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

by Felix R. Savage

  But Bethany had. All these years Hannah smugly assumed her secret was safe from her sister, turned out Bethany had been noticing things.

  “You were drunk at Mom and Dad’s funeral. You were drunk at Granny’s funeral. When we sat shiva for her, you kept sneaking away, and I’m like no one has to go to the bathroom that much, so I looked in your toilet bag.” Bethany nodded at her stunned audience, not too distressed to milk the moment. “She had airline miniatures in there,” she told them all. “Vodka, gin, I don’t even know what. And I looked in her suitcase and there was a fifth of whiskey, and I’m like, oh so that explains it—she used to get her coffee and take it upstairs, and I thought that was weird but whatever, but she was spiking the damn coffee. And she thought I didn’t guess. Right?” she screamed at Hannah. “You thought I didn’t notice anything because I’m too dumb! I’m just a stay-at-home mom, so I guess that makes me stupid as well as fat, right? But at least I’m not a fucking alcoholic!”

  Hannah stood there, wet to the skin. No one had given her a towel to wrap up in. She opened her mouth to defend herself, despite having no idea what she could say. Every one of Bethany’s accusations was true.

  David spoke before she could. “Jesus Christ, Bee-Bee, are you out of your mind?”

  Huh? Why was he angry with Bethany?

  “You knew she was an alcoholic? And you let her come here? You trusted her with our son?!”

  Oh.

  Dripping on the deck, David strode over to Bethany and tried to wrestle Nathan away from her. Bethany, weeping, resisted. “She’s my sister! I love her!”

  David gave up on trying to pry Nathan away from his wife. He faced Hannah, puce with rage. She understood that he felt guilty because he’d offered her a beer, nay, pushed it on her. “Get off my property.”

  “Please,” Hannah said.

  “You almost killed my son. Leave, or I’m calling the cops.”

  Bethany decided to side with her husband. “You may be a great scientist,” she told Hannah, “but you’re a shitty human being. I’ve tried with you, I’ve tried and tried, God knows, and this is what I get for it? Just go away, Hannah. You need professional help. Get it, please.” She started crying again.

  Hannah stumbled through the horrified, silent guests, out to her car.

  The image that stayed in her mind was Isabel—silent, her lifesaving deed unappreciated—diving back into the pool again.

  *

  And now here she sat on top of a cliff, looking down at the messy camp on the beach.

  “I quit,” she told Burke.

  Maybe she’d join the walkers. Go wherever they were going.

  “Hannah? I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

  “I. Quit.”

  She fingered the contusion on her right shin. That was where she’d hit the lip of the pool. She had bruises on both legs, and this gash on her right leg which had bled like a faucet. No one at the cookout had said anything about it. Hannah herself hadn’t even noticed it until she pulled over to cry, a mile from Bethany and David’s place. It had started hurting then, and it still hurt now, one night and a handful of Tylenol later.

  At last, Burke said, “You can’t quit.”

  “I knew you’d say that, Rich.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on with you, Hannah-banana …”

  She’d turned as she fell. Twisted, taking the damage on her own body, to protect the child. So at least she had some good instincts buried deep inside. She clung to that meager shred of self-esteem.

  “… but quitting isn’t an option.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Burke uttered the ghost of a laugh. “It’s ironic. I actually called to congratulate you.”

  “On what?”

  “Your new job. Hannah, you’re going on the Spirit of Destiny.”

  *

  She stood up, leaving her borrowed blanket in a pile, and kicked her Keds off. Barefoot, she began to pace. “This is insane, Burke. I’m not an astronaut.”

  “We’ve got five months until launch. That’s long enough for you to go up on a bunch of vomit comet flights, get fitted for a spacesuit. You’ve already done some of the basic stuff. The flight simulator …”

  “Everyone did that.”

  “Everyone isn’t a world-class expert on propulsion systems.”

  It hit her then. “This is because Koichi got kicked off the mission.”

  “You got it. We’re short a reactor and propulsion systems specialist.”

