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

by Felix R. Savage

  Lance had been on edge these past few weeks. Either he had a massive dose of first contact syndrome, or something bad had happened to him that Skyler didn’t know about. Skyler leaned towards the latter theory. It had started when they failed to prevent that disastrous leak to China. Lance had taken a lot of the blame for that. Shit rolls downhill, and when he came back from California he’d been sour, completely uncommunicative. Skyler had a feeling that Lance might have killed someone. Maybe that senator, or the JPL guy who turned up dead shortly afterwards. Or both of them. He was certainly capable of it.

  On top of all his other responsibilities, Skyler felt responsible for pulling Lance back from the brink.

  “Anything new related to crew selection?” he said, changing the subject.

  “It’s proceeding,” Lance said, in his normal voice. “The ESA’s picked their guy. The Russians have filled one of their slots, and they’ve provided a shortlist of xenolinguistics mission specialist candidates. Anyway, the crew have to start training by the end of September, at the latest.”

  At the pace they were moving, it felt like the launch of the Spirit of Humanity was scheduled for tomorrow, not 2019. Skyler grinned. “We’d better get on the ball,” he said.

  When he reached around to put his empty Heineken can on Lance’s bedside table, he knocked a copy of Men’s Health onto the floor. Under it lay Lance’s Sig Sauer, suppressor attached.

  CHAPTER 22

  Hannah did penance for her uncontrolled night of binge drinking by working harder than ever. Yes, that was possible. It was always possible. She now had the green light to build a prototype of the water-based magnetoplasmadynamic drive for vacuum tests. She nagged the propulsion group to bust their asses, and leant on Skyler to work his black magic and get them extra time on the 3D metal printers to build the prototype parts.

  They delivered the prototype to Building 32 for vacuum tests on the afternoon of Saturday, August 27th. Hannah sent everyone home to get some rest, made a half-hearted stab at tidying up the lab, and drove home herself, feeling unaccountably blue.

  ‘Home’ wasn’t really home. It was a furnished condo in League City. She’d ‘lived” here for more than a month and still didn’t know how to work the washing machine.

  Her phone rang while she was stuffing clothes into the accursed maw of the Electrolux. She touched ‘accept,’ dizzy with tiredness.

  “Aunt Hannah? I can only see your ear!”

  “Oh. Facetime,” Hannah said, smiling. She sat down with her back to the washing-machine and balanced her phone on her knee, so she could enjoy the sight of her niece’s bright little face. “I have to get with the program, huh? Are all the cool fourth-graders using Facetime these days?”

  “No, only me,” Isabel said seriously. “When are you coming to see us? The swimming pool’s finished.”

  Isabel’s love of swimming had blossomed into a real aptitude for the sport. Could a ten-year-old have an aptitude for competitive swimming? In Pacific Palisades, she could. Bethany and her husband, David, had recently built a 10-meter pool in the backyard for their budding Olympian.

  “Let’s have a race,” Isabel said. “I bet I would beat you!”

  “I bet you would, too, Izzy,” Hannah said. She knew this was Isabel’s way of trying to entice her out for a visit, and felt bad that she couldn’t promise anything at the moment.

  Bethany’s voice grew louder in the background. “I said don’t bother her, Isabel, she’s very busy!”

  Isabel’s face slid out of the screen. Bethany frowned. “Sorry, Hannah. We won’t keep you.”

  “It’s OK,” Hannah sighed.

  “What is that behind you?” Bethany said. “Is it part of the Spirit of Humanity? Is it a habitation unit or something?” Even Los Angeles soccer moms now knew the lingo associated with the project.

  Hannah laughed. “It’s a washing machine.” For some reason she couldn’t stop laughing. “I am an honest-to-God rocket scientist,” she gasped, eyes streaming, “and I can’t figure out how this fucking washing machine works!”

