Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (52 page)

“Perhaps. But I’ve been putting up with just sponge baths for a while.”

Grandmother got the
good
drugs, a scopolamine prophylactic dermal patch for motion sickness, and Seeana had promethazine standing by. The drug made Grandmother a bit woozy, but she understood about not moving her head.

She wore an adult diaper and her cotton flannel nightgown with warm socks and we tucked her into bed for travel.

Not my mattress. We’d made our own NASA-type sleeping gear, taking a tropical-weight hooded sleeping bag, putting armholes at the shoulders, and sewing Velcroed anchor straps top and bottom, to “hang” it.

Dad had selected five progressively higher altitude locations, all indoors, to transition Grandmother to the air pressure of Kristen Station. He’d made the run four times as a rehearsal.

“Shortly after I start,
they
are going to get location information, so I’m not going to linger at any of these stops longer than it takes Sam’s ears to clear.”

“Understood,” said Mom. She was adjusting an oronasal mask on Grandmother’s face. Dad already had the small, connected oxygen tank in a bag slung over his shoulder. Mom zipped up the sleeping bag and helped Davy lift Grandmother, only stepping back when Grandmother’s head was leaning on Dad’s shoulder. “Ready?” Mom asked.

“See you in space,” said Grandmother.

She and Dad vanished.

Mom and I looked at each other and jumped.

Jeline and Tessa were at the view port and Seeana was checking over her medical supplies and equipment in “sick bay,” a section of the inner hull halfway between the equator and the view port. Small items were stored in zippered bags and large items were by themselves, all Velcroed to the wall.

Over the last week the amount of fuzzy-loop Velcro patches and strips had proliferated across the inner hull like some odd fungus, growing in squares, circles, and lines.

Seeana turned her body (not her head) to look at us, raising her eyebrows.

“Any minute,” I said.

Jeline and Tessa heard and pushed off the view port frame, floating up to us along the stack.

We waited, an expectant pause that was too short to say anything, yet an eternity to endure, and then … Dad and Grandmother appeared above us, next to one of the stack’s equatorial anchor ropes.

Grandmother didn’t yell, but I saw her body twitch, that involuntary reflex, like dreaming you’re falling and jerking awake in reaction. Dad left one arm under her and put the other across her waist, giving her some sense of support.

Mom jumped to their side, her eyes anxious. I pulled myself up, pushing from rope to rope, hoping we weren’t going to have another Bea-type reaction.

When I could see Grandmother’s face, I relaxed. Her eyes were big, but she wasn’t panicked. She was looking around, moving only her eyes. “It’s
bigger
than I pictured,” she said. “And boy, that breeze on my face feels good after all that time in the ground.”

In the ground
. I hadn’t thought about the vault as a metaphor for burial. I certainly knew what she meant about still air, though. The ventilation in the vault was passive and it had gotten pretty stuffy before Dad started doing some daily atmosphere exchanges by twinning to the tropics.

Mom said, “First things first—let’s get rid of
that
.” She pulled the strap from behind Grandmother’s hair and lifted the oronasal mask off.

Grandmother looked a little alarmed as the mask came off.

Mom handed it to Davy, who tucked it into the bag with the oxygen tank. He pushed it down toward Jeline, who snagged the bag out of the air and shut the regulator off, then passed it on to Tessa, who went to put it with the medical supplies.

In the time she’d lived with us, I don’t think I’d ever seen Grandmother without some sort of oxygen feed on—a nasal cannula at the very least. She took a breath, then another and the corners of her mouth twitched up. “It’s
easy
. It’s … enough.”

Seeana floated up next to us, a ghastly smile on her face.

I said, “Are you all right, Seeana?”

She dropped the pretend smile. “Sorry. I tilted my head up too fast. I’ll be okay in a minute.” She said to Grandmother, “Get your arms out of that bag, Sam.”

Grandmother threaded her right hand out of the bag’s armhole and stared at her fingers. “I haven’t lifted my hand that high in months,” she said.

“You’re not lifting it
now
,” said Seeana. She clipped a small portable oximeter to the end of Grandmother’s index finger. Her eyebrows went up as she looked at the readout.

