Exo: A Novel

by Steven Gould

  I’d moved the major structural components into orbit and was dealing with the fiddly bits, shifting the inner and outer spheres so that all the connectors lined up, then carefully engaging their clamps and seals, when the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Sterling here.”

  “General. I didn’t think my Iridium phone would work out here.”

  “Iridium rotated one of their spares to point out. You just entered its cone. Since you’re over nine thousand kilometers away from it, its ‘footprint’ is a lot bigger than on Earth, but you’re heading northwest and it’s heading south so we’ve got about four minutes to talk.

  “Your current altitude is another nonlunar record, isn’t it?”

  “Huh. I guess so. But really, there should be a separate category for me. I cheat.” And, to tell the truth, I’d been more worried about Grandmother than space records.

  “We got a good return on your, uh, project there. They’re telling me it’s about eleven meters across.”

  “The outer hull has a diameter of twelve yards, so, yeah. That pretty good shootin’, Tex.”

  “What is it?”

  “Our new digs. We had a problem with the old one.”

  “Ah. I heard.”

  My stomach clenched. “You heard? Who told you?”

  “The CIA told the DIA who told me.”

  “Did they have something to do with it?”

  “Whoa, there. No! I was told they learned about it from your father. Didn’t he turn over a person of interest to them?”

  I exhaled. That made sense. This project was demanding too much from all of us for Dad to be off conducting interrogations, so I guess he outsourced it. “Ah. Good. I didn’t want to think they did, but it was a drone strike after all.”

  “I heard. The U.S. provided a four-man team of RPV experts to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. They’ll be helping with the debris analysis.”

  I didn’t know which was worse. People who wanted to kill us pawing through the wreckage, or people who wanted to help us doing it. “They better dress warmly.”

  “Your family is all right, though? My liaison got that part correct?”

  “At least so far.” I didn’t want to go into the tracker-implanted-in-Grandma story. I didn’t know if Dad had told them about that. “We hope our new place is beyond their reach. We hadn’t planned on starting Kristen Station for a few months.”

  “Kristen?”

  “It was Sally Ride’s middle name. Sally Kristen Ride.”

  “Station? A ma … womaned facility?”

  That was remarkably clueful of him. “General Sterling, I like you. Yes, it’s to be an occupied facility. Apex Orbital headquarters plus some space-medicine research and a guest room or two. Technically, it’s Apex Orbital Services Kristen Station, but Kristen Station for short.”

  “Yes. Round. So we’re seeing an outer hull. Does that mean there’s an inner?”

  “I’m sure we’ll do a video tour for the website when we’re done but yeah. Ten yards inside diameter—over fourteen thousand cubic feet of pressurized habitat. Less than half of the International Space Station’s shirtsleeve space but one has to start somewhere.”

  “You’re doing this by yourself? That’s a pretty big project for one small company. Do you need any assistance?”

  “With Kristen Station? Got a spare microgravity toilet?”

  “I don’t know. The two in the ISS were made by the Russians and NASA paid nineteen million for one of them.”

  “Well, we’ll let you know. We’re new at this so we’re probably going to make a bunch of mistakes.” Hopefully without killing anybody. I bit my lip. “You could get the assholes who blew up the house I was born in. I mean, I know that’s not what you do, but you could encourage all those security and intelligence people who do.”

  General Sterling cleared his throat. “Right. I honestly believe that there’s substantial pressure to do so, if just to prove to Canada that we aren’t conducting drone missile strikes within their national borders.”

  “Need to get back to work, General. I’ve still got three hundred twenty-one tons of water to bring up before I can put my interior assembly crew to work.”

  “Three hundred twenty-one tons? What do you need six hundred forty-two thousand pounds of water for?”

  “Shielding—micrometeorites and radiation. Also thermal mass. It goes between the hulls—one yard of water all the way around. It’s better than metal since it doesn’t generate secondary radiation.”

