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

by Felix R. Savage

  "It's vital that we keep the reactor running at a low power level throughout the coast phase, to preserve the stock of fissile material and keep out of the xenon pit," she said. "This means we will be generating far more power than we immediately need. We'll be running Sonic here pretty hard, about eighty percent of redline."

  “Sonic?” Jack said, looking around cluelessly.

  Hannah gestured to the engine, recognizable as such only by its length and slightly flared nozzle. Technicians were carefully aligning the helical coils with laser micrometers and sealing them in place with clear, evil-smelling glue. “Just our nickname for it. ‘Magnetoplasmadynamic engine’ is a bit of a mouthful.”

  “Ah,” Kildare said.

  Hannah wondered again why the powers that be had selected Kildare as the pilot of the SoD. Not only had the man got fired from NASA for punching a senator—or whatever it was he had done—there was a big old gap in his resume between then and now. His official bio said he’d spent the missing years in Nevada, rock-climbing. There had to be better qualifications to pilot the first spaceship humanity would ever build. Hannah instinctively mistrusted anyone with such a take-it-or-leave-it approach to authority—regardless of how much she liked the idea of senator-punching.

  "Epoxy?" Kildare asked, sniffing the air. "Isn't that rather brittle for this application?"

  Hannah smiled. "That's just to hold it in place before we pour in the Glidcop."

  "Copper ceramic composite?" Kildare’s eyes widened behind the goggles. "For thermal conductivity, of course."

  Hannah nodded. She was surprised; Glidcop wasn't well known.

  “That’s brilliant!” Kildare said.

  “Whoa there, curb your enthusiasm,” Hannah joked. “It’s OK. All you have to do is fly it.”

  “Koichi will be responsible for the care and feeding of the propulsion system,” Burke said. “In fact, there he is!”

  Burke waved to Koichi Masuoka, who came over to them with a glue gun in hand. Masuoka had left JSC to observe at the Rosatom fab for a while, then come back to participate in the engine construction process, at his own insistence. Hannah admired his dedication. He said that no one could fully understand a system unless they’d been there on the production line with a wrench—or a glue gun. Hannah fully agreed, and they’d become buddies, searching out Houston’s best ramen together on their rare evenings away from the production floor.

  “Great to see you, Jack,” Masuoka said. “As you can see, we’re making gradual progress.”

  "Koichi, they let you on the floor? Listen to, er, Hannah, here. They're encasing the whole ion channel in Glidcop. I wondered how they would get rid of the induction heating!"

  Hannah frowned. Contrary to her previous assumption, Kildare seemed to be clued-up about the engine. Uncannily clued-up. “Well, um, Jack,” she said, “I guess you didn’t waste your time away from NASA.”

  “Not quite all of it,” Kildare said.

  “Where did you say you worked in the private sector?”

  Burke started to intervene. He actually put a hand on Kildare’s arm. Kildare stepped away and said, “A little startup called Firebird Systems.”

  *

  The otherworldly glow of two smartphone screens illuminated the interior of Hannah’s beat-up Camry. The air-conditioning blew stale air in Hannah’s face as she looked up from Google. She glanced sideways at Koichi Masuoka. “Are you coming up with anything?”

  “Give me a minute,” Masuoka said, typing with one thumb.

  As they were leaving work, she’d asked him if she could borrow his Google-fu. “Any reference to Firebird Systems,” she’d said. “Or just Firebird.”

  For some reason, she didn’t feel comfortable Googling it from her work computer.

  “OK,” Masuoka said after another minute. “I found this.”

  He showed her a corporate website for Firebird Systems. It featured a lot of snazzy images and zero technical detail, as per usual for aerospace companies. Still, it was more than Hannah had found. “How’d you find this?”

  “It’s on the Wayback Machine. Not on Google anymore.” Masuoka looked as unhappy as Hannah felt.

  She clicked on “Company.”

  Only one individual was listed.

  Founder and CEO: Oliver Meeks.

  @firebirdmeeks.

  It had to be him.

  *

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Skyler said. “He’s dead.”

