Exo: A Novel

  “How are you going to adjust between sunlight and shadow? Sunlight and eclipse?”

  I nodded. “Got it. When are we going to be ready for the next test?”

  He ran his finger down my arm, across the fabric of the suit. “Let me get this back into the lab. We tested the suit in a vacuum before and we even hit it with high-energy UV, but we want to make sure it’s not degrading now that it’s met the real thing. Also, there are other things we need to examine, remember?” He raised his eyebrows at me.

  I blushed. “Right.” I turned to Mom. “Could you meet me back home after we get the suit off? I need some help.”

  Dad swiveled his head. “What kind of help?”

  I bit my lip, but not telling him would just cause him to imagine terrible things. “My skin. The suit seems to work fine, reinforcing it, but we need to check it.”

  Dad looked puzzled.

  “Everywhere, Daddy.”

  “Oh. Got it. I’ll, uh, just work on that other thing, then.”

  Cory and Mom nodded.

  My turn to imagine the worst. “What other thing?”

  “A way to handle the communications issue. We were discussing it while you were ‘out.’”

  Mom muttered, “Longest five minutes I’ve spent lately.”

  Cory said. “Satellite phone. If they work down here on Earth, with atmosphere and buildings and mountains, they should work even better in orbit. Your mom suggested it. She says she sees them used in remote sites in relief work.”

  Dad gestured sharply at the sky. “The wait would have gone a lot easier if you were talking. When you have longer-duration tests, it’s just going to get worse. At least for us.” He made a little circle movement that took in Mom and Cory.

  They still couldn’t come after me if I got into trouble, but I could see their point.

  If I was out there, I could be fine, I could be dying, I could be in need of advice, I could just need to hear their voices.

  Sort of like Joe.

  I ground my teeth together.

  It was the not knowing.

  TWELVE

  Davy: Satphone

  Davy jumped to Sim Lim Square and flinched immediately back to the Yukon, his hair, shoes, and shirt soaked. Rain had been falling so heavily that he could barely see across the square. He changed his shirt and toweled his head dry, then put on foul-weather gear.

  When he returned to Singapore, the standing water was up to the ankles of his rubber boots. He kicked his feet like a child splashing in a puddle as he walked across to the International Phone Emporium.

  Lucas was standing inside the glass door staring out at the rain. He pushed it open for Davy, smiling as he recognized him.

  Davy nodded. He waited under the overhang for a few seconds, to let the worst of the water drain off his gear, then ducked inside.

  “Come in, come in! I never see such rain, ar? Every Ah Tong Ah Seng stay away today like they melt. What you want or not?”

  “Satellite phone, Lucas. I need a satellite phone.”

  Lucas’s face lit up. “Good lau! For where? You want for Europe, Africa, and Asia, make you very good deal on Thuraya phone. GSM and satellite handset.”

  “I need it for everywhere.”

  “What you mean, everywhere ar? Even way up north?”

  “Ya.”

  “You need Iridium, then. I give you very good deal for prepaid SIM card. Okay deal for contract.”

  In the end, Davy handed over several thousand dollars in cash and Lucas, smiling, gave him a bundle double wrapped in plastic against the rain.

  Davy paused at the door and then turned back. He really couldn’t leave without warning Lucas.

  “Uh, Lucas? When we start using this phone, people might come looking, right? I mean, the SIM will trace back to you, ya?”

  Lucas frowned. “Why they looking? You kill someone?”

  Davy smiled. “Of course not. But maybe you should not know who bought these.”

  Lucas shook his head. “No, man. Next time when they ask I act blur.”

  “Next time? They asked already?”

  “Oh, no. Singlish. Next time.” He waved his hand forward. “Future time. Like ‘Next time when you married’ or ‘Next time get out of way’ ar?”

  “Oh. Okay. You act blur. More better.”

  Lucas grinned. “I blur like sotang.” At Davy’s expression, he translated, “Like squid.”

  Laughing, Davy went out into the rain.

