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

by Felix R. Savage

  Gyroscopes: spun and locked.

  Latest observations of the MOAD from the spiffy new telescope on the ISS: unchanged.

  Surprise, surprise, Jack thought. Observations of the MOAD never registered any change, except that the heat source in the alien spacecraft’s midsection cooled a few degrees more. Media contrarians, in the last fraught days, had even begun to question why we were going to all this trouble for a piece of space junk.

  Suck it up, you tedious little bores.

  He reconfirmed the SoD’s distance from the ISS. 50 kilometers. That was far enough.

  Good to go.

  Jack said to Menelaou, “Everything looks good,” and Menelaou said to Mission Control, "We have achieved minimum separation from the ISS. Power generation is stable. MPD engine is online, and thrust is stable. Request permission to punch it.”

  "Spirit of Destiny, you are approved to execute procedure 42, Trans-Europa burn. Full power to the booster and MPD engine,” Mission Control said, in a Russian accent.

  The Spirit of Destiny had two mission control centers. One in Star City and one in Houston. Star City would be taking point at this historic moment, to make up for the fact that there were three Americans on the bridge.

  Jack in the right seat. On his left, Menelaou. On her left, Lance.

  After all, Lance was the comms officer. Menelaou couldn’t kick him off the bridge. Someone had to ensure they were getting good telemetry, and Menelaou did not have the authority to replace Lance with Alexei, much as she may have wished to.

  Jack settled his shoulders against his padded backrest, trying to forget Lance was there. He gut-checked himself. Well-rested. Fully adjusted to zero-gee. He’d eaten a hearty breakfast—with fresh orange juice, the last he’d taste for five years—and then recorded a three-minute webchat with a group of second-graders in Ohio.

  Now he was ready to make history.

  The bank of instruments in front of him looked nothing like the layout in the cockpit of the space shuttle. For instance, the information on the heads-up display was calibrated in thousands of kilometers, with two detents for hundred-thousands and millions. The chronometer had readouts for weeks and years. Most fundamentally, the coordinate system was based not on Earth-based north and south, but on the poles of the Sun.

  As for the rest of the controls, there were no rudder pedals, and there was no flipping stick. Could you even call yourself a pilot when your bird had no stick? Well, he’d been a pilot when he was flying a 110-tonne brick, a.k.a. Atlantis. He’d claim the term again. No one would mind.

  Instead of a pedals and a stick, he had three axis precession controls, which used the ship's reaction wheels to change the orientation of the SoD. The throttle was firmly in the hands of the computers.

  "Full power to the MPD," Menelaou said.

  “Roger.” Jack keyed in the throttle command.

  "Reactor and turbine steady. Full power to the MPD engine," Hannah said over the intercom. “Fuel tanks are settling and pressurizing.”

  Menelaou touched the intercom. “All hands, prepare for boost.” Back in the storage module, the rest of the crew would be strapped into their acceleration couches, staring at the ceiling.

  “Hey Goose, I feel the need …” Jack said.

  “… the need for speed!” Alexei said. Both of them cackled wildly.

  “Top Gun,” Jack explained to Menelaou.

  Menelaou shook her head, smiling. “I will never understand the way men quote movie lines to each other, or why you find it so damn funny.”

  In clusters of two, separated by intervals of mere seconds, the pumps whined up to fever pitch. A deep subsonic drumming announced the ignition of the booster's engines. Jack grinned, thrilled to the core. He accidentally caught Lance’s eye—even the spook felt the excitement. Jesus God, the power of this thing!

  He executed a 'barbecue' roll, a minute movement of the gimbaled exhaust bells of the liquid-fuelled engines that rolled the SoD on its axis. For most of their trip out, they’d be soaking up so much heat from the sun that the ship would actually bend, expanding on the sunward side and contracting on the shadowed side. So, roll against the contraction. Friction from the counter-rotating hab would cancel out both rolls evenly.

  He remembered the last interview he’d done before leaving Earth. A one on one with Buzz Aldrin. A rarity for Jack, he’d been practically speechless in the presence of his hero. And Aldrin, Buzz freaking Aldrin, had said to him, “If I was fifty years younger, I’d fight you for that seat.”

