He studied the files, scrolling through in alphabetical order, the whole time wondering why they’d been given to him with no further instruction. Was there some paperwork error he was supposed to be looking for? Maybe an IG inspection coming up? Because that sounded exactly like the kind of drudgery they’d assign to a new guy . . .
He was nearing the end of the alphabet when he recognized a name. Wylie, Travis J., call sign “Coyote.” Cute.
Wylie.
It couldn’t be, could it? The recent promotion photo appended to his file confirmed that indeed it could. The sonofabitch looked like a recruiting poster: green eyes, hair light brown to blond with just enough curl to keep it interesting, a small, upturned nose which the girls probably thought was cute . . . Marshall contrasted that to his own unruly thatch of black hair, rounded nose, and a persistent five-o’clock shadow inherited from his father. But for the piercing blue eyes he got from his mother, most days he felt decidedly plain.
He shook his head, clearing the cobwebs and wondering why he was wasting brain cells worrying about this when he looked up from the government-issue PC to find an uncomfortably familiar face standing above him. An annoyingly perfect-looking, familiar face.
“Good afternoon, Ensign Hunter.”
Marshall’s mouth fell agape like a hooked fish before he collected himself. “Umm . . . afternoon, Lieutenant Wylie. What can I do for you?” he asked, nearly choking on the words.
A peculiar smirk creased his otherwise flawless visage. “I’m afraid you have that backwards, Ensign.” He motioned for him to get up and follow him into an empty meeting room nearby.
“There has to be a mistake, sir,” Marshall said. Meanwhile the voice in the back of his mind screamed Why are you protesting, dumbass?
“No mistake,” Wylie said patiently. “You’ve been selected to train on the Specter shuttle.”
“But you busted me on my final check ride.”
“Tsk-tsk,” Wylie tutted through that same peculiar smirk; Marshall couldn’t be sure whether it was playfully sincere or just smarmy. “There’s failure, and there’s creative failure. You were being tested in more ways than one. We weren’t concerned about your piloting skills. We already knew you were a good stick.”
“We?” Marshall asked. “You mean, the group CO?”
“Negative,” Wylie said, circling his finger. “Group doesn’t control this assignment.”
Marshall only became more confused with each question. “I don’t understand, sir. Who would be assigning me here if the group CO didn’t approve?”
“Some things they leave up to individual component commanders. And this is definitely one of those things.” He swiped at his tablet, pushing a new file to Marshall’s.
For the first time, Marshall noticed the subtle differences in Wylie’s charcoal-gray flight suit. The mission patches showed he’d seen orbital duty. A lot of it, judging by the worn Nomex flap that covered the biomonitor umbilical opening above his waist. Nobody used those things unless they spent an awful lot of time hanging out in zero g.
He read the message. “I’m being assigned as secondary pilot on a Specter shuttle,” he read aloud, and stopped. “Aboard the USS Borman.” He looked up in disbelief. “But junior officers don’t get Orbit Guard billets,” Marshall said.
“You’re right. They don’t. Maybe you should think about that,” Wylie said with an upturned eyebrow. “Captain Poole is used to getting his way. Sometimes we have to work extra hard to clear the path for him.” He rose from the table and rapped his knuckles on it impatiently. “Come on, we’re running late.”
“Late? For what?”
“Life Support,” Wylie said. “We’ve got to get you fitted for a new pressure suit.”
After six hours of work, the ache in Nick’s forearms and fingers was like fire shooting into his bones. Neutral buoyancy tanks and complex high-wire contraptions could only prepare one so much for the reality of working inside a pressurized suit in hard vacuum. It had quickly made him forget about his raw, itchy nose.
Their first task had been the most hazardous: Refilling the satellite’s hydrazine tanks, for if its kick motor couldn’t produce any thrust then everything else would be for nothing. They’d removed a spare bottle from a bay in Stardust’s service module and aligned it with a filler port on the sat’s lower propulsion section. “Careful,” Giselle warned. Meticulous by nature, she’d been especially so during this part of the job. “You get so much as a drop of that stuff on your suit, and you’re staying out here until your air runs out.”
