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

by Felix R. Savage

  Yearning momentarily fogged Hannah’s brain. She knew intellectually that she had placed herself in a trigger situation. The cheesy Top 40 music, the buzz of after-work chatter around them, the smell of unhealthy fried food—this was exactly the kind of environment where she used to do her drinking in the days of Hannah’s Rules.

  The real question was why she’d placed herself in this situation. It had been her choice. She could just as easily have taken Inga to one of the cafes in Starport Building 3.

  Come on, Hannah. You don’t even like beer.

  She ate a nacho. “The NXC is a dream factory,” she said. “We have to be realists. Nuclear propulsion is the only way to go. I’m not disagreeing with you about that. But the political obstacles to turning engine design over to the Russians … yikes. That’s the only reason I’m listening to you.”

  Inga was ignoring her meal, scribbling on a napkin. “Is it OK to draw?” she said, glancing up at the ceiling.

  Hannah took her meaning. Security. “It’s OK. This place is practically an extension of JSC.” All the booths around them were filled with techs, analysts, and construction workers jabbering about SoHP-related topics. There were more NASA lanyards to be seen than Houston Texans t-shirts. Nevertheless, Hannah glanced up and confirmed that the nearest security camera was too far away to capture a scribble on a napkin.

  Inga pushed the napkin across to her. “This is a sketch of the MPD engine.”

  “What’s this?” Hannah said, touching an unlabelled bubble.

  “That is the steam generator. The unique feature of this engine is that it uses water as the reaction mass.”

  “I know. Just like the alien spaceship.” By now, everyone had put two and two together. The plume of water plasma observed by the IRTF in 2011 had come from the alien spacecraft’s drive as it decelerated into Jupiter orbit. The spaceship had travelled however many light-years—coasting most of the way, for certain—on water.

  Unexpectedly, Inga flushed pink. “Is that a problem?”

  “Not at all. The main problem, honestly, is lofting enough water into orbit to reach Europa. H2O is heavy.”

  “We will have to loft so much stuff into orbit, anyway …”

  “Yep. It’s going to take every launch vehicle on Earth, working flat out for the next two years.” Hannah loaded a nacho with guacamole and made it fly on a vertical launch trajectory. It had been a long day. Leaning back, she made the loaded nacho orbit above her face. “Pieces of truss, habitation, avionics. And you want them to lift a few hundred tonnes of water, too?”

  “No. Only 70 tonnes. The ship only needs enough reaction mass to travel one way, plus a safety margin.”

  “Huh? Oh—oh.”

  Hannah brought the nacho down to land in her mouth. Chewing, in a trance, she ran mental calculations.

  “Holy smoke, Batman,” she said. “Refuel at Europa. It’s made of freaking water ice!”

  Inga grinned. It transformed her face, making her look like a fun, lively person. “You see? Land on Europa—”

  “No, no. The Spirit of Humanity is not going to be launch-capable. Oh sure, it could land—that’s easy, just crash. But it couldn’t get away again. No, we send an advance lander. Or maybe two of them. Automated electrolysis systems. Send them now. They sit there for the next three years, making reactants and collecting water. By the time the Spirit of Humanity gets there, they’ve made enough reactants to loft the water for the return trip! They launch the water tanks into orbit, and the SoH picks them up. It could work. It could freaking well work!”

  “Assuming the aliens do not interfere,” Inga joked.

  Hannah picked a celery stick out of her salad and pointed it at Inga like a gun. “That’s what the railguns are for.”

  She had gradually come to discount the possibility—remote, but non-zero—that the alien spacecraft had a living crew. You couldn’t calculate for that, anyway. Hannah now spent her days focusing exclusively on the technical challenges of reaching Europa and getting back again. The mission was worth doing for its own sake. Sometimes, lying awake at night, unable to sleep for the heat-rejection calculations running through her head, she rejoiced that this had come about in her lifetime. The alien spacecraft had given humanity a much-needed kick in the pants. It allowed her to consider way-out ideas—like this water engine—that would never have gotten a hearing this time last year.

  Yet her innate aversion to risk still governed her instincts. She leaned forward and fixed Inga with a serious gaze. “What about reliability? Eight people’s lives will depend on this.”