  “What happened? Skyler, you have to tell me the truth.”

  Hannah hunched over her phone. She’d called Skyler from the JSC parking lot, and he’d called back when she was halfway home. She’d pulled off the highway into the parking lot of a strip mall. Silhouetted figures moved around the entrance of the single open store, which seemed to be a vape shop.

  “I found this,” she said. No need to mention that actually, Koichi Masuoka had found it. A thread on a Japanese space otaku forum discussing the death of Oliver Meeks, allegedly by his own hand, on August 4th.

  Half-serious Japanese space otaku consensus: the aliens had done it.

  Hannah suspected otherwise.

  “Skyler, there is nothing about Firebird, nothing else about Meeks, nothing on the internet. It’s the dog that didn’t bark.”

  Skyler was outside. City lights blurred behind him as he walked, holding his phone up in front of him.

  Facetime. All the cool Feds are doing it.

  She knew, though, Skyler’s real reason for using Facetime was Apple’s NSA-proof end-to-end encryption.

  “I’m in San Francisco, Hannah,” he said.

  She wanted to ask him what he was doing there, but held her tongue. It was probably something to do with weapons guidance systems.

  “Things are falling to pieces out here. Google—Google—is falling apart. The customer-facing stuff is still running OK. The problems go deeper than that. If you were ever out here before the MOAD …”

  “MOAD?”

  “Mother Of All Discoveries. That’s what they’re calling it now. The alien spaceship.”

  “I see.”

  “Anyway, there was this optimism—this turbo-charged optimism, on a cultural scale, that things were going to get better. Silicon Valley was in charge of the future and the future was a high-tech John Lennon song. These people believed in transhumanism, OK? Even if they didn’t drink the singularity koolaid, they believed in their capacity to uplift humanity through technology.”

  “Then this happens,” Hannah said, understanding.

  Skyler nodded. The wind in San Francisco blew his hair around. Colorful crowds surged at the perimeter of the screen.

  “Then this happens,” he said. “And all of a sudden, they’re not in charge anymore. The power to save humanity has passed to a bunch of uncool engineers in Houston. To the extent that there’s overlap, it only makes the humiliation worse. SpaceX is having launch contract terms dictated to them by the SoD consortium. And Google is implementing takedown orders from the NXC.”

  Behind Skyler, something exploded. Skyler flinched, turned. Hot light oranged his face. “Fireworks,” he said.

  “Where are you exactly?”

  “Maiden Lane. I wanted to buy a new guitar.”

  “Did you kill Oliver Meeks?”

  Skyler’s face crumpled. The picture jostled up and down. Hannah saw stars bursting over the rooftops.

  Skyler’s face came back, too close. “I can’t say anything about that.”

  “Tell me the goddamn truth!”

  Now all she could see was his blurry, distorted lips. “I could lose my job—I could be murdered, Hannah, for telling you this.”

  “Tell me!”

  “Yes, he was murdered. Please believe me, I’ve felt completely shitty about it ever since. But I did not kill him.”

  “No,” Hannah said, “you didn’t.” Tears welled in her eyes. “I did.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “If I hadn’t asked for more in
formation about the steam generator … That was it, wasn’t it? He refused to give up the goods, so you guys killed him and took what I needed.” The tears spilled out, warping her voice, so she sounded closer to fourteen than forty. “If I’d had the courage to dig into the problem myself, I could have figured it out.”

  “That’s not what you said.”

  “It would have taken time. I thought I didn’t have time. But basically, I was being goddamn lazy.”

  She wept into the phone, baring her self-hatred to this kid she hardly knew. Her laziness had murdered Oliver Meeks. No matter what she did to make up for it, that knowledge would blight her life forever. “I can’t go on,” she sobbed. “I can’t go on.”

  “I’m coming,” said Skyler. “Stay there. I’m coming.”

  That made her laugh bitterly. “You’re in goddamn San Francisco.”

  “I’ll get on a plane.”

  Someone blurred behind Skyler, running. Yodelling cries fuzzed out the mic of Hannah’s phone.

  “What’s going on there?” Hannah cried.