“Relax, I got this,” he’d said, disabling its quantity sensors and connecting the filler ports just as they’d practiced. “I thought all the DOT regulations for these tanks made them idiot proof.”
Giselle had been cautious to the point of acting superstitious about handling the toxic propellant. “Nature always has a way of finding a better idiot. You’re chill because you have no idea how evil that stuff really is.”
Already prepared to do most of the grunt work under her expert direction, it was no wonder she’d been so willing to let him handle this. Once Nick felt the tank’s probe lock into place, he’d started the refilling process and moved away to a safe distance, again just as rehearsed. Inside, a secondary bottle of helium discharged into the tank, forcing the hydrazine through the filler port and into the satellite. A gauge mounted on the bottle’s base began falling, invisible to the ground control station. “Hydrazine’s topping off. Twenty percent, on the way up to thirty,” Billy/Xenos reported from his makeshift satellite control station aboard Stardust. “Good job not killing yourselves.”
Nick lifted his sun visor and looked to Giselle: How dangerous was it that even that hacker nerd seemed to know better?
“I told you—it’s evil stuff.”
Nick had done his homework for this job like no other before, but clearly there was more to learn. As a “fixer” for his patrons, he’d been a supremely confident jack-of-all-trades in every job they’d hired him for. Out here he’d thought the biggest threat would be burning up during a launch or reentry accident.
Arduous as that work had been, the main event was yet to come.
The comsat, built around a housing and electrical bus common to many satellites in GEO, had been brought back to life one component at a time. What made this one different, and therefore useful to his patrons, was the vacant port on its payload bay. With the components they’d come to install designed around it, the physical connections had been as straightforward as they could’ve expected on a spacewalk. The hard part had been waiting for Billy/Xenos to activate them through the satellite’s command and control network without attracting attention. That had required opening up the instrument compartment and replacing the satellite’s communications array: transponder, antenna, and control units all swapped out in favor of new gear brought up with them in Stardust’s service bay. The touchiest work had involved wiring all those new gadgets into the electrical bus. The avionics bay hadn’t necessarily been designed for easy access—who would’ve anticipated that someone might someday send a repair crew all the way up to GEO?
Nick had to remind himself it was by similar thinking that the question of salvage rights in orbit had yet to be seriously tested and would be left unresolved until someone arrived to challenge the status quo. This was a stupendously expensive dead satellite whose owners had already been recompensed by an equally stupendous insurance policy. If someone else was willing to come up here and breathe new life into it, then why should anyone stop them?
“I’ve got good uplink,” Billy said in their headsets. “Ready for the test sequence whenever you’re clear.”
Giselle pulled on her tether, reeling herself in towards Stardust. “On my way in.” She looked back at Nick expectantly. “Nick is right behind me.”
He waited for her to arrive at the opening, not looking forward to being cramped in there again. He hauled on the tether and floated toward the opening. “I’m coming.”
Safely cocooned back inside, he felt thrusters kick as Whitman moved them away from the satellite. Nick wanted to watch their computer wizard work his magic, but Giselle had convinced him it was better to remain ready to head back out immediately if there was a glitch.
“We’re clear,” the pilot reported.
“Initiating,” Billy/Xenos said. Nick waited nervously through the intervening silence. “Okay, the microwave emitter is working. That makes test card item one A-OK.”
The kid was already starting to act like he was a real astronaut. “And the manipulator arm?” Nick asked impatiently.
“Slow down,” the hacker replied, just as impatient.
Not willing to idly wait, Nick pulled himself back to the airlock opening to see the results of their work. Though Whitman had put another hundred meters of distance between them, the big comsat still loomed large against the Earth beyond. Now midafternoon at their longitude, he could see the shadow of night creeping toward them across the Atlantic. If there was any more work to be done, they’d have to do it under floodlights in the dark.
To his great relief, four mechanical arms unfolded from their mounts and began to move about their articulated joints. He thought it ironic the revived satellite now resembled a bacteriophage virus, with its insectile arms seeking a host.
