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

  They’d moved the company to the States in 2013 to access America’s startup-friendly regulatory regime, as well as its wide-open stretches of desert where nobody cared if you lit off rocket engines to see what they did.

  For Jack, coming back to the USA had been like coming home, unexpectedly so. Though he hadn’t realized it at the time, his years at NASA had stamped him with a preference for America’s free-and-easy social mores, as well as humongous steaks and bottomless Coca-Cola refills. Iced tea with sugar and lemon, on the other hand, he still considered revolting.

  But Las Vegas was very different from Houston. Far from commemorating the history of America’s golden age, Vegas celebrated an eternal present of conspicuous consumption. The whole city could feel like an illusion sometimes. And in contrast to the humid Texas summers, Vegas baked in dry heat. This had its points. Jack felt the air get twenty degrees cooler when he walked into the shadow of Ziggy One. He finished checking the aircraft.

  The plane did not belong to Firebird Systems. Fat chance when they were operating on a shoestring, with Meeks fighting their investors over every quarterly budget. Ziggy One was a converted 727 owned by The Freefall Experience, a company which offered freefall experiences—just like it said on the tin!—to tourists, for the modest price of $150,000 each. Only in Las Vegas.

  Firebird had chartered the plane for the day.

  “Have you finished loading fuel?” Jack said to the technician, an overweight man in the bright yellow Freefall Experience uniform. It made him look like a Pokemon. He fit right in with the weird and wild color schemes of the other private planes standing around.

  “Y’all are good to go, sir,” said the technician.

  “Great.” Jack turned to climb the air stairs to the cockpit.

  “Your co-pilot best get a move on, if he don’t want to miss the take-off slot,” the man called after him.

  Jack paused halfway up the steps, grinning. “That’s my co-pilot.” He pointed towards the tail of the plane.

  A truck-mounted hoist was lifting Meeks—wheelchair and all—into the passenger cabin.

  His face shaded by a baseball cap, Meeks gave them a thumbs-up.

  “Oh-kayyyy,” the technician said. “Guess y’all know what you’re doing.”

  “He didn’t have to be such a prick about it,” Jack said, when they were inside the airplane. In a land where cheerful smiles and ‘you have a nice day now’ formed the accompaniment to every interaction, the technician’s grumpiness was unusual. “On the other hand, I suppose we’re a bit different from the average charter customers.”

  “Did you tip him?” Meeks said.

  Jack slapped his forehead. “Christ. That was it.” The technician hadn’t been dubious about a disabled co-pilot. He’d been annoyed by Jack’s failure to tip. Clearly Jack hadn’t quite assimilated to American culture yet.

  He helped Meeks out of his wheelchair and folded and stowed it. Meeks lay prone on the padded floor of the airplane, near the web of straps and ties that held their cargo. “I’ll have a martini,” he teased Jack.

  “Less aggro from the peanut gallery,” Jack said, heading for the cockpit.

  He hadn’t told the truth to the Freefall Experience man—not exactly. Meeks was listed as co-pilot, and he did have his license. There was nothing wrong with his eyes or ears, after all. But he wasn’t going to help Jack fly the 727. He didn’t have to.

  Pilot’s joke: In the airplane of the future, there will be a man and a dog in the cockpit. The dog is there to prevent the man from touching anything, and the man is there to feed the dog.

  Ziggy One looked plenty futuristic on the inside. It had just a few rows of seats—currently unused—at the front of the cabin. The whole rear of the cabin was covered with off-white padding. It reminded Jack a bit of the ISS, actually. Ziggy One’s airframe had also been reinforced and the hydraulics modified to support its unique flight patterns. But the cockpit was just the same old 727 layout, with the addition of an accelerometer readout.

  Jack set the flight engineer’s panel up for starting, then crouched between the flight engineer panel and the center console to execute the start sequences. Once he had the engines running, he slid into the left seat and taxied out to the runway. The control tower affirmed that he was cleared to take off.

  Up we go!

  The thrill never got old.

