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

  Something thumped Jack’s leg under the table. Startled, he stopped speaking. Bill Walker, the administrator of NASA, straightened up, his face blank. He’d kicked Jack under the table. Shut up.

  Flustered, Jack tried to change the subject in mid-sentence. “I mean, there could be anything out there, but if we don’t look, we’ll never know, will we? So it’s better to have these resources in space, than to just sit around waiting to get hit by an asteroid, or invaded by aliens. Ha, ha.”

  Jack laughed, but no one laughed with him. What happened next was Bill Walker knocked over his Starbucks cup.

  Cold coffee flooded across the table and dripped onto Jack’s legs.

  Walker wasn’t a clumsy man. He’d been reaching for Jack’s mic, intending to turn it off or pull it away. Or maybe he’d spilt his coffee on purpose because he couldn’t reach Jack’s mic.

  Jack, silenced, cold coffee soaking into his trousers, stared at the frozen faces lining the room, and thought: Oh, shit.

  CHAPTER 8

  On the pavement outside, Walker said, “It’s a gotcha game. They got you. Don’t worry about it.”

  Jack wasn’t sure exactly what he’d said that he shouldn’t have. After the coffee spill, the hearing had wound up quickly. The dishevelled senator who asked Jack about Frostbite had left the room even before the aides were done mopping up.

  “Was it what I said about aliens?” Jack ventured. “I didn’t mean it, obviously. Or asteroids?”

  “It wasn’t that,” Walker said briefly, leaving Jack with the distinct impression that it might have been.

  “That’s a relief,” Jack said with an uneasy smile.

  “We thought it was going to be Howard up there. He was senior to you, obviously. More experience.” The subtext was obviously, HE wouldn’t have got got.

  Jack’s wet trousers stuck to his thighs. This was his only good suit—or had been. It was a wool blend, completely unsuitable for June in the nation’s capital. In contrast to the brutal air-conditioning inside the building, the afternoon sun hammered down on the sidewalk. Jack felt sweat coating his body, and not only because of the sticky heat.

  “I shouldn’t have tried to be funny,” he apologized again.

  Walker’s jaw bunched. “No, you shouldn’t have. Senators and humor don’t mix. Especially not British humor, if that’s what that was.” They stood on the U of sidewalk outside the Rayburn House Office building, waiting for their car. Crash barriers cluttered the monumental ‘60s façade. Jack thought the official areas of Washington were like something designed for Hitler. No one needed this much concrete. “There’s going to be a shitstorm,” Walker said to his deputy. The deputy nodded and started texting.

  “Sir,” Jack tried again. “I’m awfully sorry. I’m not sure exactly what it was I said ...”

  Walker sighed. “Those idiots in there? Those democratically elected, insecure, narcissistic, monstrously ambitious idiots? Before today, three of them knew about Frostbite. The chairwoman, the senator from Missouri, and the ranking member for Science. Now they all do.”

  For the second time that day Jack was silenced. The possibility that democratically elected representatives of the American people might not know about their own nation’s satellite intelligence programs hadn’t even crossed his mind. After all, this was America, the land of the free and the home of the transparent.

  “If you’d been awake during my testimony,” Walker said, “you might have noticed that I did not refer to Frostbite in any but the vaguest terms. Even the satellite’s code name is classified. It’s a kind of a don’t ask, don’t tell thing. Senator Colbert violated that mutual understanding.” Their car came.

  “Looks like C-Span’s going to play ball,” Walker’s deputy said, as they climbed into the chauffeured Town Car.

  “That’s a relief,” Walker said.

  Despite the welcome air-conditioning, Jack felt more uncomfortable than ever. He had a suspicion that Walker was fobbing him off with a partial truth. Obviously he shouldn’t have mentioned Frostbite. But if that were the worst of it, why hadn’t Walker tried to grab his mic at that moment? Why wait until Jack made a stupid joke about aliens?

  He asked nervously, “How much of a shitstorm are we expecting?”

  Walker gave a rictus smile that made him look like a politician. “It won’t be that bad. Even democratically elected idiots can be discreet when it serves their own interests.” The car turned on Constitution Avenue. “Most of the damage,” Walker added, “will be in-house.”

