Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (17 page)

“What are we going to do?” Millie’s voice contained a strain of hopelessness that made her want to slap herself.

“You’d have to
ask
her to stop.”

“For what reason?”

“Only the truth would work.”

“What? That I want her to stop because
I’m
terrified she’s going to get herself killed?”

Davy sighed. “You’re allowed to say we’re
both
scared she’ll kill herself.”

“Why don’t
you
, then?”

Davy looked down at the floor. “She’s not my mother.”

Millie frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense. Of course Cent’s not your mother. Or do you mean me, being Cent’s mother?”

Davy shook his head. “I mean Sam.
I’m
not the one who’s in danger of losing their daughter
and
their mother.” He jerked his thumb up and back, toward the bedrooms on the second floor.

It was unexpected and it rocked her back, taking her breath away. She shut her eyes, squeezing tears down her cheeks. “Dammit. I’m the one with the training. I didn’t see that.” She wiped at her face with her hands. “That is, obviously I was doing everything I could to
avoid
seeing that.”

Davy handed her the tissue box. “It’s grounds for
asking
Cent to stop. She could be brought to understand why this is such a bad time.
Telling
her to stop wouldn’t work—we both know that. She’s as stubborn as you are.”

Tears and all, Millie couldn’t help laughing.

Davy stared at her, perplexed, then got it. His face relaxed. “Okay, maybe I’m a little stubborn, too.”

Millie blew her nose. “But
you
don’t want to ask, her, do you? Why?”

Davy looked away.

Millie nodded. “Right. Because it wouldn’t be fair.”

Davy exhaled heavily.

Millie went on. “
We’re
afraid, but it isn’t as if she doesn’t know what she’s doing.
I
didn’t know about the bends thing until
she
told me. Dr. Matoska seems to be moving cautiously, too. She’ll be eighteen soon. She can be a thousand miles away in an instant.”

Davy nodded. “Yes. It’s probably less dangerous than her little adventure in New Prospect.”

Millie shuddered. “Less? At least those people would want her
alive
.”

Davy held his hand out and rocked it. “At least the hazards are known. Vacuum, heat, cold, collisions, radiation. Humans have been operating up there for over half a century.

“But when it comes to
those
bastards, it’s hard for her to know what smiling asshole is holding a hypodermic needle or a Taser behind their back. Or, my biggest fear, when a sniper is waiting completely out of sight for her to show up.” He stabbed his finger at the ceiling. “At least
they
can’t get at her up
there
.”

He dropped his hand and his shoulders slumped. “And, no,” he said. “It wouldn’t be fair.”

FOURTEEN

Cent: More Prep

Cory had reloaded all the parts of the life-model pressure sensor into the suit and was taking readings. I Bluetoothed the pictures from my phone to his laptop. He frowned. “The
right
armpit?”

I nodded.

“To be honest, I half expected mild pressure hematomas at
every
joint.” He blew the picture up on the screen until square corners of the pixels started to show. “Skin was intact, right? No sign of bleeding?”

“Definitely not.” I stabbed at my T-shirt over the armpit with my finger. “Can’t even tell where it is.”

He checked the pressure sensor readouts for the corresponding region on the life model. “The pressure is nice and uniform under these conditions, but I must admit, the model doesn’t exactly have armpits—no hollows there. You may need some padding under there, to compensate, to keep the pressure up.”

“How does the suit look?” I said, gesturing at the magnifying loupe he’d set upon the bench.

“Good so far, but you were only in vacuum for five minutes, right?”

I nodded.

“We need to test for longer durations, but I want to solve the sun visor and the water issues first,” he said. “Plus communications, right?”

I groaned. “How long?”

“What’s your hurry?”

I glared at him. I had my own agenda, but I wasn’t sharing it with
him
.

He spread his hands. “Look, we wouldn’t even be testing without your ability to get inside. We’d be months or years away even with your funding. Have a
little
patience. Your dad said I should remind you about the ‘surviving activities in low Earth orbit’ part if you got pushy.” He took a step back suddenly and his eyes got wide. “Cent?”

