Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (25 page)

I took hold of
Lost Boy
and held my wrist so I could see the GPS screen. Dad’s voice counted down to zero and—

I was much higher, 623 kilometers above sea level. The view of Earth was different, still huge, still gorgeous, but more of a sphere. There was a coast below me and I was headed out to sea, but it took me a moment to realize it was the Sea of Okhotsk and Japan would be south.

The phone rang. I connected.

“Apex One.”

“Capcom. Do you see it?”

Oh, crap. I’d been looking at the scenery again. I jumped in place, but turned 180 degrees, face out to the black. “Read me the present track, Capcom?”

He read out the numbers. My altitude and speed and heading were good, but the longitude was off by three seconds. I looked west.

“Got it, Capcom.”

It was a lot easier to spot than
Tinkerbell
had been, but then it was over nineteen feet long and eight feet in diameter. The bell of the AJ-10 rocket motor was dark, a quarter of the overall length sticking down from a clump of pumps and tanks. Everything else—the support trusses, the mating collar for the first stage, and the payload collar—was white, catching the rising sun. I closed on it in a series of short jumps, towing
Lost Boy
.

“Capcom, connect to the client, please.”

Dad used the cell phone’s conference feature to call Ms. Matapang. By arrangement, he didn’t talk. It rang three times before she answered.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Ms. Matapang. This is Apex One. I have your package ready for delivery.”

“Uh, what does that mean? Are you about to launch?”

“I’m about to connect
Lost Boy
to the Delta-K booster. Is there anything special I should know?”

“Uh. Is this for real? I know you got hold of
Tinkerbell
, but
how
can you possibly be at the Delta II second stage?”

“I’ve got another satellite rendezvous after this. Do you want us to latch it, or not?”

“Uh,
yes
! Just shove the jaws onto any of the trusses. Stay away from the pumps though.”

“Certainly.”

The booster hung in front of me, scary big, and I felt like a swimmer floating next to a humpback whale. The “jaws” were two projecting rails with a wire across the bottom. When I pushed it onto the truss and the pipe hit the trip wire, two spring hooks sprang across from each rail, capturing the truss redundantly.

I unsnapped the camera from its mount and while I floated close to
Lost Boy
and the truss assembly of the Delta-K booster, I held the case out at arm’s length and pointed the lens back toward my sun-visored helmet, then, for good measure, I imaged the GPS readout on my wrist.

“It’s engaged, Ms. Matapang. Do you want me to release the tether?”

“Uh, no. It’s not just a test of the tether, but our deploying mechanism, too. If
you
do it, it won’t be a good test. Uh, I called up the booster’s track—where are you now?”

“If you called it up, you
know
where I am.”

“Humor me?”

“I just passed over that string of islands that goes north from Hokkaido up to Kamchatka. My altitude is six hundred twenty-three kilometers, heading one hundred sixty-nine degrees, forty-eight to thirty-six north, one hundred fifty-four to thirty-three east. My velocity is seven point six six kps. My camera is on. I was hoping to record the deployment of your tether for you.”

“Oh.” Dead air for a moment. “The Kuril Islands, right. It’s still hard to take in. When you vanished in the lab … well, I thought I was hallucinating. But I see why Dr. Garcia never caught up with you when you returned
Tinkerbell
. And that suit, are you—”

“Stop.” I didn’t want her speculating about the suit and my lack of a spacecraft on a line bugged by the Defense Intelligence Agency. “When can you deploy the tether?”

“Ten minutes. We’ll be line of sight then.”

“It will take a
lot
longer than that before Texas clears horizon!”

“We’ve got Internet access to a transceiver at the University of Hawaii.”

“Ah.” That made more sense. “I can chill for ten.”

“It won’t mess up your next rendezvous?”

“Not an issue. I’m going to take some video of the booster while I’m waiting. Uh, why didn’t you want me to hook onto any of the pumps?”

“The leftover fuel is hypergolic.”

“Pardon?”

“If the Aerozine 50 fuel touches any of the dinitrogen tetroxide oxidizer, it will ignite. Makes for simple motors that can be stopped and started, but that’s why they want to deorbit these guys. If the tanks deteriorate, the fuel can explode on its own, creating more debris
without
having to collide with anything else.”

