Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (34 page)

Roberta held up her hands. “Assembled, rather.” She talked about the various parts and functions of the satellite, spending most of the time discussing the fiberglass mast while a clip of it self-assembling ran in the foreground. “I was the primary designer and fabricator but I was ably assisted by Ritchie Winodgrodzki and Amber Cosby.”

“Are they other faculty at the Texas A&M?”

“Undergraduate students, but I have high expectations.”

“So … tent poles?”

Matapang grinned. “Yes, tent poles.”

The interviewer leaned forward, face serious. “You’ve heard the arguments about this being a hoax, the product of computer special effects. The fact that there were no detected launches that corresponded to these orbits.”

Robert grinned. “Of course.”

“What to do you have to say to that?”

“Nothing.”

“What? You’re not going to argue it’s
not
a hoax?”

“Your producers don’t think it’s a hoax. I’m on your show because dozens of amateur satellite trackers reported the bird’s existence. CNN flew me to Atlanta because millions of people have watched the video and found it compelling. But for me, the best reason you’re taking this seriously is that the U.S. Space Command issued
AOS-Sat One
a catalog number and is issuing tracking statuses on it, just as it does every other spacecraft around the planet.

“Talk to
them
if you think it’s a hoax.”

“But how did it
get
there?”

“No idea. If you find out, I would
love
to know.”

*   *   *

The newly famous (notorious) firm of Apex Orbital Services offered every university in North America the chance to orbit their microsats (anything up to twenty-five kilos) at the low, low price of one thousand dollars per kilo, with a thousand dollar minimum.

We did not require vibration or temperature testing, but for this low, low price we would be releasing them in low, low orbits where atmospheric drag would deorbit them within three months.

We weren’t expecting the number of takers.

“Three hundred and fifty-five satellites?” I said.

“That’s just the ones who’ve paid so far,” said Tara.

“Three hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars?” I was having trouble wrapping my head around it.

“Oh, no, girlfriend. It’s over half a million so far, though our Singapore credit-card handler is taking three percent. Over half of them are one-cube units under a kilo, but we’ve got a lot of three-cube units and a surprising number of units over ten kilos.”

Cory said, “I think you can blame Matapang.”

“What does Roberta have to do with anything?”

Cory grinned. “She open sourced the plans for
AOS-Sat One.
You said it yourself back when we were arguing about soda lime versus lithium hydroxide: So many decisions are made because of weight constraints. When you put things up
your
way, you don’t have to account for acceleration and the high cost of extra weight.

“I’d say a lot of these units were heavily modified in the last two weeks when they realized they didn’t have to fit all their stuff in a standard cubesat deployer or follow all the red tape in ‘91-710.’”

“What’s that?”

“‘USSPACECOM Manual 91-710: Range Safety User Requirements.’ It has seven volumes. Not to say that most of these didn’t jump through all the hoops. Most of these are standard cubesats that were on launch waiting lists for years or were rejected for not doing
important
enough research. Some are probably practice units, the functional engineering prototypes created to test a design before making the
approved
one.

“At our launch rates, it’s okay if they don’t survive first contact with space. It’s a reasonable risk.”

Tara said, “At least thirty of these had their launch fees paid for by Kickstarter campaigns.”

“Great,” I said. “Now we’re taking
lunch
money.”

The other caveat for our customers was that they had to deliver their units to our designated agents at Denver International Airport
inside
security. In other words, they all had to go through TSA X-ray and explosives sniffing before we saw them.

It was Joe’s idea. Cory told him about Dad’s worry that
they
could use a satellite as a way to attack us. Cory thought it was very clever. Tara did to. So did Dad.

Okay. It was clever.

It eliminated a few units that were using propellants like hydrazine or used explosive bolts for deployment. If they used cold nitrogen-gas propellants they had to arrive empty with instructions for charging. Electric propulsion units that used arcs to generate plasmas that were in turn accelerated by electromagnetic fields made it through. Most of the satellites, though, didn’t use propulsion, just attitude control using gyroscopes or a passive gravity gradient like
AOS-Sat
’s mast, or magnetorquer rods to interact with the ambient magnetosphere. The TSA had no problem with these.