  I think I could hear his mouth working but he wasn’t managing actual words. Finally he said, “I was aware of the benefits. But we don’t do it because it costs too much to move water into orbit in those quantities.”

  I grinned. “You can’t afford to do it without somebody like me. I would gladly trade you twenty tons of water, delivered, for a working microgravity toilet. What’s your best lift cost right now? One thousand dollars per pound? At forty million that would be worth two, yeah? See what your friends at NASA would say to that.”

  * * *

  I tested all the connectors and flanges by twinning from the inner sphere to sea level, filling it pretty much instantly to 14.7 psi of normal mixed-air atmosphere. Then I did the same between the two of them.

  Both balloons—hulls—felt tight as basketballs. By the light of a chemical glow stick I navigated the space between the two spheres, going from connector to connector, but I couldn’t see anything wrong.

  I jumped to the interior. Our view port was pointing away from the sun and the earth and it was dark inside.

  The view-port assembly consisted of an aluminum pipe, three feet in diameter and three feet long, that connected flanges on the outer and inner spheres. The inner hatch was clear polycarbonate and opened 180 degrees, up against the fabric of the inner hull. This was to let people enter the cylinder and reach the outer window, the most expensive part in the station’s structure so far: two panes of aluminum silicate glass with an insulating layer of vacuum between them. There was an exterior optical coating to filter ultraviolet light and an exterior shutter made of Kevlar over an inch-thick layer of Dr. Seck’s experimental radiation shielding, which pivoted out of the way using an interior lever.

  I’d left the inner hatch open so I didn’t end up with a vacuum holding it shut. Again, I couldn’t tell anything from just looking. In any case, the suit was acting like it should at sea level so the spheres weren’t leaking so fast that they were causing my purge valve to bleed helmet air to match.

  I shut off the oxygen, purged the helmet, and took it off.

  My excuse was that I wanted to hear if there were any leaks. Truth was, I wanted to see what it was like. I flung the chem light away from me and watched it fly across the open interior of the station, then ricochet tangentially off the tight fabric again and again until it worked its way back to me, losing some energy with each collision.

  Out loud I said, “We have got to bring some tennis balls up here.” My voice seemed to vanish into the space, not inaudible, just not echoing. I wondered how the acoustic qualities would change once the exterior volume was filled with water.

  I’m sure when I pushed off the inner wall that the station moved significantly in the other direction, but the feeling was like sailing across a dark space, free as a bird.

  A bird that is currently being exposed to radiation and, if the right meteorite came along, vacuum.

  “Get on with it, girl.”

  I did spend some time listening at each through connection, but I couldn’t hear or see any signs of leaks.

  I put the helmet back on.

  Time to put the shielding up.

  We didn’t premix the fibers into the water this time. The frac tank wasn’t anywhere near big enough and we didn’t want to have to mix multiple loads.

  After just few experiments, I found I could jump directly to the station, just as I’d made it into the ISS, without having to hit vacuum first.

  I
twinned from between the hulls to outside, in orbit, evacuating the volume. As with the earlier sphere, it didn’t collapse on itself because there was no outside pressure to push in.

  We wanted as little air as possible in the shielding, so before I put the fiber bundles between—even direct jumps leaked a little—I left the bundles floating outside. I was glad they were bundled—plastic bags would’ve popped like balloons as soon as we arrived in orbit. I jumped them, one bundle at a time, between the inner and outer hulls and shook the fibers out of the bundles, raking them apart with my fingers.

  There was an electrostatic thing happening and fibers seemed to be accumulating on the fabric. When I’d shaken out all twenty bundles (ten bamboo fiber, ten synthetic wool) and disposed of the packaging, I returned to the interior and twinned to the Rosemont water reservoir in Montreal, five feet under the surface.

  I’d been thinking about using a swimming pool, perhaps an Olympic-sized pool, to keep down bacteria growth, but the people at BlimpWerks had nixed that.

