Android: Free Fall

by William H. Keith

  I pulled out my PAD and ran some quick calculations. We’d been accelerating at 1.5 gravities for ten minutes. That put us 2,700 kilometers below Midway, and falling toward Earth with a speed of around nine kilometers per second.

  Okay…so when the explosion went off, we’d been 33,086 kilometers above sea level…and that meant we were 61 minutes from impact.

  Maybe we wouldn’t have time for that work pod. I called the Space Elevator Authority command deck, up at Midway, tagging the call Urgent-one, and adding SOS to the subject line. A moment later, a woman’s face appeared on my display. The ID line beneath her face read “K. Garcia.”

  “What do you want?” she snapped. “We have an emergency here and—” Then she realized who she was talking to. “¡Gracias a Dios!” she exclaimed. “We’ve been trying to reach someone in your pod! Are all of you all right?”

  “I don’t know about the other two decks,” I told her. “Everyone on Deck Two is fine.”

  “We’re still checking the cause of the failure,” she said.

  “It was a bomb,” I told her. “Probably pretty small. Hull integrity and pressure are okay, at least so far. But it seems to have knocked us off the track.”

  She nodded. “Exactly. We’re tracking you in free fall east of the tower.”

  “Are you going to be able to get a work pod down to catch us?” I asked. “I’m figuring something like fifty, fifty-five minutes before we hit the atmosphere.”

  “We’re looking,” she told us. “We have no manned craft available, however. And our projections…” She stopped, then shook her head. “Let’s just say that an intercept and capture maneuver is very delicate, and we don’t have anyone we can get down there fast enough.”

  Right. We were only a couple of thousand kilometers below Midway…but with each passing second we were nine klicks farther down and two further to the east. If it took them, say, half an hour to get a ship ready, there wouldn’t be time to catch us before we hit the atmosphere.

  “You do have someone,” I told her.

  “Who?”

  “Me.”

  “And who are you, sir?”

  “Captain Harrison, NAPD. I flew Strikers during the War.”

  I could tell from her expression that she was checking up on me on a different screen…and possibly checking the stats for a Striker, a space superiority/strike fighter. “Oh…oh! I see, sir. But…but you’re inside the passenger pod.”

  “If you can express me a work pod with enough delta-V,” I told her, “and send me the access codes, I could teleoperate from here.”

  The conversation descended into vector technicalities. There was no way I was going to get enough delta-V down from Midway to actually capture the beanpod and shove it back into orbit, but we just might find a work-around.

  “Delta-V” is the physics term for a change in velocity, and it’s used as an expression of available muscle power in a rocket, relating available reaction mass to the mass of what needs to be moved. A beanpod has a total mass of about 140 tons. A capturing spacecraft would have to slow that mass to zero, then accelerate it against Earth’s gravity either up to orbital velocity or back to Midway. That sort of thing takes a hell of a lot of fuel.

  A far more realistic plan was simply to slow the falling pod enough so that it would survive re-entry—say, to below a half kilometer per second or so. We still needed to work through the details, but it should be possible to decelerate the falling beanpod if we could get a work pod down here with enough fuel to carry out the maneuver.

  What we needed was a work tug with a total reserve delta-V of eight or ten kps, and fifteen would be better. Available work pods and tugs near the Midway platform included WT-20 Rangers and WT(L)-44 Steeplejacks; the WT(L)-44s were typically configured for total delta-Vs of 25 kps. So far, so good.

  Unfortunately, if a Steeplejack started off from Midway with full tanks, she would expend half of her reaction mass just catching up with the falling beanpod, and use much of the rest effecting a rendezvous and capture. There wouldn’t be enough fuel left to decelerate the pod, much less drag us back up to Midway.

  As I discussed this with Ms. Garcia, she suddenly looked away, spoke with someone off-camera, then interrupted me.

  “I’m very sorry, Captain Harrison. One of the techs here just pointed out…”

  “What?”

  “Sir, we’re showing another failure in your pod. The telemetry shows that your parachute release panel is inoperative.”