  Reaching across the cockpit to perform the odd flight engineer duty, monitoring all the instruments with an eagle eye, Jack didn’t have time to appreciate the Nevada desert spread out below. “OK back there?” he shouted to Meeks.

  “Fine,” Meeks shouted back. “Great view.”

  Jack risked a glance back through the open cockpit door. That crazy bugger had hauled himself on top of the aluminum frame that held the boilerplate unit. He was sitting up there like a cross-legged Buddha with atrophied legs. Well, he had to get up there at some point to throw the switches on the pumps.

  The boilerplate unit was the whole reason for this flight. From the outside it looked a little like an explosion in a pipe factory, rendered in clear acrylic, allowing easy viewing and filming of the fluids moving inside it.

  Firebird Systems had been working on this concept since 2012. The project dated to the day before Christmas Eve, 2012—the day they examined Jack’s photos from the ISS. That day still haunted Jack’s memory. In the rare moments when he wasn’t doing anything else, he would see that smear of hot water plasma in his mind’s eye. The doom of the human race, spelled out in pixels.

  Well, three and a half years on, doom hadn’t struck yet. Jack felt gladder than ever that they hadn’t gone public with the photos. They would have been mocked by cretins who thought that if something didn’t happen immediately, it was never going to happen at all.

  He and Meeks had discussed this reprieve over and over. They had no way of knowing what might have become of the alien ship. They did know that at some point, the other shoe would drop.

  But maybe, just maybe, if nothing went on happening for long enough, they’d have time to get ready to face it when it did.

  Today, Jack felt optimistic about their chances.

  The sky was clear, cloudless blue. The altimeter read 33,100 feet.

  “Ten minutes until we get out over the Pacific,” he called back to Meeks.

  “Fingers crossed for @NASAJuno!” Meeks said. “She’s about to check up on her husband’s first mistress!”

  “What?”

  Another glance back. Meeks had his phone out. Obviously, he didn’t have a signal up here.

  “Is that Twitter?”

  “Yeah, that was posted earlier today. It’s from @hannah_a_banana.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “One of the Juno team scientists. That’s all there is. There’ve been no official updates from the @NASAJuno account since they successfully made the burn at periapse.”

  Needless to say, Jack and Meeks had been glued to the adventures of the Juno probe. The mission seemed to have been designed to take a close look at Europa. Maybe that was just a coincidence … and maybe it was also a coincidence that the probe had nearly been lost a few days ago due to “system errors.”

  And pigs might fly. That Harvard professor’s research paper had gone nowhere, but it proved that Jack wasn’t the only person to have noticed the anomalous plume. Someone, somewhere, had seen fit to investigate it further. And whoever that someone was, they had enough power to make NASA dance to their tune.

  “The silence from @NASAJuno is actually quite deafening,” Meeks mused. “So much for NASA’s commitment to transparency.”

  “Don’t forget their commitment to the economic and defense interests of America,” Jack said. He might have become Americanized in his tastes, but after his career-ending clash with Congress, his trust in America’s institutions—including NASA—had hit rock bottom, and there it had stayed.

  “Yeah.” Meeks chuckled. “Thank goodness for @hannah_a_banana, anyway. She’s got a sense of humor, eve
n if she’s only allowed to post Greek mythology jokes and pictures of mai tais.”

  Far below, America ended. The sequined blue sheet of the Pacific spread to the misty horizon. Jack adjusted the throttles and disconnected the autopilot. “Get into position,” he said.

  Ziggy One had been modified for a specific purpose: to fly parabolic arcs. Jack took the jet up at a steep angle. 1.8 gees pressed him into his seat. In the back, Meeks lay prone on the padded floor again. He had switched the boilerplate unit on before dragging himself down, adding its whirring and gurgling to the cacophony of noise inside the plane.

  After 20 seconds, Jack pushed the 727 over. The plane plummetted towards the Pacific.

  Everything which was not strapped down rose into the air, nudged by a thousand small vibrations, and began falling at the same speed as the plane—exactly like falling through space in orbit. Jack’s body floated against his harness, pressed there as the foam padding of the seat relaxed. His sunglasses, forgotten on the right-hand seat, bounced off the ceiling of the cockpit and spun lazily away.

