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

by Felix R. Savage

  “2010,” Skyler said. “The sequel to 2001.” Lugubrious movie music filled the room, so loud that Skyler had to raise his voice. "It’s a better movie, in my opinion. And it’s got some parallels with our present situation. You should give it a watch.”

  He plopped down on the bed and patted the Native American print coverlet next to him.

  Jack pulled on a clean t-shirt. He wondered if the NXC agent was completely out of his mind.

  Then he got it.

  He sat down next to Skyler. “What is it, then?”

  “Bugs,” Skyler said. “I picked this for the loud music. It is good, though.”

  “What’ve you got to say, that you don’t want the bugs picking up?” Jack had suspected they were monitored around the clock. The confirmation was unsettling … but not as unsettling as Skyler Taft taking steps to circumvent it.

  “It’s about Oliver Meeks,” Skyler said, staring straight ahead at the TV screen.

  Jack growled in his throat. He didn’t mean to. It just came out.

  “I know who killed him.”

  “I know you know. That’s what sickens me. I’ve been living with this for three years, knowing that you know.”

  “I should have told you years ago,” Skyler said. And then he spoke the name.

  Lance Garner.

  Jack instantly berated himself for not guessing before. He hunched over his knees. “Why tell me now? If you’re just twisting the knife, you’re an even more despicable human being than I thought.”

  He understood without questioning it—and Skyler apparently did, too—that legal remedies would be no remedies at all. It was the law that protected Lance Garner from justice. If anyone was going to avenge Meeks it would have to be Jack himself.

  “It’s better to know than not to know,” he acknowledged, half to himself. “But what can I do about it, stuck in here? Ten days to launch!”

  “Aha,” Skyler said, unsmiling. “Now for the good news.”

  CHAPTER 43

  As it so happened, Lance Garner was the first human being Jack met when they loaded into the SoD.

  The Soyuz gang had come up first. They had spacewalked from the ISS to the SoD, a simple maneuver that got them and their spacesuits on board. They’d had several hours to make themselves at home before the other half of the crew arrived from Florida.

  “Hey!” Lance shouted, clinging to the axis tunnel in the middle of the main hab. He had a good smile. It made him look like Tom Sawyer all grown up. “Sorry, we grabbed all the best bunks.”

  This was a joke. There were no bunks. There were sleeping spaces built into what would be the floor of the hab, when it was spun up. These were spaced out evenly around the aft wall. During construction, the crew had taken to calling them ‘coffins.’

  One coffin was much like any other, and Jack stowed his satchel of personal belongings in the nearest unclaimed one. His pulse raced. The blood sang in his ears, and it wasn’t a reaction to freefall. It was a reaction to Lance Garner. The intensity of it took him off guard. He wanted to kill the man, bloodily, with his bare hands. He was going to have to get this under control.

  The hab echoed. There’d been no time to install frivolous touches such as sound-deadening blankets. Stiff groups of tables and chairs, built into the cylindrical floor and into the ‘Potter spaces’ under the stairways on the end walls, made the place look like an Ikea showroom. Actually, though, the ‘wood’ was anodized paint; the furniture was made of ultra-lightweight aluminum. The height of luxury.

  Otherwise, the place was tolerable. It would eventually fill up with a locker-room pong, no getting around that. But for now, it had a new-car smell—a hint of machine oil, the odor of plasticizer seeping out of the flooring, muted by the low air pressure and sinus congestion that came with freefall.

  “I can see water floating in here,” Menelaou called, swarming down from the aft tube that led to the other modules. She moved hand-over-hand down the guardrail of the stairs, legs in the air. No point actually using the stairs, in freefall. “Did one of the fish tanks break?” She cast a glance at the sealed tanks full of tilapia strapped to the floor. Battery-powered pumps burbled, keeping the water fresh for the disoriented fish inside. When the hab was spun up, the tanks would be opened, and they’d stack hydroponic trays on top of them to grow vegetables in the same water. Jack foresaw that everyone was going to have to become a hydroponics specialist.

  “Only one of the tanks leaked a little,” Qiu Meili apologized.

