Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (38 page)

Davy winced. “I saw the hijacking stuff but not the Wichita part.”

“Well, it was inevitable.”

“You’re awfully
calm
about it.”

Millie sipped her tea. “What’s changed? Do we have to behave differently? More important, does this mean anything’s changed upstairs? I mean, besides the talk I just had with Seeana, Bea, Jeline, and Tessa?”

Davy grimaced. “What did you say to them?”

“I gave them the opportunity to resign. But that if they felt they could keep our secret, we would give them a bonus at the end of employment equal to their total salaries. I mean, Cent’s making money now, right?”

Davy nodded. “That was smart. The longer they work, the more money they get, but only if they maintain confidentiality to the, uh, end.” He glanced at Millie, frowning.

Millie sighed. “Yeah. The ‘end.’”

“How is Sam?”

“This morning was rough. We had to put her on the ventilator twice, but she’s off it again. She managed to eat lunch and she’s actually sleeping. When she’s having trouble breathing, she doesn’t rest at all.”

“Hmmm?”

“She said that everything gets very simple. Her whole world narrows down to the next breath, all her concentration, all her effort. And she has this overwhelming feeling—fear—that if she doesn’t give it all her attention, it will just stop.” She bowed her head. “That’s got to be just awful.”

Davy opened his mouth but ended up just shaking his head. He slid his arm around her shoulders.

Millie leaned into him. “So, I am calm about the publicity thing. It’s not my most
pressing
concern. And maybe this is a
good
thing.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Remember when the NSA was tracking me and Mom? When my brother took them to court?”

“Yeah. It didn’t stop them from snatching you and your roommate a week later.”

“But they backed down. I think what we need is
more
publicity, not less. What would the press do with a story about Daarkon Group’s real activities? What if we went public about all the disaster-relief aid we’ve provided in the last twenty years?” She put her cup down on the coffee table with a thump. “Maybe what we need is less secrecy, not
more
.”

Davy’s jaw jutted forward.

Before he said anything, Millie added, “Don’t worry. I won’t start sending out press releases.” She jerked her thumb toward the upstairs landing. “Right now, all my energy is focused up
there
.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

Cent: Safety Check

With Jade and Tara in Europe, I tried to do the rest of the satellite launches using just Dad and Cory, but Cory bailed on me.

“I’ve got to prep for the suit wrap, remember? We only have so much time before their semesters start and Joe, Tara, and Jade become unavailable. Then there’s the
other
thing.”

Dad and Cory exchanged glances and I nodded. “Right. Clearing out the suit and supplies.” We didn’t think it would be long before Cory’s lab (and involvement) would be public knowledge. The plan was to move the operational supplies and the suit somewhere less accessible.

I looked at Dad and said, “Well, I guess you and I can do the sat prep while I prebreathe, then you could be ground crew.”

Dad shook his head. “Don’t you need a safety check for suit prep and donning? Use Joe. Then he can continue to prep the birds while I act as Capcom.”

I felt my face twist and Dad looked at me, concerned.
“That’s
a sour look. Why doesn’t that work? Is Joe not available?”

Was he?
That was the question, and not in the way Dad meant.

“Okay. I’ll see if he’s free.”

*   *   *

Dad took me to the interior of the vault, 650 feet under the Kansas prairie.

“This is it?”

Fluorescents lit an ordinary ten-by-eighteen-foot room, Sheetrock walls, concrete floor, metal rafters supporting a corrugated metal roof. There was a garage-style fiberglass door at one end with a folding table set up in front of it as a temporary work space. Heavy steel file-box shelves lined the remaining three walls.

“It’s a big open cavern. These units are like warehouses built across the floor.” He pointed at a set of eight boxes on one end of the right-hand shelf. “Those are the records I started with.” He gestured at the rest of the room. “But we’re paying for future capacity and not to have our boxes mixed with other customers’.”

The rest of the shelves contained specialty boxes, many of them custom cases. A third of them were empty, but the rest held the satellites I still needed to launch.

