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

by Felix R. Savage

  “Why here?” said Hardcastle.

  “Because there are miles of empty ocean in every direction in case they miss,” Jack murmured.

  “Because we don’t want the Chinese to see it,” Menelaou said.

  “Actually, ma’am, exactly the opposite. We’re showing our Chinese friends what this asset is capable of. There’s a PLA Navy cruiser over there, not far away.”

  Jack glanced in the direction the captain pointed. Smoke stained the northern horizon.

  At the captain’s command, the sailors swung into action. The senior gunner’s mate racked a slide of projectiles under the breech and triggered the load lever. Each member of the gun crew—targeting, electrical, range safety, and telemetry—flashed a thumbs-up. “Safety!” the senior gunner’s mate barked. A loud horn sounded and a red strobe started flashing outside the barbette. In combat, of course, there wouldn’t have been any klaxon or strobe light.

  Jack put on the dark goggles and earplugs he’d been given. So did Menelaou and Hardcastle, now crowding the doorway of the barbette beside him.

  The gunner’s mate inspected the projectiles resting between the twin rails of the railgun. They were stamped with the name of their maker: BAE Systems. That was where Meeks used to work before he left to start Firebird. Jack felt a tiny pang of sadness as the gunner locked the cover closed

  Each of the sailors slapped the next on the shoulder—a final safety poll. A crackling sounded from below their feet, as the capacitors in the underdeck charged. As the Michael Monsoor rose from a wave, the gunner’s mate toggled the trigger.

  Heat and light splashed over them.

  Zzzzoik! God it was loud!

  And again—zzzzoik, zzzzoik! A sound like Jack had never heard before, an eerie sound that came from the future. One projectile followed the next, like bolts of lightning erupting from the railgun. Wind filled the barbette as the air bottle discharged, blasting toxic ozone out to the deck. A stench of acrid smoke rose from the rails. The electrical arcs were actually vaporizing metal off the surface of the rails.

  The gunner’s mate secured the trigger. The roar of the air bottle ceased. A gray contrail hung over the waves.

  A split second later, a thistledown puff of smoke materialized on the horizon.

  The sailors exchanged high-fives. Menelaou whooped girlishly. Jack—transported back to his RAF days of dropping things at high speed on other things—crowed, “Mach 5 balls of molten steel, baby!”

  “Bull’s-eye,” said the captain with a satisfied smile.

  “Sir!” cackled a sailor sitting at a screen inside the barbette. “Take a look at this feed from the tracking camera on the beach.”

  As everyone pushed past Jack to see the screen, a mop of dark curly hair appeared through the hatch leading to the weather deck.

  Followed by a sharp-featured, intelligent face.

  And a peace sign hanging out of the neck of a khaki t-shirt.

  Jack already knew that Skyler Taft was on board. Hardcastle had told him. It was an unexpected bonus.

  The NXC agent crossed the deck to them. He nodded coolly to Jack, and peered past him, into the barbette.

  On the screen showing the feed from the beach tracking camera, a torpedo-shaped projectile—one of those the destroyer had just fired—travelled in slo-mo towards a towering wave. It drilled a hole straight through the wave. A split second later, the top of the wave blew off in a V shape.

  “Pretty cool,” Jack said.

  “How the fuck did you get a ride in an Osprey?” Skyler said.

  “Apparently the British ambassador went to school with the Chief of the Defence Staff, who rang someone at the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

  Jack enjoyed Skyler’s discomfiture. After a moment Skyler said, “This was supposed to be an Americans-only thing.”

  “Yeah, that’s what the captain told me. He’d like to use me for target practice. But I am an American, after all, so he doesn’t quite dare.”

  Skyler nodded. “You just don’t sound like it. That’s what trips everyone up. And in complete sincerity, aren’t you reporting back to London?”

  Complete sincerity was not an attitude Jack associated with Skyler Taft. As for himself, he still had the completely sincere desire to punch Skyler in the face, even after these two years. Skyler might not have murdered Meeks—he wasn’t capable of it, Jack thought—but he almost certainly knew who had, and he wasn’t telling.