We hooked up the clients with college students flying home for the holidays through Denver. Dad took delivery and put them in a storage vault rented for the purpose, 650 feet under the prairie near Hutchinson, Kansas.

Dad said, “It was a salt mine. Now it’s a document-storage facility. After all, these satellites are designed to be tracked, and rather than worry if we got all the power off—well, unless they’re sending messages with neutrinos, nothing is going to get through.”

I said, “That works for me.”

*   *   *

I made a deal with General Sterling: We’d give him a list of the day’s deliveries ahead of time and USSPACECOM would do a COLA evaluation (Collision Avoidance on Launch) to avoid creating more debris.

We put the first set up on New Year’s Day.

I hadn’t planned on asking Joe for help but when I showed up to pick up Tara, he was there, waiting with her. It was easier to jump him to the lab than to talk to him—to tell him I didn’t want his help.

Especially when I wasn’t at all sure what I wanted.

Dad jumped Cory into the vault with a folding table. Tara and Joe ran the checklist on the suit and I prebreathed oxygen.

Deep underground, Cory carefully connected batteries or threw switches. When I was fully suited up, Dad met me in a field in Oklahoma holding a plastic milk crate with eight activated cubesats nestled in duct tape and foam pockets.

A piece of duct tape stuck to the outside of the crate said,
Polar Set: 1340 UT, 7.895 kps, 205 k Alt., 87° Inc., 190 west, 0 north
.

I managed this orbit immediately, still near the Marshall Islands but lower and headed almost due north. I only had to do one tweak to smooth out some eccentricity before I released them, one at a time, pushing them gently away in different directions.

Cory had said, “You can probably just dump the whole crate since
any
change in velocity will move them into slightly diverging orbits, but let’s keep them from banging into each other.”

I tried to report the deployment to General Sterling, but when I called, someone else answered his phone.

“General Sterling’s office, Captain Soldt, speaking.”

“Uh, is the general available?”

“He’s on an urgent call. If this is Space … Apex Orbital, he asked me to receive your information and request that you hold for him.”

“O … kay. The first eight are deployed, parameters as agreed.”

Soldt said, “Ah. I see it on the list. The polar orbits?”

“Right. Still no problem? It’s not too late to retrieve them.”

“Uh. I believe the track is good.
Wow
. Sorry, I’m just a bit amazed you’re calling from orbit.”

“Is there any problem with doing the next ten, the set that’s scheduled for fourteen-forty Zulu?”

“I don’t think—ah, the general’s available, now.”

Sterling came on. “Are you in orbit?”

“Yes, General. How was your Christmas?”

“Lovely thanks, but never mind that. I have an urgent situation with the International Space Station.”

I blinked. “Debris?”

“No. A medical emergency. Flight Engineer Mikhail Grebenchekov presented with acute lower-back pain last night. Ultrasound imaging revealed a ten centimeter-diameter abdominal aortic aneurism below his kidneys with evidence of bleeding into the abdomen. He needs emergency surgery right
now
and it is the consensus of the mission flight surgeons that reentry deceleration in either the Dragon capsule or the Soyuz will rupture the aneurism.”

My heart was suddenly very loud in my ears. “Are you asking for my help?”

“Depends on what you can do. If you can get him down without five Gs of acceleration, I’d phrase that as ‘We’re begging for your help.’”

I stammered, “Cer-certainly, General. Where does he need to go?”

“Texas Medical Center in Houston? Brooke Army Medical Center? Russian Academy of Medical Sciences?
Someplace
with a competent vascular surgical team.”

I didn’t have sites for
any
of those places but I’d walked past the emergency entrance of Stanford Hospital several times with Joe, back before the … incident.

“I can put him outside the emergency room of Stanford Hospital. That’s about the best hospital I can get to. The only other site I have is a second-class regional medical center in the southwest.”

“Stanford—as in Palo Alto?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me talk to NASA. Perhaps you should move closer to the ISS while I’m doing that?”

“Where is it right now?”

“Uh, just now passed the Queensland Coast, headed northeast. You want elements?”

