Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (43 page)

It was practically instantaneous, water flowing through the Cent-shaped hole (in all directions) with an orbital vacuum pulling it through. I untwinned, still in the tank, and jumped up to the catwalk. I felt the water draining out of the weave of the suit, out of my long underwear, but, in this heat and humidity, there was hardly any cooling.

Dad raised his eyebrows at me and I raised my thumb again.

I wanted to see how it was doing. I was half afraid it had split open as the water rushed in, but I was mindful of Cory’s warning about not taking the suit into orbit while it was wet.

Dad went back into the tank, and twinned, draining out the last of the water/fiber slurry.

I went ahead and shut down my oxygen, purged the helmet, and took it off.

“Where’d you put the leftovers?” I asked him when he reemerged.

“The input side of the local sewage-treatment plant. They’ll filter it and the fiber will end up in compost.”

*   *   *

I didn’t get back to the sphere for twenty-four hours. Cory wanted the suit to dry thoroughly, and he hadn’t done a close-up examination for wear and deterioration in over a month.

When I appeared in orbit, the sphere was
not
split open. It was
not
a spreading cloud of water vapor and ice crystal.

It was tight, the wrinkled cloth smoothed out, the logos more prominent. When I pushed against it, to test how taut the fabric was stretched, there was hardly any deformation.
I
moved away and it seemed to stay there. Okay, Newton’s third law—equal and opposite reaction—but twenty-eight tons was 350 times more mass than me and the suit, so I moved 350 times faster away from our point of contact than it did.

The sphere was spinning slowly, about five revolutions per minute, and I positioned myself in its shadow and studied the rim, looking for any jets of water vapor and ice backlit by the sun.

After several moments I concluded there weren’t any. A close examination of the surface didn’t yield any obvious impacts, so I moved to the aluminum and polycarbonate porthole and installed the monitor.

The package was a used four-inch Android cell phone, fully charged, but with all the radios turned off. The only thing it was doing was running a seismometer app that used the phone’s accelerometers to monitor vibration and displacement. I attached it to the port using a spring bracket that hooked into opposite sides of the aluminum frame and pressed the back of the phone firmly against the polycarbonate. To finish, I shaded it with a tent of ordinary aluminum foil, anchored around the perimeter of the port’s aluminum frame with a twisted piece of copper wire.

Lastly, I took some video, myself in the foreground. This wasn’t one of those selfies at the end of my arm. I now had a “tripod” to use when I wanted a stationary vantage point. In this case it was an extra mounting bracket to snap the camera onto. That, in turn, had two collapsible fiberglass cross pieces snapped into it. I could position this “cross” in space, pointed in the direction I wanted, and let go. Just like the ice skater spreading her arms, this slowed down any tendency of the camera to rotate.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was easy to get the camera pointing in the correct direction for minutes at a time, and the poles folded down to store in a thin pocket on my left outer thigh.

Tara groaned and fussed when I asked her about the appropriate language for a press release, then took it over, using up her evening off to edit the video and post it and the press release.

*   *   *

It took five days to weave the first suit, but Cory was being extremely careful, triple checking every step and documenting everything. They went through several powered/relaxed to unpowered/clenched cycles before they put it on the life-mode simulator.

Cory was quite pleased. “Consistent and sufficient. Variation is under four hundred pascals and nothing less than twenty-nine point nine kilopascals.”

“Let’s try it in orbit,” I said.

Cory said, “
No
!” It was almost a shout.

I blinked.

He cleared his throat. “I mean, we are a long way from that step. We need to check the performance with the pressure-sensor unitard, we need to cycle it at least a hundred times to make sure it’s behaving consistently.” He looked at me sideways. “This time we’re doing it
properly
. No
shortcuts
.”

My lips twitched.

“Can you get another suit made in the remaining time?”

“I have material for four more.”

“This one took five days.”

He said, “We were being very careful with the first one. Actual construction is about seven hours per suit. We’ll go ahead and finish this batch.”

“Five new suits? And the life-support backpacks? Helmets?”