  “That’s gonna have to stop. No spills. Period.” Menelaou gave the Chinese woman a wintry smile.

  “Life support system is up and running,” said Xiang Peixun, drifting out of the aft tube. He would have come from SLS, the secondary life support module aft of the hab where CO2, oxygen, and sewage were managed.

  “Evidently. We are breathing,” Menelaou said. “Good job, Pei. I really need to use the toilet.”

  The toilets were closets in the fore and aft walls, or what would be the walls, after the SoD escaped Earth orbit. They’d spin the hab up then. At present, this was just another freefall space, like an ISS module—if much bigger. The hab measured a full 60 meters across.

  While Menelaou was baptizing the toilet, Jack floated up to the keel tube which opened in the center of what would be the forward wall. The white-padded, intestinal tube took him to the bridge.

  “About fucking time,” Alexei greeted him. The cosmonaut floated at the main console, which took up all of one wall. Actually, every wall had consoles on it, including the one which would be the ceiling when they were under thrust. No windshield on the SoD. Tiny portholes, set here and there among the dials and levers, were ideas rather than functioning windows. Their view of the outside world came mediated via GPUs from the optic sensor array. Alexei pointed to the fine big screen in front of him, which displayed the ISS with Earth’s limb behind it. Construction yard cleanup was underway. Several eviscerated external tanks and Falcon Heavy upper stages floated near the ISS, ready to be loaded with debris for disposal via reentry burnup. Alexei explained that the astronauts who would remain on the ISS were cutting the clothesline now. Jack could see them doing it.

  “So,” Jack lowered his voice, “Hardcastle’s changed a bit, hasn’t he? Lost weight, dyed his hair …”

  Alexei’s elated expression faded to deadpan. “Hardcastle? No, no. That is a very advanced, very futuristic Russian robot. Now you see our fiendish plan to sabotage the mission.”

  Jack let out a burst of laughter. He was so glad Alexei was on board, he could have hugged him. He cast a glance at the tube to make sure they were still alone. “Kate’s making it very clear she won’t take any shit from the Chinese. She’d hardly got out of the airlock before she criticized Meili and mocked Peixun. I suppose she’s starting as she means to go on.”

  “Xiang is a pig,” Alexei said. “It’s because he has a tiny dick.”

  “Speaking of dickless wonders, Boisselot let go of the clothesline during our tow-over. I had to grab him as I went by, or he'd be on the slow boat to Venus. He’s a perfectly nice guy, but I question the sanity of the ESA selection committee.”

  Before they could slag off any more of their colleagues, Menelaou drifted onto the bridge. Without so much as a ‘hi,’ she said, “OK, Alexei. Calibrate and zero the inertial nav units, please.”

  “Done,” Alexei said.

  “Good. Then call Mission Control and get any final nav tweaks they have for us.”

  Alexei gave her a raised eyebrow, a tilt of the head.

  Menelaou took his meaning. “I know you weren’t supposed to be in charge of comms,” she said crisply. “That was Hardcastle. The NXC guy? We’ll train him up as we go. For now, you do it.”

  Jack understood her mood. The last-minute roster change had been sprung on her without warning, too. She hadn’t even had a Skyler Taft tipping her the wink.

  “Jack, it looks like Alexei’s already got the nav computers up. Check that everything’s zeroed corre
ctly, and load the flight plan. We’ll burn when engine status is confirmed and our launch window opens.” Menelaou pushed off and flew out of the bridge.

  Jack and Alexei exchanged a wry glance. Then Alexei took the radio off the loudspeakers and called CapCom. Jack smiled to himself. ‘Capsule Communicator’ for a spaceship that was most definitely not a capsule. Traditions died hard.

  Alexei spoke grumpily in Russian. Then he punched the keyboard for the nav computer. To Jack, he said, “They want us to verify the hash signature after we decrypt the data. What is the use of 5k encryption if you still don't trust the data?"

  “I'd rather know that some Earth Party hacker hasn’t spoofed our flight plan. Plenty of people down there would rather see us fly into the sun." Jack strapped himself into the pilot’s couch. "Let me know when you've got the official flight plan. I want to see if the boffins at JPL have us whipping around the backside of Mars like I told them to. Shave a few months off the trip out."

