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

  “Seriously?” Lyons said. “That is what they’re teaching in fourth-grade science these days?”

  “Her teacher’s got the whole class following the probe,” Hannah said. “I think it’s great. You’re the one who’s always complaining about the lack of early STEM education.”

  “No. No, you’re not following me. This is what they’re doing in science class? Playing with modelling clay?”

  “Oh, because you were solving rocket equations at that age,” Hannah said. “Got it, Einstein.”

  Lyons’s face reddened in humiliation. Hannah churlishly moved the model to the other side of her computer, away from him. She was better at the job than he was—better at the math, better at everything—and both of them knew it. Her Einstein crack had been petty. But God, his arrogance was getting on her nerves today. It didn’t help to recall that he was sleep-deprived and under a huge amount of stress. Which of them wasn’t?

  @firebirdmeeks: “No more Greek mythology jokes, @hannah_a_banana?”

  Hannah blinked at the Twitter window in the corner of her screen. Someone had actually replied to one of her tweets. That never happened.

  @hannah_a_banana: “Trying not to provoke the wrath of the gods again!”

  Pretty pathetic, but whatever.

  Ostentatiously ignoring Lyons, Hannah settled down to watch the probe’s downlink.

  On the 5th of July, the probe had switched on its instruments and begun to send back observational data. The spectrographic and visual image data would need to be processed before they would be viewable, but it comforted Hannah just to watch those lovely fat packets of bytes coming home.

  Tonight, Juno would swing past Europa at a distance of barely 200,000 kilometers. That was the unspoken reason why the mission control room was packed tonight. Everyone wanted to witness the fly-by that Washington had pushed for at such a high cost to the mission. Because of this requirement, countless other observations had had to be rescheduled, or in some cases cancelled altogether, and Juno would have its orbit altered by the moon. A mood of skepticism clashed with apprehension. Were they about to finally find out what the higher-ups wanted so badly to see? Hot cryovolcanoes, my ass.

  As for Hannah, she seemed to have lost her capacity to get excited about the actual content of Juno’s observations. The reboot and emergency second burn had drained her to the core. Now she was just hanging in there because everyone else was.

  @firebirdmeeks: “A mai tai would be pretty good right now.”

  Hannah smiled. She liked this guy, whoever he was. Even if he had reminded her of her indiscreet first tweet ever, a photo of a flaming mai tai with the caption, “Nom nom!”

  @hannah_a_banana: “Champagne if @NASAJuno pulls this off!”

  She still had that bottle of Moet & Chandon in her bag. Amid the brutal pressure of the last few days, she’d drunk way too much coffee and taken too many Provigils. But the one thing she hadn’t done was have a drink. It felt like part of her was missing.

  CHAPTER 13

  Passing Meeks’s bedroom on his way out, Jack paused.

  Meeks lay on his bed with his laptop balanced on his stomach. At least the bastards hadn’t confiscated that. They had to have a warrant to search Meeks’s home. On that point, Meeks and Jack’s knowledge of American law had prevailed.

  To Jack’s surprise, Meeks was smiling at the screen. Jack wouldn’t have expected to see that after the disastrous day they’d had.

  “I’m chatting with @hannah_a_banana,” Meeks explained.

  “You texted her? Tweeted her?” Jack wasn’t much of a one for social media. He barely knew how Twitter worked. “And she replied?”

  “Yeah. She’s nice.” The smile faded from Meeks’s face. “She says they’re doing a close fly-by of Europa tonight.”

  “Oh Christ,” Jack said. “Watch them muck everything up.”

  He wasn’t actually sure how a probe could muck things up, but after today he was taking it as read that the US government would embugger everything within its reach. And it now had a 400-million-kilometer reach. So much the worse for humanity.

  “Are you off, then?” Meeks said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Dig the ninja look.”

  Jack plucked self-consciously at his black t-shirt. “Right, I ought to have a mask.”

  “I think I’ve got a balaclava somewhere.”

  Jack flipped him the bird. “That wouldn’t be at all conspicuous in Nevada in the middle of July.”