  THIRTEEN

  Millie: Not Fair

  “Looks like a hickey,” Millie said. She smiled. “Sure it was the suit?”

  Cent winced. “You’re kidding, I hope. That would be an odd place for a ‘hickey.’ If it’s not an odd place, then I don’t want to know the details.”

  Millie said, “Different strokes.”

  Cent said, “Well I’m sure it’s not a hickey. Not that kind.”

  Millie thought Cent sounded a little defensive.

  Cent continued, “When we were testing, we sometimes got a marginal reading there, but not consistently.” She poked at it. “Doesn’t hurt.”

  It was in Cent’s right armpit, a reddish bruise no bigger than the ball of Cent’s thumb. She’d told Millie that her skin had been a bit dry, too, but after showering and putting on some lotion the dryness went away.

  There was only the one hickey.

  “How much water do you lose out there?” Millie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Cent said. “How would we find out?”

  “Weigh yourself, before and after. If you pee, weigh that, too.”

  “Cory probably already has it in his test protocols but I’ll mention it.” She handed Millie her phone. “Take a picture of the bruise for the records, okay?” She held a towel across her front while Millie did it.

  “Let’s do the other armpit,” Millie said. “For comparison.”

  Cent switched sides. “Sexy,” she said in a flat voice.

  “Oh, go get dressed!”

  * * *

  Millie was standing at the kitchen sink staring out the window into a light snowfall when Davy returned.

  Without looking at him, she said, “What were you thinking?”

  She heard him lean back against the opposite counter before saying, “I was thinking that it would take a lot longer to develop a practical suit.”

  She turned around. The minute he saw her face, he crossed his arms and his mouth got tight. She shook her head and then rubbed at her face with both hands, forcing the muscles to relax. “Didn’t exactly work like that.”

  “He lost his funding. The people I asked said it would take him years. How was I to know that his one insurmountable problem could be solved by a teleport?”

  “What are we going to do?” Millie’s voice contained a strain of hopelessness that made her want to slap herself.

  “You’d have to ask her to stop.”

  “For what reason?”

  “Only the truth would work.”

  “What? That I want her to stop because I’m terrified she’s going to get herself killed?”

  Davy sighed. “You’re allowed to say we’re both scared she’ll kill herself.”

  “Why don’t you, then?”

  Davy looked down at the floor. “She’s not my mother.”

  Millie frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense. Of course Cent’s not your mother. Or do you mean me, being Cent’s mother?”

  Davy shook his head. “I mean Sam. I’m not the one who’s in danger of losing their daughter and their mother.” He jerked his thumb up and back, toward the bedrooms on the second floor.

  It was unexpected and it rocked her back, taking her breath away. She shut her eyes, squeezing tears down her cheeks. “Dammit. I’m the one with the training. I didn’t see that.” She wiped at her face with her hands. “That is, obviously I was doing everything I could to avoid seeing that.”

  Davy handed her the tissue box. “It’s grounds for asking Cent to stop. She could be brought to
understand why this is such a bad time. Telling her to stop wouldn’t work—we both know that. She’s as stubborn as you are.”

  Tears and all, Millie couldn’t help laughing.

  Davy stared at her, perplexed, then got it. His face relaxed. “Okay, maybe I’m a little stubborn, too.”

  Millie blew her nose. “But you don’t want to ask, her, do you? Why?”

  Davy looked away.

  Millie nodded. “Right. Because it wouldn’t be fair.”

  Davy exhaled heavily.

  Millie went on. “We’re afraid, but it isn’t as if she doesn’t know what she’s doing. I didn’t know about the bends thing until she told me. Dr. Matoska seems to be moving cautiously, too. She’ll be eighteen soon. She can be a thousand miles away in an instant.”

  Davy nodded. “Yes. It’s probably less dangerous than her little adventure in New Prospect.”

  Millie shuddered. “Less? At least those people would want her alive.”

