The Last Astronaut Page 3

  There was a war going on up there, in the high orbits. A war of slow calculation and mathematical precision.

  Distance two kilometers and closing. Jamming enemy communications on Ka-band and millimeter wave. Deploying armament.

  The X-37d, Hawkins’s weapon platform, looked like a miniature space shuttle with no windows. Its cargo bay doors swung open, and a single jointed robotic arm unfolded itself like the hunting leg of a praying mantis. The spaceplane had been in orbit for nine hundred days, carrying out a variety of missions. Its micromissiles had been fired long before. Its high-energy laser couldn’t draw enough power when the X-37d was on the night side of Earth. This time, Hawkins intended to grab his prey with a mechanical hand—and rip it to pieces.

  He edged closer, taking his time. If the Tchaika-class satellite caught wind of him, it might run. It had three-axis thrusters that could be used to change its orbit, and if he lost it now he might never find it again. It didn’t see him, though, as far as he could tell. Its cameras were pointed downward, toward a military installation in Alaska.

  Hawkins reached forward with his robot arm, its grasping claws wide. Just a little farther now. He expended a tiny puff of his remaining fuel to close the distance.

  Perhaps the Tchaika felt the exhaust of his engines. Perhaps it had some subtle sense for when a predator was near. Its own thrusters lit up, and it started to speed away from him. Hawkins growled in frustration—then brought his arm back and swung it around, hard, so that the claw smashed against the satellite’s hull and sent it spinning out of control. He felt the impact in his hand, felt it reverberate all the way up to the bones of his wrist. The Tchaika tumbled away from him, and he’d poured on more delta-v to catch it when—

  Lights came up all around him. The universe vanished.

  Hawkins blinked and snorted and sneezed. He was sitting in a trailer in Utah, surrounded by the black boxes and haptic peripherals of a military-grade virtual reality rig.

  He’d been on duty for seventeen hours straight. Suddenly he could smell his own body. Feel how his legs had fallen asleep. The X-37d didn’t have legs. He’d forgotten his own.

  There was a knock on the door behind him. He climbed, carefully, out of his chair and went to answer it. Salt-laden air billowed into his climate-controlled domain, and he squinted into a sunny day out on the Great Salt Lake. “What,” he grunted, brain still half lost in orbit.

  Then he snapped to attention. “Sir,” he said. “I’m sorry, I was—”

  “At ease,” General Kalitzakis said. “Major, there’s someone here to talk to you. I’d like you to give him your full attention.”

  Standing behind the general was an old guy in a woven straw cowboy hat and a dusty maroon suit. Thin as a rail. Hawk’s eyes still weren’t quite focused on the real world, but he knew he’d never seen the man before. Looked like a civilian.

  The thin man looked Hawkins over, then turned to the general. “This is the man you recommended to me?”

  “He’s the best I’ve got,” Kalitzakis said.

  Hawkins couldn’t help but stand a little taller, push his chest out a little more.

  The thin man nodded and held out a hand. “Hello, son. My name’s Roy McAllister, and I have a new mission for you. You’ve been reassigned, effective immediately.”

  Hawkins was still half up in space, his mind still focused on chasing down the Tchaika-class. He fell back on muscle memory, drilled into him over his twenty-year career in the military. His hand snapped up in a salute.

  “Sir, yes sir,” he said. “Permission to take a shower before we leave?”

  McAllister smiled. “Granted, Major.”

  MAJOR WINDSOR HAWKINS, THIRTIETH OPERATIONS WING, UNITED STATES SPACE FORCE: The X-37 series of uncrewed drone vehicles are reusable, aerodynamic spacecraft with long loiter times in orbit and multimission capabilities. We launch them out of Vandenberg AFB outside of Lompoc, California, and they are operated remotely from several space force facilities. That’s all I can say about them without direct authorization from the Joint Space Operations Center.

  Parminder Rao was livid.

  Administrator McAllister was away from his desk, so there was nothing she could do but pace up and down in the hallway outside his office. Sometimes she stood there with her arms crossed, sometimes she put her hands down at her sides but kept them balled in fists. Occasionally she took the sticky note out of her pocket and glared at it again. It still said the same thing. Please see me for a new posting ASAP. That was all.

