“That is a great idea,” Ramírez says, pointing at Lenny’s drink. “You find that in the galley?”
“Dream on,” Lenny says, pulling a squeeze-flask out of his jacket. “But I’m happy to share.”
The lights above us change from flat white to pulsing blue. A synthetic male voice says, “Attention. Delta-vee warning. Acceleration vector changing. Repeat, delta-vee warning. Prepare for acceleration vector change. Thank you.”
Then the human pilot’s voice comes over the loudspeaker in the ceiling: “Gentlemen, we’re coming up on reentry. Flipping in sixty seconds. Please take your seats.”
Our path into Earth orbit requires us to burn off some speed, so the shuttle’s going to turn around and fire its main engines as retro-rockets. Pretty standard maneuver. This is a private charter, though, so the pilot doesn’t know we’ve all passed astronaut certification and don’t need to be warned about basic stuff like this.
“Guess you’ll have to wait,” Lenny says, putting away his flask and finishing his drink in one gulp.
Ramírez stows his tablet and lunges from one side of the cabin to the other, leaning to look out the small round windows on either side of the shuttle. “Hey, Kangaroo, what’s our position?”
I frown at him. “Why don’t you ask the pilot?”
“She’s busy. Come on, just give me a quick instrument reading.”
I don’t like being used like a human scanning device, but it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever been asked to do. I blink up my eye scanners and read off some numbers.
The pilot announces that we’re at the turnaround point. Gravity goes away, and the floor feels like it’s sliding out from under me. I grab a seat and belt myself in. I don’t want to be standing the wrong way when the engines kick in again.
Ramírez bounces over to yet another window and whoops. “Yes! There it is.”
He’s on my side of the shuttle. I look out and see a small, glittering speck in the distance, above the blue-and-white curve of the Earth. My eye, which can interpret all kinds of satellite data via my shoulder-phone and computer implants, identifies it as the Eyrie.
“You don’t get out much, do you?” I ask.
“Just never seen it with my own eyes before.”
“Not thinking about changing teams, are you, Ramírez?” Lenny asks, spinning his empty drink bulb in the air.
The Eyrie is home base for the other half of our agency, the Intelligence folks who gather data to guide Operations. There’s always been some tension between the two halves, and it’s been worse since the unfortunate events of last summer, which required the agency to rebuild Intel from the ground up.
“Of course not,” Ramírez says. “But I was never in the military. This is the closest I’ve ever been to a capital ship.”
“Wow,” Lenny drawls. “Must be your lucky day. Maybe they’ll invite you aboard to fuck you over in person.” I think he might be a little drunk.
“What’s your problem with Intel?” Ramírez asks.
“Seriously?” Lenny says. “Have you been living under a rock for the last eleven months?”
“Just because Sakraida and his inner circle turned out to be evildoers doesn’t mean the whole division was corrupt,” Ramírez says.
“Assholes or idiots,” Lenny grumbles.
“What?”
“Assholes or idiots,” Lenny repeats in a louder voice. “Either they knew what was going on and went along with it, or they had no idea because they’re bad at their jobs.”
“Well, that’s insultingly reductive,” Ramírez says.
“Yeah? So’s your mom.”
They continue trading barbs while I settle into a seat and buckle myself in. I really don’t want to get involved in their debate. And I haven’t seen the new Eyrie up close either.
The agency’s director of intelligence has always been based in Earth orbit, aboard a manned space station that circles the planet once every ninety minutes. It’s called the Eyrie because, I don’t know, eagles or something. But this Eyrie is actually a completely different facility from the one we had last year.
A lot of bad stuff happened last summer. My department got audited. The agency’s then-director of intelligence, Terman Sakraida, revealed himself to be a traitor and tried to crash a spaceliner into Mars. Innocent people died before we were able to stop that disaster. Sakraida and his cronies escaped, and we’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Right after Sakraida bolted, there was a lot of finger-pointing within the agency, a lot of ass-covering, a lot of passwords changed. It may be impossible to ever know the full extent of the damage he caused—and may still be able to cause. As D.Int, he had access to practically everything in the agency’s data warehouse. We have to presume he and his cronies copied every bit of information they could and took it all with them when they disappeared into the asteroid belt, where they’re no doubt now working on breaking the encryption of the most secure files.
