Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (42 page)

“So I could’ve done that when they had that wire around my neck?”

“What you did worked better. The guy still could’ve choked you even if you flooded the room.”

My turn for a reflexive touch. The abrasion hadn’t scarred, but the memory was still there.

“You do it,” Dad said.

I walked out into the water until the water was waist high before I started, but I didn’t use the rocks outside the cove. I twinned to the beach, up the slope from my father. The water knocked into him before he realized it was coming, but he did jump away before it washed him all the way into the cove.

I stopped almost immediately, my one self up on the beach by the cliff face.

Dad reappeared on the sand, ten feet off to the side.

“Where’d you go?” I asked.

“Up there.” He jerked his thumb up at the lava cliff behind us.

There was a deep cut in the beach where the water had eroded sand into the cove. Dad pointed at it and said, “You want to be careful. Running water can be a powerful force. If you’re going to move earth or knock things over, make sure it’s what you
wanted
to do.”

I felt guilty. “Will that take long to fill in?”

He held his hand out and rocked it side to side “One way or another.”

I eyed the cut doubtfully. “You said you had one more trick to show me, about twinning.”

Dad nodded. “Okay. Watch this.”

He twinned again, one self by me, the other five feet away. Then the one five feet away disappeared but I could tell Dad was still twinning because I could see faintly through him, the ocean horizon in the distance. I walked around him. When I was on his west side, I could see a distant coast.

“Where are you?” I said.

His twinning figure pointed up and I tilted my head back.

His other self was standing in midair, at least a hundred feet in the air.
Stationary
. It wasn’t my velocity trick. He was just twinning to that place and sticking there.

He stopped, his one self still in the air, but no longer motionless. He dropped. Before he reached the level of the cliff faces above, he jumped back to the beach, beside me.

“Okay.
That
was different,” I said.

“It has applications.” He walked out into the water as I had, but continued until he was neck deep. Then he turned back to me and grinned.

The deluge dropped from above like a hammer, but I’d been expecting
something
. I jumped sideways to the far end of the narrow beach and shook the water from my hair.

He was still twinning. I couldn’t even see his airborne self, but the water was rushing out of a spot twenty feet above the beach and pounding into the sand. Then it stopped and he was standing beside me as the last water fell.

The eroded beach cut was even bigger, now.

I had no words at first, but then I said, “I guess I deserved that. But look at the beach!” I jumped to the edge of the cut and had to step back as more sand collapsed into the water.

Dad joined me, wincing. “Yeah. I should fix that. Get back.”

I took several steps back. Dad jumped to the bottom of the cliff, at the head of the cut. He twinned again but
dimmed
and I realized that wherever he stood, the sun wasn’t shining. Then sand started flowing out of him, only knee high at first and then higher, his legs pumping up and down. His local self moved along the cut and sand poured out of him chest high, into the water and then rising above it, wet, then dry. He moved out from the cliff face and by the time he stopped twinning, sand was mounded three feet above the precut beach surface.

He plunged into the water, completely immersing himself and staying under long enough that I was starting to be concerned, then his head reappeared. He walked out of the water like normal people do. “Sand gets
everywhere
.”

“Where did it come from?”

“The Isaouane-n-Tifernine sand sea.”

I blinked.

“Algeria—in the southeast. I dropped down the face of a three hundred-foot-high dune causing it to slide. Then it was just a matter of keeping my head up.”

“You brought African sand to a Central American beach?”

“Well, I wanted it to match. How do you think this beach got here in the first place?”

“You
made
it?”

He shrugged. “It was a rocky cove but I really liked the privacy and the ‘teeth’ keep out any big sharks. But it’s a safe place to practice moving water, eh? Just don’t carve the beach too much.”

*   *   *

“Sterling.”

“Good morning, General.”

“Cent.” I heard him cover the mouthpiece and say something to someone in the room, then he said, “What can I do for you today?”

“I need an orbit that has a higher incidence of micrometeorite and small debris collisions.”

“Excuse me? Don’t you mean lower?”

