Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (36 page)

I thought about it. “Could you expedite the decision about Iridium Communications? They said they were waiting for DoD permission before they could negotiate a deal to compensate us for our video inspections.”

General Sterling clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

*   *   *

Okay, I knew I’d get a lecture from Dad, but I guess I wasn’t expecting one from Joe. That didn’t mean I was going to put up with it.

“So what was I supposed to do, let him die?”

“Why did you take off your helmet? That flight engineer has already tweeted two pictures of you from the ISS!”

Dad had left the “ground station” cell with Tara because it couldn’t reach out of the underground storage vault any more than the satellite transmitters could, so I hadn’t been able to call him and I
still
hadn’t connected.

“Which flight engineer? Except for Commander Elliott, they’re
all
flight engineers.”

Joe looked at his phone. “Uh, Nagata.”

“Show me,” I said.

I hadn’t even seen her holding a camera, but the first picture she’d posted was of me floating outside the cupola (sun visor still down). Compared to the standard NASA EMU suit, I looked sylphlike, almost a dancer in a unitard.

“I don’t see what you’re complaining about.”

He swiped to the next picture and stabbed his finger at it.

That
picture was inside the U.S. Lab with me and Rassmussen shaking hands over Grebenchekov, Commander Elliott in the foreground. My short hair was standing up in a way I didn’t remember at all and zero G changed the shape of my face, too. My skin color was definitely better than Grebenchekov’s.

No helmet. Face in three-quarter profile.

“That is
so
cool,” said Tara.

Joe scowled.

I bit my lip. “I understand, Joe. You’re worried that they’ll connect me to you and you’ll get the heat.”

“Fuck no! I was worried about
you
! But while you’re on the subject, what about Tara? What about Jade? You’re telling me this won’t have repercussions?”

Ouch
. Maybe he had a point, there. I locked eyes with Tara.

She shrugged. “They might connect you with
you
, I suppose. I mean,
you
, Space Girl, with
you
, Cent-that-lived-in-New-Prospect-for-a-while. But I doubt it will lead to Joe. I wasn’t aware you guys were still dating until after you weren’t anymore.”

Joe looked away.

Dad jumped into the lab with Cory.

“Where were you? We’ve had the next set of satellites ready for the last forty-five minutes.”

“Sorry. You never took me down into the vault so I couldn’t jump there to tell you.”

“Tell me? Tell me what?” He blinked, finally noticing I was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. “You’re
not
in the suit. Are you all right?”

“Fine, yes.”

Tara said, “Everyone is fine, including Flight Engineer Grebenchekov.”

Cory said, “Who is Grebenchekov?”

All three of us started talking at once, Tara excited, me matter-of-fact, and Joe angry. I shut up and let the two of them tag team it, but I got ready to defend myself.

When he’d got the whole story, Dad said, “You saved his life?”

I nodded.

He walked up to me and put his arms around me. “I’m very proud of you.”

Tears are so much easier to deal with in gravity, especially if you have someone else’s shirt to wipe them on.

Then Dad held me at arm’s length and shook me halfheartedly by my shoulders. “But the photos! Why’d you take off your helmet?” He shook me again, but the corner of his mouth kept twitching up. When he let go, he glanced sideways at the others and then back at me.

I sighed. “Lemons. Yes. I know.”

He shut his mouth, but he mimed crushing something in his hand, the other hand cupped below to catch the squeezings.

I spread my hands and changed the subject. “We’re behind schedule. We should double up on the remaining satellite insertions.”

Tara said, “We’ve got e-mail reports from all of this morning’s bird’s owners. All are transmitting. One of them had trouble uploading commands, but that seems to be a software problem.”

“Maybe I can go retrieve that one later and let them fix it?” I said.

Tara glared at me. “No more freebies! If they want to pay for retrieval, fine, and they’ll need to pay for relaunching, too!”

I held up my hands. “Yes, ma’am!”

Cory said, “Tara’s right. Even at
your
rates, they need to take responsibility for shoddy work.”

I nodded. “Right. I have my own projects, after all.”