  He’d fired her with a piece of paper. Who even still used sticky notes? There was a human resources portal on the JPL intranet for this kind of communication. There were conflict resolution channels, and appeal forms she could fill out—

  When the building’s main door opened and she saw McAllister walk in and head toward her, it was all she could do not to run to meet him and start shouting questions. As he passed her he gave her a nod as if he knew why she was there. Well, he’d better.

  “Come in,” he told her. As he seated himself behind his desk, he asked, “Dr. Rao, how long have you been working for me?”

  “Five years,” she said. “Five years of my life. All of it on one project, the Titan Express mission.”

  In truth, though, Rao had spent her entire life building up to Express. She’d worked her way through years of school, ending up with a combined MD and a PhD in astrobiology. Then she’d worked her ass off getting this job at JPL. All so she could build Titan Express, an interplanetary probe mission. If she could secure funding for Express, it would take five years just to build the probe. Then it would still take another three years just to get to Saturn’s largest moon, the only place in the solar system other than Earth with liquid lakes on its surface. The probe would drop a tiny boat onto one of those lakes, then sieve through the liquid methane looking for any sign of microbes. If it was successful, it would be the first time life had ever been found outside of Earth’s atmosphere. It would be a scientific breakthrough of incredible proportions. It would be the crowning achievement of her career.

  Except this morning Titan Express had been canceled.

  Without warning. Without discussion. Her life’s work just—canceled.

  “I came in to find my workstation locked down. All of my data, all my notes, my preliminary blueprints for Express—everything gone.” Being angry, Rao thought, was better than breaking down in a crying mess in public from the horror of it all. Those were her two options, as she saw it. She picked angry. “How dare you? Do you know what kind of hoops I’ve had to jump through, how much paperwork, how many people I’ve had to schmooze?”

  “I do,” McAllister told her. “Would you like to sit down?”

  “No,” she said. “No. I would not like to sit down. I’d like to hear an explanation. They tell me you’ve been out of the building all day. Someone said you went to Utah. Was there a good reason you weren’t here to explain this to me eight hours ago?”

  “Yes,” McAllister said. “Dr. Rao, I understand your frustration. If you would just sit down, I think I can give you something. Maybe not a full explanation, not yet. But I’ve chosen you for something very special, and I think—”

  “You’re changing my job? Without asking?”

  He smiled. Despite her anger, despite her fierce energy, he looked at her and smiled, and she was certain, absolutely convinced, he was excited.

  Parminder Rao had worked in the same building as Roy McAllister for five years, and she had never seen him angry, or red in the face, or even annoyed. She had certainly never seen this little faraway smile, this slightly distant look in his eyes before.

  She sat down.

  “I have some data here,” he told her, reaching up to touch the device clipped to his ear. Her own device, a tiny nose stud her mother had given her, vibrated in response. He had sent her a very large file. She flicked her eyes downward and an overlay came up across her vision, showing her column after column of tiny numbers.

&nb
sp; “These are—what? Orbital parameters for something. A rock, or…” There was something wrong with the data. It didn’t look right—some of the numbers were way too big. “Why are you showing me this? I’m an astrobiologist, not an astronomer.”

  “But you see it. Don’t you?” McAllister asked.

  And then she did.

  If those numbers were correct—

  “Oh shit,” she said.

  “You realize now why I took you off Titan Express? Why I have a new job for you that I figured might be right up your alley?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. Because that was all she could say. Every bit of brainpower she had was busy checking those numbers, rechecking them.

  They kept coming up the same. The data had to be correct.

  And they changed… everything.

  PARMINDER RAO, NASA ASTROBIOLOGIST: At the time I didn’t even know the thing’s name, or who had discovered it. I only knew it was decelerating, and that meant everything. Objects in space move unless acted on by a force. That’s the basis of Newtonian mechanics. Planets, comets, asteroids all move at the same speed in their orbits, only slowing down or speeding up when gravity pulls on them, when they encounter drag… This object was spontaneously decelerating. Meaning it was slowing down under its own power. It wasn’t some dead rock tumbling through the solar system. It was a spaceship.

