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

  Jack picked up the stepladder, as everyone rushed over. “Ach! Are you hurt, Ollie?” Inga exclaimed.

  “He’s fine. What fun would Christmas be without a prang or two?” Jack said with a laugh. He did not offer to help Meeks get up. He moved the stepladder along and went back to stringing up tinsel, while everyone else fussed over Meeks. Jack knew how much his friend detested being treated like a cripple. He might be a paraplegic, but in Jack’s mind, he was exactly the same person as ever. He was brilliant, hyperactive, and right now incredibly frustrated about engine efficiency. Jack watched as Meeks snarled and swore at Inga and the others, who were trying to help, but seemed only to make things worse.

  After they finished the decorations, Jack found himself at loose ends. He sat at the three-monitor CAD setup on the far side of the ground floor, sorting through the photographs he’d taken on the ISS. It was about time he got around to them. He planned to enhance and print out his best ones. Inspiration for the team.

  Gosh, here’s Jupiter!

  It was strange to look back and rememb how excited he’d been about capturing Jupiter on film. Greg Howard had died that same night. Jack had forgotten about this photo set amidst the chaotic aftermath of the tragedy.

  To his disappointment, the pictures weren’t that great. As advanced as it was, his Canon’s resolution was not on the level of a telescope. Jupiter dissolved into a clump of pale pixels.

  Hang on.

  The time-stamp of the photo was roughly midday.

  What’s this?

  Jack enhanced the contrast.

  That makes no sense.

  Absorbed in enhancing and retouching the picture, trying to make the apparent smear go away, Jack didn’t hear Meeks wheeling up behind him. “Are those your space photographs?”

  Jack jumped. ‘The Fairytale of New York’ on the stereo had drowned out the squeak of the wheelchair’s tyres. “Yes.”

  Meeks rolled up to the desk. It was exactly the right height so the arms of the wheelchair could fit underneath. “Was there something wrong with your camera?”

  “No,” Jack said.

  Meeks tugged the mouse out from under Jack’s hand. He checked the exposure and processing settings. “That looks like a plume of water vapor. Except it wouldn’t have shown up unless it were dense enough to be illuminated by the sun, or very, very hot.”

  “And that would be impossible.”

  “Let’s say for the sake of argument that it really is a hot plume of water vapor. Plasma, actually. Hang on.” Meeks whizzed over to a different computer and began to Google. “Here’s something,” he said about thirty seconds later. “It’s behind a paywall …” He subscribed to the journal on the spot.

  Superheated volcanic water eruption observations on Jovian moons. Jack read the abstract over Meeks’s shoulder.

  “Well, they’ve got that all wrong,” he said when he finished.

  “Yup,” Meeks said. “They would only have been looking at a very tight view of Jupiter and its moons. I bet they didn’t realise how far the plume extended.”

  Jack nodded. He walked back to the other computer and stared at his photograph.

  All his training and experience with NASA had taught him that ‘impossible’ was a moving target. The things he’d done as an astronaut would have been considered science fiction by their grandfathers’ generation. In the space industry, ‘impossible’ barriers got shattered all the time. It was just a question of overcoming human and technological limitations. Anything was theoretically possible with the right people and materials.

  Out of nowhere, Jack suddenly remembered the weird noises he’d heard through his headset on the Atlantis.

  Beep, beep, beeeeep.

  Wheeeeooow …

  EEEEEEE!

  He shuddered, hard. His entire skin seemed to shrink up tight on his body. For Jack Kildare, that was the moment when two plus two made four and the world changed.

  He glanced at Meeks. “Ollie, do you believe in aliens?”

  Meeks continued to stare at the photograph without answering. Jack began to feel annoyed and ashamed of his own overreaction.

  He went on, a bit defensively, “I’m not sure if you know this, but all astronauts believe in aliens. It's simply impossible not to, when you’ve been out there and seen for yourself how… big it is; how much there is of it. Space. So many stars, and now we know there are billions of potentially habitable planets. There’s no way they're not out there. But for the same reason, no one believes they'll ever come here. It's too far from A to B.”

