Freefall: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 1) Page 9

  In the middle of Friday morning, the JPL parking lot should have been a sea of cars without a living soul in sight. Instead, clusters of scruffy people swirled around news vans with satellite dishes mounted on the roof. Every TV network in the country, not to mention bloggers ranging from serious science reporters to alt-right conspiracy theorists, had descended on the campus. Caught flat-footed, security was still devising a strategy to handle the mob.

  This wasn’t how NASA would have chosen to announce Juno’s final observations, Hannah was sure. But what did they expect, when they made every scientist get a Twitter account?

  She hadn’t leaked the pictures, but someone had. She suspected Ralf Lyons.

  It didn’t really matter. Sooner or later, the world would have to know that Juno had photographed a dot that might or might not be an alien spaceship orbiting Europa.

  Was it an alien ship? Hannah wondered, wrestling with the cork of the champagne bottle.

  A handsome black man in his twenties approached her. “Can I help you with that?”

  “Sure,” Hannah said, handing him the bottle with a sigh.

  “Celebrating?” He didn’t ask who she was. He probably assumed a plump Jewish woman struggling to open a champagne bottle in a parking lot could not be a rocket scientist. Pop, the cork shot out. He handed the bottle back to her. “It’s pretty exciting, I agree. By the way, I’m Todd from The Atlantic. You should check out the site if you have a minute. We’re live-blogging the first contact event.”

  “First contact, huh?” Hannah said.

  “Did you see what the Dalai Lama said? ‘This will mean an end to war and conflict.’”

  Until that moment, Hannah had been going to drink some of the champagne and throw the rest away, at least that’s what she told herself. She changed her mind when she detected the new narrative impinging on her reality. Standing there with foam spilling over her hand, she said, “Fuck the aliens. They killed my baby.”

  She upended the bottle of champagne. It splashed onto the ground.

  “Um, it’s great to get your perspective,” said Todd from The Atlantic, watching the champagne glug out of the bottle onto the ground. “Could I have your name again?”

  “You want a quote for your website?” Hannah said. “If these are aliens, the first thing they did was to shoot down our most advanced space probe. This is not going to end well.”

  She jumped into her car and backed out, narrowly missing him.

  Isabel’s model of Jupiter, forgotten on the ground, got squashed flat under the Camry’s wheels. Nothing remained but a smear of modelling clay in a puddle of champagne.

  CHAPTER 15

  The morning sun flooded the kitchen of Meeks’s house in Bunkerville. A monitor on the table and a laptop on the counter jabbered. Jack sat shirtless at the kitchen table, bent over. Meeks sponged the gouge in his shoulder. It stung like hell.

  “I drove back to the road and took the long way around,” Jack said. “I took that road that runs along the Arizona border, then got back on 170 at Mesquite.”

  “With a bullet in your shoulder.”

  “Don’t be so fucking dramatic,” Jack said. He was ashamed of the risks he’d taken. Also, his shoulder hurt, even if it was actually just a graze. “The point is they didn’t get a good look at me. They didn’t see the truck. DNA? My DNA is all over the office, anyway.”

  “Yeah, well done,” Meeks said. He taped a bandage to Jack’s shoulder. “You really need stitches.”

  Jack shook his head—which sent a twinge of pain through his shoulder. He wasn’t going near the ER.

  “All right, have it your way.” Meeks gathered up bloody gauze and wheeled, one-handed, to the rubbish bin. Jack looked at the monitor on the table. It was streaming CNN.

  “… a day of enormous significance for humanity,” said Neil deGrasse Tyson. “The big question is, do we greet these cosmic visitors in a spirit of love, or will we cower in fear of the unknown?”

  Meeks reached across Jack to the keyboard, minimized CNN, and pulled up the BBC.

  Stephen Hawking said, “… ought to continue to project a non-confrontational stance. The fact that they have not yet annihilated us gives reason for guarded optimism.”

  Click. Al-Jazeera: “… not take for granted that the first contact event will be managed and orchestrated by the West ...”

  Click. RT: “… in response to the apparent presence of aliens, Roscosmos has announced a large-scale development program aimed at building a manned spacecraft capable of travelling to Europa ...”