“How did you get the jump site?” I asked. “Do they let nonemployees down here?”

Dad said, “If you’re spending enough, you get an escort down here when you’re storing your stuff. Do you have this?”

I inhaled the cool, dry air and got whiffs of minerals and cardboard. I jumped away to the Eyrie, then back again. “Yeah. Got it.”

Dad opened one of the cases and tapped a sheet of paper on top of the satellite. “Here’s the prelaunch procedure. Every bird has one.” He pointed at a tank of nitrogen in the corner. “There are some that need to have their cold-gas thrusters charged—I’ll show Joe how to set the regulator and do the connections.”

“Oh? So you have to have a penis to do that?”

Dad’s mouth dropped open and I felt my face go hot.

He blinked and said, “Well, where did
that
come from?”

I stammered, “I’m just saying that
I
could charge the nitrogen reservoirs, too.”

“Well, yes, I know you could. But I thought since Joe can’t put
satellites in orbit
, he might handle the sat prep while you’re taking care of
that
little chore. Did you think I was saying you were incapable of handling this?”

“Sorry, Daddy. I … it’s not you.”

“Joe? Does he say you can’t do this kind of thing?”

I shrugged. “He doesn’t
say
it. It’s the college thing.”

Dad winced. “He holds that over you?”

I waved my hands side to side, palm out.

“Or are
you
holding that over you?” he asked. “I’m sorry the high school thing didn’t work out. I’d have said you probably could still do college
somewhere
right up until Space Girl’s face became the international symbol for OMG and WTF.”

I had to laugh at that.

“I know about missing college. I always wanted to do that. Know what else I always wanted to do?”

I shook my head.

“I always wanted to be an astronaut.” He stepped closer and put his arms around me. “I know about a lot of kids who go to college. I only know
one
who has her own space program.”

I leaned into him and wiped my cheeks on his fleece.

Dad rested his chin on my head. “If I were Joe, I’d be jealous of
you
.”

*   *   *

I started prebreathing oxygen after breakfast and, during the next two hours, I moved the suit and supplies to the vault, organizing everything in checklist order.

Halfway through this Dad showed up and started doing satellite prep, turning on power switches, connecting batteries, charging nitrogen reservoirs.

I picked up Joe from behind Krakatoa and brought him straight to the vault.

Dad had his hands full but nodded. I pushed the clipboard into Joe’s hands and he blinked, then cleared his throat and said, “Right. Procedure one-A, air processing unit. Step one, release latches on rebreather chamber—”

We’d done it enough times now that we had suit prep down to twenty minutes even
with
the rigorous double-checking every step that Joe was insisting on.

“I just don’t want to be the one to fuck this up,” he said. “I fuck up,
you
have to live with the consequences.”

Or die with them
, I thought, but I didn’t voice this. “I’m good with being careful,” I said, my voice muffled by the prebreath mask.

Joe snorted. “Could have fooled
me
.”

Dad laughed, I think, though his face was still when I turned to glare at him.

Joe went down to the next item on his list. “Okay, go hit the bathroom.” It was on the list, the last step before squeezing into the suit.

I jumped to the cabin for that step, checking in with Mom. This wasn’t on the checklist, but
she
considered it a
critical
part of the process—knowing when I was about to go up.

“And don’t forget to check in after, too!”

Back in the vault Joe relaxed the suit and I pulled off the fleece and sweat pants that I wore over my undersuit base layers. He made a show of turning away but he was watching out of the corner of his eyes.

I jumped into the suit. Through the oxygen mask I said, “There, you can stop pretending not to look.”

He dialed down on the rheostat, shrinking up the suit. “Got news for you, girl. Without the coveralls, the suit is just as, uh,
contour faithful
as your long underwear is.” He handed me the neck gasket.

I held my breath while I forced my head through it. And I mean “forced.” Cory compares it to being born. Once it was snug around my neck, I snapped its collar ring into the inner seal on the helmet flange and Joe doubled-checked that it was fully engaged. We’d only got it wrong, once, back during testing, and that became immediately obvious the second we tried to pressurize the helmet and air rushed past my collarbone.

