Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (21 page)

“Uh, how long are you going to be doing this?”

“Oh, we’re going to be operating for several years. Or did you mean today? Just this one orbit. We’ll be off the air in another thirty minutes, but depending on our post-mission analysis, I’m deorbiting a satellite tomorrow.”

I heard a sharp intake of breath.

“Oh, don’t worry. It’s not one of
yours
.”

I disconnected the call.

My heart was pounding and my stomach felt a little sick. For a second I thought something was wrong with my life support, but I realized it was just reaction. It’s not that I
like
confrontation. But it doesn’t really scare me since I can always jump away from it if I have to and, I must admit, I tend to be a little impulsive.

Before Mr. Mendez called back, I hit the headset button to redial our base-station phone.

“Are you all right, Cent?” Dad’s voice.

I sighed with relief. “I’m fine, but let’s go with call signs from here on out. I just talked to the most annoying man.” I told them about Mr. Mendez of Iridium Communication’s Satellite Network Operating Center and their very all too accurate conclusions.

“Yeah. We talked to one of his people. You think they’re listening in?”

“Maybe.”

“Call signs, then. Roger that, Baby Bear.”

I rolled my eyes. “Okay, Papa Bear. I can see the Hawaiian Islands. Coming up on Oahu.”

Cory’s voice spoke. “I am
not
going to be Mama Bear.”

“Roger that, Porridge.”

Dad laughed.

Cory said, “I prefer, ‘Capcom.’ What’s your environmental status, Baby Bear?”

“Can we come up with something besides Baby Bear? But I’m not too hot, not too cold. I guess that makes it ‘just right.’ I’ve drunk enough water that the pressure has dropped—just a trickle when I bite the valve. Doesn’t Capcom stand for ‘Capsule Communicator?’”

“Used to. Now they translate it as ‘Spacecraft Communicator’ and they use it for everything, including talking to the ISS. ‘Capcom’ is a nice clear word, easy to understand on noisy transmissions.”

“Roger that, Capcom.”

*   *   *

I passed over the West Coast halfway down the Baja peninsula. It took me fourteen seconds to cross the Sea of Cortez. On this pass, I was going to be well south of the pit, but I wanted an entire orbit, just like Yuri. I waited until I reached my starting longitude, 104 degrees west, before jumping down to ten kilometers for an intermediate pressure adjust, then straight to Cory’s lab.

“Forget the checklist,” I said loudly, to be heard through the helmet. “Get the satphone turned off. I don’t
think
it will acquire a signal, but I don’t want them figuring out where we’re based.”

Cory unclamped that side of the compartment and, rather than power it down, he popped the battery out.

Then, we did the rest of the checklist by the numbers.

“Think Iridium will shut you down?” Dad asked when my helmet came off.

“They can’t shut
me
down. I don’t know if they’ll turn off the phone. They won’t if they know what’s good for them.”

Dad frowned? “Threat?”

“No, though I guess I could start deorbiting their satellites. Or threaten to. Take some close-ups of their birds and send them e-mail: ‘Nice little satellite you have there.
Shame
if anything happened to it.’”

Dad smiled briefly but said, “No.”

“Make that ‘hell, no.’”

He nodded. “You catch more flies with honey—”

“I’ve always thought that was disgusting. Dead flies in honey. Yuck. If they cooperate, perhaps I’ll offer advertising.”

“Advertising?”

“Well, product endorsement. Put an Iridium patch on my coveralls. Take a few pictures floating in space next to one of their birds. ‘Apex Orbital uses Iridium. You should, too!’”

“Apex Orbital? Is that what we are?” asked Cory.

I shook my head. “Apex Orbital is what
I
am. You’ll need to come up with a company, too. Cause—” I deepened my voice. “—‘Apex Orbital uses Matoska MCP Suits for superior mobility in exoatmospheric environments.’”

“Suits? There’s just the
one
.” But he was grinning at the thought.

“We’ll have to fix that, right?”

*   *   *

When I was completely out of the suit I weighed myself, and Cory measured the remaining water.

