The getaway special (6 page)

"I want to find out how much damage we've done on the ground." Judy wasn't sure she wanted to know, but she supposed there was no point in delaying the inevitable. "All right," she said, "but no transmissions just yet. Let's find out how much trouble we're in before we let them know we're back."

"They'll spot us quick enough with radar," Carl pointed out.

"If they're looking out here. We must be ten thousand kilometers up."

"Twelve," Allen said.

"Won't matter," Carl said, but he set the radio to receive only and started sifting through the commercial frequencies, switching on the cabin speaker so all three of them could hear. There weren't many stations with the power to punch a clear signal that far into space, and there was a lot of static from stations that had just enough signal to create interference, but Carl managed to tune in an English-language station long enough to hear the end of the Beatles' "Yesterday."

"Appropriate," he sneered. The deejay came on and told them that the weather was partly cloudy and fifty-seven degrees out with a slight chance of rain in the higher elevations. Judy chuckled as she always did when she heard that phrase from space, but her breath caught in her throat at the deejay's next words.

"Here's an update on the new computer virus that . . ."

Whatever else he had to say was lost in static.

Judy felt her heart lurch. "Get that station back!" she ordered. Carl tried, but atmospheric conditions had apparently changed enough to block it. He tuned on across the spectrum until he heard another snippet:

". . . extremely virulent email virus has apparently mutated into three different forms already. The original 'hyperdrive plans' form hit less than an hour ago, but the Internet Virus Watch Consortium has already detected two variations, one with a subject line reading 'Wait, it's real!' and another one reading simply 'Hoax.' These are very dangerous virus programs that can apparently cause irreparable hardware damage to your computer if you even open them, so the only safe course of action is to delete them unopened, even if it appears that they were sent by someone you know." Judy looked over at Allen, whose mouth was open wide enough to stick his foot into. "Impossible, is it?" she asked.

"It—I—how could they do that so
fast
?"

"Like I said earlier, they've probably had contingency plans for something like this ready to go for years. A real virus they can rename to mimic your email and send out from thousands of sites all at once; it would overrun the entire net within minutes."

"It wouldn't be a virus," Carl said happily. "It's an email worm. Reads the address book on the target computer and sends out more copies of itself to everyone listed there." She glared at him. "Virus, worm, whatever; the important thing is that somebody's managed to do an end-run around Allen's email."

"Yes, they have, haven't they? They've given us a second chance."

"Second chance, my ass! This is a power grab, pure and simple. Whoever did this is trying to keep it all to themselves. You don't really think they're going to tuck the plans away and never use them, do you?"

Carl shook his head. "Of course not. There'll be controlled experimentation, cautious exploration, and—"

"By whom? The CIA? Carl, do you really want
them
to be the ones who lead humanity into space?"

That took a little of the wind out of his sails, but not enough. "It's a moot point," he said. "They've won."

"No they haven't," Allen growled. He tapped at his keyboard, the radio beacon beeped again, and Earth shrank to a third its former size.

"Where did you take us?" Judy asked. "Geosynchronous orbit." The communication satellite, like practically everything the shuttle carried into orbit, looked like a cylindrical tank with solar panels and antennas attached to it. Judy had seen dozens of them in her time as a pilot, but never from her current vantage point: just behind one in orbit 36,000 kilometers from Earth. In normal operation the shuttle never got that high; the satellites were released in low orbit and had to use their own engines to climb into position.

It had taken
Discovery
another two jumps to reach it, but that was just to fine-tune their orbit. The extra velocity they had picked up during their fall toward the Moon had been almost exactly what they needed.

Now Allen was outside in a spacesuit, tethered to the end of the shuttle's manipulator arm while he plugged his computer into the satellite's diagnostic port. Judy, watching through the payload bay windows, could see him tapping the keys with a screwdriver off his tool belt because his gloved fingers were too thick to type with.

"How's it going?" she asked over the intercom.

