Davy couldn’t help shuddering. “If by debilitating you mean convulsions, vomiting, shitting yourself and, what was that last one? Oh, yeah, not breathing.” He paused to take a couple of deep breaths. “You’re not telling me anything new. Could you trace the purchases from Cyberonics or the vendors on any of the sensors?”
Hunt shook his head. “Dead ends. Companies that never existed or, in the case of the sensors, cash purchases. The only thing that led someplace was the code.”
“Code?”
“The overwritten firmware. When the NSA decompiled the machine language, they found a set of unique assembly language-library subroutines. They could only find one other piece of hardware that used that library.”
Davy raised his eyebrows.
“It was a DoD contractor. I’m sorry, but I’m not allowed to say which one.”
“So they’re still a DoD contractor.”
Hunt didn’t say anything.
Davy let it go for the moment. That was twenty years in the past. “How about our friends at the nursing home?”
“We got four of them. All of them are U.S. citizens. Two of them have residences in LA county, but two of them came in from out of the country.”
Davy raised his eyebrows. “Costa Rica?”
“How’d you know?”
“Some of the employees of Bochstettler and Associates ended up there. Same kind of business, different name—Stroller and Associates. There’s a link between them and the Daarkon Group.”
Hunt took out his phone and began typing on the keyboard. “Stroller like baby stroller?”
“Yeah. CEO is William Stroller. I first found Daarkon Group by following him there. There’s a Facebook photo with James B. Gilead and William Stroller at a Daarkon Christmas party.”
Hunt nodded at the mention of Gilead’s name. “Gilead surfaced two months ago for his daughter’s wedding but then vanished again. Except for that, he hasn’t been seen in almost two years.”
Davy nodded. “Yeah. Not since I visited their offices in LA and they went to ground.”
Hunt said, “What did you do to them?”
Davy wasn’t going to tell the CIA about gravimeters and jumping. “Just looking but they made me. It spooked them.”
“What were your intentions?”
To never be a target again. To make sure Millie and Cent aren’t targets. “Know thy enemy. I certainly did no more than show up, but the wicked flee where no man pursueth.”
Hunt blinked. “Well, it’s hard to pursue when you didn’t see them go.”
Davy said, “So, where’s the Retreat?”
“Ah, you’ve heard of it? We have no idea. There was a mention of the Retreat in an e-mail between Gilead and his wife in the weeks before the wedding. The only other mention was in a phone conversation between a lower-level Daarkon exec, Todd Hostetler, and Kirsten McAdams, one of Gilead’s known personal assistants. Ms. McAdams shut him down as soon as he said the name. Like ice. Hostetler apologized profusely.”
“Anything else?”
Hunt shook his head. “Nothing. No where, no what, no who. Communications going in or out from there have to be blinded, possibly double blinded. All previous cell phones associated with the top-tier executives have either been canceled or are moribund. Not only no calls, but none of them have connected into any cell network in the last fifteen months.”
“Well, it makes me feel better knowing you can’t find them either, but why are you trying?”
“Well, initially we were wondering if you got them.”
Davy didn’t bother responding to that.
Hunt looked off to the side. “There has always been some concern when people are so highly connected and you don’t know who’s pulling their strings.”
“It should damn well be a matter of national security. Far more justifiably than your pursuit of me.”
Hunt turned to watch the street traffic. Without turning back to Davy, he said, “Well, I agree with you. But the job has a certain amount of, well, following orders, you know?”
Davy showed his teeth but it wasn’t a smile. “Yes, but whose orders? If you knew all the hands tugging that string, that would be one thing, but there’s still the chance one of those hands belongs to a person like Lawrence Simons. Like James B. Gilead.”
Hunt turned away from the traffic. “Then why are you here?”
“I’ll work with you but I won’t work for you. I gave you Stroller and Associates. You told me about the guys who came for Samantha. This stuff I can do. But if one of your bosses gets anxious again and tries for some kind of snatch … well, afterward he won’t think it was a poor decision—he’ll think it was a disastrous decision. A career-ending decision.”
