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

by Felix R. Savage

“No, wait up,” Travis said. “Maybe he was just destroying the evidence. Like a kind of a James Bond thing.”

  “Yeah,” Skyler said. “That’s right.”

  Josh folded his arms. Skyler smiled fiercely. He’d got them on the back foot.

  “So what’s up, man?” Travis said. He said to Josh, “If we got this one that wrong, I want to hear it from his own mouth.”

  Josh said grudgingly to Skyler, “You know you’re this close to being on a watchlist?”

  That shook Skyler. “Why?”

  “You don’t have Facebook, you aren’t on Twitter, you only use your Harvard email account. You’re still using a dumb phone. In the year 2012.”

  “I guess that pisses you guys off?”

  “I’m just wondering why you’re so …” Josh waved one hand, inviting Skyler to fill in the blank.

  “Cautious,” Skyler said. “I’m cautious. It’s common sense, like you said. I don’t understand people who do Facebook and stuff like that.”

  “So you don’t hate America?” Travis said, eyebrows raised.

  Skyler decided to be honest. That meant taking a moment to think it over. He had never really considered the question of whether he hated America or not. The closest he’d come was a vague sense that maybe America wasn’t all bad, but that was no more than instinctive contrarianism, because everyone he knew in academia did hate America.

  “OK,” he said. “It’s like this. Some songs, the lyrics are stupid, but the melody’s beautiful. For example, Imagine. The lyrics are a bunch of half-assed utopian bullshit. But the tune is a classic. I guess that’s how I feel about America. I love the melody, even if I don’t like a lot of the lyrics we’re singing right now.”

  Travis looked at Josh, pooching out his lips. “That’s pretty good,” he said. “I might steal that.”

  “So why’d you burn our business cards?” Josh said.

  “Because I don’t need to call you.”

  “OK.”

  “I’m in. You didn’t mention the compensation, but I’m in.” It’s got to be better than an assistant professorship at Ohio State. He decided it would be undiplomatic to say that out loud.

  Both of the CIA guys laughed. Then Travis shook Skyler’s trembling hand. “It’s OK. Those weren’t our real names, anyway. I’m Tom Flaherty.”

  “You don’t look Irish,” Skyler said.

  “I’m what they call black Irish.” Chuckle, chuckle. “That was a joke, son."

  Skyler laughed.

  “That's OK, not many people appreciate my sense of humor. I run this here government-funded tinfoil-hat operation, and this’s my right-hand man.”

  “Lance,” said the pale-eyed one. His handshake was cold.

  CHAPTER 6

  Hannah Ginsburg had a hangover, and it wasn’t even Monday.

  She drove into work with the California sun beating in her eyes, sunglasses not helping. At least the car was OK. Be thankful, as her Jewish grandmother would have said. It could have been worse. She’d rear-ended someone’s Tesla last night as she pulled out of her parking place near La Cuevita, the best tequila bar in Greater Los Angeles.

  She drove into the western parking lot at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and parked. She got out, walked around her second-hand Camry, and stopped at the rear fender.

  There was a noticeable dent. She’d seen that already. Now she noticed specks of blue paint glinting in the dent. She pulled a Kleenex out of her bag, squatted down, and scrubbed at the flecks for a good two minutes before realizing how stupid she was being.

  No one had seen the fender-bender. The owner of the other car might not even have noticed the damage. (Of course they had.) She should have left a note with her contact details on the windscreen, but she hadn’t, so they’d never know who scraped their fancy-schmancy Model S. It could have been worse, Bubbie. So much worse. Hannah could have wound up with a DUI. She could have woken up somewhere else, instead of at home in her cozy little studio apartment in Highland Park. That happened, sometimes.

  She walked towards Building 36. On the way, she grabbed a large coffee from the cart on the mall. She gulped it as she hurried through the woodsy JPL campus.

  There were two Hannahs.

  One Hannah got drunk, and sometimes woke up in the wrong bed, and now, apparently, also backed into other people’s cars.