  Jack knew the 89-year-old astronaut would be watching now, along with his surviving handful of Apollo comrades. Those lion-hearted octogenarians, the first and last men to walk on the moon, would be cheering on the Spirit of Destiny and its crew.

  An overwhelming sense of responsibility braced him, while his hands continued to calmly move between position, rate and fuel indicators on his panel. He’d done this exact same thing 1272 times, precisely, in the flight simulator at JSC.

  Pilot joke: The computers fly the plane. You fly the computers.

  Jack grinned to himself as he glanced from one screen to the other, checking tank pressures, combustion chamber temperatures and pressures. So this was what making history felt like: pushing buttons …

  Mission Control spoke in Jack’s helmet. They wore pressure suits as a precaution, in case the hastily-built SoD should spring a weld.

  Instead of the pro forma status update Jack expected, the voice from Star City said, “SoD, this is a heads up from the NRO. Satellites have picked up launch indications from China. Flight parameters—”

  They lost the transmission there. It happened. Lance scrambled to restore the signal.

  “—your orbital inclination,” Mission Control said.

  “Say again, Mission Control,” Menelaou said tautly. “Didn’t copy your last.”

  “Flight parameters indicate the launched object will collide with you.” The Russian voice lost its formality. “Poslusajte, guys, it’s a missile. Early warning systems in Siberia and Alaska just picked it up. Three thousand meters altitude. Four thousand meters. Assuming solid booster and second stage, anticipate ninety seconds until intercept.”

  The words lodged in Jack’s gut like bullets.

  “Son of a bitch,” Menelaou said flatly.

  Lance sat unmoving. Jack wondered at that, and then he realized: Lance had expected this …

  “What’s your current orbital inclination, SoD?”.

  Menelaou read it out. They were still on the same orbital track as the ISS, spiraling out of Earth’s gravity well. Altitude: 537 kilometers. Well within range of a hit-to-kill interceptor.

  “Tell us what to do, Star City,” Menelaou said. “It would be a damn shame for us to die before we even leave Earth orbit.”

  CHAPTER 45

  Mission Control told them what to do.

  “Throttle down the booster to zero.”

  “Roger,” Jack said, but he wasn’t really listening. He was remembering the taste of beer in a Beijing bar, and hearing Theodore Zhang say, No, this is something bigger. It could hit a target as far up as geostationary orbit.

  The subsonic thunder of the booster stopped. The three of them stared at the readouts. Lance said, “There it is.”

  The SoD’s radar array had picked up the missile at the 200-klick range circle. At the sight of the fast-moving green wasp on the radar plot, Jack’s awareness skipped like a scratched CD. Suddenly, he was no longer a forty-two-year-old astronaut. He was a fighter pilot, on his way to deliver another payload of death to Saddam’s forces, watching surface-to-air missiles puff up from the ruined hellscapes of Iraqi towns. Evading them was like avoiding ants on the sidewalk. So easy it didn’t even count as a game.

  This bird didn’t have a stick. Didn’t even have wings. But it had an engine that packed almost two gees of thrust.

  Mission Control told them what to do next.

  Modify the booster’s programming.

  Dump it.
<
br />   Fly away.

  “Roger,” Menelaou snapped. She said to Lance, “It’s a heat-seeking missile. It’s homing in on the booster. So we dump the booster. Get cracking! Fix the programming!”

  The plan made sense to Jack … for about half a second. If they jettisoned the booster early? They wouldn’t make it out of Earth’s gravity well. They’d be stuck.

  Sitting ducks for the next missile.

  Jack said, “I’m taking defensive action.” Mind made up, he snapped the yaw control on the booster motors hard to the right, then back to zero. The SoD ponderously slewed to point its tail towards Earth. “Garner, don’t touch the booster.”

  “Do it!” Menelaou said to Lance.

  Lance twitched into life, like a battery-powered toy that had been switched on. “Hit it with the railguns!” he said. “Blow that fucker away!”

