap.”

  Foggerty fumbled with his suit. Felix helped him get into it and checked all the seals, then got into his own suit. At least I can do something right, he thought. Aouda double-checked everyone’s suit before locking down her own helmet.

  Felix savored the warm, fresh air flowing into his helmet. It smelled metallic but had none of the moisture, sweat, and carbon dioxide that permeated the crew module.

  “You know how to deploy a tether?” Aouda asked over the suit radio.

  Felix nodded.

  “Uh, I can’t hear you nod.”

  “Right.” He felt heat in his face. “Yeah, I do.”

  “Good. You guys get up to the airlock. I’m going to maneuver us as close as I can, then set this thing to descend back to DSS altitude so they can recover it.”

  Felix climbed up the long access tube with Foggerty close behind. “I don’t understand why,” Foggerty groused, his voice winded, “you people built the airlock,” a pause for breath, “so far away.”