  “Uh oh,” Jack said, trying for a light tone.

  Walker touched the intercom button to communicate with the driver. “We’ll be dropping Mr. Kildare off at his hotel.”

  *

  “Hello?” Hannah said, trying desperately to sound normal. If this was the police calling about the car she’d rear-ended, she had to come across as the kind of person who had her shit together and never but never drove over the limit.

  “Is this Aunt Hannah?” squeaked a child’s voice.

  The tension drained out of Hannah’s body. “Isabel?”

  “I bet you didn’t know it was me, did you?” Isabel giggled. Hannah reflexively grinned in response. Isabel, six, was her favorite niece, not to mention her only niece.

  “I did not know it was you, monkey. Where are you calling from?” Horrible possibilities cascaded through her mind. “Oh my God, Izzy, are you OK?”

  “I’m fine! This is my new cell phone! Mommy bought it for me today! You’re the first person I’ve called!”

  Hannah wondered if Mommy—Hannah’s younger sister Bethany—knew that Isabel was busy running up Mommy’s phone bill. She decided not to say anything. If Bethany was stupid enough to buy a six-year-old a cell phone, she deserved it. Anyway, it wasn’t Hannah’s role to play the hardass. She enjoyed the role of indulgent aunt, taking Isabel for ice cream, or to the funfair on the Santa Monica Pier, whenever she could get into L.A. on the weekend … which wasn’t often enough.

  Isabel chattered about her swimming lessons—“I put my face in the water yesterday!” Hannah duly praised her, and promised to come for a visit this Saturday, no matter what.

  Ending the phone call, she returned to Burke and the others. They were all clustered around Lyons, some of the team members kneeling behind him on the big square bench. They were all looking at Lyons’s cell phone. “That’s just weird,” Lyons said.

  “What are you looking at?” Hannah said.

  “I can get C-Span streaming on this. We were looking at the Atlantis hearing. It just glitched.”

  “Alt-F4. That kind of a glitch,” said someone else.

  “It’’s supposed to be live,” Lyons complained, shaking his cell phone as if the gadget were the problem.

  “They always have a delay so they can bleep out f-bombs,” Hannah said. “Maybe that’s what happened.”

  “Well, it was Kildare talking.” Several people laughed. None of them had ever met Jack Kildare, as astronauts didn’t have any reason to visit JPL as a rule, but astronauts and foul language went together like apple pie and ice cream. Not surprising, as most of them started off in the military.

  Burke was silent.

  Aha, Hannah thought. It wasn’t just an f-bomb. It was a political glitch, wasn’t it?

  She walked back to the office with the others, feeling pensive. Buried in engineering problems on a daily basis, she tended to forget that the charter of NASA was “to advance US scientific, security, and economic interests.” The agency’s mission was a political one. If only it could just be about the engineering …

  Her mind drifted back to Juno’s orbital insertion burns. Although the probe would not reach Jupiter for another four years, the burns could be calculated now.

  On Earth, a lot could happen in four years. But not in space. That was one of the reasons Hannah loved space, actually. You could plan things years in advance, knowing that nothing would happen in the meantime to throw off your calculations. The planets and their mo
ons were permanent, unchanging. These alleged hot cryovolcanic plumes on Europa, for example … if they really existed, that would upend astronomy. But in Hannah’s opinion, there was a 99% chance Dr. Meinritz had screwed up his observations.

  Never mind. Washington had asked for this fly-by, so Washington would get it.

  Mentally immersed in the numbers, she forgot all about going into L.A. on Saturday.

  CHAPTER 9

  Jack emptied his apartment in Clear Lake. He’d lived there for over five years without accumulating any more stuff than could fit in two suitcases. He drove to Johnson Space Center along Gemini Avenue and Saturn Lane. This dingy Houston suburb was one big memorial to the history he had been so proud to be a part of. Up in the Astronaut Office, he emptied his desk drawers—a small bin liner held everything. A couple of other people from his class, the Peacocks of 2004, came over to offer awkward good wishes. Jack was only the third astronaut ever to be dismissed from NASA. The cause of his dismissal hadn’t been made public, although rumors of a Washington shitstorm had done the rounds. His former colleagues seemed unsure whether to sympathise with him or shun him.

