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

  Just before midnight, the clouds disappeared.

  “Hey hey,” Tamura said placidly. “Got Jupiter for you.”

  Skyler dumped his guitar in its case and sprang to the console.

  “Got Europa, too,” Tamura said. “Just came around the limb there.”

  “Screw Europa,” Skyler said inattentively. If there was anything less interesting than a gas giant, it was a gas giant’s frozen, radiation-drenched moon. He selected the points for spectrograph capture. “Sweet,” he said, watching the grainy black-and-white guide image with his points overlaid. He could see the great eye of Jupiter’s famous storm, and on a whim flagged it for a spectrograph capture. “Odo’s gonna love this.”

  “Hope he feels better soon,” Tamura said. Dr. Meinritz had come out to Hawaii with Skyler, because who wouldn’t jump at the chance of a holiday in Hawaii, even if it was March? The buff, outdoorsy professor had planned to drive around seeing the sights while Skyler put in the long hours at the IRTF. On their first day Odo had promptly come down with a bug. Who was it said schadenfreude is the spice of life?

  “Yeah, he was feeling a bit better today,” Skyler said. He stared at the data on his screen. “Are you sure this thing is working?”

  “Ya know how many years I’ve been operating this ‘thing’? It is working. Something wrong?”

  “Yeah … not sure.”

  What he was seeing couldn’t be right.

  Save data.

  “Nuh uh,” Skyler muttered, glued to the graphs appearing on the screen. “Nothing out there is that hot.””

  Save data, he commanded again.

  1.7x106 Kelvin? Seriously?

  Then temperature readings returned to normal, and the graphs resumed a more reasonable shape.

  Skyler checked the data dumps from 23:45 and 23:47 to make sure they were really there. They were.

  The weird temperature readings were there, too, in black and white.

  Tense as a cat on a windowsill, he pulled out his cell phone.

  “Odo?”

  “Yeah, hey, what is it?” The professor sounded suspiciously perky for a man who was supposed to be in bed.

  “Are you at the motel?”

  “I am very sick,” Odo replied. He was German. “Do you need something?”

  “OK, this is what happened,” Skyler said. And then the voice of caution tickled at the back of his mind. Not on the cell phone. You never know who might be listening. “Odo, can you just get up here?”

  Maybe Skyler’s excitement carried over the phone. Odo arrived barely an hour later in his own rented car, probably having broken the 5mph speed limit by a factor of ten. He blew his nose loudly into a wad of Kleenex. “So this better be good,” he said.

  Skyler glanced at Tamura. The veteran operator folded his arms. He didn’t know exactly what Skyler was so worked up about. But he wasn’t going anywhere.

  Fine. If this was anything, NASA would have to know soon, anyway.

  “I observed absorption lines at 1950 nanometers, 1450 nanometers, and 1200 nanometers,” Skyler said. He opened the first file. He’d already copied both files to his keychain USB, for safekeeping. “See? And look at these overall temperature readings. They’re coming from behind Europa and across the disk of Jupiter.”

  In the space of three minutes, between 23:45 and 23:47, Skyler had developed an intense interest in Europa, which he had formerly dismissed as a boring, radioactive iceball.

  “It looks like a plume of ...” he started, but Odo cut him off.

  “Water! Those absorption lines, it can only be water!”

  “It’s hot,” Skyler continued. “See? Nothing is that hot out there! It’s so hot it’s not even vapor. It must be a plasma!”

  Heart racing, he snuck a glance at Odo’s profile.

  The professor stared transfixed at the screen. His face looked pallid in the bluish glow from the screen. His lips trembled. “Die Außerirdischen,” he whispered in German.

  “What?” Skyler said. He knew that word. Aliens. He wanted to hear Odo repeat it in English, to confirm that they weren’t both going crazy. “What do you think it is?” he pushed.

  The next instant felt very long.

  At last Odo straightened up and faced Skyler. He wore a fixed grin. “It could be a sign of new processes going on in Europa. A massive volcanic eruption of water vapor. This could completely alter our understanding of cryovolcanism on Jupiter’s icy moons!”