“Longitude, latitude, bearing, altitude, horizontal and vertical velocity.”

“That’s
so
wrong.” He read them off to me.

I said, “Transitioning. Call me back.”

I appeared in eclipse and flipped up the visor. The station was ahead of me in the orbit, and above, lit by the half moon behind me. I could see the truss and the panels and the pressurized modules, but it stretched no farther across the sky than the moon did behind me.

The phone rang and I answered, “Space Girl.”

“Sterling. I’ve got mission control at Johnson patched in. They, uh, want to interface with your control systems so you can
safely
approach the ISS.”

“Oh, really?”

Another man’s voice came on. “This is Flight Director Grimes. We have you at ten kilometers on the Warden system. We didn’t see you enter our no-fly sphere. What is your propellant?”

I rolled my eyes and jumped.

The ISS went from thumbnail size held at an arm’s length to bigger than my spread fingers.

In the background I heard a voice say, “—under a thousand meters!” and Flight Director Grimes said, “Abort your approach! Abort your approach!”

“General? Do they want assistance or not?”

Sterling sounded exasperated. “It’s not just Grebenchekov. There’s seven other people on the station and a hundred and fifty billion dollars in infrastructure investment.”

I closed my eyes.
I
knew I could get there without breaking things. “What does the crew want?”

The flight director said, “They are, of course, very concerned for their crewmate, but it’s
our
job to weigh all the factors when—”

I just disconnected.

My next jump took me to fifty meters under the Destiny module just as the station passed the terminator. Sunlight ran golden fire down the length of the solar panels and I flinched, flipping down the visor and blinking my eyes.

I’d seen photos, but really, just like everything else, the photos don’t do it justice.

All the shutters were open on the observation cupola on the Tranquility node, making it look like an exotic six-petaled flower. I could see two faces in the central circular window, both looking down—out?—at me. I added a few meters per second velocity in that direction, adjusting sideways as the entire station tried to slide away from me.

Go fast to raise. Slow down to drop. Moving in orbit is not intuitive. I killed all relative velocity one meter away from the cupola.

A woman whose wildly spreading hair was constrained by the headset she was wearing was waving at me, grinning widely. The man next to her was shaking his head, but not, I think, in disapproval.

The phone rang.

“Space Girl.”

General Sterling sounded amused. “The flight director has given up on the official docking procedures. Commander Elliott reports that you’re right outside the cupola?”

“Yes. Am I good to enter?”

“One second. They’re going to patch—”

A woman’s voice came over my headset. The words didn’t quite sync with the woman’s lips on the other side of the glass, but I could tell it was her, her words lagging as they were routed through multiple satellites and ground stations.

“—can hear her. Can she hear me?”

I held up my thumb. “Loud and clear.”

“Hey! Ditto that. I’m Flight Engineer Alis Nagata. This is Commander Ken Elliott. Where is your spacecraft?” She craned her neck to look through the side ports, scanning.

Ah, well, I knew it would come out eventually.

“I’m wearing it,” I said.

They looked at each other.

She said, “How is that—”

“Even possible?” I channeled Matapang. “That’s a
very good
question. First things first—didn’t you declare a medical emergency?”

“Uh, roger that. We’re clearing the suits out of the Quest Joint Airlock so we can depressurize it for your entry. Shouldn’t take more than—”

I jumped.

The call dropped as the metal skin of the ISS cut out my satphone signal. My ears popped and the automatic feed valve buzzed loudly, jetting oxygen into my helmet to raise it above the station’s one atmosphere.

I’d jumped past Elliott and Nagata in the cupola into the middle of the Tranquility node. I put my hand on a bright blue handrail and twisted back toward them.

They were staring, wide-eyed, and a buzzing alarm was audible even through my helmet.

I flipped up the visor and held up my hand with a “Wait,” motion. It only took me ten seconds to shut off my oxygen feed, purge the helmet, and disengage the flange. The alarm was louder now and I left the headset on to protect my ears. Despite knowing it was okay, it felt dangerous to let go of the helmet, but when I finally did, it just hung there, above my head.