Freefall: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 1)

by Felix R. Savage

  The two knew each other well. They’d overlapped in Star City, the Russian counterpart of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, when Jack was undergoing his Soyuz training. On icy nights—not that there was any other kind of night in Russia, as far as Jack could tell—they used to drive out into the forest and blast away at tree-trunks with Alexei’s service weapon. Other times, they’d venture into Moscow and try to pick up astronaut groupies. There were astronaut groupies in Russia. Not in the US.

  Mission Commander Howard floated out of the shuttle’s crew hatch. He looked tired and older than ever. Their ordeal nursing the nearly-fatally wounded Atlantis to the ISS had taken a lot out of him. Jack saw a glint of wetness on Howard’s eyelashes, and looked away in a hurry as the mission commander futilely blinked. Tears didn’t flow in microgravity, but that didn’t stop them coming. Howard had been saying goodbye to the Atlantis.

  America’s longest-running spaceflight program hadn’t been meant to end like this. They should’ve touched down at Kennedy Space Center to quiet congratulations, the satisfaction of a job well done, the bittersweet pride of having been the last astronauts to fly on a space shuttle.

  Instead, they’d be flying home by Soyuz, one by one, over the span of the next year.

  Alexei explained the tentative schedule for their return. It was going to take that long because custom seats had to be made for each of them, molded to their bodies, as well as specially designed Russian re-entry suits.

  The nature of the Atlantis’s original mission was a delicate subject, and neither Alexei nor Jack alluded to it. But Jack knew Roscosmos had to be pissed as hell at having to bail out an NRO mission, and would charge a hefty price for the rescue. At least NASA had taken seat molds for the crew themselves. Some difficulties you could anticipate.

  Rivera would go first, on account of his spacesickness, although no one mentioned this. Then Howard. Moskowitz third. Jack last.

  “I was due a holiday,” Jack said, eyeing the science experiments lining the walls of the US lab module.

  “We will keep you busy,” Alexei threatened. “You can start by looking after my lettuces. They don’t grow properly.”

  “I don’t have a green thumb. More like a brown one,” Jack said uneasily.

  “There are toilets to clean, too,” Alexei offered, grinning.

  The two mission specialists from the Atlantis had gone ahead into the Tranquility module, eager to visit the famous Cupola. Jack was saving that for later. No matter how much busywork they gave him, he’d surely have plenty of time to revel in the views. He showed his Canon to Alexei, who asked if he had any dirty pictures on the memory card.

  The two men floated through the Russian storage module, and down a tunnel lined with white plastic pillows, barely wide enough for two people to pass each other. It felt like taking a trip down a robot’s esophagus. At the far end of the tunnel, Alexei braked with one hand. He put a finger to his lips. Jack, coming up alongside him, heard voices in the Russian module ahead, the heart of the ISS, known as Central Port.

  Howard had gone past them while they were shooting the breeze in the US lab module. One of the voices was his. The other had to be Katharine Menelaou, the current station chief.

  “—needless,” Howard was saying. “It could be parked in a graveyard orbit, where its orbit wouldn’t decay due to atmospheric drag. Power it down, fix it up, bring it home later.”

  He was talking about the Atlantis.

  “It could be, Greg,” said Menelaou. The station chief had a folksy Midwestern lilt to her voice. But you could hear the hard edges under the Ohio niceness. “I’m just telling you since you asked, it probably won’t be. They are leaning towards deorbiting the shuttle in a reasonably short timeframe.”

  “Well, I guess we might be able to scoop some of her out of the Pacific, after she burns up in the atmosphere.”

  Howard didn’t sound happy about that. But personally, Jack thought a fiery deorbit would be a more honorable fate for the old space shuttle than NASA’s original plan to decommission her and display her alongside her sisters. The Atlantis deserved better than to be flayed and wired up in a museum for an indifferent public to glance at.

  “It’s a shame,” Howard said. “That’s all. It’s a damn shame.”

  “I know,” Menelaou said. “But it’ll be decided way higher up the food chain.”

  Alexei raised his eyebrows at Jack. He whispered: “Ball-breaker.” Jack suppressed a laugh.

  They pushed off and floated out of the tunnel, into Central Port. There was no ‘up’ and ‘down’ on the ISS, but the little portholes set into one wall, framing views of Earth, made that wall feel like the floor, and that’s the way Menelaou and Howard were oriented.