“So, you’re down six hundred six grams. If we assume it was all water loss … heat transfer in a vacuum is six hundred twenty-five heat calories per gram of evaporated water—” He stabbed at a calculator. “—call it three hundred seventy-nine kilocalories of cooling over ninety-four minutes. The at-rest heat production for an average human is fifty-eight watts per square meter” He looked at me, head to toe. “Average human has a surface area of one point eight square meters but you’re on the small side—let’s call it one point five.” More calculator clicks. “That’s eighty-seven watts—seventy-two kilocalories an hour, one hundred eight kilocalories for the whole orbit. Looks like you picked up an extra two hundred seventy-one kilocalories from solar radiation.”

Dad looked concerned. “Is that dangerous? Would that burn her up?”

Cory grinned. “No, it’s fine. About the same amount of heat she’d produce from moderate exercise—say walking briskly. I’d say the white overalls are doing their job, so don’t plan on too many endorsements—or at least make sure their patches are highly reflective.”

I’d carried four film dosimeters into orbit, flat, credit-card-sized pieces of plastic that self-developed when exposed to gamma and X-ray radiation. One was clipped to the outside of the Nomex coveralls, one inside the coveralls, and one we slipped between my base-layer shirt and the MCP suit, just below my right collarbone before we snugged the suit up. (That one left a rectangular outline.) The last one we taped to the inside of the helmet, at the back.

As expected, the outside, unprotected badge picked up the most, somewhere between twenty and fifty millisieverts, an amount that if accumulated yearly, every year, would increase your chances of getting cancer by 10 percent. Fortunately, the Nomex coveralls alone cut it to under ten millisieverts, and inside the MCP suit it was below five. The dosimeter at the back of the helmet, shielded by the polycarbonate dome and the visor assembly with its four layers of Nomex/Kevlar, two of heavy aluminum foil, and two layers of Teflon-coated cloth, had no reading.

“I’m sure there was radiation,” said Cory. “Just not an amount within this unit’s sensitivity. This gives us an idea, but these badges were designed for first responders in some kind of radionuclide exposure. Reactor accidents. Spills. What you were exposed to was mostly high-energy particles from solar and cosmic radiation.

“If you’re going to hang out in orbit for long periods of time I’ll want more shielding. No, forget the ‘if.’ In the radiation belts and the high orbitals you’ll need shielding even for brief exposures.”

“What do they use for the Constellation suits?”

“For EVA’s they use a hard torso, but they have all sorts of oversleeve and overleg coverings, depending on the environment. Mostly it’s multilayers of aluminized Mylar with an outer micrometeor protection layer.”

“I could put on
two
coveralls.”

“We’ll see. Sounds like a really good test for the material-science lab here at Stanford. Fortunately, we’re a long way from working outside of LEO.”

I just smiled.

When Mom helped me check, we found another pressure hickey, this time on my left ankle. Again, no pain, no external bleeding, just a bluish-red patch between the heel and the ankle bone.

“I wonder if this will happen every time.”

Mom said, “You sure it doesn’t hurt?”

“Painless, I promise.” I thought back to my three months in high school. “If hickeys were life threatening, then there’d be a lot more deaths among teenagers.”

“True. Come tell Grandmother about your day.”

I grinned. “Absolutely.”

SEVENTEEN

Samantha: Poker Face

The first three days after Samantha moved to the cabin were rough.

Samantha’s routine oxygen supplementation in Wichita (elevation 1,299 feet) was three liters per minute through a nasal cannula. After an hour in the Yukon, at forty-five hundred feet, she was in respiratory distress, with oxygenation levels around 85 percent. Seeana put her on a nose-and-mouth mask and upped the flow to nine liters per minute. Her oxygenation levels crept up above ninety, again. When they added IV liquids, she got up to 95 percent.

“Why is that?” asked Millie.

Seeana said, “Dry lungs, probably. Too much fluid in the lungs is bad, but not enough also interferes with oxygen uptake. You get this thick, dry mucous which doesn’t clear. We need to keep her hydrated
and
keep her oxygenated. Her lungs are in pretty good shape, but her diaphragm isn’t working near as hard as it should.”

Millie sighed. “None of her muscles are.”

Seeana nodded. “But they
could
. Her neurologist blames the inactivity from the fractures. He says her type of muscular degenerative disease
can
be countered with physio, but she’s so brittle it has really interfered with exercise.” Seeana sighed.

