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

by Felix R. Savage

  Jack could see a dozen hard-hats at work right now, crawling over the scaffolding, or buzzing to and from the storage nets on ‘broomsticks.’ Most of them wore white NASA spacesuits. Two red suits identified his future crewmates, Qiu Meii and Xiang Peixun.

  He reached out and grabbed the scaffolding, simultaneously releasing the carabiner that held him on the clothesline.

  He and Alexei exchanged a careful zero-gee high five and separated to begin their shifts.

  Plumbing.

  Today, Jack was installing some piping for the engine.

  “At least I’m picking up useful skills,” he quipped.

  “Plumbers make much more than astronauts,” someone else on the far side of the structure agreed.

  “But welders make even more than plumbers,” Alexei put in.

  “On the other hand,” Jack mused, “there’s not much call on Earth for lines carrying liquid oxygen …”

  Everyone bantered to pass the time. Except the two Chinese. Jack had tried several times to strike up a friendly relationship with them—especially with Qiu, it had to be said. Nothing availed. It wasn’t as if they could not speak English. They just preferred to keep themselves to themselves, it seemed.

  Both Xiang and Qiu were working at the hab end of the ship today, installing external sensors.

  An hour into his shift, Jack rested in the shadow of the mighty engine. A drop of perspiration detached from his head and floated in front of his face. He blew at it, making it adhere to the inside of his visor.

  The water-based magnetoplasmadynamic engine, the size of his parents’ house, triggered the same complex feelings as when he’d seen it in a half-finished state in the cleanroom at Johnson Space Center.

  Pride. Meeks had invented this lovely monster. Jack had helped. They’d put their stamp on history, and what did it really matter who got credit?

  Rage. Meeks bloody well deserved credit. He did not deserve to be dead.

  Jack drank a mouthful of water from the nozzle in his helmet. Forget it, he told himself. You have to let it go and move on. There’s no other way.

  His intensive work and training schedule over the last 25 months—culminating in this plumbing job at the world’s highest construction site—had helped him to avoid dwelling on the whys and what-ifs of Meeks’s murder. But he could never shake off the shame of knowing that he’d personally benefited from it. So what if he was the best person for the job? If Meeks hadn’t been murdered, the pilot slot would 100% have gone to someone with a better track record of respecting authority.

  Out of piping. Need to get more from storage.

  He moved forward along the scaffolding until he reached a tethered broomstick. Swinging his leg over, he twisted the throttle and rocketed away from the SoD.

  The broomstick took the prize for best space hack since the astronauts of Apollo 13 built a CO2 scrubber out of socks and duct tape. It was a small LOX tank with a heater and a nozzle attached. Park and ride. There’d been jokes about quidditch at first. The very name ‘broomstick’ came from Harry Potter. But by now, everyone took the near-miraculous convenience of the little mobility vehicles for granted.

  Buzzing towards the storage net, Jack passed into the shadow of the ISS. For a moment, he was in utter darkness. His helmet lamp beam lost itself in the infinite blackness of space. Reflexively, he twisted his head to look in the direction of Jupiter.

  Light splashed over him from behind, casting his shadow over the broomstick’s handlebars.

  At the same time, the radio erupted with screams and curses.

  Disaster scenarios warred for space in Jack’s mind. He leaned over, shifting his weight to swing the broomstick around.

  Flickering white sheets of exhaust hid the SoD’s engine.

  CHAPTER 31

  The SoD was on fire. That’s what it looked like, as clouds of exhaust hid the MPD engine, lit brilliantly from within.

  “The ullage motors are firing!” Alexei’s bellow rose above the crosstalk.

  Jack seesawed between relief that the whole ship hadn’t blown up, and aghast incomprehension. All eight ullage motors—tiny engines that would nudge the SoD forward to settle the tanks previous to main engine ignition—had fired at once.

  And done their job.

  The SoD was moving.

  The scaffolding-enclosed monster surged away from the ISS, leaving behind clouds of exhaust, and the ullage motors themselves, still attached to their endplate—it’d broken off the truss.

  People spun out from the SoD on their tethers, jolted loose by the sudden movement.

  The clothesline strained, with the mass of the SoD on one end and the ISS on the other.