  The railgun controls were on Jack’s side of the bridge, which was probably just as well. Jack, concentrating on the yaw control, couldn’t be bothered to disabuse Lance of his Star Wars-inspired illusions. Menelaou did it for him. “Moron!” she said to Lance. “The guns aren’t even fucking loaded! You can’t just put a round on the rails and leave it there! Come back the next day, it’ll be vacuum-welded to the rails. That’s what nearly killed Galileo. Now dump the booster!”

  “Creeping cheetos,” Lance yelled, still stuck on the railguns. “This is what they’re for!”

  “You wanna sit here and wait for three minutes while we load rounds, and then another five while we power up the rails?” Menelaou purred. She reached over and shook Lance’s shoulder. “Missile’s gonna get here before that. Dump the goddamn booster!”

  But Lance’s futile trigger-happiness had bought Jack time to finish planning his own maneuver.

  “Hannah!” he yelled into the intercom. ”Can you centralize the mass flow?”

  “What?” Hannah said.

  “Rig the mass flow to be faster in the center of the tube!”

  “What’s going on? We’re in a hard yaw. What are you doing up there?”

  “DO IT!”

  “Roger,” she said in a tone dripping with skepticism. She had no idea how serious the situation was, and Jack didn’t have time to explain.

  He returned his attention to the radar plot. The missile was closing in.

  “Jettison the fucking booster!” Mission Control said, completely forgetting themselves. “Ty chto, okhuyel? What are you waiting for?”

  Jack was waiting for the missile to get close enough.

  He’d trained for every kind of disaster the boffins could think up.

  No one had thought of a heat-seeking missile.

  But his training had included reorienting the SoD. Jack slapped the yaw controls to stop their rotation. At the same time, he killed all the booster's liquid-fueled engines.

  Muted crashes told of loose items hitting forward bulkheads throughout the ship.

  Lance sat frozen, staring at the radar plot. Jack knew the signs. That was a man who’d given up any illusion of control over his fate, and was waiting to die.

  “Okayyyy,” Menelaou said. “I see what you’re doing. Mission Control, Kildare is going to attempt to take the missile out. It might work.”

  The missile screamed higher.

  Wait.

  Wait for it to lock on.

  The missile turned, targeting the SoD. In another split second, its kill booster would fire, and they’d be toast.

  Now.

  Jack engaged the engine. Maximum thrust.

  Ionization coils off. Auto-ignition controls off. Turbopumps for the booster engines on.

  Clouds of hydrogen and oxygen gusted out of the back of the booster, obscuring their view of Earth. Jack waited ten agonizing seconds, until the engines started spitting out liquid hydrogen and LOX. Then he turned on the reaction control thrusters, shoving the ship away from the cloud of liquid reactants.

  “Now for the fun part," Menelaou purred. Lance continued to sit immobile, watching the green dot close in on them.

  Jack snapped on the ionization coils. A loud shock wave thundered through the ship. A torus of live steam boiled aft. Jack engaged the engine at maximum thrust, and a tongue of plasma reached back and touched the edge of the cloud of reactants. A blinding light flared from the aft monitor. The cloud had just exploded in flame.

  Jack’s lips stretched in an unconscious grin. He throttled the engine down, way down. Minimum thrust.

  He repeated the max-min thrust maneuver three more times, while the SoD tried to shake itself to pieces around them. And the missile—

  Well, the missile.

  The optical sensor array caught its fate on camera.

  When the cloud of fuel and LOX ignited, the missile locked on the flaring reactants, drawing it off a precious few degrees.

  That was just the beginning.

  Donut-shaped rings of plasma bloomed out of the thrusters. It looked like the SoD was blowing smoke rings, except these were rings of 90,000 degree plasma.

  The heat-seeking missile died an ironically apt death, soaked in water plasma hotter than the heart of the sun. The series of blasts fried its electronics, reducing it from a hit-to-kill interceptor to a big dumb lump of metal.

  It coasted harmlessly past the SoD. Soon it would reach its highest altitude and begin its long fall back towards Earth.

  “It worked! It goddamn worked!” Menelaou whooped. She leaned into the intercom. “Mission Control, do you read me? Kildare just executed a series of max thrust / min thrust maneuvers that cooked the missile like a Christmas turkey. We are alive and well.”