  “Hmm,” Skyler said. He felt more disappointed than he would have expected. Then again, Odo was a smart guy. He knew that talking about Die Außerirdischen got you nowhere fast in their field.

  “Come on, Skyler! This is fucking huge! We might even get a Nobel Prize out of it.”

  CHAPTER 5

  This is fucking huge, Dr. Meinritz had said that night in the control room of the IRTF.

  But it didn’t change anything for Skyler Taft.

  They returned to Cambridge, where Dr. Meinritz immediately threw himself into analyzing the spectrographs. Meanwhile, the professor pushed off the Jupiter project onto Skyler. So for the next five months, Skyler was left to write up the composition of Jupiter’s cloud layers—for observing conditions had continued perfect on the fourth and fifth nights of their IRTF slot, allowing them to gather massive amounts of incredibly boring data—while Odo jetted off here and there to discuss the anomaly.

  The anomaly. That’s what they called it at the lab now.

  Skyler still thought of it as his discovery.

  But his connection to it grew more tenuous every day. After all, what had he actually discovered? He’d been physically present in the IRTF control room when the telescope picked up the water plume from Europa. That’s all. Just a stroke of luck. It could have happened to anybody.

  Still, it had been his stroke of luck, the only one to come his way in ages, and it just didn’t feel fair that he was getting left out.

  Dr. Meinritz was spreading the word about the anomaly to other institutions, and running into predictable skepticism. As the saying went, the only difference between science and screwing around was writing it down. But what really made science was being able to repeat it. If they had seen a genuine volcanic eruption on Europa, you would expect to see another one at some point. So there would have to be a near-constant watch kept on Europa and Jupiter to catch the next eruption. The problem was that no one wanted to commit scarce telescope time to such an unlikely project.

  Odo had already contacted NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) about making an emergency request for observations from their Juno probe, which was scheduled to arrive in the Jovian system shortly. But so far, he wasn’t having much luck. One person at NASA had taken a look at the temperature readings and asked if they’d forgotten to top off the cryostat that night.

  On the first warm evening in May, Skyler sat on the porch of his house in Arlington, noodling on his guitar. It wasn’t actually his house, of course. He shared the top floor with a Google employee, a junior researcher from Genzyme, an MIT lab tech, and the MIT guy’s druggie girlfriend. That’s why Skyler spent so much time, weather permitting, on the porch. The neighbors might not like him playing his guitar out here. They could kiss his ass.

  He played Dylan—Blowin’ In The Wind—and Baez—Sacco & Vanzetti. It was a funny relationship they had, Skyler and folk music. He loved the tunes while understanding that the lyrics were, in general, pretty stupid. Sacco and Vanzetti? Guilty as hell. And yet that melody. Oh, boy.

  A sleek black Lexus drove around the corner and cruised along the street, as if looking for parking. Both sides of the street were parked up solid, since there was no room for driveways or garages between the hundred-year-old triple-deckers. The Lexus slowed outside Skyler’s house, then rolled on. Skyler grinned and started a new song. “Imagine there’s no parking,” he crooned.

  The Lexus came back around the block. It stopped in front of Skyler’s house, blocking the street.

  Skyler put his guitar aside and
lit a cigarette. He smoked rarely, and then only to piss people off.

  Two men got out of the Lexus. One was younger, wearing a suit. The other, older, wore jeans and a plain navy blue t-shirt with a logo-less baseball cap.

  They squeezed between the parked cars onto the sidewalk. They were probably friends of the Google chick, Skyler thought, while a deeper instinct said, No, they’re not. It was the plain blue t-shirt. He didn’t know why that set off an alarm. It just did.

  The men came up the steps. “Hey,” the younger one said, smiling. “Looking for a guy who lives here? Skyler, uh, Taft?”

  Skyler was sitting on the old porch swing, on a blanket that generations of stray cats had peed on. He didn’t get up. “Can I help you?”

  “Are you Skyler Taft?”

  “Yeah.” Skyler took a drag on his cigarette. It was coming in handy now, giving him an excuse to fidget. He was nervous, and he still didn’t know why.