  Jack experienced a nightmarish sense of déjà vu. He remembered piloting the Atlantis through the aftermath of the fatal debris strike, desperately fighting the shuttle’s uncontrolled rotation.

  The memory told him what to do.

  He turned his broomstick and raced to the clothesline. Just before he got there, he whipped around in a 360° flat turn. Earth spun like a saucer beneath him, and the broomstick’s hot exhaust burnt through the clothesline.

  Jack ducked, the long end sailing over his head as it snapped back towards the ISS.

  “Alexei!” he cried. “Stay with the SoD! Keep everyone on the structure!”

  An awful scream interrupted him. It was the more awful for being female. Crosstalk erupted again. Everyone was saying Qiu Meili’s name.

  “I’m coming for you,” Jack shouted. He turned his broomstick once more and raced back to the ISS.

  Inside, it was chaos. A dozen hands seized Jack as he floated out of the airlock. He shook them off, fought his way through the Inochi module. “We have to go after them!” Through the American module. “It’s getting further and further away!” And so to the Russian module, where the current ISS station chief, Grigor Nikolin, had anticipated the necessary maneuver and prepared burn parameters for the Soyuz.

  One or more Soyuzes stayed attached to the ISS all the time. They were lifeboats—although, with so many people up here now, any evacuation order would have turned into a grisly lottery. They also served as engines for the ISS itself. When the space station’s orbit had to be adjusted, they fired up the Soyuz for a while.

  Now, the Soyuz was their only chance of saving the SoD, and the people clinging to her.

  The SoD, half-built, couldn’t stop or turn around. It had no working propulsion system. So the ISS would have to chase it.

  Nikolin shoved Jack into the capsule by standing on the ‘ceiling’ and pushing on his shoulders. Twist, wriggle, and squeeze. Boarding a Soyuz was like going back into the womb, if your mother was a robot. Wrong size seat, too. He couldn’t have got in at all if he’d not stripped off his spacesuit. Sitting in the Soyuz’s right-hand seat in his underwear, he punched in the burn parameters that Nikolin had scrawled in pencil on a page from an assembly manual.

  Slowly, slowly, the ISS began to move.

  While he was down in the Soyuz, Jack’s only means of communication was shouting. Following Nikolin’s instructions, he throttled the Soyuz’s engine up. In a slow-motion chase through low Earth orbit, the ISS gradually overhauled the runaway SoD. Then Jack had to maneuver the space station into sync with the half-built spaceship once more—another hour of fiddly, high-stakes tapping on the console.

  The clothesline was restrung.

  One by one, the stranded hardhats returned ‘home’ to the ISS.

  Only then did Jack have time to wonder: “What the hell happened?”

  *

  He got no answers from Nikolin, who was busy talking to Mission Control. He went to meet Alexei at the Inochi airlock. The cosmonaut looked like he’d lost half a stone sweating into his spacesuit. He guzzled water.

  “Is Qiu all right?” Jack said.

  Alexei nodded. “She’s fine. A piece of truss whacked her in the belly. Some bruising, that’s all. What the hell happened?”

  “That’s what I was about to ask you
.”

  “Let’s talk to Menelaou.”

  They found Katharine Menelaou in Center Dock with Nikolin, who’d got off the blower with Mission Control. They had probably chewed his ear off. The station chief looked to be in a foul mood. “The ullage motors fired. They will have to be replaced. That may mean an extra launch. It’ll screw up the schedule.”

  “But why did they fire?” Menelaou demanded. “It shouldn’t have happened.”

  “Why are you asking me? Those motors were made in America.”

  Qiu Meili floated subjectively below the pair, over the porthole that looked down on Earth. Wearing only shorts and a skimpy tank top, she looked like she was curled on the floor. She was a small, fragile-looking woman with pixie-cut hair, and let’s face it, she was cute as hell.

  Giddy with exhaustion, Jack shot Alexei a mock-salacious leer. He drifted down to Qiu. “All right?”

  “That was frightening,” she said in a small, flat voice. “I thought I was going to die.”

  “All’s well that ends well,” Jack said, giving her a pat on the shoulder. The touch sent her bobbing against the floor, while Jack rebounded in the other direction.

  She uncurled and straightened out in the air. “Yes, we can order new motors and replace the endplate. We can go back for the storage nets. They can be towed with broomsticks.”