  Meeks laughed and went back to his screen. Without looking up again, he said, “Be careful.”

  “Don’t worry. If it looks remotely dodgy, I’ll come straight back,” Jack lied.

  He whistled Radioactive, to prove just how confident he was, as he went down the hall to the kitchen. His North Face daypack sat open on the kitchen table. He started to zip it up. Then he grabbed the long butcher knife from the block on the counter, wrapped it in a tea towel, and stuck it in beside his hammer, screwdriver, and boltcutters.

  A connecting door from the kitchen led into the garage. Jack started his Toyota truck and drove down the tree-lined driveway.

  At least they hadn’t suspended his driver’s license.

  The little town of Bunkerville, NV lay silent and lightless beneath a crescent moon. Jack waited obediently at the stop sign before turning onto NV-170. Not one other vehicle in sight.

  He’d been living in North Vegas with Inga until she unexpectedly quit Firebird Systems earlier this year. It was hard to say which had failed first—their relationship, or her commitment to the company. One thing had led to another in a cascade of failures. Inga had gone home to Germany, and Jack had moved into Meeks’s spare bedroom.

  He didn’t plan on staying here forever. The silence and the isolation drove him nuts. But now he had to question whether the company would have a future at all.

  Those jerks weren’t FAA. The guy with the badge, maybe. Not the other two.

  Arseholes! Jack’s blood boiled when he remembered how the guy with the peace sign necklace had very nearly threatened him at gunpoint.

  A fucking peace sign!

  Without realizing it, Jack had sped up to 75 mph. He slowed down. There were no cops out here tonight, for sure, and the road ran straight as a ruler through the low hills. But he was very wary of breaking the law at this point.

  Which was ironic, considering what he intended to do.

  He turned onto an unnamed road and drove out into the Mojave Desert. The Toyota’s headlights lit a seemingly endless strip of asphalt laid across barren terrain dotted with creosote bushes. Once, a coyote ran across the road, forcing Jack to jam on the brakes.

  Thirty miles out of Bunkerville, he reached the Firebird Systems Launch & Test Facility. The grandiosely named facility was actually just a warehouse at the back edge of an asphalted parking lot. They had been planning to build small-scale test vehicles for when they started test launches.

  A chest-height fence, topped with curlicues of barbed wire, surrounded the lot.

  Outside the front gate sat a parked car, its headlights off. Jack cursed to himself as he flashed past, hopefully too fast for the occupants of the car to read his license plate.

  They’d put a 24-hour watch on the facility. This was definitely not a routine response to an FAA violation.

  If he were to keep his promise to Meeks, he would now turn around and head for home. But Jack wasn’t giving up that easily. He drove on until the facility was out of sight, then slowed, swung off the road, and bumped at 10 miles per hour over the uneven desert terrain.

  If he ever saw Inga again, he’d take her out to dinner to thank her for leaving him the 4WD truck she used to drive out into the desert to go bouldering.

  He parked the truck behind a low rise and hiked the rest of the way back to the facility. The night air felt cool on his skin. A breeze carried the faint sweet smell of sagebrush from the hills. Overhead, the moon glowed like a celestial neon sign. Even a new moon could light up the whole
sky when you were far from urban light pollution. He couldn’t do anything to prevent the pale skin of his face and arms from showing up, but as he approached the facility, he pulled on the beanie he’d had since his RAF days. He should have taken Meeks up on that jesting offer of a balaclava. Somehow, he hadn’t expected that he would actually end up doing this.

  The moonlight gleamed on the barbed wire. The warehouse hid the front gate and the car guarding it.

  Breathing evenly, Jack snipped the barbed wire with his boltcutters. Just as well they hadn’t had the money to install the motion sensors Meeks had wanted.

  He climbed over the fence, pushing the loose curls of barbed wire out of the way, and walked swiftly towards the back entrance of the warehouse. Strips of yellow police tape crisscrossed the door. DO NOT ENTER. The goddamn nerve of them.

