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

by Felix R. Savage

  “It was too late.” Skyler felt the back of his head, checked his fingers for blood. There was none. Visibly mustering his courage, he faced Jack. “It’s too late to hire Oliver Meeks. But we would like to hire you.”

  “You’re barking. I’m not a bloody scientist. I’m a pilot.”

  “Exactly,” Skyler said, “exactly! You’re a superb pilot.” His fast-talking East Coast gabble sped up to warp speed. “We’re finalizing crew selection right now. Every other agency has already selected its candidates. The Russians had to give up one of their slots to the Chinese. They were not happy about that, to put it mildly. We had to give one up, too. But we’ve still got one left.”

  Jack abruptly remembered: Seven folders in Katharine Menelaou’s stack.

  The Spirit of Destiny was to have an eight-man crew.

  “We’ve had a hell of a time finding a qualified pilot. Which isn’t exactly surprising when you think about the fact that we haven’t got a manned spaceflight program. At any rate, it means bringing back someone who flew the space shuttle. And I’ve just personally recommended to Richard Burke that that should be you.”

  Amazement warred with outrage. Jack was conscious of a blossoming urge to dance around the office singing hallelujah. That lasted all of a second before he realized what was going on here.

  He glanced up at the security camera on the ceiling.

  “It’s off,” Skyler said.

  Just how much power did Skyler have?

  The question answered itself. All of it. This stringy, peace-symbol-wearing guy, and his shadowy confreres, held the reins of power in this country.

  Including the power to commit murder and get away with it.

  “You’re trying to buy me off,” Jack said. “This is a bribe to keep me quiet, so you won’t get in hot water.”

  Skyler shook his head. After a moment, he said, “If it mattered that much, you’d be dead.” After another moment, he added, “America needs you.”

  Jack paced in the narrow space available, his thoughts careening between alternatives.

  “England needs you,” Skyler said, re-tailoring his pitch.

  Jack’s left hand throbbed. Blood dotted the gauze he’d clumsily wrapped around his fingers in the parking lot of a Flagstaff drugstore. He must have torn the scabs open when he knocked Skyler around, like a low-rent hooligan.

  He suddenly felt disgusted with himself, and weary beyond measure. He wanted to leave. Forget everything. Crawl inside a bottle of cheap whiskey and hide, like a wounded animal hiding in its den.

  But Jack Kildare had zero tolerance for weakness. More than the thought of failure, he couldn’t abide the idea of surrendering to his own petty flaws.

  “Please,” Skyler said. “Goddamn it, dude! Do you want me to get on my knees here?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Jack said. He ferociously scrubbed any emotion out of his voice. “Of course I’ll take the job.”

  When Burke came back in, Menelaou was with him. Both of them congratulated Jack, seeming pleased (Menelaou) and relieved (Burke) by his decision. “This is one of those days it seems like God is watching over our mission,” Burke declared.

  When Jack looked around from having his hand shaken and his ears tugged—a Menelaou trick—Skyler was still standing there. “Let’s set a time and I’ll introduce you to the team leaders here at JSC,” he said.

  That was when it dawned on Jack.

  I’m going to have to work with this guy.

  Impossible.

  The pendulum of determination swung back the other way. He drew breath to tell them he’d made a mistake, he couldn’t take the job.

  His eye fell on that dove on the wall. Burke had one of those posters in his office, too.

  Meeks, way back in 2012: This is the biggest test we’ll ever face … The Christmas lights gleaming on his face, red and green. Have we got what it takes?

  OK, Ollie. OK.

  “Looking forward to it,” he said.

  CHAPTER 29

  Hannah came into work to find an email from Skyler.

  Hope this is everything you need.

  She skimmed the attached documents, then dug into the specifications for a vortex generator to be installed in the steam drum.

  When she next looked up, the morning was almost over. Outside the window of her office, the cube farm was hopping.

  She walked out and hollered for everyone’s attention.

  “I think we’ve solved our problem.” She tried not to grin. Nothing was solved until it had been tested. But she felt good about this. “Prototype team, it’s time for another go-round!”

  Inga was absent.

  “Where is she?”