  “Eight people?” Inga said.

  “Yes. They want an eight-man crew.”

  “We fit enough engines and turbines that we always make sure we have N+2 redundancy.”

  Hannah ate the rest of her nachos, thinking about the unforgiving Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. The more mass you carry, the harder you have to push away part of that mass to get the same amount of movement. But if you don’t have to take all the mass you need for the return trip out there with you, you can accelerate to a greater velocity with the same engine design, and get there quicker.

  The crew would not be eating nachos on board the Spirit of Humanity, anyway. They’d be dining on fresh vegetables and legumes, not an unhealthy snack in sight. Hydroponic gardening was the only possible way to keep the crew alive for that long. The life-support department was working on a setup that would deliver an optimal supply of calories and nutrients. They might even include live fish.

  “Has the crew been chosen yet?” Inga asked, interrupting her ruminations.

  “I think they’re being chosen as we speak. Of course, I’m not involved in that at all. It’s pure, cut-throat politics.” Hannah sighed at the reminder of the looming risk that political considerations might warp the mission at any stage. With the hundreds of other scientists and engineers working on the project worldwide, she was absolutely determined to fight that threat tooth and nail. Nobody’s pet political agenda should take precedence over getting the Spirit of Humanity safely to Europa … and back again.

  And yet she had to work within the system.

  Game the system, if that was what it took.

  Of course the NXC had their own agenda, too. But that didn’t mean Skyler and his buddies couldn’t hit a home-run from time to time.

  An American-sourced propulsion system might make everyone happy … except the Russians. Wait. What if the American propulsion system was powered by the Russian gas-cooled reactor? Yes, that would work! It would keep the Russians happy too, and she wouldn’t have to worry about the iffy-looking water-cooled reactor used in the original MPD drive proposal. She would need to bring in someone with gas-cooled reactor experience to check the Russians’ work, but she could get Skyler to do that for her. Didn’t the Brits use gas-cooled reactors for electrical power? It looked like this was really going to fly.

  If the mass ratio could be finessed within the crucial parameters.

  She pushed aside her empty nachos plate, and her untouched salad. Inga, chewing her burger, raised her eyebrows. Hannah tugged the napkin dispenser closer and borrowed Inga’s pencil.

  “My freehand drawing skills are craptacular,” she muttered, fifteen minutes later, after scrumpling up several failed attempts. (Those napkins went in her bag. She’d shred them back at her office.)

  Her sketch showed a truss tower with the MPD engine at one end. The truss narrowed to two-thirds of the way up, supporting radiator vanes, and met a disc labeled Bioshield. Above that, several cylindrical modules like a string of beads. One, by far the largest, she’d labeled Main hab. Spin gravity. 60 m diameter min – Coriolis.

  Inga had watched her sketching in silence. Now she said, “Schön. Wunderschön!”

  “I actually know what you mean,” Hannah murmured. Emotion rose in her chest. The Spirit of Humanity had sprung to life in her mind, growing with every stroke of her pencil, each component supporting the others in an exquisite balance. Sure, she was basing th
is off of ballpark figures. But the ratios worked.

  Inga picked up her beer glass and found it empty. “I must have another beer to celebrate. You?”

  “No,” Hannah started automatically. But the emotion surging through her called for release. A thought flickered momentarily through her mind: It’s OK to have a drink, because Skyler isn’t here. What a strange thing to think! She decided not to examine it. “OK, you win. Just one beer …”

  Just one beer.

  Lie of the freaking century.

  CHAPTER 21

  Skyler picked Inga Pitzke up from JSC at 11:30 p.m. and drove her back to the Budgetel Inn near Starpark, where she was staying until NASA found her somewhere to live. She might be here for a while. The Spirit of Humanity project had placed a giant thumb on the scales of the Houston real estate market. In the forecourt of the Budgetel Inn, people leaned against the sides of pickup trucks, drinking and talking noisily about construction and launch schedules. Inga shrank from them, not realizing, perhaps, that they were all NASA personnel like herself.