  “Oh, Hannah,” Bethany said. “OK. First of all, you select the cycle …”

  Calmly, Bethany walked her through the process of getting her clothes on the way to clean. She did not reproach Hannah for her many broken promises to visit. She did not pull the guilt-trip shtick she had inherited from their late mother. Towards the end of the call, she said, “So, are you coming out for Izzy’s birthday?” When Hannah started her usual stumbling litany of ‘maybe’ and ‘hopefully,’ Bethany cut her off with a genuinely warm laugh. “It’s OK, Hannah. She would like you to be here, but if it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.”

  Hannah hung up the phone feeling like something had changed between them. Her sister accepted her life, at last, for what it was. All it had taken was an alien spaceship.

  She crashed on her unmade bed and enjoyed her first full night’s sleep in a month.

  The next day was Sunday. Hannah did not have much difficulty talking herself into going to work. She had to finalize the staff rota that she’d been putting off for most of last week, the vacuum chamber team was expecting a test suite to run once they’d get her engine installed and ready, and she also had to bring Koichi Masuoka up to speed as soon as possible.

  Masuoka was a 32-year-old JAXA astronaut. He would be crewing on the Spirit of Humanity as the reactor and propulsion mission specialist. He’d arrived at JSC last week for training. Talk about being thrown in at the deep end. Hannah had to teach him everything she knew, and also the things she didn’t know yet, such as how to make a steam generator and separator that worked in freefall.

  She passed through the JSC security checkpoint, pondering whether to just bombard the liquid with enough microwaves to both flash it to steam and turn it to plasma. She barely noticed the tense and snappish attitude of the security guards.

  Getting out of her car, she stopped dead.

  Raised her sunglasses.

  Lowered them again.

  The giant banner that hung across the admin building across her office window should have read Spirit of Humanity.

  She was absolutely sure that’s what it had said yesterday.

  Now it read: Spirit of Destiny.

  “It’s too early in the day for hallucinations,” Hannah said aloud.

  On her way into the building, she noticed a cluster of East Asian people being escorted along the hall by security. More personnel of Chinese descent getting fired? She hadn’t thought there were any left. But she shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Maybe they were compatriots of Masuoka’s, come to join in the insanity.

  She entered the propulsion group’s office, still marvelling at the mystery of the banner. “Hey, Ross,” she called across the office, to the only other person here. “Did you see the banner out front?”

  Ross Ferguson, a design engineer, said, “Log onto your computer.”

  “I’m talking about the banner.”

  “Just do it.”

  Hannah went into her own office and booted her desktop. She immediately saw what Ferguson meant. The login screen used to display the Spirit of Humanity project’s snazzy logo. The logo had changed. It was now a stylized dove, rendered in a deep blue colour that looked familiar, but she couldn’t place, flanked by olive branches. And it read, yup, Spirit of Destiny.

  “What the hell,” Hannah said. At least her login still worked. She opened up her email, and found an all-hands announcement extolling the name change in terms of “more clearly reflecting our mission.” There was a link to a press release.

  Chinese Space Agency CNSA Joins Historic Spirit of Destiny Project.

  Other emails informed her that she was going to get a bunch of new people added to the propulsion group. She also learned that they would now be outsourcing the entire drive subframe assembly to China.

  She went back out to the general office space. A couple more people had trickled in. “Don’t you guys have lives?” she said, smiling. She was
so proud of them. Her blood boiled at the very thought that the politicians might fuck up what they were accomplishing here.

  She strode to the bank of elevators, seething while she waited for one to arrive. Impatient, she waited for less than 10 seconds before turning to the stairwell, slamming the door open with a crash that echoed in the stark space. She stomped up the stairs to Richard Burke’s office and walked in without knocking.

  Burke stood talking to three Chinese (she assumed) men whose formal business suits marked them out as strangers to JSC.

  “Hannah, just a moment, if you don’t mind!”

  Burke’s curt tone felt like a slap in the face. Hannah went and got herself a coffee from the vending machine down the hall. Her hand shook with anger, and coffee spilled onto the carpet tiles. A little while later the three Chinese men passed her on their way to the elevator. Their bearing made her think military. Their business suits might as well have been uniforms. She went back to Burke’s office.