Billy/Xenos confirmed what Nick could see. “Test card item two is good. I’ve got full control authority through each axis and the grapplers are responsive. We’re ready to go try it on our test subject.”
“We’re at min safe distance,” Whitman said. “Bird is clear to maneuver.” At that, Nick felt Giselle grab his feet to yank him back inside. They weren’t wasting any time. The EVA had been timed to end near the opening of their first maneuver window.
“Stand by,” Billy/Xenos said. “Ignition in three . . . two . . .”
Outside, there was a flash of white fire as the comsat’s previously dead kick stage flared to life for the first time in months. It would have been a wild surprise back at its ground station had it still been connected to its owner’s control net.
It was almost a full twenty-four hours before the reanimated satellite arrived at its next stop. With a final puff of control jets, it settled into its new orbit alongside a still-functioning comsat below Stardust’s position in the graveyard band. “Bird is in position and stable,” Whitman said. “On station at Z plus one hundred meters. Reaction wheels are holding orientation. Drift is negligible.”
Nick let out a satisfied grunt and pushed away from the flight station. He was slowly getting accustomed to the pilot’s practical, minimalist way of conveying information. No emotion, no hyperbole, no enthusiasm: here’s where they stood, where they were going, and what might get in the way. The anodyne nominal was apparently the highest expression of confidence one could utter in the spaceflight business.
He settled into the lower equipment bay, careful to avoid entangling himself in the patchwork of cables and monitors that made up their makeshift satellite control station. It already dominated most of the lower bay and what would normally have been their sleeping area, and the empty squeeze bottles and food wrappers carelessly left to float about only added to the clutter. Nick imagined a floor cluttered with empty pizza boxes and energy drinks back on Earth. He pulled himself to a stop and floated above Billy’s shoulder. As the hacker took over control of the satellite from the pilot, he paid no attention to Nick’s exasperated efforts to clean up his mess.
“We do have trash receptacles, you know,” Nick said.
“This is how I work, man,” Billy/Xenos said without apology. “A job like this takes ninja-like focus.”
“It also takes functioning equipment,” Nick said as he waved an empty wrapper, surprised at himself. He was starting to sound like an old hand. “If this stuff fouls an air exchanger or a cooling fan, this could all end up being a very expensive sightseeing trip.” One that his paymasters would be most unhappy about and unwilling to accept excuses for.
“Okay. Here.” Billy sighed and reached for an empty squeeze bottle by his head in a perfunctory gesture. “Now would you like to know how Necromancer is doing?”
“Necro-what?”
“Necromancer. A magic being able to control the dead.”
Did this really have to turn into a Dungeons & Dragons metaphor? Though he had to admit the name was in fact appropriate. Nick bit off his rising irritation. “Please,” he said. “Indulge me.”
Billy/Xenos pointed to his center screen, which showed another satellite overlaid with intercept data from their revived comsat. “That’s our target, SAMCOM-3. In service for ten years, scheduled for disposal in eight months. It won’t be missed.”
“And you’re sure we’ve not been detected?”
The hacker shrugged. “There’s no way to be certain. It’s not like it’ll broadcast a warning or turn around and blast us like a milsat would.”
Nick smiled to himself. The kid held a lot of baseless assumptions about just how capable the military supposedly was up here. He’d remained stubbornly unconvinced that precious few satellites were armed even with cursory defensive weapons, a fact Nick knew their patrons were counting on. “So we’re close enough to test?”
“Yes,” Billy said too patiently. “It hasn’t budged, which tells me its operators are completely unaware we’ve tucked in right next to it.” He pointed at a digital map of South America studded with overlapping circles. “This is their network coverage of Paraguay and Brazil. We’ll be able to see the effects in real time once we neutralize SAMCOM-3.”
The kid really was going native up here. “Neutralize” sounded so much more astronautically professional than “cripple” or “take out.”
Whitman turned and caught Nick’s eye. “Spoken like a steely-eyed missile man,” the pilot joked.
