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

by Felix R. Savage

  Now Xiang and Qiu smilingly quaffed energy drinks, accompanied by dynamic text effects.

  “Tell you what it is,” Lance said. “They want to take over the mission. Look at that ad, they’ve literally pushed us into the background.”

  Skyler sighed in frustration. “And therefore they sabotage the ullage motors …? Maybe it was an accident.”

  They escaped the city traffic and drove north. Industrial sprawl scabbed the land. The Dong Yangfun Industries Inc. factory loomed over a back road. At the gates, they had to wait for their interpreter to show up before they could be admitted. Lance shook hands with the podgy, cheerful little interpreter without cracking a smile. Skyler knew what he was thinking: This is pointless.

  They toured the factory, accompanied by their interpreter and a manager. Skyler was shocked. He’d expected the production floor to look like something out of a brochure from Foxconn, Shenzhen’s largest and most famous electronics supplier. It looked more like a sweatshop. Young men and women sat bent-backed at long rows of tables. They weren’t even wearing masks, let alone head-to-foot protective gear. They worked with soldering irons, crimps, and tweezers.

  “This is where we assemble the power distribution units,” said their interpreter.

  Skyler moved closer, and almost tripped on the cables trailing over the floor. None of the assembly line workers even looked up. Maybe they’d been told not to talk to the gweilo visitors. Or maybe they had quotas to make.

  The Spirit of Destiny—and ultimately, the outcome of humanity’s encounter with the MOAD—depended on the dexterity of overworked twenty-somethings in the armpit of Shenzhen.

  Mindboggling.

  “Let’s see the test area,” Lance said.

  Another room filled with rows of desks. More young people, system-level-testing the units with tabletop electronic measurement instruments. More bowed heads.

  They left the factory the back way, past the ventilation fans of the company cafeteria. The smell of pork soup blew into their faces. Rain began to drizzle down.

  “I wouldn’t entrust the safety of a goldurned Christmas hog to that assembly and test process,” Lance said, watching their interpreter run through the rain to his own car.

  Skyler nodded. “Quality assurance ultimately depends on the test equipment. So what are we gonna do, chase down the makers of the measurement instruments?”

  “This whole thing is a wild goose chase,” Lance said bitterly.

  “Flaherty has to cover his ass.”

  “At least you email him. Tell him we gotta massively tighten up the ground inspections. This shit is frightening.”

  Skyler, in full agreement, got out his phone and began to type. He had the SDIMP platform installed on the device.

  A worker dashed across the yard to them. She looked about seventeen, and carried a plastic bag. When she reached them, she gasped, “Spirit of Destiny?”

  “Hey honey, what can we do for you?” Lance said.

  “Please give.” She pushed the bag at Lance. “Spirit of Destiny … Qiu Meili. For her!”

  The plastic bag turned out to contain a teddy-bear. It held a soft white ball emblazoned with the word EUROPA in English.

  Once the girl had run back inside, Skyler laughed out loud. “And you thought she might be a whistleblower …? Just a Qiu Meili fan.”

  “Yup, that’s pretty funny,” said Lance, and tossed the teddy-bear out the window on the highway.

  But they had gained valuable information, Skyler thought. No way on earth would that girl have knowingly sabotaged a component meant for the Spirit of Destiny. Nor would any of her coworkers, he guessed. Chinese support for the mission ran broad and deep.

  Which meant it was looking more and more like the sabotage must have occurred in orbit.

  Shit.

  They were stalled in traffic again. “I got better things to do,” Lance fumed, without specifying what those better things were.

  Skyler looked at his phone. “The SoD crew are landing right about now.”

  So they flew to Beijing.

  CHAPTER 34

  China!

  The skyline of Beijing imprinted itself indelibly on Jack’s brain. No matter that he’d seen this cityscape many times on TV, the reality came as a shock to the system. He stared out of the high-speed train—a goddamn maglev!—like a country bumpkin.

  London had nothing on this place.

  New York? L.A.? Hickvilles.