  “Shut up,” Meeks said. “I’m thinking.”

  “But they have come here, haven’t they?” Jack rubbed his face with his hands. If he was right, this was probably the worst news the human race had ever received. A smear on a photograph. “That’s a drive plume.”

  “Of course it is,” Meeks said impatiently.

  A huge wave of relief washed over Jack. He wasn’t going bonkers. Meeks saw it, too.

  He said in a false light tone, “Bang goes the Fermi Paradox, eh? ‘Where is everybody?’ Well, Enrico, they were actually on their way. And now they’re here.”

  On the other side of the room, Inga dropped a Christmas tree bauble. Jack whipped around at the sound of shattering glass. So much for taking it lightly. His body was in fight-or-flight mode.

  Meeks turned to watch Inga picking up the pieces of the bauble. Then he said, “Speaking of the Fermi paradox. Where is everybody? I’ve always thought the most logical explanation is that they’re out there, but we’re unable to detect their signals. There may be modes of long-distance communication we’re completely unaware of, which are standard for a highly advanced species. But that’s the trouble. It implies that any other species out there is highly advanced.” Meeks brought his thumb and forefinger together. “If they’ve got the ability to travel between the stars, they also have the ability to squash us like a bug.”

  “Agreed, but I wonder why they haven’t got around to it yet. I took these pictures in April.” Jack laughed. “Listen to us! Discussing a bloody alien invasion.”

  “It was bound to happen someday,” Meeks said. “God knows why they’re delaying. Gathering data on us, perhaps. The good news is, every day they haven’t invaded us is another day we’ve got to prepare.”

  Jack touched the smear on the screen. “It’d take us decades to build anything capable of taking on that.”

  “Not necessarily,” Meeks said. He tapped the screen with a pen. A smile slowly spread across his face. “Do you realize what this is?”

  “Water plasma. The article said it was heated to 1.6 million degrees Kelvin.”

  “Exactly.” Meeks’s smile broadened. “It's the answer!”

  “To what?”

  “Getting enough fuel on board whilst still being light enough to take off! Water! The answer is water!”

  Meeks spun on his wheels. Then he halted.

  “Don't say anything, Jack.”

  “About aliens? Well, of course not. We’d need more proof.” In Jack’s own mind, no further proof was needed. But the worst of all possible worlds would be for the public to panic—and then move on to the next news cycle, while the threat remained real and unaddressed.

  “Say nothing about absolutely any of it,” Meeks said. “We don’t want the competition getting hold of this.” He rolled down the ramp to where the others were putting the finishing touches on the Christmas tree. “All right, everyone! Change of plans! We’re going to be working over Christmas …”

  CHAPTER 10

  Hannah snacked mindlessly on a bag of spinach-flavored rice crackers as she watched Juno’s heartbeat pulse on her screen. It was July 4th, 2016.

  Five years since her baby launched from Cape Canaveral.

  Four years since the team received the ridiculous, still-unexplained request from Washington to alter Juno’s orbital insertion burn for a close fly-by of Europa.

  Fifteen minutes until the probe would complete its main burn and s
ettle into orbit around Jupiter.

  The mission control room at JPL buzzed with tension. Hannah and the other key team members sat at a long desk with their backs to a wall, facing the cameras. NASA had come a long way in presenting a slick, media-friendly face to the world of the internet age. Everything in the room was branded, from the team’s matching t-shirts, to their water bottles—even the snacks Hannah was eating had the Juno logo on the bag, a stylized representation of the tri-winged probe.

  If Hannah lifted her gaze from her computer, she would see giant screens on the far wall displaying mission graphics with the same logo. But she didn’t look up. She was only vaguely conscious of the video and still photographers circling the team. Nothing mattered except the carrier wave hitting the receiving stations in Madrid, Goldstone, and Canberra, proving that Juno had been alive and well 48 minutes ago.

  That was how long it took to send a signal back from Jupiter to Earth.

  48 minutes.