“Oh, really?” I eyed the booster, nervously.

“Really, really,” she said. “So
don’t
bump it.”

“Roger that. Apex One out.”

I disconnected and, as I waited for Dad to call me back, I took video of the booster, giving myself very slight relative velocity down its various sides. On the shadowed side, it was barely visible, lit by reflected earthlight, but I was not at all tempted to wrestle the booster’s dark side around for better-lit shots. As soon as I’d imaged each side and both ends, I backed a hundred meters away, down orbit.

*   *   *

The phone rang.

“Apex One.”

“This is General Sterling.”

I just groaned.

“You did it again, didn’t you? How many launches is that?”

“A bit
busy
! What do you want?”

“What are you doing?” I guess he realized how inane that sounded because he immediately modified it to, “What operations are you conducting?”

“You’re the one with the phone tap. You
know
what I’m doing.”

“It’s not a live feed. They give me recordings later. The Iridium Network Center texted me you were back in orbit.”

“Huh.” It sounded like the truth. I giggled.

“What’s so amusing?” He sounded annoyed.

“Laughing at myself, General. Not at you.”

“Oh?”

“You have kids, General?”

He paused, then slowly said, “I do. Grown, now.”

“How self-centered were they when they were my age?”

That surprised a laugh out of him.

“My mom says it’s normal, but when I realized you weren’t spending all your time listening in on my phone calls, I had to laugh at myself. It’s not always about
me
, is it?”

“Hmmm. Well, monitoring your, uh, activities is actually interfering with my regular duties. So, what are you doing over the Pacific?”

“I just attached a nanosatellite to NORAD two six six two three, the Delta-K booster from the 2000 launch. The Aggies will take it from here, deploying a tether to bring it down over the next few months.”

I checked the time on the GPS. Eight or nine minutes had passed since talking to Matapang. I was about fifty meters above the booster, maintaining a good camera angle on the attached satellite.

“We brought their unit in for analysis.”

“Yes. You did. I put their engineering prototype up.”

“Oh, really? Dr. Garcia mentioned you offered a launch.”

“We don’t offer launches. We offer
deliveries
.”

He cleared his throat. “Well, Dr. Garcia certainly didn’t report commissioning a
delivery
.”

“
He
didn’t, but if he would answer his grad student’s e-mails, he might be aware of these things.” Enough about Dr. Garcia. “I’m very interested in seeing how this tether works. It’s quite simple for me to add tethers to the multi-ton debris. It’s too big for me to deorbit otherwise. Any of
your
old birds need retrieving?”

The general cleared his throat. “Is that a serious offer?”

“We’re in the biz, remember?”

“I thought you said you weren’t interested in government contracts?”

That was right, I had. “Ah. Well, you’re right. But we
are
committed to remediating three kilos for every kilo we put in orbit. We just put a seventeen-kilo satellite up, so we need to get fifty-one kilos down.”

“You don’t count the Delta-K booster? What is that, seven tons?”

“It’s not down yet so, no. I’ll deorbit at least fifty-one kilos today.”

“Don’t you
plan
this stuff ahead of time?”

“Oh, I have a target, just wondered if you had anything you wanted to offer instead.”

“Surely it matters what orbit it’s in?”

“Only altitude, really. Promised my ground crew I would stay inside the Van Allen belts, and I’m avoiding the South Atlantic Anomaly. Oops. Excuse me.”

A hundred meters away, a piece of stainless steel about the size and shape of a two-quart flowerpot kicked off the end of
Lost Boy
and was moving briskly away, trailing a barely visible silver ribbon. I jumped closer, holding my hands clear of the camera. From only a few meters, the ribbon was more substantial than it had first seemed, composed of multiple strands of aluminum wire, loosely cross woven with Teflon.

I gave myself some velocity down the length of the tether, catching up with the “flowerpot.” It was spinning on its axis, unwinding the tether and gyro-stabilizing the spool/terminator. When I looked down the length of the tether I could see it was developing a gentle curve as the spool responded to the local gravity gradient, bending slowly toward Earth.