Davy pointed at Hunt. “But the way things work they’ll make sure you take the blame.”
“As you say,” Hunt said. “That’s the way things work.”
Davy nodded, stepped around the corner of the building into deep shadow, and jumped.
SIXTEEN
Cent: Good enough for Yuri
“I just think you should stick to under two hundred kilometers.”
I hate it when they argue with me while I’m wearing the prebreathe mask. This time it was Cory and Dad.
“Why?”
“Radiation,” said Cory.
I took a deep breath, lifted the mask away from my mouth and said, “Are you kidding?” I put the mask back on and purged it before inhaling again. Took it off. “I’m staying equatorial and below the inner Van Allen belt. No real difference!” I put the mask back on.
Dad said, “If you stick to under two hundred klicks, the orbit will take less time—therefore less radiation.”
I lifted the mask again. “Two hundred three miles, three hundred twenty-seven kilometers. If it was good enough for Yuri, it’s good enough for me.” Mask on, deep breaths. “And the difference in orbital period is less than five minutes!”
Dad wasn’t giving up. “He didn’t have a circular orbit. His perigee was only one hundred five miles—one hundred sixty-nine kilometers!”
I just shook my head.
Dad glared. “I hate arguing with you when you’re wearing that mask!”
He couldn’t see my mouth but he could tell I was smiling.
We “launched” from the lab. There was no real point in having the “ground crew” in Texas, especially since the prepaid cell phone wouldn’t get a signal there. When I jumped to ten kilometers, it was over the pit because that was the site I had. Ditto for twenty kilometers and then 104.
The phone rang in my headset and I hit the answer button.
“Status?” asked Cory.
“At one hundred four klicks altitude. Adding velocity now.” I flipped the visor down to protect my eyes.
It was a weird thing.
When I was learning to add velocity while jumping, my first clue, my first feedback, was the sound of air rushing by. Not much air rushing by at these altitudes. See the problem?
Now all of my feedback was visual, the motion of the earth below or the stars above or the readings of the space-enabled GPS. I faced southeast and tried to imagine the earth spinning below me.
It stayed still.
I was station keeping, jumping back to that spot 104 kilometers above the pit, to zero my vertical velocity, but with each jump, trying to add horizontal speed to the east.
It wasn’t working. I’d drop again, but I wasn’t moving sideways that I could tell.
Well, maybe if …
I watched the readout on the GPS instead, looking at the heading and imagining it reading 120 degrees, one kilometer per second.
Suddenly the earth was sliding slowly under me, moving west and a bit north. I was still dropping, though, since one kilometer per second wasn’t anywhere near orbital velocity for this altitude.
“Status?” This time it was Dad’s voice and I could tell that Cory had put the cell phone on speaker.
“One kilometer per second, altitude ninety-nine kilome
ters. Heading one hundred twenty-eight degrees. Central Texas.”
I jumped again, back to altitude, trying to double the horizontal velocity. I peered at the GPS. Had it changed? It still said 1.0 kilometers per second, but the earth seemed to be really spinning below. I looked at the display again. Not 1.0, but 10.0—ten kilometers per second.
Whoa, Bessie.
I barely kept myself from flinching back to my bedroom. Wouldn’t that have surprised Grandmother.
This wouldn’t take me in a circular orbit. This was fast enough to take me all the way out past the geosynchronous satellites, 35,800 kilometers away, before swinging back in a highly elliptical orbit. If the vector was in the right direction, it might even be enough velocity to get me gravitationally captured by the moon.
“Ten kps, One hundred five degrees bearing, one hundred forty-eight kilometers altitude.”
Cory said, “What was your speed? I don’t think I heard that right.”
“Ten kps.”
“Do you think that reading is right?”