The agency decided that rather than go over every centimeter of the old Eyrie to make sure the bad guys hadn’t left behind any booby traps or other nasty surprises, it was safer to deorbit the entire station and put up a new one. So that’s what they did. Evacuated all personnel, fired a few thrusters, then let the whole kit and kaboodle fall out of orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.
Our new D.Int is Admiral Darlene Morris of the United States Outer Space Service, and she brought her own office to her new job—literally. US-OSS decommissioned her former command, the battleship Waukegan, and removed its main weapons and refitted it for service as an orbital station. If anyone had previously compromised that vessel—a ship of the line during the Independence War between Earth and Mars—we would have bigger problems anyway. There’s been only a little grumbling from the Intel folks about the utilitarian military accommodations.
The shuttle’s acceleration alarms sound again, and my seat presses up against me. I watch Ramírez settle into a window seat across the aisle.
Then something explodes beneath us. Red alert lights flood the cabin.
It’s got to be the engines, I think as my hands instinctively clutch my seat belt, making sure it’s buckled tight and low across my lap. The entire shuttle vibrates more than I feel like it should. The sunlight coming in through the windows slides across Ramírez’s face. We’re tumbling. Shit.
The pilot’s voice interrupts the loud alarms. “Gentlemen, we’ve had a main drive malfunction,” she says, sounding remarkably calm. “I’m in contact with OTC and they’re working on a recovery plan. Please stand by.” She ends her announcement.
As much as I trust Orbital Traffic Control to do their jobs, I’m not going to just sit around and wait for that. I put a calculator in my eye and start doing some math.
“Someone’s trying to kill you!” Ramírez points at me. “Who knows you’re aboard this shuttle?”
“Calm down,” Lenny says, unbuckling himself and moving to the back of the cabin. “If they wanted to kill us, they’d have hit the fuel tanks, not the rockets.”
“This can’t be an accident,” Ramírez says. “Not with Kangaroo aboard.”
“We’ll figure it out later.” Lenny yanks open a storage locker and pulls out a spacesuit. “First we do our best not to die in a fire.”
“We’ve got maybe fifteen minutes before this shuttle starts disintegrating,” I say. If the pilot can’t regain control and point the heat-shielded part of the ship downward, friction with the thickening atmosphere will start melting parts off the spacecraft.
“Isn’t there an escape pod?” Ramírez asks.
“No,” Lenny says, inspecting the three spacesuits he’s extracted from the locker. “This is a short-range shuttle. Safety regulations only require lifeboats on interplanetary vehicles.”
“When I get home, I am writing a strongly worded letter to whoever’s in charge of that!” Ramírez says.
Lenny looks at me. “These are vacuum suits. They won’t last long out there.”
&nb
sp; “They’ll be fine in the pocket,” I say.
He gives me a wolfish grin. Definitely drunk. “Once more into the breach!”
“What’s happening?” Ramírez asks.
“Good news, Ramírez,” Lenny says. “We’re all going for a spacewalk.”
* * *
I put a countdown timer in my eye and remind everyone as the minutes tick by. It takes two minutes for Lenny to yell loudly enough to convince the pilot to open the cockpit door, at which point I knock her out with one of the handy sedative injector slugs from my emergency medkit. You never know when you’ll have to sneakily render someone unconscious.
Then it’s five minutes to get all of us into emergency spacesuits, and one more minute for me to tie Lenny, Ramírez, and the pilot together with some plastic wrap from the galley so I can stow them all in one location inside the pocket.
After closing the portal, I’m all alone with eight minutes left. I move toward the airlock and call Oliver on my shoulder-phone. This close to Earth, I can connect to any number of secure satellite relays. I really hope my audio implants are still working.