  Skyler didn’t go into her room with her. She was a shy woman, and might be intimidated, even though she was taller than him. He leaned against the doorjamb. “So you think she’ll go for it?”

  Inga stood in the dreary little vestibule, clutching her handbag. “I think she is convinced it’s the best engine concept. It is the best engine concept. Best specific impulse you can achieve.” Inga was a ferocious partisan of the water-based magnetoplasmadynamic drive. That’s why she had done what she’d done.

  Skyler had been trying to come up with a tactful way of asking his next question, but he couldn’t. “Did she ask you about Firebird Systems?”

  Inga took a step backwards. “No, she did not mention it. We talked only about the drive.”

  “OK. That’s good,” Skyler said. “No need to bring it up unless she mentions it.”

  Inga burst out, “What does Hannah know about Firebird? What is her understanding about … about where the IP came from?”

  The truth was that the IP had come from Inga herself. Back in March, she’d stolen the entire contents of Firebird’s server and quit, planning to take the IP down the road to one of Firebird’s competitors. There was more to this earnest, reserved German woman than met the eye. The NXC had swooped in before Inga could make the career-ending mistake of offering the IP to another aerospace company. They’d had their eye on Firebird Systems for a while, and had actually tried to purchase the company, only to be rebuffed by the founder. So Inga and her stolen data had fallen like manna into their laps.

  Hannah Ginsburg, of course, knew none of this. “I don’t think she’s given it a second thought,” Skyler answered honestly. “She’s a hundred and ten percent focused on the science. Why would she give any thought to stuff that should be handled by the legal department? She assumes we either have a license for the technology, or acquired it outright at some point. We’re the Feds, after all.”

  And now they were in a bit of a pickle. Given time, they would establish legal right to the Firebird IP. They just hadn’t done it yet.

  But that wasn’t Inga’s problem, so Skyler smiled at her. “Don’t worry about the legal issues. Just do your job. I think you’ll fit right in here.”

  A chorus of American Pie crashed over them from the parking lot. It was first contact syndrome, as Skyler thought of it. Ever since July 8th, it seemed as if no one wanted to go to sleep. People stayed up carousing to put off the moment of facing the darkness alone.

  Inga cringed at the noise.

  “I know they sound like drunken rednecks,” Skyler said, “but they’re mostly NASA scientists.”

  Unexpectedly, Inga grinned. “You know what comes to me, when I’m at JSC? Talking with Hannah, meeting the team—mein Gott, they’re all so brilliant!—I feel that this must be like the Manhattan Project. The best minds in the world, doing battle with the unknown. This is our Manhattan Project. I’m so honored to be here. Thank you, Skyler.” Swiftly, she crossed the vestibule and gave him a peck on the cheek.

  Skyler stood outside the closed door. The Manhattan Project? Under his breath, he quoted Robert Oppenheimer. “‘I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.’” Jesus. I hope not.

  He went slowly upstairs to the second floor of the Budgetel Inn.

  He and Lance were staying here, too.

  Houston real estate: not for guys on federal housing allowances.

  He bypassed his own room and knocked on Lance’s door. First contact syndrome—he had a touch of it, too. Anyway, he wanted to find out what, if anything, Lance had heard from the design committee.

  Lance opened the door with a beer in his hand. “We did it,” he said jubilantly.

  “Holy crap, that was fast,” Skyler said, following him into the room.

  “Everything’s moving fast. Decisions like this—would’ve taken years before. Now? One conference call, boom, done. Seems like the launch and construction subgroup really liked the concept.”

  “I knew they would,” Skyler said, playing it cool. “What happens next?”

  “The propulsion group builds a unit to run vacuum tests.”

  “Hmm,” Skyler said.

  “What? It’s great. This is the best concept, right?”

  “Yes,” Skyler said. But he was uneasy. The truth was, he suspected there might be a flaw in the design somewhere. He had looked at the schematics and it seemed to him that the water cooled reactor design didn’t add up, and the steam generator didn’t seem to have any means of steam separation without gravity. Inga admitted that she didn’t know how Firebird Systems had ultimately worked out the freefall fluid dynamics. She had quit while they were still knee deep in it, and that’s why the NXC had wanted to obtain Firebird’s server. They wanted to know if Oliver Meeks and his team had worked out the answer in the months after Inga left the company.