  *

  Hannah had her own private domain within the SoD. Well, it didn’t have her name on the door, and there wasn’t actually a door, but everyone understood—she hoped—that Engineering was the territory of Hannah Ginsburg. Private, keep out. Trespassers will be fed to the reactor.

  She ‘moved in’ by taping a picture of Bethany, David, Isabel, and Nathan to the wall, above the all-important ‘dollar meter.’ She then hung an origami Star of David, made by some schoolchild in Israel, over the hexagonal array or reactor status lights, and that was her little kingdom furnished. She could touch the walls with her fingers and her feet if she floated horizontally to the ‘floor.’

  One of the curved side walls was taken up with reactor and turbine controls. Pumps, thermocouples, SCRAM controls, the wall had it all. Any visitor, not that there would be any, could see the status of both critical components at a glance.

  The opposite wall was dedicated to the engine controls. Everything from tankage pressures to the width and speed of the plasma exhaust was measured, manipulated, and morphed here.

  The other two walls, where they weren't crammed with equipment lockers and racks of electronics, were given over to the mundane housekeeping controls for the rest of the ship.

  She still couldn’t believe she was really here. Her whole career had been dedicated to space, but she was supposed to be the one who stayed home while others took the risks.

  Well, at least she wouldn’t have to stare at the others all the time. She’d have her privacy. That could make all the difference between acquiring a spirit of adventure, and going insane.

  Moments later, Lance Garner invaded her kingdom.

  “Go away,” Hannah said. “I’m busy.”

  “Whatcha doing?”

  “Cranking up the reactor.”

  “Can I watch? I won’t get in the way.”

  Hannah made a tight, irritated feel-free gesture. After all, this was everyone’s ship. She just hoped he wasn’t going to make a habit of it.

  Lance floated in the mouth of the keel tube, which opened in the middle of the circular ‘ceiling.’ There was a hole in the ‘floor,’ too, which led to the turbine room.

  “Family?” Lance said, indicating the picture.

  “Yes,” Hannah said.

  She had made it up with Bethany. There had been a degree of deception involved. She’d let Bethany think that she was ‘getting help’… actually, she’d told Bethany in as many words that she was getting help. She’d had to, or Bethany might have taken it into her head to tell Burke, or God knows the media, that her sister was an alcoholic. For her own good.

  But of course, Hannah couldn’t actually get help, or Burke and everyone else would know that she had a problem.

  It was OK, though. She’d dried out before, in the white heat of the engine design process. She could do it again. At the moment, she hadn’t had a drink for two weeks, and she was doing OK.

  She would be doing OK, if Lance weren’t hanging there watching her. It made her nervous.

  She really wished she knew why NASA had foisted a Fed on them at the last minute.

  She focused on the dollar meter, which reported the amount of neutrons being created by nuclear reactions in the core.

  You can get a reactor to ninety cents fairly quickly. It's that last ten cents that give reactor operators nightmares.

  The idea was get as close to ‘one dollar,' a.k.a. 'criticality,' as you could, without going over. She programmed the slow withdrawal of the control rods as a wave of reactivity swept through the warming fuel channels.

  “So the reactor’s all the way at the back of the ship. But you can manage everything from here?” Lance said.

  Hannah looked up at him. That was such a stupid question, she wondered if he was making fun of her. “When the reactor’s running, it emits gamma rays. Yes, it’s shielded, but that shielding is primarily to reduce the space radiation that bombards the reactor, otherwise we'd turn into a bright ball of gas. It’s not a safety guarantee for us. So there’s a bioshield aft of here.” She pointed at the wall behind the reactor controls. “Six feet of water in a tank of steel, polyethylene, and lead. That’s what prevents gamma rays from washing over us, and killing us all within minutes. If I went back there while the reactor’s running? I’d be so radioactive, you couldn’t even risk retrieving my body.” She paused to see how he was taking this. Perfect poker face. “So, yeah. I can do everything by computer from here. Did you get any training?”