“We ordered the helmets from the original manufacturer, but I’ve outsourced the visor assembly and the life-support backpacks. We’re adding some safety monitors for oxygen and carbon dioxide partial pressures and an ear clip for blood oxygenation and pulse. Oh, and helmet pressure.”

“Display? Audible alarm?”

Cory nodded. “Both, I think. Telemetry if I can arrange it, but that depends on what comms we end up with. All the satphone providers can handle data but I don’t think we can use Iridium outside of LEO.”

“Don’t forget local comms. We have more than one suit, we can start doing multiperson missions.”

“
Exactly
,” he said and tapped himself on the chest.

I shivered. I’d been thinking Dad—maybe Mom. The people who could survive a catastrophic failure of the suit. If I were in orbit with someone who couldn’t teleport away at need, I’d have to stay
very
close. “Better make that redundant comms.”

*   *   *

By the end of the week amateur astrophotographers were posting pictures of the sphere, a tiny shining speck just big enough to see as circular, with phases of illumination like the moon.

I’d found one point of impact, a frozen plug sealing a triangular hole a half inch across. According to the seismometer app, we’d had fifteen impacts total, but one had been clearly larger than the others, a sharp spike and movement that lasted for some minutes as the shockwave bounced back and forth through the watery interior of the sphere.

The other collisions registered as smaller spikes and, despite substantial searching, I couldn’t find the holes.

At the end of the second week, we’d registered another twenty-five impacts, but really hadn’t lost any appreciable water, though one of the impacts produced a hole nearly two inches across. You could see the fibers matted in the icy plug and I spent extra time watching how it behaved in full sun, even going so far as to halt the rotation of the sphere to keep it in full sun at least forty-five minutes.

It
evolved
, changing shape slightly and though I detected some vapor streaming away after its longest solar exposure (fifty-two minutes, terminator to terminator) it hadn’t let go, but seemed to grow thicker, melting and refreezing on the outside like a scab that keeps getting picked at.

I went back to trying deliberate punctures but it took a
lot
more force to stab the icepick through the BlimpWerks fabric than it had the ice bag, probably because of the Kevlar layer. I finally managed it by adding sixteen-feet-per-second motion toward the sphere, about the speed you’d get from falling off a four-foot ledge on Earth, and punching the icepick into it at impact.

Only did it once. It hurt.

The only advantage of this deliberate hole was I could
find
the point of puncture. The hole still sealed immediately and it didn’t tell us any more than the earlier experiments with the ice bags.

What else could I try?

*   *   *

Dad stared at me. “You want what?”

“A gun. Well, a bullet, but a fast bullet. Just
one
. And something to shoot it with.”

“Ah. This is for the sphere?”

“Yeah. It will give us a known velocity and we can video the impact.”

“Uh. But you’ll fire it in a vacuum.”

“Yeah.”

He went off and talked to someone. When I next saw him he had a rifle and a box of ammo. “This is about as fast as it gets, for commercial off-the-shelf. The consensus seems to be that, as long as the rifle doesn’t have time to heat up or cool down too much, it will be just like firing a rifle in the atmosphere.”

“Ah. Expansion and contraction of the metal?”

“Yeah. Also, too hot and the primer or propellant might ignite on their own.”

That was a scary thought, but it would definitely take time for either to happen. “How fast is it? How much mass?”

He handed me a sheet of paper. “One thousand four hundred two meters per second. Seventy-five grains.”

“Grains? What’s grains?”

“Grains. Wheat, barley. One of the oldest measurements.” At my expression, he got out his phone and Googled it.

“
An English Penny, which is called the Sterling, round without clipping, shall weigh Thirty-two Grains of Wheat dry in the midst of the Ear.”

“Great. How many cubits a second does this bullet go?”

Dad relented. “Fifteen point four three two three six grains to the gram.” He used the calculator app on his phone. “Round it to four point nine grams.”

I did the calculations later while I was killing time prebreathing. The bullet’s energy of impact would be north of forty-eight hundred joules. A more typical orbital collision was nine times faster. Kosmos 2251 collided with Iridium 33 at over 11,699 meters per second. At those speeds, the 4.9 gram bullet would impart over 335 thousand joules, the energy of a third of a stick of dynamite exploding.