  In the back, Meeks let out a whoop of sheer joy. He kept whooping, and yelling, and laughing like a child as he rebounded off the padded walls.

  “This is fucking amazing!” Fifteen seconds into their freefall dive, Meeks finally found words for the experience. “This is absolutely fucking terrific!”

  Jack smiled. The sensation of freefall brought back bittersweet memories for him. But this was the first time Meeks had ever experienced it. “Now you know what it feels like,” he shouted back.

  He heard Meeks laugh the laugh of the freefall virgin discovering what it was like to slip the bonds of gravity.

  It happened to almost everyone.

  Of course, in freefall, it no longer mattered that Meeks’ legs didn’t work. He could float free, just like anyone else. No need to worry about steps and staircases. He was free.

  Twenty seconds had passed. Jack levelled the plane out. Truth be told, he hadn’t flown parabolic maneuvers since he was in the RAF, and he breathed a private sigh of relief when the 727 flattened out into their previous flight pattern.

  “Ready to go up again?” he called back.

  “Hell yeah!” Meeks lay on his back on the floor, grinning like a loon at the ceiling.

  “Don’t forget this time, you’re actually supposed to be doing science up there …”

  *

  The boilerplate unit was a one-quarter scale reproduction of the nuclear reactor and Brayton cycle turbines—minus the parts that dealt with superheated steam, of course—that would be used to provide electrical power for the thrusters and engines on their spaceplane. The engines would allow the spaceplane to cast off the bonds of gravity and easily maneuver to drop off a satellite in geostationary orbit … and eventually, perhaps, go further.

  They flew 15 parabolic arcs. Bobbling in the air above the unit, Meeks confirmed that the fluids and gasses circulated properly, and that the turbines could stand up to freefall.

  The experiment was a complete success.

  So Jack flew one more arc, just for fun.

  Then he turned the 727 east, and flew sedately back towards Las Vegas.

  Meeks propped his back against the unit and drank from a plastic bottle of water. The combination of freefall and experimental success had left him cheerful to the point of bubbliness, a rare mood for him lately. “We can start building the prototype next month,” he said. “Then we’ll do vacuum tests on the magnetoplasmadynamic engine. We might manage a test launch within the year!”

  I hope we have that long, Jack thought. Gazing down at the urban sprawl of Reno, all he could think was how vulnerable it looked.

  “I could live in space. One doesn’t need legs if one can fly,” Meeks said a few minutes later. “I’d like to build an orbital habitat. Why not?”

  “First things first,” Jack said.

  “Space should belong to us. Not to them.”

  Jack shared Meeks’s instinctual outrage at the idea that the alien ship, wherever it was now, might threaten humanity’s future in space. On the other hand though, the ship had given Meeks the idea for the water plasma drive, and they’d just taken a giant step towards making the drive a reality. They touched down at McCarran International in high spirits, planning a celebratory dinner with the rest of the Firebird team.

  Jack parked the 727 in their designated spot, a hundred yards from the terminal. The air stairs glided towards the plane. Several men stood on the platform. “Uh, Ollie?”

  Meeks was on the phone, making dinner reservations at a well-known steakhouse. Jack made a throat-slicing gesture. He grabbed Meeks’s wheelchair, flipped the backrest upright and sent it rolling down the plane to Meeks, and then opened the forward cabin door.

  An oven blast of hot air rolled in. The air stairs approached the plane and stopped a foot away. One of the men on the platform held up a badge. “FAA,” he said. “You the pilot? Mr. John Kildare?”

  “Is there a problem?” Jack said.

  The FAA man wore a crumpled business suit. He was the archetypal Federal Asswipes Anonymous bureaucrat. The other two men on the platform wore jeans, navy blue t-shirts, and sunglasses. Jack couldn’t figure out their role.

  “You bet your ass there’s a problem,” the FAA man said. “Unless you got a different name for a violation of the Atomic Energy Act.”

  Jack said the first thing that came into his head. “I’m an American citizen.”