  There was a green smudge on the horizon, a little margin of tortured sunlight under a deck of dark clouds. Storm weather for a storm that had done its worst and now was moving on, the clouds heading up the coast at fourteen kilometers an hour to wreck somebody else’s weekend. It was March in Florida, in the second half of the twenty-first century. Hurricane season.

  There were twelve divers in the airboat. It had originally been owned by a company that did manatee watching tours, but now it belonged to the City of Titusville. Chuy, the divers’ boss, had brought his family with him, his wife Esmee and his kid Hector. Hector was up in the prow, watching the waves break around the boat’s sharp nose. His mom kept one hand on the waistband of his pants so he didn’t fall out, but the kid had spent most of his four years out on the water, and nobody was really worried.

  In the stern Sally Jansen checked her gear. Each diver had brought their own, some of them still relying on big scuba tanks and regulators. Old, well-loved hoses wrapped in tape and scuffed-up regulators. Most, like Jansen, had rebreathers no bigger than a small knapsack. She pressed her mask against her face and tested the seal, then nodded to herself and checked her weight belt to make sure it wasn’t too frayed. Then she checked everything a second time. Old habits.

  It wasn’t a long ride out to the flats, but it was one she dreaded a little. The boat cruised around the northern end of Merritt Island, half of which was permanently flooded and edging over into marshland, crowds of white birds standing on the roofs of drowned houses. If you looked closely you could still make out a rectangular shadow just below the water—the long strip where space shuttles used to land. South of there was nothing but memories. The old assembly building and the tall gantries like the skeletons of proud towers were barely recognizable now, draped in long vines and covered in bird nests. Over the years storms had softened the old structures, rust and rain making them melt like candle wax, but slowly, oh so slowly.

  It stung. It still stung, even after all these years, to see Canaveral brought low. I could have moved away, Jansen thought. I had years and years to find some other place, some other hole to hide in. But that old pain was like a pair of shoes that pinch your feet but you wear them enough and they get broken in and then you convince yourself that’s comfort, that’s as good as it’s going to get.

  “OK,” Chuy called from the front of the boat. “We’re here.”

  She waved back at him, not wanting to shout over the roar of the engines as they powered down. Eventually they died out and there was no sound but the slap slap slap of water on the hull.

  It was the signal she’d been waiting for. Jansen flipped backward into the blood-warm water, felt it surge up all around her in a welter of silver bubbles. She closed her eyes, and for a moment, one perfect, silent moment, it was almost there.

  The old, desired feeling—weightlessness. It was almost the same as flying free in infinite space. Almost.

  She opened her eyes. The other divers were plunging around her, each like a comet hurtling around the sun with their own trail of bubbles.

  Time to get to work.

  SALLY JANSEN: When I came home from space they offered me a job at the astronaut office, a desk job with a pension and health care, which sounded great. I lasted two days. I felt like all those eyes, all those people staring at me, were burning holes in the back of my shirt. I was the woman who lost the second space race, right? After the Chinese landed on Mars, after America gave up on space—nah. I couldn’t do it. There were a lot of tears and people wanting to shake my hand on the way out the door. Nobody was cruel. But I think they were glad to see me go.

  The seafloor off Canaveral sloped gently out toward the abyss. Here the bottom was only about six meters down. The water had been stirred up by the storm, and visibility wasn’t great, but as the divers kicked down through rays of wavering sunlight, Jansen could make out the turbines easily enough. There were hundreds of them, round hunched shapes like a herd of buffalo grazing on the mud. Each turbine was three meters wide, its cowl shaggy with sargassum. Inside the cowls knife-thin fans turned sluggishly, moved by warm water streaming northward from the Gulf of Mexico, generating electricity from the current. Good energy, clean as it came, but the generators needed constant maintenance. Anyone with a dive certificate could make a living down here, just keeping those turbines free of debris and spinning.