  “The Russians have plenty of experts.”

  “They want to put someone up. Sure they do. But we don’t want to give them the slot.”

  “Oh, I get it. This is another international cooperation moment.”

  “Yeah.” International cooperation had become universally understood shorthand for vicious international competition. “It was inevitable, the moment Masuoka got yanked. Everyone’s jockeying for the slot. The Chinese want it, too.”

  “They don’t have anyone with the expertise, do they? And they already have two crew slots. Whereas the Russians only have one. And we have three. It would be fairer to give it to them.”

  “Since when,” said Burke, “is fairness the guiding principle here?”

  “Point,” Hannah acknowledged bleakly.

  “The guiding principle, my guiding principle, is the success of the mission. And this is why I am turning to you, Hannah.” He was in the office on a Sunday again. She pictured him leaning on his desk, resting his head on one hand. “Not because you’re American. But because you understand the Spirit of Destiny’s propulsion system better than anyone. You’re not just a world-class expert—when it comes to Sonic, you’re the expert.”

  She didn’t argue with that.

  “You built that thing. You practically invented it.”

  “No,” she murmured. “Oliver Meeks did that.”

  “Yes. You figure he would want to see it put into the care of someone else? I think he would prefer the person who built it, who made his dream a reality.”

  She thought about Nathan, the way David had yelled at Bethany for putting the child into her care. Sonic was even more finicky and breakable than a child. She shook her head. “No, Burke, I can’t do it.”

  “You’re being goddamn selfish!” he yelled down the phone, like he’d never ever yelled at her before.

  That shook her. Was it true? Perhaps it was—

  —because the first, the very first thing that sprang to mind when she thought about the mission was five years without booze.

  And God knows she couldn’t live without booze that long. Because she was a sad sack alcoholic. Right?

  Burke modulated his tone. “Is there something else I don’t know about, Hannah?”

  She froze, one foot poised, like a deer. “Such as what?”

  “I’ve looked at your medical records. Everything seems fine. But what about your genetics? I know,” he said delicately, “your parents passed away prematurely …”

  “Oh, you’re thinking about cancer,” she realized. “Nope. They died in a traffic accident. And speaking of cancer, I’m Ashkenazi, as you know. So I’ve actually had those tests—for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. My sister and I both got tested. We’re both fine, I’m thankful to say.”

  “That is wonderful news. So there’s no obstacle to you joining the mission. But I’m not going to push you, if your heart’s not in it.”

  “Rich …”

  “No, Hannah-banana,” he said with a deep sigh. “I understand. It’s too much to ask. You’d be going where no human being has ever gone before. Beyond the asteroid belt. Into the Jovian system, which we never got to study up close, after all. You’d be facing trials of will and courage that very few could pass, and those few only because they’re driven by an insatiable desire to explore the unknown. And if that’s not enough, you’d be investigating an alien artefact, potentially dangerous, which may explode the boundaries of human knowledge … or just explode.” Burke sighed again. “No
one could take that on who wasn’t driven, dedicated, infernally curious, and at the same time, a good team player with a sense of humor. Which doesn’t at all describe you, of course.”

  He’d just described the way she was without the booze. The way she wanted to be. “Go to hell, Rich,” she said, laughing. “I’ll do it. I was just surprised, that’s all”

  “No, no. I’ll tell them we’re OK with Nikolai Petrov taking the slot.”

  “I’ll do it! I want to!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes!”

  “I knew you’d jump on it,” Burke said in satisfaction. They both laughed. “You do know about the survivability stats,” Burke mentioned.

  “Oh, rats, I was forgetting about those,” Hannah said in mock horror.

  The ‘survivability stats’ had been a thing in the news recently. Someone on the internet had jumped into a bucket full of poorly understood math and come up with figures for the chances of the crew’s survival. The SoD consortium had debunked them, pointing out that there were too many unknowns to make any such calculations, but the precision of the figures had helped them catch the public imagination. So, according to the internet, the likelihood that at least one crew member of the SoD would return to Earth was 55%. The likelihood that they all would: 13%.

