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

by Felix R. Savage

  “A radiation dosimeter?”

  “Yes! Amazing how compact everything is nowadays.”

  “Dad, we’ve got those in the ship …”

  “A portable one might come in handy,” his father said.

  His mother added, “We also got this made online.”

  A lightweight travel mug covered with slogans and jokes, ranging from ‘I heart Nuneaton’ to a cartoon of the SoD with the caption ‘I can’t believe the government is paying for this.’

  Jack grinned. “This is definitely coming with me.”

  The Meekses tactfully left, to give them some time together. The reporters of course besieged them the moment they appeared on the doorstep. Jack and his parents watched from behind the sitting-room curtains. His father muttered, “I’d like to see him mow some of them down with that Jag.”

  “Weren’t they divorced, Mum?” Jack said.

  “Apparently they were, but they’ve got back together. It’s funny, isn’t it? The death of a child often drives couples apart, but in this case it seems to have brought them back together.”

  The death of a child. The words hung in the air, reminding Jack that he was his parents’ only child. Without having an inflated sense of his own importance, he knew they both lived for him and through him. And now they were seeing him off on a journey more dangerous than any of his deployments in Iraq.

  He put a hand on each of their shoulders. “Mum. Dad. You may have heard some statistics floating around. Fifty-five percent … thirteen percent? Those come straight from the Department of Making It Up Wholesale. The truth is that no one has any real grasp of the risks, least of all me.”

  “That’s reassuring,” his father said dryly.

  “Right? But I promise you one thing. I will come back.”

  Wheeeeeooooow. Beep, beep, beeeep. EEEEEE!

  Those spooky noises he’d heard on the Atlantis suddenly echoed in his mind. He never had told anyone about that. He clenched his jaw in irritation. Why should he remember that now?

  “I will come back,” he repeated, forcefully.

  Later, autopiloting through the round of interviews the consortium had promised to the British media, he touched the capsule of ashes in his pocket. It helped to distract him from the wretched business of leaving his parents, possibly for the last time.

  He had to do something more for Meeks. It was a loose end. Yes, Jack planned to return to Earth, absolutely and without a doubt, but how could he set off for Europa in the first place, knowing that Meeks’s murderer was still walking around and thinking they’d got away with it?

  Maybe there was time. In a week, Jack would enter pre-flight quarantine at Kennedy Space Center. The door would slam on the possibility of further action at that point. So he had a few days. But where to start?

  Skyler, obviously. If anyone knew the truth, Skyler Taft did. Jack hadn’t seen the little twat since Beijing. Where was he, anyway?

  CHAPTER 40

  Skyler let himself into the Beacon Hill townhouse where he’d grown up. The frigid March wind swept in after him. “Hello,” he shouted.

  Standing in the hall, he heard faint explosions from upstairs.

  “Trek?”

  That had to be his brother Trekker playing a video game, but if Trek wasn’t going to come down and say hi, screw him. Skyler was only here on a duty call, and duty had been satisfied by the act of walking through the door. He didn’t have to actually see any of his family, much less talk to them.

  He wandered through to the kitchen. The kitchen table was covered with drying watercolors—Dad’s—and the huge natural-gas stove held a collection of pots which, on inspection, contained sour-smelling dye baths, not anything edible. Skyler opened the refrigerator. It was slim pickings, in the nutritional sense, although high-calorie junk abounded. Skyler had skipped lunch. He selected a packet of Reese’s peanut butter cups. The salt shaker stood on the counter. Skyler sprinkled salt on the chocolate.

  Munching, he went to look out of the double doors into the backyard. Enclosed by high brick walls, it was a green marble rectangle with a wrought iron table and chairs in the middle. You couldn’t tell what season it was out there, except for the bare branches of the trees in neighboring gardens poking over the wall. A hefty bronze nude reclined near the table and chairs. It was an original Rodin, although ‘original’ kinda lost its meaning when, like old Auguste, you turned out copies of your own stuff by the hundred.