  Well, they hadn’t managed to nab the server. But probably it was no big deal. Probably fluid dynamics was easy. Inga, after all, was a metallurgist, not a propulsion engineer. And God knows Skyler was not a propulsion specialist, either. But someone like Hannah would probably be able to see the answer in a single glance.

  Skyler sighed. He went and looked out the window. In the parking-lot, the tailgate party had moved on to the oeuvre of Tina Turner. Skyler’s fingers itched. Rollin’ on the river … He hadn’t picked up his guitar in weeks.

  Lance, oblivious, had gone back to his computer. Typing like crazy, he was exchanging messages on SDIMP—Secure Discussion and Instant Messaging Platform—with NXC colleagues in other parts of the country, and overseas. In a month, the agency had grown like a mushroom. They were building new competencies in fields ranging from xenolinguistics to nutrition. Lance, hunched over his computer in his boxer shorts, was actively managing fifty full-time agents and twice as many experts on retainers.

  Skyler, to his own bemusement, had also been anointed a manager. Director Flaherty had put him in charge of the deliberately vaguely named Spaceflight Innovation section. In practice this meant everything to do with the water-based magnetoplasmadynamic drive.

  He got himself a cold one out of the minifridge and lay on his stomach on Skyler’s bed, tapping on his Surface Pro.

  First stop: Twitter.

  Skyler stalked all the players in the worldwide spacecraft propulsion ecosystem. Most of them practiced extreme circumspection online.

  Tonight, Hannah Ginsberg had posted her first tweet since July. It was a photo of her own hand holding a Bacardi Breezer. Caption: “I freaking earned this today!!!”

  It had already been retweeted 176 times by followers of the Spirit of Humanity project. Well, no harm done.

  Skyler gazed at the pixels that formed an image of Hannah’s hand. He had a powerful urge to reply to the tweet. “Where’s mine?” Something dorky like that.

  He didn’t do it, of course. It would be counter to NXC protocol. Anyway, she was probably asleep under her desk already. She really did sleep in her office. She�
�d shown him the sleeping bag, camp mattress, pillow, and eyemask that she kept in the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet. It was like a little spaceship under there.

  He’d stop by her office tomorrow. Congratulate her on resolving the engine selection issue. He felt a pleasant tingle of anticipation at the thought—which dissipated like a hit off a cheap joint.

  She didn’t know he’d stolen the goddamn MPD drive from the guys who invented it. She could never know.

  “Hey, Skyler,” Lance said without looking around from his computer.

  “What?”

  “This just in from Sean at the INR.”

  “Uh oh.”

  The INR—the Bureau of Intelligence and Research—was the State Department’s intelligence wing. Under a new intelligence-sharing agreement, the INR kept the NXC apprised of geopolitical rumblings that might affect the Spirit of Humanity project.

  “New analysis of all-source intelligence. The CCP is about to fold CNSA into the command structure of the PLA. Expect some kind of announcement within the next few days.”

  “They’re upping the ante, huh?” Skyler sighed.

  Minus the acronyms, State had just told them that the Chinese government was about to place the Chinese National Space Agency under military command. Any way you sliced it, that did not amount to the long-awaited Chinese endorsement of the Spirit of Humanity project.

  “What did I say, you cannot trust them,” Lance said, banging his fist on the rickety table where his laptop sat.

  The Obama administration had sought to appease China by extending billions of dollars in trade concessions. Clearly it had not produced the desired rapprochement.

  “There’s always the nuclear option,” Skyler said. “Pay off all foreign holders of US treasuries.” He was partial to this solution himself. It had an elegance about it. At the click of a mouse, the Fed could tank the Chinese economy. And the Chinese knew that, too. That was why, in Skyler’s opinion, Xi Jinping’s opposition to the Spirit of Humanity project would ultimately turn out to be no more than face-saving bluster.

  The news from the INR sounded bad, sure. But it was just a red flag waved at the G8 powers to see if they’d blink. He expounded this perspective to Lance, but got the feeling Lance wasn’t really listening.