Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (20 page)

“No. I’ll keep an eye on it. Besides, as I drink, there will be more room in the chamber and the pressure will drop.”

“Understood. Give me your stats again. I’d like to get the elements of your orbit.”

“I just crossed the equator and I’m well out into the Atlantic. Altitude is three hundred forty one kilometers, speed is seven point seven two kps.” I gave him the longitude and latitude.

“How’s your temperature?”

“I feel comfortable. It’s local afternoon, but I’m not feeling anything heating up.” I was feeling a little thirsty so I took another cautious gulp from the water “jet.”

Over the next ten minutes I gave him updates as the sun sunk lower behind me.

“Okay,” he said, a few minutes after the last update, “Pretty circular. I’ve got an apogee of three hundred sixty-two kilometers and a perigee of three hundred twenty-two. Inclination of orbit is twenty-four point three degrees and period is just under ninety-two minutes. Were you going to adjust it anymore?”

I thought about it. Our biggest concern was radiation and, as long as we were below the inner Van Allen belt, it was moderate. The earth’s magnetic field funneled the sun’s charged particles around the planet or trapped them in the radiation belts. Because the inclination of my orbit was low, I also wasn’t going anywhere near the South Atlantic Anomaly, where the inner Van Allen Radiation belt drops within two hundred kilometers of the surface. Lots of high-energy particles
there
.

“Ninety-two minutes. Copy that. Let’s leave things as they are.”

When I first started looking at orbital speeds and periods, I thought there should be more of a difference between 200 and 340 kilometers of altitude. I thought of it as a 60 percent increase. What I didn’t realize was that it was the
radius
of the orbits that mattered. Not the distance to sea level but how far it was to the center of the earth. So it was really the difference between 6,600 and 6,740 kilometers, a change of just two percent.

The entire earth was darkening below me as I reached the west coast of Africa. For me, the sun was still brilliantly bright through the visor and a full hand span above the horizon, but the curvature of the earth put everything below me into night. A few minutes later, when the sun dropped over the horizon, the entire western edge of the planet lit up, a bright thin band of atmosphere, and then it faded.

Wow.

And then it was
too
dark.

For a second, I waited, thinking my eyes would adjust, but finally I remembered the visor and pushed it up. There were stars above and man-made stars below when I crossed the African coast over Benguela, Angola.

For me it was a line of lights defining the coast and a splotch of light where the city and airport were. But Cory identified the location for me. Now that he had the orbit, he was running an active plot on computer. When I passed a brightly lit city, he was able to name it for me.

It took less than seven minutes to cross the continent, three thousand miles through Angola, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia (again), Malawi, and Mozambique. Two minutes later I zipped past the northern tip of Madagascar and my ground track bent north again over the dark Indian Ocean and brighter swaths of moonlit clouds stretching east toward Australia.

“Hey, Cent,” Cory said.

“Yeah?”

“You might want to look up.”

I tried to turn, like I would on Earth, twisting my hips, but my legs went one way and my torso went the other, then returned, and I was still facing the earth. So I ran in place, pumping my legs in circular motion, as if I was running forward. My entire body began rotating backwards. I stopped running and my body stopped rotating.

Ha! Just like on the videos.

I did it again until the earth was to my back and I was looking out into the black. The three-quarter moon was quite a ways north of me and the amazing Milky Way was off to my left, but I don’t think that’s what Cory meant.

“What am I looking—
OH MY GOD
!”

I’m not religious, really, but some things.

“That’s sixty kilometers above you,” Cory said. “It’s crossing your path at about thirty degrees. You’re going faster, of course.”

At sixty kilometers it was only a jagged dot, but I could make out the panels sticking off the main truss and crossing it, a thicker white line of modules running from the standby Dragon personnel capsule off the Harmony node all the way to the standby Soyuz off the Zvezda service module at the other end. To my eye it was drifting backward in orbit, and from north to south, though we must have been going the same direction (south to north) or it would’ve crossed my path like a bullet, at several kilometers a second.