  “Hi, Kath,” Alexei said. “I’m just showing Jack around. It’s his first time on-station.”

  “Yeah?” Katharine Menelaou looked Jack up and down. “Jack Kildare, OK. The Brit. First mission?”

  “No,” Jack said. No, ma’am was on the tip of his tongue. Something about the rail-thin, hard-faced Menelaou triggered old military habits he’d largely shaken off. He rudely scratched one armpit to undo any impression of subservience. “My first mission was STS-125, the last Hubble servicing mission, in 2009.”

  “Ah. Well, welcome aboard,” Menelaou said. “It’s gonna be a bit crowded, obviously …”

  The ISS had already been fully staffed, with a total of six people on-station: three Russian cosmonauts, two Americans, and a Japanese robotics researcher. The crew of the Atlantis brought their numbers to ten—the most in ISS history. However, with so many modules separated by tunnels and 90-degree angles, it didn’t feel crowded. In fact, compared to the crew module of the space shuttle, this was a McMansion. Jack smiled blandly at the station chief.

  “We’ve got plenty of food, so don’t worry about that,” Menelaou went on. “As far as sleeping areas go, you can take your pick of walls.”

  “He can sleep in Zvezda, with us,” Alexei said.

  After a moment, Menelaou said, “OK, yeah, that’ll work.” Jack smiled in thanks, while privately wishing Alexei hadn’t made the offer. He did appreciate it, as he knew he wouldn’t be getting one of the deluxe sleeping booths in the US lab module, anyway. But it underlined his separateness from the American contingent, something he was never eager to draw attention to.

  “Jack,” Howard said, “we’re going to organize a series of EVAs to inspect the damage to the Atlantis. While that’s being prepped, I want you to take as many high resolution photographs as you can to cover the impact points, and make sure you have enough angles for 3D reconstruction. The post mortem on this is going to be huge. There might even be a Congressional investigation, depending on what the cause of the impact ultimately turns out to be.”

  You mean, if they can prove it came from the Great Chinese Science Experiment, Jack thought. Which will be a lot harder if the Atlantis is de-orbited and burnt up on re-entry. He suddenly realized that Howard might have other motivations besides sentimentality for opposing that plan. On the other hand, he could understand that the bureaucrats at the top of the NASA food chain might not want China openly blamed for the catastrophe.

  “I’ll have to testify in committee, anyway,” Howard said gloomily. “Related to that, we’ll need to pull all the logs and transcripts, and everyone will need to prepare a statement and personal report.”

  “You got it,” Jack said.

  Alexei hadn’t been kidding. They were going to be kept busy.

  Yet even with a full daily schedule of duties, including two hours a day of exercise, the astronauts on the ISS had free time from about eight o’clock until lights-out at midnight. Some wrestled with the appallingly slow broadband connection to exchange emails with their families. Some squeezed in more exercise. Alexei was carrying on a long-distance relationship with a Russian female military pilot stationed in Syria. He agonized over love-emails to her, while fending off uproariously bad advice from the other cosmonauts—well, Jack gathered i
t was uproarious, the way they all laughed.

  Despite only speaking a few words of Russian, Jack found himself getting along better on this side of the ‘Iron Curtain’ … yes, it existed. There was a barrier between the Russians and the rest, no matter how much everyone insisted they were all colleagues working towards shared goals. It was the language barrier, but not just that. A hint of coolness in the air. A slight reserve on both sides.

  Jack came to believe it started with the other Westerners taking their cues from Menelaou. The station chief never behaved less than professionally, but now and then she made a throwaway comment that revealed her political views. She was such a hardcore neocon, she could’ve understudied for Dick Cheney.

  But Jack himself was a brick in the wall, too. Hell, he couldn’t even tell Alexei and the other guys what the Atlantis’s last mission had been about. Because bloody Frostbite spied on the Russians as well.

  Thank God there weren’t any Chinese on the ISS, anyway! The atmosphere would have been so frigid, they’d have frost on the inside of the portholes.