  That also went for Dad. Skyler frowned at the watercolors on the table. They depicted happy couples, family groups. The photographs Dad painted from were propped against water jars. Avigdor Taft had real talent, in his elder son’s opinion, but for some reason he chose to churn out these commercial ‘hand-painted portraits,’ as if it gratified him to produce middlebrow hack-work. He had an online store, capitalizing on the Taft name and their Beacon Hill address.

  Footsteps sounded in the hall. Trekker came into the kitchen. He was unshaven and wore sweats that clearly hadn’t been washed for weeks. “Hey, that’s my food,” he said, spotting a peanut butter cup vanishing into Skyler’s mouth.

  “You have a whole candy store in that fridge,” Skyler replied. “You won’t miss it.”

  All through their childhood and adolescence it had been a theme: don’t take Trek’s food. The caution had been well-intentioned. Mom and Dad had believed junk food was the devil, and only allowed it in the house because Trek’s needs trumped principle. Trek had severe cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that carried a sentence of mortality in early adulthood. At twenty-seven, he’d already lived longer than the doctors expected. He coughed terribly, and was so skinny you could practically see through him. Hence the attempts to feed him up with whatever had the most calories per bite.

  “Dad’s?” Skyler said, nodding at the pans of dye on the stove.

  “Piper’s.” Trek did not explain what Piper was doing with dye. He probably didn’t know, or care.

  “Is she walking again?” Skyler said, anticipating Trek’s indifferent shrug.

  Their sister had dropped out of Rhode Island School of Design, and then dropped out of Massachusetts College of Art and Design, both times because she couldn’t get her coke habit under control. Nowadays she went on a lot of Earth Party walks with like-minded druggies and dropouts. It was embarrassing.

  Skyler, Piper, and Trekker. Of the three of them, only Skyler had achieved something like success—although you couldn’t exactly blame Trek for not being a go-getter, with a death sentence hanging over him.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” Trek said, finally evincing some curiosity.

  “I’m wondering that myself. I should be in Russia,” Skyler said. “This guy I work with? I’m pretty sure he attempted to sabotage the Spirit of Destiny. So I’ve been watching him.”

  Skyler had no qualms about letting Trek in on this. Trek wouldn’t spread it around. Just in case, Skyler was careful to name no names.

  “This guy, he’s probably also working with the Chinese. I shouldn’t say probably. Maybe. He says it’s someone else.”

  “He would say that,” Trek commented.

  “Exactly.” Skyler sighed. “I have some dirt on him, but I need more.” He had not shared his photos of Lance and the Chinese woman with Director Flaherty, realizing on reflection how circumstantial it all was. A confrontation would achieve nothing at this point except to alert Lance to be more careful. As it happened, Lance had done nothing suspicious since Beijing. But this trip to Russia might give him the opportunity he’d been waiting for. “I think he might be planning to sabotage the gear the astronauts will be taking with them to the SoD. I’m gonna go along to keep an eye on him … but the boss told me to come here first.”

  “Why?”

  Skyler imitated Flaherty’s voice, not that Trek would know what the original sounded like. “’When was the last time you been home, Taft? Go say hey to your momma.’”

  Trek laughed. “Does he know Mom lives in Bali?”

 
Given the NXC’s close links with the NSA, Flaherty certainly did know it, which made his order even weirder. Before Skyler could say this, Trek’s laugh turned into a cough. The horrible whooping noise went on and on. Trek’s face purpled. Skyler went over to his brother and pounded on his back with loose fists.

  Trek got the cough under control. He went to the fridge and drank some milk straight from the carton. “So this guy. Why would he sabotage the SoD? What would be in it for him?”

  “Money,” Skyler said immediately. This was the easiest part of the whole puzzle. “And sex. Although he probably thinks it’s love. But mostly money.”

  “OK. What’s in it for the guys paying him?”

  “The Chinese.”

  “Why would they sabotage the SoD?”

  “That is indeed the question. But here’s what I think: they have their own mission to Europa waiting in reserve. Our intel sats have seen a lot of activity around the Korla test launch complex in northwestern China. That facility doesn’t have anything to do with SoD-related launches. So it’s possible that they want to take out the SoD, knowing that if this mission fails, we’ll have shot our bolt. Then the field will be clear for them. They’ll reach Europa before anyone else. The MOAD will be all theirs.”

