Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (54 page)

“You know,” said Connie. “I quite like three feet of water.”

We did five minutes at the view port and then Tara stuck the camera to a patch of Velcro and all eight of us gathered, floating behind Connie as she said, “From ten thousand kilometers above the earth, this has been Connie del Olmo from Apex Orbital Services Kristen Station.”

*   *   *

Our Singapore server cluster crashed again, but we’d
warned
them about the show and they were able to swing extra capacity in fairly quickly.

Coverage was mixed.

We were dilettantes and amateurs. We were insane space squatters. We were bold pioneers. The whole thing was the biggest hoax since the moon landings. Space Girl’s Space Mom is
hawt
and Space Granny wasn’t so bad either.

There were thousands of inquiries about moving all variety of invalid relatives into our facility. There were hundreds more decrying our privileged ability to move one invalid relative into space.

There were a substantial number of people willing to pay fantastically large sums for relatively short visits.

“Omigod,” Tara said. “This could be a
much
more lucrative sideline than the satellites.”

“Who cleans up after them?”

“For this kind of money? I will!”

“Greedy.”

“Charge that much money, give three quarters of it to
charity
and it’s
still
a lot of money.”

“
That
has some merit. Let me think about it.” My phone beeped and I glanced at it. “Time for some station maintenance. Batteries and O
2
. And Cory’s first trip into vacuum.”

“Yeah? His first EVA?”

“How can it be an EVA if there’s no vehicle? We’ve been calling it EAO, exoatmospheric operations.”

“Has he tried it on?”

I laughed. “The actual question is, has he taken it
off
. I don’t think I’ve seen him out of it in the last three days.”

*   *   *

I wasn’t storing my suit in Kristen Station because there was always the possibility I’d have to arrive there after a disaster, for some kind of rescue or evacuation work. But for planned vacuum work I moved it there first, since it was the perfect place to purge nitrogen from my system.

Nitrogen levels were creeping up in Kristen Station. Every time someone came up, even if they’d emptied their lungs before the jump, their bodies would outgas it for several hours.

Cory had a solution though. Oxygen concentrators are designed to strip nitrogen out of normal air so we had plans to adapt one for the purpose when we could get to it.

It was on the list.

The list was growing.

How many employees does NASA have?

I dropped off my suit and charged life-support pack, sticking them to a wall, then picked up Cory’s equipment (except for his suit—he
was
already wearing it.) Then I took him up.

There was
some
nervousness.

“Grandmother, talk to this boy. He needs distraction.”

The plan was for Cory to spend the next forty-five minutes purging nitrogen while visiting with Grandmother and running through the station’s recorded environment data on the computers, while I put on a portable O
2
mask and started my maintenance list.

Two laundry bins were dropped off at a cleaners and three bins of clean laundry returned to the station.

Five doubled bags of trash dropped into a random Dumpster in Fort Worth.

Two wire-mesh cartridges of depleted soda lime emptied and then refilled with eighty-four pounds of new pellets in the Michigan warehouse. Cartridges sealed in plastic bags and then parked in the station until needed.

A portion of the list required suiting up, like the weekly inspection of Kristen Station’s outer hull, looking for damage and signs of fabric deterioration. There’d been a few impacts recorded by the accelerometers, but small ones, and there was a good chance that we wouldn’t even be able to find where they’d gone in, but it was a perfect job for Cory’s first spacewalk.

Also, perfect weather. And by weather I mean solar weather; the Van Allen belts were still behaving, which still put our orbit in the sweet spot, radiation wise.

Also on the list were retrieving rejuvenated activated charcoal and desiccant cartridges, and checking the measurements between our outside mooring rings, destined to anchor a framework for solar panels.

When we could get to it.

It was on the list.

But we still weren’t done flushing nitrogen, so I turned to the last nonspacewalk task on the list, swapping out oxygen cylinders.

There are lots of tri-cities in the U.S., but the three that Tri-City Medical Oxygen served were Fremont, Newark, and Union City on the east side of San Francisco Bay, down near San Jose.