  Staying aloof from the tensions as best he could, Jack loitered in the Cupola whenever he could get it to himself. The seven-sided bay window lived up to its reputation. When the ISS was orbiting over Earth’s dayside, you got spectacular views of home. When night hid Earth, the stars blazed out, undimmed by light pollution, and auroras danced over the poles.

  Jack hadn’t seen such amazing skies since he was a child in Warwickshire. Actually, ever. He took picture after picture.

  Most amateur shutterbugs in space photographed Earth exclusively. Jack had been the same, until he heard those weird sounds on the Atlantis. He’d tried to bury the memory (Wheeeeoooooeee … EEEEE!) but it kept repeating on him, like a dodgy kebab. He’d considered telling Alexei about it, asking him if he’d ever heard anything like that out here, but he knew that would destroy his reputation with the whole cosmonaut corps. It wasn’t worth it.

  Instead, reasoning that the best way to satisfy his curiosity was to give in to it, he spent time in the cupola gazing away from Earth, taking pictures of the fathomless darkness beyond humanity’s home planet.

  The pictures were usually a waste of pixels. You couldn’t even see the outer planets in any detail, although the views out here were much better, naturally, than from Earth.

  But shortly after he arrived on the ISS, he had a rare opportunity to photograph Jupiter in full color. He claimed his spot in the Cupola in plenty of time, feeling excited. Google told him Jupiter was 400 million miles and change beyond Earth. It would probably only be a few dozen pixels total, but that wasn’t the point. Jack cranked the external shields of the Cupola’s windows open, and drank in the black eternal night.

  They’d had a treat for dinner: fresh apples, sent up on the Soyuz that had come to take Mission Commander Howard home. Howard’s custom Soyuz seat had been made and delivered, so he’d be heading home to face the Congressional music. The rumored investigation into the causes of the Atlantis disaster had materialized, and Jack was certain that Howard would milk the chance to air his firm belief—neither conclusively proved, nor disproved, by their impact analysis—that the accident should be laid at the feet of the Chinese. Jack was just glad he wouldn’t have to poke his own head above the parapet. Much better to be up here, far away from petty political games—even if politics did infect the atmosphere on ISS itself.

  Never mind.

  There’s Jupiter.

  Oh, you beauty.

  Click. Click.

  He imagined he could even see Europa, Jupiter’s second moon, a pinprick on the bright blob of the gas giant.

  Click click click.

  All quiet on the ISS. Not a sound except for the constant, comforting white noise of the fans. No eerie pips from outer space. No ear-stabbing electronic shrieks. It was just Jack and the 2-inch screen of his Canon.

  Click. Click. These pictures are going to be bloody fantastic. Who needs aliens?

  “Oh my God!” Mission Specialist Moskowitz’s voice, high and raw. “Oh my God! I need help in here, get the first aid kit!”

  Jack dropped his camera. It bobbled on his wristband as he flew towards Moskowitz’s scream.

  “It’s Greg! He’s not moving—he’s not breathing!”

  CHAPTER 4

  Earlier that same night, a young man named Skyler Taft drove at the stipulated 5 miles per hour up the side of Mauna Kea. He swung his rented 4WD Subaru into the parking lot of NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility and got out. It was dusk.

  Way up here, 13,700 feet above sea level, the only sound was the wind. The dry, thin air tickled Skyler’s throat. He shivered and zipped his parka all the way up against the cold. Patches of snow dappled the slopes around the parking lot, although spring had already come to Hilo, down on the coast, where he was staying. He walked around the Subaru to get his guitar out of the trunk. His hiking boots crunched on cinders from the dormant volcano.

  Golden and orange clouds swathed the western horizon like an exploding quilt. It was a spectacular sunset but it made Skyler’s shitty mood even worse.

  He needed clear weather. Yes, everyone had to cope with bad weather while observing, but come on! The last two nights, the clouds had been so thick, even the IRTF’s three-meter telescope couldn’t see anything. They only had two more nights on the telescope after this.

  Ye gods, am I ever gonna catch a break?

  He trudged up the slope to the IRTF’s snowglobe dome. The already-opened letter crackled in the inside pocket of his parka.

  Letting himself into the windowless control room, he faked a bright tone. “Yo Pete! How’s it going?”

  At the C-shaped arrangement of desks on the far side of the room, a balding white head turned. Glasses caught the light from the anglepoise lamp above the computers.