  The alarm box shone red, indicating the system was armed. Jack punched his security code in.

  The light turned green.

  The plods hadn’t reset the entry codes!

  Grinning, Jack pushed the door open, stepped between the strips of tape, and closed the door after him. He stood immobile for a moment. It was hot and stuffy. He smelled solder and machine oil. The building was divided into two. There was an office space and there was the workshop he stood in now, where they’d built the boilerplate unit. As his eyes adjusted, he made out the hulking silhouettes of the milling machine and lathe. Everything looked untouched.

  But his goal was in the other room. He crossed the workshop and entered the open-plan office. This was where the 12-person engineering team had been gathered this afternoon, eagerly awaiting the results of the freefall test flight, when state troopers had burst into the building and escorted them all off the premises.

  They hadn’t even been given time to collect their personal belongings.

  State troopers, in SWAT gear, driving an APV, as if they were clearing a building full of jihadists, not meek rocket scientists.

  Meeks had spent the evening comforting the traumatized engineers and promising them that the lawyers would sort it out. Privately, he and Jack were not optimistic. That was why they’d decided that Jack should break into their own facility tonight. It was a crazy thing to do, but it was their only hope of protecting their IP.

  The engineers said they’d seen the state troopers unplugging their laptops and taking them away.

  But maybe the state troopers hadn’t known that those laptops held nothing of value. Firebird’s IP existed on Meeks’s home computer … and in one other place. Jack was about to find out if the state troopers had gotten to it, or not.

  In the moonlight that came through the blinds, the empty desks looked naked without any computers on them. A potted tiger-tail plant had been overturned, someone’s bottle of soda spilled. Desk calendars and kitschy ornaments littered the floor.

  Jack crossed the office to a door in the corner and used Meeks’s key to open it.

  There stood their server, untouched.

  “Yes!” Jack whispered.

  The state troopers hadn’t known the difference between clients and stand-alone PCs. The laptops and desktops they had confiscated hadn’t had any data on them. They were mere terminals with no information on their drives, but a lot of processing power for the CAD packages. The data was all on the server.

  Jack logged into the server and started to overwrite the drives in the storage array with zeroes. It took an agonizing amount of time, watching the numbers on the terminal climb towards the end of the drives. Finally he was done. All the data was gone forever, beyond the reach of any but the most well-funded labs that claimed they could look for the magnetic ghosts left behind. He had one final trick left for them, though.

  He took his hammer out of his daypack, to turn the glass platters of the drives into a million-piece jigsaw, and started to release the handles that held the drives into their bays.

  He froze.

  The front door had just opened.

  Footsteps entered the office.

  Jack slid the drives free and backed out of the server closet holding them in a bunch in his hand. With his back to the door, he closed it as quietly as possible. The steel-core, fireproof door nevertheless made an audible thunk.

  “Shit,” said a voice. “Is there someone in here?”

  That voice! It was the guy from the airport.

  A torch beam flashed across the office, catching Jack’s chest.

  “Hey! Who’s that?”

  No point in stealth now. Jack grabbed a coffee mug off the nearest desk and flung it in the direction of the torch. A yell told him he’d made contact. He hurled the drives at the floor, hearing a snap as each drive shattered. It sounded as loud as a car crash in the silent office, followed by the tinkling of broken glass. Cringing, Jack dived to the floor after them and crawled under the desks, towards the door. The torch beam flashed all over the office and the guy swore into a two-way radio, demanding backup. Sounded panicky. Sounded like he expected everything to fall into place for him and didn’t know how to react when it did not. Jack couldn’t wait until he found the trashed server.

  They collided at the door into the workshop. The fact was Jack was close to panic himself. If he got ID’d, everything was over. He shoved the guy into the wall. The guy bounced off the wall, swinging his fists wildly. Jack had the butcher knife in his hand. He couldn’t remember how it had got there. He slashed at the guy’s arms, felt the point catch on flesh. Horror pulsed through him—what the hell was he doing?