I rubbed at my face with both hands and exhaled. When I took my hands down some of the tightness had left my cheeks. Anyway, Cory wasn’t leaning back anymore.

“How long?” I asked again, only milder.

Cory said carefully, “Your dad says he can have the satellite handset by tomorrow, but I need to work out how we’re going to integrate it into the helmet and harden it for vacuum. I was thinking we’d make another aluminum chamber to hold the phone and the water bladder. We’ll position the oxygen tank lower, the rebreather chamber a little higher, and put the new section in the middle. And we’ll need to pressure test it and the connections. If things go well, I’m thinking four, five days. No, dammit, then there’s the visor.”

I held up my hand.

“
I’ll
take care of the visor.”

*   *   *

“
Tinkerbell
piggybacked on a Delta II launch delivering three multisensor oceanography platforms into low Earth orbit. We had a liquid gas propulsion system to get us to our target altitude of eight hundred fifty kilometers. Unfortunately the thruster solenoid failed open and we ended up blowing the entire store of hydrazine on one continuous thrust.
Tinkerbell
ended up in a highly elliptical orbit with an apogee of eleven hundred kilometers and a perigee of two hundred.

“For a while, we were in deep doo-doo with NASA and the U.S. Strategic Command because they predicted a potential collision with the
NOAA 9
meteorological satellite.”

We were on the fifth floor of Rudder Tower and the room was half full, perhaps twenty-five student and faculty members of the campus Makers Club.

Roberta Matapang, the guest speaker, was a graduate student working on her Ph.D. in astronautical engineering. She was describing her work on a nanosatellite designed and built by a consortium of Texas A&M and University of Texas students and faculty. I liked her but so far, every question asked, no matter how stupid, was a “Good question.”

“Was a collision really likely?” asked one of the two guys on the front row.

I rolled my eyes, then took a deep breath and let it out. Probably wasn’t being fair. After all, I’d been researching the low Earth orbital environment for
months
.

Ms. Matapang said (you guessed it), “Good question. The chances of any one object running into another are
very
low. However, there are over nineteen thousand pieces of debris bigger than ten centimeters. So while the chance of any particular
one
of them hitting another are pretty low, the chances that one of the many
does
have a collision approaches certainty.

“Over two thousand of those pieces were the result of just
one
collision in 2009, when a defunct Cosmos satellite collided with
Iridium 33
at over forty-two thousand kilometers per hour.”

“Jesus,” said the other front row student. “Were they orbiting in opposite directions?”

Ms. Matapang shook her head. “Roughly right angles.
Iridium 33
was in a polar orbit and the Cosmos was highly inclined, too.”

“But your satellite, uh,
Tinkerbell,
didn’t collide?”

“No. As its orbital track was refined by CelesTrak, the risk was downgraded. They passed more than three kilometers apart.”

“What about your mission—could you do any science in that orbit?” the same boy asked.

“Good question. The main mission of
Tinkerbell
was to rendezvous with a discarded Delta II second stage, but now we don’t have the fuel to do it. We’ve used the onboard camera for some Earth imaging, but that’s about it.”

“Is there a danger that it will run into something else?” asked the first student to speak.

“Another good question. Probably not. She’s experiencing considerable atmospheric drag at perigee and we don’t think she’ll survive another two hundred orbits.”

“Why did you want to rendezvous with the Delta upper stage?”
Did I say that out loud?
I’d been wondering for two days, since I’d found out about the talk, and researched what I could online.

She smiled at me and most of the students turned their heads to see who’d spoken. I was not the only woman in the room, but you could count the rest on one hand.

“Good question. The first part of the mission was to image the booster’s exterior. It’s been in orbit for over seventeen years, much of it in regions thick with orbital debris. Since we have exact prelaunch specifications, the idea was to examine the degree of micro- and macro-collisions.”

“Or one of those fast collisions?” the first boy in the front row suggested.

I shook my head and Ms. Matapang noticed. “Do you want to tell him why?”

“Is the booster still its original orbit?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Right,” she said. She looked back at the front row. “A major collision would’ve changed the orbit as well as torn it apart. The second part of our mission, though,
was
to change the orbit.”