  The other Hannah was the flight dynamics team lead for the Juno Project. She painstakingly calculated orbits and burn timings, nursing the pioneering Juno probe through space. Destination: Jupiter.

  These two were not the same person, and never the twain should meet, she was firmly resolved. As long as she kept her work life and her personal life separate, she’d be OK.

  By the time she reached her desk, she felt more like her work self. She still had a headache. It would take another hour or so until she was hitting on all cylinders, so she used that time to clear out her email inbox.

  “Hey, Richard? Did you get this?”

  Hannah leaned around her computer. She pitched her voice to reach across the open-plan office to Richard Burke. The lanky, balding systems engineer was the Juno Project’s lead scientist, making him the senior person on the Juno team here at JPL. He was kind of sexy, Hannah thought, with his 70s-style moustache and tanned forearms, although she’d never flirt with him, because he was not only married but her boss as well.

  “The thing from Suzanne?” Burke said. Hannah nodded.

  From: Suzanne Stone

  Suzanne Stone was the Juno program executive. She hid out on the other side of the country, at NASA headquarters, and rarely poked her nose into the JPL team’s business.

  Subject: Request for emergency observations of Europa

  “What’s she smoking?” Hannah said. “She wants us to do a fly-by of Europa? That’s not in the mission. It’s not even possible. The probe’s aimed for a polar orbital insertion.”

  “They want to look for traces of that cryovolcanic eruption that was observed a couple of months back,” Burke said.

  This, too, was in the email. Hannah clicked on Suzanne’s link and skimmed the attached academic paper. She’d first read it when it was published last month. The lead author was a Professor Odo Meinritz from Harvard. His conclusion that Europa might be tectonically active would be fascinating, if true. To Hannah, it smelt more like an equipment malfunction. Either way, it had nothing to do with Juno’s mission to study the composition, gravity field, and magnetosphere of Jupiter.

  Ralf Lyons, the mission navigator, looked around the ficus plant between his desk and Hannah’s. “No way was that a cryovolcanic eruption,” he said. “Too hot.”

  “What was it, then?” Hannah said. “Aliens?” She laughed.

  Lyons laughed, too. “Yeah, the advanced civilization buried under the ice of Europa just blew themselves up.”

  “Do-doo-do-dumm-dummm,” Hannah hummed the famous bit from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  “Well, we could alter the orbit to do a longer fly-by of Europa,” Lyons said.

  “That’s what Suzanne wants,” Burke said.

  “It would depend if the propulsion system could hack it. Is your baby up to the job, Hannah?”

  They called the probe Hannah’s baby, because she’d worked with the Lockheed Martin team that built it from day one. Juno used a LEROS 1b engine that had been around since the 1990s, but Hannah had personally designed modifications to the engine bell that increased its specific impulse. She scratched her nose. “Of course the system is up to it,” she said. “But there are risks involved in increasing the dwell time in Jupiter’s radiation belts, and we’ll have to calculate the propellant usage really carefully, or we risk not being able to deorbit the craft when we’re done. On top of that, anyone who already has their observations planned is going to be, hmm, let’s say mildly unhappy, because Juno won’t be where they expected it to be, when they expected it to be there. Is this worth it?”

  Hannah had achieved success in her profession because she tho
ught deeply about risk, both on the scale of individual component failure and on the complex system level. She never let anything take care of itself. Whatever befell Juno on its way to Jupiter, chances were Hannah would already have planned for that eventuality.

  The one thing she hadn’t planned for was the bureaucratic foot of Washington stomping all over their mission.

  When she finished enumerating the risks of altering Juno’s orbit insertion, and sketching out how they could be managed, everyone in the office was grinning broadly.

  Lyons did a golf clap. “Hannah’s so got this.”

  She gave him the finger. “I just don’t get why this is even happening.”

  “Because Suzanne says it’s happening,” Burke said in a world-weary singsong.

  “Who is this Meinritz guy? How come he gets to go around our investigation team and come in through the Washington door?”

  “He’s screwing Suzanne,” Lyons suggested.