  No one knew, and Hannah dismissed it from her mind until she got home that night. She drowsily checked her email on her phone one last time while brushing her teeth.

  Dear Hannah, I’m very sorry. I have resigned from the Project. I go back to Germany.

  Best regards,

  Inga Pitzke

  Suddenly wide awake, Hannah spat out a mouthful of toothpaste, rinsed her mouth, and phoned Inga.

  “Hallo?”

  “Inga, it’s me. I just got your email. What’s happening? Something wrong?”

  “Ja. I did a wrong thing.” Inga’s voice broke. “I’m sorrry, Hannah, I can’t say more. Please don’t call me again.”

  “Where are you?” Hannah heard airport noise in the background.

  “Chicago. I fly to Frankfurt now.” Inga was definitely crying. “Give my good wishes to the team, Hannah, please. Goodbye.”

  Click.

  “So we’re going to need a new metallurgist,” Hannah told the team next morning, concealing her private concern.

  As worried as she was about Inga, she couldn’t go sharing details of Inga’s personal life in public.

  Not that she actually knew any details …

  I did a wrong thing.

  That phrase troubled Hannah. But Inga’s English wasn’t perfect. She might just have meant that something had gone wrong. What, though? A relationship? She’d never mentioned a boyfriend …

  For days, Hannah couldn’t get the sound of Inga’s long-distance sobs out of her mind. But inevitably, the matter slipped lower down her priority list. They built a new prototype. It passed the vacuum tests without breaking, exploding, or otherwise disassembling itself. Hannah flew to Russia to kick the tyres of Rosatom’s gas-cooled reactor prototype. While there, she was wined and dined every night by hard-drinking Russian colleagues, and had an erotic fumble with a dark-eyed atomic physicist.

  Couldn’t call it a romantic encounter, when she could hardly remember it.

  On the plane back, she sat with a fuzzy head and a dry mouth, ordering glass after glass of white wine from the cabin attendant, and wondering why she felt so … good.

  She’d broken all her rules in one five-day marathon of brainstorming sessions, brightly lit Moscow restaurants that smelled of onions, and booze-fueled sex.

  But the trip had been immensely productive. They’d determined that the reactor could easily power the magnetoplasmadynamic engine and the design baseload of the SoD, and still leave enough power for 'reserve functions'—a euphemism for the ship’s weaponry. The Russians had even offered a pair of compact electrolysis units, powered by plutonium radioisotope generators, for the advance landers that would land on Europa ahead of the Spirit of Destiny, to manufacture reactants for the ship’s return journey. The SoD was going to fly. So who cared if Hannah Ginsburg had a few drinks along the way?

  Not the Russians, anyway. ‘High-functioning alcoholic’ seemed to be Russian for normal. She smiled to herself. Maybe she’d found her spiritual home …

  Back at JSC, the next two months passed in a blur of frenetic activity. They specced the hardware, with the contractors feeding them their expertise and the workers standing around with lit welding torches. Then the performance modellers came back with the grim news that given the ship’s wet mass, the MPD engine simply did n
ot have the power to cleanly break Earth orbit. The ship would need a liquid-fuelled booster to help it escape Earth’s gravity well.

  But how were they to get millions of gallons of liquid fuel into orbit, without massively pushing back the SoD’s launch schedule? The planet’s launch-to-orbit capacity was already maxed out. And you couldn’t order up more Soyuzes and Falcons like buying new cars. Those things took years to build …

  It was Koichi Masuoka who solved the problem.

  “Maybe there is a workaround,” he said in his careful English. “I sometimes wonder why NASA never took the external tank all the way up to orbit before. Now that the shuttle is grounded, we could fly an ET full of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen up to orbit instead of the shuttle. But maybe there are not enough SRBs available …”

  Hannah’s flung her arms around the Japanese astronaut’s neck and kissed him. “If there aren’t enough SRBs? We have three hundred billion dollars. Oh yeah, baby! This will work!”

  Masuoka flushed pink. “Anyway, let’s do the calculations. Do we have the performance specs for the tank and SRBs available?”

  They did. But a new problem popped its head out of the weeds.

  “The plan works great in theory. Unfortunately, we can't do it just with SRBs," Hannah told Burke. "You can't turn them off once they're lit.”