  If that wasn’t enough, every time they met, Skyler did or said something new to piss Jack off. Like now.

  The devil got into Jack, and he drawled, “Reporting back to London? What would I have to report? Oh, we had a slight problem the other day with the ullage motors. But there’s really nothing to see here; move along.”

  “Yeah, that,” Skyler said. He was wearing Navy khakis. He looked gormless in them, but less gormless than usual, as if he might actually have been putting in gym time. “It wasn’t looked into as thoroughly as it could have been.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  Skyler glanced towards the railgun. “Aren’t you going to take a turn, since you’re here?”

  The gunner’s mate was showing Katharine Menelaou how to insert a projectile into the cradle breech. She staggered, laughing. Heavy! That’s what they were here for. To learn how to shoot the railgun.

  Americans only.

  “The SoD’s guns will be smaller than this. The rails will only be a meter and a half, and they’ll only need a 750 kiloamp supply, since they don't have to shove a projectile through ten klicks of air,” Skyler said. “Obviously, our hope and expectation is that it’ll never be needed.”

  “I hope the SoD’s gun will be inspected properly before it’s sent up,” Jack said.

  Skyler gave him a displeased look, as if he had hoped this subject had been dropped. “It’s actually a very simple design, and yes, of course they’ll be inspected. And tested. And tested again.”

  “But weren’t the ullage motors also inspected and tested?”

  “There was a cosmic ray burst. It fried the relay chip. When that chip failed, the voltage surged into the detonator, and the ullage motors fired.”

  Jack didn’t believe a word of it. “If these electronics aren’t hardened against cosmic rays, that is one hell of an oversight, isn’t it?” Of course the electronics were hardened. And if there’d been a cosmic ray burst big enough to overcome them regardless, everything would have shorted out, and the construction workers would’ve been glowing in the dark.

  Another storm of lightning bolts and futuristic screeches from the railgun interrupted. Skyler cringed, fumbling his goggles on.

  “Dammit,” Menelaou joked loudly. “Missed the Chinese warship.”

  “You know, it actually wasn’t a cosmic ray burst,” Skyler said. “We’ve pretty much traced the problem to the supplier of the power distribution units used in the ullage motors.”

  “And who’s that?”

  “Dong Yangfun Industries. Headquartered in Shenzhen.”

  Jack stared incredulously. “Components for those motors came from China? They’re only supposed to be supplying the Shenzhou crewed lander.”

  “Spirit of togetherness,” Skyler said, sketching an air-quote with one hand.

  “You’ve got to be joking.”

  “I am. They were the lowest bidder. Three hundred billion dollars isn’t actually an infinite amount of money.”

  “What about the ground inspections? They should have caught the problem.”

  “Outsourced those, too.”

  Jack slowly digested the fact that Skyler wasn’t joking.

  “It can’t have been deliberate,” he said, knuckling the bridge of his nose. “An astronaut almost died when the motors fired. Qiu Meili. She’s Chinese.”

  “They’d have had no way of knowing she would be outside when it happened,” Skyler said. “Anyway, look at it from their point of view. When you’ve got 1.3 billion people, what’s one more or less?”

  The cap
tain yelled, “Taft! Come and show the space cadets how it’s done.” Grinning, he beckoned Skyler.

  Jack said. “You’re approved to fire that thing?”

  “One of the many perks of being in the NXC,” Skyler said. “We get to play with all the coolest toys.”

  He winked at Jack and bounded into the barbette. That expression stayed in Jack’s mind. Winks suited no one, no matter if they had a somewhat theatrical personality, like Skyler. But in that moment the NXC agent’s face had looked tortured.

  And no wonder.

  Jack had thought all along that the accident that nearly destroyed the SoD must have been sabotage. But that was before he knew about components and ground inspections being outsourced to China. That threw it wide open. Sabotage? Or shoddy workmanship? Or underpaid workers cutting corners at the inspections facility? He didn’t envy the NXC having to untangle that mess.

  But then again, they weren’t the ones who’d be boarding the SoD, with more potentially defective parts still undiscovered.