  Trek nodded. “This is it for NASA, isn’t it?”

  “Yup. We’ve put everything we’ve got into the SoD.”

  “Chances we could start again from scratch?”

  “Zero. We don’t even have a functioning government.”

  “At least we still have a functioning stock market,” Trek said—an allusion to the millions of dollars their dad had sitting in stocks and bonds, inherited from his father. Dividends paid the family’s bills, including Trek’s hospital bills. When Skyler thought about that, his pet policy idea of paying off foreign investors in Treasuries, immediately and massively devaluing the dollar, seemed a lot less attractive.

  “Well, if you get this guy,” Trek said, “give him a kick in the nuts for me.” He opened the door, letting cold air into the kitchen. Then he lit a blunt.

  “Trek!”

  “What?”

  Skyler waved away the marijuana smoke clouding from Trek’s nostrils. “I don’t know what’s worse,” he said. “You’re smoking weed … or you’re smoking weed in front of a Fed.” He considered how hopeless it was to instruct anyone on how to live their life. “Or, you’re smoking weed and you haven’t offered me any.”

  Trek laughed. This time, he didn’t start coughing. “This shit is amazing. Quality’s gone way up since Massachusetts legalized it. Here, try for yourself.”

  Skyler took a hit off the blunt. He felt the pleasant swimminess spread through his head, and he felt the harsh smoke hitting his bronchioles. He thought about Trek’s lungs, which were full of thick, sticky, bacteria-trapping mucus. Smoke of any kind was the worst possible thing for Trek to be inhaling. But he decided not to say anything more about it. He didn’t want to lose Trek’s love.

  The brothers stood by the open door and blew the smoke outside, watching the March wind toss the bare boughs above the wall.

  *

  Not to be deflected, Skyler flew straight to Russia from Boston. He arrived in Baikonur on the day of the Intergalactic Tennis Open, an annual tradition that had been moved up this year so that the departing astronauts could take part. From high in the standing-room-only bleachers, he watched Adam Hardcastle destroy Alexei Ivanov, 6-4, 4-6, 6-2. Applause was muted.

  Hardcastle would be going up to the SoD in a Soyuz. So would Ivanov, Qiu, and Xiang. The other four would be going up by Dragon from Kennedy Space Center, known to insiders as KSC.

  Skyler took the inevitable call from Director Flaherty while he was loitering in the outdoor market, an open-air Aladdin’s cave of space-themed swag and household staples. “What the fuck are you doing there?”

  He was being asked that a lot recently, Skyler reflected.

  “You’re supposed to be in Florida. I told you to go see your momma. Then you were supposed go to Florida, not fucking Khazakhstan.” Flaherty—whom Skyler had first met on a front porch in Arlington, under the name of Travis Moore—started laughing. He had too keen a sense of absurdity to stay angry long. It was the secret to his successful career in the mad, mad world of the American intelligence community. “You’re not even on the right fucking continent!”

  Skyler said, “Hey, did you know you can get a thing of fresh apricots for five rubles here? Or a mug with Alexei Ivanov’s face on it. They’re gonna be living off us for years to come.”

  SoD money had crashed into Baikonur like an earthquake, demolishing rickety Soviet-era buildings, replacing them with modern glass and steel. The ubiquitous space-themed monuments and artworks had survived, but had transmogrified into kitsch in their spanking-new surroundings. From where he stood, Skyler could see the ornate entrance of the market, which looked like a cross between an Orthodox onion dome and something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Smells of turmeric and chili tinged the dry, cold air.

  “Get your ass on a plane,” Flaherty dictated. “I already said I want you at KSC.”

  To watch over Menelaou, Boisselot … and Kildare … and Ginsburg.

  Do not want.

  “And I want Lance at Baikonur.”

  To watch over the other four.

  But why, anyway? What did Flaherty imagine was going to happen to the astronauts during their pre-flight quarantine? Did he think someone would slip polonium-210 into their food?

  Nonsense. Once the doors of the Cosmonaut Hotel slammed shut behind Hardcastle, Ivanov, Qiu, and Xiang at 10 a.m. tomorrow morning, they’d be safe from any outside interference.