  “Suzanne is married,” Burke said peaceably. Lyons opened his mouth, probably to say that that never stopped anyone. Hannah saw him think better of it. There was an least one extramarital affair going on in this very office that she knew of. Some people weren’t as careful to keep their work lives and their personal lives strictly separated as she was. Burke went on: “Anyway, Suzanne wouldn’t request this if Bill hadn’t okayed it.”

  Bill Walker was the Administrator of NASA. The big boss.

  “I guess the Meinritz dude must be politically connected,” Hannah said, shaking her head. This reminded her that she still had a headache. She did a Gollum voice. “Oh, the corruption, it burnsss, my precious, it burnsss.”

  She reached into her desk drawer for ibuprofen. Time to start replanning the orbits to see how long she could get the craft near Europa, without cooking the avionics in their titanium box.

  Over lunch, Burke said to Hannah, “It’s nothing to do with Professor Meinritz. He approached our investigation team last month to ask for these observations, but he didn’t even get his foot in the door. This is coming from somewhere else within the federal government.”

  Hannah sipped her Snapple. Hannah’s Rule #1, the cardinal rule: No drinking at work. They were sitting out on one of the square concrete benches under the trees. In Pasadena, you could sit out all year round. She thought about what Burke had just told her. “You’re being kind of sinisterly vague,” she said.

  “That’s because I don’t know anything for sure. But a lot of this is going to be on you. Sure, you’ll have Ralf to help, but …” Burke rolled his eyes and bit into his chicken sandwich. “So I figured you should know as much as I know. Which you now do.”

  Hannah smiled at the lead scientist. Burke was such a nice guy. When political shit rolled downhill, it landed on him, but he never let it get to him. Never even raised his voice, just did his best to shield his team from interference. He and his wife had three lovely kids at a private high school.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I was thinking about it this morning, and it’s gonna be a fun challenge. I’m trying to increase the fly-by time near Europa without frying the control systems.”

  “It’s going to increase your workload,” Burke sighed.

  “I live for my work,” Hannah said gamely. The thing was, it was true.

  Some other people from the team came to sit with them, carrying food from the franchises and street carts on the mall. They finished lunch while speculating about the Atlantis investigation. The Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness was hearing testimony in Washington today.

  Hannah’s cellphone rang. She plucked it out of her bag and stared in horror at an unknown number. This had to be about the car she’d rear-ended.

  It was happening. Her work life and personal life were about to collide with disastrous consequences. The insurance wouldn’t pay out … she’d lose the car … everyone would find out about her problems … Cold with terror, she answered the phone. “Hello?”

  CHAPTER 7

  The chairwoman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee said, “We’ll proceed to Mr. John Kildare, mission pilot for STS-136, who was on board the Atlantis at the time of the incident.”

  No one called Jack ‘John’ except his Irish grandmother. He smiled at the chairwoman, who sat in the middle of the raised dais on the far side of the room, wearing a loud pink jacket. Other representatives and senators dotted the rows of chairs below the dais, facing the trio from NASA who’d been called to testify at the joint hearing on the Atlantis disaster: NASA Administrator Bill Walker, his deputy, and Jack. It should have been Greg Howard, but Howard was dead. So here was Jack, in his only good suit. The retired general who’d headed up the accident investigation board was also present.

  The big boss and his deputy were relaxed to the point of semi-consciousness. They had ramparts of Poland Springs bottles and Starbucks cups around their memo pads. Jack hadn’t asked for anything. He hadn’t realized the hearing was going to last all day.

  Now, finally, it was his turn. He cleared his throat. “Right. Thank you. It’s an honor to be here.”

  The C-Span television crew off to the side of the room faffed around, turning one of their cameras on Jack.

  “Can you pull the mic a little closer, Mr. Kildare?” the chairwoman said.

  “Sorry. Right.” This time, the mic let out a squeal of feedback. Off to a great start.

  The white-haired chairman of the Science Committee, a Republican from Missouri, spoke. “As I said in my opening statement …” He proceeded to recapitulate his entire opening statement. Jack sat patiently, trying not to sink back into the trance of boredom and unhappiness that had swallowed him as the hearing dragged on.