  Lance wiggled a hand. “Some. But to be honest, there wasn’t time to bone up on a whole lot of specifics. That’s why I’m asking, you know?”

  “That’s fine. There are no stupid questions,” Hannah said, although she didn’t believe this. Most questions were stupid.

  She watched the dollar meter as the next fifty centimeters of control rod emerged from the center of the reactor. Suddenly, the dollar meter jumped to ninety-five and the hexagonal array indicators flared yellow, indicating coolant temperatures in the operating range. The coolant pumps kicked on with a tactile hum. The meter in the water/steam separator twitched, and various power relays clicked.

  “What did you just do?” Lance said edgily.

  Hannah smiled. “I made a dollar today. Sorry if it scared you.”

  “Shee-it. Skyler told me you were kind of a hard-ass.” Lance was grinning. “He said you were always busting his chops …”

  It wounded her to know that Skyler had spoken about her in such terms, and to this weirdo, of all people. Although she’d deleted Skyler from her contacts list, she hadn’t managed to delete him from her memory.

  “Now I’m going to set the reactor on auto-pilot.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” Lance said.

  Nothing happened, of course, except that wash of yellow light on the reactor array reached out to the border of the display.

  Lance laughed. “You had me going there. Skyler wasn’t kidding …”

  It was that second reference to Skyler that got her. She wiggled her toes out of the stirrups and floated up to him. “Lance, can I ask you a question? What are you doing here?”

  “Are you gonna deck me if I say that’s classified?”

  “Tricky to deck someone, when a) there isn’t a deck, and b) there isn’t any gravity,” Hannah said dryly. “Well?”

  “Like they told you at KSC, Hardcastle backed out at the last minute. I’m his replacement.”

  “I smell something funny in here. It’s kind of familiar … oh yeah. It’s the smell of horseshit.”

  Lance grinned, this time seemingly with admiration. Then his humor faded. “Can I trust you, as a fellow American?” he said quietly.

  It seemed a strange way of putting it. “Of course,” she said.

  Lance leaned in closer. “Someone on this ship doesn’t want it to leave orbit. They tried to sabotage it once already. Remember?”

  Hannah’s mouth opened and closed.

  “My job is to suspect everybody.”

  “So that’s why you came to
watch me crank the reactor up,” she managed.

  “Yeah. If you just yanked the rods out, all the folks on Earth would see is a new star in the sky.”

  “If you know that, you know I couldn’t push a button and blow the ship up. There are failsafes, and the failsafes have fallback plans, and the fallback plans have their own Plan Bs.”

  “Yeah, but you’re God back here. You could get around all that. No, I’ll tell you how I know you’re cool.” Lance nodded down at the hexagonal array. “Suicide bombers don’t hang up a Star of David.”

  He floated back up through the keel tube.

  Her mind swimming, Hannah pushed off and flew to her intercom. “Engineering.”

  “Bridge,” came Menelaou’s voice.

  “The reactor has achieved first criticality. I’m now waiting for the delayed neutron production to stabilize. Meanwhile, I'm warming up the secondary heat exchanger and getting the steam generator online. We’ll be good to go in about three hours.”

  Three hours and seven minutes later, the reactor achieved stabilization. The steam turbine generator had taken up the ship’s baseload power needs, and the fuel cells were finally shut off. Hannah ramped up the output to three quarters of maximum. Not a hiccup, not a gurgle. She sent a mental thank-you to her dark-eyed Rosatom physicist. The reactor was Russian engineering at its finest: simple, even clunky, and guaranteed to work.

  The SoD’s engine took the water created while the fuel cells were running, and pumped it through a fat electric arc, flashing it to steam. The steam rushed down the central cavity, where tremendous pulses of radio energy shattered the bonds that held the atoms together, ionizing the hydrogen and oxygen into a blue-white plasma. Another series of coils shoved the plasma hard, cramming it out of the exhaust bell at immense velocities.

  The upshot of all this violent activity was that the SoD started to move away from the ISS at a walking pace. Several spacewalkers floated on tethers outside the ISS, waving goodbye from positions safely out of range of the exhaust.

  CHAPTER 44

  Star sights: valid.