I always made this trip empty-handed first, to make sure I could arrive without falling over. The H-sized tanks weigh about as much as I did and the last thing I wanted was to fall over with one on top of me.

The loading-dock doors were down, which was not normal, and I wondered if I’d mistook the day, but it wasn’t the weekend and it was normal hours. I walked around to the office door and saw a hastily scribbled sign taped to the inside of the window.

Closed because of IDIOT PLUMBER. We have gone to hire a DIFFERENT PLUMBER and the water should be drained by tomorrow. Deliveries will still be made.

(SG, your tanks in usual place.)

It made me smile.
They should try dealing with leaking water in microgravity.
But it also made me worry.

We’d been awfully fortunate so far.

The worst leak we’d dealt with was when the computer-controlled solenoid valve on our cooling water failed open, resulting in a twenty-degree drop in air temperature before Mom manually closed the feed from the water bladders. She also could’ve closed the shutoff valve where the exhaust port went through the inner hull (which we had to do when we swapped out the bad valve).

I wasn’t worried about the air integrity of our inner hull as long as the water and outer hull stayed in place, but that outer skin, despite the Kevlar and the outer Mylar, hadn’t been intended for space. The water inside helped protect it from massive temperature swings but it was still getting hit with fierce ultraviolet and vacuum.

It was why we tried to keep at least one jumper up there at all times.

Yes, we’d chosen a low-debris orbit, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t take a hit from some chunk from outside the Earth-Moon system, zipping in at
real
speeds. My worst scenario involved a hit from something big enough or fast enough to penetrate both hulls—resulting in rapid decompression. The jumper would have fifteen seconds, tops, to get everyone out before she passed out.

And there wasn’t a jumper up there right now.

I jumped into the building, back to “my” rack near the “filled” side of the cryogenic charging tanks.

My feet splashed through an inch of water. It was everywhere, and smaller pieces of equipment were stacked on cinder blocks or each other, to keep out of the wet. Even my rack, a floor stand that held four H-sized tanks with a laminated sign that said,
APEX ORB SVCS: Full Tanks Only. 2 person sign-off!
had been raised up on a set of four-by-four lumber blocks.

I jumped back to the station and looked around. Everything was fine. Cory was at one of the control/monitor computers and Grandmother floated nearby, saying something. Jeline was the mission medical specialist on duty, which wasn’t very onerous—she was playing solitaire using a magnetic board and a deck of metal-core cards that we’d brought up so Grandmother could continue playing and teaching them contract bridge.

Grandmother looked up at me and said, “Everything all right?”

I exhaled. “Yes. Everything’s fine.”

The two depleted tanks had already been uncoupled from the pressure manifold, but were still held against the stack by individual straps. I unclipped the first strap and let the tank float out to where I could get my arms around it, then jumped it back to Tri-City, putting it with the dozens on the “empty” side of the filling stations, then repeated the process for the other one.

I splashed through the water to my rack. When I took hold of the valve of the first filled tank, I got the biggest shock of my life.

Electrical.

It seemed as if every muscle in my body seized (including my grip on the valve) and I blinked, blinked, bli—

THIRTY-EIGHT

Millie: Do you know where Cent is?

Davy was not thrilled with Millie’s proposed house-hunting areas but he had to admit his choice of wilderness isolation hadn’t worked out so well.

“It worked for a
long
time, dear. I loved that house and
we’re going to rebuild there
! But meanwhile, we need a ground base with a little more scope. Trying to make do with the warehouse and the Eyrie just isn’t working.”

“But … but urban blight?”

“Yes. Fewer questions. Cheaper properties.
We
don’t need to drive through those neighborhoods. People won’t question security shutters and really heavy doors.”

“Anybody could drive right up to it!”

“The best place to hide a needle is in a bunch of other needles.”

He got an odd expression on his face. “Huh. I hadn’t thought about that.”

“You hid in New York. You hid in Stillwater.”