  “That’s more like it,” Jack said. “The Russkis don’t mess about.”

  “They’re just posturing. They don’t have the money for that,” Meeks said. “They may have the technology. The TEM project is promising. They were planning their first test launches in 2018. I suppose it could be accelerated if they throw money at it … which they haven’t got.”

  The TEM project, supervised by Russian nuclear group Rosatom, had been initiated in 2010 with the goal of building a nuclear-powered spacecraft for Mars exploration. The focus of everyone’s interest had suddenly changed to distant, icy Europa.

  “They may get the money now,” Jack said. He thought of how excited his old friend Alexei must be. He’d have to ring him.

  “It depends whether Putin thinks it’s got propaganda value,” Meeks said. “At any rate, nuclear propulsion is the only way we’re getting there. Which makes all this a rather amazing coincidence, doesn’t it?”

  Jack nodded bleakly. Firebird Systems, which was developing a ground-breaking nuclear spacecraft engine, had just been shut down by regulatory fiat. If not for Jack’s exploits last night, their IP would now be in the possession of the US government.

  “They knew what Juno was going to find,” he said.

  “So did we,” Meeks said. He muttered under his breath, “Maybe we should have gone public to begin with.”

  It was a rare admission of self-doubt from Meeks, who never second-guessed his own decisions, or at any rate never confessed to it. Jack immediately said, “No. We’d have been idiots to pop our heads over the parapet. Let the government take the heat.”

  On CNN, assorted activists were demonstrating outside the White House, while on MSNBC, the director of the FBI reassured Americans that their country remained safe from attack. It was a completely meaningless statement, given that no one had any idea what the alien spaceship could do, much less why it was here. But the director’s calm, authoritative demeanor would count for more than his words.

  “Who the hell are they, anyway?” Jack wondered aloud. “FBI? NSA? Or maybe even the Office of Naval Intelligence?” There were so many clandestine agencies operating under the federal umbrella at this point, he could only guess which one had targeted Firebird Systems.

  “I got a weird vibe from that guy,” Meeks said thoughtfully.

  “The bloke with the peace symbol necklace?”

  “Yeah. Hard to describe, but I got the impression he was switched on.”

  Jack raised his eyebrows. Yes, the guy had seemed confident to the point of arrogance yesterday. But at midnight in the ransacked office, he’d gone to pieces. In all fairness, so had Jack. He vividly recalled slashing the guy with a butcher knife. He hadn’t told Meeks about that, reasoning that he was fairly sure the guy had not been seriously hurt, so there was no need to mention it. But the memory still horrified him.

  He got up and went to make coffee. Meeks had a Nuova Simonella espresso machine, set on a special low countertop. He’d had the whole kitchen remodelled for wheelchair accessibility. Yesterday, the high-end coffeemaker had seemed like a minor indulgence, given there wasn’t a barista in sight. Yesterday, they’d had a company with hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital funding. Today, what did they have? Maybe nothing.

  When Jack got back this morning, Meeks had been on the phone with their lawyers. He’d been up all night, too—talking with their investors on both sides of the Atlantic, trying to convinc
e them that this was just a bump in the road.

  “We will get through this,” he said as Jack sat down again with his coffee. Meeks patted his laptop. “Everything’s on here, and I’ve deleted our cloud storage account as a precaution. If they want our IP, they will have to work with us.”

  Jack nodded tiredly, drank his coffee. He wanted to be optimistic, but last night’s violence had left him in a dark place. He felt as lost and melancholy as he had in 2003, when he realized that a few of the bombs he dropped over Iraq from his Tornado GR-4 had missed their targets, and blown civilian houses—and their occupants’ lives—apart. Maybe he’d be able to believe what Meeks was saying when he’d had some sleep.

  “That said, I don’t think there’s necessarily any reason we have to work with the government,” Meeks went on. “I’ve already reached out to Elon and Jeff. Robert and Fatih emailed me last night. They agree that this is too important to be left up to the ineptocracy.”