  Burke's eyes were turned her way, but she knew that he wasn't seeing her. She waited patiently, recognizing a mind hard at work. And it was a brilliant mind. Burke might be an administrator now, but he was also the man who’d sent the Juno probe to Jupiter, solving hellacious engineering problems along the way. She’d brought this problem to him because she was at her wits’ end.

  “Liquid fuelled, right?” he mumbled. His hands moved aimlessly, touching his lips or tapping on his desk. It was only ninety seconds by the wall clock, but it seemed an eternity to Hannah.

  “Heh,” Burke said at last, a broad smile suffusing his face. “Use the engines SpaceX developed for the Falcon Heavy. You’ll have to give them a turbopump upgrade to handle LH2. Bolt two of them into a cylindrical housing. SRBs on the east and west of the external tank, Falcon engines north and south. Should get you up, no problem.”

  “Might work,” Hannah said. “That gets the reactants into orbit. What about the booster itself?”

  Burke sketched quickly on a pad of paper. He pointed to the cartoon rocket he’d drawn. “Here’s the Falcon-SRB-ET combo. We’ll call it Shuttle-Lite. Put it close to the construction zone. Then …” He sketched an arrow from the Shuttle-Lite to the truss representing the engine end of the Spirit of Destiny. “Bolt the Shuttle-Lite’s engine onto the SoD’s truss. There’s your liquid-fueled booster."

  Everyone called the ship the SoD—pronounced sod—now. The British gas-cooled reactor specialists had objected in the strongest terms, and Hannah gathered there’d even been diplomatic objections lodged, but no one cared what the Brits thought. What mattered was keeping the Chinese happy.

  Yet even that wouldn’t matter if the ship didn’t fly.

  Hannah stared at the sketch. “One isn’t going to do the job.”

  “Nope. See what six will do for you." Burke filled the back end of the truss with cartoon rockets. "Then take the ET and snuggle it inside the truss. It will hold six of them, like a sixpack of microbrews. See? Array them in a hexagon around the exit of the MPD engine’s exhaust. Keep the foam, for microimpact protection.”

  Hannah’s mind snagged on the word microbrew. She reminded herself that she didn’t even like beer, and elation swept the craving away. “That's brilliant, Rich! Standard hardware all around. Bet the tooling and jigs are still in place for the engines, at least.”

  “Call Elon now. We're going to need sixteen upgraded Falcon engines, for eight Shuttle-Lites.”

  “Why did six just turn into eight?”

  Burke's smile, wide before, seemed about to swallow his ears. She remembered how much he used to love this stuff before they turned him into an uber-bureaucrat. It was great to see him having fun again. “The advance lander team’s been making a stink recently,” he said. “Begging for launch priority, not getting it. This solves their problems, too.”

  Hannah got it before he could say any more. “Yesss! Bolt their hardware onto the other two external tanks. Fill up the ETs with reactants. Strap on Shuttle-Lite engines, and off they go to Europa. Woo-hoo!” She pumped both fists in the air, exhilarated. “The guys from the advance lander team are so going to owe us drinks.”

  “Eight flights should do it.”

  “Ten,” Hannah said beadily. “Stuff's gonna fail, you know.”

  “Get moving,” said Burke, giving her a light punch on the shoulder. “Hope it all works out.”

  Meanwhile, NASA sites throughout America were hiring three shifts to keep up with production demands. Stennis scheduled engine test firings so often that smoke plumes over the Mississippi bayou no longer elicited comment. Thiokol was racing to fabricate SRB segments as fast as they could. It got so frantic that even the infamous PEPCON facility was rebuilt to crank out the solid rocket fuel needed.

  It wasn't just NASA who was overtaxed. German engineers were speedily, but carefully, crafting the habitation unit for the SoD. Russian titanium mines were hiring anyone who would swing a pickaxe, forcing other industries to raise wages to hang onto their workforce. Even China relented on their self-imposed quotas for foreign purchases of rare earths, so that exotic alloys for the nuclear reactor piping could be fabricated.

  Hannah hadn’t seen Skyler for ages. He’d vanished from JSC, and so had a couple of the other Feds.