“I didn’t mean
me
. That airport that Hunt found? The base for that drone-control aircraft the CIA found?”

“Yes. I thought that didn’t lead anywhere useful?”

“Well, not
yet
. They were operating out of Hayward Executive Airport in the East Bay area. I’ve been looking for a ranch or remote estate in central California. Maybe I should be looking in the cities.”

“Those are
not
small cities.”

“Needles. A lot of needles.”

“Good luck with that. Meanwhile, I’m going to try and find a house.”

She wasn’t bothering with a Realtor, or even doors for that matter. She didn’t care about the state of the neighborhood or the yard. She wanted a large kitchen, multiple bedrooms, a large utility space and garage, and good electrical mains.

And bathrooms. Large bathrooms with showers, bathtubs, toilets. While she didn’t have to use the microgravity toilet in Kristen Station, she had tried it. After that she’d jumped to the small bathroom in the Michigan warehouse whenever necessary.

She was looking at a boarded-up hotel in Detroit, twenty rooms, a room-service kitchen, and an indoor (drained) pool and hot tub, when the satellite pager went off.

Expected Cent back 50 min ago. Cory here for their spacewalk. Not responding to page.

—Sam

Millie jumped to Kristen Station by way of the Michigan warehouse and the Eyrie.

She said, first, “Did you text Davy?”

Her mother said, “Not yet. Next, if you hadn’t responded.”

Cory was frowning. He was wearing the suit, but he’d relaxed it partially. “It’s not like her, but I thought maybe something came up that you would know about.”

Millie shook her head and regretted it. “No. She wouldn’t leave the station without transport this long without arranging for Davy or me to cover. When did you last see her?”

He pointed at Cent’s spacesuit, backpack, and helmet Velcroed near the equator, where Cent kept it when on station. “We were both prebreathing for my first spacewalk, but she’d just taken two empty O
2
tanks down to swap them out.” He gestured toward the oxygen-tank bank where the gap was obvious. “Do you suppose the replacements weren’t ready?”

Sam shook her head. “They keep four filled tanks prepped for us at all times. Cent says they’ve been very reliable.”

Millie went to video uplink with the built in satphone. “I’m texting Joe, Tara, and Jade.” She sent them all:

Do you know where Cent is?—Millie @ station

Then she took a deep breath and said, “And now I’m texting Davy.”

Tara responded before Davy arrived. Jade’s response came almost immediately after, while Millie was filling Davy in.

“I’ll check the regular places again,” Davy said. “While you wait to hear from Joe.” He was back in under a minute with snowflakes in his hair. “I hit the warehouse, the Eyrie, and even took a quick look at the cabin site, up on the ridge and the springhouse. Nothing.”

When five minutes passed and Joe still hadn’t responded, Millie rang his cell phone, but the call went directly to voice mail.

Millie jumped Cory back to his lab so Cory could use his faculty clearance to get Joe’s class schedule.

“Huh. Two of these lecturers post attendance and Joe wasn’t in either class today.”

“Well, he wasn’t with Cent
then
,” Millie said, pointing at one of the class times. “She was still doing station maintenance.”

They tried Joe’s phone again using the landline. No response.

“I’m taking you back to the station,” said Millie.

“Why? They might call here or something.”

“It’s the ‘something’ I’m worried about. You don’t have to go to the station but I’d feel a lot better if you weren’t in your usual haunts right now.”

“You think they’ve been grabbed?”

Millie didn’t say anything. Instead her cheek twitched and the corners of her mouth pulled down.

Cory said, “I’ll go back to the station.”

THIRTY-NINE

Cent: Oubliette

I could hear someone talking. No, two someones, but I was really confused. I hurt all over and it was like my brain wasn’t working properly.

“—yes, they have that trick with water we discussed, but they really can’t get away when you secure them like this.”

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I
knew
that voice, but I’d only heard it the one day, less than a dozen sentences almost two years before.

Isn’t she supposed to be in prison?

The second voice had a different quality about it, slightly electronic.