  Xiang Peixun squeezed out of the tunnel leading from the new Chinese module. He was a short, powerfully built man who resembled, in Jack’s opinion, a jaundiced toad. He snapped something in Mandarin. Qiu lowered her gaze, said, “Excuse me,” and followed Xiang towards the new Chinese module that now opened off the Russian module.

  Menelaou gazed after them unhappily.

  Jack could guess what was going on in her mind. In the old days, Menelaou had viewed their Russian partners as opponents to be fenced with and watched carefully. But now that the Chinese were in the picture, they’d moved up into the No. 1 enemy slot. Meanwhile, Menelaou was all sweetness and light with the Russians.

  She said to Grigor Nikolin, “We’ll need to go through the helmet cam footage from everyone who was outside when the ullage motors fired.”

  Nikolin regarded her steadily. “We already know what happened. The ullage motors malfunctioned. Made In America isn’t what it used to be, perhaps.”

  Evidently Menelaou’s new resolve to cozy up to the Russians was not wholly reciprocated.

  “They could not possibly have been faulty,” Menelaou said, and that told Jack she was rattled. You just couldn’t say that. Anything might be faulty.

  “If the motors were not faulty when they left Earth,” Nikolin said, “someone here induced a fault in them.” He shrugged.

  The station chief’s speculation, so calmly uttered, hit Jack like a punch in the gut.

  Alexei blurted out what Jack was thinking.

  “Sabotazh?”

  “Da,” Nikolin said. “Sabotage.”

  *

  “But what can be done?” Alexei said. “Nothing. There’s no way to prove it.”

  Koichi Masuoka said, “Why would anyone want to sabotage the SoD?”

  Jack said dryly, “Stranger things have been heard of.”

  The sabotage—maybe-sabotage, maybe-not-sabotage—attempt had pushed the three crewmates closer together. Jack felt that he could trust these two men. During the voyage, they’d all be entrusting their lives to one another, anyway. Now, they were united by their skepticism about NASA’s supplier network. They came to share a conviction that the ullage motors must have been interfered with before they left Earth.

  But their hushed discussions in the cupola of the ISS led to nothing. The powers that be dropped the investigation like a piece of rubbish out of the window of a speeding train.

  Faster, faster! Move along, nothing to see here! The Spirit of Destiny was scheduled to depart in six months. Every television network in the world had already teased the big event, and ad time had been sold. Construction had to be completed on deadline. Overtime, what’s that?

  So replacement parts were sent up on the next scheduled Falcon 9 launch. Work continued, with only the excitement of dropped tools and botched arc-welds to break up the monotony.

  On November 27th, with 150 days to go until launch, Jack flew back to Earth, together with the other Americans on station.

  They didn’t need to cram into Soyuz capsules anymore. SpaceX had rushed its reusable Dragon 2 crewed spacecraft into service, just in time to provide shuttle services for the SoD construction crew. The Dragon 2 capsule held four astronauts. It was slightly less comfortable than the Soyuz, and much noisier—until reentry, when the engines shut off, and the Dragon 2 deployed its parachutes for the last stage of its descent through Earth’s life-giving skin of air.

  The quiet got to Jack. His months on the ISS had accustomed him to constant noise. Silence had no place in spaceflight. Although he knew the parachutes were functioning as designed, he didn’t take a deep breath until the capsule touched down in the Mojave Desert.

  Still wobbly from months in freefall, he flew to New York together with Katharine Menelaou and Adam Hardcastle, the third American member of the SoD crew, who’d serve as the communications mission specialist and co-pilot.

  The three of them went on ‘The Early Show,’ ‘The Tonight Show,’ ‘The O’Reilly Factor,’ and other talk shows Jack had never heard of. This was the opening salvo of the SoD’s publicity tour, a gimmick dreamt up by the SoD consortium to win support from an increasingly skeptical world. Jack told the host of The Tonight Show that he expected the MOAD would turn out to carry a crew of cryogenically frozen leprechauns. The audience laughed.

  After that, Menelaou and Hardcastle vanished. Jack only found out where they’d gone by chance, when Richard Burke phoned to reprimand him for the leprechauns remark.