Fully dressed—coveralls, boots, gloves, helmet, backpack—I turned to Dad.

Dad looked at his watch and then back at me.

I shrugged. We were done early. When you don’t make small talk, you go through the checklist at a pretty good clip.

Dad opened his mouth to say something, but then shut it again, pointing at his ear and then at the door to the vault. The last thing we wanted was for one of the storage-facility employees to hear someone speaking loudly in one of these units.

He turned to the laptop perched on one of the empty shelves and clicked through some options, then wrote a line on a piece of cardboard, handed it to Joe, and pointed at the screen.

Joe leaned forward and read from the screen, then the cardboard, then back to the screen again. He held up his thumb, and gave the cardboard back to Dad who stuck it in the top of the milk crate sitting on the folding table.

I stepped closer. The box held ten cubesats, and a chart of coordinates with times of insertion corresponding to the “empty” parts of our orbit. The first one on the schedule wasn’t for another thirty minutes, but the scrap of cardboard had an insertion point scheduled for four minutes from now.

I held up my thumb and jumped.

*   *   *

I no longer had to look at the GPS to reach my standard “Yuri” orbit over the Marshall Islands, which was good, since in the vault my GPS wasn’t getting any signal. I had to float above the Pacific for thirty seconds before the unit acquired enough satellites for a fix. Once it was working, I counted down to the insertion time and shifted to the new coordinates.

Got it in one try. That is, within the limits of error for my instruments and the CelesTrak software.

I tossed the cubesats in different directions to keep them from clipping each other. We probably didn’t need to be too picky. The circumference of our orbit was 41,318 kilometers. If you laid out the 345 satellites end-to-end across their longest deployed dimensions, they would measure less than a hundred meters—a tenth of a kilometer. Distributed evenly in that orbit, each one could have a 120 kilometers of elbow room.

And, of course, this didn’t count the inevitable drift as I added slight differences of velocity when I deployed them, or how atmospheric drag affected the units with different cross sections differently, or how the actual shape of the earth (not really a sphere, you know) caused perturbations in the orbits.

My phone was set to dial USSPACECOM but not, this time, to General Sterling. Technical Sergeant Agatha Mertens was now our official liaison into the U.S. Space Command satellite catalog. She answered on the first ring.

“Good morning, Agatha. Apex Orbital here.” I felt funny calling her by her first name but she’d insisted.

“Good morning, Cent. What do you have for me?”

“I have sats five three seven three two thru five three seven four one deployed. Mean anomaly at thirteen hundred Zulu today is fifteen point eight degrees.” Since we were using the same orbital plane for all these nonpolar satellites, the only information they needed was where in the orbit the satellites were at what time. They already had the names of the satellites, transmitting frequencies, and operators.

“I copy fifteen point eight degrees at thirteen hundred Zulu. Sats seven hundred thirty-two through seven hundred forty-one. Ten sats in all.”

“Correct.”

“The list says those are all one-unit cubesats.”

“You got it.”

“Uh, the list here says you’re putting up some more today.”

“Yes?”

“It says
seventy-five
more.”

“At least. Need to finish by Friday and I’ve got two hundred thirty-five more to go.”

“Affirmative. I take it you’ll be calling me back shortly?”

“Roger that, Agatha. Cent out.”

*   *   *

We deployed 127 before we quit for the day.

Dad tried to do the Capcom thing for a while, but it just slowed things down and I convinced him that it would be a better use of time if he helped Joe prep satellites.

It got so that I could move directly into the new orbit before the GPS had lock and I would just adjust the mean anomaly as a secondary jump. After lunch, as a test, I rendezvoused with one of the earlier deployment points—that is, to its current location—and was able to eyeball seven of the ten birds I’d dropped off there a few hours before.

By the end of the day, Joe was ready to get out of there. “It doesn’t look like a cavern,” he said, “but it feels like one.”

Even though it was only 6
P.M.
local time when I jumped him to the alleyway behind Krakatoa, it was full dark.