  I sagged inside.

  Even if we were able to survive re-entry, we would not survive the impact at the end of the trip. The beanpod had no engines—not even maneuvering thrusters—and the emergency airfoil parachute was the pod’s only chance for carrying out a soft landing.

  “What kind of failure are you showing?” I asked.

  “Just ‘panel inoperative,’” Garcia told me. “It may be an electrical fault.”

  Yeah, or someone popped an access panel and snipped a wire, I thought. Whoever had planted the bomb would have known that beanpods carried a chute just in case of a rail failure. They’d wanted to make sure we didn’t reach the Earth’s surface alive.

  One of the elderly women seated on the other side of the compartment was watching my face. “We’re not really in orbit, are we?” she said.

  “No, ma’am. We’re not. We’re falling. We have…” I checked the time. “About fifty-one minutes before impact.”

  And less than that to live if we hit the atmosphere at nine kilometers per second. I wasn’t sure what the heat resistance of the beanpod’s outer shell was, but 9 kps was more than fast enough to turn us into a particularly brilliant shooting star, streaking down through the sky east of the Beanstalk. By an extraordinarily unlikely coincidence of mathematics and physics, a convenient rule of thumb states that the peak temperature in degrees Kelvin of the shock layer around a body entering the atmosphere is equal to the body’s velocity in meters per second. Nine kps translated to a reentry temperature of 9,000 degrees.

  We would cook long before what was left of us slammed into the ground.

  I turned back to Garcia’s anxious face. “Look, if we can get a pod down here,” I told her, “we can fix the goddamn parachute. What’s the beanpod status up there?”

  She looked confused. “We have four down-Stalk beanpods in-dock,” she said, “but when the…when the emergency took place, we put a hold on all descents.”

  “So you have an empty beanpod available? Good! Here’s what we’re going to do.”

  Velocity is velocity, whether it comes from a rocket expending fuel, or a beanpod accelerated by diamagnetic impellers down a Beanstalk travel rail.

  Take a work tug. According to Garcia, they had one with nearly full tanks that could be deployed immediately—a WT-20 Ranger with extendible remote arms and auxiliary RM tanks. Maneuver it next to an empty beanpod waiting on the guide rail beneath Midway Station and have it latch on to the recessed grappling holds on the beanpod’s hull.

  And then accelerate the beanpod down-Stalk at 1.5 gravities, dragging the tug along for the ride.

  Ten minutes later, the tug would let go, traveling, now, at nine kilometers per second. Hold the acceleration a bit longer, and the tug would be traveling faster, be able to catch up with us and overtake us. It would have to use some of its fuel to match our two kps lateral velocity, and to carry out the actual rendezvous…but most of its fuel supply would be available for deceleration.

  It would be damned hairy, but it just might work.

  “We’re running the calculations now,” Garcia told me.

  I’d already done so, as we talked. Assuming no mistakes, no misses in the rendezvous or problems in target acquisition, no telemetry drop-out, no problems at all out of the thousands of things that could go wrong…

  We might be able to slow the falling pod to somewhere around one or two kilometers per second.

  Which still gave us a good chance of being cooked on the way down. But it was the be
st option we had out of very few choices.

  “Okay, Captain Harrison,” Garcia told me. “We’re maneuvering the tug now. It should be on its way to you soon.”

  So now there was nothing to do but wait.

  “What…can we do?” one of the businessmen asked. At least the other passengers were calm, though wolf-boy looked like he was going to hyperventilate.

  “You can take your PAD,” I told him, “and try to make contact with the other two decks on our pod. Call SEA to get a passenger e-ID list, okay?” He nodded. “SEA Control has been trying to reach people on-board the pod. They probably didn’t get through on the other decks, though, because of panic. I want you to try to reach someone, anyone, on both decks, and keep trying until you do. We need to let them know we’re working on the problem, and that they need to stay calm and quiet, right?”

  I’d seen what panic could do to a few people trapped in a tight space. I didn’t like thinking about what might be happening on the decks above or below this one.