  This was the big city. This was the future, for better or worse. Not just a few, not just a few dozen, but hundreds of skyscrapers stabbed into the low, leaden clouds. The big screens on their summits flashed like technicolor lightning, veiled by the haze and the gathering twilight.

  “Pollution,” Menelaou said. She handed out surgical masks.

  People hurried along with their heads down like New Yorkers used to do in the days before the Earth Party took over. Few of them seemed to be wearing surgical masks.

  “Oh, Jack!” Qiu giggled, pointing. “There’s you!”

  He missed it that time, but caught the same advert five minutes later on a different skyscraper. His enormous image grinned whitely, stuck his thumbs up, and climbed into a capsule resembling a Dragon 2 with the serial numbers scraped off. It was the most cringeworthy thing Jack had ever seen. Good thing Alexei wasn’t with them—he’d have laughed his arse off. “What was it an advert for?”

  “Razors,” Qiu said happily. Breathing the particulate-matter-enriched air of her native land seemed to pep her up. “Don’t you remember the shoot?”

  “No.” He vaguely remembered signing something.

  “It is probably CG,” Xiang Peixuan said. “I am advertising beer.”

  After that it became a game, spotting their own faces on billboards and screens. Qiu and Xiang won by lengths. Understandably, they were the most popular members of the crew here.

  There was a black-tie reception that night, and then on the morrow a tour of the Forbidden City. Jack, hungover, got in trouble for taking pictures in the wrong place, or with the wrong kind of camera, or at the wrong angle, or something—he couldn’t understand the soldier who told him off, and the soldier couldn’t understand him, and they ended up shouting at each other until someone from the consortium hurried along to smooth things over.

  After that, Jack was in no mood for another nine-course dinner with another bevy of officials and celebrities.

  Shark’s fins again, I bet.

  Birds’ nests, too. Or some other bloody endangered thing.

  He quietly slipped out of their hotel and sloped off to Sanlitun—a district characterized by Google as an ‘upscale expat haunt’—where he had an appointment with Theodore Zhang.

  The appointment amounted to a text from Jack this afternoon, after his row with the PLA soldier— “In your neck of the woods. Drinks on me” — and Theo Zhang’s reply, which was mostly four-letter words, but expressed warm enthusiasm for the idea of drinks.

  Theodore Zhang had been one of the first people to invest in Firebird Systems. Well, his fund had been. But his fund was a one-man band, headquartered in NYC, with a branch in Beijing which was actually Theo’s home. He had inherited piles of green, was Jack’s impression, and unlike most Chinese princelings, had also inherited a brain to go with it, and a nerd’s fascination with aerospace.

  “They blackballed me from the SoD project,” Zhang said. “I have a company specializing in aerospace telemetry and precision guidance systems. We bid on the inertial guidance system contract, but it went to a different company.”

  “It’s a feeding frenzy,” Jack said. He was drinking a Tsingtao. He’d had a hell of a time getting here. Took the wrong train, had to backtrack. People staring. They were staring at him here, too. No wonder, as he was the only white person in the bar. He and Zhang sat at a shabby wooden table. Graffiti adorned the bare concrete walls. Loud Chinese pop played. “You know, Theo, this doesn’t strike me as an upscale expat haunt.”

  “Sanlitun? Upscale? Wher
e’d you hear that?”

  “Google.”

  “Oh, Google’s wonky. Their search algorithms have been compromised,” Zhang said, as if Jack should have known that. “Anyway, Google doesn’t have a presence in China. The Party kicked them out. In this country, you have Party connections, or you have nothing. That’s why my company didn’t get the SoD contract.”

  “No doubt, mate. It’s a racket.”

  Zhang drained his beer and opened his second one by banging it on the edge of the table. He had five bottles lined up in front of him like bowling pins. He wasn’t looking very well, Jack realized. A former distance runner in his Harvard days, he used to exude preppy good cheer. Now he seemed sour. His clothes were seedy, too—a baggy black blazer and matching trousers. Flipflops on his feet. “How’s Ollie?” he said.

  Jack’s world turned sideways for a moment. Zhang didn’t know Meeks was dead!