  “So,” she said. “Without warning, I come into work to find out that the name of the project has changed, and my team’s workload is going to double,” she took a deep breath before launching into the rest of her tirade in an even harsher tone, “because CNSA is now participating in the project, and this was all announced in a press release backdated to 11:59 p.m. on Friday. I love that detail. Did they think if they change everything around over the weekend, we won’t notice?”

  “I didn’t get advance warning, either,” Burke said. He sat in his desk chair, looking out the window at the construction site where the truss assembly building was going up. He spun his chair around to face her. “You know where I should be right now? At home in Pasadena with my wife and kids. It’s goddamn Sunday morning. I shouldn’t be here.” Burke was a Lutheran, devoted in an understated way to his faith. “Candy says the services have been packed over the last month. Worshippers spilling out of the doors. And here I am in Houston, debating a goddamn logo change.”

  “It isn’t just a logo change. All our workflows will have to change. We’ll have to coordinate with Yantai as well as Star City. That adds an extra layer of complexity to a project that is already pushing the envelope of what we can handle.”

  “It is what it is, Hannah.”

  “Politics.”

  “Yes. Look on the bright side. This is now a truly global project. And they’ve got some top-flight people at CNSA, especially in the realm of remote sensing and optics.”

  “Those guys you were talking to?”

  “‘Liaison officers,’” Burke said, making air quotes with his fingers.

  Hannah sat down in the low-slung chair at the corner of his desk. She sipped her still-too-hot vending machine coffee. “What changed?”

  “Apart from the logo?”

  “No, no. Incidentally, that dove? Barf. But I mean, what’s the political 411? Three years ago we banned Chinese nationals from entering a NASA facility. Last week, we were firing people because they had a Chinese grandmother. Now we’re welcoming PLA officers into our maximum-security development facility.” That was a shot in the dark. Burke’s eyes tightened. He didn’t deny it. “There has to be some explanation,” she prodded, still angry on behalf of her team, who would be stuck with needless administrative work as a result of the reorg.

  Burke stood up. Hannah reacted, scrambling to her feet. She spilled coffee on the decorative rug in front of his desk. She bit back the apology that sprang to her lips.

  “They threatened,” Burke said, “to shoot down the ship if they could not participate.”

  Hannah dropped her paper cup of coffee.

  “The threat was apparently credible. Remember that weather satellite? The president and the other G8 leaders decided to take it seriously.”

  “They threatened … to blow up the Spirit of Humanity? In orbit?”

  “The Spirit of Destiny, Hannah. The Spirit of Destiny. I gather it sounds good in Chinese.”

  “I can’t freaking believe it.”

  “The stakes are high. They’ve never been higher. We’ve discussed this. It was wrong to leave the Chinese out in the first place, in my opinion. That has now been rectified.”

  Hannah shook her head, thinking that it was going to be next to impossible to work with the new Chinese colleagues she’d been promised. What a freaking mess.

  As if reading her thoughts, Burke said, “It isn’t the Chinese people who are the problem. It isn’t their scientists. It’s their government. We have to keep that distinction in mind.”

  “What, so those suits weren’t Chinese army officers?”

  “They were. But we have to remember the PLA isn’t some kind of monolith. There are guys in there who genuinely favor international cooperation, and others who don’t. Remember the Senkaku Islands thing?”

  “Oh yeah, when they shot down those Japanese fighters.”

  “Yup. So that tendency—”

  “To shoot things down—”

  “—is real. But certain people got very sharply reprimanded over the Senkakus incident. They’re licking their wounds at the moment. So we’ll just have do our damndest to get this ship built, and fueled, and on its way, before the bad apples regroup and throw a spanner in the gears.”

  Hannah pointed at him. “Signs that you’ve become an uber-bureaucrat: when you talk about apples using spanners.”

  Burke rolled his eyes. “How’s the prototype coming?”