  They’d come out today because after the storm half the turbines were reporting nonfunctional. Jansen saw the problem right away. A piece of old fishing net had fetched up across the turbines, making it look as if they were snared in a giant spider’s web. The net must have been drifting for years, skating along the sea floor at the whim of the currents, until it snagged on the machines. It was thick with captured detritus, old bits of wood and fish bones and human trash that it had scooped up along the way.

  Clearing it was slow, painstaking work. To avoid damaging the turbines they had to cut the net free strand by strand. The thick plastic cord was designed to stretch rather than tear, and you had to hold it tight with one hand while you sawed away with the other. She gathered up huge bunches of the stuff, tying it up in big knotty clumps that they could easily haul away when they were done.

  She tried not to get depressed at the amount of human refuse stuck in the net’s coils, the countless old chip bags and dead batteries and just so much plastic, shopping bags and yogurt cups and egg cartons, discarded paint cans that were probably toxic and old smartphones that definitely were. The colors all still bright as they would be for another thousand years.

  The trash she pushed away from her, let it be carried away by the current. There was so much of it there was no way to gather it up for proper disposal. She tried not to watch it float away as she cleared the faces of the turbines.

  But then she saw something that made her heart skip a beat—and a moment later made her laugh inside her mask. A tiny pair of arms reaching out to her, pleading for help. Tiny brown plastic arms. She cut the owner of those arms free and stared at it for a while, then shoved it in one of her pockets. She could take a better look later. For now, the fishing net required her full attention.

  When they were done, as the boat sped back toward shore she teased the salt water out of her short hair and leaned back, getting used to breathing real air again. Somebody handed her a beer and she raised it in thanks. She’d drunk half of it before she thought to look in her pocket.

  The thing she’d found was a very old action figure, a little brown creature half-bear and half-ape with a doglike face, its thick fur lovingly sculpted. A bandolier ran across its chest. It had a bad gash across one foot, maybe from hitting t
he turbine’s vane. Its eyes were a bright and staring blue.

  She felt as if she was being watched. She looked up and saw Hector staring at the toy in her hand. “You know this guy?” she asked. “He’s got your daddy’s name, kind of,” she said.

  “His name is Jesús?” Hector asked.

  “Chewbacca,” she said. Hector gave her an expression so serious it made her smile. “This is Chewbacca.” She held the little figure up and made it dance for him. She tried to imitate the Wookiee’s gargling roar.

  Hector’s eyes narrowed.

  “What’s that?” Chuy asked, coming over. He hunched down next to her and took the figure, turning it over and over in his hands. Then he whistled. “That’s something!” he said. “You know you could sell this online, right? Some of these old toys, they go for big money. Big money, OK?” He pulled off his baseball cap and rubbed his forehead, then pulled the cap back on in one quick, practiced motion. “Rich people, they’ll buy just about anything, if it’s old enough.”

  Hector was still staring.

  “You ever show him a Star Wars movie?” Jansen asked.

  “Movies? He’s got his own stream,” Chuy said. “What would he want with that corny old stuff?”

  Jansen nodded and handed the figure to Hector. She looked him right in the eye, and he seemed to understand—this was a gift. He frowned in acceptance, then ran off to his mother, who was handing out sandwiches in the bow.

  Jansen sat up and let the wind off the water finish drying her hair. Chuy sat down next to her in companionable silence. She handed him her half-finished beer and he polished it off as they watched the waves.

  “You want to come for dinner tonight?” he asked. “We’re making pad thai. Esmee got some real sticky rice, even, from that new fancy grocery store.”

  Jansen shook her head. He always asked. About one time in ten, she took him up on the offer. He had a nice little ranch house in Oak Park with a patio out back where she could sit and play with his kids or—more often these days—watch them while they ran VR shows, eyes encased in thick goggles, hands twitching at their sides. She would make sure they didn’t wander out of the yard—when they tried she would put a gentle hand on their shoulder and turn them around. Then Esmee would come out and the two women would make small talk, slow, pointless conversations that were mostly about just sharing space. She liked those evenings. Chuy was the closest thing she had to family these days, since her mother died. Close enough.