  Skyler’s worry was what might happen to them—and their gear—in between now and then.

  “Just twenty-four hours, boss,” he pleaded, knowing that he was drawing down his amassed brownie points. “One more day. That’s all, and I’ll only be two days late getting to KSC.”

  After some more back-and-forth, Flaherty relented. The fact that there were no more flights to Moscow today probably colored his decision. Skyler watched the sun sink towards the steppe from Yuri Gagarin Park. Brown grass poked up through trodden snow. Skyler had no reason for being here, apart from that it was easy for him to blend in among the tourists who’d flocked into town for the historic launch. The same rationale had taken him to the outdoor market earlier. He knew precisely where Lance was all the time, thanks to the locator app. All he wished to do was be where Lance was not, so Lance wouldn’t know that Skyler was spying on him.

  Wouldn’t Lance see Skyler on his own locator app? Not if he didn’t turn it on and look for him, and why would he do that? He thought Skyler was in Florida. It was a risk worth taking, Skyler thought, with the security of the SoD mission at stake.

  He ate borscht, fish, and meat dumplings at the restaurant of the Sputnik Hotel. It was just across the street from the Cosmonaut Hotel where the astronauts were staying. Lance was holed up next door in the much swankier Hotel Cosmodrome. His red dot on the screen of Skyler’s phone stayed so still, Skyler wondered if he’d turned in for the night. But he couldn’t take anything for granted.

  Drinking a second cup of grainy, sweet coffee, he wondered how much of this foul stuff he’d need to stay awake all night.

  Then Lance moved.

  CHAPTER 41

  On the screen of Skyler’s phone, a red dot exited the Hotel Cosmodrome and crossed the street.

  Lance’s phone was moving. So, presumably, was Lance.

  He was going to the Cosmonaut Hotel.

  Skyler threw rubles on the table and galloped out. He lurked in the gateway of the Sputnik Hotel, watching Lance argue with the guards on the other side of the street. Security was tight, with good reason.

  To Skyler’s disgust, the guards let Lance in.

  Skyler waited as long as he dared, and then crossed the street himself. Lance had unknowingly done the heavy lifting for him. Having allowed one NXC agent in, the guards barely blinked a
t another one who explained that he was “with that guy.”

  Skyler walked rapidly across the concrete plaza in front of the hotel. It was full dark now. Floodlights lit the grandiose façade. He’d seen Lance go in the main entrance. He went around the back of the building.

  Out of sight of the windows, standing beneath a tree, he questioned what he hoped to accomplish here. Lance could be in there planting bombs in the astronauts’ gear. He’d been carrying a rucksack. But whatever mischief he was up to, Skyler couldn’t do anything about it. He pictured himself charging in there and demanding that Lance’s stuff be scanned, Lance himself subjected to a body-search—bend and grab your ankles, dog!

  They’d laugh at him.

  They didn’t know what Skyler knew, which was the depravity Lance was capable of. A man in a wheelchair, for fuck’s sake. Computer monitors shattering. Coffee on the floor, mingling with blood. And then the crowning horror … If Lance could do that, he could do anything.

  The Cosmonaut Hotel had been renovated, in line with Baikonur’s overall facelift. The west wing, to Skyler’s right where he stood, was the quarantine area. It had its own doors at ground level. During their pre-flight period of isolation, astronauts and cosmonauts could run, swim and play tennis in the hotel’s grounds, and take selfies in the Avenue of the Cosmonauts, where each cosmonaut or astronaut planted a tree before their voyage.

  Skyler stood near the entrance to the Avenue of the Cosmonauts now. Yuri Gagarin’s tree towered at the head of the long double line of trees. It was almost 60 years old, and pretty big.

  A man came out of the west wing, carrying a large rucksack. Skyler stiffened. Lance?

  As the man crossed behind the main building, the light from the windows revealed his fleshy profile.

  Adam Hardcastle.

  Huh?!?

  Hardcastle angled towards Skyler, who hastily retreated.

  The astronaut walked along the Avenue of the Cosmonauts, away from the hotel.

  Fascinated, Skyler kept pace with him, walking on the patches of grass where there was no snow, placing his sneakered feet down as quietly as he could.