Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (30 page)

That’s how they caught Dad.

At 1:30 a young woman in a denim jacket and khaki pants walked through the front door. She looked around and then took a manila envelope out of her shoulder bag and began walking through the room, holding it so anyone could read the letters APEX ORBITAL writ large upon it.

I raised my hand when she neared me, watching her warily.

She blinked and said, “I’m supposed to ask if you know who this came from.”

“Roberta?” I said.

She nodded and handed it to me. “Right.”

“Is Roberta okay?” I asked.

“Was when she gave me this. Roberta said, ‘The note explains all.’” She jabbed her finger toward the envelope. “I’m not supposed to linger.”

I nodded. “Well, thanks.”

She turned around and left. I bent down behind the table, as if to tie my shoes, and jumped away.

*   *   *

The handwritten note said:

Hey Space Girl,

They’re definitely watching me. This note is being delivered by my landlady’s daughter.

I had one of the students put the first unit on the roof of the lab. It’s in a cardboard box next to the elevator stack.

I’m eating lunch over in Bryan at the same time this is being delivered to you in hopes they will be following me. Instructions are in the box, but let me know (via e-mail) if you have any questions. I have the parts for the other two if this one satisfies.

Roberta

I could look down on the space-engineering building from the top level of the massive parking garage next door. The cardboard box sat in the shade, up against the north side of the elevator shack.

It could be a trap. There could be guys waiting inside the roof-access door. It could be booby-trapped. For one brief second I considered getting Dad, but that thought didn’t last long.

With Dad involved it might take all day to get the thing off the roof. Or worse. I could practically hear him saying, “Not worth the risk.”

Well, it wasn’t
his
satellite.

I jumped to the roof and crouched by the box.

The top wasn’t taped and one of the flaps fluttered in a breeze. I flipped it back gently. When nothing went boom or emitted scary hissing noises, I flipped the rest of the flaps open. All I could see was gray foam, but when I peeled back one corner, I could see a rectangular section of solar cells and aluminum framing.

Well, it
looked
like it was the real deal.

I replaced the foam, closed the box, and jumped it to the sandy wash in West Texas. I set it down gently and jumped a hundred feet away.

When it hadn’t exploded after five minutes, I hit the cabin for Dad’s portable radio-frequency sweeper. I started from a hundred feet away and walked slowly toward it, but there was no RF from the box, nothing
active
.

You might ask why I didn’t sweep the box back on that rooftop? I could justify by saying there would be so much radio-frequency stuff happening on campus, it would’ve been meaningless. That it was isolated from local radio out here.

The truth was I didn’t think about it.

I jumped it to the Eyrie and unpacked it carefully, still not convinced it wouldn’t explode. The sheet of instructions said:

The OBC, transmitter, EPS, and batteries are all COTS. The solar cells are space-qualified triple-junction cells. Aluminum frame and pop rivets from Home Depot. I was going to get all fancy with the extendible mast but then one of our undergrads saw these snap-together fiberglass tent poles at REI. The mast needed to be nonconductive or it will generate electrodynamic drag like the tether you attached for us.

There is an elastic cord down the center of the pole and simply unbundling the section should cause it to self-assemble. Manually check that the sockets are fully engaged, though, as the elastic will degrade rapidly from temperature swings and outgassing of plasticizer into the vacuum.

The counterweight is hollow and half filled with steel shot to dampen oscillations from deployment or thermal perturbation.

Lot of acronyms. I had to go look them up online. COTS had several meanings, including “Commercial Orbital Transfer Systems” but the one that clearly pertained here was “Commercial Off-the-Shelf,” meaning that they were components not purpose-built for the satellite. OBC turned out to be “On Board Computer” and EPS was “Electrical Power System.”

To add your audio message, connect a computer to the USB port and the onboard nonvolatile flash will mount as an external drive. Put an .mp3 or .wav file in the root directory and the radio will transmit it on continuous loop. Make it 5 minutes long and it will loop every 5 minutes. Make it 90 minutes long and it will loop every 90. There’s 4 gigabytes of storage so you have substantial message-length flexibility. If there is more than one .wav or .mp3 file in the root, the system will play them in turn, in name-sort order, before looping.