  All three men smiled. Someone down below laughed. Glancing down, Jack saw the Freefall Experience technician in his Pokemon-esque uniform driving the air stairs. The man looked back at him with cold dislike.

  “Step aside, sir,” the FAA official said.

  Jack stepped aside. “This is a misunderstanding,” he said. “We haven’t violated any laws or regulations.”

  The air stairs closed the gap with the 727. The FAA official and his two escorts entered the plane. The smell of sweat hit Jack’s nostrils as they passed him. Meeks rolled to meet them, working hard to drive his wheelchair across the padded floor. “I apologize for any miscommunication,” he said with a smile. “How can we help you today?”

  Meeks was good at dealing with visitors from red-tape land. Courteous and cooperative, that was the ticket. But Jack’s hopes that this could be swiftly sorted out faded as the three men simply ignored Meeks. They walked straight past him and began taking pictures of the boilerplate unit.

  “Is that a steam generator?” one of the navy t-shirts said to Jack. The other one was unhooking the webbing straps that held the unit in place.

  “Yes, it is,” Jack said shortly.

  “So you admit to flying a nuclear reactor over the continental United States,” the FAA official said triumphantly.

  “For fuck’s sake!” Jack exploded. “It’s not a bloody nuclear reactor! It’s an acrylic box with a steam generator and some cameras in it!”

  “Calm down, sir,” said the younger navy t-shirt. He had curly hair in a short white-boy afro and wore a silver peace symbol necklace. His dark eyes stared at Jack down the length of the aircraft. Jack became aware that he was clenching his fists. He relaxed his stance minutely. Then he noticed the lump at the young man’s waistband, concealed by his loose t-shirt. Jesus, the guy was carrying a gun!

  “That’s illegal within the secure areas of an airport,” Jack said, letting the little bastard know he was onto him. His heart thumped.

  The curly-haired man shrugged. His colleague was slapping nuclear hazard stickers on the housing of the boilerplate unit. “You were offered an opportunity to sell your company in 2015,” the curly-haired one said. “You didn’t take it. You should have.”

  “That was you?” Meeks said. Jack was tongue-tied, remembering that he’d advised Meeks to take the offer. Meeks stared levelly at the fake FAA agents. “And just who are you, again?”

  “Jeez, it’s hot in here,” said the curly-haired guy, lifting his t-shirt to fan air underneath it. The gun was a Glock.
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  “Right,” Meeks said. “I’m calling our lawyers.” He started to dial.

  The curly-haired man walked up to Meeks and plucked his phone out of his hand. “We’ll have to impound that for inspection.” All the blood drained out of Meeks’s face. “Your phone, too,” the man said, holding out his hand to Jack. “You’ll get it back when we’re done with it.”

  “And if I’d rather not give you my phone?” Jack bluffed.

  “Then we’ll suspend your pilot’s license.” The man grinned mockingly. “Actually, we’re going to do that anyway.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Hannah’s ten-year-old niece, Isabel, had made a clay model of Jupiter in science class. She—or more likely, her mother, Hannah’s sister Bethany—had sent it to Hannah in a reused Amazon box. Hannah winced in guilt, as Bethany had probably intended, when she found it on the doormat outside her apartment. Bethany and David had been expecting her to visit over the Fourth of July weekend. She’d broken her promise. Again.

  At least this time, she’d had a good excuse.

  She showered and changed into less-stinky clothes. Then she headed back to JPL, taking the clay model with her.

  The mission control room looked like a bomb had hit it. A few people were still wearing their Juno logo t-shirts. That was because they had been wearing them continuously since the near-catastrophe on the 4th. Trash overflowed from the wastepaper baskets. One of the mission control staff snored with her head on her desk.

  It was just as well the media had been banned from the mission control room tonight.

  Hannah arranged Isabel’s clay model next to her computer. Four pea-sized clay balls on the ends of pins represented the Galilean moons. The one made of white and yellow clay smooshed together was probably meant to be Europa.

  Sucking down coffee, Hannah took a picture of the model with her phone, and tweeted it.

  @hannah_a_banana: “This is what @NASAJuno will be seeing with its science eyes tonight! Kinda ☺”