  The rumor was they were off in some God-forsaken place, observing tests of the SoD’s ‘reserve functions.’

  It had to be railguns. Hannah knew of no other offensive technology that required such huge energy accumulators. Well, maybe lasers, but all high-energy laser systems also required piping for the exotic chemical reactants involved. There was none of that in the SoD’s design. Just massive power leads and stacked high-farad capacitors.

  Hannah shook her head. Railguns. If the SoD encountered anything that needed that much stopping, humanity was already screwed. But on the other hand, she fully concurred with the principle of better safe than sorry.

  If it was railguns, they’d be made in Sweden, probably by Bofors, or whatever they called themselves now.

  Maybe Skyler was in Sweden.

  Hiking the fjords, falling for some blonde, beautiful … railgun designer?

  Hannah tried her best to put him out of her mind. After all, disappearances were hardly unusual these days. The sheer scale of the Spirit of Destiny project, and its ballooning importance in the eyes of the world, had sparked an ongoing bureaucratic fight to the death for control. The top echelons of NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, JAXA, and CNSA (a.k.a. the aerospace division of the People’s Liberation Army, as people were always muttering) warred bitterly for increments of decision-making authority. Unpredictable hurricanes of money swept away whole sub-organizations, broke them down to their components, and scattered blinking and stressed individuals around the globe. Hannah counted it a victory that she had managed to remain at JSC this long, and keep her core team together. She owed that largely to her friendship with Richard Burke, who’d developed into a world-class bureaucratic gladiator.

  Their greatest victory by far was retaining control of the entire engine development and construction process.

  And so, fourteen months later, Hannah stood on the glass-smooth concrete floor of the brand-new Orbital Processing Facility 1, a hangar-like building that stood beside the equally new truss assembly building. She watched technicians carefully slide precision-wound coils onto the main shaft of the ion channel for the Spirit of Destiny’s magnetoplasmadynamic engine.

  Turning to the flat-panel workstation where the designs were displayed, she smiled to herself. Gone were the days of a sheet of plywood on sawhorses, with three-ring binders and rolls of blueprints. This all-electronic construction cleanroom remind
ed Hannah of the days when she’d worked on Juno’s engine at the Lockheed Martin facility—in retrospect, maybe the happiest days of her life.

  She adjusted her goggles where they sealed against her crinkly blue microfiber 'bunny suit.’ Sure was nice not to have to worry about whether your fashion choices projected sufficient authority. Her nametag did the job by itself: GINSBURG (Propulsion Group Leader). She’d never been prouder of her title than she was at this moment.

  “Hannah.”

  She barely heard Burke’s voice over the staticky noise of her hood.

  “Hannah? She’s been down here since … actually, yesterday. I don’t think she sleeps anymore.”

  “No, I just die at sunrise,” Hannah said, turning from the floating images on the screen. “Watch out, Rich, you’re looking pretty tasty in that blue onesie.”

  Oh, hell. Burke had someone with him. The tall, broad-shouldered man extended a gloved hand. “Nice to meet you, Ms. Ginsburg.”

  Despite his blue bunny suit and enclosing goggles, Hannah recognized Jack Kildare, the mission pilot. She had met all the other crewmembers as they cycled through JSC for training, but this was the first time she’d ever met Kildare in the flesh. He’d been in his own coffin, the flight simulator at the other end of the flight line.

  “The man who punched a US senator,” she greeted him. “It’s an honor.”

  Kildare looked uncomprehending. “I didn’t punch a senator.”

  “At the Atlantis hearing?”

  “Oh. No, I’m afraid not. I didn’t even spill coffee on a senator. Only on myself.”

  “Too bad,” Hannah said lightly. US senators were slightly less popular at JSC than tarantulas. The kumbaya moment of unity after the first contact event had not lasted long. “Well, nice to meet you, anyway. I guess you’ve come to see my baby?”

  She gave Kildare a quick guided tour. Burke tagged along with them, interjecting an unneeded comment or quip whenever Hannah paused in her spiel. The result was Jack Kildare couldn’t get a word in sideways. Not that he seemed to have anything to say. Hannah took his glaze-eyed expression for the typical non-engineer’s reaction.