Currently there is a 60-second test.wav file in the root directory comprised of 59 seconds of silence and a 1-second 400 hertz tone. You can delete it or leave it in place as part of your broadcast set.

The batteries are currently charged and the OBC will boot on master power ON and begin broadcasting at 145.990 MHz as soon as the Power On Self-Test is complete.

Let me know when it’s up and we’ll monitor.

“You should include some Chuck Berry,” said Grandmother.

Tara stared at her, appalled and worried. Both Grandmother and I started laughing but that stopped pretty quickly when Grandmother started wheezing.

“Calm down there, girl!” said Seeana, a worried look her face. She cranked the oxygen regulator up, increasing the flow.

I’d brought Tara to Grandmother to discuss branding issues, but we’d segued into planning the audio message for
AOS-Sat One
pretty quickly.

Grandmother’s wheezing stopped after a few more breaths and she closed her eyes for a minute. “Sorry, Tara, your face was just so funny. You must’ve thought I’d gone all senile on you.”

Tara shook her head and said, “Of course not.”

This nearly set Grandmother off again, but she held it to a chuckle. She looked at me and said, “She’s a very
polite
liar.”

Tara grinned. “Okay,
who
is Chuck Berry?”

My computer was open before me and I flipped over to my music app. The opening guitar riff from “Johnny B. Goode” screamed out of my speakers.

Even before Chuck Berry began singing, Tara said,
“Oh
. I know that song.” I stopped the music after the first verse and she added, “But why do you want
that
on the recording?”

“Tradition,” said Grandmother.

I was the one whose father used the space program for history lessons. I filled Tara in. “It was sent out on a gold-plated record on Voyager 1 and 2 that included greetings in different languages and various kinds of music. ‘Johnny B. Goode’ was one of the samples.”

Grandmother nodded. “What do we have so far?”

Tara read the draft. “Greetings from
AOS-Sat One
!
AOS-Sat One
was fabricated by Texas A&M University’s AggieSat Lab and placed in orbit by Apex Orbital Services: providing orbital insertion and recovery for spacecraft up to fifty kilograms in mass, placed in Low, Medium, and High Earth Orbits. Apex Orbital services, the home of—”

I interrupted her. “I thought we agreed that we weren’t going to include that part!”

She ignored me, continuing with, “—the home of Space Girl. For prices and endorsement opportunities, visit our website at apexorbital dot com. Apex Orbital—we deliver!”

Grandmother flipped over a piece of paper on her bedspread. It was Tara’s new design, a five line squiggle of a space-helmeted figure, clearly female but not obnoxiously so. She was pulling the satellite in the Apex Orbital logo as if it were a suitcase. “
We
didn’t agree,” Grandmother said. “
You
disagreed. Everybody
else
likes it.”

I rolled my eyes.

Tara said, “You may know loads about orbits, but you don’t know nuthin’ about advertising.” She bounced her eyebrows up and down. “Space. Girl.”

I looked at Grandmother and said, “There’s never a snowball around when you need one.”

Grandmother said, “How many different messages could we fit on there?”

“Hundreds, why?”

“It just might be nice to vary the message. The order, the emphasis. It could get very boring, the same message over and over, even if we do play ‘Johnny B. Goode’ between every spot.”

“I don’t mind boring. What’s important is that it comes from orbit.”

Tara said, “Put the new logos on the site tonight, Space Girl.”

I told Grandmother, “I’m going to drop her into a snowbank on the way home.”

“I wish you’d let
me
edit the web page directly,” said Tara. “It’s frustrating having to run the iterations through you.”

I winced. “I can give you access, but not from your computer and definitely not from this country. Not unless you want all the three-letter guys camped on your doorstep.”

Tara said, “Three letter guys?”

Grandmother said, “NSA, DIA, CIA, and the ETC.”

“ETC?” I said.

“Etcetera,” Grandmother said.

“Ha.” We hadn’t mentioned the DoD and General Sterling of the Air Force Space Command. I added, “ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN.”

Tara laughed but then sobered, looking sideways at me. “We should get Joe to do some of the recording. He has that great baritone. Remember when he narrated that piece for the snowboard club?”