  CHAPTER 33

  Skyler poked his head into the cabin allotted to the NXC. “They’re leaving,” he said.

  The cabin held eight berths, and it had occurred to Skyler before that the crew of the SoD would have less room to spread out than the sailors of the USS Michael Mansoor. He himself had done time in orbit last year, helping with construction. That’s how he thought of it—doing time. The ISS was a prison. A smelly prison, where you might end up with turds floating around the living area, courtesy of an under-trained Brazilian astronaut whom Skyler still remembered with strong dislike. The SoD’s main hab would be bigger, but would offer even less privacy. The Michael Mansoor at least had normal toilets.

  Lance lay on his bunk, reading a fitness magazine. He looked up. “They gone?”

  “No, they’re going now,” Skyler said patiently.

  The other NXC agents left off playing with their various screens and devices, put on their shoes.

  Laura: thirty, blonde-ponytailed, an electronic engineer and markswoman who’d nearly made it to the Rio Olympics.

  Guillermo: fluent in three languages, a kick-boxer, who’d finished medical school and done a stint in the CIA.

  Curtis: a former F-16 pilot who’d joined NASA just before the MOAD hit the fan, and was still pissed that he would never get to go to Mars.

  Skyler had recruited them all, and many others, in his latest role as the NXC’s human capital advisor. God knows why, Director Flaherty thought he was a good judge of people. Maybe he was. He felt proud of these three, anyway. They’d all come through their training with flying colors. Any one of them could do the job and do it well.

  Lance came out to the flight deck with him to see the astronauts off. The three SoD crew members weren’t supposed to know anyone else from the NXC was on board, but Lance made his own rules.

  The Sea King’s rotors spun up. The clattering noise mingled with the wuthering of the wind. Waves crashed on the Michael Mansoor’s hull, and the destroyer’s mighty engines rumbled. Skyler had never suspected before this that seafaring was so damn noisy.

  Menelaou came out and walked towards the helicopter. “Safe journey,” Skyler called, waving, but she glanced neither left nor right, and never saw him and Lance.

  Kildare followed her. He saw Skyler and Lance. He checked his stride, as if he were thinking about coming back for a chat. But it was too late—the helicopter’s rotors had sped up to a blur in readiness for takeoff. He vaulted in, and disappeared from view.

  Lastly, Adam Hardcastle came out of the superstructure. He jogged over to Skyler and Lance. “Guess I’ll see you in China,” he yelled over the noise. “That’s the next stop on the great publicity tour.”

  “Looking forward to it?” Lance said.

  Hardcastle rolled his eyes. “I think I’ll survive a few months of the celebrity treatment.”

  With a flinty look on his face, Lance watched Hardcastle jog across the flight deck and clamber into the Sea King. The helicopter lifted off. The Michael Mansoor ploughed on through the waves, steaming back towards its home port of San Diego.

  “It might be him,” Lance said.

  “Hardcastle?”

  The Sea King shrank to a dot in the vast blue sky.

  “Yeah,” Lance said. “He might be trying to make sure his family are provided for.”

  “Jeez, Lance.”

  “It’s got to be one of them,” Lance said, shrugging. He turned to go back in. Skyler followed him, after a last wistful look at the sea.

  “Let’s not start suspecting the crew,” Skyler said, “until we’ve ruled out sabotage at the factory.”

  “Or at the ground inspections site …”

  “Anyway, if we’re looking at the crew, I nominate Kildare as prime suspect.”

  “Boisselot? He was up there at the time.”

  “So was Ivanov.”

  “Let’s suspect them alllll,” Lance said with a grin.

  They arrived on the foredeck to find Laura, Guillermo, and Curtis being instructed in the operation of the railgun. It was the same lesson that the astronauts had received yesterday, and the NXC agents were learning how to use the fearsome weapon for the same reason.

  They were America’s second string.

  If one of the American astronauts had to drop out for any reason, the NXC would have a readymade replacement standing in the wings.