  Fran Wilde said, “Bad enough that you have all that ionizing radiation up there. Chlorine is an oxidizer—that’s how it kills germs—and it will react badly with the nylon and the coatings. Please—no chlorine!”

  I thought Dad was crazy when he suggested a reservoir in Canada in the middle of the winter, but he’d said, “It’s completely underground and runs above sixty-five degrees. Very clean water—they renovated the entire reservoir in the last decade.”

  It felt freezing, but these things are relative. The water filled the space in less than fifteen seconds.

  When I untwinned, I stayed with the shielding. I was hoping that none of the fiber ended up in the reservoir. When I cracked another chem light, it was apparent that the fibers had thoroughly mixed through the liquid. I could barely see the light at arm’s length.

  * * *

  Cory let me use one of the new suits to return to orbit in twenty minutes, rather than requiring me to wait for twenty-four hours while the original suit dried.

  No geysers of ice crystals were spewing from the outer hull of Kristen Station. When I jumped into the interior, the reaction of my helmet’s oxygen feed to the inner sphere’s pressure told me we still had something close to one atmosphere.

  Grabbing the view-port frame and adding tangential velocity, I rotated the structure so the window pointed toward Earth. This was far easier than I’d expected, leading to the realization that the water wasn’t moving; the hulls’ fabric was sliding across it. The largest amount of resistance was where the water was flowing around the view-port cylinder as it dragged through the liquid.

  The inner coating of the sphere (a light gray so pale it was almost eggshell) reflected the bluish earthlight from the side opposite the window, diffusing it throughout the interior. This time when I kicked off the wall it felt far more solid than it had before, and I watched the surface ripple away from the point of contact, a slight pulsing wave more imagined than seen.

  I nearly vomited as the circular interior destroyed my sense of up and down. Well, that and my attempt at a quadruple somersault, wall-to-far wall.

  I returned to Cory’s lab and took off the suit and then, sure it was a stupid thing to try, I jumped right back to the station, arriving inside (GOOD!) beside the view port, in my long underwear.

  I knew we needed to get the life support going but I was more worried about CO2 accumulating around my face than running out of oxygen. I knew if I kept moving, it would be a long time before the air reached toxic levels.

  I gulped, suddenly scared.

  Come on, girl, it’s time.

  * * *

  I appeared inside the front door of Joe’s house. I could hear the TV going and called out, “Hello?”

  Ms. Trujeque stuck her head into the hall from the living room and said, “Oh. Cent! I didn’t hear you knock. I could swear that door was locked.”

  I shook my head and jerked my thumb over my shoulder. “I didn’t come through the door. Some of those reporters are still out there.”

  She blinked. We hadn’t talked since I was still attending Beckwourth High School back when I started dating Joe. That was before we had to leave town in a hurry. Joe and I had still dated after that, but secretly, to keep Joe from becoming a target.

  Then we’d had our breakup and there was even less reason for me to be hanging out with Joe’s mother.

  She gave me a doubtful look like, You look like a nice girl and not a demon from hell but you never can really tell. At least that’s the interpretation my imagination provided. “The reporters. Right! That’s why we’ve been making sure the door was locked. Come in! It’s just me and Joe. His brother and father are off shooting pool.”

  Joe was on the end of the couch closest to the TV and I guess he hadn’t heard my voice over the television because when I came into the room he shot to his feet and looked confused.

  There’s a lot of that going around.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “I wanted to show you something.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  I turned to Ms. Trujeque. “Do you have a couple of gallon ziplock bags and some paper towels?”

  “Sure. What for?”

  I said, “A quick science experiment.”

  We followed her into the kitchen. I folded four sheets of nice, thick, absorbent paper towels into each bag, tucked one into my back pocket, and handed Joe the other. “Keep it open, just in case.”

  “In case of what?”

  I smiled at Ms. Trujeque and I hope the smile didn’t look as weird and nervous as it felt. “I’m going to show Joe the construction on our new office. We’ll be gone about ten minutes.”