  Linda Moskowitz evidently had no doubts. Jack met her on the way to the elevator. She was wearing a blue NASA polo-neck, and carrying her laptop, sporting a huge NASA insignia on the cover. Jack was wearing holey Levis and carrying a bin liner. Moskowitz looked straight past him as if he didn’t exist.

  Flying out of the country, he got that feeling that he didn’t exist again and again. Who’s watching the day darken above the clouds? Who’s pouring overpriced airline wine into a plastic glass? Who’s standing at a baggage carousel, waiting for his suitcases to appear between gigantic twine-wrapped cardboard boxes from the Third World? Not an astronaut. Not anymore.

  Dear filthy old Heathrow. They lost one of his suitcases. He abandoned it, caught a shuttle bus to the Park Inn on the Bath Road, simply because it was the first hotel it stopped at, and didn’t move from his room for the next two days, except to make foraging trips to the off-license up the road.

  On the third day, he showered, shaved, rented a car from Avis, and drove to Warwickshire, chewing spearmint gum the whole way.

  “Hi, Mum.”

  His mother screamed and dropped her pruning shears, which was not flattering, but understandable. She had thought he was on the other side of the Atlantic.

  “The garden’s looking lovely,” Jack added. It was. Now that she and his father were retired, his mother had gone from a keen gardener to an obsessive one. She had strange ideas about planting flowers whose colors clashed with each other, bursting out of crannies in the pocket-sized garden, but somehow it all worked.

  She pulled herself together, hugged him, and asked what they owed the visit to.

  “I’ve lost my job,” Jack said. “But not to worry. I’ve got loads of prospects lined up.”

  He hadn’t. His mother, realizing this, made it clear without a word that he was welcome to stay as long as he liked. His father, on the other hand, had a lot invested in Jack’s success. A retired science teacher, he used to bask in the reflected glory of his NASA astronaut son. He kept on at Jack for details of his supposed job leads with obtuse persistence. On the fourth night of his stay, Jack blew up at him and stalked off to the pub.

  At the end of that too-long night, he brooded over a last can of lager in his childhood bedroom. He might have a go at processing his photos from the ISS. He hadn’t looked at them since he took them. But all he had here was a laptop, and neither its screen quality nor processing software were really up to the job …

  He was about to boot up the laptop, anyway, when he got a call from Oliver Meeks.

  “How’s everything?” Meeks said, sounding as sprightly as if he’d just woken up. It was three in the morning. He probably had.

  Meeks had been a friend of Jack’s at Bristol University, where Jack studied physics as an undergraduate. They shared a common interest—all right, obsession—with rockets, spacecraft, and all things that went boom. Meeks was hands-on. He built things. A little while after they graduated, he’d built a rocket-propelled car that corkscrewed across the bottom of a quarry in Wales and smashed into a slate cliff-face at a hundred miles an hour. Meeks had lost the use of his legs. A while after he got out of hospital, he’d gone to work for BAE Systems. That was the last Jack had heard of him, until now:

  “So you got canned by NASA? Bad luck.”

  Evidently Meeks had stayed better informed about Jack’s movements than vice versa.

  “Yeah, how’d you hear?” Jack said.

  “Your father,” Meeks said, with the whinnying laugh that wrongly put a lot of people off him. “He rang me up earlier. I think he’s worried that you’re sinking into a spiral of pathetic, loser-ish depression and will finish up an unemployable alcoholic.”

  “The sly old git,” Jack said, with a certain amount of admiration. “He’s overreacting, need I say. One late night at the pub and he thinks I’ve got a problem.” In fact, Jack’s grandfather—his father’s father—had drunk himself into an early grave, causing much needless grief and suffering for the family. So Jack’s father, himself a teetotaler, tended to be twitchy about booze. Jack opened his window and propped his elbows on the sill to talk with his head outside, keeping his voice lowered. The scent of his mother’s phlox drifted up through the warm night. “What are you up to these days, Ollie? And how the hell did my father get your phone number?”

  “Off the internet, I expect,” Meeks said. “I’m not hard to find if you bothered to look. Firebird Systems.”