“AggieSat Lab deployed the tether and I needed to get some video. It’s looking good. So, any thoughts on an air force remediation target before I go to my next rendezvous?”

I heard him lick his lips. “If you’re serious, there’s a chunk of debris from the 2007 Chinese antisatellite test that has caused ISS evasion maneuvers several times in the past few years and will again in a few months.”

I looked at the Delta-K booster. “Doesn’t have a bunch of hypergolic fuel on it, does it?”

“Onboard fuel was nitrogen gas but even that probably didn’t survive the impact. It hit head on at over eight kps. More debris than even the Iridium-Kosmos collision.”

“I know. How big is the piece you want me to get?”

“It’s a compact mass about fifty centimeters across.”

“Half a meter? What kind of closing velocities—for the ISS that is?”

“Well, depending on the crossing angle—nine to eleven kps.”

“Whoa.” That was booking. I’d read that the impact of a ten centimeter object at ten kilometers per second was the equivalent of twenty-two sticks of dynamite. This would be more like a bunker buster. “What is it?”

“Could be any of a number of things. NiCad batteries. The reaction wheels. The nitrogen tank. One of the two onboard radiometers.”

Half a meter was about the size of
Tinkerbell
and that had been a pain to locate. “How bright is it—high albedo?”

I heard him ask somebody off to the side. The answer didn’t come back very quickly and he said, “One second. Looking it up.”

I took some more video of the tether deploying. The curve was even more pronounced, now.

General Sterling came back. “Not as bright as some, but we’ve tracked it optically. Shows up fine on radar.”

I don’t
have
radar
. I’d really have to look into that.

I wondered if doing this would buy more cooperation from them. “I might need some active tracking input to locate that. Are you still in Leesburg?”

“No. I’m back in my office in Colorado.”

“Ah. So, e-mail a phone number where we can call you, okay? Info at apexorbital dot com. I’ve got this thing to do, but I should be able to call you back in ten or twenty minutes.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Inspection video, remember? You were there when I made the offer.”

“The Iridium bird? Which one?”

I disconnected.

*   *   *

Dad was a bit upset. “I’ve been calling forever!”

“Sorry. It’s that air force general. You told me to be polite, remember?”

“Politely hang up, next time! Thought you were
dead
.”

“Sorry. I need the setup for Iridium four.”

Iridium birds four through eight all launched aboard the same rocket, a Delta II from Vandenberg in May of 1997. These were the first Iridium satellites in orbit. One through three were prototype test units that never launched.

Dad read off the coordinates, bearing, altitude, and the speed, then added, “Northern Russia, headed for Mongolia, China, and Thailand. Mark in twenty seconds.”

The Iridium sats are triangular prisms a meter on a side and over four meters long. They orbit perpendicular to the earth’s surface, a double set of solar panel wings on the end away, and four microwave horn-gateway antennae for ground stations pointing down from the other end. Just above the gateway antennae, another set of flat-plate slotted array antennae point sideways, cross linking with the other satellites. Then, above that, three flat-panel antennae, each about the size and shape of a standard door, lean out from the sides of the prism and communicate with subscriber handsets over seven hundred kilometers below.

Well, not
all
of the handsets were that far away.

After my jump, I was still thirty kilometers distant, but my target was easy to see. Those big, flat, door-shaped antennae catch sunlight like nobody’s business.

My seventy-eight-hundred-kilometer jump from the Delta booster had dropped the call, of course. I waited a few minutes, seeing if Dad could connect. When the phone didn’t ring, I closed in on the satellite in a series of jumps. The phone rang while I was still a kilometer away.

“Apex One.”

“Capcom. You okay?”

“Just fine. Did it go to voice mail?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You take another call?”

“No. Being this high, and away from the bird, I think I was outside the broadcast cone. I’m
still
probably outside the cone, but I’m only a klick away, so we’re probably getting side lobe leakage.”

“Right. Get your vids. I’ll be happier when you’re down.”

“About that. There should be an e-mail in the Apex Orbital account. Can you pull it up while I get the inspection video?”