Of course, there was no doubt that both he and their EVA specialist had noticed plenty of other details, if not already figured out the purpose of their mission. Nick would deal with that variable later, after reentry. For now they still had tests to conduct and two more satellites to modify if this worked.
Billy was otherwise oblivious to them, hyperfocused on his work and in full character as the notorious hacker Xenos. “Capacitors have a full charge from the solar cells. The microwave emitter’s self-test routine came back clean, no squawks. We can proceed whenever you’re ready.”
Nick made a grand gesture of deferring to the kid. “You may proceed.”
It was as simple as Billy/Xenos selecting a password-protected item on his control menu. He entered a six-digit code and watched a status bar change color. “It’s emitting. SAMCOM’s getting cooked right now.”
“You’re certain?”
“Again, no. Not without directly hacking the satellite. But the whole point of this is to not leave a trail, right?” He pointed at the network map.
Nick watched it for any clues. “Nothing’s happening.”
“Give it a second.”
Soon one of the overlapping circles, labeled SMCM-3, flickered before disappearing completely. Adjacent circles soon began flickering as well, changing radii as ground controllers scrambled to compensate.
“And there you go. SAMCOM-3 is cooked like a microwave burrito. Paraguay and northern Argentina just lost whatever passes for the internet down there.”
No great loss, Nick thought to himself. Still, this was encouraging. “No signs of life from the satellite?”
Billy pointed at a status window. “EM spectrum’s quiet. You can see they’re pinging the crap out of it, but it’s not transmitting.”
So they’d just passed the first test. Nick noticed Whitman looking back over his shoulder expectantly. “Ready when you are.”
“The bird’s all yours,” Billy said, lifting his hands from the keyboard.
At that, Whitman pushed up from his seat and floated back to join them. He opened up a hard-shell case that held a set of simple controls: numeric keypad, a few covered switches, and two small joysticks. “T
his’ll take a bit of a fine touch,” Whitman said, slaving one of Billy’s monitors to his control box. After scrolling through an activation menu, he tapped one of the joysticks and the image in his monitor shifted with it as he pulsed Necromancer’s thrusters. “I’ve got control authority.” He turned to Billy. “Can you confirm our range?”
“Fifty meters,” the kid said.
“Give me callouts every ten meters. Thrusting forward.” He tapped against the other joystick and SAMCOM-3 soon began to grow onscreen.
“Forty.” The satellite grew steadily larger.
“Thirty.” It began to fill the screen. Nick was surprised at how steadily everything moved, as if he’d anticipated wind or waves to nudge them about as they might on Earth.
“Twenty.” Whitman tapped back against the joystick and the image slowed.
“Ten.” One more tap and the image stopped cold.
“Stable at four meters,” Whitman said. “Ready for the claw.” He looked to Giselle, who had stayed in the copilot seat. Without a word, she floated down to them and took over the control box as Whitman went back to his seat. If what came next didn’t work, their trip would be for nothing.
She threw over a mode selector, and the same joysticks used to maneuver the satellite now controlled the grappling arms. It limited what they could do at any one time—fly the satellite or use the grappler—but it saved precious mass and volume aboard their small orbiting workshop. She activated a camera mounted alongside the claw and another window appeared on-screen, filled with SAMCOM’s frame. It grew as she moved the claw closer until ending with a shudder.
“Capture.”
6
In his limited flying career, Marshall Hunter had yet to succumb to airsickness. Not during instrument training, not while learning aerobatics and upset recovery; not once had he felt the urge to tear off his mask and lunge for a barf bag.
All of that had occurred while he’d been in the pilot’s seat, behind a windscreen or beneath a bubble canopy with his instruments to lean on instead of his own vestibular vicissitudes. The rolling and shaking of launch might have been otherwise tolerable if he’d had some kind of outside reference. Here, strapped into the back of an S-21 Specter spaceplane, its lifting-body fuselage enclosed behind a clamshell fairing, he had no view of the window or even the pilot’s instruments. For the first time in his flying experience, he was a helpless passenger.
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