  Davy held his hand out and rocked it. “At least the hazards are known. Vacuum, heat, cold, collisions, radiation. Humans have been operating up there for over half a century.

  “But when it comes to those bastards, it’s hard for her to know what smiling asshole is holding a hypodermic needle or a Taser behind their back. Or, my biggest fear, when a sniper is waiting completely out of sight for her to show up.” He stabbed his finger at the ceiling. “At least they can’t get at her up there.”

  He dropped his hand and his shoulders slumped. “And, no,” he said. “It wouldn’t be fair.”

  FOURTEEN

  Cent: More Prep

  Cory had reloaded all the parts of the life-model pressure sensor into the suit and was taking readings. I Bluetoothed the pictures from my phone to his laptop. He frowned. “The right armpit?”

  I nodded.

  “To be honest, I half expected mild pressure hematomas at every joint.” He blew the picture up on the screen until square corners of the pixels started to show. “Skin was intact, right? No sign of bleeding?”

  “Definitely not.” I stabbed at my T-shirt over the armpit with my finger. “Can’t even tell where it is.”

  He checked the pressure sensor readouts for the corresponding region on the life model. “The pressure is nice and uniform under these conditions, but I must admit, the model doesn’t exactly have armpits—no hollows there. You may need some padding under there, to compensate, to keep the pressure up.”

  “How does the suit look?” I said, gesturing at the magnifying loupe he’d set upon the bench.

  “Good so far, but you were only in vacuum for five minutes, right?”

  I nodded.

  “We need to test for longer durations, but I want to solve the sun visor and the water issues first,” he said. “Plus communications, right?”

  I groaned. “How long?”

  “What’s your hurry?”

  I glared at him. I had my own agenda, but I wasn’t sharing it with him.

  He spread his hands. “Look, we wouldn’t even be testing without your ability to get inside. We’d be months or years away even with your funding. Have a little patience. Your dad said I should remind you about the ‘surviving activities in low Earth orbit’ part if you got pushy.” He took a step back suddenly and his eyes got wide. “Cent?”

  I rubbed at my face with both hands and exhaled. When I took my hands down some of the tightness had left my cheeks. Anyway, Cory wasn’t leaning back anymore.

  “How long?” I asked again, only milder.

  Cory said carefully, “Your dad says he can have the satellite handset by tomorrow, but I need to work out how we’re going to integrate it into the helmet and harden it for vacuum. I was thinking we’d make another aluminum chamber to hold the phone and the water bladder. We’ll position the oxygen tank lower, the rebreather chamber a little higher, and put the new section in the middle. And we’ll need to pressure test it and the connections. If things go well, I’m thinking four, five days. No, dammit, then there’s the visor.”

  I held up my hand.

  “I’ll take care of the visor.”

  * * *

  “Tinkerbell piggybacked on a Delta II launch delivering three multisensor oceanography platforms into low Earth orbit. We had a liquid gas propulsion system to get us to our target altitude of eight hundred fifty kilometers. Unfortunately the thruster solenoid failed open and we ended up blowing the entire store of hydrazine on one continuous thrust. Tinkerbell ended up in a highly elliptical orbit with an apogee of eleven hundred kilometers and a perigee of two hundred.

  “For a while, we were in deep doo-doo with NASA and the U.S. Strategic Command because they predicted a potential collision with the NOAA 9 meteorological satellite.”

  We were on the fifth floor of Rudder Tower and the room was half full, perhaps twenty-five student and faculty members of the campus Makers Club.

  Roberta Matapang, the guest speaker, was a graduate student working on her Ph.D. in astronautical engineering. She was describing her work on a nanosatellite designed and built by a consortium of Texas A&M and University of Texas students and faculty. I liked her but so far, every question asked, no matter how stupid, was a “Good question.”

  “Was a collision really likely?” asked one of the two guys on the front row.

  I rolled my eyes, then took a deep breath and let it out. Probably wasn’t being fair. After all, I’d been researching the low Earth orbital environment for months.