  The guy screamed and fell back. Jack plunged past him into the workshop and crashed out the back door, tearing down the crime scene tape. He fled towards the back fence.

  “Hold it!”

  Light flashed around the side of the warehouse. Jack, halfway over the fence, squinted, blinded. He swung his other leg over and dropped to the desert.

  “Stop right there or I will shoot!”

  That had to be the state trooper from the front gate. Jack believed him. He sprinted into the desert.

  A deafening crack! split the night. Jack threw himself to the ground, and pain bit into his shoulder.

  CHAPTER 14

  “Welcome to Europa, Juno!” Richard Burke said exultantly.

  The emotion in his voice pierced through Hannah’s apathetic doze. She leaned forward to inspect the latest images from JunoCam, the visible-light camera mounted on the probe. These pictures were scientifically useless—JunoCam was a public relations instrument, not a scientific instrument—but they didn’t require any processing, so the team could view them as soon as they were received.

  A black sky with a white dot on it.

  That was Europa.

  The probe was still 250,000 kilometers away from the icebound moon. Over the next few hours, it would swing a bit closer, but for all intents and purposes, this was as good as it would get.

  “Maybe JADE or JEDI will pick up particles from the super heated jets,” Burke speculated.

  Lyons nudged Hannah’s elbow. She turned, ready to be pissed at him all over again for belittling her niece’s science project.

  He angled his screen slightly towards her. It displayed a meme of that wild-haired guy from the History Channel, with the caption: “I’m not saying it was aliens … BUT IT WAS ALIENS!”

  Hannah rolled her eyes and giggled, accepting the olive branch. Lyons was a good guy at heart. More importantly, he was one of the team. Working together, against the odds, they’d achieved the ridiculously difficult goal of placing Juno near Europa. What Washington wanted, Washington had got. NASA gets the job done.

  “Mission freaking well accomplished,” she said, stretching her arms over her head. “Can we go home now?”

  “Hey, what’s that?” said an imaging specialist at the end of the long desk where they were sitting.

  Hannah’s attention snapped back to her screen.

  “Zoom in.”

  “It’s like a dot.”

  “The resolution is so shitty on this thing.”

&nbs
p; Hannah pulled up the newest still shot and zoomed in.

  A dot. A black pinprick on the surface of Europa … or maybe in orbit around it.

  Long-range telescopy had established beyond a doubt that Europa did not have a moon of its own.

  “A rock,” Hannah suggested. “A recent capture.”

  Lyons danced in his chair. “Aliens,” he chanted. “Aliens, aliens.”

  “We have to wait for the spectroscopic data from the UVS or JIRAM,” Burke warned.

  His caution went unheeded. The room was in an uproar.

  As if guided by a sixth sense, Hannah’s gaze suddenly snapped back to the small window on her screen that displayed Juno’s heartbeat.

  The Madrid receiving station had gone mute.

  Goldstone.

  Canberra.

  She couldn’t remember which one was facing Jupiter at that moment, but it didn’t matter; all three receiving stations had stopped picking up Juno’s signal.

  “We’re not receiving telemetry anymore,” she shouted.

  She clutched her mouse in a paralytic grip, fruitlessly clicking on signal routing and antenna targeting.

  The invisible cord that bound her to Juno, across 945 million empty kilometers, seemed to stretch, twisting around her heart. Then it snapped. She felt the loss of the probe as a physical shock.

  “It’s shut down,” she said between her teeth. “Again.”

  They spent the rest of the night trying to bring the probe back online. Time after time, they uploaded reboot sequences and waited an hour and three-quarters, and another hour and three-quarters.

  Nothing.

  This time, Juno hadn’t gone into safe mode. It had just … gone. Its electronics—in their titanium box, hardened to withstand the radiation of Jupiter—had suffered some event that fried them completely. Or maybe the probe had been struck by a meteorite. Or something. They had no idea.

  At 10 a.m. the next morning, Hannah staggered out into cruelly bright sunlight. She made her way to her car. When she got there, she put down Isabel’s model of Jupiter and took the bottle of Moet out of her bag.