  Whatever would happen, had already happened. Juno was on autopilot. They could no longer affect the outcome of the orbital insertion burn. But that knowledge didn’t ease the tension one jot.

  Ralf Lyons, the mission navigator, kept up a stream of nervous chatter on her left. On her right, Richard Burke, the team leader, was calmly working through his emails. His two-fingered typing—which he insisted was highly efficient—grated on Hannah’s nerves, making her unconsciously grit her teeth with irritation. She ate another rice cracker.

  The snacks were subbing in for what she really wanted, which was a drink.

  It had been a tough four years for Hannah. All the issues that inevitably cropped up with a probe operating at the very edge of humanity’s technological capability, combined with the demands of redesigning the mission on the fly to achieve the Europa fly-by, had resulted in a lot of late nights at work … and a lot of after-work drinks. It was like a Newtonian equal and opposite reaction. The harder she worked, the harder she had to play, as if to burn off the constantly accumulating stress.

  Could you really call it play, what she did? She had eleven bars within her Highland Park territory that she visited on a strict rotation. Hannah’s Rule #2: No drinking at home. The advent of Uber had made it a lot easier for her to keep this rule. Now, she could head out for the night secure in the knowledge that a few taps on her iPhone could get her home without risking a DUI. She had it all down to a system. N units of alcohol allowed per week. N Vicodin allowed per hangover. No to sexy strangers.

  She knew, of course, there was something amiss in viewing her own body as a mechanical system to be recalibrated on a daily basis, but it worked for her. And it would continue to work, as long as she followed the rules.

  She had a bottle of champagne in her bag at her feet. Hannah’s Rule #1, of course, was No drinking at work. But tonight was surely an exception. She planned to bring out the champagne and share it with the team—she’d also brought a sleeve of plastic cups—when Juno had achieved orbital insertion, and they could escape the cameras filming their every move.

  She pushed away a fantasy of escaping to the ladies’ room, uncorking the champagne, and downing a quick slug.

  Right now, Juno’s engine was burning, slowing the probe’s velocity by 540 meters per second.

  This was a big, fast burn designed to slew the probe around and get it facing away from the sun. If something went wrong at this stage, it would all be on Hannah.

  The doppler residuals showed that Juno had reached periapsis—its point of closest approach to Jupiter. Bonus points, this was the closest any human craft had ever approached the massive gas giant. Juno was skimming just 4,500 kilometers above Jupiter’s cloud tops, rotating at 5 rpm, the engine burning sweetly. Not bad for a craft that Hannah had helped to build in a glorified shed at Lockheed Martin.

  Suddenly the carrier wave stuttered. Hannah stiffened. Thoughts of champagne vanished. The volume of chatter in the room swelled, gaining an alarmed edge.

  “It’s just a communications hiccup,” Burke said evenly.

  Hannah’s fingers flew, checking the tracking and receiver. Communications wasn’t her specialty, but there shouldn’t be any reason for a hiccup.

  Yet the probe’s heartbeat had stopped. The icons for all three receiving stations sat mute.

  “Have we lost tracking?” Hannah asked. Her voice didn’t sound like her own.

  “It’s got to be a receiver issue,” Burke said. “Stay cool, Hannah-banana, we’ll check it.”

  Hannah had mixed feelings about this nickname. It had started when the powers that be ordained that they all needed to tweet. She’d picked @hannah_a_banana as her Twitter handle one evening while drunk, and only found out about it when people at work started calling her ‘Hannah-banana.’ She couldn’t reject it now without explaining how she’d ended up with that Twitter handle. Besides, all her tweets were linked to the @NASAJuno account.

  She couldn’t even begin to imagine the tweet she’d have to send after this. “#Juno so sorry.” Her baby was all by itself, 600 million kilometers from Earth, dying.

  Pulse.

  The receiving stations picked up a single tone.

  Everyone in the control room held their breath.

  Pulse. Pulse.

  “It’s alive!” Lyons shouted.

  Hannah whooped in jubilation.

  Juno’s heart was still beating.