  “Says it’s gonna clear up tonight,” said Peter Tamura, the telescope operator. He was a full-time employee of the University of Hawaii.

  “It better,” Skyler said. He dumped his guitar case on the floor. With a ta-daaah! gesture, he placed a grease-spotted paper bag on the desk. “Donuts from Lanky’s.”

  It had been Odo’s idea to pick up the treats, not Skyler’s. But Skyler saw it had been a good one. The plump telescope operator’s eyes lit up. “That stuff’ll kill ya,” Tamura grunted, reaching for the bag.

  “Brain food,” Skyler said, biting into a glazed donut roughly the size of a dinner plate. “How do you think I got my Ph.D?”

  Not that getting his Ph.D had made one damn bit of difference to Skyler’s life. Before, he’d been a graduate student at Caltech. Now, he was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard. Harvard! Sure, it sounded nice until you realized that the Ivy League—hell, the world—was oversupplied with elite Ph.Ds. Astronomy might not be as popular as some fields, but that’s because the number of good jobs available was pitifully tiny.

  So Skyler had cast his net beyond the Ivy League, and damned if he didn’t get the door slammed in his face, again.

  “Didja hear back from NASA?” Tamura asked. They’d been chatting about Skyler’s job hunt last night. You had to talk about something, sitting here from dusk to daybreak, waiting for the clouds to go away. Skyler had confided that he’d applied for an astronomy job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Yesterday a letter from NASA had arrived for him at home in Arlington, MA. Too impatient to wait, he’d asked his housemate to Fed-Ex it to the motel where he was staying in Hilo.

  $25 for a buttload of nothing, as it transpired.

  “Yeah. I struck out,” Skyler said. He pulled the letter out of his parka, which he was still wearing—you didn’t use heaters in the IRTF control room, as heat would distort the telescope’s images. He held up the offending envelope and dramatically tore it in half, then stuffed it into the trashcan. Tamura laughed.

  Later, while Tamura was in the bathroom, Skyler got the letter out of the trashcan and cut it into small pieces with the desk scissors. It was just common sense not to leave personal inform
ation lying around.

  But that was later.

  Now: “Big Dog is ready,” Skyler announced, through the donut clamped in his teeth, as he checked the Big Dog array in the XUI.

  “Roger,” Tamura said. “Big Dog is on.”

  Big Dog was the software that controlled the spectrograph—the key piece of the IRTF, which measured infrared wavelengths to provide information about planets and stars that conventional telescopes could not. Guide Dog was imaging / guiding software. It documented where the telescope was pointing.

  “Guide Dog is ready,” Skyler said, swallowing his mouthful of donut.

  “Roger. Guide Dog is on,” Tamura said.

  The veteran operator focused the telescope on Skyler’s objective: Jupiter.

  With the professor he worked for, Dr. Odo Meiritz of Harvard’s Department of Astronomy, Skyler was looking to obtain more information about the atmosphere of the solar system’s largest gas giant. Dr. Meiritz had a theory that there were sharply defined differences in cloud composition at different depths that might give rise to simple life. The IRTF could ‘see’ the separate cloud layers of Jupiter: colder at the top, hotter the further down you went, and each point could give you a separate spectrograph. If the weather over Mauna Kea ever cleared up, they might be able to prove that compounds were present that could support life.

  Skyler didn’t really give a crap about Jupiter. This project was Odo’s baby. Skyler himself was more interested in Herbig Ae/Be, and to a lesser extent T Tauri, gravitational collapse, and development of main sequence stars near reflection nebulae.

  But any crumb of success might count towards the next phase of his so-called career. So he silently begged the weather to improve as the night wore on. Cracking his knuckles, munching donuts, drinking Diet Coke to stay alert, he entertained Tamura with horror stories from previous observations in Atacama and other facilities on Mauna Kea, and tried not to look at the shreds of the NASA rejection letter in the trashcan.

  Around eleven o’clock, when it seemed like they were never going to get a break in the clouds, he got bored enough to take his guitar out. Tamura complained, but hell, he listened to NPR, so he had no business objecting to noise. Anyway, the operator grudgingly admitted that “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” was a good song. Skyler played the Beatles; he played Dylan and Guthrie. He didn’t have any great talent, but he could pluck the chords and carry a tune.