“Hello, Kangaroo,” Oliver says in my ear. Why does everyone sound so calm? “This is Equipment. I was wondering when you’d call.”
“EQ, Kangaroo. You know what’s happening, then?”
“Semper vigilantes.”
“You’re always fighting crime?”
“Never mind,” Oliver says. “I take it you’ve secured the other passengers in the pocket and are preparing to abandon ship?”
I’m at the airlock and studying the emergency release instructions. “Great minds think alike. I’d like to get a little altitude once I’m outside. Was hoping you could help me time my jump so I go up and not down.”
“Affirmative,” Oliver says. “Let me know when you’re ready.”
“Wait one.” I pull the handle on the airlock’s inner door and step inside. I close the door behind me and look for something to brace against when I pop the outer door. The air in here is going to blow out, and I don’t want to go with it. I need to stay with the shuttle for this next stunt.
I find a tether point for a spacewalk cable—thank government regulations for standard airlock construction guidelines—and hook one glove into it, tugging to make sure I’m secure. Then I hit the egress cycle activation control.
Air hisses out of the compartment for a few seconds. The outer door swings open, then flies completely off its hinges and disappears. The shuttle’s still tumbling, but now it’s eerily silent after that explosion of cabin air into the thin upper atmosphere. I activate the magnets in my spacesuit boots and slowly, carefully walk out onto the exterior hull.
It takes me nearly a minute to crawl over to a flat section of the shuttle, and then another couple of seconds to steady myself enough to stand. It’s pretty nerve-wracking, standing up on a shuttle that’s spinning every which way, trusting that my mag-boots will keep me attached. But the agency’s standard astronaut training prepared me to at least endure the physical disorientation. Still, it’s probably a good thing I didn’t partake of Lenny’s flask earlier.
I slowly, carefully walk across the hull toward the back of the shuttle, where the engines used to be. I can see part of the hull torn away by the explosion. When I get closer, I see that there are several segmented metal shafts hooked into the hull just above the ragged edge of the blast.
There was something attached to the outside of the shuttle. Something that wasn’t supposed to be there. The metal parts stuck into the hull look like they were severed from some other device. I see wires and circuitry inside the hollow triangular shafts.
I can’t tell what our stowaway might have been, but maybe someone else can later. I record as much as I can with my eye, in every scanning mode available, then move back to the widest, flattest section of the hull I can find. After stabilizing myself—closing my eyes helps—I call Oliver again.
“This feels oddly familiar,” I say, thinking of the last time I stood on the outside of a spaceship spinning out of control.
Oliver ignores my remark. “The good news is, you’re in free fall and there don’t appear to be any additional thrust vectors at play now. I’m putting an indicator in your HUD.”
The heads-up display fused to my left cornea lights up with a horizontal box that fills in with color from left to right—first red, then yellow, then green when the box is entirely filled.
“So I jump when it’s green?”
“Affirmative. I’ve given you as much error margin as I can.”
“Okay.” I keep my eyes closed—I don’t want the giant planet spinning around me to distract me—and bend my knees as far as I can. Lenny was right; these are really cheap spacesuits. I feel like I’m stuck inside a balloon.
“Don’t wait too long,” Oliver says. “You’re approaching the mesosphere.”
“Is that bad?” I’m counting to myself as I watch each cycle of the progress bar, finding the right rhythm to time my jump.
“That’s where reentering objects start to burn up.”
“Okay, let’s stop talking now.”
“Good luck.” A soft beep indicates Oliver’s disconnected the call. But I’m sure he’s still watching my telemetry, maybe even seeing my image through a telescope nearby. The agency has lots of automated surveillance resources this close to Earth. Analysts in Ops and Intel are probably also monitoring my situation. Because they need to know if I’m about to die.
No pressure, Kangaroo.
The progress bar turns yellow. I tense my leg muscles. As soon as the bar turns green, I slap the control to deactivate my mag-boots. At the same time, I extend both my legs straight as hard and fast as I can.
Then I open my eyes.