  The reporters and bloggers covering the event posted happy tweets. Burke pumped his fists in relief. Lyons hugged Hannah. Other people jumped to their feet and did victory dances.

  But their elation died down within seconds, because all was very far from well.

  “Juno has rebooted,” Burke said. “It’s gone into safe mode. ”

  As quickly as Hannah’s spirits had recovered, she now experienced a roller-coaster plunge into horror.

  Right in the middle of the main burn, Juno had undergone a complete systems shutdown. The engine had cut off. The probe was now in safe mode, awaiting instructions.

  And all this had happened 48 minutes ago.

  For the last 48 minutes, her baby had been spinning like an unpowered frisbee, hurtling through a zone full of rocks and dust—and insanely high radiation—away from Jupiter.

  The horrifying reality of the situation sank in. They risked losing Juno altogether. If the probe couldn’t insert into orbit around Jupiter, it would plummet irretrievably into the abyss of trans-Jovian space.

  “I’ve got this,” Hannah muttered. “I’ve got this.” She called up the probe’s orbital parameters. A brief wince of agony pulled at her mouth.

  Lyons said, “It’s not the end of the world. The probe’s been burning for a while. We can still get into orbit, it’s just going to be a very elongated orbit. We have to plan a new burn at periapsis on the next orbit to complete the insertion.”

  Hannah—who was already doing that—spared Lyons a glance. “I would call you brilliant, but I’m in the room.”

  In the sleepless hours and days that followed, Hannah designed a burn that would fire Juno’s thrusters just before the little craft reached its periapsis around Jupiter, dragging the orbit back towards the gas giant … and Europa. This sub-optimal, elongated orbit would still give the probe substantial dwell time near Europa, though not as much as Washington had asked for.

  Even when her work was done, and the probe had received its instructions via the uplink, she couldn’t rest. She mentally ran over the burn parameters again and again, attacking her own calculations from every side to see if there was any risk she might have underestimated.

  Something had caused Juno to unexpectedly shut down and reboot.

  And they’d made zero headway in figuring out what it was.

  A few hours before the emergency burn was scheduled to start, she sat wearily at her desk in the mission control room. She could have gone home, but she knew she would end up at La Cuevita.

  Burke had not gone home in a couple of days, either, although unlike Hannah, he had a family wai
ting at home for him. He slumped beside her, talking on the phone. The tone of his voice told her he was talking to Suzanne Stone, the Juno program executive in Washington, or someone else at the top of the food chain.

  “We’re still analyzing the reboot event. At this time, unfortunately, we do not know what caused it.”

  Hannah tensed, knowing what was coming next.

  “Yes, it’s possible that this was a recurrence of the same error that caused the probe to enter safe mode just over 90 hours ago.”

  The words felt like salt in the wound of Hannah’s diminished confidence. The terrible fact was they had had warning of the reboot error. Because it had happened before. Almost four days before Juno reached Jupiter, the probe had unexpectedly rebooted itself. That time, it hadn’t been critical. The team had ended up writing it off as the result of a shower of charged solar particles overwhelming the probe’s radiation hardening. After all, there’d been a coronal mass ejection that might have clipped it.

  But now it looked like they had been wrong.

  “Nope,” Burke said. “Sorry, ma’am. We do not know what caused that event, either …”

  His face was a bad shade of ruddy, his eyes bloodshot for lack of sleep. Hannah knew how heavy the burden of responsibility was. She stirred herself from her near-cataleptic slouch, scribbled on the back of a print-out, and held it up for Burke to see:

  It’s actually quite funny once you get past the tragic elements and the sense of encroaching doom.

  Burke laughed out loud. “Sorry, ma’am. Just want to mention, as you know, we have got a great team working on the problem here …”

  Hannah smiled. She really, really wanted a drink now.

  CHAPTER 11

  Summer in Las Vegas. Heat shimmered above the tarmac of McCarran International Airport, making the runways look like they were covered with water. Jack settled his Ray-Bans on his nose and walked through the blazing sunlight to Ziggy One. It was July 7th, 2016, and Firebird Systems had been based in Nevada for almost three years.