  “I thought you worked at BAE?”

  “Not anymore,” Meeks said. “I started Firebird a few years back.”

  Jack suddenly had a vivid flashback of Meeks’s rocket-propelled car hurtling across the quarry. It had been a spectacular smash-up. Meeks had cartwheeled out of the fireball in his flame-retardant Formula One style nomex getup, still strapped into his seat, never to walk again. The name of that car had been Firebird. It took a certain type of man to adopt a life-altering failure as his personal totem. “Congratulations,” Jack said. “How’s that going?”

  Meeks snorted. “If you want to get old before your time, try starting a company in this bloody country. They might as well just go the whole hog and ban ideas.”

  In Meeks’s case that would probably be a good thing, Jack thought. “What are you making now, then? Rocket-propelled wheelchairs?”

  Meeks whinnied. “I considered it, but I decided to stick to spaceships.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yes, a single stage to orbit spaceplane. The thing is in about a year we’ll be ready to fly our first test launches. So I’ll need a pilot. Of course, you’ve probably got something else lined up …”

  *

  Shortly before Christmas 2012, Jack was in Firebird Systems’ corporate headquarters, otherwise known as Meeks’s house in the Rhondda Cynon Valley. Optimized throughout for wheelchair access, the spread had ramps instead of stairs, and huge picture windows overlooking the forested opposite side of the valley. Meeks came from an extremely well-off family. That was just as well, since Firebird was burning through money like there was no tomorrow. They’d reached the stage where they could get the thing sub-orbital, but couldn’t load it with enough fuel to make a decently round orbit, and still carry a payload somewhere useful. But with Christmas coming up, Meeks had issued an edict against doom and gloom “at least until Boxing Day.” The small, fanatically committed team of design engineers had been dragged away from their computers to decorate a 12-foot Christmas tree.

  Under these circumstances, Jack felt bad about accepting even a token salary, especially since he couldn’t contribute to making their existing engines more efficient.

  He could hang tinsel, anyway. He balanced on a stepladder, driving thumbtacks into the wall above the picture window in the living-room. He looped fluffy silver tinsel over each tack. The smell of mulled wine filled the house, and on the stereo Psy sang “Gangnam Style
.” Jack knew he ought to be spending Christmas at home, since he was actually in the same country as his parents for a change, but they were used to being alone. They’d told him not to go to the bother of coming down for the day. And honestly, it was going to be more fun here. Although most of the team would disperse on Christmas Eve, their German metallurgist, Inga, would be staying here over the holidays. Inga had the body of a Valkyrie and a nerdish lack of social confidence. Jack reckoned she just needed to be brought out of her shell. He was still weighing it, but they were all adults, and it shouldn’t disrupt the team if they got cozy under the mistletoe after a few glasses of wine.

  He climbed down from the stepladder and moved it around Meeks’s wheelchair. Meeks was spraying the window with one of those fake snow aerosols. No clichéd season’s greetings for him—he was literally writing rocket equations, backwards, so they could be read from outside if anyone ever came up here, which they didn’t.

  Physically, Meeks and Jack were a study in contrasts. Jack, ruddy, fair-haired, just under the astronaut height cut-off at six foot two and a half, was in the best shape of his life. His revenge on NASA was to stay at peak fitness with daily runs and weightlifting. Meeks was beaky-faced, dark-haired, with an overdeveloped upper body that looked out of proportion to his withered legs. And then, of course, there was the fact that Meeks was in a wheelchair. But their minds worked the same way.

  “Why don’t you put the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation?” Jack said.

  “No, I prefer the vis-viva equation,” Meeks said. “No one ever comes out here except for us, anyway.”

  He strained up in his wheelchair, stretching to write the last figure—and the wheelchair rolled into the bottom of the stepladder.

  Jack reached instinctively for the curtain rail, then realized he was going over no matter what he did. He jumped clear, landing on his feet. He was too late to catch the stepladder. It crashed down across the wheelchair. Meeks was no longer in the chair. He’d thrown himself out. He lay at the base of the window, the spray can still clutched in one hand, his useless legs crumpled like sticks. “Sorry,” he said. “God. Sorry about that.”