Cory frowned. “The new suits?”

I shook my head. “No.
My
space station.”

*   *   *

Okay, I thought the first wave of press response after
AOS-Sat One
went live and the first video went viral was crazy.

SPACE GIRL SAVES ISS COSMONAUT.

EMERGENCY MEDICAL EVACUATION ON INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION.

FORGET 911: SPACE GIRL TO THE RESCUE

IS IT A BIRD, A PLANE, AN AMBULANCE?

And, inevitably, to prove it’s never what a girl can do, it’s how she looks:

SPACE GIRL IS HAWT!

During a scheduled in-flight video interview with the Associated Press, Commander Elliott and Flight Engineer Rasmussen were asked about my actions. Rasmussen said, “I’ve been asked not to discuss this pending the formulation of NASA’s official response.” She looked away from the camera and when she looked back water was accumulating in her eyes in that annoying zero-G way. She flicked the water away from her face with a finger and said,
“I’m
grateful as hell.”

Commander Elliott added, “The entire crew is grateful. We are overjoyed that Misha is safe and out of danger.”

NASA and the hospital kept press away from Grebenchekov, but when the first officials from Roscosmos (the Russian Federal Space Agency) arrived, they brought representatives from the Russian press with them.

“I love
kosmos devushka
!” Grebenchekov said. “She speaks very good Russian!”

Ha. Take
that
, General Sterling.

*   *   *

The vast majority of our new customers in the university microsat promotion did not need specific orbits. They did need enough inclination to reach the latitudes of their tracking facilities. The universities (and three
high schools
) were distributed from Miami to Fairbanks. Most of the exceptions had already been taken care of in the first set of polar-orbit launches.

Confident now in the precision of our deliveries, USSPACECOM approved a faster insertion rate. “It would simplify things if you distributed the rest of these short-lived units in the
same
orbital plane,” General Sterling said. “It would make the COLA evaluations for
our
launches simpler.”

I was talking to him via the base-station cell phone, sitting on the roof of “Gunner” Lee’s house in Ft. Worth. As much trouble as it took to get
that
jump site, I figured I might as well use it, and I didn’t really care if they tracked the call there.

“Ooh. Our own orbit! Some of the tracking stations are moderately north. We’d need to match the fifty-degrees inclination of our previous nonpolar deployment. Would that work?”

“Yes. Can you handle two-line orbital sets yet?”

I grimaced. “We’ve got the CelesTrak software running ground side. It’s just not as intuitive to me as lat-long ground track with altitude, or even uncoded Keplerian elements.”

He groaned. “This is no—”

“—way to run a space program? We’re working on improving our space-side hardware. My girls are seeing if we can work out a deal to test MiGHO.”

“MiGHO? Why do I get all my space news from a seventeen-year-old girl?”

“Oh, surely
you
have heard of it? Multi-System GPS for High Orbits?”

Sterling growled. “The one
I
heard about was in a
classified
briefing. Perhaps you’re talking about something different.”

I raised my eyebrows. “I’m talking about the German project with the ESA? Uses side-lobe transmissions from
all
the GPS systems—U.S. Navstar, EU Galileo, Russian GLONASS, and Chinese Compass navsats—to get position and velocity fix as far out as lunar orbit?”

“Hmph. We’re flying it on a DoD mission two years from now. How did
you
find out about it?”

“I don’t know about your briefing, but it’s not exactly a secret. The company generated several academic papers and they sounded very interested when we queried.” My turn. “Who told
you
I was seventeen?”

He paused. “Well,
you
mentioned it to Flight Engineer Rasmussen … Ms. Rice. Or is it Ms. Harrison-Rice?”

Oh,
fuck
. “I didn’t mention
that
.”

“Once they saw the news stills and video from your delivery of Flight Engineer Grebenchekov, it was a matter of minutes before the NSA delivered a file to the DIA. I got a heavily redacted version, but it includes you and your parents.”

I almost hung up. “And does that change anything?”