Mom twisted to see and laughed out loud. “Ninety-seven, and you only just arrived.”

Grandmother freed her other hand, and was holding both of them out, moving them up, higher than her head, then down, almost to her waist. I wondered if she’d noticed that Dad was no longer holding on to her.

Seeana reached up to her own neckline and unclipped something from the cloth of her scrubs. She leaned in and reached over to the side of Grandmother’s head. “Here—just like a clip-on earring.”

“What’s this?” Grandmother asked feeling the centimeter-wide piece of plastic clipped to her earlobe.

“Wireless oximeter. There’s no point in taking you off oxygen tubes if you have to trail wires around, too.”

Grandmother licked her lips. “I can go anywhere in here?”

Mom and Dad nodded.

“I’d like to look out that window.”

Dad reached toward one of the sleeping bag straps and Mom smacked his hand. He pulled it back, shaking it and glaring at Mom.

Mom ignored him and said, “That’s an
excellent
idea, Mom. Go
do
that.”

Seeana’s smile came back, only this time it was genuine. “Yeah, that’s right. You
go
, girl.”

Dad made a silent “ah” shape with his mouth and he pushed off the rope, drifting back, followed almost immediately by Seeana and Mom.

Grandmother’s eyes got really big and then twitched down, looking at the empty space under her, suddenly aware that no one held her—that no one was supporting her.

“Here, Grandmother.” I held out my hand and, when she gripped my fingers, I moved them to the closest rope.

She reached out with her free hand and tentatively felt the texture of the sheathed line, smooth, almost silky, then closed her fingers around it.

I pulled my arm back from her other hand, and she resisted, gripping my fingers harder. I stopped, waited.

With a firming of her mouth, she released my fingers and took hold of the rope.

I smiled and said, “It’s just for common convenience, but we consider the view port is
down
. That lighted end is
up
. You
can’t
fall and it takes very little force to move you anywhere you want to go.”

THIRTY-SIX

Cent: I’m kind of a mushroom myself

“The surgeon died in a car accident about eight hours after the missile took out your residence in Canada, but I expect the more relevant event was when you snatched Mr. Doe and the drone crashed.”

Hunt and Davy were in Maclean, Virginia, sitting in the back of Hunt’s favorite sushi restaurant. Davy had ordered tea but wasn’t touching it.

He’d made
that
mistake in the past.

“Not an accident?”

“No witnesses. The car hit a light pole at high speed but there were impact marks on the driver’s side where another vehicle forced it off the road.”

“They wouldn’t have killed him if he didn’t know something.”

“Or some
body
. We talked to the anesthesiologist and the scrub nurse. The surgeon told
them
that the device was an experimental electrical bone-growth stimulator.”

Davy gritted his teeth. “Electrical, anyway.”

“Is it still transmitting?”

“Not currently, but it could be back in sleep mode, waiting for a triggering transmission. Not that that would do them any good.”

Hunt laughed lightly. “I suspect that moving her into orbit was the last thing they expected you to do.”

Davy nodded.
And that had a positive benefit.
But there was still a smoking ruin where their home of twenty years stood. “What’s the story on the drone?”

“It
was
a Predator. It wasn’t one of
ours
.”

Davy looked very skeptical. “Not one of the CIA’s?”

“Not one of the U.S.’s. It was one of several MQ-1s sold to Italy. It reportedly went down in the Adriatic Basin west of Montenegro, twelve hundred meters deep.”

“And here it is scattered across a Canadian hillside.”

“Tell me about it. The DoD is, to say the least, livid. That unit has U.S. technical advisors.”

“So it
was
one of yours?”

“There was U.S. personnel around. Investigation ongoing. Diverted or stolen.”

Davy remained stone-faced. “Doesn’t mean it wasn’t black ops of some kind.” He relaxed a little. “Okay. I don’t believe it was you guys for lots of reasons. But just so you know? If I find a reason to change my mind, you guys are going to start losing orbital assets right and left.”