  Now that was good to hear. Jack wasn’t sure anything would come of it—after all, Firebird was a minnow next to the likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin—but at least it was a step in the right direction. “Sounds like they get it,” he said.

  “Yes. If this could happen to us, it could happen to any private space company. We’ve got to stick together, and I think they understand that.”

  On the monitor, the already-famous JunoCam pictures flashed up yet again. Jack took his coffee mug and went outside. The lawn, recently mown by Jack himself, smelled pleasantly of cut grass. He squinted up at the sky. A hawk soared across the blue emptiness. Another peaceful morning in Nowhere, USA—but Jack couldn’t wind down. Part of his brain kept expecting the blue sky to rain destruction. He knew the fear wouldn’t leave him until they got to Europa, one way or another, and learned what was out there.

  CHAPTER 16

  Skyler spent the first day of the crisis in transit. His colleague Lance, he of the peckerwood drawl, who actually held a master’s in international relations from Duke, had had some business to take care of at JPL in California. That left Skyler to fly the boilerplate unit they’d confiscated from Firebird Systems back to headquarters at Langley, Maryland.

  He felt a bit guilty about checking the unit in as oversized luggage, a few hours after they’d slapped its inventor with an Atomic Energy Act violation for doing the same thing. But by now, they knew for sure the unit wasn’t a nuclear reactor. It was just a riddle. A handmade Rube Goldberg contraption that allegedly represented America’s best hope of catching up with the Russians.

  Skyler wasn’t a nuclear scientist. He turned the unit over to the DEFSEC experts at headquarters, hoping they could make head or tail of it. He prayed it wouldn’t turn out to be a dud. He was in enough trouble as it was. His supervisor, Bob Flaherty, a merciless Marines vet, had a lot of questions about the break-in at Firebird’s R&D facility in the Nevada desert. By the time the debrief session was over, Skyler almost felt thankful for his bandaged forearms. At least that proved he wasn’t making it all up.

  The debrief concluded on a brighter note, however, with a promise that several Nevada state troopers would be transferred to desk jobs. And rightly so. How dumb did you have to be to confiscate the wrong fucking hardware?

  In his four years of working for the federal government, Skyler had learned that there existed dimensions of dumb in this country beyond anything he ever imagined. Columbia, Caltech, Harvard—he’d lived in a bubble. Now he lived in the real world. It was exhilarating.

  Understanding, really understanding, just how dumb and helpless most people were gave him compassion for them. He and Lance left Langley early the next morning to drive to Dulles. Their route took them through some of the capital’s most impoverished suburbs. They passed rusted cars, trash-strewn yards, grown men on kids’ bikes. Payday lenders, used appliance shops. Churches, churches, churches. Lance drove with slitted eyes—he came from a working poor background, and would sometimes go off on vitriolic rants about how the collapse of the working class was their own fault. Skyler, a third-generation Ph.D, knew he didn’t have the right to opine on that, although he agreed broadly with Lance. He just knew that love ‘em or hate ‘em, these were his people.

  And now their future rested in his hands.

  He’d downloaded high-rez copies of the JunoCam pictures, as well as some partial observations recorded by the other instruments on board Juno, during his turnaround at Langley. He pored over his laptop all the way to the airport.

  They flew economy most of the time—contrary to rumor, the federal government did not enjoy wasting money—but today, because they were flying at such short notice, they got to enjoy Virgin Atlantic’s first-class “suites.” The sidewalls of the seats meant Skyler could work without the risk of anyone snooping over his shoulder. He completed his review of the data, ate a Thai beef salad with roasted pine nuts and chili dressing, and started typing notes. By the time the plane touched down at Brussels Airport, he’d produced a page of concise, punchy talking points for the president.

  US president Barack Obama and his entourage had already been whisked away by the time Skyler and Lance arrived, but they overlapped with the arrival of Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe. They dodged the voracious Japanese media swarm and cabbed it into a city paralyzed by gridlock.

  “Jeepers,” Lance said. “And I thought D.C. traffic was bad.”

  Motorcycle cops on white bikes, in traffic-cone orange helmets, forced their way past the taxi. Grudging drivers made way for a motorcade of black Town Cars and airport shuttle buses.