It’s not strictly necessary, since the readouts in my left eye are telling me everything I—and Oliver—need to know about my course and speed. But it’s reassuring to see that there’s empty space in front of me and not a huge freakin’ blue planet.
I’m just about to breathe an exaggerated sigh of relief when an alert starts blinking in my eye. A red arrow points me to turn my head to the right, and then I see a red circle pulsing around something heading toward me very quickly, according to my eye’s short-range radar.
I squeeze my fingertips together to call Oliver again. “Hey, EQ, it looks like there’s something pretty solid heading toward me very fast? Am I about to hit some space junk up here?” Centuries of launching satellites and rockets has left a lot of debris still circling the planet.
“No worries, Kangaroo,” Oliver says. “You’re in range of the Eyrie. That’s a Pelican coming to pick you up.”
Oh, Lenny is not going to like this.
CHAPTER THREE
Earth orbit—the Eyrie space station
I’m guessing 5 minutes before Lenny throws a fit
“Welcome aboard, Kangaroo,” says the officer on the Eyrie’s flight deck when I step off the ladder of the Pelican. “D.Int would like to speak to you as soon as you’re settled.”
I used to get a little miffed when people didn’t ask me if I was all right after getting rescued. But I’m used to it now. The reason they don’t ask is because they already know: Jessica makes a habit of relaying my vitals, which she receives from my implanted sensors whenever I’m in range and not running silent, to anyone else who might need them. “Privacy” is not a word that exists in my department’s vocabulary.
“Regarding what topic?” I ask the officer. I don’t generally get debriefed by someone who reports directly to the secretary of state. Well, unless it’s Paul.
“I don’t have that information,” the officer says. “I’ll escort you to her office when you’re ready.”
“Sure. Just one second.”
I turn back to look up the ladder, where Ramírez and Lenny are arguing with the Pelican’s pilot. I want to make sure they’re not going to come to blows, but I also need a moment to collect myself. Because whatever D.Int wants to talk to me about, it’s p
robably pretty serious.
“You two okay there?” I call up the ladder.
“We’ll be fine as soon as I get off this station,” Lenny says.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the pilot says, “even if I had authorization, I can’t land you in this vehicle. The Pelicans aren’t designed for reentry.”
“Just walk across the deck, Carrozza,” Ramírez says to Lenny.
“I am not setting foot in this place,” Lenny replies.
“You do realize that you’re technically aboard already, right?”
Lenny points at the pilot. “We are leaving. You get us a ground-to-orbit shuttle. We’ll dock with them in space and transfer over.”
The pilot glances at Ramírez, who throws his hands up. “I’ll need to get authorization, sir.”
“You do that. We’ll wait here.” Lenny folds his arms.
“Okay, well, you two have fun with that,” I say. “I’m going to go now.”
Ramírez and Lenny mutter and wave at me. I turn and follow the flight deck officer into the Eyrie.
The official history of the agency says that we built the original Eyrie as a cost-saving measure, to take advantage of the direct solar power always available in Earth orbit. It takes a lot of electricity to run all those information-crunching supercomputers. Unofficially, it’s because the D.Int at the time wanted an ultra-secure facility for handling all this sensitive data. It’s impossible to sneak up on an orbital space station, and there’s no chance any unauthorized personnel can slip aboard without detection.
I’m not saying that all our D.Ints have a tendency to be paranoid, but there does seem to be a pattern, historically.
Admiral Morris’s office is near the center of the station—the most heavily shielded location, and the least vulnerable to any outside attack—which means it’s not in the large gravity ring rotating around the Eyrie’s midsection. I’m thankful for the gradual change to weightlessness as the flight deck officer and I ride the lift into the station hub.
The door to D.Int’s office is a half-meter-thick slab of titanium alloy that takes a good fifteen seconds to roll back. I have time to peek around the space while waiting, and it’s pretty luxurious, all things considered. Even looks like she has a private bathroom in here. Must be nice to not have to worry about your colleagues making a mess because they can’t get the hang of using a zero-gee toilet.
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