They were only sixty kilometers away—the eight humans currently in space.

Nine total.

I could
see
it. I could
jump
to it.

And I would, but not today.

*   *   *

Sunrise, like sunset, was
spectacular
, happening sometime after I crossed Papua New Guinea into the Pacific proper. I had to grab the sun visor to flip it into place quickly, and in my haste, I hit the headset button, disconnecting Cory and Dad.

Oops.

I floated on, secure in the knowledge that they would call back, so, when the phone rang after thirty seconds, I tapped the button and said, “Sorry, about that. Accidentally hit the disconnect.”

“Oh, really?”

My teeth clicked together. It wasn’t Dad’s voice and it wasn’t Cory’s. “Hello?”

“This is Mark Mendez. Who am I talking to?”

“You have the wrong number,” I said.

“I’m pretty sure this is the handset I’m interested in. I’m calling from the Iridium Communications Satellite Network Operating Center in Leesburg, Virginia.”

Uh-oh.
I tried bluffing. “Then you
know
how expensive my satphone minutes are.”

Dad had prepaid four thousand dollars for five thousand units when he purchased the phone, which did take the price down to eighty cents per minute. Still, some people bought smaller chunks that weren’t as discounted, costing over a $1.25 a minute. Our minutes were “global,” supposed to be good
almost
anywhere, but Dad had added, “We might not be able to use them above North Korea.”

“Your account minutes are not being deducted for this
diagnostic
call,” the voice said. “We’re seeing some aberrant behavior from your handset. The call you were just on, was it working all right?”

My breathing slowed a little. I hadn’t realized it had increased. “Sure, awesome. Though I hung up on my peeps by accident. They’re probably trying to call me
right now
.”

I heard him say something to the side, not into the mouthpiece. “What? No, that’s not possible. Check it by footprint.” His voice strengthened. “Oh. Your party, yes, they were. An associate at the Tempe gateway station is talking to them now.”

“You intercepted their call? That’s kind of creepy.”

“They wouldn’t have been able to reach you while I was on the line. We just wanted them to know that your handset was still operational.”

“And why wouldn’t it be?”

He chuckled. “This will sound a little crazy, but according to our Doppler shift data, the handset is traveling nearly twenty-eight thousand kilometers per hour. We’re trying to find the glitch in our system.”

Someone spoke to him in the background and I heard, “—not sure it’s a glitch.”

“Hold please,” he said. The sound went away. I think he muted his mike.

He was gone long enough that I thought the call had dropped. I was about to hit the disconnect when he came back.

His voice was accusatory. “Your
handset
is switching between satellites in completely different orbital planes as often as it switches between units in the same orbit.”

Well, damn.
I stalled for time. “The same orbit?”

“Our satellites are in polar orbits, in six different orbital planes, thirty degrees apart. If your handset was sitting in one location, the handoff would be between one of the eleven satellites in the same plane, with occasional sideways transfers as the rotation of the earth took the handset under a different plane. During your previous call, your phone was handed off to satellites in a different orbital plane
seven
times.”

“Seven? I thought you said there were just six.”

“Your handset encountered the first plane again on the
opposite side of the planet
.”

“Why do you keep saying ‘handset?’”

“You’ve mounted the handset in some sort of microsat. Those are
orbital
speeds. You’re linking to it by a separate transceiver, then using our system to check your radio link, yes?”

Oh. He doesn’t think
I’m
in space. He thinks the
handset
is
. “I suppose that’s one possibility,” I said.

I could hear the other person speaking in the background again and Mendez said off to side, “Not possible.” Pause. “Well
which
is it?”

I didn’t hear the response.

He spoke back into the headset. “What is your satellite’s NORAD ID?”

“We didn’t apply for one.”

“You don’t
apply
for an ID. NORAD assigns them on launch! We’ve got a rough plot of your satellite’s orbit and there’s nothing in the Joint Space Operations tracking database that matches.”