Premission, I set the camera at a lower resolution to enable a higher frame rate: 120 frames per second, to capture as much of the event as possible. Once I was suited up, I took the rifle out to West Texas and fired it a few times from different positions. With the helmet on I couldn’t hold it against my shoulder
and
aim down the sights but I could still roughly hit the center of my target, an eight-foot stretch of arroyo wall, from thirty feet. It kicked a bit, but the weight of the rifle and the rubber stock recoil pad on the butt absorbed much of it.

In orbit, I set the camera up on its “tripod,” pointed obliquely at the center of the sphere on its fully lit side. It was cross lit by earthlight with a stretch of black space in the background.

I backed off thirty feet, put the gun’s stock to my shoulder, and fired.

I didn’t get to see the impact. The off-center thrust of the rifle spun me around. By the time I stopped the spin and returned to the sphere, the new leak was plugged, though there was a cloud of dispersing ice crystals in the vicinity.

*   *   *

I broke down the camera stand and returned the rifle to Dad, who was sitting in the warehouse in Michigan, standing by with our base-station cell phone, just in case I needed to check things from orbit.

“Did it work?” he asked, loudly.

I gave him the thumbs up. He looked at the rifle and said, “I’m going to leave it in the Eyrie until we’re sure you don’t need it again. All right?”

I nodded.

“Okay.” He looked down at his laptop. “Your target just passed four hundred twenty-two kilometers over Vancouver Island, headed east.” He gave me the rest of the coordinates and speeds. I gave him another thumbs up and, picturing a very particular location, jumped.

The helmet purge didn’t activate like it normally did in orbit. And I wasn’t having to flip my visor down in the harsh glare of direct sunlight.

I was floating in the middle of the Tranquility node, International Space Station.

Ha!

I
thought
it was possible but trying it without the suit on had seemed a bit
risky
. I shut off my oxygen, purged the helmet, and popped it off. Good old noisy ISS.

I was unstrapping my life-support backpack when Rasmussen and Nagata floated into the node from Unity. Rasmussen was dressed in workout clothes. Nagata carried a DSLR camera with a huge telephoto lens. Rasmussen was talking but it was hard to hear her over the whine of the ventilation fans.

“Hey,” I said about the time they noticed me.

Their eyes went wide and Rasmussen grinned. “If I knew you were coming, I’d’ve baked a cake.”

Nagata brought her camera up automatically but then looked down at the telephoto lens. She shook her head. “Too close. Could you back up about six hundred feet?”

I hooked the helmet and backpack into the bungee cords of the treadmill behind me, then looked at Rasmussen. “Oh—sorry. Are you about to use that?”

She dismissed my apology with the wave of her hand. “Later. Right now we’ve got a visitor.”

“Why didn’t the depressurization alarm go off?” asked Nagata.

“Well,” I said. “I came, uh,
directly
.”

Nagata blinked. “Directly. You mean from ground side? Say, California?”

“Ground side. Not California, though. I was about five hundred feet above sea level so air pressure was probably pretty close.”

“Why’d you wear the suit, then?” asked Rasmussen.

“Well, I wasn’t
sure
if I could do it. Last thing I wanted to do is end up in my shirtsleeves three meters
that
way.” I pointed at the closest bulkhead.

Nagata said, “I’ll tell Commander Elliott you’re here.”

Rasmussen put her hand on Nagata’s arm. “Wait a minute, Alis. I want to talk to her about Misha.
She
could solve it.”

Nagata blinked. “Kate, uh, the director would completely flip—”

“Maybe it would be better,” said Rasmussen, “if you didn’t
know
about this conversation.”

Nagata exhaled through pursed lips, then said, “
What
conversation?” She turned to enter the observation cupola. “What visitor?” To no one in particular she said, “There are no activities scheduled for Leonardo today.”

Kate gestured at my helmet and backpack. “Better not leave that in sight.”

I raised my eyebrows. “O … kay.” I unhooked the straps and followed her into the Unity module and she motioned me
down
, toward Earth, into the Leonardo PMM. Even with all the bags and storage racks, it felt
huge
, more than twice the volume, at least, of my twelve-foot sphere.