Hunt jerked his chin sideways, neither denying nor affirming. “Predators are operated long range through a Ku-band satellite link and I’ve been told that this bird
wasn’t
using our … orbital assets.” He paused. “Now, I’m kind of a mushroom myself,” meaning he was kept in the dark and fed bullshit, “but if true, this means they were using the C-band line-of-sight data link which is limited to one hundred fifty nautical miles.”

Davy frowned. “That would reach into Alaska, barely, but it was in the mountains—line of sight would’ve been interrupted from a ground station. If it wasn’t being controlled by satellite, it had to be controlled locally.”

Hunt shook his head. “You have one other possibility: an airborne asset controlling it from a distance. It would have to be high, but it could be almost out to one hundred fifty miles if it were high enough.”

“But the drone loitered overnight!”

“It could do that on automatic. The human pilots and their aircraft could’ve spent hours on the ground, then gone back up when the helicopter you disabled reached the area.”

“Seems like an awful stretch. Why are you bothering?”

“Because we found that aircraft.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

Cent: Live From Kirsten Station

Jade and Tara were furious with me. Tara said, “We would never have gone off to the beach if you’d told us you were doing this!”

Turns out being furious makes you move your head a
lot
. Tara got most of her ejecta into the bag, but Jade blasted her emesis sack right out of her hands with just the sort of results you might imagine.

Thank god for Tessa. She was there with the clean-up kit in seconds. I got another emesis bag into Jade’s hands, then Tessa and I donned odor-blocking disposable masks and chased globules down with wads of paper towels.

This is the sort of thing that really stops a conversation, but ten minutes later, at the upper end of the sphere, we resumed it.

Quietly (Grandmother was napping) Jade said, “Have you posted any video? There wasn’t a hint of this on the news when I was scanning the channels in St. Martin.”

“Not yet. We’ve had other priorities. We’re still a construction zone, you know.”

“Yeah, but this is
huge
. Your grandmother is
living
in space. She’s the only one, right?”

“Technically. The rest of us are commuters so far.”

Jade said, “I’m surprised you aren’t up here all the time!”

I looked at her, eyebrows raised, and she blushed. “They say you get over it in a week!”

“
You
haven’t tried our microgravity toilet.
Some
things work better down there.” To be fair, we had the pee part working pretty good. The other system still had problems but at least I could jump the entire unit down to Earth and steam clean it when necessary.

Tara, turning a little
more
pale, said, “But you should definitely let us do an interview with your
resident
. Not only is it historic, it’s the best way to reward our sponsors and to get more.”

“Okay. We’ll talk about it.”

*   *   *

We did. Dad hated the idea, Mom was neutral. I was iffy, myself, but when Grandmother was all for it, I chimed in on the pro side.

Tara skipped an entire week of class to set up the interview.

All the networks were interested, but when they discovered it wouldn’t be one of those remote interviews, where the interviewee was talking from space and the reporter ground side, they went crazy. Millions were offered for an exclusive, which was reasonable, given that the Russians charged over twenty-five million to send a space tourist up.

We said no.

After all the back-and-forth we agreed to one reporter to be selected from the different networks by lottery
after
the candidates had passed microgravity testing in a commercial parabolic aircraft. We would broadcast live through satellite link in equipment provided by the network pool, and we would keep the equipment after.

The only thing any of the networks fought us on was that we specified it be a woman reporter.

Dad didn’t trust them, of course. Before he allowed the equipment in the station, he had it examined carefully by Wanda and her friends.

It turned out to be an unmodified off-the-shelf, high-end mobile-reporting setup that used satphone technology to provide live HD video and stereo audio from anywhere in the world. It had the added advantage of functioning
as
a satphone, letting a news anchor ask questions, studio to frontline.

A thirty-second clip of our equipment test ran on most networks.

“Space Girl here. Welcome to Apex Orbital Services Kristen Station, currently—” Pivot to viewport. “—ten thousand three hundred eighty-three kilometers over the Gulf of Aiden. Please join Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Connie del Olmo when she tours this new facility and interviews the people who live and work here, this Saturday evening, ten
P.M.
Eastern, seven
P.M.
Pacific.” Cut to exterior shot provided by me, and the chorus of Wilson Pickett’s version of “Mustang Sally.”