  “That’s bad for you,” said the older man.

  “Kiss my ass,” said Skyler.

  Both men laughed. The younger one said. “Kind of chilly for sitting out, isn’t it?”

  “My housemates are home,” Skyler said.

  “Wanna go grab a coffee?”

  “I saw a Starbucks as we were coming along,” the older man said.

  “That’s the one on Mass Ave,” Skyler said. “It’s always full of students. You can’t get a seat.”

  The older man chuckled and said, “OK. We can talk right here.”

  “Just a couple of minutes of your time, if you’re agreeable,” the younger one added. He had Deep South vowels, and a peckerwood jut to his pale brows. Skyler reminded himself that just because you talked slowly didn’t mean you thought slowly. “I’m Josh, and this’s Travis.”

  The two men handed over business cards. There was nothing on the cards except their names—Joshua Beauchamp, Travis Moore—their cellphone numbers, and an address in Augusta, Georgia. Skyler tried to think what was down there. He didn’t know, but he was 99% sure it would turn out to be something to do with the federal government.

  The older man, Travis, took over the … conversation? Interrogation? He was black, with silver speckles in his hair. He carried some extra weight over his belt buckle. “You probably figured this out already,” he said with his chuckle that wasn’t a chuckle, just punctuation. “We’re extremely interested in the work you’re doing with Professor Meinritz.”

  “I’m not doing any work with him,” Skyler said, employing a Clintonian definition of with. He was doing grunt work for Odo. Not with him. Not since his discovery.

  “Oh yeah?” Josh said. “Don’t you work at the Observatory?”

  “At Harvard, yeah.”

  “That’s all the way over in Cambridge. How do you get there?”

  “Bike path. It’s a nice ride.”

  “I guess that would be good exercise,” Travis said, and they chatted for a couple of minutes about bike commuting. Josh said that he commuted by bike sometimes, too, but everyone thought he was crazy on account of the heat down south. “Someone should invent an air-conditioned bike!” Travis said. He chuckled again.

  “Must be nice in Hawaii this time of year,” Josh said. “You were out there recently, huh?”

  “In March,” Skyler said. His anxiety spiked again. Suddenly, he was back in the IRTF control room, watching impossible graphs take shape on the screen. He leaned down, stubbed his cigarette out on the porch, and tossed it into the street.

  “You were working at the …” Travis paused, as if trying to remember its name. “The Infrared Telescope Facility?”

  An SUV rolled down the street and stopped behind Travis and Josh’s Lexus, patiently waiting for it to move. Boston area drivers didn’t honk in this kind of situation. They were too used to it.

  Travis jumped off the porch and went to move the car. Skyler was surprised at first, and then not. He’d assumed Travis was the senior man, just because he was older. But it was Josh who’d taken the lead to begin with. Him with his pale peckerwood eyes.

  “Dr. Meinritz has been telling the whole world about some observations you made? A water plume, if I’ve got that right? At a temperature of almost three million Fahrenheit?”

  “That’s right,” Skyler said, while his faint hope that Josh and Travis might turn out to be from NASA, come to offer him a position at JPL working on the James Webb space telescope, dwindled to nothing. Degrees Fahrenheit, for chrissakes! Astronomers used the Kelvin scale. Nor would anyone from NASA struggle to recall the name of the IRTF. And they’d call it the IRTF, not the ‘Infrared Telescope Facility.‘ NASA didn’t have any facilities in Georgia, anyway.

  “The professor’s saying it could be a new type of volcano? Volcanoes in outer space!” Josh marvelled. “How is that even possible?”

  ““The same way it happens on Earth. Something gets squirted out of something else by increasing pressure,” Skyler said, going into TA mode. It made him feel better to see Josh as an undergrad dozing through Astrophysics 101. Now the man was even taking his smartphone out. Just like an undergrad. “On icy moons like Europa, cryovolcanoes can produce eruptions of water vapor. Now we’ve previously seen cryovolcanoes on Europa, but the hint is in the name: cryo, meaning cold. But now Dr. Meinritz thinks there has to be something different out there. Of course, at a few million degrees, it’s definitely not a cryovolcano! Hell, that’s hotter than the magma that comes out of volcanoes on Earth.”

