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

by Felix R. Savage

  “And that,” Alexei said, “is why they’re pissed.”

  The blame war escalated overnight. Warships faced off in the Sea of Japan. Fighter jets performed fly-bys at distances measured in centimeters.

  Behind the scenes, diplomats must have been maneuvering frantically, but the media did not care to know about that. Heavy artillery, tanks, and aircraft carriers filled the communal screen in the SoD’s kitchen.

  “Just out of curiosity,” Menelaou said to Mission Control, “will we still get our refueling flight if war breaks out?”

  Her question had an acid edge. 27 hours had passed since the thwarted missile attack, and the SoD remained parked in an elongated low Earth orbit.

  Well. Parked wasn’t exactly the word, when you were hurtling around the globe at 24,000 kilometers per hour.

  The aborted burn had used up 20% of the booster’s liquid fuel, so they couldn’t make a second attempt without refueling. And all Misson Control had for them on that front was “Wait.”

  It was going to be damned tricky to send that refueling flight, Jack thought. The aborted burn had raised the SoD’s apogee, without altering its perigee. Now, at apogee—the point at which the SoD was furthest from Earth—they were running all the way out to 800 kilometers. The best option he could see was to send a Shuttle-Lite to catch up with the SoD at perigee, but at perigee, you were travelling much faster … Tricky as hell.

  And it got worse. Jack feared the thwarted missile attack might have damaged the SoD. They’d seen liquid hydrazine leaking from the rocket nozzle of the missile’s booster …

  … and that was all they’d seen, before the SoD’s rear-facing cameras glitched out.

  Now they had no ‘eyes’ behind the bioshield. If the engine or the external tanks had been damaged, they couldn’t see it.

  “Why are the cameras out?” Giles Boisselot queried, innocently.

  “Irregular electrical loads.” Menelaou jerked her chin at Jack. “It happened when he was dicking around with the engines.”

  Menelaou’s appreciation for Jack’s defensive maneuvers had taken a steep downwards turn.

  “Hydrazine,” she mused darkly. “That’s nasty shit. Extremely corrosive.” She ran through a litany of potential problems it could have caused. “Crushed insulation on the external tanks … impacts on the engine bells…”

  Not to mention thermal damage from the flaming cloud of propellant I ignited, Jack thought. He decided to mention that at a more opportune time.

  “Could’ve eaten through the insulation on the piping … we might be venting cryogenic fluid from the ETs …”

  “I could go out there and kick them,” Alexei offered. “It often works. Alternatively: duct tape?”

  Everyone laughed at the classic astronaut solution. Even Qiu and Xiang, who’d understandably held somewhat aloof from the rest of the crew over the last hours, smiled hesitantly.

  Jack felt glad that the two Chinese astronauts were still part of the team. That could have turned nasty. Although Qiu and Xiang had acted as shocked and outraged as anyone else, it was humanly impossible not to wonder if they had known, or should have known, about the missile attack. CNSA had denied any involvement. Unit 63618 was a separate organization, which had gone rogue without anyone’s knowledge—that was China’s official line, and knowing what he did about silos in behemoth organizations, Jack believed it. And yet … and yet. The Japanese weren’t buying it. Should he?

  Of all people, Lance had taken the lead in restoring trust among the crew, going out of his way to express faith in Qiu and Xiang. Given his status as a Fed, that had a dispositive effect.

  What sort of game was he playing? Jack wondered, watching him with disgust.

  *

  “Hannah?”

  She looked up, startled. Lance again.

  “Mind if I visit with you for a minute?”

  She liked it that he asked. She wasn’t really doing anything, anyway. She was just watching the hexagonal array, like an anxious mother hovering over a child’s cot.

  Lance eased himself through the hole in her ‘ceiling.’ He floated down to her level, hair standing on end. “About the potential damage to the engine—”

  “The risk is significant,” Hannah interrupted. “I explained this to Kate. I told her all the different ways both the MPD and the booster engines could be damaged back there. It needs to be checked out.”

  “Well, that’s what I wanted to talk about,” Lance said. “I’m going to suggest a spacewalk.”