  The man nodded. I looked at the other three businessman. “You,” I said. “Use your PAD and help him. Keep trying until you get the message across.”

  “What about us?” one of the construction workers asked.

  I looked him up and down. He was a big, beefy man, with powerful hands. My first impression was to tag him as better in the brawn department than in brains.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mike,” he told me. “Big Mike Morales.”

  “Okay, Mike. You and your friend are now Deck Two Security. I want you to keep an eye on everyone else. They are to stay strapped in at all times. I don’t want anyone bouncing around the cabin, understand?”

  The beanpod was tumbling very slowly. Any spin would be giving us some artificial gravity…but we were smack at the center of the cigar-shaped pod so we weren’t feeling it much. To all intents and purposes, we were in zero-gravity.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Anybody gets out of his seat, if anybody even looks like they’re going to panic, you can use any amount of force you feel is justified. Got it?”

  “I understand, boss,” Morales said, and he grinned. The other passengers showed varying degrees of alarm, but there was no shouting or screaming.

  “How long do we have?” the kid with the snakeskin face asked.

  I glanced at my time display. “Forty-two minutes,” I told her. “Plenty of time.”

  But that was a lie. If this worked at all, it was going to be damnably close.

  I looked at Jones. He was still breathing a little hard, and his eyes were unfocused, but he was being quiet, at least. He saw me looking at him, and wiggled a bit in his seat. “You think you could get this thing off my hands?” he asked.

  I considered the question, then shrugged. “Sure. But if you give me any trouble, Big Mike over there is going to put you to sleep, and he won’t be gentle about it. On my orders.”

  Jones agreed, and I used my pen-blade to slice through the zip-strip. He thanked me and rubbed his wrists. And I made sure my PAD was recording.

  “So…while we’re waiting,” I said in a light and conversational tone, “you care to tell me anything?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Bullshit. You knew there was a bomb on-board this beanpod. You were watching me up at Midway to make sure I went on-board. Who were you reporting to?”

  He shook his head, but his eyes were looking desperate.

  “You planted a bug on me when we first met, while we were headed up-Stalk last week. That means you knew who I was, and you knew—or guessed—that I was working on the Dow case. You followed me onto the beanpod, and managed to disappear once we reached Midway.”

  Still no response, but his breathing was faster, and I saw perspiration beading on his upper lip. A droplet came loose and slowly, slowly settled toward the deck.

  “That bug guided an assassination team to me when I was out on the lunar surface. You probably already knew that Mark Henry was out there…but when you knew I’d tracked him down and that I was going out to bring him in, you decided to kill both of us.”

  “It wasn’t me! I didn’t try to kill anybody!”

  “Then who was it? Who’s pulling your strings?”

  No answer.

  “Okay, let’s talk about you. You’re not a clone, are you?”

  This time he shook his head, surprise written on his face. “No…but I don’t know how the hell you figured that out. They told me no one would be able to tell the difference!”

  “Oh, it was a good g-mod. I’ve met some Jones-model clones, and you’re close enough to be their twin. That was the idea, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s your name? Your real name?”

  “Federico Cavallo.”

  “Federico. Good. Go back a few nights, Federico, to the twenty-third. You were with Coleman and Hodgkins that night, weren’t you? I’m thinking Coleman was the killer. She pretended to be room service, or some such…and when the door opened she went in with her monoknife. Hodgkins followed, with that mining laser. But you were there, too.”

  “No! I wasn’t!”

  But I saw the flare of his nostrils, the quick, slight, sharp dilation of his pupils. And that told me I was on the right track.

  “That night didn’t go down the way it was supposed to, did it?” I continued. “Mark Henry was supposed to take that laser, break into the room, and kill Dow…and maybe carve up Eve as well. A crime of passion, right?

  “But Henry balked and ran. The poor guy was terrified, and his clone conditioning had him by his throat. So Coleman decided to modify the plan. She would use the monoknife, because the laser might not kill Dow immediately. Aiming the thing is tricky, and it takes time for a laser, even a 100-kilowatt tunneler, to burn through muscle and bone. So she sliced, and Hodgkins followed up with the laser to make it look good. But there was still a problem. Eve.”