“No sir. We’re putting up a test, uh, platform to see how it handles microcollisions and, while we’ve already tested the material with deliberate punctures, none of them were at orbital velocities.”

“I see, I guess. How big is this platform?”

“It’s a twelve-foot diameter sphere.”

“Oh! An
inflatable
. You are okay with microimpacts, but you don’t want anything big hitting it, right?”

“Right. Nothing trackable. Just the smaller stuff.”

“Unfortunately, you could probably do that anywhere inside a thousand kilometers. Well, you don’t want the orbit too low, though. A low-mass satellite with that cross section would deorbit pretty quick.”

“Low mass? I wouldn’t call twenty-eight tons low.”

“You said it was an inflatable.”

“Yes. But we’re inflating it with thirty-three cubic yards of water.”

“Water? You’re putting twenty-eight tons of water in orbit?”

“For the experiment, yes. Is that a problem?”

“That’s over seven times what the Dragon capsule can deliver to ISS.”

“Oh? Cool.”

“How many trips will it take you?”

“That’s proprietary, General. Is there a higher incidence of microdebris in any particular orbit?”

“The stuff we know about also has the bigger debris mixed in. Trackable. That’s why we
know
about it. Twenty-eight tons? That’s
huge
.”

“It’s a little bigger than your average spy satellite, but not
much
. What are those, twenty tons?”

“You know this from direct observation?”

“Wikipedia. Look, I’d like to put up my test sphere tomorrow. I was thinking out about five hundred klicks. Above the ISS but below the Iridium constellation. Perhaps a straight equatorial, zero-inclination orbit. You want to check that out and I can touch base with Sergeant Mertens before I begin?”

“Twenty-eight tons of water?”

“And change. I’ll check in with Agatha tomorrow.”

“Right. Jesus. Twenty-eight tons?”

THIRTY

Cent: 4,800 Joules

I picked up the twelve-foot sphere from Fran Wilde of BlimpWerks. The porthole’s aluminum frame was only ten inches across but they had it sealed and clamped into the fabric.

“We tested it at twenty PSI,” she said. “It was tight as a drum after twelve hours.”

I hefted the entire roll. “How did you get it so flat?”

“We pumped it out, down to a couple of psi. Compared to out here—” She waved her hand through the air. “—it’s a ‘vacuum,’ but when you’re up there it will probably expand without you doing anything.”

I hefted the bag. By my calculations, the cloth alone weighed forty-seven pounds. The stainless steel inflation valve and the porthole with its half-inch-thick polycarbonate window and aluminum frame added another seven.

“So the flange anchoring system worked out?” They’d been worried about that. Apart from fill valves, they had no experience in bonding metal fixtures into their envelopes. Luckily lots of work on that problem had been done by others.

Ms. Wilde said, “Between our fabric reinforcement and this combination of toothed grips, compression gaskets, and sealant, I think we’ve got it solved.”

“How’s the big guy coming?”

“We don’t take delivery of the outer port until the end of the week, but we did a full-assembly low-pressure inflation test with an aluminum hatch in its place.”

“Oh? All the ports in?”

“Every one. We pumped the inner sphere to three psi over and the outer at two psi.”

“Not exactly a leak test.”

“No. Just an alignment test to make sure the inner flanges all matched up with the outer ones and that we had a uniform gap all the way around.”

“And?”

“Three feet plus or minus three inches and we think the variability will shrink once you get gravity out of the mix.”

“Very nice.” I slapped the bundle in my arms. “Let’s see how it flies.”

*   *   *

Agatha confirmed that a five-hundred-kilometer equatorial orbit with a thirty-five-degree mean anomaly at midnight Zulu would be clear of any operational or derelict spacecraft
and
would cross the fringe of the Kosmos 2551/Iridium 33 cloud in a week.

Ms. Wilde was correct about the sphere’s behavior once I got it into orbit. It may have only had a few psi of air in the tightly rolled folds but it was several orders of magnitude more pressure than was outside.

To keep it manageable while I refined the orbit to match Agatha’s parameters, I’d wrapped the bundle several times around with a nylon cargo strap. As soon as I was in orbit, the cloth bulged out at the ends and from between the straps, but stayed mostly contained.