  “Even the internet gives me a better than even chance of coming back,” Hannah said. “I’ll take that.”

  She walked to the edge of the cliff. Vertigo gripped her. Digging her bare toes into the sparse grass, she gazed out at the Pacific, and then down again at the chaotic camp on the beach. She had thought about joining the walkers. Leaving her whole life behind.

  As it turned out, she didn’t even need to quit her job to do that.

  CHAPTER 39

  Jack walked along Wentworth Drive towards his parents’ house. The street ahead of him, lined with neat lawns and neat brick houses, lay empty and gray in the rain.

  A boy came around the bend, pedaling a bike. He stopped, put his feet down, and stared. Well might he stare.

  Behind Jack, reporters packed the street. Juggling their cameras and microphones, they tripped over each other to keep up with Jack’s rapid, pissed-off stride. Satellite vans trundled in the rear of the horde.

  Jack outdistanced them, heading into the crescent where his parents lived. The Kildare home stood out from the others on the crescent because of the garden. His mother’s riot of plants took the place of a lawn. It was March, so the daffodils were in full flower, their trumpets pearled with droplets by the fine English rain.

  Warned to expect this invasion, his parents waited on the doorstep with stiff expressions.

  There was a Jaguar parked on the forecourt. Had Dad bought a new motor? It would no longer be beyond their means, since Jack was quite well paid these days, and he sent most of the dough home to them. It would be wildly out of character though.

  He hugged them, whispered, “Sorry about this,” and then eased them inside and closed the door in the reporters’ faces. It took considerable willpower not to slam it, much less flip them off as he would have liked to.

  His mother said, “Aren’t we supposed to do an interview?”

  “We can do it later. Let them hang around and get wet for a bit.”

  On cue, Jack’s phone started to ring. So did his mother’s. So did his father’s. So did the landline in the sitting-room.

  Jack turned his phone off, advised his parents to do likewise, and went into the sitting-room with the intention of pulling the phone out of the wall. This was his last visit home before the crew started pre-launch procedures. He would not see his parents again for five years … if ever. He was damned if he’d let this gutter-dwelling mob intrude for the sake of clicks and ratings.

  In the doorway of the sitting-room, he stopped in surprise.

  A couple his parents’ age sat on the sectional sofa, teacups in hand. They were both expensively dressed and Jack twigged that he was looking at the owners of the Jaguar. As far as he knew he’d never seen them before.

  The man rose, transferred his teacup to his left hand, and shook Jack’s hand. “We’ve been following your career with great interest. It’s a pleasure.”

  Jack’s mother rescued him, putting in: “Jack and Oliver were so close, they were like brothers, weren’t you, Jack?”

  Cripes. These were Meeks’s parents!

  The doorbell rang, and kept ringing. Jack’s father left the room, saying he would disconnect it.

  Jack mumbled something polite to Meeks’s parents. His mother followed up with a remark about how ‘Oliver’ must be smiling down on them from heaven now.

  Helen Kildare, née Robinson, was American. That was how Jack got his dual citizenship. Born in Charleston, she’d lived in England ever since she met John Kildare on a London bus in 1972, and her Southern accent lingered only faintly, but she could and did say sentimental things no Brit would have dreamt of uttering.

  Jack expected that remark about Meeks playing a harp with the angels would bring the conversation, such as it was, to a crashing halt. But Meeks’s parents surprised him. They eagerly took up the topic of heaven. Jack’s father—the relapsed Catholic—plunged onto the end of the sectional and joined in.

  Jack sat on the hassock that hovered apart from the sectional, like a detached booster rocket, and smoothed the rain off his hair. He took off his jacket and dropped it on the floor, as was his habit. The dog—Marvin, a spaniel—promptly lay on it.

  “Tea, honey?” his mother said.

  “Lovely, Mum.”