“Perhaps we recently changed orbits?”

“No, there would’ve been a collision evaluation if a change had been detected. And it
would
have been. Unless you’ve managed to get your satellite smaller than five centimeters. The nine-five-five-five handset you’re using is fifteen times longer than that.”

“I
knew
we should’ve told somebody we were launching.”

He exhaled sharply. “Right. As if you could launch without detection.”

Obviously,
I
could, but I understood his conviction. Peaceful rocket launches look a lot like nonpeaceful ballistic missile launches and there was a lot of technology out there to detect
those
.

I could hang up, or I could tell him the truth. “All right, Mr. Mendez, I
am
using your system for orbit-to-ground communications. My associate—” Dad “—looked through your TOS and didn’t find any restrictions on altitude. Is orbital use a violation of your terms of service?”

He didn’t say anything for five seconds. Finally, speaking slower than before, he managed, “That’s … incredible. Uh, no it’s not covered in the TOS. I guess they didn’t consider it a possibility. Our Iridium NEXT constellation includes a system to communicate with space-borne assets, but it won’t be completely deployed for four more years. Anyone putting packages in orbit for the U.S. works with the TDRS System in geosynchronous or uses transceivers and ground stations. Why are
you
using ours?”

“I would think that would be obvious: So we can communicate from any part of our orbit—no waiting to come around to a ground station. Are we messing up your network by calling from altitude?”

“Uh, no. Since you’re not transmitting through the atmosphere you have excellent signal strength. But we
should
probably have a different sort of user agreement. If nothing else, people capable of putting a satellite in orbit can afford premium rates.”

“Greedy, much?”

“Just good business. Let me to speak to your boss.”

“My
what
?”

“Your boss—put him on.”

Him?

I looked down at the deep blue of a Pacific striped with low cumulous clouds and calmed myself by thinking,
He can’t see what I’m seeing.
I loved how the cloud’s shadows trailed across the water to the west as the sun rose. I took two deep breaths before saying, “I can’t do that.”

“Can’t or won’t? I
will
shut your handset out of the system.”

“On what grounds? Who’s violating the terms of service now? You’ve already interrupted today’s mission.”

“This is not our usual usage,” he said. “It needs to be discussed!”

Emphatically I said, “I
knew
we should have gone with Inmarsat or Globalstar. Your network probably won’t work for us anyway when we’re working the high orbitals.”

“Working the high—? Never mind—let me speak to the person in charge!”

“You already
are
.”

Someone said something to him and he covered the mouthpiece of his handset, but I still heard a muffled, “No additional delay? That’s not possible.” Then, to me, “We’re not seeing a delay on your radio-to-orbit transmission. How are you doing that?”

“Because I’m
with
the handset, Mr. Mendez. I’m not sending a separate radio signal to a satellite and using Iridium to check it. I’m using the satphone to communicate with my
ground crew
.”

I heard his sharp intake of breath. “This is a
manned
mission?”

I gritted my teeth. “This is a
womaned
mission. Now are you going to get off the line and let me talk to my peeps or not?”

“That’s
not
possible,” he said, but the certainty wasn’t there.

“You keep saying that. I’m not sure it means what you think it means.”

“You’re in orbit.”

“Pretty damn sure. At seven point seven two kilometers per second, three hundred fifty-one kilometers above sea level. I’m coming up on the International Date Line. There’s some islands below. Don’t know which ones but they have a lot of ring-shaped barrier reefs. Uh, atolls? Where is the Iridium bird I’m connected to?”

“Uh,” I heard his head move against his handset. “It’s just south of the Marshall Islands.”

“That would be it. You wouldn’t believe how the water color changes as it gets shallower. Makes me want to go snorkeling.” I took a sip of water and in a flat voice I said, “Besides talking to my nonexistent boss, what do you want, Mr. Mendez?”