“Oh. But you ran out of fuel,” said the second boy on the front row.

She smiled at him. “Yes we did, but that fuel was only to rendezvous. To deorbit the upper stage,
Tinkerbell
was going to hook onto one of the Delta’s support-truss struts, then kick out a five hundred meter spool of woven aluminum tether. This stretches out along the local vertical and degrades the orbit.”

The guys were puzzled.

“Why does that degrade the orbit?”

“Why do you think?”

One of the faculty in the middle of the room suggested, “Atmospheric drag?”

Ms. Matapang held her forefinger and thumb close to each other, “A tiny, tiny bit. What else?”

One of female faculty members said, “Solar wind?”

Ms Matapang shook her head. “Let me give you a clue. The tape is electrically conductive.” She looked around the room but nobody reacted. She added, “And it would be moving through Earth’s magnetic field.”

“Like a wire in a generator,” said the woman who’d spoken.

“Yes,” said Ms. Matapang. “The wire generates current and the empty spool, dangling down, acts as an electron emitter. The current creates a magnetic field along the wire which generates electrodynamic drag as it moves through the magnetosphere.”

A kid on the front row held up a piece of wire, pulled out of his pocket and waved it around. “I’m moving this wire through the earth’s magnetic field and I’m not really getting much in the way of current.”

Okay,
he
didn’t get a “good question” response.

“How fast are you moving the wire?” Ms. Matapang asked.

“Oh, a meter a second? Roughly.”

Ms. Matapang said, “Besides being considerably longer, the tether moves through the magnetosphere at orbital speeds. That’s over seven
thousand
meters per second. You can understand how that might be a little more significant? It does take a while to degrade the orbit, but it’s a matter of weeks or months, not the years atmospheric drag would take.”

“So it’s a remediation test?” I asked.

Matapang lit up like a light bulb. “
Exactly
. None of us want an ablative cascade.”

I nodded.
I
certainly didn’t.

Some of the audience knew what an ablative cascade was, but the rest had to have it explained.

“The amount of orbital debris has reached a point where a hypervelocity collision has the possibility of creating more debris which in turn causes more collisions, which in turn—” She spread her hands apart, flexing her fingers sharply over and over. “It would put so much debris in LEO that it could render the polar orbitals unusable.”

When she finished taking questions, I sprang out of my chair and walked briskly up to her, arriving while others were still getting out of their chairs. “Do you have the NORAD Catalog Number for
Tinkerbell
?”

She blinked. “Uh, yes, in my phone.” She pulled it out and went through her contacts. “It’s five three four two zero. You want to track it? It’s small but if conditions were right, you might be able to acquire it with binoculars.”

“Sure,” I said. “Thought I might try and ‘acquire’ it at perigee. Two hundred orbits? How many days will that be?”

“Two hundred orbits is a wild-ass guess. Small as the cross section is, we’re not getting as much drag at perigee as we expected. Thirteen, fourteen days. Maybe. Plus or minus a week.”

“Do you have a card?”

“I think so. Looking for an internship? What’s your major?”

I shook my head. “Oh, I’m already working on a project, thanks. I don’t have a major yet.”

“Undeclared, eh?” She dug into the bottom of her satchel. “Ha.” She pulled out a dog-eared business card with the university seal. “Here it is.” She peered at it. “Still current, too, for another three months.”

I thanked her and made room for the others. Two guys started walking toward me, smiling, one of whom was tall and gangly like Joe. I turned and slipped out the door. As soon as the frame blocked their view of me, I jumped away.

*   *   *

“Gunner” Lee was a guy on eBay selling reproductions of the Apollo moon mission gear, including a reproduction helmet with the Lunar Excursion Visor Assembly for six hundred dollars. He was grumpy in e-mail about my wanting to inspect it before purchase. He was even grumpier when I showed up at his door in a suburb of Fort Worth and turned out to be this teenage girl. He wouldn’t let me in to see the thing until I held up a wad of cash. Even then, he made me put on disposable gloves before handling it.