  This time, he gave the smallest of nods.

  Very often, if you can hammer a suspect with everything you know and everything you think you know, even when you can’t prove it, the sheer weight of the material will lower a suspect’s defenses, and he’ll start confirming parts of the story…and even adding some bits that you might not have known.

  “Someone,” I continued, boring in relentlessly, “had to take her out. She wasn’t in on your little conspiracy, was she? So you went in behind Coleman with a taser. You shot her, right here…” I tapped my solar plexus, right at the bottom of my ribcage. “You shot her and 40,000 volts knocked her out of action, at least for a little while, and incidentally scrambled her short-term memory. You thought she wouldn’t be able to remember who came in and killed Dow. I guess you didn’t know just how tough a bioroid is.”

  That last bit was a calculated gamble on my part, but a pretty good one, I thought, for a spur-of-the-moment ploy. He wouldn’t know for sure what Eve remembered, or whether the taser had even had the desired effect. A roboticist might have been able to predict the exact effect of 40,000 volts on a bioroid with fair accuracy, but this guy wasn’t a roboticist. By hinting that the taser shot had failed to affect her memory, that the bioroid had remembered everything, I put more doubt in his mind…and convinced him that I knew the whole story.

  “No,” he said slowly. “No, she wasn’t supposed to remember anything.”

  “There were three of you in that room, weren’t there?”

  “Yes.”

  “You shot Eve. Coleman used her monoknife on Dow. And Hodgkins used the laser to make it look like the deed had been done by a mad clone with a mining laser.”

  He mumbled something.

  “What was that?”

  “Yes,” he said, loud enough to hear.

  Loud enough for my PAD to record him. And I was willing to bet that Lily had been recording, too.

  “So…do you want to tell me who put this little bit of theater together?” I asked. “Or shall I tell you?”

  He looke
d at me sharply, then, eyebrows questioning. “It…it was Coleman. She was the one running it all.”

  “C’mon,” I said, sneering. “Do I look stupid? Coleman hates androids, yeah, but something on this scale is way beyond her reach. I think she might have come up with the idea in the first place, maybe when she learned her boyfriend Dow had dumped her for a ’roid. I think she took that idea to her boss, Thomas Vaughn. Or…was it someone even higher? Someone on the board of Humanity Labor? Like Geraldo Martín?”

  His pupils dilated again. I was zeroing in on-target.

  “There had to be a pretty damned big organization behind her to put this thing together. Micro-tracking devices. Skyhoppers at the Sinus Medii. Some pretty sophisticated intersec software cracking, along with some slick efforts to compromise security at a number of levels. Who’d you have doing your programming? Noise Reilly?”

  I actually had other ideas about that, but I was trying to prime the pump, trying to get him to start naming names.

  “No,” he said. He slumped in his seat, almost trying to take on a zero-G fetal curl.

  “Who pulled the strings, Federico?” I asked him.

  “You’ve already got it all figured out,” he said sharply. “You don’t need me…”

  “Apparently Martín and Vaughn don’t need you either, Federico,” I said. “They must know you were arrested and brought on-board this pod. I didn’t notice any last-minute attempts to stop departure, did you?”

  “We’re all…expendable,” he said.

  “All but the very top. Coleman, Hodgkins, you…you’re all expendable. What about Vaughn? What about Martín?”

  “Look, you don’t understand! They’ll kill me if I talk!”

  I moved closer, lowering my voice so the others wouldn’t hear. “Seems to me, Federico, that you’re already going to die. If we do get out of this mess your friends have put us in, I’ll arrange for protection…but right now the only thing you have going for you is my sweet, loving, and understanding nature. Cross me and I throw you to the wolves…and I don’t mean Fuzzy-face over there on the other side of the pod. Help me and I’ll help you…unless, of course, we slam into Amazonas and none of it matters after all.”