"Just about got it," he replied. "I've got all five hundred channels ready to accept my input when I give the command, so now all I need to do is hook up the video stream." The black-and-white screen beside the back windows was showing an old rerun of
Space Rangers
at the moment. Normally it was used to watch the manipulator arm at work, but they could patch any signal they wanted to it. Allen had strung an antenna out in front of the satellite so they could monitor its broadcast, and Judy had tuned through the microwave channels until she had found an unscrambled show. "I can't believe it," she said. "You can just plug in your computer and take over an entire communications satellite?"

He laughed. "Well, it helps if you've got the control program already loaded."

"And where did you get that?"

"Friends in high places."

Carl, who'd been glowering from the copilot's chair all the while, laughed derisively. "Another nut case from INSANE, no doubt. I hope he hangs alongside you when the Feds catch up with him." Allen didn't bother to reply. Neither did Judy. She was just as tired of shutting him up as she was of listening to him. The only reason she hadn't locked him into a bunk alongside Gerry was because she knew he wouldn't do anything to stop her or Allen from what they were doing. He'd lost the argument, but he wasn't the type to try forcing his way. He would wait for the courts to exonerate him, and in the meantime he would snipe at them and make them feel guilty.

Judy would have felt guiltier if she believed him, but she still didn't buy his rationale. There might be some economic disruption as people got used to the idea that they weren't stuck on one planet anymore, but throwing the internet into chaos to stop the plans had probably caused more financial damage than the hyperdrive would. And as for the personal consequences, she might lose her job for failing to follow orders, but she couldn't believe she'd be in any real danger when they got home. This wasn't the seventeenth century, after all, and unlike Galileo, neither she nor Allen would have to recant their beliefs on pain of death. Once the secret was out, scientists everywhere would confirm it, and when that happened the government would have far bigger things to worry about than prosecuting Judy and Allen for giving it away.

"Okay, I'm ready," Allen said. "Here goes." The notebook computer was dangling at the end of its data cable; he grasped it in his left glove while he pushed the "Enter" key with his right index finger.
Space Rangers
whirled into static, replaced by a bright blue screen with white words: "Emergency Alert. If you have videotape equipment, set it to record the following program." Allen's calm, classical-station-disk-jockey voice read the message aloud, then the screen cleared to show Allen himself, dressed in a white spacesuit liner, in a sequence that Judy had filmed just minutes earlier with one of the shuttle's public relations cameras. They had stored the image digitally on his computer's hard drive, and he was playing it back now through the video interface.

"By now you may have already heard that the Space Shuttle
Discovery
has demonstrated a revolutionary new device, a faster-than-light engine for traveling through space. I am Doctor Allen Meisner, the inventor of that device, and I've interrupted your program today to give you the plans for it." He smiled wide for the camera, and Judy winced at how goofy he looked. Nobody was going to believe him. People all over the world were no doubt switching channels already, sure that he was selling something.

But then, he was on all the channels. They could switch satellites if they wanted, but even then they would probably encounter him on at least half the channels there. All the communications satellites were linked these days, relaying signals around the globe. Even the European satellites were part of the system. They could be taken off-line from the ground, but Judy knew not all of them would be. Not in time, anyway. The ones under private control—like the one they had hijacked—probably wouldn't go off-line at all. After all, this was news, and none of the networks would want to be the only ones
not
carrying it. The video zoomed in on the computer screen, which showed an image of the circuit diagram that Allen had attempted to email to everyone. In a voice-over, he described how to assemble it and how the finished engine worked. The whole thing took less than ten minutes, including the last-minute addition that he had hastily cobbled together to explain the distance calibration. The presentation looked like a bad high school physics film the way he—or more often just his hand—pointed out various parts of circuit diagrams, but as Judy watched him describe how to build and operate a hyperdrive engine, she couldn't help but be impressed. Some people, anyway, would record it, and that's all that mattered. It wouldn't take long for them to realize it was genuine, and once the secret was in private hands, it would spread throughout the world just as fast as an email virus.