  Ms. Trujeque suddenly looked nervous. “You’re going to do that thing, like when you give him lifts to Stanford?” She’d never seen it. She’d only heard about it after Space Girl made the news and Joe was outed as one of the narrators on our satellite’s audio loop.

  I nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Where is your new office?”

  I looked at my watch. “Right now? It’s over Greenland.”

  I don’t think Joe’s eyes could have gotten any bigger. “Already? I thought the habitat was months away.”

  “Well … circumstances. We had to change the timing.”

  Ms. Trujeque looked from me to Joe and back again. “You mean space?”

  “Ten minutes only,” I said.

  “Won’t you suffocate? Or explode?”

  “Oh, no. It’s inside our station. A shirtsleeve environment.”

  She stared at Joe and I wondered if she was going to tell him not to. You could see it, a sudden terrorized expression coupled with the realization that he would do it no matter what she said.

  “What are the bags for?”

  “Space adaption syndrome.”

  She looked puzzled and I added, “Joe might vomit.”

  “Hey!” Joe said. “I will not!”

  “Better men than you have, but hopefully not,” I said. “Especially if you hold your head still. Do not swivel it around, do not indulge in vigorous motion. This trip is for looking, not doing, okay?”

  He started to nod but stopped himself. “Okay,” he said, instead. “No motion.”

  “Good. Treat your neck like it’s a rigid post. It doesn’t turn or tilt. Move your whole torso when you want to look at something. Slowly.”

  Ms. Trujeque tried to smile, but it came across as resignation. She said, “I’ll start some peppermint tea for when you get back. When I was pregnant with Joe I threw up every morning for four months, but peppermint tea always brought me around by lunch.”

  “That sounds great,” I said. I locked eyes with her. “We’ll be right back.”

  * * *

  Joe didn’t throw up when we first appeared in the middle of Kristen Station, but he yelled.

  “Sorry,” he said, breathing rapidly. “It’s not the jumping,” he explained. “It’s the falling.”
The feeling of falling, he meant.

  We were pretty much dead center in the sphere, the view port was “beneath” us, since our feet pointed at it. The port was no longer pointed directly at Earth, but a substantial amount of earthlight was still coming in the window and the giant, round room still looked amazing.

  “Eyes on me,” I said. “Up is away from the viewport. Down is toward it.”

  “Wow.”

  “Look, I didn’t want to say this in front of your mom and it’s a trillion-to-one shot, but just suppose we lost both hulls at once and you found yourself exposed to vacuum. Don’t hold your breath, okay?”

  He blinked and his eyes moved from my face to the sphere’s wall. “Would it really make a difference? We’d be dead in ninety seconds.”

  “I can have us back in the atmosphere long before that. But if you hold your breath you’ll rupture your lungs, right?”

  He took a deep breath, exhaled. “Embolism. Right. Don’t hold my breath.”

  I jumped in place, adding a foot-second toward the view port, and snagging his ankle as I drifted “down.” We settled, gripping the inner frame of the view port, on opposite sides. “Okay, now you’re lying on the floor looking down through the window.”

  He was clenching the improvised barf bag tightly but his color looked okay.

  I wasn’t used to looking at the earth from this altitude, or through a window for that matter. I’d been concentrating on the work: deploying the outer sphere, then the inner, hooking them together, and filling them. I’d been a good, hardworking Space Girl and I felt justified taking a moment now.

  It was late afternoon over the North Atlantic and we could see the terminator creeping across central Europe as the sun set. “Pretty cool, eh?” I said.

  Joe didn’t say anything and when I looked at him, my heart melted. He was using the paper towels from the improvised barf bag, but not to vomit. He was wiping the tears from his eyes.

  I swallowed. “I did that the first time, too. No matter how many times you look at it in magazines or TV or even on an IMAX screen, the real thing beats it all hollow.”

  His voice was hoarse. “How high?”

  “Orbital radius or altitude?”