Once I was in the groove, I pulled open the Velcro closure and let it loose.

It expanded, quickly at first, then slowing as the pressure dropped with the volume increase and the stiffness and mass of the fabric became a factor. By the end of a minute, though, it was a sphere, though there were still wrinkles in the fabric and it easily dimpled when I pushed a finger into it.

I backed off and admired the whole. It was highly reflective silver with an almost painful highlight at the angle of maximum reflection. The occluded side, in shadow, was still lit by reflected earthlight.

The Apex Orbital Logo incorporating Space Girl predominated, with the zeppelin-shaped BlimpWerks logo above and off to the side. Both were repeated on the opposite hemisphere. They’d done them in gold Mylar with a black trim and fused them to the aluminized Mylar outer coating with an adhesive they said would survive wide temperature swings.

Right. Time to see inside.

I moved to the porthole, flipped up the sun visor, and looked within. No surprise, I saw nothing but black, but I’d brought a flashlight, an upper-end disposable that we
thought
would survive vacuum. I pressed it against the polycarbonate and switched it on.

The interior nylon layer was an unremarkable gray, but I could see well enough to jump within and I did.

The automated pressure valve on my oxygen feed didn’t react because the interior was so close to vacuum as to make no difference. The port was pointed toward Earth and, after my eyes adjusted, it provided all the light I needed.

I jumped away.

I appeared in a defunct drilling yard in South Texas where we were renting a brand-new, never-used frac tank, a large open-topped, rectangular steel tank with a five-hundred-barrel capacity. This was the equivalent of seventy-seven cubic yards, twice what the sphere could hold.

Dad was standing on the catwalk landing at one end, dumping bags of chopped bamboo and synthetic-wool fibers down into the tank. He was wearing a wet suit and a dust mask and I could tell he was sweating up a storm because the fibers were sticking to his forehead and neck.

I jumped up onto the catwalk and he threw his last empty bag onto a pile on the ground, saying loudly, “That’s the last of that.”

The tank was three-quarters full, filled earlier when he twinned to the local municipal water tower, but the fibers were floating on the surface, matted.

“Time to mix. You should try and twin to your target.”

He vaulted over the railing, splashing down into the water, then twinned from there to five feet above the surface of the water at the other end of the tank. The tank went from calm and matted to a roiling torrent as the liquid flowed through him to plunge back down, sucking the fibers under the surface and thoroughly mixing them into the fresh water.

Right. My turn.

My first attempt at twinning was several meters away from the sphere. The helmet purge valve buzzed from the pressure drop. I was immediately surrounded by fog as the hot, humid air rushed through me into space, the moisture flashed to ice crystals, and the BlimpWerks sphere was actually blown away from me.

I stopped twinning in orbit, and the helmet vented all the way down to 4.9 psi.

I jumped closer, and then into the interior of the sphere and twinned again. The walls moved away slightly and I heard a thump as they fully inflated, pressurized to one atmosphere. The pressure valve on my oxygen buzzed, bringing my relative helmet pressure up, and I stopped again, still in the sphere.

It was weird. I knew that I could actually take off my helmet in here. Well, until the walls started getting punctured by micrometeorites. I twinned again, but to vacuum, to outside the sphere, and my helmet buzzed again, venting.

My first thought was that the sphere would collapse, like it had when the BlimpWerks people pumped the air out in their factory, but it didn’t. It wasn’t the vacuum pulling in that had caused that, but the greater air pressure outside
pushing
in. When the outside vacuum matches the inside the sphere stayed “inflated.”

I jumped back to Texas, tank side. Dad was back on the catwalk, dripping, but he’d taken off the dust mask.

“All mixed,” he said, and held up a glass jar filled with liquid. It was mostly clear but white and gray fibers floated uniformly through the mix.

I held up my thumb and he dumped it back in. I took a good look at the tank below before returning to the interior of the sphere.

I twinned to under the surface, crouched at the bottom of the tank, wondering how long it would take the water to flow into the interior of the sphere.