  Throwing caution to the winds, he related the whole sordid story, including his belief that Meeks had been murdered by the NXC. As he told the tale, anger crowded out sadness. It was a good trade-off for Jack, and one that he made every time he remembered that night.

  Zhang’s eyes got bigger and bigger. But when Jack finished speaking, he didn’t respond immediately. He toyed with the beer caps lying on the table. “That’s a shame,” he said eventually.

  Jack closed his teeth. “Yes, it is a shame,” he said.

  “Ollie would have been very interested in something I saw recently.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When I got your text, I thought, OK, I can tell Jack and he’ll tell him.”

  In a way that would still be true. Meeks was with Jack. He never entirely went away. “Tell me.”

  “I can’t leave the country, did I mention that?”

  “No, you didn’t. I thought you had an American passport?”

  “It’s useless when they stop you at the airport. Anyway, this is all because my company bid on the SoD contract. We should have got that fucking contract. We were this close! They were considering our bid. That’s when I visited Unit 63618.”

  Jack shook his head. “Am I meant to know what that is?”

  “It’s in western China. It’s a launch facility.”

  “Oh, part of the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center?”

  The Jiuquan facility was where CNSA launched most of its satellites, and also its payloads destined for the SoD.

  “Near there,” Zhang said. “But not very near. The Gobi desert is pretty big.” He took another gulp of beer. “Unit 63618 is a hit-to-kill launch site.”

  Jack sat back. Suddenly conscious of the people around them, he glanced uneasily at the drinkers. Most of them looked like goths, Beijing version. Two guys in bomber jackers, sitting at the bar, stood out. But they had their backs to Jack and Zhang and they were chatting with the barman.

  “It’s OK,” Zhang said. “You may have noticed that most people in China don’t speak English. So anyway. I saw the main base, the launch pad, and the instrumentation sites. That’s what they wanted our technology for. Precision guidance for long-range missiles. It wasn’t for the SoD at all, although the same agency was managing the procurement.”

  “CNSA?”

  Zhang waggled a hand in a very American gesture: kinda sorta.

  “Right,” Jack said. “CNSA is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the PLA. So they’re testing hit-to-kill interceptors?”

  “That’s been going on for years,” Zhang clarified. “This is bigger than the American SLS. With our guidance system it could hit a target as far up as geostationary orbit.”

  Jack felt a chill. “Maybe it’s for destroying space debris? There’ll be a lot of crap left behind in orbit when we go.”

  “Maybe,” Zhang said. He opened his fourth beer. His face had flushed red in blotches. “So anyway, let’s talk about something different. What’s it like to be famous?”

  “Oh, the adverts. It’s bloody embarrassing.”

  “Everyone in China knows your face,” Zhang laughed. “You’re bigger than Tom Cruise.”

  Christ. It hadn’t even dawned on him. That’s why people had been staring at him all night, of course.

  “Theo, is it all right for you to meet with me?”

  “Of course it’s all right,” said Zhang, who was starting to slur his words. “It’s a free country. Oh, wait.” He theatrically slapped his forehead.

  “I wouldn’t want you to get into trouble.” Jack pushed back his chair and stood up.

  “Where are you going? I’m telling you, it’s fine. The Party’s blacklisted me. I’ve been un-personned. I no longer exist. At least I still have savings in the US.”

  “I can’t help you get out of the country,” Jack said. “But I’m going to get you home.”

  He heaved Zhang to his feet. They walked out of the bar into raucous noise. Stalls and open-air seating spilled into the right of way. Jack dragged Zhang through a crowd of girls who were defying the November cold in hot pants and microminis. Something odd: they all had patterns of little red dots on their faces, like Hindu bindis, but many more of them, clustered like freckles on their cheeks and foreheads.

  “What’s up with the little red dots?” he said to Zhang, to distract him from complaining that he wanted to carry on drinking.

  “Oh, that. It’s a thing. No Earth Party here, but acupuncture isn’t illegal yet. I’m not going home. It’s not even nine o’clock.”

  It was ten thirty. “Listen to your Uncle Jack. You’ve had enough.” And if Zhang was telling the truth, it wouldn’t be good for him to be seen with Jack. Zhang might not care what happened to him, but Jack did.