  “Oh, it’s just this Earth Party,” Skyler said. “Google’s lost half their top people: they’re running for the hills. These are the ones who got left behind. They’d rather set fire to a Chinese restaurant than curse the darkness. Same old, freaking same old.”

  Knuckles rat-tatted on the window of Hannah’s car. She looked up to see a bulky silhouette looming outside the car.

  “I’ll call you back, Skyler,” she said, dry-mouthed with fear. She dropped the phone in her lap. Cracked open the window. “What is it?”

  The smell of some sweet vape drifted in through the window. “It’s not safe here, ma’am. Wouldn’t stop here if I was you.”

  “Why?” Hannah said, on the verge of panic. On her lap, her thumb clicked her iPhone dark. San Francisco and Skyler vanished.

  “Some of the boys talking ‘bout jacking your car.” The large man—who, it appeared, had come to warn her off for her own safety—jerked a thumb at the group in front of the vape shop. “Not the regulars, they cool. It’s the git-outta-town gang.”

  In the darkness, Hannah dimly saw a banner under the eaves of the strip mall where she was parked, stretched across the fronts of two unoccupied stores. It said: EARTH PARTY.

  She had literally learned about the Earth Party two minutes ago, from Skyler. She’d been so immersed in her work, she never even glanced at the news. She vaguely speculated that the Earth Party must be something like the Tea Party, with bonus arson and carjackings.

  “OK,” she said. “Thanks for warning me. I’ll—I’ll be on my way.”

  “You do that.” The man slapped the roof of her car and stood back.

  She drove back to her home that wasn’t a home, eyes blurred with tears.

  When she got there, she popped open her MacBook, and discovered that her own goddamn Twitter timeline had been messed with.

  The night they lost Juno, she’d exchanged tweets with some random guy who used the handle @firebirdmeeks. That must have been Oliver Meeks. If only she’d kept up that connection, Meeks might be alive today. Her immersion in her work had come at a hideous cost. She had completely forgotten about @firebirdmeeks until tonight.

  Now, his tweets to her had vanished. But she remembered some of them.

  @hannah_a_banana A mai tai sounds good right now!

  Yes. Yes, it did.

  She stopped at the liquor store on her way home. She never did call Skyler back. He Facetimed her again and again in the following days, but she never picked up. Eventually she blocked his number.

  CHAPTER 30

  “If you wanted to kill the Spirit of Destiny, you’d design something just like the Earth Party.”

  That was SoD commander Katharine Menelaou speaking, in November 2018, 400 vertical kilometers above the United States.

  Menelaou’s voice crackled into the airlock of the ISS’s new Inochi module, where Jack and Alexei were resting and breathing 100% pure oxygen.

  “I have no problem with people thinking the MOAD is a hoax, or even saying so. Freedom of speech. But someone should’ve drawn the line when they began to sabotage the political process. Do we have to wait until they actually bring down the federal government?”

  The occasion for Menelaou’s tirade was the daily news digest sent up to the ISS. Wikileaks had exposed that a group of hackers affiliated with the Earth Party had monkeyed with electronic voting machines across the US, flinging control of Congress to the Democrats in the recent mid-term elections. The revelations had plunged the machinery of the American government into chaos. No change there, then, thought Jack.

  “This needs to be fixed,” Menelaou said. “If we don’t have a functioning government, we don’t have a mechanism to provide funding to NASA and the SoD project. Of course, that’s a feature not a bug, from the Earth Party’s point of view.” Menelaou sighed loudly. “Step one: Persuade 90% of Americans that the government made the MOAD up. Step two: Discredit the government. Step three: anarchy, I guess. Who knows what the fuck they want?”

  Alexei coughed discreetly. “I was ten when the USSR fell, but I remember it well. Step three is brief, and leads very rapidly to step four: A few people get filthy stinking rich.”

  Menelaou laughed. “I’ll tell you what, Alexei, the Russian system of government is looking better all the time.”

  Alexei agreed wryly, “This couldn’t happen in Russia. No funding mechanism? The president signs a check.” A timer beeped. “OK, that’s two hours. Let’s go, Jack.”