  It was just a bureaucratic formality. He mustn’t let it get to him. But he kept thinking about Greg Howard, who should have been here in his place. The mission commander had died on the ISS, of cardiac arrest. His death was now fodder for scientific enquiries into causes of death in space, and officially had nothing to do with the Atlantis disaster. But it was all connected in Jack’s mind. The ordeal of losing the space shuttle couldn’t not have contributed to Howard’s death. Meanwhile, the politicians’ longwinded speeches about safety and transparency struck Jack as missing the point completely.

  Even worse, they kept implying it had been NASA’s fault for putting the Atlantis in harm’s way. As if the mission planners could somehow have known the space shuttle would cross paths with a piece of deadly debris. As if space wasn’t irredeemably dangerous to begin with. They were already in the situation where even the contingency plans had contingency plans. No amount of redundant systems would ever make this job safe, and some of the pieces of debris orbiting the Earth were just too damn small to be seen by radar.

  The senator finally got around to his question for Jack, which was simple: “Did you see the piece of debris that struck the Atlantis?”

  Jack said that he had not, but he’d heard it all right. The politicians made skeptical faces. He got the feeling that at least some of them had just taken against him in reaction to his accent. Immigration was a big thing in Congress this year. Maybe for politicians, there was little difference between an illegal immigrant from Central America and a British astronaut with dual citizenship.

  Prompted by the white-haired Republican senator, Jack walked them through the Atlantis crew’s reaction to the impact and the actions they’d taken to stabilize the shuttle. About the only thing he didn’t mention was how he’d torn up a letter from his mother to check for leaks in the pressure vessel. That was none of their business.

  At last the senator circled back around to the lethal piece of debris. “In your opinion, Mr. Kildare, and note I’m saying in your opinion, where did it originate from?”

  Jack sat without moving a muscle. He felt Greg Howard’s ghost jogging his elbow, urging him to lay the blame on the Chinese. He committed himself to telling the truth. “It could have been a piece of the Chinese satellite that was destroyed in 20
07. Or it could have been shrapnel from the Iridium-Cosmos collision. Or something else. We just don’t know.”

  The senator sat back, grumpily. Howard’s ghost drifted away. Jack felt like he’d let him down. But Walker was smiling, and so was the chairwoman. They approved of the way Jack had managed not to actually give his opinion when it was asked for. The moment of danger was past, Jack had scraped through without damaging the NASA family or himself, and he was going to need a hot shower to wash off the taint of this place.

  “I’m done,” the senator grunted.

  One of the congressmen in the cheap seats below the dais stirred. Jack was mentally halfway out the door already. He sighed and settled back into his chair. This couldn’t last much longer …

  “The chair recognizes the senator from North Carolina. Mr. Colbert, go on.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Chairwoman. And I would also like to thank Mr. Walker and his staff for their diligence today. Now, I may have missed this, and I apologize, but I would just like to return to the mission, um, STS-136, the reason you were up there in the first place. I didn’t catch that, Mr. Kildare?”

  “Well, it was an NRO mission,” Jack said, assuming the senator knew what that meant. The National Reconnaissance Office provided satellite intelligence and imaging for all the other US intelligence agencies.

  “OK,” Senator Colbert said. “But I’m not really understanding why it was so urgent, the repairs to this satellite, why it was so important that we had to send a space shuttle up there and put American lives at risk. That part’s not making sense to me as we speak at this moment.”

  Young for a politician, maybe forty, Senator Colbert had a rumpled appearance and a way of talking with his hands that made him seem non-threatening. His question didn’t feel hostile at all, unlike the previous questions that Jack had had to field.

  “Well, obviously it is vitally important that we can continue spying on our allies,” Jack said, allowing himself a tiny detour into sarcasm. He smiled at the senator. “Russia, the North Koreans, China, and of course our friends in NATO—if Frostbite wasn’t watching them like a hawk, who knows what mischief they might get up to? If we were willing to risk American lives servicing the Hubble Space—”