I looked away.

Of course I remembered. It was a YouTube compilation of epic snowboard crashes, mostly starring my old slalom partner, Carl. Joe did the voice-over epic-movie-trailer style. “One man doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this world, but he can run into a hill. OF. SNOW.” It was the juxtaposition of Carl’s spectacular crashes with the voice-over that made it fall-over funny, but of course now it just made me want to cry.

When I looked back, Tara had a concerned expression on her face.

I said, “You work it out with him. He’s back home, right? I want to put the bird up on Sunday.”

Tara blinked. “Can we watch?”

I raised my eyebrows. “Watch? It’s not like a rocket launch. There’s no ground-shaking roar of flames and all.”

“You have to suit up, right? If we’re going to work with Cory on making more suits, I want to see how it works. We should
all
see it but Jade will have to wait until she’s back from Europe.” Tara looked down at her hands. “I understand if you don’t want Joe there.”

Grandmother was watching me very carefully.

Tara put her hand to her mouth. “Oh. Uh, about Joe—”

I waved my hand. “Grandmother knows. My parents don’t, though.” I was scheduled to transport Joe back to Stanford in January, when it was time for them to start winding the next prototype. I hadn’t counted on having to transport him—to touch him—before that.

“If he wants,” I said.

*   *   *

Saturday afternoon, I picked up the USB thumb drive with the edited audio from the apartment Tara shared with her mom in New Prospect.

“It’s the file called beacon.wav,” she said. “We did six messages, as discussed. And Joe
does
want to come tomorrow. What time are you doing it?”

I felt nauseated.

Tara took one look at my face and said, “You
said
he could.”

“Nine Pacific. I’ll pick you all up here, is that okay?”

Tara said, “Mom’ll be here.”

“Damn. Right. Behind the coffee shop, then. At ten
A.M.
Mountain. Make it straight up ten, so you don’t freeze your butts off.”

“Our cute butts,” said Tara.

I smiled but it wasn’t very convincing.

*   *   *

Back at the Eyrie, I listened to the recording with my computer. They’d switched up the wording on the message each time, but always conveying the same information.

Joe did three different voices, one extra deep, one natural, and one in a dead-on pommy BBC accent. Tara did one of hers natural, one with a deep southern accent, and, to my surprise, one in Diné. Each of them was separated by “Johnny B. Goode” and the Morse tones for AOS-Sat One and, damn them, a vocal sting in two-part harmony of the first five notes from
Also Sprach Zarathustra
. The root, major fifth, and octave were hummed, but that dramatic last two notes were—you probably guessed—“Space Giiiiiiiiiiiiiirl!”

I laughed until I cried.

Well, I laughed and then I cried.

I made a copy and edited out every bit of Joe’s voice until there was just Tara and Chuck and the Morse tones and loaded that one onto the satellite.

When I powered up the satellite, it took five seconds before the broadcast started showing up on Dad’s portable radio-frequency scanner. When I plugged in earphones, it came across, loud and clear.

Dammit, dammit,
dammit.

I powered the bird down, reconnected it to my computer with the USB cable, and put Tara’s original version back on the satellite, “Space Giiiiiiirrrrl,” and Joe and all.

TWENTY-THREE

Cent: 2100 Kilometers

I jumped to the rooftop of Krakatoa ten seconds before 9
A.M.
, breathing oxygen and dressed in my undersuit outfit, but with my long wool coat and sheepskin boots over that. When I peeked over the parapet at the back, Tara and Joe were below, cupping something hot in Krakatoa’s distinctive paper cups. Their breath fogged the air around them.

I scanned up and down the alley, then checked out the side street as well. All seemed clear.

I appeared behind Joe, lifted the edge of the mask and said, louder than necessary, “Ready?”

“Shit!” he said, jerking around.

For a second it looked like he would drop his cup, or maybe squeeze it so hard it would pop the top off and spill his mocha, but to my disappointment, he managed to hold onto it.

Tara put one hand over her mouth. After a second she said, “Ready.”

I jumped her to Cory’s lab where she burst out laughing. “That was
mean
.”