“Well, it sort of clears up why we haven’t seen your launches. And it helps that you’re not foreign nationals. There had been some fears expressed that you would start removing some of our orbital intelligence assets.”

I remembered what I’d said to Dad back when space command first “discovered” me. I repeated it: “Nice little spy sat you have there,
shame
if anything were to happen to it?”

“Yes. Like that. I suggest you don’t repeat that.”

“You don’t have to worry about
me
.”
I’ll play nice if
you
guys will.

“From what I can see, you would be putting these birds into orbit regardless of our approval. Better for
us
to insure they go into safe orbits, so we’re cooperating … for now. But my boss flew to Washington to discuss the matter with … well, with people. It’s all way above
my
pay grade.”

Sterling’s boss was the head of U.S. Space Command.
He
reported to the air force chief of staff. I didn’t want to think about who was in that meeting.

Sterling cleared his throat. “I will say that it is a
good
thing your identity became known in conjunction with your medevac of Grebenchekov. Saving his life, plus your remediation of the Fengyun 1C debris, has earned you substantial good will from
some
parties. We’ll just have to see, Ms. Rice.”

“It’s Cent.”

He
hummed
. “Yes. That was in the file, too, but I didn’t want to presume.

“We’ll just have to see, Cent.”

*   *   *

Over the next three days we put 108 satellites into what we were calling the Apex Standard Low Earth Orbit. At 205 kilometers altitude, the circumference of the orbital track was over forty-one thousand kilometers. Evenly distributed, that was one of those tiny cubesats every 115 kilometers.

I also made one quick trip to the ISS, prearranged through General Sterling. He patched me through to Johnson who patched me to the station.

Commander Elliott said, “The package is on the RMS above the Terrace.”

The “Terrace” was the Exposed Facility outside of Kibo, the Japanese Experiment Module. A small air lock with a sliding table allowed the crew to move experiments from inside the station to outside, where the RMS—the Remote Manipulator System, a Japanese-built arm not unlike the larger Canadarm—moved the experiments in or out of one of the many slots on the Terrace.

The “package” in this case, was a small foil envelope.

Flight Engineer Rasmussen was looking out the right-side window on the end of the Kibo module.

When I had my hand on the foil envelope, she turned back to the RMS operator station and opened the jaws of the manipulator, releasing the envelope. I tucked it into one of the large coveralls pockets on my leg and made sure the Velcro was closed.

Then I held up
my
package and pointed at the manipulator. She turned her head and said something. Commander Elliott floated up to the left-hand window and I heard his voice. “What is
that
?”

“That” was an eight-quart aluminum pressure cooker that Cory had modified by replacing the automatic pressure release with a manual valve. It also had a simple pressure gauge, currently showing the internal pressure was 14.6 psi higher than the vacuum outside.

“I’ve got five pounds of seedless grapes, five pounds of Honeycrisp apples, and five pounds of navel oranges. You haven’t had a supply flight in six weeks, right?”

I saw Rasmussen lick her lips and the jaws of the manipulator closed firmly on the pressure cooker’s handle.

There’s always enough food on the ISS, but fresh fruit only lasts a week or two after resupply flights.

Commander Elliott said, “Fruit? Really?”

“There’s also two pounds of my mom’s Christmas fudge.”

Elliott turned his head. “Flight Engineer Rasmussen! We have an
urgent
experiment to recover. The Kibo air lock is still unpressurized, yes?”

I heard Rasmussen’s voice come distantly through Elliott’s mike. “Affirmative.”

“Open that outer door and extend the sliding table. We need to get that puppy on board!”

“I’ll come get my container later,” I said. “Any messages for Misha?”

Through the window I saw Rasmussen reach her hand out for the headset that Elliott wore. He gave it to her.

Her voice came over the link. “Choose a date.”

I repeated it back to her. “That’s the message?”

“Yes. By the way, the crew
already
liked you because you helped Misha. When they see the fruit, there may be a few marriage proposals.”

“Aren’t they
all
married?”

“And your point would be?”

I laughed. “Tis the season,” I said.

And jumped.

*   *   *