  He flagged down a taxi on the main drag and climbed in with Zhang, who reluctantly volunteered his address. This turned out to be a ritzy highrise on the Chaoyang Road. Jack said to the taxi driver, “Wait.” He watched until Zhang weaved into the foyer.

  Uneasily, he settled back against the grubby white seat cover. “Four Seasons Beijing,” he said.

  “Shen me?”

  “Four Seasons Beijing. Hang on.” Jack fished out the city map he’d picked up in the hotel’s foyer. He pointed to the name of the hotel. “Here.”

  “Dong le.”

  The taxi started. Jack folded his arms and watched the city slide past.

  Unit what was it?

  63618.

  In the Gobi desert.

  A launch facility for hit-to-kill interceptors.

  With a jolt, he clocked where the taxi was. Zipping along in a river of traffic. Streetlights illuminated gray Stalinist cubes set well back from a typically broad Beijing street. Trees. This wasn’t the way they’d come. “Hey, are you sure this is the right way?”

  “Wo ting bu dong.”

  Jack perched on the edge of the seat, all thoughts of Unit 63618 driven from his mind. The taxi sped on. Now the neon of the city center lay behind them. Ahead was nothing but traffic and darkness.

  Hell with this. Jack waved his hand beside the driver’s face. “I want to get out.”

  “Wo ting bu dong.” The driver moved his head aside as if Jack’s hand was an annoying fly.

  Jack remembered things he’d seen on Google when he was researching Sanlitun. Travellers’ stories of being taken for a ride, way out into the country, charged the earth. Robbed of all their belongings.

  You couldn’t trust Google anymore, Zhang had said. It was glitchy.

  But Jack trusted the evidence of his eyes, and this was definitely not the way back to the Four Seasons.

  “I said stop! I want to get out!”

  The driver didn’t bother answering him at all this time, but he had to stop at the next red light, because there were dozens of cars ahead of them, and the moment the taxi came to a halt, Jack threw the door open and stepped out. The driver yelled in surprise. Jack slammed the door and ran across four lanes of halted traffic, zigzagging through diesel exhaust fumes. The light changed. A lorry blared its horn. Jack leapt onto the pavement and the lorry accel
erated, missing him by a hair.

  Panting, he glanced up and down the long, empty sidewalk. Where the hell was he?

  What an arsehole that driver was!

  Better get off this street before he comes back.

  Jack did not know why the driver should come back, instead of cruising for an easier mark elsewhere, but in the back of his mind he heard Alexei relating horror stories about the USSR. How people used to disappear.

  Alexei was talking out of his arse, of course. He was too young to remember the USSR. And even if that kind of thing used to happen—this wasn’t Moscow circa 1990, was it? This was Beijing in 2018.

  Jack hastened back the way they’d come. It would be good to get back to the bright lights and the crowds, anyway. Safety in numbers.

  He reached a cross street. The city was a grid. He’d parallel on the next street over.

  As he turned the corner, he looked back and saw two men walking after him, briskly.

  Jack’s stomach formed itself into a cold, hard knot.

  He walked faster. The traffic noise from the wide street behind him swallowed the sound of his trainer-clad feet. He looked back again.

  The two men turned the corner, following him.

  Jack fished his phone out of his coat. It was a special NASA phone, which exclusively utilized voice-over-internet protocol. Alexei was in bloody France, so he dialed Koichi, who’d come with them to China.

  Ring. Ring.

  He crossed a traffic-less street and turned another corner.

  “Jack?”

  “Yeah, Koichi, it’s me. Sorry about this, but can you swing transport? I need a pick-up.”

  “When?”

  “Ideally, now.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Somewhere in Beijing. Use the phone location app …” Jack turned for another look at the two men behind him.

  They’d closed the distance to half of what it was.

  They were just passing under a streetlight.

  Jack recognized the two bomber jackets who’d been drinking at the bar while he and Zhang talked.

  As he stared, not quite believing his eyes, trying to convince himself these were two different men, they sped up. One of them called out to him in Chinese. It sounded like a command.