  “Jack, we’re trying to make the public understand the importance of our mission—”

  “Yeah, I’m very sorry about that,” Jack said. “I see I’m supposed to be flying to LA tonight. I don’t think the glitterati are going to take to me. Or vice versa.”

  “Katharine and Adam will actually be joining you for the Emmy Awards.”

  “Where have they gone, anyway?”

  Burke went quiet. After a moment, he said, “NXC business, Jack.” The veteran administrator sounded very tired. “Believe me, you’ll find out about it soon enough.”

  Jack hung up and looked down from his hotel room at the crowds in Fifth Avenue. The famed avenue had become a pedestrian mall—a de facto victory for the Earth Party. But the people down there didn’t look like they were on a ‘walk,’ as everyone now called the Earth Party’s meandering, carnival-esque migrations from nowhere to nowhere. They looked like shoppers intent on scoring designer trinkets. As if nothing had changed.

  Jack made another phone call.

  “I’m sorry, His Excellency is not available.”

  “My name’s Jack Kildare. Spirit of Destiny?”

  “I see. Just a moment, Mr. Kildare.”

  Jack pictured a Sloane Ranger tapping buttons with French-polished fingernails. He’d visited the British ambassador’s residence in D.C. after his selection. It was a haven of subdued elegance in an ugly city.

  “Jack, marvellous to hear from you. What can I do for you?”

  Jack took a deep breath. “Well, Your Excellency, it’s like this …”

  Evening found Jack on a Virgin America Airbus, flying west.

  But he was not headed for L.A. and a dire round of parties and red-carpet photo ops.

  Even in this day and age, Her Majesty’s Government still had some pull.

  Jack changed at LAX for a flight to Honolulu. Arriving bleary-eyed at the end of what had by now been a very long day, he was whisked into a SUV which drove him to the Navy base at Pearl Harbor.

  An Osprey awaited. Glum fly-boys spurned Jack’s weary attempts at banter.

  He slid into sleep, lulled by the noise, and awoke high above Bikini Atoll.

  CHA
PTER 32

  Sunlight blazed down on endless miles of what appeared to be empty ocean. Jack was assured that Bikini Atoll lay approximately 15 kilometers to the west, but he couldn’t see it without the binoculars, which Katharine Menelaou was hogging.

  The Zumwalt-class destroyer USS Michael Monsoor sliced through tall waves. The deck rolled underfoot. Adam Hardcastle caught his balance on the railing. His chubby face was pale. “I’m seasick,” he said to Jack in tones of indignant disbelief. “Never been spacesick—and I get seasick. What gives?”

  Hardcastle was a nice guy. Wife and kids—the only SoD crew member to have dependents. Jack sometimes wondered how the conversations between Mr. and Mrs. Hardcastle went. Honey, I’m going to Europa. Don’t wait up for me.

  Hardcastle and Menelaou had joined the Michael Monsoor yesterday, aboard the Sea King helicopter now parked on the flight deck at the back of the ship. It had transported them from the aircraft carrier supporting the Michael Monsoor, out of sight in the distance.

  Hardcastle had greeted Jack’s unscheduled arrival with a grin and a fist-bump. Menelaou, not so much.

  Jack kept his thoughts to himself, watching the seamen ready the ship’s electromagnetic railgun. Three gunner’s mates occupied the barbette, a foot-thick metal shell on the foredeck of the destroyer, which enclosed the breech of the gun. Jack stood just inside the door of the barbette. He didn’t want to get in the gunners’ way, but he wanted to see this beast fire.

  Behind him, the deck baked in the tropical sun. The breeze carried the smell of baking paint, gear grease, and diesel smoke—so much for refreshing sea breezes. Hardcastle clung to the railing. The chemical miasma couldn’t be helping his sea-sickness.

  The captain of the Michael Monsoor strode across the deck. In Jack’s very brief acquaintance with the man, he came off as a snarling, obnoxious prick. “Gentlemen, we are about to fire the railgun,” he said.

  “Excuse me?” Katharine Menelaou said.

  “Sorry. Ma’am.” The captain smirked, another insult having successfully found its mark. Then he went on, “This is the most advanced projectile weapon in existence today. We will now demonstrate its firepower, targeting Bikini Atoll.”