By the end of three days, they had Samantha back on a nasal cannula at four liters per minute oxygen flow, with oxygenation in the low nineties.

Seeana was cautiously optimistic. “But if we end up with a respiratory infection it could go bad. We need to be prepared to mechanically assist her breathing.”

“A ventilator?”

“Not an invasive ventilator. If she’s intubated
or
tracheal, she’ll need to be in an ICU.
I’m
not willing to do that in this environment. But there’s noninvasive ventilation with a nose mask or full-face mask.”

“Like a CPAP machine?”

“Yes. Or BPAP. Far less chance of ventilator pneumonia. But if we can keep her oxygen levels up, her neurologist and her pulmonologist both felt the harder she works her muscles, the better.”

Samantha improved, but with Seeana’s guidance, Millie purchased a high-end ResMed Stellar 150 noninvasive ventilator.

“At this rate, we’re going to need a cash infusion,” Davy said. “I wonder where Daarkon keeps its cash.”

Millie shook her head sharply. “No.”

“If not them, who?”

Millie tapped him on the chest. “We don’t have to steal. We have skills. Unique skills. We can earn it.”

“You want me to work for the NSA again? That didn’t exactly work out for the best.”

“No, it didn’t. But let’s see what we can come up with, okay? We’ve had offers from the non-governmental relief organizations.” She licked her lower lip and added, “And Cent seems to have some notions, too.”

*   *   *

All three of the health aides were from Metro Manila; Bea and Jeline were from Quezon City, and Tessa from Muntinlupa, in the south.

“Don’t jump where they can see if you can help it,” Millie told Cent when they were both in Samantha’s room. “We blindfolded them and had them sit in a chair. Your dad jumped the chair without touching them.”

“What do
they
think happened?” Cent asked.

Samantha laughed softly. “Well, once it was clear that I didn’t care what they said or thought, they’ve been speculating up a storm. I’ve heard a dozen suggestions including drugs and airplanes.”

Millie said, “We paid substantial recruiting fees, which went to their families, and I think they’re okay with things so far. The real test will be when their shifts are up and we take them back for their five days off.”

“Five days?”

“Yeah. Ten days on, five days off. All three are here to begin with, for training, but in five days Tessa goes home. She comes back five days after that and Bea goes.”

“Doesn’t that put, uh, Jeline on for fifteen?”

“Yes. That’s what they decided. Jeline’s family is trying to buy an additional car for her brothers and she wanted the extra pay.”

Bea was the tall one, nearly six feet. Jeline and Tessa were the same height as Cent, but Jeline’s face was more angular and Tessa tended to bob her head every time someone spoke to her. Their English was excellent and all three had several years’ experience in geriatric care.

Their previous employers had required them each to take care of several clients. They considered their current working conditions luxurious, especially after Davy installed a satellite dish to pick up Filipino TV channels.

Samantha had them set up a card table against the bed and taught them, and Seeana, to play bridge, patiently working through basic contract bidding.

They, in turn, taught Samantha and Seeana to play
Pusoy
, a card game where each of four players has to make three ranked five-, five-, and three-card poker hands out of their hand. Players got points based on whose individual front, middle, and back hands they beat, and whose they didn’t.

Sometimes Samantha was too tired to play, unable to hold up the cards, even with her arms propped on pillows, but she enjoyed watching and she enjoyed the company. They would move the table slightly off to one side and some combination of the health aides, Seeana, Millie, and Cent would play, not just
Pusoy
, but Texas hold ’em, which Seeana had gotten hooked on from watching televised tournaments.

The health aides jumped at that and wanted to play for outrageous amounts. Millie provided a massive set of colorful poker chips, but limited the actual money to ten or twenty dollar buy-ins. Big piles of chips changed hands and vehement Tagalog oaths were sworn.

Cent did a little reading on the subject and, using a decent understanding of statistics and probability, usually finished in the money.

*   *   *

One evening, after the card table had been packed away and Cent ended up alone with her grandmother, she said, “Why do they do that? They bluff or they try to make their hand on the last card no matter what the odds.”

Samantha chuckled. “Playing it safe is boring.
You
fold eight times out of ten, right? They’re in it for the narrative, the struggle, the drama. For them, losing big is almost as good as winning big. They
do
enjoy themselves.”