  For sure, Skyler thought, every country involved in the mission had trained up its own understudies. But none of them could compare to his kids. He was younger than all of them except Laura, yet he thought of them as his kids. He’d handpicked each of them, and felt confident that they were the cream of the crop.

  He looked on with pride, seeing how fast they absorbed what the gunnery sergeant had to impart.

  But as he recalled his conversation with Lance, his thoughts took a dark turn.

  How did it really feel to be Laura, Curtis, or Guillermo? What was it like to train for a mission that you’d never go on … unless someone else got kicked off it?

  For example, because they were a Chinese spy?

  The incident with the ullage motors had completely blindsided the SoD consortium. All their safety inspections had failed to catch the faulty power distribution units. The logical conclusion—Lance’s conclusion—was that someone up at the ISS had screwed with the units.

  Skyler still held out hope that they’d find the problem lay with Yang Dongfun Industries, which would be bad, but better than if one of the crew turned out to be responsible.

  Zzzzzoik!

  A wave of heat and light crashed over the deck.

  Another projectile, travelling at approximately Mach 5, smashed into poor, abused Bikini Atoll.

  The captain, standing just inside the barbette, beckoned to Skyler. “Taft, you shoot better than any of these pussies. Give them a demonstration.”

  Same thing as yesterday! The captain really was an asshole. He knew how much Skyler didn’t enjoy shooting the railgun. Liked tormenting him. Ordering the unaccountable, almighty NXC around, now that he had them on board his ship.

  Well, not for much longer, thank God.

  Skyler racked a new slide of projectiles. The load lever felt warm under his hands. He knew it was because so many other people had been touching it, but the metal felt like it might be alive, an illusion aided by the slight vibrations coming from the gun.

  “I’ll do it,” Lance said, watching hungrily.

  “No, he’s better than you are,” the captain said.

  Both of them gritted their teeth and sucked it up.

  “Safety,” Skyler yawned, wishing he dared ignore the safety protocol, just to see them jump.

  *

  Two days later, they arrived in China. Lance had vented his feelings in a flurry of emails and sat-phone calls that rearranged their schedule. The Osprey was there, together with its peeved crew, so why shouldn’t they use it? Thus the sickeningly expensive and fancy VTOL aircraft, which had left its home base
at the whim of the British ambassador, returned to Pearl Harbor in the role of a taxi for the NXC.

  “This is the life,” Lance deadpanned.

  They left Laura, Curtis, and Guillermo in Hawaii, to run up and down mountains, something they could do just as well there as anywhere. Skyler and Lance flew to Hong Kong amidst hordes of homeward-bound Chinese tourists. Then they took a train to Shenzhen.

  Skyler had been to China before. But this was a different China. The level of crowding in Shenzhen’s streets was simply unreal. It reminded him of the way the Earth Party’s ‘walkers’ would occupy the hearts of American cities, maybe indulging in some light looting, but mostly just sitting around. However, everyone in Shenzhen seemed to have a destination in mind, and to be intent on getting to it ASAP, even if they had to jaywalk and knock other people out of their way.

  “Does China have anything like the Earth Party?” he said, thankful for the taxi that cocooned them from the mob.

  “Figure they don’t,” Lance said. “If they did, they’d crush it Falun Gong style.”

  A military APV blocked an intersection. It didn’t look like there’d been an incident. It was just a show of force. A soldier aimed his rifle at their taxi, eyes dead and cold under his visor. Skyler didn’t breathe until they were through the intersection.

  “We’ve been hearing chatter about a split between the PLA and the CCP,” he noted.

  “There has been a split between the PLA and the CCP,” Lance said, “since Mao died. They’re not buddies. Their interests just happen to coincide.”

  “I wonder if they share an interest in stopping the Spirit of Destiny.” But it just didn’t make sense. The ChiComs had moved heaven and earth to get included in the mission … not to stop it.

  Lance pointed to the top of a nearby skyscraper. Big screens flashed advertisements, lurid beneath the overcast sky.

  One of the screens showed the SoD crew. The two Chinese astronauts, Xiang and Qiu, posed in front of the others, as if they were the stars of the show.

  Skyler laughed. “They look like Power Rangers.”