  “Oh, no,” Hannah said immediately. “I wouldn’t recommend that. Not at this stage. The reactor’s been throttled down, but it’s still hot.” She thought about embarking on a detailed explanation of dose rates and relative absorption factors, but decided not to. Lance’s absorption factor for lectures about radiation was low. Ha, ha. She settled for saying, “You don’t want to go back there now. Wait a few days.”

  “Do we have a few more days? The refueling flight is going to come, and then we’ll be on our way.”

  “I’ll believe in that refueling flight when I see it.”

  “It’ll come,” Lance said, demonstrating a child-like faith in NASA. “And then what? Are we going to burn out of orbit without even checking for damage?”

  “I know, I know! It’s a problem.” Hannah weighed the risk/reward equation in her mind. “Well, I guess you could peek. But I would object very strongly to anyone going behind the bioshield.”

  “But it’s not gonna kill anyone to just take a look from here?”

  “No.”

  “Gotcha. Appreciate it.” Lance pushed off and ascended back to the tube.

  “If you can get my cameras fixed, that would be great,” Hannah called after him. “But be careful.”

  She settled back to watching the readouts and trying not to think about how much she wanted a drink.

  *

  Lance floated up to Jack, who was mindlessly watching the news. He’d actually begun to rethink the advantages of the Ka communications system. Yeah, it was great having television on board. The downside was they had television on board.

  “Hey, Kildare.”

  “Yeah?” Jack said, as pleasantly as he could.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Huh?”

  “Spacewalk,” Lance explained. “We need to find out if the ship is damaged. This shit is getting ridiculous.”

  Jack uncurled in the air. He glanced aft from the kitchen area, across the bare expanse of floor that would eventually be their hydroponic garden. Menelaou, Qiu, Xiang, and Boisselot were sleeping, or at least hanging out in their coffins. The cute little red ‘occupied’ squares were visible on their coffin lids. Alexei was doing his shift on the bridge. Hannah was in Engineering, as usual.

  “Kate wants it done,” Lance said. “Hannah said it’s fine as long as we’re careful.”

  Jack frowned. Without a word to Lance, he floated up through the tube to the bridge and asked Alexei for a location check.

  “That’s the Andes down there,” Alexei said.

  “So we’re passing through the South Atlantic Anomaly,” Jack said. “Fantastic.”

  The South Atlantic Anomaly was an area where Earth’s inner Van Allen belt dipped down to within 200 kilometers of the surface. The anomaly was like a witch dancing over the Atlantic, foxing satellites and frying chips on insufficiently hardened spacecraft.

  “Yes, I am expecting the computers to crash any minute,” Alexei said. “Are you getting shooting stars?”

  Jack shook his head. “Lance wants to go out there.”

  “About fucking time!” Alexei exclaimed, employing one of his favorite English expressions. “I’ll go with him.”

  “No, mate, you’re on bridge duty. Just monitor the radio.”

  Jack went back to the hab and said curtly, “You’re on.”

  They flew down to the storage module, which was between Engineering and Secondary Life Support. Eight spacesuits hung on the wall. Each astronaut had his or her
own suit. They made a colorful array: gunmetal gray for the NASA astronauts’ suits, blue for Boisselot of ESA, red for the Chinese pair, pale khaki for Alexei’s Orlan suit, and white for Lance’s old-style NASA suit.

  Lance had previously explained at length, as if he were some sort of expert, that the older suit was actually superior to the Z-2. The newer design had been rushed into production for this mission; it wasn’t field-tested.

  Jack didn’t care about that. He liked the Z-2 for its greater flexibility. Also, the integrated life-support pack, rising up in a smooth cowl around the back of the helmet, made you look a bit like the aliens from the Predator movies.

  He climbed into the plastic-smelling garment, amusedly remembering the minor kerfluffle when there’d been an online petition for him to carry a British flag into space.

  As it was, all he’d brought from England was a few small things from his parents … and Meeks’s ashes.

  He brushed his fingers over the bellows pocket on his suit’s thigh where the capsule of ashes resided.