  Ms. Matapang said (you guessed it), “Good question. The chances of any one object running into another are very low. However, there are over nineteen thousand pieces of debris bigger than ten centimeters. So while the chance of any particular one of them hitting another are pretty low, the chances that one of the many does have a collision approaches certainty.

  “Over two thousand of those pieces were the result of just one collision in 2009, when a defunct Cosmos satellite collided with Iridium 33 at over forty-two thousand kilometers per hour.”

  “Jesus,” said the other front row student. “Were they orbiting in opposite directions?”

  Ms. Matapang shook her head. “Roughly right angles. Iridium 33 was in a polar orbit and the Cosmos was highly inclined, too.”

  “But your satellite, uh, Tinkerbell, didn’t collide?”

  “No. As its orbital track was refined by CelesTrak, the risk was downgraded. They passed more than three kilometers apart.”

  “What about your mission—could you do any science in that orbit?” the same boy asked.

  “Good question. The main mission of Tinkerbell was to rendezvous with a discarded Delta II second stage, but now we don’t have the fuel to do it. We’ve used the onboard camera for some Earth imaging, but that’s about it.”

  “Is there a danger that it will run into something else?” asked the first student to speak.

  “Another good question. Probably not. She’s experiencing considerable atmospheric drag at perigee and we don’t think she’ll survive another two hundred orbits.”

  “Why did you want to rendezvous with the Delta upper stage?” Did I say that out loud? I’d been wondering for two days, since I’d found out about the talk, and researched what I could online.

  She smiled at me and most of the students turned their heads to see who’d spoken. I was not the only woman in the room, but you could count the rest on one hand.

  “Good question. The first part of the mission was to image the booster’s exterior. It’s been in orbit for over seventeen years, much of it in regions thick with orbital debris. Since we have exact prelaunch specifications, the idea was to examine the degree of micro- and macro-collisions.”

  “Or one of those fast collisions?” the first boy in the front row suggested.

  I shook my head and Ms. Matapang noticed. “Do you want to tell him why?”

  “Is the booster still its original orbit?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Right,” she said. She looked back at the front row
. “A major collision would’ve changed the orbit as well as torn it apart. The second part of our mission, though, was to change the orbit.”

  “Oh. But you ran out of fuel,” said the second boy on the front row.

  She smiled at him. “Yes we did, but that fuel was only to rendezvous. To deorbit the upper stage, Tinkerbell was going to hook onto one of the Delta’s support-truss struts, then kick out a five hundred meter spool of woven aluminum tether. This stretches out along the local vertical and degrades the orbit.”

  The guys were puzzled.

  “Why does that degrade the orbit?”

  “Why do you think?”

  One of the faculty in the middle of the room suggested, “Atmospheric drag?”

  Ms. Matapang held her forefinger and thumb close to each other, “A tiny, tiny bit. What else?”

  One of female faculty members said, “Solar wind?”

  Ms Matapang shook her head. “Let me give you a clue. The tape is electrically conductive.” She looked around the room but nobody reacted. She added, “And it would be moving through Earth’s magnetic field.”

  “Like a wire in a generator,” said the woman who’d spoken.

  “Yes,” said Ms. Matapang. “The wire generates current and the empty spool, dangling down, acts as an electron emitter. The current creates a magnetic field along the wire which generates electrodynamic drag as it moves through the magnetosphere.”

  A kid on the front row held up a piece of wire, pulled out of his pocket and waved it around. “I’m moving this wire through the earth’s magnetic field and I’m not really getting much in the way of current.”

  Okay, he didn’t get a “good question” response.

  “How fast are you moving the wire?” Ms. Matapang asked.

  “Oh, a meter a second? Roughly.”

  Ms. Matapang said, “Besides being considerably longer, the tether moves through the magnetosphere at orbital speeds. That’s over seven thousand meters per second. You can understand how that might be a little more significant? It does take a while to degrade the orbit, but it’s a matter of weeks or months, not the years atmospheric drag would take.”