  Hannah gratefully retreated to safer territory. “We delivered it to Building 32 yesterday. While we wait for the results of the vacuum tests, I’m going to get started on designing Brayton cycle turbines to use with the Russian reactor design. I’ve already discussed this with Nikolai Petrov, the propulsion reactor design lead at Rosatom. We’re looking at helium as the working gas, and discussing what output and return temperatures the reactor needs. It looks promising, although we’ll need to bring in a specialist to do the heavy lifting. Actually, I’d like to fly to Star City to take a look at their working prototype.”

  “Keep me updated on your travel plans. Anything else?”

  Hannah hesitated.

  While driving to work, she’d reached the conclusion that she needed more detail on the steam generator. She couldn’t find the answer in the documentation she’d been given, and Inga was no help on that question. She wasn’t hopeful that the results of the vacuum tests would resolve it, but maybe she could get herself a ride on a vomit comet that would. Anyway, she didn’t want to bother Burke with technical issues, when he had so much else on his plate.

  “No,” she said. “That’s it right now. Sorry about your carpet.”

  “It’s only a rare Persian antique,” Burke said, with a wink, letting her know they were still cool.

  “Want me to wash it for you? I just figured out how to use my washing machine.”

  “Little victories, Hannah-banana. Little victories.”

  CHAPTER 23

  On the morning of Friday, August 2nd, Skyler got a text from Hannah. “Can you come upstairs? Important.”

  Skyler abandoned the emails he was ploughing through in the NXC office two floors below Hannah’s office. He hurried upstairs, telling himself not to be ridiculous. She was ten years older than him. She was most definitely not anyone’s idea of a lust object. Didn’t matter. Skyler had the curse of being attracted to women for their minds.

  As he threaded through the cubicle farm on the fifth floor, he noticed the heavy salting of East Asians among the propulsion specialists. Some of them might be Japanese. The majority were probably Chinese newcomers. More than a hundred CNSA-accredited personnel had descended on JSC this week, charging the rah-rah atmosphere with new tensions.

  “Half of them aren’t even scientists,” Lance had said earlier this morning. “They’re spies.”

  Skyler wryly reflected that the influx of Chinese made the place look more like every astrophysics department he’d ever known. And if some of them were spies, so what? So was he. He knew he wasn’t supposed to be think
ing like this, but it was true, wasn’t it? Different government, same goal: the successful launch of the Spirit of Humanity.

  Sorry. The Spirit of Destiny.

  Hannah stood in her office with her arms folded.

  “Uh oh,” Skyler said.

  “We got the results of the vacuum tests back.” Hannah indicated a sheaf of printouts on her desk.

  “And?”

  “The engine works, it works great,” Hannah said, flatly.

  “But?”

  “They say, and I’m quoting from the email they sent me, you’re a bunch of idiots if you think this steam generator is going to do anything other than disassemble itself once in freefall. I was worried about it not working, OK? I’m not used to dealing with steam unless it’s shooting out the engine bell after I’ve combined hydrogen with oxygen. But they think it’s going to explode!”

  While Hannah spoke, Skyler’s blood turned to ice. He managed, “I thought the steam separation thing was a minor detail.”

  “It’s a minor detail like cracks in the foam insulation on the Columbia were a minor detail.”

  “If you’d been here in those days, those astronauts would still be alive,” Skyler said.

  She didn’t even smile. He should have known by now that flattery didn’t move her. He did know it, but he was panicking.

  “I’ve concluded that the specs I was given were not complete,” she said. “I asked Inga about the company that came up with this design. Firebird Systems? She says they’re not around anymore. But maybe you can track down someone who knows how they resolved the issue, if they did resolve it.”

  “I can try,” Skyler said. He’d had a gas-station burrito for breakfast. It sat in his stomach like a lump of solid grease, making him feel nauseated.

  “I just want to emphasize that this is urgent. I have people in Star City waiting on specs which I led them to believe we would have finalized by the end of the week.” Hannah’s fingers crushed her elbows, white-knuckled. “I’m asking myself if we picked the wrong engine design. I do not want to be asking this question.”