“Pretty sure. Longitude is changing far more rapidly than it was before and my altitude is jumping. And the earth’s spin, well, let’s just say it’s zippin’ along.”
“Cent, from LEO, it only takes ten point nine kps to escape Earth’s gravity!”
“Don’t worry. Just using it to reach my target altitude. I’ll trim it way back.”
When the altitude read three hundred kilometers, I started trimming the horizontal speed back, paying more attention to my vertical speed.
“Status?” Dad’s voice was a bit strident.
“Crossing Cuba. Eight kps. Altitude three hundred seven kilometers. Heading one hundred twenty degrees.”
I kept increasing or decreasing the horizontal component until my vertical speed was barely changing, a very slight rise, less than a tenth of a kilometer every few minutes.
“What’s happening there, Cent?”
“Altitude three hundred forty kilometers. Bearing one hundred twelve degrees. Velocity seven point seven two kps.”
I bit down on the bite valve to take a sip of water and it squirted hard, jetting into the back of my throat and airway. I began coughing furiously and beads of water splashed off the inside of my faceplate and began floating around my face.
“Cent what’s wrong?” Cory said, his voice rising slightly.
Dad said, “Return, Cent, abort! Christ, her life support must be failing!”
I got my throat clear and took a wheezing breath, then another, finally saying, “S’okay. Got some water down the wrong pipe.”
Dad said, “Jesus!”
I heard Cory exhale before saying, “Microgravity can be tricky. Liquids don’t always behave like you expect.”
Tell me about it. Though I didn’t think it was microgravity that was the problem.
When we’d tested the suit the day before, the water feed had behaved like any earthbound hydration pack—bite down to open the valve and suck to get the water into the mouth.
I cautiously bit down on the bite valve again, barely squeezing, and water sprayed hard into my mouth. I released the valve and swallowed the water.
“We’ve got a bit of an overpressure problem in the water compartment, Cory.”
“What? Oh!” I heard him smack his forehead with the palm of his hand. “The compartment is at a full atmosphere and the helmet is now a third of that! It must be squirting like a fire hose. It’s not leaking through the bite valve, is it? It wasn’t designed to hold a pressure differential—just open so you can suck water through the tube. Last thing you want is a helmet full of water.”
I glanced at the drops that were floating in front of my eyes. They were drifting past my cheeks, heading for the air return to the rebreather. The first filter cartridge the water would hit in the rebreather chamber was the activated charcoal, but next one after that was silica gel and it would probably soak up the drops.
Unless—
I realized that, really, the first thing the water would encounter on entering the chamber was one of the circulation fans.
I hoped it wouldn’t short out.
“The bite valve seems to be holding,” I said. “Maybe we can put an overpressure valve on the water compartment, to vent the excess when I’m, uh, exoatmospheric?”
“Sure. I’ve even got a spare that’s set to five psi. It’ll take less than a half hour to drill, tap, and install it. You want to come back and take care of that now?” From the tone of his voice, I knew which one he preferred.
“No. I’ll keep an eye on it. Besides, as I drink, there will be more room in the chamber and the pressure will drop.”
“Understood. Give me your stats again. I’d like to get the elements of your orbit.”
“I just crossed the equator and I’m well out into the Atlantic. Altitude is three hundred forty one kilometers, speed is seven point seven two kps.” I gave him the longitude and latitude.
“How’s your temperature?”
“I feel comfortable. It’s local afternoon, but I’m not feeling anything heating up.” I was feeling a little thirsty so I took another cautious gulp from the water “jet.”
Over the next ten minutes I gave him updates as the sun sunk lower behind me.
“Okay,” he said, a few minutes after the last update, “Pretty circular. I’ve got an apogee of three hundred sixty-two kilometers and a perigee of three hundred twenty-two. Inclination of orbit is twenty-four point three degrees and period is just under ninety-two minutes. Were you going to adjust it anymore?”