  They checked each other’s seals, and entered the airlock to pre-breathe oxygen. The whole time they were in there, Lance gassed about the political situation on Earth. It was like he didn’t want to think about the task awaiting them.

  CHAPTER 47

  Earth down there. The total blackness of space out here … except for when streaks of light crossed Jack’s vision. These were the ‘shooting stars’ Alexei had mentioned. What they meant was you were taking rads.

  A two-hour pre-breathe had brought them right back into the South Atlantic Anomaly again.

  Let’s just get this over with.

  Tethered, Jack moved hand over hand along the trusses, inspecting the outsides of the hab modules. This was the easy bit, so they were doing it first. Lance went up one side of the truss ‘tower,’ Jack went up the other.

  The tower enclosed the turbine room and the ‘bottom’ three hab modules like a scaffolding. Clinging to the inside of the titanium/aluminum trusses, Jack shone his helmet lamp on the sides of the modules, checking for dings and dents, or any signs of corrosion.

  Two landing craft clung to the outside of the truss tower: a Dragon and a modified Shenzhou. Like baby koalas riding on their mother’s back, the Dragon and Shenzhou would accompany the SoD all the way to Europa.

  If they ever made it out of Earth orbit.

  The truss tower terminated in a mighty steel disk, built into the bottom of the main hab, which incorporated all of the bearings and seals. If the hab were rotating at the moment, Jack would’ve had to turn back here. It wasn’t, so he repositioned his tether and floated around the outside of the main hab, between the rim thrusters. That took him to the bridge.

  Bolted onto another disk on the 'top' of the hab module, the bridge was the only non-cylindrical module, sporting a nose cone to deflect microimpacts. The rule still held that all spaceships had to be gray. There was no color on the SoD at all. The exception that proved the rule was an engraving of that daft dove logo on the outside of the nose cone, done in hard-wearing pink and green enamel.

  Jack maneuvered to one of the bridge portholes. He tapped on the transparent aluminum with his emergency torch.

  On the radio, Alexei shouted, “Blin!!”

  Jack had been intending to pretend he was an alien, but Alexei’s mild swear cracked him up. “Pancake?”

  “It’s a well-beloved curse word, asshole,” Alexei said over the radio, with dignity.

  “So much for your krutoi image.” Mr. Tough Guy. “Pancake, pancake.”

  “I have heard you saying ‘Sugar’ instead of ‘Shit’ when Meili is listening.”

  “That’s different. It’s this thing we have called chivalry, you may have heard of it.”

  “Don’t let Kate catch you talking about chivalry. She’ll throw you out without your spacesuit.”

  Chuckling, Jack suddenly pictured Lance listening to all this, and felt ashamed. “No damage to the modules that I’ve seen,” he said, getting back to business. “Lance?”

  “Everything looks fine over here,” Lance said. “I’m going back to inspect the engine now.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Alexei said. “It’s too hot.”

  “Hannah said it was OK.”

  Jack thought: How do I wish to kill thee? Let me count the ways … “I’ll sort this, Alexei.”

  He scrambled back along the truss tower. On the way, he suffered two more shooting stars.

  Lance clung to the bioshield, as if standing on a parapet, looking down at the view of Earth. His head and shoulders were above the rim of the massive steel shield / tank. As Jack floated up towards him, Lance floated higher, up through a gap in the truss. His tether belled out behind him in a loop. Jack grabbed it in one hand and yanked him back behind the shield.

  “What’s the point of being out here if we don’t check the engine?” Lance said. He had a point, certainly.

  Jack attempted the mental arithmetic. South Atlantic Anomaly + residual reactor radiation. The latter was the biggie. But the other factor in the equation was Jack’s lifetime dose of radiation. After all the time he’d spent in space, he was already rather warm. And he had five years to go.

  “Too much fun stuff coming out of the reactor,” he said, trying for a jokey tone. “We’ll peek. That’s all.”