  Unable to relax yet, Jack barked, “Star City, this is Jack. Should we expect any more bogeys?”

  There might be another missile. In his experience, there usually was another missile.

  “Keyhole satellites aren’t picking anything up,” Mission Control said. As their survival sank in, Jack reflected that he’d come full circle. In 2011, he’d risked his life to repair a Keyhole satellite—and ended up losing his job over it. Now, those very same satellites had saved their lives. It might even have been Frostbite, Keyhole-12a, that saw the missile launch and shrilled its electronic warning. “Our missile defense systems are on high alert, and so are the American systems,” Mission Control said, perhaps trying to be reassuring. “If there’s another launch, we can test them.” A Russian chuckle. “At present we would like you to maintain your orbit and await further instructions.”

  "Good!" Menelaou said. "We've abused the hell out of our engines. We need to check them over."

  Jack craned to the porthole nearest him. Of course, all that could be seen through the thickness of transparent aluminum was black space. “I wonder where it’s going to fall,” he mumbled.

  “What?” Lance said.

  “The missile. After all, what goes up must come down.”

  “Eh, it’ll probably fall in the Pacific,” Menelaou said lightheartedly. She reached over and tugged Jack’s ears. “You did it, Killer. How the hell did you even think of that?”

  “Cheating.” Jack smiled weakly. “Thought of it ages ago, kicking the MPD concept around with Ollie. He had a devious mind.” He chuckled at the memory, but it came out sounding like a bark of sadness. “Any high-powered drive is indistinguishable from a weapon. That was his favorite saying.”

  “Well, I have no idea who Ollie is,” Menelaou said. Of course she didn’t. The presiding genius of the SoD project didn’t even exist on the internet anymore. “Well done, anyway.”

  Lance said, “There was no Ollie.”

  Jack sat upright, staring at him. “What did you say?”

  “You’re lying,” Lance said. His blue eyes glistened with the shock of their close call. Jack wondered if he even knew what he was saying. “The engine was developed at NASA. We have the documentation to prove it.”

  “No one ever suggested otherwise, Lance,” Menelaou said lightly, which proved just how completely the NXC had erased Meeks from history. It also cued
Lance to shut up, which he did.

  Jack clenched his jaw. The adrenaline sloshing around his system urged him to knock Lance’s head off. Here and now, in front of the mission commander. There’d never be a better time, right?

  Yes. There would be a better time. His chance would come. He just had to be ready for it.

  CHAPTER 46

  Tumbling through space, the 20,000-kg metal cylinder that had been a hit-to-kill interceptor reentered Earth’s atmosphere at high speed. Missile defense installations blasted at it, but its unpredictable flight path defeated their targeting. The missile landed in a small town named Meiwa in Gunma Prefecture, Japan. Sonic booms broke windows as far away as Tokyo. Skyscrapers swayed. Thanks to Japan’s long experience with earthquakes, anti-seismic construction was the norm throughout the islands. Nothing much fell down. But that was no consolation to the residents of Meiwa. A crater had appeared in the middle of their town.

  Where there used to be an elementary school.

  Sod’s law.

  The crew of the SoD watched the news in horror. Unlike on the ISS, they didn’t have to rely on prepackaged news digests. Their ‘Ka’ communications system could receive HD television, as well as provide sideband Internet at up to 8Gb speeds.

  They followed along in real time as Japan reacted with fury to the ‘Meiwa Massacre.’ Doctrinal pacifism went only so far, as it turned out. 43 small children and two teachers had died. Two firefighters and a police officer had died in a secondary collapse of the school building as they searched desperately for survivors. This could not be papered over with diplomatic regrets.

  The Japanese prime minister went on television blaming China and threatening retribution. The news channels played the sequence from the SoD's aft camera over and over. The markings on the missile were translated into dozens of languages.

  By now, the whole world knew that the missile had been launched from a secret test launch facility in the Gobi desert.

  Unit 63618.

  “I warned them,” Jack wretchedly confessed to Alexei. He felt as if he could and should have done more. “When I was at the Japanese embassy, I told them everything Zhang told me. So they knew about the facility. They could have …” Done what, exactly? “It looks as if they didn’t do anything with the information.”