  His father expounded a theory, new to Jack, that the resurrection of the body, as preached by the Church, made perfect sense in view of quantum theory. Retired science teacher or not, it was clear he didn’t understand quantum theory (nor did Jack), but he explained to the Meekses that quanta—the fundamental building blocks of matter—were capable of remote and mysterious entanglements. This being the case, why shouldn’t God reassemble one’s body—the atoms, mind you, the very same atoms that composed one’s body now—on the Day of Judgment, no matter where they may have scattered to in the meantime?

  Meeks’s mother said, “That’s an intriguing idea, but isn’t God capable of anything? Why would He need to go to the bother—”

  “Oh well you see, that’s the broader theory,” John Kildare said. “Everything we see that isn’t currently understood—including miracles, even the miracles of Jesus—is evidence of a higher physics. God so arranged the universe that anything should be possible. It isn’t magic.”

  Meeks’s mother was a plump woman with hair dyed a shade of blonde that surely hadn’t been her natural color. Despite this, she projected faded elegance. She half-rose, hovering over the coffee table as if looking for somewhere to put down her teacup. The coffee table overflowed, as usual, with the trappings of Jack’s father’s hobby: weather observations charted on graph paper pads, colored markers and a slide rule, measurement units for a wireless temperature logger, and an anemometer, half-disassembled. John Kildare was an amateur meteorologist. The tea tray balanced precariously on a corner of the table.

  Jack’s mother sprang up to take the unwanted cup. Mrs. Meeks bent and delved in a large handbag. She removed something from it, and came around the coffee table to Jack. “On that note,” she said, “that is, resurrection, and so forth—”

  She stood on the dog’s paw. Marvin howled. Jack, standing, bent to soothe him.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Meeks said. “Please do tell us, straight away, if this is inappropriate. But I believe he would have liked it, and …” Her voice failed. She pushed the object at Jack, who turned it over, nonplussed. It was a brushed aluminum capsule about four inches long.

  Mrs. Meeks was crying. It was a terrible sight, this carefully made-up woman in her sixties, with tears tracking her mascara down her cheeks. Her husband put an arm around her and guided her back to the sofa. He said, “What she means to say is that we think Oliver would have liked to have his ashes scattered in spa
ce.”

  Jack jumped. The capsule in his hand suddenly seemed to generate a violent electric charge. It was Meeks! It was his bloody ashes. Oh, God.

  “If you would be so kind,” Mr. Meeks went on. “But perhaps you aren’t allowed to take any personal belongings up with you?”

  Jack blurted, “Of course I’ll do it!” What did one say? “It would be an honor. Thank you for thinking of me.”

  Meeks’s mother babbled thanks. Jack’s mother sat close beside her with a box of tissues.

  Jack sat down again. He suddenly felt sick with sadness, as if Mrs. Meeks’s grief were catching. What a nice cheerful visit this was turning out to be.

  Throughout these years of training, orbital construction work, and more training, the relentless tempo of deadlines and the ever-approaching date of the launch itself had occupied his mind, almost to the exclusion of all else. Firebird Systems, the outrage of NASA’s technology theft, and above all, Meeks’s murder, had been relegated to a dark cupboard in the back of his mind.

  Now it all came falling out, exactly as if Mrs. Meeks had found the cupboard and opened it.

  He’d vowed to identify Meeks’s murderer and bring him (or her) to justice, and what had he done about it? Fuck all. And now, with just two weeks left to go until launch, it was too late.

  He owed Meeks much more than an empty sentimental gesture. But if it brought Meeks’s parents some closure, it was well worth doing. He slid the capsule containing Meeks’s remains into the pocket of his jeans. That seemed like a poor way to treat it, but the alternative was asking his mother for a plastic carrier bag, which would, he suspected, be worse.

  “It’ll be no problem,” he said. “We’re each allowed to take three kilos of personal belongings.”

  That prompted his parents to bring out the things they had bought or made for him to take, including a a new rosary to replace the beat-up one which had lived in his back pocket for the last two years. “It’s made of tungsten,” his father said proudly. “Tough enough to stand up to space! And here.” A thumb-sized gadget on a keychain. “I’m sure you know what this is!”