  “Hollande,” Skyler said.

  “Naw, Merkel,” Lance said.

  “I saw him texting in the back seat.”

  “They’re hard to tell apart.”

  This G8 summit had been announced in reaction to the exploding media frenzy. In Skyler’s opinion, they should have held off a few days. The alien ships had already been orbiting Europa for five years. Another day or so wouldn’t have made any difference. This way, the world leaders risked feeding the hype, instead of balancing it out with gravitas and leadership.

  “But hey, I’m not the president,” he said to Lance, after explaining his views. They had now been sitting in traffic for 45 minutes. “Maybe this was the right call.”

  “Holy cow, check that out,” Lance said, pointing out the window.

  Aging art nouveau buildings lined the street. Skyler sighed at the sight of graffiti defiling every wall and door. TTIP non merci, donnez-nous des OVNI! Le OVNI est Le DIEU du Paix etes-vous PRET?

  “No thanks TTIP, give us UFOs,” Skyler translated with his high-school French. “The UFO is the GOD of peace, are you READY?” He shook his head. “Jesus. People are nuts.”

  “Yeah, that’s fucked-up, but look at them.”

  A pair of soldiers in green-and-brown camo prowled along the sidewalk, carrying large automatic rifles. Passersby stepped out of their way without a glance, proving that this was normal.

  “We need to get us some of that,” Lance said.

  The taxi crawled into a mob of protesters. A placard written in English—Tell Us The Truth Mr. President!—knocked against Skyler’s window.

  “Everything’s up for grabs now,” Lance said.

  Lance was clearly enjoying the hell out of this. For an undercover operative, chaos spelt opportunity. Skyler was enjoying it, too, for different reasons. He didn’t aspire to remake the government of the United States, although it wouldn’t hurt. Quite simply, this was the moment he’d been waiting for all his life, without even knowing it. The moment when he could make a difference. Give me partial spectrographic images and I will shift the world on its axis.

  Night had fallen by the time they reached the Justus Lipsius building on the Rue de la Loi. Police cordons sealed off the whole block. Hundreds of people queued at the checkpoints. Skyler and Lance’s credentials did not possess the magical power here that they did in the US. They achieved entry to the building just in time to see the world leaders rising from a small t
able littered with plates. Dozens of photographers seethed like piranhas outside a velvet rope. The politicos had concluded their working dinner in full sight of the world’s press.

  It was a fairly good bet, Skyler thought, that he and Lance hadn’t missed anything.

  Dodging the functionaries who were removing the velvet rope, he hurried up to a presidential aide and pressed his talking points into her hand. “Give this to the chief.”

  The Virgin Atlantic first-class cabin, thank God, had a printer. Paper was considered more secure than digital data these days.

  The aide said, “What the heck is this?” She pushed the sheet of paper back at him.

  “It’s our policy positions,” Skyler said.

  “Ben didn’t mention you,” the aide said. She hurried after the president. Skyler was left fuming with his carefully prepared talking points in his hand.

  “Depechez-vous,” snapped a security guard, physically pushing Lance back as he attempted to follow. Good thing they weren’t armed on this trip. Lance would probably have drawn down on the security guard then and there.

  “We’re from the NXC,” Skyler said. The situation was desperate enough to break the protocol against mentioning the NXC in public. “Le Council … Nationale … des Xenoaffairs?”

  It was futile. You couldn’t translate Xenoaffairs into French. The word didn’t even exist in English. And neither, officially, did their agency.

  The word xenoaffairs had been coined in 2013, when the NXC was spun off from the CIA to prepare for the possibility of diplomatic contact with the alien visitors to Europa.

  Now their moment had come, and Skyler and Lance were stuck on the outside of the action, leaving President Obama at a severe disadvantage.

  CHAPTER 17

  Skyler and Lance tried everything to penetrate the onion-like layers of aides and hangers-on around the president. They even got Bob Flaherty to phone Valerie Jarrett. She promised them a meeting with a presidential speechwriter ahead of the first working session tomorrow morning.