  Jack pushed off from the wall and flew, legs first, straight into the lower torso assembly of his EVA suit, which was affixed to the opposite wall of the airlock. “Didn’t even touch the sides,” he whooped. He’d been practising this maneuver. Had plenty of chances to practise.

  “Careful out there, guys,” Menelaou said, adding sarcastically, “Not that either of you ever takes any risks.”

  Down on Earth, various parts of the globe might be spiraling into anarchy, but in low earth orbit, a group of twenty-five men and women doggedly continued to assemble the Spirit of Destiny.

  Jack squirmed into the rigid top half of his EVA suit. He joined the two halves of the suit together, aligning the water and gas connections for the suit ventilation. Then he put on his gloves, his visor and helmet assembly, and lastly his outer gloves. All actions he’d done hundreds of times now. It was starting to become rote, and therein lay the danger. He and Alexei checked each other’s seals.

  The final item on their checklist was to increase the pressure in their suits, to check for leaks. None detected.

  They picked up their tools and drifted out of the airlock, into the shadow of the ISS.

  The daylit expanse of Earth, clouds dotting the blue Pacific, stunned Jack with its beauty. He’d once been bored by Earth views, seeing them with a photographer’s eye as clichéd and old hat, but the MOAD had changed that. Everything became more precious when it was under threat—and Jack continued to believe the MOAD was a threat, even while people on Earth increasingly assumed that just because it hadn’t done anything threatening yet, it wasn’t going to.

  Tethers describing inertial curves behind them, he and Alexei floated along to the ‘clothesline’ which stretched a hundred horizontal meters from the ISS to the Spirit of Destiny.

  The spaceship was almost finished. It resembled a tapered 215-meter scaffolding with a humongous thruster array at one end, and a 60-meter-diameter cylinder at the other. This was the main hab module. Smaller modules snuggled inside the truss, between the main hab and the bioshield tank, which was only a little less big.

  Most of the scaffolding was temporary, there to assist construction workers with their tasks. Everything took so much more effort in freefall, where turning a screw, for example, made your whole body turn the other direction. But there’d been no other way. A monster like this could never have been lofted into orbit. Trusses, components, and pre-assembled modules had been built on the ground and sent up separat
ely, ready to be plugged into place. Ditto the engines.

  What remained to be done was all that plugging-in.

  Welding. Wiring. Plumbing.

  Jack used to be an astronaut, now he was a plumber. Alexei had morphed into a welder. It was all part of the job.

  They clipped onto the clothesline—a zip line like the ones in adventure playgrounds on Earth. Spider wheels, powered by little solar panel arrays, pulled them along in a smooth gliding motion that felt subjectively like falling towards the Spirit of Destiny.

  Away off on their left and right, horizontally level with the spaceship, giant nets held construction supplies and discarded packing materials. These nets also corralled the tanks of LH2 and LOX that had come up on the first ‘Shuttle-Lite’ launches. The construction crew pumped the liquefied reactants into fuel cells moored to the ship’s truss, and water and electricity came out. They used the electricity for construction. The water was stored in the bioshield, where it would be used as extra rad-shielding until the SoD’s engine needed it.

  The huge cylindrical tanks—ETs, external tanks dating back to the shuttle era—that had brought the reactants up from Earth had also found their way into the SoD’s hacktastic mission plan. Two of them had set off for Europa last year, powering the advance landers. Six more had stayed to become part of the SoD. They garlanded the engine end of the ship like cartridges in the chambers of a massive revolver. When the SoD broke Earth orbit, those ETs would be full to the brim with reactants—fuel for the ship’s liquid-fueled booster.

  Every gramme of this stuff had cost thousands of dollars to bung into orbit. The SoD had monopolized Earth’s launch capacity for two solid years. Every space agency and private company that could fling a can of bolts out of the atmosphere had been drafted in. The tempo of launches dwarfed anything in the history of spaceflight.

  To sustain the pace necessary to meet their launch schedule, everyone on Earth who’d had EVA training and would sign a release form had been roped into the construction force.