The radio came alive with frantic calls from Mission Control the moment the television broadcast began, but Judy switched it off. She already knew what they would have to say. Her skin prickled as she waited for a laser blast from the defense satellites, but she didn't really think that would happen. This was an international communications satellite, and unlike the automatic shot that hit the shuttle's tail fin, shooting at them now would take an executive decision to authorize. She was willing to bet nobody would stick their neck out to do that, not without thinking it over very carefully, by which time Judy and her crew would be gone.

They let Allen's video repeat once before they unplugged it and let the satellite resume its normal programming. Judy brought the arm and Allen down into the cargo bay again, then moved the shuttle away with the maneuvering engines as soon as Allen was in the airlock. A few minutes later he had removed his spacesuit and joined her on the flight deck. "Where to now?" he asked, taking his position at the hyperdrive controls.

"The space station, I guess," Judy said. "I think we've done about all we can do from out here." Carl snorted. "Believe me, you've done more than enough."

7

Space Station
Freedom
had not lived up to its designers' dreams. That was less the fault of the architects and the engineers than it was the fault of the waffling politicians and the vociferous minority they represented, but whatever the cause, administrative costs and "tactical compromises" had eaten so much of the budget that there was little left for hardware. So little, in fact, that the astronauts had taken to calling it "
Fred
" in order to save forty-three percent on the cost of the name. For a while it had lost its name entirely. When the Russians had been part of the project, NASA had decided that calling it "Freedom" might be considered a slap in the face to the former Soviet power, so some poetic genius in the front office had decided it should be referred to by the totally uninspired, bureaucratically functional title of "the International Space Station" instead. The Russians, who had poetry in their souls, had hated that even worse than "Freedom," but they were too polite to say so. Then, after the inevitable political split, NASA revived the old name and tried to pretend that the alliance had never happened. Never mind that billions of dollars had been poured down the drain on hardware that was now useless without its Russian counterparts; the official dogma was that we had never counted on their help and didn't need it now.

That was true enough, Judy supposed. The place held air and six crewmembers. But it was a far cry from what it could have been.

Even so, when the lumpy row of habitat modules and their crosswise boom of solar panels blinked into existence only a few miles away, Judy felt a strong sense of relief. With the vertical stabilizer missing there was no hope of landing, and with the toilet stopped up they only had a few hours before they had to break out the waste bags. Whatever else its shortcomings, at least
Fred
had working plumbing. But more than that, as soon as they docked she could turn over the hyperdrive to someone else. She wouldn't be responsible for it anymore, and wouldn't have to keep making decisions that would affect the whole human race.

She switched the radio to the ship-to-station frequency and spoke into the tiny microphone that snaked around the side of her face from her communications carrier. "
Freedom
, this is
Discovery
, do you copy?"

The voice in her headset was female. That would be Mary Hunter, the station commander. She didn't sound excited about the call. "Roger
Discovery
, this is
Freedom
. We copy, and have you on radar. What is your status?"

All business, eh? Judy shrugged and said, "Nominal, except our vertical stabilizer is damaged beyond repair. And the toilet is backed up again. Request permission to dock and wait for the next shuttle."

"Ahh . . .
Discovery
, be advised that the United States government has issued a warrant for your arrest. If you dock here, we'll have to confine you to quarters and turn you over to the Feds on the next flight down."

Judy laughed. "Confined to quarters? Mary, the habitat module is thirty feet long. Where are we going to go?"

"With Doctor Meisner's device on board, who knows? I don't particularly want to find out, and besides, we have orders."

Judy looked over at Carl in the copilot's seat, strapped in for the thrust they'd never needed. Normally Gerry would be sitting there, but he was still locked into his bunk. He'd given them plenty of reason, but suddenly it didn't seem quite so unlikely that Mary would do the same to them.