  Letting go of Lance’s tether, he climbed to the edge of the bioshield, holding onto the trusses above his head. He popped his head up. He was looking down the length of the truss tower, past the radiator fins that stuck out through the trusses, and the convex heat reflector between the fins and the external tanks. Holding still, he strained to see any wisps of vapor. If the hydrazine spill had holed the ETs, or the piping, that would be the giveaway.

  Nothing.

  “Looks fine,” he said.

  “Yeah, but we should go down there.”

  Lance started to climb over the bioshield.

  Jack grabbed him by the top of his PLSS, the life-support backpack attached to his spacesuit. “If you go down there, you won’t come back!”

  As the words popped out of his mouth, it dawned on him that Lance might have a good reason for going down there.

  To screw with the engine.

  Going back there would chop Lance’s life expectancy down to a few days, but maybe that would be worth it to him. Or his masters.

  Jack remembered the panic on the bridge as the missile raced towards them.

  Lance freaking out: Use the railguns, use the railguns.

  Wasting time which they could have used to dump the booster, like Mission Control wanted.

  Surely Lance must have known that the railguns weren’t even loaded …

  His time-wasting failure to obey orders would have killed them all, right there, if not for the ‘fiery rings of doom’ that Jack and Meeks had dreamed up one rainy day in Wales.

  So the missile attack had failed—

  —and now Lance was trying another way.

  “You go back there, then!” Lance said, as Jack pulled him back down behind the bioshield. “Are you pussy or something?”

  Jack blurted, “Did you know about Unit 63618? Did you know they were going to try to blow us out of the sky?”

  It seemed unbelievable. But Jack had learnt the hard way that the federal government would go to any lengths, and sink to any depths, to cover up their own guilt.

  So—had the NXC plotted with the Chinese to destroy the SoD, to cover up the evidence of their original sin of destroying Firebird Systems and murdering Oliver Meeks? Quite conceivably, yes. It was all about institutional longevity for these boys.

  Lance twisted around. “Yeah, I knew about Unit 63618,” he snapped. “I even snuck up to their perimeter one time. Soldiers chased me away. But no, I did not know they were going to shoot a freaking missile at us. We thought they were building their own spaceship. They take out the SoD, launch their own mission—the MOAD’s theirs. But for that to work, it has to not be obvious to the whole world that they sh
ot down the SoD. So yeah, dude. I was surprised.”

  “Lance—“

  “But it still doesn’t feel right to me. I still think there’s a spy on this tub. A saboteur. It ain’t me. Is it you?”

  Jack stared at him in horror. His reaction had nothing to do with Lance’s tirade. Lance was oblivious to the fact that his sudden twisting motion had had a disastrous effect. The fabric cover of the PLSS had torn loose in Jack’s hand. It undulated behind Lance like a superhero’s cape.

  Now Lance’s back bumped against the bioshield, and the hard cover of his PLSS came off and floated away.

  Jack instinctively dived past Lance to grab it.

  Stupid goddamn noob hadn’t even made sure the cover was latched properly!

  “Hey! What the fuck?” Lance said.

  “You’ve lost your PLSS cover,” Jack gasped. Seizing the wandering plastic rectangle in one glove, he grasped the edge of Lance’s PLSS with the other. The interior of the unit was a tangle of pipes and connectors, crammed in around the liquid oxygen tank. To Jack, it was like looking at his mother’s garden: everything beautiful, everything in its proper place.

  “Lemme go,” Lance said.

  “Don’t move!”

  “Are you OK out there, guys?” Alexei said.

  “Yes,” Jack said. “We’re fine.”

  Liquid oxygen tank.

  LOX heater.

  A skinny little tube connecting the two.

  Jack whispered, so quietly that he could hardly hear it himself, “How does it feel to be helpless, Garner? Does it give you a little more sympathy for others?”

  “What? What’d you say?”

  “Ollie was helpless. He was in his fucking wheelchair when you shot him.” Jack’s vision tunneled, so that he seemed to be looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Everything was far away but crystal clear. He reached into the PLSS, grasped the tube connecting the LOX tank to the heater, and yanked it loose.

  Then he replaced the cover.

  “OK. You’re good to go,” he said, giving Lance a light slap on the shoulder.