I thought about it. Our biggest concern was radiation and, as long as we were below the inner Van Allen belt, it was moderate. The earth’s magnetic field funneled the sun’s charged particles around the planet or trapped them in the radiation belts. Because the inclination of my orbit was low, I also wasn’t going anywhere near the South Atlantic Anomaly, where the inner Van Allen Radiation belt drops within two hundred kilometers of the surface. Lots of high-energy particles there.
“Ninety-two minutes. Copy that. Let’s leave things as they are.”
When I first started looking at orbital speeds and periods, I thought there should be more of a difference between 200 and 340 kilometers of altitude. I thought of it as a 60 percent increase. What I didn’t realize was that it was the radius of the orbits that mattered. Not the distance to sea level but how far it was to the center of the earth. So it was really the difference between 6,600 and 6,740 kilometers, a change of just two percent.
The entire earth was darkening below me as I reached the west coast of Africa. For me, the sun was still brilliantly bright through the visor and a full hand span above the horizon, but the curvature of the earth put everything below me into night. A few minutes later, when the sun dropped over the horizon, the entire western edge of the planet lit up, a bright thin band of atmosphere, and then it faded.
Wow.
And then it was too dark.
For a second, I waited, thinking my eyes would adjust, but finally I remembered the visor and pushed it up. There were stars above and man-made stars below when I crossed the African coast over Benguela, Angola.
For me it was a line of lights defining the coast and a splotch of light where the city and airport were. But Cory identified the location for me. Now that he had the orbit, he was running an active plot on computer. When I passed a brightly lit city, he was able to name it for me.
It took less than seven minutes to cross the continent, three thousand miles through Angola, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia (again), Malawi, and Mozambique. Two minutes later I zipped past the northern tip of Madagascar and my ground track bent north again over the dark Indian Ocean and brighter swaths of moonlit clouds stretching east toward Australia.
“Hey, Cent,” Cory said.
“Yeah?”
“You might want to look up.”
I tried to turn, like I would on Earth, twisting my hips, but my legs went one way and my torso went the other, then
returned, and I was still facing the earth. So I ran in place, pumping my legs in circular motion, as if I was running forward. My entire body began rotating backwards. I stopped running and my body stopped rotating.
Ha! Just like on the videos.
I did it again until the earth was to my back and I was looking out into the black. The three-quarter moon was quite a ways north of me and the amazing Milky Way was off to my left, but I don’t think that’s what Cory meant.
“What am I looking—OH MY GOD!”
I’m not religious, really, but some things.
“That’s sixty kilometers above you,” Cory said. “It’s crossing your path at about thirty degrees. You’re going faster, of course.”
At sixty kilometers it was only a jagged dot, but I could make out the panels sticking off the main truss and crossing it, a thicker white line of modules running from the standby Dragon personnel capsule off the Harmony node all the way to the standby Soyuz off the Zvezda service module at the other end. To my eye it was drifting backward in orbit, and from north to south, though we must have been going the same direction (south to north) or it would’ve crossed my path like a bullet, at several kilometers a second.
They were only sixty kilometers away—the eight humans currently in space.
Nine total.
I could see it. I could jump to it.
And I would, but not today.
* * *
Sunrise, like sunset, was spectacular, happening sometime after I crossed Papua New Guinea into the Pacific proper. I had to grab the sun visor to flip it into place quickly, and in my haste, I hit the headset button, disconnecting Cory and Dad.
Oops.
I floated on, secure in the knowledge that they would call back, so, when the phone rang after thirty seconds, I tapped the button and said, “Sorry, about that. Accidentally hit the disconnect.”
“Oh, really?”
My teeth clicked together. It wasn’t Dad’s voice and it wasn’t Cory’s. “Hello?”
“This is Mark Mendez. Who am I talking to?”
“You have the wrong number,” I said.
“I’m pretty sure this is the handset I’m interested in. I’m calling from the Iridium Communications Satellite Network Operating Center in Leesburg, Virginia.”