  Josh slid his phone back inside his suit jacket. When he did that, Skyler saw something that made him go absolutely cold. The man was carrying a gun. Was concealed carry even legal in Massachusetts?

  “Travis says he’s gonna circle around and look for a parking place,” Josh explained. “Man, I wouldn’t want to have a car if I lived up here.”

  “That’s why I don’t. As well as, you know …” Skyler, flustered, rubbed his index finger and thumb together in the universal gesture for money.

  Josh smiled slightly. No fake chuckles from him. “If you lived down south, you’d have to have a car. Not necessarily a truck with a Dixie flag on the bumper. It’s a pretty diverse area where we are.”

  Skyler nodded. He was hyper-aware of his physical vulnerability, his guitar lying stupidly behind him on the porch swing. No one else was out on the street. Curtains glowed warmly. He could smell supper cooking in the second-floor apartment.

  Josh made a sudden movement. Skyler flattened himself against the porch swing, like a child shrinking into a corner. Then he saw what Josh had reacted to. Just a rat running across the porch steps.

  “Shee-yit!” Josh said.

  “We get a lot of them around here,” Skyler said. “Because of the recycling laws. The bins are supposed to be animal-proof, but people don’t put the lids on properly.”

  Josh grinned ruefully— “I just about jumped out of my skin!” and suddenly Skyler was no longer afraid of him. He understood that Josh was as nervous as he was, and it had nothing to do with rats.

  “So you wanted to know about the Europa observations?” he said.

  “Yeah. Yeah. Let me ask you a question, in your personal opinion. What do you think caused that water plume?”

  Skyler gazed up at him for a long moment without answering. At last he said, “Aliens. Nothing makes things that hot, in a mature solar system, apart from nuclear fusion … or intelligent life.”

  Josh grimaced, looking troubled. “That’s what we think, too.”

  Travis came jogging back, having found a parking place way over on Mass Ave. By that time, Josh had pretty much offered Skyler a job. He had a funny way of working around to it. He said nothing about the benefits and opportunities that his organization could offer Skyler. Instead, he harped on how they needed Skyler’s expertise to adequately analyze the ‘risk profile’ of the anomaly. He said that there were dozens of people with the same qualifications, of course, but Skyler had been involved with this thing from the beginning, so they’d prefer to have him.
r />   Just a stroke of luck. Could have happened to anyone.

  Skyler turned to the out-of-breath, grumpy Travis. “So what is this organization?” he said. “I mean, maybe I’m supposed to know, but I don’t.”

  “The CIA,” Travis said, shrugging.

  Which was actually going to have been Skyler’s second guess, behind the FBI.

  “At the moment, we’re with the CIA,” Josh clarified. “But there could be changes. It depends how this thing goes. I mean, maybe it just goes away. But there’s a possibility that a separate organization could be set up to deal with it. That’s kind of up in the air right now, but we’d like to have you on board, anyway.”

  “Uh huh,” Skyler said. He looked up at the darkening sky above the roofs on the other side of the street. Only a few stars were visible. Goodbye, proto-stars, he thought.

  “Well, you don’t have to make up your mind right now,” Josh said. “You’ve got our cards, you can give us a call. We would just request that you don’t talk to anyone about this. It’s not like you’d be prosecuted for it. Just, you know, use common sense.”

  “Hang on,” Skyler said. He stood up. He was still holding their business cards. He took his cigarette lighter out of his pocket and set fire to the corners.

  All three of them watched the little rectangles flare up like candles in the dark. When the flames got near his fingers, Skyler dropped them and stamped them out.

  “Well, I’ve been told to fuck off before,” Josh said. His face was tight with anger. “But that was a first. Do you burn American flags, too?”

  Skyler scuffed his shoe over the soot smears, knocking the unburnt scraps off the porch into the drift of old dead leaves below. His pulse hammered in his throat.